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"Black Men Ski" | {0: 'Singer-songwriter Stew spins improvisatory songs drawn from his seemingly endless stable of stories and ideas. His musical Passing Strange won a Tony for Best Book in 2008.'} | TED2006 | Has anyone ever been to Aspen, Colorado? It's not a joke yet; those aren't the jokes. Is this thing off? I went to Aspen recently and stumbled into this song. β« Black men go to Aspen β« β« and rent colorful chalets. β« β« Giggle at the questions β« β« their mere presence seems to raise. β« β« Get taken for men β« β« we don't resemble in the least. β« "Are you ... ?" "No." β« It's a winter wonderland β« β« in the belly of the beast. β« β« And black men ski. β« β« Black men ski. β« β« Black men send back sushi β« β« with a scorned Yakuza's flair. β« β« We make postmodern art β« β« with bacon grease β« β« and hot combed hair. β« β« We secretly play Beethoven β« β« inside our bassmobiles. β« β« We can tell you how cool looks β« β« but cannot show you how it feels β« β« when black men ski. β« β« When black men ski. β« β« Black men now are students β« β« of gay sensibility. β« β« We wear ironic T-shirts β« β« drenched in code unknown to thee. β« β« We get baptized in Walden Pond β« β« amongst a searing mob β« β« because the cleansing blood of Jesus β« β« could not do a thorough job. β« β« Black men ski. β« β« Black men ski. β« β« Chinese guys can jump real high β« β« and Germans cook soul food. β« β« White boys rap and hippies nap β« β« their dreads up to look rude. β« β« Jazz is now suburban β« β« it's Marsalisly clean. β« β« And now we've got Viagra β« β« everyone's a sex machine. β« β« So black men ski. β« What else can we do? β« Black men ski. β« β« Black men ski. β« β« Black men ski. β« β« Some kids I'll describe as friends β« β« say I am race-obsessed. β« β« The luxury of your opinion β« β« shows that you are blessed. β« β« See, I have poems about sunsets β« β« flowers and the rain. β« β« I've read them to policemen β« β« but it was all in vain. β« β« So black men ski. β« β« Black men ski ... β« elegantly. β« Black men ski. β« β« Black men ski. β« |
The ghastly tragedy of the suburbs | {0: 'James Howard Kunstler may be the worldβs most outspoken critic of suburban sprawl. He believes the end of the fossil fuels era will soon force a return to smaller-scale, agrarian communities -- and an overhaul of the most destructive features of postwar society.'} | TED2004 | The immersive ugliness of our everyday environments in America is entropy made visible. We can't overestimate the amount of despair that we are generating with places like this. And mostly, I want to persuade you that we have to do better if we're going to continue the project of civilization in America. By the way, this doesn't help. Nobody's having a better day down here because of that. There are a lot of ways you can describe this. You know, I like to call it "the national automobile slum." You can call it suburban sprawl. I think it's appropriate to call it the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. You can call it a technosis externality clusterfuck. And it's a tremendous problem for us. The outstanding β the salient problem about this for us is that these are places that are not worth caring about. We're going to talk about that some more. A sense of place: your ability to create places that are meaningful and places of quality and character depends entirely on your ability to define space with buildings, and to employ the vocabularies, grammars, syntaxes, rhythms and patterns of architecture in order to inform us who we are. The public realm in America has two roles: it is the dwelling place of our civilization and our civic life, and it is the physical manifestation of the common good. And when you degrade the public realm, you will automatically degrade the quality of your civic life and the character of all the enactments of your public life and communal life that take place there. The public realm comes mostly in the form of the street in America because we don't have the 1,000-year-old cathedral plazas and market squares of older cultures. And your ability to define space and to create places that are worth caring about all comes from a body of culture that we call the culture of civic design. This is a body of knowledge, method, skill and principle that we threw in the garbage after World War II and decided we don't need that anymore; we're not going to use it. And consequently, we can see the result all around us. The public realm has to inform us not only where we are geographically, but it has to inform us where we are in our culture. Where we've come from, what kind of people we are, and it needs to, by doing that, it needs to afford us a glimpse to where we're going in order to allow us to dwell in a hopeful present. And if there is one tremendous β if there is one great catastrophe about the places that we've built, the human environments we've made for ourselves in the last 50 years, it is that it has deprived us of the ability to live in a hopeful present. The environments we are living in, more typically, are like these. You know, this happens to be the asteroid belt of architectural garbage two miles north of my town. And remember, to create a place of character and quality, you have to be able to define space. So how is that being accomplished here? If you stand on the apron of the Wal-Mart over here and try to look at the Target store over here, you can't see it because of the curvature of the Earth. (Laughter) That's nature's way of telling you that you're doing a poor job of defining space. Consequently, these will be places that nobody wants to be in. These will be places that are not worth caring about. We have about, you know, 38,000 places that are not worth caring about in the United States today. When we have enough of them, we're going to have a nation that's not worth defending. And I want you to think about that when you think about those young men and women who are over in places like Iraq, spilling their blood in the sand, and ask yourself, "What is their last thought of home?" I hope it's not the curb cut between the Chuck E. Cheese and the Target store because that's not good enough for Americans to be spilling their blood for. (Applause) We need better places in this country. Public space. This is a good public space. It's a place worth caring about. It's well defined. It is emphatically an outdoor public room. It has something that is terribly important β it has what's called an active and permeable membrane around the edge. That's a fancy way of saying it's got shops, bars, bistros, destinations β things go in and out of it. It's permeable. The beer goes in and out, the waitresses go in and out, and that activates the center of this place and makes it a place that people want to hang out in. You know, in these places in other cultures, people just go there voluntarily because they like them. We don't have to have a craft fair here to get people to come here. (Laughter) You know, you don't have to have a Kwanzaa festival. People just go because it's pleasurable to be there. But this is how we do it in the United States. Probably the most significant public space failure in America, designed by the leading architects of the day, Harry Cobb and I.M. Pei: Boston City Hall Plaza. A public place so dismal that the winos don't even want to go there. (Laughter) And we can't fix it because I.M. Pei's still alive, and every year Harvard and M.I.T. have a joint committee to repair it. And every year they fail to because they don't want to hurt I.M. Pei's feelings. This is the other side of the building. This was the winner of an international design award in, I think, 1966, something like that. It wasn't Pei and Cobb, another firm designed this, but there's not enough Prozac in the world to make people feel OK about going down this block. This is the back of Boston City Hall, the most important, you know, significant civic building in Albany β excuse me β in Boston. And what is the message that is coming, what are the vocabularies and grammars that are coming, from this building and how is it informing us about who we are? This, in fact, would be a better building if we put mosaic portraits of Josef Stalin, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, and all the other great despots of the 20th century on the side of the building, because then we'd honestly be saying what the building is really communicating to us. You know, that it's a despotic building; it wants us to feel like termites. (Laughter) This is it on a smaller scale: the back of the civic center in my town, Saratoga Springs, New York. By the way, when I showed this slide to a group of Kiwanians in my town, they all rose in indignation from their creamed chicken, (Laughter) and they shouted at me and said, "It was raining that day when you took that picture!" Because this was perceived to be a weather problem. (Laughter) You know, this is a building designed like a DVD player. (Laughter) Audio jack, power supply β and look, you know these things are important architectural jobs for firms, right? You know, we hire firms to design these things. You can see exactly what went on, three o'clock in the morning at the design meeting. You know, eight hours before deadline, four architects trying to get this building in on time, right? And they're sitting there at the long boardroom table with all the drawings, and the renderings, and all the Chinese food caskets are lying on the table, and β I mean, what was the conversation that was going on there? (Laughter) Because you know what the last word was, what the last sentence was of that meeting. It was: "Fuck it." (Laughter) (Applause) That β that is the message of this form of architecture. The message is: We don't give a fuck! We don't give a fuck. So I went back on the nicest day of the year, just to β you know β do some reality testing, and in fact, he will not even go down there because (Laughter) it's not interesting enough for his clients, you know, the burglars, the muggers. It's not civically rich enough for them to go down there. OK. The pattern of Main Street USA β in fact, this pattern of building downtown blocks, all over the world, is fairly universal. It's not that complicated: buildings more than one story high, built out to the sidewalk edge, so that people who are, you know, all kinds of people can get into the building. Other activities are allowed to occur upstairs, you know, apartments, offices, and so on. You make provision for this activity called shopping on the ground floor. They haven't learned that in Monterey. If you go out to the corner right at the main intersection right in front of this conference center, you'll see an intersection with four blank walls on every corner. It's really incredible. Anyway, this is how you compose and assemble a downtown business building, and this is what happened when in Glens Falls, New York, when we tried to do it again, where it was missing, right? So the first thing they do is they pop up the retail a half a story above grade to make it sporty. OK. That completely destroys the relationship between the business and the sidewalk, where the theoretical pedestrians are. (Laughter) Of course, they'll never be there, as long as this is in that condition. Then because the relationship between the retail is destroyed, we pop a handicapped ramp on that, and then to make ourselves feel better, we put a nature Band-Aid in front of it. And that's how we do it. I call them "nature Band-Aids" because there's a general idea in America that the remedy for mutilated urbanism is nature. And in fact, the remedy for wounded and mutilated urbanism is good urbanism, good buildings. Not just flower beds, not just cartoons of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. You know, that's not good enough. We have to do good buildings. The street trees have really four jobs to do and that's it: To spatially denote the pedestrian realm, to protect the pedestrians from the vehicles in the carriageway, to filter the sunlight onto the sidewalk, and to soften the hardscape of the buildings and to create a ceiling β a vaulted ceiling β over the street, at its best. And that's it. Those are the four jobs of the street trees. They're not supposed to be a cartoon of the North Woods; they're not supposed to be a set for "The Last of the Mohicans." You know, one of the problems with the fiasco of suburbia is that it destroyed our understanding of the distinction between the country and the town, between the urban and the rural. They're not the same thing. And we're not going to cure the problems of the urban by dragging the country into the city, which is what a lot of us are trying to do all the time. Here you see it on a small scale β the mothership has landed, R2-D2 and C-3PO have stepped out to test the bark mulch to see if they can inhabit this planet. (Laughter) A lot of this comes from the fact that the industrial city in America was such a trauma that we developed this tremendous aversion for the whole idea of the city, city life, and everything connected with it. And so what you see fairly early, in the mid-19th century, is this idea that we now have to have an antidote to the industrial city, which is going to be life in the country for everybody. And that starts to be delivered in the form of the railroad suburb: the country villa along the railroad line, which allows people to enjoy the amenity of the city, but to return to the countryside every night. And believe me, there were no Wal-Marts or convenience stores out there then, so it really was a form of country living. But what happens is, of course, it mutates over the next 80 years and it turns into something rather insidious. It becomes a cartoon of a country house, in a cartoon of the country. And that's the great non-articulated agony of suburbia and one of the reasons that it lends itself to ridicule. Because it hasn't delivered what it's been promising for half a century now. And these are typically the kind of dwellings we find there, you know. Basically, a house with nothing on the side because this house wants to state, emphatically, "I'm a little cabin in the woods. There's nothing on either side of me. I don't have any eyes on the side of my head. I can't see." So you have this one last facade of the house, the front, which is really a cartoon of a facade of a house. Because β notice the porch here. Unless the people that live here are Munchkins, nobody's going to be using that. This is really, in fact, a television broadcasting a show 24/7 called "We're Normal." We're normal, we're normal, we're normal, we're normal, we're normal. Please respect us, we're normal, we're normal, we're normal. But we know what's going on in these houses, you know. We know that little Skippy is loading his Uzi down here, getting ready for homeroom. (Laughter) We know that Heather, his sister Heather, 14 years old, is turning tricks up here to support her drug habit. Because these places, these habitats, are inducing immense amounts of anxiety and depression in children, and they don't have a lot of experience with medication. So they take the first one that comes along, often. These are not good enough for Americans. These are the schools we are sending them to: The Hannibal Lecter Central School, Las Vegas, Nevada. This is a real school! You know, but there's obviously a notion that if you let the inmates of this thing out, that they would snatch a motorist off the street and eat his liver. So every effort is made to keep them within the building. Notice that nature is present. (Laughter) We're going to have to change this behavior whether we like it or not. We are entering an epochal period of change in the world, and β certainly in America β the period that will be characterized by the end of the cheap oil era. It is going to change absolutely everything. Chris asked me not to go on too long about this, and I won't, except to say there's not going to be a hydrogen economy. Forget it. It's not going to happen. We're going to have to do something else instead. We're going to have to down-scale, re-scale, and re-size virtually everything we do in this country and we can't start soon enough to do it. We're going to have β (Applause) β we're going to have to live closer to where we work. We're going to have to live closer to each other. We're going have to grow more food closer to where we live. The age of the 3,000 mile Caesar salad is coming to an end. We're going to have to β we have a railroad system that the Bulgarians would be ashamed of! We gotta do better than that! And we should have started two days before yesterday. We are fortunate that the new urbanists were there, for the last 10 years, excavating all that information that was thrown in the garbage by our parents' generation after World War II. Because we're going to need it if we're going to learn how to reconstruct towns. We're going to need to get back this body of methodology and principle and skill in order to re-learn how to compose meaningful places, places that are integral, that allow β that are living organisms in the sense that they contain all the organs of our civic life and our communal life, deployed in an integral fashion. So that, you know, the residences make sense deployed in relation to the places of business, of culture and of governance. We're going to have to re-learn what the building blocks of these things are: the street, the block, how to compose public space that's both large and small, the courtyard, the civic square and how to really make use of this property. We can see some of the first ideas for retro-fitting some of the catastrophic property that we have in America. The dead malls: what are we going to do with them? Well, in point of fact, most of them are not going to make it. They're not going to be retro-fitted; they're going to be the salvage yards of the future. Some of them we're going to fix, though. And we're going to fix them by imposing back on them street and block systems and returning to the building lot as the normal increment of development. And if we're lucky, the result will be revivified town centers and neighborhood centers in our existing towns and cities. And by the way, our towns and cities are where they are, and grew where they were because they occupy all the important sites. And most of them are still going to be there, although the scale of them is probably going to be diminished. We've got a lot of work to do. We're not going to be rescued by the hyper-car; we're not going to be rescued by alternative fuels. No amount or combination of alternative fuels is going to allow us to continue running what we're running, the way we're running it. We're going to have to do everything very differently. And America's not prepared. We are sleepwalking into the future. We're not ready for what's coming at us. So I urge you all to do what you can. Life in the mid-21st century is going to be about living locally. Be prepared to be good neighbors. Be prepared to find vocations that make you useful to your neighbors and to your fellow citizens. One final thing β I've been very disturbed about this for years, but I think it's particularly important for this audience. Please, please, stop referring to yourselves as "consumers." OK? Consumers are different than citizens. Consumers do not have obligations, responsibilities and duties to their fellow human beings. And as long as you're using that word consumer in the public discussion, you will be degrading the quality of the discussion we're having. And we're going to continue being clueless going into this very difficult future that we face. So thank you very much. Please go out and do what you can to make this a land full of places that are worth caring about and a nation that will be worth defending. (Applause) |
Human-centered design | {0: 'David Kelleyβs company IDEO helped create many icons of the digital generation -- but what matters even more to him is unlocking the creative potential of people and organizations to innovate routinely.'} | TED2002 | There's a lot of exciting things happening in the design world and at IDEO this past year, and I'm pleased to get a chance to share some of those with you. I didn't attend the first TED back in 1984 but I've been to a lot of them since that time. I thought it [would] kind of be interesting to think back to that time when Richard got the whole thing started. Thank you very much, Richard; it's been a big, enjoyable part of my life, coming here. And so thinking back, I was thinking those of us in Silicon Valley were really focused on products or objects β certainly technological objects. And so it was great fun in those days, and some of those of you who are in the audience were my clients. We'd come in with some prototype underneath a black cloth and we'd put it on the conference table, and we'd pull off the black cloth and everybody would "ooh" and "ah." That was a really good time. And so we'll continue to focus on products, as we always have. And if you were here last year, I probably wrestled you to the floor and tried to show you my new EyeModule 2, which was a camera that plugged into the Handspring. And I took a lot of pictures last year; very few people knew what I was up to, but I took a lot of pictures. This year β maybe you could show the slides β this year we're carrying this Treo, which we had a lot to do with and helped Handspring design it. Also, though we designed it a few years ago β it's just become ubiquitous in the last year or so β this Heartstream defibrillator which is saving lives. Maybe you've seen them in the airports? They seem to be everywhere now. Lots of lives are being saved by those. And, we're just about to announce the Zinio Reader product that I believe will make magazines even more enjoyable to read. So, we really will continue to focus on products. But something's happened in the last 18 years since Richard started TED, and that's that people like us β I know people in other places have caught onto this for a long time, but for us, we've really just started ... we've kind of climbed Maslow's hierarchy a little bit β and so we're now focused more and more on human-centered design, human-centeredness in an approach to design. That really involves designing behaviors and personality into products. And I think you're starting to see that, and it's making our job even more enjoyable. Interestingly enough, we used to primarily build 3-D models β you know, you've seen some today β and 3-D renderings. Then we'd go and we'd show those as communicating our ideas. But firms like ours are having to move to a point where we get those objects that we're designing and get them in motion, showing how they'll be used. And so in order to do that we've been forming internal video-production groups in order to make these kind of experience prototypes that show just what we mean about the man-machine relationship. And it's a much better way to see. It's kind of like architects who show people in their houses, as opposed to them being empty. So I thought that I would show you a few videos to show off this new, broader definition of design in products and services and environments. I have a few of them β they're no more than a minute or a minute-and-a-half apiece β but I thought you might be interested in seeing some of our work over the last year, and how it responds in video. So, Prada New York: we were asked by Rem Koolhaas and OMA to help us conceive the technology that's in their retail store in New York. He wanted a new kind of store β a new one β a store that had a cultural role as well as a retail one. And that meant actually designing custom technology as opposed to just buying things off the shelf and putting them to use. So, there're lots of things. Everything has RF tags: there's RF tags on the user, on the cards, there's the staff devices that are all around the store. You pick them up, and once you see something that you're interested in, the staff person can scan them in and then they can be shown on any screen throughout the store. You can look at color, and sizes, and how it appeared on the runway, or whatever. And so then the object β the merchandise that you're interested in β can be scanned. It's taken into the dressing room, and in the dressing room there are scanners so that we know exactly what clothing you have in the dressing room. We can put that up on a touch screen and you can play with that, and get more information about the clothing that you're interested in as you're trying it on. It's been used a lot of places, but I particularly like the use here of liquid crystal displays in the changing room. The last time I went to see this store, there was a huge buzz about people standing outside and wondering, "Am I going to actually get to see the people changing clothes here?" But if you push the button, of course, the whole wall goes dark. So you can try to get approval, or not, for whatever you're wearing. And then one of my favorite features of the technology is the magic mirror, where you put on the clothes. There's a big display in the mirror, and you can turn around β but there's a three second delay. So you can see what you look like from the back or all the way around, as you look. (Applause) About a year and a half ago we were asked to design an installation in the museum β this is a new wing of the Science Museum in London, and it's primarily about digital and biomedical issues. And a group at Itch, which is now part of IDEO, designed this interactive wall that's about four stories tall. I don't know if anybody's seen this β it's pretty spectacular in the room. Anyway, it's based on the London subway system. And so you can see that the goal is to bring some of the feedback that the people who had gone to the museum were giving, and get it up on the wall so everybody could see. Just for everybody to see. So you enter your information. Then, like the London tube system, the little trains go around with what you're thinking about. And then when you get to a station, it's expanded so that you can actually read it. Then when you exit the IMAX theatre on the fourth floor β mostly teenagers coming out of there β there's this big open space that has these tables in it that have interactive games which are quite fun, also designed by Durrell [Bishop] and Andrew [Hirniak] of Itch. And the topics include things that the museum is about: male fertility, choosing the sex of your baby or what a driverless car might be like. There's lots of room, so people can come up and understand what it is before they get involved. And also, it's not shown in the video, but these are very beautiful. They go to the top of the wall and when they reach all the way to the top, after they've bounced around, they disperse into bits and go off into the atmosphere. The next video is not done by us. This is CBS Sunday Morning that aired about two weeks ago. Scott Adams ran into us and asked us if we wouldn't help to design the ultimate cubicle for Dilbert, which sounded like a fun thing and so we couldn't pass it up. He's always been interested in technology in the future. (Video: Scott Adams: I realized that at some point I might be the world's expert on what's wrong with cubicles. So we thought, well, wouldn't it be fun to get together with some of the smartest design guys in the world and try to figure out if we could make the cubicle better? Narrator: Though they work in a wide-open office space spectacularly set under San Francisco's Oakland Bay Bridge, the team built their own little cubicles to fully experience the problems. Woman: A one-way mirror. I can look out; you can look at yourself. Narrator: They took pictures. Woman: You feel so trapped, when someone kind of leans over and you're sort of held captive there for a minute. SA: So far it's chaos, but a lot of people are doing stuff, so that's good. We'll see what happens. Narrator: The first group builds a cubicle in which the walls are screens for the computer and for family photos. In the second group's scenario, the walls are alive and actually give Dilbert a group hug. (Laughter) Behind the humor is the idea of making the cubicle more human.) David Kelley: So here's the final thing, complete with orange lighting that follows the sun across β that follows the tracks of the sun β across the sky. So you feel that in your cubicle. And my favorite feature, which is a flower in a vase that wilts when you leave in disappointment, and then when you come back, it comes up to greet you, happy to see you. (SA: The storage is built right into the wall.) DK: You know, it has homey touches like a built-in fish tank in the walls, or something to be aggressive with to release tension. (SA: Customizable for the boss of your choice.) DK: And of course: a hammock for your afternoon nap that stretches across your cubicle. (SA: Life would be sweet in a cubicle like this.) DK: This next project, we were asked to design a pavilion to celebrate the recycling of the water on the Millennium Dome in London. The dome has an incredible amount of water that washes off of it, as well as wastewater. So this building actually celebrates the water as it comes out of the recycling plant and goes into the reed bed so that it can be filtered for the final time. The pavilion's design goal was to be kind of quiet and peaceful. In contrast to if you went inside the dome, where it's kind of wild and crazy and everybody's learning all kinds of things, or fooling around, or whatever they're doing. But it was intended to be quite quiet. And then you would wander around and gather information, in a straightforward fashion, about the recycling process and what's being done, and how they're going to reuse the water once it comes through the plant. And then, if you saw, the panels actually rotate. So you can get the information on the front side, but as they rotate, you can see the actual recycling plant behind, with all the machines as they actually process the water. You can see: there's the plant. These are all very low-budget videos, like quick prototypes. And we're announcing a new product here tonight, which is the first time this has ever been shown in public. It's called Spyfish, and it's a company called H2Eye, started by Nigel Jagger in London. And it's a company that's trying to bring the experience β many people have boats, or enjoy being on boats, but a very small percentage of people actually have the capability or the interest in going under the water and actually seeing what's there, and enjoying what scuba divers do. This product, it has two cameras. You throw it over the side of your boat and you basically scuba dive without getting wet. For us β there's the object β for us, it was two projects. One, to design the interface so that the interface doesn't get in your way. You could have that kind of immersive experience of being underwater β of feeling like you're underwater β seeing what's going on. And the other one was to design the object and make sure that it was a consumer product and not a research tool. And so we spent a lot of time β this has been going on for about seven or eight years, this project β and [we're] just ready to start building them. (Narrator: The Spyfish is a revolutionary subaquatic video camera. It can dive to 500 feet, to where sunlight does not penetrate, and is equipped with powerful lights. It becomes your eyes and ears as you venture into the deep. The battery-powered Spyfish sends the live video-feed through a slender cable.) DK: This slender cable was a huge technological advancement and it allowed the whole thing to be the size that it is. (Narrator: And this central box connects the whole system together. Maneuvering the Spyfish is simple with the wireless remote control. You watch the video with superimposed graphics that indicate your depth and compass heading. The fluid graphics and ambient sounds combine to help you completely lose yourself underwater.) (Applause) DK: And the last thing I'll talk about is ApproTEC, which is a project that I'm very excited about. ApproTEC is a company started by Dr. Martin Fisher, who's a good friend of mine. He's a Ph.D. from Stanford. He found himself in Kenya on a Fulbright and he had a very interesting insight, which is that he said, "There must be entrepreneurs in Kenya; there must be entrepreneurs everywhere." And he noticed that for weddings and funerals there they could find enough money to put something together. So he decided to start manufacturing products in Kenya with Kenyan manufacturers β designed by people like us, but taken there. And to this date β he's been gone for only a few years β he's started 19,000 companies. He's made 30,000 new jobs. And just the sales of the products β this is a non-profit β the sales of these products is now .6% of the GDP of Kenya. This is one guy doing this. This is a pretty spectacular thing. So we're in the process of helping them design deep-well, low-cost manual pumps in order for these people who have a quarter acre of land to be able to grow crops in the off-season. What they do now is: they can grow crops in the rainy season but they can't grow them in the off-season. And so by doing that, the woman that you saw in the first thing β she's a school teacher β always wanted to send her kids to college and she's going to be able to do it because of these things. So with seed-squeezers, and pumps, and hay-balers and very straightforward things that we're designing β my students are doing this as class projects and IDEO has donated their time to do this kind of work β it's really amazing to see his success, Martin's. We also were thinking about the experience of Richard, and so β (Laughter) β we designed this hat, because I knew I'd be the last one in the day and I needed to deal with him. So I just have one more thing to say. (Laughter) Can you read it? (Laughter) Well, it's always kind of funny when he comes up and hovers. You know, you don't want to be rude to him and you don't want to feel guilty, and so I thought this would do it, where I just sit here. (Laughter) (Applause) So we saw a lot of interesting things being designed today in this session, and from all the different presenters. And in my own practice, from product to ApproTEC, it's really exciting that we're taking a more human-centered approach to design, that we're including behaviors and personalities in the things we do, and I think this is great. Designers are more trusted and more integrated into the business strategy of companies, and I have to say, for one, I feel very lucky at the progress that design has made since the first TED. Thanks a lot. |
What squatter cities can teach us | {0: "Since the counterculture '60s, Stewart Brand has been creating our internet-worked world. Now, with biotech accelerating four times faster than digital technology, Stewart Brand has a bold new plan ..."} | TED2006 | Basically, there's a major demographic event going on. And it may be that passing the 50 percent urban point is an economic tipping point. So the world now is a map of connectivity. It used to be that Paris and London and New York were the largest cities. What we have now is the end of the rise of the West. That's over. The aggregate numbers are overwhelming. So what's really going on? Well, villages of the world are emptying out. The question is, why? And here's the unromantic truth β and the city air makes you free, they said in Renaissance Germany. So some people go to places like Shanghai but most go to the squatter cities where aesthetics rule. And these are not really a people oppressed by poverty. They're people getting out of poverty as fast as they can. They're the dominant builders and to a large extent, the dominant designers. They have home-brewed infrastructure and vibrant urban life. One-sixth of the GDP in India is coming out of Mumbai. They are constantly upgrading, and in a few cases, the government helps. Education is the main event that can happen in cities. What's going on in the street in Mumbai? Al Gore knows. It's basically everything. There's no unemployment in squatter cities. Everyone works. One-sixth of humanity is there. It's soon going to be more than that. So here's the first punch line: cities have defused the population bomb. And here's the second punch line. That's the news from downtown. Here it is in perspective. Stars have shined down on earth's life for billions of years. Now we're shining right back up. Thank you. |
How brain science will change computing | {0: "Jeff Hawkins pioneered the development of PDAs such as the Palm and Treo. Now he's trying to understand how the human brain really works, and adapt its method -- which he describes as a deep system for storing memory -- to create new kinds of computers and tools."} | TED2003 | I do two things: I design mobile computers and I study brains. Today's talk is about brains and β (Audience member cheers) Yay! I have a brain fan out there. (Laughter) If I could have my first slide, you'll see the title of my talk and my two affiliations. So what I'm going to talk about is why we don't have a good brain theory, why it is important that we should develop one and what we can do about it. I'll try to do all that in 20 minutes. I have two affiliations. Most of you know me from my Palm and Handspring days, but I also run a nonprofit scientific research institute called the Redwood Neuroscience Institute in Menlo Park. We study theoretical neuroscience and how the neocortex works. I'm going to talk all about that. I have one slide on my other life, the computer life, and that's this slide here. These are some of the products I've worked on over the last 20 years, starting from the very original laptop to some of the first tablet computers and so on, ending up most recently with the Treo, and we're continuing to do this. I've done this because I believe mobile computing is the future of personal computing, and I'm trying to make the world a little bit better by working on these things. But this was, I admit, all an accident. I really didn't want to do any of these products. Very early in my career I decided I was not going to be in the computer industry. Before that, I just have to tell you about this picture of Graffiti I picked off the web the other day. I was looking for a picture for Graffiti that'll text input language. I found a website dedicated to teachers who want to make script-writing things across the top of their blackboard, and they had added Graffiti to it, and I'm sorry about that. (Laughter) So what happened was, when I was young and got out of engineering school at Cornell in '79, I went to work for Intel and was in the computer industry, and three months into that, I fell in love with something else. I said, "I made the wrong career choice here," and I fell in love with brains. This is not a real brain. This is a picture of one, a line drawing. And I don't remember exactly how it happened, but I have one recollection, which was pretty strong in my mind. In September of 1979, Scientific American came out with a single-topic issue about the brain. It was one of their best issues ever. They talked about the neuron, development, disease, vision and all the things you might want to know about brains. It was really quite impressive. One might've had the impression we knew a lot about brains. But the last article in that issue was written by Francis Crick of DNA fame. Today is, I think, the 50th anniversary of the discovery of DNA. And he wrote a story basically saying, this is all well and good, but you know, we don't know diddly squat about brains, and no one has a clue how they work, so don't believe what anyone tells you. This is a quote from that article, he says: "What is conspicuously lacking" β he's a very proper British gentleman β "What is conspicuously lacking is a broad framework of ideas in which to interpret these different approaches." I thought the word "framework" was great. He didn't say we didn't have a theory. He says we don't even know how to begin to think about it. We don't even have a framework. We are in the pre-paradigm days, if you want to use Thomas Kuhn. So I fell in love with this. I said, look: We have all this knowledge about brains β how hard can it be? It's something we can work on in my lifetime; I could make a difference. So I tried to get out of the computer business, into the brain business. First, I went to MIT, the AI lab was there. I said, I want to build intelligent machines too, but I want to study how brains work first. And they said, "Oh, you don't need to do that. You're just going to program computers, that's all. I said, you really ought to study brains. They said, "No, you're wrong." I said, "No, you're wrong," and I didn't get in. (Laughter) I was a little disappointed β pretty young β but I went back again a few years later, this time in California, and I went to Berkeley. And I said, I'll go in from the biological side. So I got in the PhD program in biophysics. I was like, I'm studying brains now. Well, I want to study theory. They said, "You can't study theory about brains. You can't get funded for that. And as a graduate student, you can't do that." So I said, oh my gosh. I was depressed; I said, but I can make a difference in this field. I went back in the computer industry and said, I'll have to work here for a while. That's when I designed all those computer products. (Laughter) I said, I want to do this for four years, make some money, I was having a family, and I would mature a bit, and maybe the business of neuroscience would mature a bit. Well, it took longer than four years. It's been about 16 years. But I'm doing it now, and I'm going to tell you about it. So why should we have a good brain theory? Well, there's lots of reasons people do science. The most basic one is, people like to know things. We're curious, and we go out and get knowledge. Why do we study ants? It's interesting. Maybe we'll learn something useful, but it's interesting and fascinating. But sometimes a science has other attributes which makes it really interesting. Sometimes a science will tell something about ourselves; it'll tell us who we are. Evolution did this and Copernicus did this, where we have a new understanding of who we are. And after all, we are our brains. My brain is talking to your brain. Our bodies are hanging along for the ride, but my brain is talking to your brain. And if we want to understand who we are and how we feel and perceive, we need to understand brains. Another thing is sometimes science leads to big societal benefits, technologies, or businesses or whatever. This is one, too, because when we understand how brains work, we'll be able to build intelligent machines. That's a good thing on the whole, with tremendous benefits to society, just like a fundamental technology. So why don't we have a good theory of brains? People have been working on it for 100 years. Let's first take a look at what normal science looks like. This is normal science. Normal science is a nice balance between theory and experimentalists. The theorist guy says, "I think this is what's going on," the experimentalist says, "You're wrong." It goes back and forth, this works in physics, this in geology. But if this is normal science, what does neuroscience look like? This is what neuroscience looks like. We have this mountain of data, which is anatomy, physiology and behavior. You can't imagine how much detail we know about brains. There were 28,000 people who went to the neuroscience conference this year, and every one of them is doing research in brains. A lot of data, but no theory. There's a little wimpy box on top there. And theory has not played a role in any sort of grand way in the neurosciences. And it's a real shame. Now, why has this come about? If you ask neuroscientists why is this the state of affairs, first, they'll admit it. But if you ask them, they say, there's various reasons we don't have a good brain theory. Some say we still don't have enough data, we need more information, there's all these things we don't know. Well, I just told you there's data coming out of your ears. We have so much information, we don't even know how to organize it. What good is more going to do? Maybe we'll be lucky and discover some magic thing, but I don't think so. This is a symptom of the fact that we just don't have a theory. We don't need more data, we need a good theory. Another one is sometimes people say, "Brains are so complex, it'll take another 50 years." I even think Chris said something like this yesterday, something like, it's one of the most complicated things in the universe. That's not true β you're more complicated than your brain. You've got a brain. And although the brain looks very complicated, things look complicated until you understand them. That's always been the case. So we can say, my neocortex, the part of the brain I'm interested in, has 30 billion cells. But, you know what? It's very, very regular. In fact, it looks like it's the same thing repeated over and over again. It's not as complex as it looks. That's not the issue. Some people say, brains can't understand brains. Very Zen-like. Woo. (Laughter) You know, it sounds good, but why? I mean, what's the point? It's just a bunch of cells. You understand your liver. It's got a lot of cells in it too, right? So, you know, I don't think there's anything to that. And finally, some people say, "I don't feel like a bunch of cells β I'm conscious. I've got this experience, I'm in the world. I can't be just a bunch of cells." Well, people used to believe there was a life force to be living, and we now know that's really not true at all. And there's really no evidence, other than that people just disbelieve that cells can do what they do. So some people have fallen into the pit of metaphysical dualism, some really smart people, too, but we can reject all that. (Laughter) No, there's something else, something really fundamental, and it is: another reason why we don't have a good brain theory is because we have an intuitive, strongly held but incorrect assumption that has prevented us from seeing the answer. There's something we believe that just, it's obvious, but it's wrong. Now, there's a history of this in science and before I tell you what it is, I'll tell you about the history of it in science. Look at other scientific revolutions β the solar system, that's Copernicus, Darwin's evolution, and tectonic plates, that's Wegener. They all have a lot in common with brain science. First, they had a lot of unexplained data. A lot of it. But it got more manageable once they had a theory. The best minds were stumped β really smart people. We're not smarter now than they were then; it just turns out it's really hard to think of things, but once you've thought of them, it's easy to understand. My daughters understood these three theories, in their basic framework, in kindergarten. It's not that hard β here's the apple, here's the orange, the Earth goes around, that kind of stuff. Another thing is the answer was there all along, but we kind of ignored it because of this obvious thing. It was an intuitive, strongly held belief that was wrong. In the case of the solar system, the idea that the Earth is spinning, the surface is going a thousand miles an hour, and it's going through the solar system at a million miles an hour β this is lunacy; we all know the Earth isn't moving. Do you feel like you're moving a thousand miles an hour? If you said Earth was spinning around in space and was huge β they would lock you up, that's what they did back then. So it was intuitive and obvious. Now, what about evolution? Evolution, same thing. We taught our kids the Bible says God created all these species, cats are cats; dogs are dogs; people are people; plants are plants; they don't change. Noah put them on the ark in that order, blah, blah. The fact is, if you believe in evolution, we all have a common ancestor. We all have a common ancestor with the plant in the lobby! This is what evolution tells us. And it's true. It's kind of unbelievable. And the same thing about tectonic plates. All the mountains and the continents are kind of floating around on top of the Earth. It doesn't make any sense. So what is the intuitive, but incorrect assumption, that's kept us from understanding brains? I'll tell you. It'll seem obvious that it's correct. That's the point. Then I'll make an argument why you're incorrect on the other assumption. The intuitive but obvious thing is: somehow, intelligence is defined by behavior; we're intelligent because of how we do things and how we behave intelligently. And I'm going to tell you that's wrong. Intelligence is defined by prediction. I'm going to work you through this in a few slides, and give you an example of what this means. Here's a system. Engineers and scientists like to look at systems like this. They say, we have a thing in a box. We have its inputs and outputs. The AI people said, the thing in the box is a programmable computer, because it's equivalent to a brain. We'll feed it some inputs and get it to do something, have some behavior. Alan Turing defined the Turing test, which essentially says, we'll know if something's intelligent if it behaves identical to a human β a behavioral metric of what intelligence is that has stuck in our minds for a long time. Reality, though β I call it real intelligence. Real intelligence is built on something else. We experience the world through a sequence of patterns, and we store them, and we recall them. When we recall them, we match them up against reality, and we're making predictions all the time. It's an internal metric; there's an internal metric about us, saying, do we understand the world, am I making predictions, and so on. You're all being intelligent now, but you're not doing anything. Maybe you're scratching yourself, but you're not doing anything. But you're being intelligent; you're understanding what I'm saying. Because you're intelligent and you speak English, you know the word at the end of this sentence. The word came to you; you make these predictions all the time. What I'm saying is, the internal prediction is the output in the neocortex, and somehow, prediction leads to intelligent behavior. Here's how that happens: Let's start with a non-intelligent brain. I'll argue a non-intelligent brain, we'll call it an old brain. And we'll say it's a non-mammal, like a reptile, say, an alligator; we have an alligator. And the alligator has some very sophisticated senses. It's got good eyes and ears and touch senses and so on, a mouth and a nose. It has very complex behavior. It can run and hide. It has fears and emotions. It can eat you. It can attack. It can do all kinds of stuff. But we don't consider the alligator very intelligent, not in a human sort of way. But it has all this complex behavior already. Now in evolution, what happened? First thing that happened in evolution with mammals is we started to develop a thing called the neocortex. I'm going to represent the neocortex by this box on top of the old brain. Neocortex means "new layer." It's a new layer on top of your brain. It's the wrinkly thing on the top of your head that got wrinkly because it got shoved in there and doesn't fit. (Laughter) Literally, it's about the size of a table napkin and doesn't fit, so it's wrinkly. Now, look at how I've drawn this. The old brain is still there. You still have that alligator brain. You do. It's your emotional brain. It's all those gut reactions you have. On top of it, we have this memory system called the neocortex. And the memory system is sitting over the sensory part of the brain. So as the sensory input comes in and feeds from the old brain, it also goes up into the neocortex. And the neocortex is just memorizing. It's sitting there saying, I'm going to memorize all the things going on: where I've been, people I've seen, things I've heard, and so on. And in the future, when it sees something similar to that again, in a similar environment, or the exact same environment, it'll start playing it back: "Oh, I've been here before," and when you were here before, this happened next. It allows you to predict the future. It literally feeds back the signals into your brain; they'll let you see what's going to happen next, will let you hear the word "sentence" before I said it. And it's this feeding back into the old brain that will allow you to make more intelligent decisions. This is the most important slide of my talk, so I'll dwell on it a little. And all the time you say, "Oh, I can predict things," so if you're a rat and you go through a maze, and you learn the maze, next time you're in one, you have the same behavior. But suddenly, you're smarter; you say, "I recognize this maze, I know which way to go; I've been here before; I can envision the future." That's what it's doing. This is true for all mammals β in humans, it got a lot worse. Humans actually developed the front of the neocortex, called the anterior part of the neocortex. And nature did a little trick. It copied the posterior, the back part, which is sensory, and put it in the front. Humans uniquely have the same mechanism on the front, but we use it for motor control. So we're now able to do very sophisticated motor planning, things like that. I don't have time to explain, but to understand how a brain works, you have to understand how the first part of the mammalian neocortex works, how it is we store patterns and make predictions. Let me give you a few examples of predictions. I already said the word "sentence." In music, if you've heard a song before, when you hear it, the next note pops into your head already β you anticipate it. With an album, at the end of a song, the next song pops into your head. It happens all the time, you make predictions. I have this thing called the "altered door" thought experiment. It says, you have a door at home; when you're here, I'm changing it β I've got a guy back at your house right now, moving the door around, moving your doorknob over two inches. When you go home tonight, you'll put your hand out, reach for the doorknob, notice it's in the wrong spot and go, "Whoa, something happened." It may take a second, but something happened. I can change your doorknob in other ways β make it larger, smaller, change its brass to silver, make it a lever, I can change the door; put colors on, put windows in. I can change a thousand things about your door and in the two seconds you take to open it, you'll notice something has changed. Now, the engineering approach, the AI approach to this, is to build a door database with all the door attributes. And as you go up to the door, we check them off one at time: door, door, color ... We don't do that. Your brain doesn't do that. Your brain is making constant predictions all the time about what will happen in your environment. As I put my hand on this table, I expect to feel it stop. When I walk, every step, if I missed it by an eighth of an inch, I'll know something has changed. You're constantly making predictions about your environment. I'll talk about vision, briefly. This is a picture of a woman. When we look at people, our eyes saccade over two to three times a second. We're not aware of it, but our eyes are always moving. When we look at a face, we typically go from eye to eye to nose to mouth. When your eye moves from eye to eye, if there was something else there like a nose, you'd see a nose where an eye is supposed to be and go, "Oh, shit!" (Laughter) "There's something wrong about this person." That's because you're making a prediction. It's not like you just look over and say, "What am I seeing? A nose? OK." No, you have an expectation of what you're going to see. Every single moment. And finally, let's think about how we test intelligence. We test it by prediction: What is the next word in this ...? This is to this as this is to this. What is the next number in this sentence? Here's three visions of an object. What's the fourth one? That's how we test it. It's all about prediction. So what is the recipe for brain theory? First of all, we have to have the right framework. And the framework is a memory framework, not a computational or behavior framework, it's a memory framework. How do you store and recall these sequences of patterns? It's spatiotemporal patterns. Then, if in that framework, you take a bunch of theoreticians β biologists generally are not good theoreticians. Not always, but generally, there's not a good history of theory in biology. I've found the best people to work with are physicists, engineers and mathematicians, who tend to think algorithmically. Then they have to learn the anatomy and the physiology. You have to make these theories very realistic in anatomical terms. Anyone who tells you their theory about how the brain works and doesn't tell you exactly how it's working and how the wiring works β it's not a theory. And that's what we do at the Redwood Neuroscience Institute. I'd love to tell you we're making fantastic progress in this thing, and I expect to be back on this stage sometime in the not too distant future, to tell you about it. I'm really excited; this is not going to take 50 years. What will brain theory look like? First of all, it's going to be about memory. Not like computer memory β not at all like computer memory. It's very different. It's a memory of very high-dimensional patterns, like the things that come from your eyes. It's also memory of sequences: you cannot learn or recall anything outside of a sequence. A song must be heard in sequence over time, and you must play it back in sequence over time. And these sequences are auto-associatively recalled, so if I see something, I hear something, it reminds me of it, and it plays back automatically. It's an automatic playback. And prediction of future inputs is the desired output. And as I said, the theory must be biologically accurate, it must be testable and you must be able to build it. If you don't build it, you don't understand it. One more slide. What is this going to result in? Are we going to really build intelligent machines? Absolutely. And it's going to be different than people think. No doubt that it's going to happen, in my mind. First of all, we're going to build this stuff out of silicon. The same techniques we use to build silicon computer memories, we can use here. But they're very different types of memories. And we'll attach these memories to sensors, and the sensors will experience real-live, real-world data, and learn about their environment. Now, it's very unlikely the first things you'll see are like robots. Not that robots aren't useful; people can build robots. But the robotics part is the hardest part. That's old brain. That's really hard. The new brain is easier than the old brain. So first we'll do things that don't require a lot of robotics. So you're not going to see C-3PO. You're going to see things more like intelligent cars that really understand what traffic is, what driving is and have learned that cars with the blinkers on for half a minute probably aren't going to turn. (Laughter) We can also do intelligent security systems. Anytime we're basically using our brain but not doing a lot of mechanics β those are the things that will happen first. But ultimately, the world's the limit. I don't know how this will turn out. I know a lot of people who invented the microprocessor. And if you talk to them, they knew what they were doing was really significant, but they didn't really know what was going to happen. They couldn't anticipate cell phones and the Internet and all this kind of stuff. They just knew like, "We're going to build calculators and traffic-light controllers. But it's going to be big!" In the same way, brain science and these memories are going to be a very fundamental technology, and it will lead to unbelievable changes in the next 100 years. And I'm most excited about how we're going to use them in science. So I think that's all my time β I'm over, and I'm going to end my talk right there. |
Swim with the giant sunfish | {0: 'Tierney Thys is a marine biologist and science educator. She studies the behavior of the Mola mola, or giant ocean sunfish -- and works with other scientists to make films that share the wonders they see.'} | TED2003 | I'd like to start tonight by something completely different, asking you to join me by stepping off the land and jumping into the open ocean for a moment. 90 percent of the living space on the planet is in the open ocean, and it's where life β the title of our seminar tonight β it's where life began. And it's a lively and a lovely place, but we're rapidly changing the oceans with our β not only with our overfishing, our irresponsible fishing, our adding of pollutants like fertilizer from our cropland, but also, most recently, with climate change, and Steve Schneider, I'm sure, will be going into greater detail on this. Now, as we continue to tinker with the oceans, more and more reports are predicting that the kinds of seas that we're creating will be conducive to low-energy type of animals, like jellyfish and bacteria. And this might be the kind of seas we're headed for. Now jellyfish are strangely hypnotic and beautiful, and you'll see lots of gorgeous ones at the aquarium on Friday, but they sting like hell, and jellyfish sushi and sashimi is just not going to fill you up. About 100 grams of jellyfish equals four calories. So it may be good for the waistline, but it probably won't keep you satiated for very long. And a sea that's just filled and teeming with jellyfish isn't very good for all the other creatures that live in the oceans, that is, unless you eat jellyfish. And this is this voracious predator launching a sneak attack on this poor little unsuspecting jellyfish there, a by-the-wind sailor. And that predator is the giant ocean sunfish, the Mola mola, whose primary prey are jellyfish. This animal is in "The Guinness World Book of Records" for being the world's heaviest bony fish. It reaches up to almost 5,000 pounds β on a diet of jellyfish, primarily. And I think it's kind of a nice little cosmological convergence here that the Mola mola β its common name is sunfish β that its favorite food is the moon jelly. So it's kind of nice, the sun and the moon getting together this way, even if one is eating the other. Now this is typically how you see sunfish, this is where they get their common name. They like to sunbathe, can't blame them. They just lay out on the surface of the sea and most people think they're sick or lazy, but that's a typical behavior, they lie out and bask on the surface. Their other name, Mola mola, is β it sounds Hawaiian, but it's actually Latin for millstone, and that's attributable to their roundish, very bizarre, cut-off shape. It's as if, as they were growing, they just forgot the tail part. And that's actually what drew me to the Mola in the first place, was this terribly bizarre shape. You know, you look at sharks, and they're streamlined, and they're sleek, and you look at tuna, and they're like torpedoes β they just give away their agenda. They're about migration and strength, and then you look at the sunfish. (Laughter) And this is just so elegantly mysterious, it's just β it really kind of holds its cards a lot tighter than say, a tuna. So I was just intrigued with what β you know, what is this animal's story? Well, as with anything in biology, nothing really makes sense except in the light of evolution. The Mola's no exception. They appeared shortly after the dinosaurs disappeared, 65 million years ago, at a time when whales still had legs, and they come from a rebellious little puffer fish faction β oblige me a little Kipling-esque storytelling here. Of course evolution is somewhat random, and you know, about 55 million years ago there was this rebellious little puffer fish faction that said, oh, the heck with the coral reefs β we're going to head to the high seas. And lots of generations, lots of tweaking and torquing, and we turn our puffer into the Mola. You know, if you give Mother Nature enough time, that is what she will produce. They look β maybe they look kind of prehistoric and unfinished, abridged perhaps, but in fact, in fact they are the β they vie for the top position of the most evolutionarily-derived fish in the sea, right up there with flat fish. They're β every single thing about that fish has been changed. And in terms of fishes β fishes appeared 500 million years ago, and they're pretty modern, just 50 million years ago, so β so interestingly, they give away their ancestry as they develop. They start as little eggs, and they're in "The Guinness World Book of Records" again for having the most number of eggs of any vertebrate on the planet. A single four-foot female had 300 million eggs, can carry 300 million eggs in her ovaries β imagine β and they get to be over 10 feet long. Imagine what a 10 foot one has. And from that little egg, they pass through this spiky little porcupine fish stage, reminiscent of their ancestry, and develop β this is their little adolescent stage. They school as adolescents, and become behemoth loners as adults. That's a little diver up there in the corner. They're in "The Guinness World Book of Records" again for being the vertebrate growth champion of the world. From their little hatching size of their egg, into their little larval stage till they reach adulthood, they put on 600 million times an increase in weight. 600 million. Now imagine if you gave birth to a little baby, and you had to feed this thing. That would mean that your child, you would expect it to gain the weight of six Titanics. Now I don't know how you'd feed a child like that but β we don't know how fast the Molas grow in the wild, but captive growth studies at the Monterey Bay Aquarium β one of the first places to have them in captivity β they had one that gained 800 lbs in 14 months. I said, now, that's a true American. (Laughter) (Applause) So being a loner is a great thing, especially in today's seas, because schooling used to be salvation for fishes, but it's suicide for fishes now. But unfortunately Molas, even though they don't school, they still get caught in nets as by-catch. If we're going to save the world from total jellyfish domination, then we've got to figure out what the jellyfish predators β how they live their lives, like the Mola. And unfortunately, they make up a large portion of the California by-catch β up to 26 percent of the drift net. And in the Mediterranean, in the swordfish net fisheries, they make up up to 90 percent. So we've got to figure out how they're living their lives. And how do you do that? How do you do that with an animal β very few places in the world. This is an open ocean creature. It knows no boundaries β it doesn't go to land. How do you get insight? How do you seduce an open ocean creature like that to spill its secrets? Well, there's some great new technology that has just recently become available, and it's just a boon for getting insight into open ocean animals. And it's pictured right here, that little tag up there. That little tag can record temperature, depth and light intensity, which is correlated with time, and from that we can get locations. And it can record this data for up to two years, and keep it in that tag, release at a pre-programmed time, float to the surface, upload all that data, that whole travelogue, to satellite, which relays it directly to our computers, and we've got that whole dataset. And we didn't even have β we just had to tag the animal and then we went home and you know, sat at our desks. So the great thing about the Mola is that when we put the tag on them β if you look up here β that's streaming off, that's right where we put the tag. And it just so happens that's a parasite hanging off the Mola. Molas are infamous for carrying tons of parasites. They're just parasite hotels; even their parasites have parasites. I think Donne wrote a poem about that. But they have 40 genera of parasites, and so we figured just one more parasite won't be too much of a problem. And they happen to be a very good vehicle for carrying oceanographic equipment. They don't seem to mind, so far. So what are we trying to find out? We're focusing on the Pacific. We're tagging on the California coast, and we're tagging over in Taiwan and Japan. And we're interested in how these animals are using the currents, using temperature, using the open ocean, to live their lives. We'd love to tag in Monterey. Monterey is one of the few places in the world where Molas come in large numbers. Not this time of year β it's more around October. And we'd love to tag here β this is an aerial shot of Monterey β but unfortunately, the Molas here end up looking like this because another one of our locals really likes Molas but in the wrong way. The California sea lion takes the Molas as soon as they come into the bay, rips off their fins, fashions them into the ultimate Frisbee, Mola style, and then tosses them back and forth. And I'm not exaggerating, it is just β and sometimes they don't eat them, it's just spiteful. And you know, the locals think it's terrible behavior, it's just horrible watching this happen, day after day. The poor little Molas coming in, getting ripped to shreds, so we head down south, to San Diego. Not so many California sea lions down there. And the Molas there, you can find them with a spotter plane very easily, and they like to hang out under floating rafts of kelp. And under those kelps β this is why the Molas come there because it's spa time for the Molas there. As soon as they get under those rafts of kelp, the exfoliating cleaner fish come. And they come and give the Molas β you can see they strike this funny little position that says, "I'm not threatening, but I need a massage." (Laughter) And they'll put their fins out and their eyes go in the back of their head, and the fish come up and they just clean, clean, clean β because the Molas, you know, there's just a smorgasbord of parasites. And it's also a great place to go down south because the water's warmer, and the Molas are kind of friendly down there. I mean what other kind of fish, if you approach it right, will say, "Okay, scratch me right there." You truly can swim up to a Mola β they're very gentle β and if you approach them right, you can give them a scratch and they enjoy it. So we've also tagged one part of the Pacific; we've gone over to another part of the Pacific, and we've tagged in Taiwan, and we tagged in Japan. And over in these places, the Molas are caught in set nets that line these countries. And they're not thrown back as by-catch, they're eaten. We were served a nine-course meal of Mola after we tagged. Well, not the one we tagged! And everything from the kidney, to the testes, to the back bone, to the fin muscle to β I think that Γs pretty much the whole fish β is eaten. So the hardest part of tagging, now, is after you put that tag on, you have to wait, months. And you're just wondering, oh, I hope the fish is safe, I hope, I hope it's going to be able to actually live its life out during the course that the tag is recording. The tags cost 3500 dollars each, and then satellite time is another 500 dollars, so you're like, oh, I hope the tag is okay. And so the waiting is really the hardest part. I'm going to show you our latest dataset. And it hasn't been published, so it's totally privy information just for TED. And in showing you this, you know, when we're looking at this data, we're thinking, oh do these animals, do they cross the equator? Do they go from one side of the Pacific to the other? And we found that they kind of are homebodies. They're not big migrators. This is their track: we deployed the tag off of Tokyo, and the Mola in one month kind of got into the Kuroshio Current off of Japan and foraged there. And after four months, went up, you know, off of the north part of Japan. And that's kind of their home range. Now that's important, though, because if there's a lot of fishing pressure, that population doesn't get replenished. So that's a very important piece of data. But also what's important is that they're not slacker, lazy fish. They're super industrious. And this is a day in the life of a Mola, and if we β they're up and down, and up and down, and up and down, and up and up and down, up to 40 times a day. As the sun comes up, you see in the blue, they start their dive. Down β and as the sun gets brighter they go a little deeper, little deeper. They plumb the depths down to 600 meters, in temperatures to one degree centigrade, and this is why you see them on the surface β it's so cold down there. They've got to come up, warm, get that solar power, and then plunge back into the depths, and go up and down and up and down. And they're hitting a layer down there; it's called the deep scattering layer β which a whole variety of food's in that layer. So rather than just being some sunbathing slacker, they're really very industrious fish that dance this wild dance between the surface and the bottom and through temperature. We see the same pattern β now with these tags we're seeing a similar pattern for swordfishes, manta rays, tunas, a real three-dimensional play. This is part of a much larger program called the Census of Marine Life, where they're going to be tagging all over the world and the Mola's going to enter into that. And what's exciting β you all travel, and you know the best thing about traveling is to be able to find the locals, and to find the great places by getting the local knowledge. Well now with the Census of Marine Life, we'll be able to sidle up to all the locals and explore 90 percent of our living space, with local knowledge. It's never β it's really never been a more exciting, or a vital time, to be a biologist. Which brings me to my last point, and what I think is kind of the most fun. I set up a website because I was getting so many questions about Molas and sunfish. And so I just figured I'd have the questions answered, and I'd be able to thank my funders, like National Geographic and Lindbergh. But people would write into the site with all sorts of, all sorts of stories about these animals and wanting to help me get samples for genetic analysis. And what I found most exciting is that everyone had a shared β a shared love and an interest in the oceans. I was getting reports from Catholic nuns, Jewish Rabbis, Muslims, Christians β everybody writing in, united by their love of life. And to me that β I don't think I could say it any better than the immortal Bard himself: "One touch of nature makes the whole world kin." And sure, it may be just one big old silly fish, but it's helping. If it's helping to unite the world, I think it's definitely the fish of the future. |
Salvation (and profit) in greentech | {0: 'John Doerr is an engineer, acclaimed venture capitalist and the chairman of Kleiner Perkins.'} | TED2007 | I'm really scared. I don't think we're going to make it. Probably by now most of you have seen Al Gore's amazing talk. Shortly after I saw that, we had some friends over for dinner with the family. The conversation turned to global warming, and everybody agreed, there's a real problem. We've got a climate crisis. So, we went around the table to talk about what we should do. The conversation came to my 15-year-old daughter, Mary. She said, "I agree with everything that's been said. I'm scared and I'm angry." And then she turned to me and said, "Dad, your generation created this problem; you'd better fix it." Wow. All the conversation stopped. All the eyes turned to me. (Laughter) I didn't know what to say. Kleiner's second law is, "There is a time when panic is the appropriate response." (Laughter) And we've reached that time. We cannot afford to underestimate this problem. If we face irreversible and catastrophic consequences, we must act, and we must act decisively. I've got to tell you, for me, everything changed that evening. And so, my partners and I, we set off on this mission to learn more, to try to do much more. So, we mobilized. We got on airplanes. We went to Brazil. We went to China and to India, to Bentonville, Arkansas, to Washington, D.C. and to Sacramento. And so, what I'd like to do now is to tell you about what we've learned in those journeys. Because the more we learned, the more concerned we grew. You know, my partners at Kleiner and I were compulsive networkers, and so when we see a big problem or an opportunity like avian flu or personalized medicine, we just get together the smartest people we know. For this climate crisis, we assembled a network, really, of superstars, from policy activists to scientists and entrepreneurs and business leaders. Fifty or so of them. And so, I want to tell you about what we've learned in doing that and four lessons I've learned in the last year. The first lesson is that companies are really powerful, and that matters a lot. This is a story about how Wal-Mart went green, and what that means. Two years ago, the CEO, Lee Scott, believed that green is the next big thing, and so Wal-Mart made going green a top priority. They committed that they're going to take their existing stores and reduce their energy consumption by 20 percent, and their new stores by 30 percent, and do all that in seven years. The three biggest uses of energy in a store are heating and air conditioning, then lighting, and then refrigeration. So, look what they did. They painted the roofs of all their stores white. They put smart skylights through their stores so they could harvest the daylight and reduce the lighting demands. And, third, they put the refrigerated goods behind closed doors with LED lighting. I mean, why would you try to refrigerate a whole store? These are really simple, smart solutions based on existing technology. Why does Wal-Mart matter? Well, it's massive. They're the largest private employer in America. They're the largest private user of electricity. They have the second-largest vehicle fleet on the road. And they have one of the world's most amazing supply chains, 60,000 suppliers. If Wal-Mart were a country, it would be the sixth-largest trading partner with China. And maybe most important, they have a big effect on other companies. When Wal-Mart declares it's going to go green and be profitable, it has a powerful impact on other great institutions. So, let me tell you this: when Wal-Mart achieves 20 percent energy reductions, that's going to be a very big deal. But I'm afraid it's not enough. We need Wal-Mart and every other company to do the same. The second thing that we learned is that individuals matter, and they matter enormously. I've got another Wal-Mart story for you, OK? Wal-Mart has over 125 million U.S. customers. That's a third of the U.S. population. 65 million compact fluorescent light bulbs were sold last year. And Wal-Mart has committed they're going to sell another 100 million light bulbs in the coming year. But it's not easy. Consumers don't really like these light bulbs. The light's kind of funny, they won't dim, takes a while for them to start up. But the pay-off is really enormous. 100 million compact fluorescent light bulbs means that we'll save 600 million dollars in energy bills, and 20 million tons of CO2 every year, year in and year out. It does seem really hard to get consumers to do the right thing. It is stupid that we use two tons of steel, glass and plastic to haul our sorry selves to the shopping mall. It's stupid that we put water in plastic bottles in Fiji and ship it here. (Laughter) It's hard to change consumer behavior because consumers don't know how much this stuff costs. Do you know? Do you know how much CO2 you generated to drive here or fly here? I don't know, and I should. Those of us who care about all this would act better if we knew what the real costs were. But as long as we pretend that CO2 is free, as long as these uses are nearly invisible, how can we expect change? I'm really afraid, because I think the kinds of changes we can reasonably expect from individuals are going to be clearly not enough. The third lesson we learned is that policy matters. It really matters. In fact, policy is paramount. I've got a behind-the-scenes story for you about that green tech network I described. At the end of our first meeting, we got together to talk about what the action items would be, how we'd follow up. And Bob Epstein raised a hand. He stood up. You know, Bob's that Berkeley techie type who started Sybase. Well, Bob said the most important thing we could do right now is to make it clear in Sacramento, California that we need a market-based system of mandates that's going to cap and reduce greenhouse gases in California. It's necessary and, just as important, it's good for the California economy. So, eight of us went to Sacramento in August and we met with the seven undecided legislators and we lobbied for AB32. You know what? Six of those seven voted yes in favor of the bill, so it passed, and it passed by a vote of 47 to 32. (Applause) Please. Thank you. I think it's the most important legislation of 2006. Why? Because California was the first state in this country to mandate 25 percent reduction of greenhouse gases by 2020. And the result of that is, we're going to generate 83,000 new jobs, four billion dollars a year in annual income, and reduce the CO2 emissions by 174 million tons a year. California emits only seven percent of U.S. CO2 emissions. It's only a percent and a half of the country's CO2 emissions. It's a great start, but I've got to tell you β where I started β I'm really afraid. In fact, I'm certain California's not enough. Here's a story about national policy that we could all learn from. You know Tom Friedman says, "If you don't go, you don't know"? Well, we went to Brazil to meet Dr. Jose Goldemberg. He's the father of the ethanol revolution. He told us that Brazil's government mandated that every gasoline station in the country would carry ethanol. And they mandated that their new vehicles would be flex-fuel compatible, right? They'd run ethanol or ordinary gasoline. And so, here's what's happened in Brazil. They now have 29,000 ethanol pumps β this versus 700 in the U.S., and a paltry two in California β and in three years their new car fleet has gone from four percent to 85 percent flex-fuel. Compare that to the U.S.: five percent are flex-fuel. And you know what? Most consumers who have them don't even know it. So, what's happened in Brazil is, they've replaced 40 percent of the gasoline consumed by their automotive fleet with ethanol. That's 59 billion dollars since 1975 that they didn't ship to the Middle East. It's created a million jobs inside that country, and it's saved 32 million tons of CO2. It's really substantial. That's 10 percent of the CO2 emissions across their entire country. But Brazil's only 1.3 percent of the world's CO2 emission. So, Brazil's ethanol miracle, I'm really afraid, is not enough. In fact, I'm afraid all of the best policies we have are not going to be enough. The fourth and final lesson we've learned is about the potential of radical innovation. So, I want to tell you about a tragic problem and a breakthrough technology. Every year a million and a half people die of a completely preventable disease. That's malaria. 6,000 people a day. All for want of two dollars' worth of medications that we can buy at the corner drugstore. Well, two dollars, two dollars is too much for Africa. So, a team of Berkeley researchers with 15 million dollars from the Gates Foundation is engineering, designing a radical new way to make the key ingredient, called artemisinin, and they're going to make that drug 10 times cheaper. And in doing so, they'll save a million lives β at least a million lives a year. A million lives. Their breakthrough technology is synthetic biology. This leverages millions of years of evolution by redesigning bugs to make really useful products. Now, what you do is, you get inside the microbe, you change its metabolic pathways, and you end up with a living chemical factory. Now, you may ask, John, what has this got to go with green and with climate crisis? Well, I'll tell you β a lot. We've now formed a company called Amyris, and this technology that they're using can be used to make better biofuels. Don't let me skip over that. Better biofuels are a really big deal. That means we can precisely engineer the molecules in the fuel chain and optimize them along the way. So, if all goes well, they're going to have designer bugs in warm vats that are eating and digesting sugars to excrete better biofuels. I guess that's better living through bugs. Alan Kay is famous for saying the best way to predict the future is to invent it. And, of course, at Kleiner we, kind of, apologize and say the second best way is to finance it. And that's why we're investing 200 million dollars in a wide range of really disruptive new technologies for innovation in green technologies. And we're encouraging others to do it as well. We're talking a lot about this. In 2005, there were 600 million dollars invested in new technologies of the sort you see here. It doubled in 2006 to 1.2 billion dollars. But I'm really afraid we need much, much more. For reference, fact one: Exxon's revenues in 2005 were a billion dollars a day. Do you know, they only invested 0.2 percent of revenues in R&D? Second fact: the President's new budget for renewable energy is barely a billion dollars in total. Less than one day of Exxon's revenues. Third fact: I bet you didn't know that there's enough energy in hot rocks under the country to supply America's energy needs for the next thousand years. And the federal budget calls for a measly 20 million dollars of R&D in geothermal energy. It is almost criminal that we are not investing more in energy research in this country. And I am really afraid that it's absolutely not enough. So, in a year's worth of learning we found a bunch of surprises. Who would have thought that a mass retailer could make money by going green? Who would have thought that a database entrepreneur could transform California with legislation? Who would have thought that the ethanol biofuel miracle would come from a developing country in South America? And who would have thought that scientists trying to cure malaria could come up with breakthroughs in biofuels? And who would have thought that all that is not enough? Not enough to stabilize the climate. Not enough to keep the ice in Greenland from crashing into the ocean. The scientists tell us β and they're only guessing β that we've got to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by one half, and do it as fast as possible. Now, we may have the political will to do this in the U.S., but I've got to tell you, we've got only one atmosphere, and so somehow we're going to have to find the political will to do this all around the world. The wild card in this deck is China. To size the problem, China's CO2 emissions today are 3.3 gigatons; the U.S. is 5.8. Business as usual means we'll have 23 gigatons from China by 2050. That's about as much CO2 as there is in the whole world. And if it's business as usual, we're going out of business. When I was in Davos, China's Mayor of Dalian was pressed about their CO2 strategy, and he said the following, "You know, Americans use seven times the CO2 per capita as Chinese." Then he asked, "Why should China sacrifice our growth so that the West can continue to be profligate and stupid?" Does anybody here have an answer for him? I don't. We've got to make this economic so that all people and all nations make the right outcome, the profitable outcome, and therefore the likely outcome. Energy's a six-trillion-dollar business worldwide. It is the mother of all markets. You remember that Internet? Well, I'll tell you what. Green technologies β going green β is bigger than the Internet. It could be the biggest economic opportunity of the 21st century. Moreover, if we succeed, it's going to be the most important transformation for life on the planet since, as Bill Joy says, we went from methane to oxygen in the atmosphere. Now, here's the hard question, if the trajectory of all the world's companies and individuals and policies and innovation is not going to be enough, what are we going to do? I don't know. Everyone here cares about changing the world and has made a difference in that one way or another. So, our call to action β my call to you β is for you to make going green your next big thing, your gig. What can you do? You can personally get carbon neutral. Go to ClimateCrisis.org or CarbonCalculator.com and buy carbon credits. You could join other leaders in mandating, lobbying for mandated cap and trade in U.S. greenhouse gas reductions. There's six bills right now in Congress. Let's get one of them passed. And the most important thing you can do, I think, is to use your personal power and your Rolodex to lead your business, your institution, in going green. Do it like Wal-Mart, get it to go green for its customers and its suppliers and for itself. Really think outside the box. Can you imagine what it would be like if Amazon or eBay or Google or Microsoft or Apple really went green and you caused that to happen? It could be bigger than Wal-Mart. I can't wait to see what we TEDsters do about this crisis. And I really, really hope that we multiply all of our energy, all of our talent and all of our influence to solve this problem. Because if we do, I can look forward to the conversation I'm going to have with my daughter in 20 years. (Applause) |
How PhotoSynth can connect the world's images | {0: 'Blaise AgΓΌera y Arcas works on machine learning at Google. Previously a Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft, he has worked on augmented reality, mapping, wearable computing and natural user interfaces.'} | TED2007 | What I'm going to show you first, as quickly as I can, is some foundational work, some new technology that we brought to Microsoft as part of an acquisition almost exactly a year ago. This is Seadragon, and it's an environment in which you can either locally or remotely interact with vast amounts of visual data. We're looking at many, many gigabytes of digital photos here and kind of seamlessly and continuously zooming in, panning through it, rearranging it in any way we want. And it doesn't matter how much information we're looking at, how big these collections are or how big the images are. Most of them are ordinary digital camera photos, but this one, for example, is a scan from the Library of Congress, and it's in the 300 megapixel range. It doesn't make any difference because the only thing that ought to limit the performance of a system like this one is the number of pixels on your screen at any given moment. It's also very flexible architecture. This is an entire book, so this is an example of non-image data. This is "Bleak House" by Dickens. Every column is a chapter. To prove to you that it's really text, and not an image, we can do something like so, to really show that this is a real representation of the text; it's not a picture. Maybe this is an artificial way to read an e-book. I wouldn't recommend it. This is a more realistic case, an issue of The Guardian. Every large image is the beginning of a section. And this really gives you the joy and the good experience of reading the real paper version of a magazine or a newspaper, which is an inherently multi-scale kind of medium. We've done something with the corner of this particular issue of The Guardian. We've made up a fake ad that's very high resolution β much higher than in an ordinary ad β and we've embedded extra content. If you want to see the features of this car, you can see it here. Or other models, or even technical specifications. And this really gets at some of these ideas about really doing away with those limits on screen real estate. We hope that this means no more pop-ups and other rubbish like that β shouldn't be necessary. Of course, mapping is one of those obvious applications for a technology like this. And this one I really won't spend any time on, except to say that we have things to contribute to this field as well. But those are all the roads in the U.S. superimposed on top of a NASA geospatial image. So let's pull up, now, something else. This is actually live on the Web now; you can go check it out. This is a project called Photosynth, which marries two different technologies. One of them is Seadragon and the other is some very beautiful computer-vision research done by Noah Snavely, a graduate student at the University of Washington, co-advised by Steve Seitz at U.W. and Rick Szeliski at Microsoft Research. A very nice collaboration. And so this is live on the Web. It's powered by Seadragon. You can see that when we do these sorts of views, where we can dive through images and have this kind of multi-resolution experience. But the spatial arrangement of the images here is actually meaningful. The computer vision algorithms have registered these images together so that they correspond to the real space in which these shots β all taken near Grassi Lakes in the Canadian Rockies β all these shots were taken. So you see elements here of stabilized slide-show or panoramic imaging, and these things have all been related spatially. I'm not sure if I have time to show you any other environments. Some are much more spatial. I would like to jump straight to one of Noah's original data-sets β this is from an early prototype that we first got working this summer β to show you what I think is really the punch line behind the Photosynth technology, It's not necessarily so apparent from looking at the environments we've put up on the website. We had to worry about the lawyers and so on. This is a reconstruction of Notre Dame Cathedral that was done entirely computationally from images scraped from Flickr. You just type Notre Dame into Flickr, and you get some pictures of guys in T-shirts, and of the campus and so on. And each of these orange cones represents an image that was discovered to belong to this model. And so these are all Flickr images, and they've all been related spatially in this way. We can just navigate in this very simple way. (Applause) (Applause ends) You know, I never thought that I'd end up working at Microsoft. It's very gratifying to have this kind of reception here. (Laughter) I guess you can see this is lots of different types of cameras: it's everything from cell-phone cameras to professional SLRs, quite a large number of them, stitched together in this environment. If I can find some of the sort of weird ones β So many of them are occluded by faces, and so on. Somewhere in here there is actually a series of photographs β here we go. This is actually a poster of Notre Dame that registered correctly. We can dive in from the poster to a physical view of this environment. What the point here really is is that we can do things with the social environment. This is now taking data from everybody β from the entire collective memory, visually, of what the Earth looks like β and link all of that together. Those photos become linked, and they make something emergent that's greater than the sum of the parts. You have a model that emerges of the entire Earth. Think of this as the long tail to Stephen Lawler's Virtual Earth work. And this is something that grows in complexity as people use it, and whose benefits become greater to the users as they use it. Their own photos are getting tagged with meta-data that somebody else entered. If somebody bothered to tag all of these saints and say who they all are, then my photo of Notre Dame Cathedral suddenly gets enriched with all of that data, and I can use it as an entry point to dive into that space, into that meta-verse, using everybody else's photos, and do a kind of a cross-modal and cross-user social experience that way. And of course, a by-product of all of that is immensely rich virtual models of every interesting part of the Earth, collected not just from overhead flights and from satellite images and so on, but from the collective memory. Thank you so much. (Applause) (Applause ends) Chris Anderson: Do I understand this right? What your software is going to allow, is that at some point, really within the next few years, all the pictures that are shared by anyone across the world are going to link together? BAA: Yes. What this is really doing is discovering, creating hyperlinks, if you will, between images. It's doing that based on the content inside the images. And that gets really exciting when you think about the richness of the semantic information a lot of images have. Like when you do a web search for images, you type in phrases, and the text on the web page is carrying a lot of information about what that picture is of. What if that picture links to all of your pictures? The amount of semantic interconnection and richness that comes out of that is really huge. It's a classic network effect. CA: Truly incredible. Congratulations. |
Want to help Africa? Do business here | {0: 'Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is a respected global economist.'} | TED2007 | Thank you very much, Chris. Everybody who came up here said they were scared. I don't know if I'm scared, but this is my first time of addressing an audience like this. And I don't have any smart technology for you to look at. There are no slides, so you'll just have to be content with me. (Laughter) What I want to do this morning is share with you a couple of stories and talk about a different Africa. Already this morning there were some allusions to the Africa that you hear about all the time: the Africa of HIV/AIDS, the Africa of malaria, the Africa of poverty, the Africa of conflict, and the Africa of disasters. While it is true that those things are going on, there's an Africa that you don't hear about very much. And sometimes I'm puzzled, and I ask myself why. This is the Africa that is changing, that Chris alluded to. This is the Africa of opportunity. This is the Africa where people want to take charge of their own futures and their own destinies. And this is the Africa where people are looking for partnerships to do this. That's what I want to talk about today. And I want to start by telling you a story about that change in Africa. On 15th of September 2005, Mr. Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, a governor of one of the oil-rich states of Nigeria, was arrested by the London Metropolitan Police on a visit to London. He was arrested because there were transfers of eight million dollars that went into some dormant accounts that belonged to him and his family. This arrest occurred because there was cooperation between the London Metropolitan Police and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission of Nigeria β led by one of our most able and courageous people: Mr. Nuhu Ribadu. Alamieyeseigha was arraigned in London. Due to some slip-ups, he managed to escape dressed as a woman and ran from London back to Nigeria where, according to our constitution, those in office as governors, president β as in many countries β have immunity and cannot be prosecuted. But what happened: people were so outraged by this behavior that it was possible for his state legislature to impeach him and get him out of office. Today, Alams β as we call him for short β is in jail. This is a story about the fact that people in Africa are no longer willing to tolerate corruption from their leaders. This is a story about the fact that people want their resources managed properly for their good, and not taken out to places where they'll benefit just a few of the elite. And therefore, when you hear about the corrupt Africa β corruption all the time β I want you to know that the people and the governments are trying hard to fight this in some of the countries, and that some successes are emerging. Does it mean the problem is over? The answer is no. There's still a long way to go, but that there's a will there. And that successes are being chalked up on this very important fight. So when you hear about corruption, don't just feel that nothing is being done about this β that you can't operate in any African country because of the overwhelming corruption. That is not the case. There's a will to fight, and in many countries, that fight is ongoing and is being won. In others, like mine, where there has been a long history of dictatorship in Nigeria, the fight is ongoing and we have a long way to go. But the truth of the matter is that this is going on. The results are showing: independent monitoring by the World Bank and other organizations show that in many instances the trend is downwards in terms of corruption, and governance is improving. A study by the Economic Commission for Africa showed a clear trend upwards in governance in 28 African countries. And let me say just one more thing before I leave this area of governance. That is that people talk about corruption, corruption. All the time when they talk about it you immediately think about Africa. That's the image: African countries. But let me say this: if Alams was able to export eight million dollars into an account in London β if the other people who had taken money, estimated at 20 to 40 billion now of developing countries' monies sitting abroad in the developed countries β if they're able to do this, what is that? Is that not corruption? In this country, if you receive stolen goods, are you not prosecuted? So when we talk about this kind of corruption, let us also think about what is happening on the other side of the globe β where the money's going and what can be done to stop it. I'm working on an initiative now, along with the World Bank, on asset recovery, trying to do what we can to get the monies that have been taken abroad β developing countries' moneys β to get that sent back. Because if we can get the 20 billion dollars sitting out there back, it may be far more for some of these countries than all the aid that is being put together. (Applause) The second thing I want to talk about is the will for reform. Africans, after β they're tired, we're tired of being the subject of everybody's charity and care. We are grateful, but we know that we can take charge of our own destinies if we have the will to reform. And what is happening in many African countries now is a realization that no one can do it but us. We have to do it. We can invite partners who can support us, but we have to start. We have to reform our economies, change our leadership, become more democratic, be more open to change and to information. And this is what we started to do in one of the largest countries on the continent, Nigeria. In fact, if you're not in Nigeria, you're not in Africa. I want to tell you that. (Laughter) One in four sub-Saharan Africans is Nigerian, and it has 140 million dynamic people β chaotic people β but very interesting people. You'll never be bored. (Laughter) What we started to do was to realize that we had to take charge and reform ourselves. And with the support of a leader who was willing, at the time, to do the reforms, we put forward a comprehensive reform program, which we developed ourselves. Not the International Monetary Fund. Not the World Bank, where I worked for 21 years and rose to be a vice president. No one can do it for you. You have to do it for yourself. We put together a program that would, one: get the state out of businesses it had nothing β it had no business being in. The state should not be in the business of producing goods and services because it's inefficient and incompetent. So we decided to privatize many of our enterprises. (Applause) We β as a result, we decided to liberalize many of our markets. Can you believe that prior to this reform β which started at the end of 2003, when I left Washington to go and take up the post of Finance Minister β we had a telecommunications company that was only able to develop 4,500 landlines in its entire 30-year history? (Laughter) Having a telephone in my country was a huge luxury. You couldn't get it. You had to bribe. You had to do everything to get your phone. When President Obasanjo supported and launched the liberalization of the telecommunications sector, we went from 4,500 landlines to 32 million GSM lines, and counting. Nigeria's telecoms market is the second-fastest growing in the world, after China. We are getting investments of about a billion dollars a year in telecoms. And nobody knows, except a few smart people. (Laughter) The smartest one, first to come in, was the MTN company of South Africa. And in the three years that I was Finance Minister, they made an average of 360 million dollars profit per year. 360 million in a market β in a country that is a poor country, with an average per capita income just under 500 dollars per capita. So the market is there. When they kept this under wraps, but soon others got to know. Nigerians themselves began to develop some wireless telecommunications companies, and three or four others have come in. But there's a huge market out there, and people don't know about it, or they don't want to know. So privatization is one of the things we've done. The other thing we've also done is to manage our finances better. Because nobody's going to help you and support you if you're not managing your own finances well. And Nigeria, with the oil sector, had the reputation of being corrupt and not managing its own public finances well. So what did we try to do? We introduced a fiscal rule that de-linked our budget from the oil price. Before we used to just budget on whatever oil we bring in, because oil is the biggest, most revenue-earning sector in the economy: 70 percent of our revenues come from oil. We de-linked that, and once we did it, we began to budget at a price slightly lower than the oil price and save whatever was above that price. We didn't know we could pull it off; it was very controversial. But what it immediately did was that the volatility that had been present in terms of our economic development β where, even if oil prices were high, we would grow very fast. When they crashed, we crashed. And we could hardly even pay anything, any salaries, in the economy. That smoothened out. We were able to save, just before I left, 27 billion dollars. Whereas β and this went to our reserves β when I arrived in 2003, we had seven billion dollars in reserves. By the time I left, we had gone up to almost 30 billion dollars. And as we speak now, we have about 40 billion dollars in reserves due to proper management of our finances. And that shores up our economy, makes it stable. Our exchange rate that used to fluctuate all the time is now fairly stable and being managed so that business people have a predictability of prices in the economy. We brought inflation down from 28 percent to about 11 percent. And we had GDP grow from an average of 2.3 percent the previous decade to about 6.5 percent now. So all the changes and reforms we were able to make have shown up in results that are measurable in the economy. And what is more important, because we want to get away from oil and diversify β and there are so many opportunities in this one big country, as in many countries in Africa β what was remarkable is that much of this growth came not from the oil sector alone, but from non-oil. Agriculture grew at better than eight percent. As telecoms sector grew, housing and construction, and I could go on and on. And this is to illustrate to you that once you get the macro-economy straightened out, the opportunities in various other sectors are enormous. We have opportunities in agriculture, like I said. We have opportunities in solid minerals. We have a lot of minerals that no one has even invested in or explored. And we realized that without the proper legislation to make that possible, that wouldn't happen. So we've now got a mining code that is comparable with some of the best in the world. We have opportunities in housing and real estate. There was nothing in a country of 140 million people β no shopping malls as you know them here. This was an investment opportunity for someone that excited the imagination of people. And now, we have a situation in which the businesses in this mall are doing four times the turnover that they had projected. So, huge things in construction, real estate, mortgage markets. Financial services: we had 89 banks. Too many not doing their real business. We consolidated them from 89 to 25 banks by requiring that they increase their capital β share capital. And it went from about 25 million dollars to 150 million dollars. The banks β these banks are now consolidated, and that strengthening of the banking system has attracted a lot of investment from outside. Barclays Bank of the U.K. is bringing in 500 million. Standard Chartered has brought in 140 million. And I can go on. Dollars, on and on, into the system. We are doing the same with the insurance sector. So in financial services, a great deal of opportunity. In tourism, in many African countries, a great opportunity. And that's what many people know East Africa for: the wildlife, the elephants, and so on. But managing the tourism market in a way that can really benefit the people is very important. So what am I trying to say? I'm trying to tell you that there's a new wave on the continent. A new wave of openness and democratization in which, since 2000, more than two-thirds of African countries have had multi-party democratic elections. Not all of them have been perfect, or will be, but the trend is very clear. I'm trying to tell you that since the past three years, the average rate of growth on the continent has moved from about 2.5 percent to about five percent per annum. This is better than the performance of many OECD countries. So it's clear that things are changing. Conflicts are down on the continent; from about 12 conflicts a decade ago, we are down to three or four conflicts β one of the most terrible, of course, of which is Darfur. And, you know, you have the neighborhood effect where if something is going on in one part of the continent, it looks like the entire continent is affected. But you should know that this continent is not β is a continent of many countries, not one country. And if we are down to three or four conflicts, it means that there are plenty of opportunities to invest in stable, growing, exciting economies where there's plenty of opportunity. And I want to just make one point about this investment. The best way to help Africans today is to help them to stand on their own feet. And the best way to do that is by helping create jobs. There's no issue with fighting malaria and putting money in that and saving children's lives. That's not what I'm saying. That is fine. But imagine the impact on a family: if the parents can be employed and make sure that their children go to school, that they can buy the drugs to fight the disease themselves. If we can invest in places where you yourselves make money whilst creating jobs and helping people stand on their own feet, isn't that a wonderful opportunity? Isn't that the way to go? And I want to say that some of the best people to invest in on the continent are the women. (Applause) I have a CD here. I'm sorry that I didn't say anything on time. Otherwise, I would have liked you to have seen this. It says, "Africa: Open for Business." And this is a video that has actually won an award as the best documentary of the year. Understand that the woman who made it is going to be in Tanzania, where they're having the session in June. But it shows you Africans, and particularly African women, who against all odds have developed businesses, some of them world-class. One of the women in this video, Adenike Ogunlesi, making children's clothes β which she started as a hobby and grew into a business. Mixing African materials, such as we have, with materials from elsewhere. So, she'll make a little pair of dungarees with corduroys, with African material mixed in. Very creative designs, has reached a stage where she even had an order from Wal-Mart. (Laughter) For 10,000 pieces. So that shows you that we have people who are capable of doing. And the women are diligent. They are focused; they work hard. I could go on giving examples: Beatrice Gakuba of Rwanda, who opened up a flower business and is now exporting to the Dutch auction in Amsterdam each morning and is employing 200 other women and men to work with her. However, many of these are starved for capital to expand, because nobody believes outside of our countries that we can do what is necessary. Nobody thinks in terms of a market. Nobody thinks there's opportunity. But I'm standing here saying that those who miss the boat now, will miss it forever. So if you want to be in Africa, think about investing. Think about the Beatrices, think about the Adenikes of this world, who are doing incredible things, that are bringing them into the global economy, whilst at the same time making sure that their fellow men and women are employed, and that the children in those households get educated because their parents are earning adequate income. So I invite you to explore the opportunities. When you go to Tanzania, listen carefully, because I'm sure you will hear of the various openings that there will be for you to get involved in something that will do good for the continent, for the people and for yourselves. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Rethink the desktop with BumpTop | {0: "Anand Agarawala's job: to imagine and build the computers you'll use in 20 years."} | TED2007 | So, I kind of believe that we're in like the "cave-painting" era of computer interfaces. Like, they're very kind of β they don't go as deep or as emotionally engaging as they possibly could be and I'd like to change all that. Hit me. OK. So I mean, this is the kind of status quo interface, right? It's very flat, kind of rigid. And OK, so you could sex it up and like go to a much more lickable Mac, you know, but really it's the kind of same old crap we've had for the last, you know, 30 years. (Laughter) (Applause) Like I think we really put up with a lot of crap with our computers. I mean it's point and click, it's like the menus, icons, it's all the kind of same thing. And so one kind of information space that I take inspiration from is my real desk. It's so much more subtle, so much more visceral β you know, what's visible, what's not. And I'd like to bring that experience to the desktop. So I kind of have a β this is BumpTop. It's kind of like a new approach to desktop computing. So you can bump things β they're all physically, you know, manipulable and stuff. And instead of that point and click, it's like a push and pull, things collide as you'd expect them. Just like on my real desk, I can β let me just grab these guys β I can turn things into piles instead of just the folders that we have. And once things are in a pile I can browse them by throwing them into a grid, or you know, flip through them like a book or I can lay them out like a deck of cards. When they're laid out, I can pull things to new locations or delete things or just quickly sort a whole pile, you know, just immediately, right? And then, it's all smoothly animated, instead of these jarring changes you see in today's interfaces. Also, if I want to add something to a pile, well, how do I do that? I just toss it to the pile, and it's added right to the top. It's a kind of nice way. Also some of the stuff we can do is, for these individual icons we thought β I mean, how can we play with the idea of an icon, and push that further? And one of the things I can do is make it bigger if I want to emphasize it and make it more important. But what's really cool is that since there's a physics simulation running under this, it's actually heavier. So the lighter stuff doesn't really move but if I throw it at the lighter guys, right? (Laughter) So it's cute, but it's also like a subtle channel of conveying information, right? This is heavy so it feels more important. So it's kind of cool. Despite computers everywhere paper really hasn't disappeared, because it has a lot of, I think, valuable properties. And some of those we wanted to transfer to the icons in our system. So one of the things you can do to our icons, just like paper, is crease them and fold them, just like paper. Remember, you know, something for later. Or if you want to be destructive, you can just crumple it up and, you know, toss it to the corner. Also just like paper, around our workspace we'll pin things up to the wall to remember them later, and I can do the same thing here, and you know, you'll see post-it notes and things like that around people's offices. And I can pull them off when I want to work with them. So, one of the criticisms of this kind of approach to organization is that, you know, "Okay, well my real desk is really messy. I don't want that mess on my computer." So one thing we have for that is like a grid align, kind of β so you get that more traditional desktop. Things are kind of grid aligned. More boring, but you still have that kind of colliding and bumping. And you can still do fun things like make shelves on your desktop. Let's just break this shelf. Okay, that shelf broke. I think beyond the icons, I think another really cool domain for this software β I think it applies to more than just icons and your desktop β but browsing photographs. I think you can really enrich the way we browse our photographs and bring it to that kind of shoebox of, you know, photos with your family on the kitchen table kind of thing. I can toss these things around. They're so much more tangible and touchable β and you know I can double-click on something to take a look at it. And I can do all that kind of same stuff I showed you before. So I can pile things up, I can flip through it, I can, you know β okay, let's move this photo to the back, let's delete this guy here, and I think it's just a much more rich kind of way of interacting with your information. And that's BumpTop. Thanks! |
We can be Buddhas | {0: 'The first American to be ordained a Tibetan Monk by the Dalai Lama, Robert A.F. Thurman is a scholar, author and tireless proponent of peace.'} | TEDSalon 2006 | Thank you. And I feel like this whole evening has been very amazing to me. I feel it's sort of like the Vimalakirti Sutra, an ancient work from ancient India in which the Buddha appears at the beginning and a whole bunch of people come to see him from the biggest city in the area, Vaishali, and they bring some sort of jeweled parasols to make an offering to him. All the young people, actually, from the city. The old fogeys don't come because they're mad at Buddha, because when he came to their city he accepted β he always accepts the first invitation that comes to him, from whoever it is, and the local geisha, a movie-star sort of person, raced the elders of the city in a chariot and invited him first. So he was hanging out with the movie star, and of course they were grumbling: "He's supposed to be religious and all this. What's he doing over there at Amrapali's house with all his 500 monks," and so on. They were all grumbling, and so they boycotted him. They wouldn't go listen to him. But the young people all came. And they brought this kind of a jeweled parasol, and they put it on the ground. And as soon as they had laid all these, all their big stack of these jeweled parasols that they used to carry in ancient India, he performed a kind of special effect which made it into a giant planetarium, the wonder of the universe. Everyone looked in that, and they saw in there the total interconnectedness of all life in all universes. And of course, in the Buddhist cosmos there are millions and billions of planets with human life on it, and enlightened beings can see the life on all the other planets. So they don't β when they look out and they see those lights that you showed in the sky β they don't just see sort of pieces of matter burning or rocks or flames or gases exploding. They actually see landscapes and human beings and gods and dragons and serpent beings and goddesses and things like that. He made that special effect at the beginning to get everyone to think about interconnection and interconnectedness and how everything in life was totally interconnected. And then Leilei β I know his other name β told us about interconnection, and how we're all totally interconnected here, and how we've all known each other. And of course in the Buddhist universe, we've already done this already billions of times in many, many lifetimes in the past. And I didn't give the talk always. You did, and we had to watch you, and so forth. And we're all still trying to, I guess we're all trying to become TEDsters, if that's a modern form of enlightenment. I guess so. Because in a way, if a TEDster relates to all the interconnectedness of all the computers and everything, it's the forging of a mass awareness, of where everybody can really know everything that's going on everywhere in the planet. And therefore it will become intolerable β what compassion is, is where it will become intolerable for us, totally intolerable that we sit here in comfort and in pleasure and enjoying the life of the mind or whatever it is, and there are people who are absolutely riddled with disease and they cannot have a bite of food and they have no place, or they're being brutalized by some terrible person and so forth. It just becomes intolerable. With all of us knowing everything, we're kind of forced by technology to become Buddhas or something, to become enlightened. And of course, we all will be deeply disappointed when we do. Because we think that because we are kind of tired of what we do, a little bit tired, we do suffer. We do enjoy our misery in a certain way. We distract ourselves from our misery by running around somewhere, but basically we all have this common misery that we are sort of stuck inside our skins and everyone else is out there. And occasionally we get together with another person stuck in their skin and the two of us enjoy each other, and each one tries to get out of their own, and ultimately it fails of course, and then we're back into this thing. Because our egocentric perception β from the Buddha's point of view, misperception β is that all we are is what is inside our skin. And it's inside and outside, self and other, and other is all very different. And everyone here is unfortunately carrying that habitual perception, a little bit, right? You know, someone sitting next to you in a seat β that's OK because you're in a theater, but if you were sitting on a park bench and someone came up and sat that close to you, you'd freak out. What do they want from me? Like, who's that? And so you wouldn't sit that close to another person because of your notion that it's you versus the universe β that's all Buddha discovered. Because that cosmic basic idea that it is us all alone, each of us, and everyone else is different, then that puts us in an impossible situation, doesn't it? Who is it who's going to get enough attention from the world? Who's going to get enough out of the world? Who's not going to be overrun by an infinite number of other beings β if you're different from all the other beings? So where compassion comes is where you surprisingly discover you lose yourself in some way: through art, through meditation, through understanding, through knowledge actually, knowing that you have no such boundary, knowing your interconnectedness with other beings. You can experience yourself as the other beings when you see through the delusion of being separated from them. When you do that, you're forced to feel what they feel. Luckily, they say β I still am not sure β but luckily, they say that when you reach that point because some people have said in the Buddhist literature, they say, "Oh who would really want to be compassionate? How awful! I'm so miserable on my own. My head is aching. My bones are aching. I go from birth to death. I'm never satisfied. I never have enough, even if I'm a billionaire, I don't have enough. I need a hundred billion." So I'm like that. Imagine if I had to feel even a hundred other people's suffering. It would be terrible. But apparently, this is a strange paradox of life. When you're no longer locked in yourself, and as the wisdom or the intelligence or the scientific knowledge of the nature of the world, that enables you to let your mind spread out, and empathize, and enhance the basic human ability of empathizing, and realizing that you are the other being, somehow by that opening, you can see the deeper nature of life. And you can, you get away from this terrible iron circle of I, me, me, mine, like the Beatles used to sing. You know, we really learned everything in the '60s. Too bad nobody ever woke up to it, and they've been trying to suppress it since then. I, me, me, mine. It's like a perfect song, that song. A perfect teaching. But when we're relieved from that, we somehow then become interested in all the other beings. And we feel ourselves differently. It's totally strange. It's totally strange. The Dalai Lama always likes to say β he says that when you give birth in your mind to the idea of compassion, it's because you realize that you yourself and your pains and pleasures are finally too small a theater for your intelligence. It's really too boring whether you feel like this or like that, or what, you know β and the more you focus on how you feel, by the way, the worse it gets. Like, even when you're having a good time, when is the good time over? The good time is over when you think, how good is it? And then it's never good enough. I love that Leilei said that the way of helping those who are suffering badly on the physical plane or on other planes is having a good time, doing it by having a good time. I think the Dalai Lama should have heard that. I wish he'd been there to hear that. He once told me β he looked kind of sad; he worries very much about the haves and have-nots. He looked a little sad, because he said, well, a hundred years ago, they went and took everything away from the haves. You know, the big communist revolutions, Russia and China and so forth. They took it all away by violence, saying they were going to give it to everyone, and then they were even worse. They didn't help at all. So what could possibly change this terrible gap that has opened up in the world today? And so then he looks at me. So I said, "Well, you know, you're all in this yourself. You teach: it's generosity," was all I could think of. What is virtue? But of course, what you said, I think the key to saving the world, the key to compassion is that it is more fun. It should be done by fun. Generosity is more fun. That's the key. Everybody has the wrong idea. They think Buddha was so boring, and they're so surprised when they meet Dalai Lama and he's fairly jolly. Even though his people are being genocided β and believe me, he feels every blow on every old nun's head, in every Chinese prison. He feels it. He feels the way they are harvesting yaks nowadays. I won't even say what they do. But he feels it. And yet he's very jolly. He's extremely jolly. Because when you open up like that, then you can't just β what good does it do to add being miserable with others' misery? You have to find some vision where you see how hopeful it is, how it can be changed. Look at that beautiful thing Chiho showed us. She scared us with the lava man. She scared us with the lava man is coming, then the tsunami is coming, but then finally there were flowers and trees, and it was very beautiful. It's really lovely. So, compassion means to feel the feelings of others, and the human being actually is compassion. The human being is almost out of time. The human being is compassion because what is our brain for? Now, Jim's brain is memorizing the almanac. But he could memorize all the needs of all the beings that he is, he will, he did. He could memorize all kinds of fantastic things to help many beings. And he would have tremendous fun doing that. So the first person who gets happy, when you stop focusing on the self-centered situation of, how happy am I, where you're always dissatisfied β as Mick Jagger told us. You never get any satisfaction that way. So then you decide, "Well, I'm sick of myself. I'm going to think of how other people can be happy. I'm going to get up in the morning and think, what can I do for even one other person, even a dog, my dog, my cat, my pet, my butterfly?" And the first person who gets happy when you do that, you don't do anything for anybody else, but you get happier, you yourself, because your whole perception broadens and you suddenly see the whole world and all of the people in it. And you realize that this β being with these people β is the flower garden that Chiho showed us. It is Nirvana. And my time is up. And I know the TED commandments. Thank you. |
A memorial at Ground Zero | {0: 'Architect David Rockwell draws on his love of drama and spectacle to create fantastic, high-impact restaurants, cultural facilities, airline terminals, theater sets -- and playgrounds. '} | TED2002 | Kurt Andersen: Like many architects, David is a hog for the limelight but is sufficiently reticent β or at least pretends to be β that he asked me to question him rather than speaking. In fact what we're going to talk about, I think, is in fact a subject that is probably better served by a conversation than an address. And I guess we have a bit of news clip to precede. Dan Rather: Since the September 11th attack on the World Trade Center, many people have flocked to downtown New York to see and pay respects at what amounts to the 16-acre burial ground. Now, as CBS's Jim Axelrod reports, they're putting the finishing touches on a new way for people to visit and view the scene. Jim Axelrod: Forget the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty. There's a new place in New York where the crowds are thickest β Ground Zero. Tourist: I've taken my step-daughter here from Indianapolis. This was β out of all the tourist sites in New York City β this was her number-one pick. JA: Thousands now line up on lower Broadway. Tourist: I've been wanting to come down here since this happened. JA: Even on the coldest winter days. To honor and remember. Tourist: It's reality, it's us. It happened here. This is ours. JA: So many, in fact, that seeing has become a bit of a problem. Tourist: I think that people are very frustrated that they're not able to get closer to see what's going on. JA: But that is about to change. In record time, a team of architects and construction workers designed and built a viewing platform to ease the frustration and bring people closer. Man: They'll get an incredible panorama and understand, I think more completely, the sheer totality of the destruction of the place. JA: If you think about it, Ground Zero is unlike most any other tourist site in America. Unlike the Grand Canyon or the Washington Monument, people come here to see what's no longer there. David Rockwell: The first experience people will have here when they see this is not as a construction site but as this incredibly moving burial ground. JA: The walls are bare by design, so people can fill them with their own memorials the way they already have along the current perimeter. Tourist: From our hearts, it affected us just as much. JA: The ramps are made of simple material β the kind of plywood you see at construction sites β which is really the whole point. In the face of America's worst destruction people are building again. Jim Axelrod, CBS News, New York. KA: This is not an obvious subject to be in the sensuality segment, but certainly David you are known as β I know, a phrase you hate β an entertainment architect. Your work is highly sensual, even hedonistic. DR: I like that word. KA: It's about pleasure β casinos and hotels and restaurants. How did the shock that all of us β and especially all of us in New York β felt on the 11th of September transmute into your desire to do this thing? DR: Well the truth of the matter is, post-September 11th, I felt myself in the role originally β first of all as someone who lives in Tribeca and whose neighborhood was devastated, and as someone who works less than a mile from there β that I was in the role of forcing 100 people who work with me in my firm, to continue to have the same level of enthusiasm about creating the places we had been creating. In fact we're finishing a book which is called "Pleasure," which is about sensual pleasure in spaces. But I've got to tell you β it became impossible to do that. We were really paralyzed. And I found myself the Friday after September 11th β two days afterwards β literally unable to motivate anyone to do anything. We gave the office a few days off. And in discussing this with other architects, we had seen people saying in the press that they should rebuild the towers as they were β they should rebuild them 50 stories taller. And I thought it was astonishing to speculate, as if this were a competition, on something that was such a fresh wound. And I had a series of discussions β first with Rick Scofidio and Liz Diller, who collaborated with us on this, and several other people β and really felt like we had to find relevance in doing something. And that as people who create places, the ultimate way to help wasn't to pontificate or to make up scenarios, but to help right now. So we tried to come up with a way, as a group, to have a kind of design SWAT team. And that was the mission that we came up with. KA: Were you conscious of suddenly β as a designer whose work is all about fulfilling wants β suddenly fulfilling needs? DR: Well what I was aware of was, there was this overwhelming need to act now. And we were asked to participate in a few projects before this. There was a school, PS 234, that had been evacuated down at Ground Zero. They moved to an abandoned school. We took about 20 or 30 architects and designers and artists, and over four days β it was like this urban barn-raising β to renovate it, and everyone wanted to help. It was just extraordinary. Tom Otterness contributed, Maira Kalman contributed and it became this cathartic experience for us. KA: And that was done, effectively, by October 8 or something? DR: Yeah. KA: Obviously, what you faced in trying to do something as substantial as this project β and this is only one of four that you've designed to surround the site β you must have run up against the incredibly byzantine, entrenched bureaucracy and powers that be in New York real estate and New York politics. DR: Well, it's a funny thing. We finished PS 234, and had dinner with a small group. I was actually asked to be a committee chair on an AIA committee to rebuild. And I sat in on several meetings. And there were the most circuitous grand plans that had to do with long-term infrastructure and rebuilding the entire city. And the fact is that there were immediate wounds and needs that needed to be filled, and there was talk about inclusion and wanting it to be an inclusive process. And it wasn't an inclusive group. So we said, what is β KA: It was not an inclusive group? DR: It was not an inclusive group. It was predominantly a white, rich, corporate group that was not representative of the city. KA: Shocking. DR: Yeah, surprising. So Rick and Liz and Kevin and I came up with the idea. The city actually approached us. We first approached the city about Pier 94. We saw how PS 234 worked. The families β the victims of the families β were going to this pier that was incredibly dehumanizing. KA: On the Hudson River? DR: Yeah. And the city actually β through Tim Zagat initially, and then through Christyne Nicholas, then we got to Giuliani β said, "You know we don't want to do anything with Pier 94 right now, but we have an observation platform for the families down at Ground Zero that we'd like to be a more dignified experience for the families, and a way to protect it from the weather." So I went down there with Rick and Liz and Kevin, and I've got to say, it was the most moving experience of my life. It was devastating to see the simple plywood platform with a rail around it, where the families of the victims had left notes to them. And there was no mediation between us and the experience. There was no filter. And I remembered on September 11th, on 14th Street, the roof of our building β we can see the World Trade Towers prominently β and I saw the first building collapse from a conference room on the eighth floor on a TV that we had set up. And then everyone was up on the roof, so I ran up there. And it was amazing how much harder it was to believe in real life than it was on TV. There was something about the comfort of the filter and how much information was between us and the experience. So seeing this in a very simple, dignified way was a very powerful experience. So we went back to the city and said we're not particularly interested in the upgrade of this as a VIP platform, but we've spent some time down there. At the same time the city had this need. They were looking for a solution to deal with 30 or 40 thousand people a day who were going down there, that had nowhere to go. And there was no way to deal with the traffic around the site. So dealing with it is just an immediate master plan. There was a way β there had to be a way β to get people to move around the site. KA: But then you've got to figure out a way β we will skip over the insanely tedious process of getting permits and getting everybody on board β but simply funding this thing. It looks like a fairly simple thing, but this was a half a million dollar project? DR: Well, we knew that if it wasn't privately funded, it wasn't going to happen. And we also, frankly, knew that if it didn't happen by the end of the Giuliani administration, then everyone who we were dealing with at the DOT and the Police Department and all of the β we were meeting with 20 or 30 people with the city at a time, and it was set up by the Office of Emergency Management. This incredible act on their part, because they really wanted this, and they sensed that this needed to happen. KA: And there was therefore this ticking clock, because Giuliani was obviously out three months after that. DR: Yeah. So the first thing we had to do was find a way to get this β we had to work with the families of the victims, through the city, to make sure that they knew this was happening. Because this didn't want to be a surprise. And we also had to be as under the radar screen as we could be in New York, because the key was not raising a lot of objection and sort of working as quietly as possible. We came up with the idea of setting up a foundation, mainly because when we found a contractor who would build this, he would not agree to do this, even if we would pay him the money. There needed to be a foundation in place. So we came up with a foundation, and actually what happened was one major developer in New York β KA: Who shall remain nameless, I guess? DR: Yeah. His initials are JS, and he owns Rockefeller Center, if that helps anyone β volunteered to help. And we met with him. The prices from the contractors were between five to 700,000 dollars. And Atlantic-Heydt, who's the largest scaffolding contractor in the country, volunteered to do it at cost. So this developer said, "You know what, we'll underwrite the entire expense." And we said, "That's incredible!" And I think this was the 21st, and we knew this had to be built and up by the 28th. And we had to start construction the next day. We had a meeting that evening with his contractor of choice, and the contractor showed up with the drawings of the platform about half the size that we had drawn it. KA: Sort of like the Spinal Tap scene where you get the tiny little Stonehenge, I guess? (Laughter) DR: In fact, it was as if this was going to be window-washing scaffolding. There was no sense of the fact that this is next to Saint Paul β that this is really a place that needs to be kind of dignified, and a place to reflect and remember. And I've got to say that we spent a lot of time in putting this together, watching the crowds that gathered at Saint Paul β which is just to the right β and moving around the site. And I live down there, so we spent a lot of time looking at the need. And I think people were amazed at two things β I think they were amazed at the destruction, but I think there was a sense of disbelief about the heroics of New Yorkers that I found very moving. Just the sort of everyday heroics of New Yorkers. So we were in this meeting and the contractor literally said, "I'm going to lock the door, because this developer will not agree to have you leave till you've signed off on this." And we said, "Well, this is half the size, it doesn't have any of the design features that have been agreed upon by everyone β everyone in the city. We'd have to go back to the beginning to do this." And I convinced him that we should leave the room with the agreement to build it as designed. The next day I got an email from the developer saying that he was withdrawing all funding. So we didn't know what to do, but we decided to cast a very wide net. We emailed out letters to as many people as we could β several people in the audience here β who were very helpful. KA: There was no thought of abandoning ship at that point? DR: No. In fact I told the contractor to go ahead. He had already ordered materials based on my go-ahead. We knew that one way or another this was going to happen. And we just felt it had to happen. KA: You were funding it yourself and with contributions and this foundation. Richard, I think very correctly, made the point at the beginning β before all the chair designers came out β about the history of chair designers imposing aesthetic solutions on this kind of universal, banal, common problem of sitting. It seems to me with this, that it was the opposite of that. This was an unprecedented, singular design problem. DR: Well here's the issue: we knew that this was not in the sense of β we think about the site, and think about the need for a memorial. It was important that this not be categorized as a memorial. That this was a place for people to reflect, to remember β a kind of quiet place. So it led us to using design solutions that created as few filters between the viewer β as we said about the families' platform β and the experience as possible. It's all incredibly humble material. It's scaffolding and plywood. And it allows β by sort of the procession of the movement, up by Saint Paul's and down the other side β it gives you about 300 feet to go up 13 feet from the ground to where you get the 360 degree view. But the design was driven by a need to be quick, cheap, safe, respectful, flexible. One of the other things is this is designed to be moveable. Because when we looked at the four platforms around the site, one of which is an upgrade of the families' platform, we knew that these had to be moveable to respond to changing conditions, and the changing definition of what Ground Zero is. KA: Your work β I mean, we've talked about this before β a lot of your work, I think, is informed by your belief in, or your focus on the temporariness of all things and the evanescence of things, and a kind of "Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die," sort of sense of existence. This is clearly not a work for the ages. You know, a couple of years this thing isn't going to be here. Did that require, as an architect, a new way of thinking about what you were doing? To think of it as this purely temporary installation? DR: No, I don't think so. I think this is, obviously, substantially different from anything we'd ever thought about doing before, just by the nature of it. Where it overlaps with thoughts about our work in general is, number one β the notion of collaboration as a sort of way to get things done. And Kevin Kennon, Rick Scofidio, Liz Diller and all the people within the city β Norman Lear, who I spoke to four hours before our deadline for funding, offered to give us a bridge loan to help us get through it. So the notion of collaboration β I think this reinforces how important that is. And in terms of the temporary nature of it, our goal was not to create something that would be there longer than it needed to be. I think what we were most interested in was promoting a kind of dialogue that we felt may not have been happening enough in this city, about what's really happening there. And a day or two before it opened was Giuliani's farewell address, where he proposed the idea of all of Ground Zero being a memorial. Which was very controversial, but it resonated with a lot of people. And I think regardless of what the position is about how this sacred piece of land is to be used, having it come out of actually seeing it in a real encounter, I think makes it a more powerful dialogue. And that's what we were interested in. So that, very much, is in the realm of things I've been interested in before. KA: It seems to me, among other things, a lovely piece of civic infrastructure. It enables that conversation to get serious. And six months after the fact β and only a few months away from the site being cleaned β we are very quickly, now, getting to the point where those conversations about what should go there are getting serious. Do you have β having been as physically involved in the site as you have been doing this project β have any ideas about what should or shouldn't be done? DR: Well, I think one thing that shouldn't be done is evaluate β I think right now the discussion is a very closed discussion on the master plan. The Protetch Gallery recently had a show on ideas for buildings, which had some sort of inventive ideas of buildings. KA: But it had some really terrible ideas. DR: And it also felt a little bit like a kind of competition of ideas, where I think the focus of ideas should be on master planning and uses. And I think there should be a broader β which there's starting to be β the dialogue is really opening up to, what does this site really want to be? And I truly believe until the issue of memorial is sorted out, that it's going to be very hard to have an intelligent discussion. There's a few discussions right now that I think are very positive, about depressing the West Side Highway and connecting this over, so that there's one uninterrupted piece of land. KA: Well, I think that's interesting. And it gets to another issue that was probably inappropriate to discuss six months ago, but perhaps isn't now, which is, not many of us love the World Trade Center as a piece of architecture, as what it had done to this city and that huge plaza. Is this an opportunity, is the silver lining β a silver lining, here β to rebuild some more traditional city grid, or not? DR: I think there's a real opportunity to engage in a discussion of why we live in cities. And why do we live in places where such dissimilar people collide up against us each day? I don't think it has much to do with 50 or 60 or 70 or 80 thousand new office spaces, regardless of what the number is. So yeah, I think there is a chance to re-look at how we think about cities. And in fact, there's a proposal on the table now for building number seven. KA: Which was the building just north of the Towers? DR: Right, which the towers fell into. And the reason that's been held up is essentially by community outrage that they're not re-opening the street to connect that back to the rest of the city. I think a public dialogue β I think, you know, I'd like to see an international competition, and a call for ideas for uses. KA: Whether it's arts, whether it's housing, whether it's what amount of shopping? DR: Right. And we're looking for other things. This small foundation we put together is looking for other ways to help. Including taking a small piece adjacent to the site and inviting 10 architects who currently don't have a voice in New York to do artist housing. And find other ways to encourage the discussion to be against sort of monolithic, single solutions, and more about a multiplicity of things. KA: Before we end, I know you have a piece of digital video of the experience of being on this platform? DR: John Kamen β who's here, actually β put together a two and a half minute piece that shows the platform in use. So I thought that would be good to end with. DR: We're looking from Fulton Street, west. One of the tricky issues we had with the Giuliani administration was I had forgotten how anti-graffiti he was. And essentially our structure was designed to be written on. KA: As you say, it's not a memorial. But were you conscious of memorials? The Vietnam Memorial? Those kinds of forms? DR: We certainly did as much research as we could, and we were conscious of other memorials. And also the complexity and length of time they really take to do. It's 350 people on the committee for Oklahoma City, which is why we thought of this as a sort of ad-hoc, spontaneous solution that expanded on Union Square and the places that were ad-hoc memorials in the city already. The scaffolding you can see built up over the street is de-mountable. What's interesting now is the nature of the site has totally changed, so that what you're aware of is not just the destruction of the buildings in Ground Zero, but all of the buildings around it β and the scars on the building around it, which are enormous. This shows Saint Paul's on the left. KA: I just want to thank you on behalf of New Yorkers for making this happen and getting this done. But the kind of virtually instantaneous nature of its erection, and its being there, almost before you could believe that a response of this magnitude could be accomplished, is part of its extraordinary β I don't know if beauty is the word β but presence. DR: It was an honor to do. And we were thrilled to be able to show it here. |
Let's rethink America's military strategy | {0: "Strategic planner Thomas Barnett has advised US leaders on national security since the end of the Cold War. His bold ideas about the future of warfare and the military are spelled out in his best-selling book <em>The Pentagon's New Map.</em>"} | TED2005 | I get asked a lot what the difference between my work is and typical Pentagon long-range strategic planners. And the answer I like to offer is what they typically do is they think about the future of wars in the context of war. And what I've spent 15 years doing in this business β and it's taken me almost 14 to figure it out β is I think about the future of wars in the context of everything else. So I tend to specialize on the scene between war and peace. The material I'm going to show you is one idea from a book with a lot of ideas. It's the one that takes me around the world right now interacting with foreign militaries quite a bit. The material was generated in two years of work I did for the Secretary of Defense, thinking about a new national grand strategy for the United States. I'm going to present a problem and try to give you an answer. Here's my favorite bonehead concept from the 1990s in the Pentagon: the theory of anti-access, area-denial asymmetrical strategies. Why do we call it that? Because it's got all those A's lined up I guess. This is gobbledygook for if the United States fights somebody we're going to be huge. They're going to be small. And if they try to fight us in the traditional, straight-up manner we're going to kick their ass, which is why people don't try to do that any more. I met the last Air Force General who had actually shot down an enemy plane in combat. He's now a one star General. That's how distant we are from even meeting an air force willing to fly against ours. So that overmatched capability creates problems β catastrophic successes the White House calls them. (Laughter) And we're trying to figure that out, because it is an amazing capability. The question is, what's the good you can do with it? OK? The theory of anti-access, area-denial asymmetrical strategies β gobbledygook that we sell to Congress, because if we just told them we can kick anybody's asses they wouldn't buy us all the stuff we want. So we say, area-denial, anti-access asymmetrical strategies and their eyes glaze over. (Laughter) And they say, "Will you build it in my district?" (Laughter) (Applause) Here's my parody and it ain't much of one. Let's talk about a battle space. I don't know, Taiwan Straits 2025. Let's talk about an enemy embedded within that battle space. I don't know, the Million Man Swim. (Laughter) The United States has to access that battle space instantaneously. They throw up anti-access, area-denial asymmetrical strategies. A banana peel on the tarmac. (Laughter) Trojan horses on our computer networks reveal all our Achilles' heels instantly. We say, "China, it's yours." Prometheus approach, largely a geographic definition, focuses almost exclusively on the start of conflict. We field the first-half team in a league that insists on keeping score until the end of the game. That's the problem. We can run the score up against anybody, and then get our asses kicked in the second half β what they call fourth generation warfare. Here's the way I like to describe it instead. There is no battle space the U.S. Military cannot access. They said we couldn't do Afghanistan. We did it with ease. They said we couldn't do Iraq. We did it with 150 combat casualties in six weeks. We did it so fast we weren't prepared for their collapse. There is nobody we can't take down. The question is, what do you do with the power? So there's no trouble accessing battle spaces. What we have trouble accessing is the transition space that must naturally follow, and creating the peace space that allows us to move on. Problem is, the Defense Department over here beats the hell out of you. The State Department over here says, "Come on boy, I know you can make it." And that poor country runs off that ledge, does that cartoon thing and then drops. (Laughter) This is not about overwhelming force, but proportional force. It's about non-lethal technologies, because if you fire real ammo into a crowd of women and children rioting you're going to lose friends very quickly. This is not about projecting power, but about staying power, which is about legitimacy with the locals. Who do you access in this transition space? You have to create internal partners. You have to access coalition partners. We asked the Indians for 17,000 peace keepers. I know their senior leadership, they wanted to give it to us. But they said to us, "You know what? In that transition space you're mostly hat not enough cattle. We don't think you can pull it off, we're not going to give you our 17,000 peace keepers for fodder." We asked the Russians for 40,000. They said no. I was in China in August, I said, "You should have 50,000 peace keepers in Iraq. It's your oil, not ours." Which is the truth. It's their oil. And the Chinese said to me, "Dr. Barnett, you're absolutely right. In a perfect world we'd have 50,000 there. But it's not a perfect world, and your administration isn't getting us any closer." But we have trouble accessing our outcomes. We lucked out, frankly, on the selection. We face different opponents across these three. And it's time to start admitting you can't ask the same 19-year-old to do it all, day in and day out. It's just too damn hard. We have an unparalleled capacity to wage war. We don't do the everything else so well. Frankly, we do it better than anybody and we still suck at it. We have a brilliant Secretary of War. We don't have a Secretary of Everything Else. Because if we did, that guy would be in front of the Senate, still testifying over Abu Ghraib. The problem is he doesn't exist. There is no Secretary of Everything Else. I think we have an unparalleled capacity to wage war. I call that the Leviathan Force. What we need to build is a force for the Everything Else. I call them the System Administrators. What I think this really represents is lack of an A to Z rule set for the world as a whole for processing politically bankrupt states. We have one for processing economically bankrupt states. It's the IMF Sovereign Bankruptcy Plan, OK? We argue about it every time we use it. Argentina just went through it, broke a lot of rules. They got out on the far end, we said, "Fine, don't worry about it." It's transparent. A certain amount of certainty gives the sense of a non-zero outcome. We don't have one for processing politically bankrupt states that, frankly, everybody wants gone. Like Saddam, like Mugabe, like Kim Jong-Il β people who kill in hundreds of thousands or millions. Like the 250,000 dead so far in Sudan. What would an A to Z system look like? I'm going to distinguish between what I call front half and back half. And let's call this red line, I don't know, mission accomplished. (Laughter) (Applause) What we have extant right now, at the beginning of this system, is the U.N. Security Council as a grand jury. What can they do? They can indict your ass. They can debate it. They can write it on a piece of paper. They can put it in an envelope and mail it to you, and then say in no uncertain terms, "Please cut that out." (Laughter) That gets you about four million dead in Central Africa over the 1990s. That gets you 250,000 dead in the Sudan in the last 15 months. Everybody's got to answer their grandchildren some day what you did about the holocaust in Africa, and you better have an answer. We don't have anything to translate that will into action. What we do have is the U.S.-enabled Leviathan Force that says, "You want me to take that guy down? I'll take that guy down. I'll do it on Tuesday. It will cost you 20 billion dollars." (Laughter) But here's the deal. As soon as I can't find anybody else to air out, I leave the scene immediately. That's called the Powell Doctrine. Way downstream we have the International Criminal Court. They love to put them on trial. They've got MiloseviΔ right now. What are we missing? A functioning executive that will translate will into action, because we don't have it. Every time we lead one of these efforts we have to whip ourselves into this imminent threat thing. We haven't faced an imminent threat since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. But we use this language from a bygone era to scare ourselves into doing something because we're a democracy and that's what it takes. And if that doesn't work we scream, "He's got a gun!" just as we rush in. (Laughter) And then we look over the body and we find an old cigarette lighter and we say, "Jesus, it was dark." (Laughter) Do you want to do it, France? France says, "No, but I do like to criticize you after the fact." What we need downstream is a great power enabled β what I call that Sys Admin Force. We should have had 250,000 troops streaming into Iraq on the heels of that Leviathan sweeping towards Baghdad. What do you get then? No looting, no military disappearing, no arms disappearing, no ammo disappearing, no Muqtada Al-Sadr β I'm wrecking his bones β no insurgency. Talk to anybody who was over there in the first six months. We had six months to feel the lob, to get the job done, and we dicked around for six months. And then they turned on us. Why? Because they just got fed up. They saw what we did to Saddam. They said, "You're that powerful, you can resurrect this country. You're America." What we need is an international reconstruction fund β Sebastian Mallaby, Washington Post, great idea. Model on the IMF. Instead of passing the hat each time, OK? Where are we going to find this guy? G20, that's easy. Check out their agenda since 9/11. All security dominated. They're going to decide up front how the money gets spent just like in the IMF. You vote according to how much money you put in the kitty. Here's my challenge to the Defense Department. You've got to build this force. You've got to seed this force. You've got to track coalition partners. Create a record of success. You will get this model. You tell me it's too hard to do. I'll walk this dog right through that six part series on the Balkans. We did it just like that. I'm talking about regularizing it, making it transparent. Would you like Mugabe gone? Would you like Kim Jong-Il, who's killed about two million people, would you like him gone? Would you like a better system? This is why it matters to the military. They've been experiencing an identity crisis since the end of the Cold War. I'm not talking about the difference between reality and desire, which I can do because I'm not inside the beltway. (Laughter) I'm talking about the 1990s. The Berlin Wall falls. We do Desert Storm. The split starts to emerge between those in the military who see a future they can live with, and those who see a future that starts to scare them, like the U.S. submarine community, which watches the Soviet Navy disappear overnight. Ah! (Laughter) So they start moving from reality towards desire and they create their own special language to describe their voyage of self-discovery and self-actualization. (Laughter) The problem is you need a big, sexy opponent to fight against. And if you can't find one you've got to make one up. China, all grown up, going to be a looker! (Laughter) The rest of the military got dragged down into the muck across the 1990s and they developed this very derisive term to describe it: military operations other than war. I ask you, who joins the military to do things other than war? Actually, most of them. Jessica Lynch never planned on shooting back. Most of them don't pick up a rifle. I maintain this is code inside the Army for, "We don't want to do this." They spent the 1990s working the messy scene between globalized parts of the world What I call the core and the gap. The Clinton administration wasn't interested in running this. For eight years, after screwing up the relationship on day one β inauguration day with gays in the military β which was deft. (Laughter) So we were home alone for eight years. And what did we do home alone? We bought one military and we operated another. It's like the guy who goes to the doctor and says, "Doctor, it hurts when I do this." (Laughter) The doctor says, "Stop doing that you idiot." I used to give this brief inside the Pentagon in the early 1990s. I'd say, "You're buying one military and you're operating another, and eventually it's going to hurt. It's wrong. Bad Pentagon, bad!" (Laughter) And they'd say, "Dr. Barnett, you are so right. Can you come back next year and remind us again?" (Laughter) Some people say 9/11 heals the rift β jerks the long-term transformation gurus out of their 30,000 foot view of history, drags them down in to the muck and says, "You want a networked opponent? I've got one, he's everywhere, go find him." It elevates MOOTW β how we pronounce that acronym β from crap to grand strategy, because that's how you're going to shrink that gap. Some people put these two things together and they call it empire, which I think is a boneheaded concept. Empire is about the enforcement of not just minimal rule sets, which you cannot do, but maximum rule sets which you must do. It's not our system of governance. Never how we've sought to interact with the outside world. I prefer that phrase System Administration. We enforce the minimal rule sets for maintaining connectivity to the global economy. Certain bad things you cannot do. How this impacts the way we think about the future of war. This is a concept which gets me vilified throughout the Pentagon. It makes me very popular as well. Everybody's got an opinion. Going back to the beginning of our country β historically, defenses meant protection of the homeland. Security has meant everything else. Written into our constitution, two different forces, two different functions. Raise an army when you need it, and maintain a navy for day-to-day connectivity. A Department of War, a Department of Everything Else. A big stick, a baton stick. Can of whup ass, the networking force. In 1947 we merged these two things together in the Defense Department. Our long-term rationale becomes, we're involved in a hair trigger stand off with the Soviets. To attack America is to risk blowing up the world. We connected national security to international security with about a seven minute time delay. That's not our problem now. They can kill three million in Chicago tomorrow and we don't go to the mattresses with nukes. That's the scary part. The question is how do we reconnect American national security with global security to make the world a lot more comfortable, and to embed and contextualize our employment of force around the planet? What's happened since is that bifurcation I described. We talked about this going all the way back to the end of the Cold War. Let's have a Department of War, and a Department of Something Else. Some people say, "Hell, 9/11 did it for you." Now we've got a home game and an away game. (Laughter) The Department of Homeland Security is a strategic feel good measure. It's going to be the Department of Agriculture for the 21st century. TSA β thousands standing around. (Laughter) I supported the war in Iraq. He was a bad guy with multiple priors. It's not like we had to find him actually killing somebody live to arrest him. I knew we'd kick ass in the war with the Leviathan Force. I knew we'd have a hard time with what followed. But I know this organization doesn't change until it experiences failure. What do I mean by these two different forces? This is the Hobbesian Force. I love this force. I don't want to see it go. That plus nukes rules out great power war. This is the military the rest of the world wants us to build. It's why I travel all over the world talking to foreign militaries. What does this mean? It means you've got to stop pretending you can do these two very disparate skill sets with the same 19-year-old. Switching back, morning, afternoon, evening, morning, afternoon, evening. Handing out aid, shooting back, handing out aid, shooting back. It's too much. The 19-year-olds get tired from the switching, OK? (Laughter) That force on the left, you can train a 19-year-old to do that. That force on the right is more like a 40-year-old cop. You need the experience. What does this mean in terms of operations? The rule is going to be this. That Sys Admin force is the force that never comes home, does most of your work. You break out that Leviathan Force only every so often. But here's the promise you make to the American public, to your own people, to the world. You break out that Leviathan Force, you promise, you guarantee that you're going to mount one hell of a β immediately β follow-on Sys Admin effort. Don't plan for the war unless you plan to win the peace. (Applause) Other differences. Leviathan traditional partners, they all look like the Brits and their former colonies. (Laughter) Including us, I would remind you. The rest β wider array of partners. International organizations, non-governmental organizations, private voluntary organizations, contractors. You're not going to get away from that. Leviathan Force, it's all about joint operations between the military services. We're done with that. What we need to do is inter-agency operations, which frankly Condi Rice was in charge of. And I'm amazed nobody asked her that question when she was confirmed. I call the Leviathan Force your dad's military. I like them young, male, unmarried, slightly pissed off. (Laughter) I call the Sys Admin Force your mom's military. It's everything the man's military hates. Gender balanced much more, older, educated, married with children. The force on the left, up or out. The force on the right, in and out. The force on the left respects Posse Comitatus restrictions on the use of force inside the U.S. The force on the right's going to obliterate it. That's where the National Guard's going to be. The force on the left is never coming under the purview of the International Criminal Court. Sys Admin Force has to. Different definitions of network centricity. One takes down networks, one puts them up. And you've got to wage war here in such a way to facilitate that. Do we need a bigger budget? Do we need a draft to pull this off? Absolutely not. I've been told by the Revolution of Military Affairs crowd for years, we can do it faster, cheaper, smaller, just as lethal. I say, "Great, I'm going to take the Sys Admin budget out of your hide." Here's the larger point. You're going to build the Sys Admin Force inside the U.S. Military first. But ultimately you're going to civilianize it, probably two thirds. Inter agency-ize it, internationalize it. So yes, it begins inside the Pentagon, but over time it's going to cross that river. (Laughter) I have been to the mountain top. I can see the future. I may not live long enough to get you there, but it's going to happen. We're going to have a Department of Something Else between war and peace. Last slide. Who gets custody of the kids? This is where the Marines in the audience get kind of tense. (Laughter) And this is when they think about beating the crap out of me after the talk. (Laughter) Read Max Boon. This is the history of the marines β small wars, small arms. The Marines are like my West Highland Terrier. They get up every morning, they want to dig a hole and they want to kill something. (Laughter) I don't want my Marines handing out aid. I want them to be Marines. That's what keeps the Sys Admin Force from being a pussy force. It keeps it from being the U.N. You shoot at these people the Marines are going to come over and kill you. (Laughter) (Applause) Department of Navy, strategic subs go this way, surface combatants are over there, and the news is they may actually be that small. (Laughter) I call it the Smart Dust Navy. I tell young officers, "You may command 500 ships in your career. Bad news is they may not have anybody on them." Carriers go both ways because they're a swing asset. You'll see the pattern β airborne, just like carriers. Armor goes this way. Here's the dirty secret of the Air Force, you can win by bombing. But you need lots of these guys on the ground to win the peace. Shinseki was right with the argument. Air force, strategic airlift goes both ways. Bombers, fighters go over here. Special Operations Command down at Tampa. Trigger-pullers go this way. Civil Affairs, that bastard child, comes over here. Return to the Army. The point about the trigger-pullers and Special Operations Command. No off season, these guys are always active. They drop in, do their business, disappear. See me now. Don't talk about it later. (Laughter) I was never here. (Laughter) The world is my playground. (Laughter) I want to keep trigger-pullers trigger-happy. I want the rules to be as loose as possible. Because when the thing gets prevented in Chicago with the three million dead that perverts our political system beyond all recognition, these are the guys who are going to kill them first. So it's better off to have them make some mistakes along the way than to see that. Reserve component β National Guard reserves overwhelmingly Sys Admin. How are you going to get them to work for this force? Most firemen in this country do it for free. This is not about money. This is about being up front with these guys and gals. Last point, intelligence community β the muscle and the defense agencies go this way. What should be the CIA, open, analytical, open source should come over here. The information you need to do this is not secret. It's not secret. Read that great piece in the New Yorker about how our echo boomers, 19 to 25, over in Iraq taught each other how to do Sys Admin work, over the Internet in chat rooms. They said, "Al Qaeda could be listening." They said, "Well, Jesus, they already know this stuff." (Laughter) Take a gift in the left hand. These are the sunglasses that don't scare people, simple stuff. Censors and transparency, the overheads go in both directions. Thanks. |
Tour Microsoft's Virtual Earth | {0: 'Stephen Lawler and the Virtual Earth team have created an addictively interactive 3D world that is poised to reinvent our view of advertising, gaming, weather/traffic reporting, instant messaging and more.'} | TED2007 | What I want to talk to you about today is virtual worlds, digital globes, the 3-D Web, the Metaverse. What does this all mean for us? What it means is the Web is going to become an exciting place again. It's going to become super exciting as we transform to this highly immersive and interactive world. With graphics, computing power, low latencies, these types of applications and possibilities are going to stream rich data into your lives. So the Virtual Earth initiative, and other types of these initiatives, are all about extending our current search metaphor. When you think about it, we're so constrained by browsing the Web, remembering URLs, saving favorites. As we move to search, we rely on the relevance rankings, the Web matching, the index crawling. But we want to use our brain! We want to navigate, explore, discover information. In order to do that, we have to put you as a user back in the driver's seat. We need cooperation between you and the computing network and the computer. So what better way to put you back in the driver's seat than to put you in the real world that you interact in every day? Why not leverage the learnings that you've been learning your entire life? So Virtual Earth is about starting off creating the first digital representation, comprehensive, of the entire world. What we want to do is mix in all types of data. Tag it. Attribute it. Metadata. Get the community to add local depth, global perspective, local knowledge. So when you think about this problem, what an enormous undertaking. Where do you begin? Well, we collect data from satellites, from airplanes, from ground vehicles, from people. This process is an engineering problem, a mechanical problem, a logistical problem, an operational problem. Here is an example of our aerial camera. This is panchromatic. It's actually four color cones. In addition, it's multi-spectral. We collect four gigabits per second of data, if you can imagine that kind of data stream coming down. That's equivalent to a constellation of 12 satellites at highest res capacity. We fly these airplanes at 5,000 feet in the air. You can see the camera on the front. We collect multiple viewpoints, vantage points, angles, textures. We bring all that data back in. We sit here β you know, think about the ground vehicles, the human scale β what do you see in person? We need to capture that up close to establish that what it's like-type experience. I bet many of you have seen the Apple commercials, kind of poking at the PC for their brilliance and simplicity. So a little unknown secret is β did you see the one with the guy, he's got the Web cam? The poor PC guy. They're duct taping his head. They're just wrapping it on him. Well, a little unknown secret is his brother actually works on the Virtual Earth team. (Laughter). So they've got a little bit of a sibling rivalry thing going on here. But let me tell you β it doesn't affect his day job. We think a lot of good can come from this technology. This was after Katrina. We were the first commercial fleet of airplanes to be cleared into the disaster impact zone. We flew the area. We imaged it. We sent in people. We took pictures of interiors, disaster areas. We helped with the first responders, the search and rescue. Often the first time anyone saw what happened to their house was on Virtual Earth. We made it all freely available on the Web, just to β it was obviously our chance of helping out with the cause. When we think about how all this comes together, it's all about software, algorithms and math. You know, we capture this imagery but to build the 3-D models we need to do geo-positioning. We need to do geo-registering of the images. We have to bundle adjust them. Find tie points. Extract geometry from the images. This process is a very calculated process. In fact, it was always done manual. Hollywood would spend millions of dollars to do a small urban corridor for a movie because they'd have to do it manually. They'd drive the streets with lasers called LIDAR. They'd collected information with photos. They'd manually build each building. We do this all through software, algorithms and math β a highly automated pipeline creating these cities. We took a decimal point off what it cost to build these cities, and that's how we're going to be able to scale this out and make this reality a dream. We think about the user interface. What does it mean to look at it from multiple perspectives? An ortho-view, a nadir-view. How do you keep the precision of the fidelity of the imagery while maintaining the fluidity of the model? I'll wrap up by showing you the β this is a brand-new peek I haven't really shown into the lab area of Virtual Earth. What we're doing is β people like this a lot, this bird's eye imagery we work with. It's this high resolution data. But what we've found is they like the fluidity of the 3-D model. A child can navigate with an Xbox controller or a game controller. So here what we're trying to do is we bring the picture and project it into the 3-D model space. You can see all types of resolution. From here, I can slowly pan the image over. I can get the next image. I can blend and transition. By doing this I don't lose the original detail. In fact, I might be recording history. The freshness, the capacity. I can turn this image. I can look at it from multiple viewpoints and angles. What we're trying to do is build a virtual world. We hope that we can make computing a user model you're familiar with, and really derive insights from you, from all different directions. I thank you very much for your time. (Applause) |
New insights on poverty | {0: 'In Hans Roslingβs hands, data sings. Global trends in health and economics come to vivid life. And the big picture of global development -- with some surprisingly good news -- snaps into sharp focus.'} | TED2007 | I told you three things last year. I told you that the statistics of the world have not been made properly available. Because of that, we still have the old mindset of developing in industrialized countries, which is wrong. And that animated graphics can make a difference. Things are changing and today, on the United Nations Statistic Division Home Page, it says, by first of May, full access to the databases. (Applause) And if I could share the image with you on the screen. So three things have happened. U.N. opened their statistic databases, and we have a new version of the software up working as a beta on the net, so you don't have to download it any longer. And let me repeat what you saw last year. The bubbles are the countries. Here you have the fertility rate β the number of children per woman β and there you have the length of life in years. This is 1950 β those were the industrialized countries, those were developing countries. At that time there was a "we" and "them." There was a huge difference in the world. But then it changed, and it went on quite well. And this is what happens. You can see how China is the red, big bubble. The blue there is India. And they go over all this β I'm going to try to be a little more serious this year in showing you how things really changed. And it's Africa that stands out as the problem down here, doesn't it? Large families still, and the HIV epidemic brought down the countries like this. This is more or less what we saw last year, and this is how it will go on into the future. And I will talk on, is this possible? Because you see now, I presented statistics that don't exist. Because this is where we are. Will it be possible that this will happen? I cover my lifetime here, you know? I expect to live 100 years. And this is where we are today. Now could we look here instead at the economic situation in the world? And I would like to show that against child survival. We'll swap the axis. Here you have child mortality β that is, survival β four kids dying there, 200 dying there. And this is GDP per capita on this axis. And this was 2007. And if I go back in time, I've added some historical statistics β here we go, here we go, here we go β not so much statistics 100 years ago. Some countries still had statistics. We are looking down in the archive, and when we are down into 1820, there is only Austria and Sweden that can produce numbers. (Laughter) But they were down here. They had 1,000 dollars per person per year. And they lost one-fifth of their kids before their first birthday. So this is what happens in the world, if we play the entire world. How they got slowly richer and richer, and they add statistics. Isn't it beautiful when they get statistics? You see the importance of that? And here, children don't live longer. The last century, 1870, was bad for the kids in Europe, because most of this statistics is Europe. It was only by the turn of the century that more than 90 percent of the children survived their first year. This is India coming up, with the first data from India. And this is the United States moving away here, earning more money. And we will soon see China coming up in the very far end corner here. And it moves up with Mao Tse-Tung getting health, not getting so rich. There he died, then Deng Xiaoping brings money. It moves this way over here. And the bubbles keep moving up there, and this is what the world looks like today. (Applause) Let us have a look at the United States. We have a function here β I can tell the world, "Stay where you are." And I take the United States β we still want to see the background β I put them up like this, and now we go backwards. And we can see that the United States goes to the right of the mainstream. They are on the money side all the time. And down in 1915, the United States was a neighbor of India β present, contemporary India. And that means United States was richer, but lost more kids than India is doing today, proportionally. And look here β compare to the Philippines of today. The Philippines of today has almost the same economy as the United States during the First World War. But we have to bring United States forward quite a while to find the same health of the United States as we have in the Philippines. About 1957 here, the health of the United States is the same as the Philippines. And this is the drama of this world which many call globalized, is that Asia, Arabic countries, Latin America, are much more ahead in being healthy, educated, having human resources than they are economically. There's a discrepancy in what's happening today in the emerging economies. There now, social benefits, social progress, are going ahead of economical progress. And 1957 β the United States had the same economy as Chile has today. And how long do we have to bring United States to get the same health as Chile has today? I think we have to go, there β we have 2001, or 2002 β the United States has the same health as Chile. Chile's catching up! Within some years Chile may have better child survival than the United States. This is really a change, that you have this lag of more or less 30, 40 years' difference on the health. And behind the health is the educational level. And there's a lot of infrastructure things, and general human resources are there. Now we can take away this β and I would like to show you the rate of speed, the rate of change, how fast they have gone. And we go back to 1920, and I want to look at Japan. And I want to look at Sweden and the United States. And I'm going to stage a race here between this sort of yellowish Ford here and the red Toyota down there, and the brownish Volvo. (Laughter) And here we go. Here we go. The Toyota has a very bad start down here, you can see, and the United States Ford is going off-road there. And the Volvo is doing quite fine. This is the war. The Toyota got off track, and now the Toyota is coming on the healthier side of Sweden β can you see that? And they are taking over Sweden, and they are now healthier than Sweden. That's the part where I sold the Volvo and bought the Toyota. (Laughter) And now we can see that the rate of change was enormous in Japan. They really caught up. And this changes gradually. We have to look over generations to understand it. And let me show you my own sort of family history β we made these graphs here. And this is the same thing, money down there, and health, you know? And this is my family. This is Sweden, 1830, when my great-great-grandma was born. Sweden was like Sierra Leone today. And this is when great-grandma was born, 1863. And Sweden was like Mozambique. And this is when my grandma was born, 1891. She took care of me as a child, so I'm not talking about statistic now β now it's oral history in my family. That's when I believe statistics, when it's grandma-verified statistics. (Laughter) I think it's the best way of verifying historical statistics. Sweden was like Ghana. It's interesting to see the enormous diversity within sub-Saharan Africa. I told you last year, I'll tell you again, my mother was born in Egypt, and I β who am I? I'm the Mexican in the family. And my daughter, she was born in Chile, and the grand-daughter was born in Singapore, now the healthiest country on this Earth. It bypassed Sweden about two to three years ago, with better child survival. But they're very small, you know? They're so close to the hospital we can never beat them out in these forests. (Laughter) But homage to Singapore. Singapore is the best one. Now this looks also like a very good story. But it's not really that easy, that it's all a good story. Because I have to show you one of the other facilities. We can also make the color here represent the variable β and what am I choosing here? Carbon-dioxide emission, metric ton per capita. This is 1962, and United States was emitting 16 tons per person. And China was emitting 0.6, and India was emitting 0.32 tons per capita. And what happens when we moved on? Well, you see the nice story of getting richer and getting healthier β everyone did it at the cost of emission of carbon dioxide. There is no one who has done it so far. And we don't have all the updated data any longer, because this is really hot data today. And there we are, 2001. And in the discussion I attended with global leaders, you know, many say now the problem is that the emerging economies, they are getting out too much carbon dioxide. The Minister of the Environment of India said, "Well, you were the one who caused the problem." The OECD countries β the high-income countries β they were the ones who caused the climate change. "But we forgive you, because you didn't know it. But from now on, we count per capita. From now on we count per capita. And everyone is responsible for the per capita emission." This really shows you, we have not seen good economic and health progress anywhere in the world without destroying the climate. And this is really what has to be changed. I've been criticized for showing you a too positive image of the world, but I don't think it's like this. The world is quite a messy place. This we can call Dollar Street. Everyone lives on this street here. What they earn here β what number they live on β is how much they earn per day. This family earns about one dollar per day. We drive up the street here, we find a family here which earns about two to three dollars a day. And we drive away here β we find the first garden in the street, and they earn 10 to 50 dollars a day. And how do they live? If we look at the bed here, we can see that they sleep on a rug on the floor. This is what poverty line is β 80 percent of the family income is just to cover the energy needs, the food for the day. This is two to five dollars. You have a bed. And here it's a much nicer bedroom, you can see. I lectured on this for Ikea, and they wanted to see the sofa immediately here. (Laughter) And this is the sofa, how it will emerge from there. And the interesting thing, when you go around here in the photo panorama, you see the family still sitting on the floor there. Although there is a sofa, if you watch in the kitchen, you can see that the great difference for women does not come between one to 10 dollars. It comes beyond here, when you really can get good working conditions in the family. And if you really want to see the difference, you look at the toilet over here. This can change. This can change. These are all pictures and images from Africa, and it can become much better. We can get out of poverty. My own research has not been in IT or anything like this. I spent 20 years in interviews with African farmers who were on the verge of famine. And this is the result of the farmers-needs research. The nice thing here is that you can't see who are the researchers in this picture. That's when research functions in poor societies β you must really live with the people. When you're in poverty, everything is about survival. It's about having food. And these two young farmers, they are girls now β because the parents are dead from HIV and AIDS β they discuss with a trained agronomist. This is one of the best agronomists in Malawi, Junatambe Kumbira, and he's discussing what sort of cassava they will plant β the best converter of sunshine to food that man has found. And they are very, very eagerly interested to get advice, and that's to survive in poverty. That's one context. Getting out of poverty. The women told us one thing. "Get us technology. We hate this mortar, to stand hours and hours. Get us a mill so that we can mill our flour, then we will be able to pay for the rest ourselves." Technology will bring you out of poverty, but there's a need for a market to get away from poverty. And this woman is very happy now, bringing her products to the market. But she's very thankful for the public investment in schooling so she can count, and won't be cheated when she reaches the market. She wants her kid to be healthy, so she can go to the market and doesn't have to stay home. And she wants the infrastructure β it is nice with a paved road. It's also good with credit. Micro-credits gave her the bicycle, you know. And information will tell her when to go to market with which product. You can do this. I find my experience from 20 years of Africa is that the seemingly impossible is possible. Africa has not done bad. In 50 years they've gone from a pre-Medieval situation to a very decent 100-year-ago Europe, with a functioning nation and state. I would say that sub-Saharan Africa has done best in the world during the last 50 years. Because we don't consider where they came from. It's this stupid concept of developing countries that puts us, Argentina and Mozambique together 50 years ago, and says that Mozambique did worse. We have to know a little more about the world. I have a neighbor who knows 200 types of wine. He knows everything. He knows the name of the grape, the temperature and everything. I only know two types of wine β red and white. (Laughter) But my neighbor only knows two types of countries β industrialized and developing. And I know 200, I know about the small data. But you can do that. (Applause) But I have to get serious. And how do you get serious? You make a PowerPoint, you know? (Laughter) Homage to the Office package, no? What is this, what is this, what am I telling? I'm telling you that there are many dimensions of development. Everyone wants your pet thing. If you are in the corporate sector, you love micro-credit. If you are fighting in a non-governmental organization, you love equity between gender. Or if you are a teacher, you'll love UNESCO, and so on. On the global level, we have to have more than our own thing. We need everything. All these things are important for development, especially when you just get out of poverty and you should go towards welfare. Now, what we need to think about is, what is a goal for development, and what are the means for development? Let me first grade what are the most important means. Economic growth to me, as a public-health professor, is the most important thing for development because it explains 80 percent of survival. Governance. To have a government which functions β that's what brought California out of the misery of 1850. It was the government that made law function finally. Education, human resources are important. Health is also important, but not that much as a mean. Environment is important. Human rights is also important, but it just gets one cross. Now what about goals? Where are we going toward? We are not interested in money. Money is not a goal. It's the best mean, but I give it zero as a goal. Governance, well it's fun to vote in a little thing, but it's not a goal. And going to school, that's not a goal, it's a mean. Health I give two points. I mean it's nice to be healthy β at my age especially β you can stand here, you're healthy. And that's good, it gets two plusses. Environment is very, very crucial. There's nothing for the grandkid if you don't save up. But where are the important goals? Of course, it's human rights. Human rights is the goal, but it's not that strong of a mean for achieving development. And culture. Culture is the most important thing, I would say, because that's what brings joy to life. That's the value of living. So the seemingly impossible is possible. Even African countries can achieve this. And I've shown you the shot where the seemingly impossible is possible. And remember, please remember my main message, which is this: the seemingly impossible is possible. We can have a good world. I showed you the shots, I proved it in the PowerPoint, and I think I will convince you also by culture. (Laughter) (Applause) Bring me my sword! Sword swallowing is from ancient India. It's a cultural expression that for thousands of years has inspired human beings to think beyond the obvious. (Laughter) And I will now prove to you that the seemingly impossible is possible by taking this piece of steel β solid steel β this is the army bayonet from the Swedish Army, 1850, in the last year we had war. And it's all solid steel β you can hear here. And I'm going to take this blade of steel, and push it down through my body of blood and flesh, and prove to you that the seemingly impossible is possible. Can I request a moment of absolute silence? (Applause) |
Inside the world's deepest caves | {0: 'Engineer and daredevil cave explorer Bill Stone is obsessed with discovery -- on Earth and beyond.'} | TED2007 | First place I'd like to take you is what many believe will be the world's deepest natural abyss. And I say believe because this process is still ongoing. Right now there are major expeditions being planned for next year that I'll talk a little bit about. One of the things that's changed here, in the last 150 years since Jules Verne had great science-fiction concepts of what the underworld was like, is that technology has enabled us to go to these places that were previously completely unknown and speculated about. We can now descend thousands of meters into the Earth with relative impunity. Along the way we've discovered fantastic abysses and chambers so large that you can see for hundreds of meters without a break in the line of sight. When you go on a thing like this, we can usually be in the field for anywhere from two to four months, with a team as small as 20 or 30, to as big as 150. And a lot of people ask me, you know, what kind of people do you get for a project like this? While our selection process is not as rigorous as NASA, it's nonetheless thorough. We're looking for competence, discipline, endurance, and strength. In case you're wondering, this is our strength test. (Laughter) But we also value esprit de corps and the ability to diplomatically resolve inter-personal conflict while under great stress in remote locations. We have already gone far beyond the limits of human endurance. From the entrance, this is nothing like a commercial cave. You're looking at Camp Two in a place called J2, not K2, but J2. We're roughly two days from the entrance at that point. And it's kind of like a high altitude mountaineering trip in reverse, except that you're now running a string of these things down. The idea is to try to provide some measure of physical comfort while you're down there, otherwise in damp, moist, cold conditions in utterly dark places. I should mention that everything you're seeing here, by the way, is artificially illuminated at great effort. Otherwise it is completely dark in these places. The deeper you go, the more you run into a conflict with water. It's basically like a tree collecting water coming down. And eventually you get to places where it is formidable and dangerous and unfortunately slides just don't do justice. So I've got a very brief clip here that was taken in the late 1980s. So descend into Huautla Plateau in Mexico. (Video) Now I have to tell you that the techniques being shown here are obsolete and dangerous. We would not do this today unless we were doing it for film. (Laughter) Along that same line, I have to tell you that with the spate of Hollywood movies that came out last year, we have never seen monsters underground β at least the kind that eat you. If there is a monster underground, it is the crushing psychological remoteness that begins to hit every member of the team once you cross about three days inbound from the nearest entrance. Next year I'll be leading an international team to J2. We're going to be shooting from minus 2,600 meters β that's a little over 8,600 feet down β at 30 kilometers from the entrance. The lead crews will be underground for pushing 30 days straight. I don't think there's been a mission like that in a long time. Eventually, if you keep going down in these things, probability says that you're going to run into a place like this. It's a place where there's a fold in the geologic stratum that collects water and fills to the roof. And when you used to find these things, they would put a label on a map that said terminal siphon. Now I remember that term really well for two reasons. Number one, it's the name of my rock band, and second, is because the confrontation of these things forced me to become an inventor. And we've since gone on to develop many generations of gadgets for exploring places like this. This is some life-support equipment closed-cycle. And you can use that now to go for many kilometers horizontally underwater and to depths of 200 meters straight down underwater. When you do this kind of stuff it's like doing EVA. It's like doing extra-vehicular activity in space, but at much greater distances, and at much greater physical peril. So it makes you think about how to design your equipment for long range, away from a safe haven. Here's a clip from a National Geographic movie that came out in 1999. (Video) Narrator: Exploration is a physical process of putting your foot in places where humans have never stepped before. This is where the last little nugget of totally unknown territory remains on this planet. To experience it is a privilege. Bill Stone: That was taken in Wakulla Springs, Florida. Couple of things to note about that movie. Every piece of equipment that you saw in there did not exist before 1999. It was developed within a two-year period and used on actual exploratory projects. This gadget you see right here was called the digital wall mapper, and it produced the first three-dimensional map anybody has ever done of a cave, and it happened to be underwater in Wakulla Springs. It was that gadget that serendipitously opened a door to another unexplored world. This is Europa. Carolyn Porco mentioned another one called Enceladus the other day. This is one of the places where planetary scientists believe there is a highest probability of the detection of the first life off earth in the ocean that exists below there. For those who have never seen this story, Jim Cameron produced a really wonderful IMAX movie couple of years ago, called "Aliens of the Deep." There was a brief clip β (Video) Narrator: A mission to explore under the ice of Europa would be the ultimate robotic challenge. Europa is so far away that even at the speed of light, it would take more than an hour for the command just to reach the vehicle. It has to be smart enough to avoid terrain hazards and to find a good landing site on the ice. Now we have to get through the ice. You need a melt probe. It's basically a nuclear-heated torpedo. The ice could be anywhere from three to 16 miles deep. Week after week, the melt probe will sink of its own weight through the ancient ice, until finally β Now, what are you going to do when you reach the surface of that ocean? You need an AUV, an autonomous underwater vehicle. It needs to be one smart puppy, able to navigate and make decisions on its own in an alien ocean. BS: What Jim didn't know when he released that movie was that six months earlier NASA had funded a team I assembled to develop a prototype for the Europa AUV. I mean, I cut through three years of engineering meetings, design and system integration, and introduced DEPTHX β Deep Phreatic Thermal Explorer. And as the movie says, this is one smart puppy. It's got 96 sensors, 36 onboard computers, 100,000 lines of behavioral autonomy code, packs more than 10 kilos of TNT in electrical onboard equivalent. This is the target site, the world's deepest hydrothermal spring at Cenote Zacaton in northern Mexico. It's been explored to a depth of 292 meters and beyond that nobody knows anything. This is part of DEPTHX's mission. There are two primary targets we're doing here. One is, how do you do science autonomy underground? How do you take a robot and turn it into a field microbiologist? There are more stages involved here than I've got time to tell you about, but basically we drive through the space, we populate it with environmental variables β sulphide, halide, things like that. We calculate gradient surfaces, and drive the bot over to a wall where there's a high probability of life. We move along the wall, in what's called proximity operations, looking for changes in color. If we see something that looks interesting, we pull it into a microscope. If it passes the microscopic test, we go for a collection. We either draw in a liquid sample, or we can actually take a solid core from the wall. No hands at the wheel. This is all behavioral autonomy here that's being conducted by the robot on its own. The real hat trick for this vehicle, though, is a disruptive new navigation system we've developed, known as 3D SLAM, for simultaneous localization and mapping. DEPTHX is an all-seeing eyeball. Its sensor beams look both forward and backward at the same time, allowing it to do new exploration while it's still achieving geometric sensor-lock on what it's gone through already. What I'm going to show you next is the first fully autonomous robotic exploration underground that's ever been done. This May, we're going to go from minus 1,000 meters in Zacaton, and if we're very lucky, DEPTHX will bring back the first robotically-discovered division of bacteria. The next step after that is to test it in Antartica and then, if the funding continues and NASA has the resolution to go, we could potentially launch by 2016, and by 2019 we may have the first evidence of life off this planet. What then of manned space exploration? The government recently announced plans to return to the moon by 2024. The successful conclusion of that mission will result in infrequent visitation of the moon by a small number of government scientists and pilots. It will leave us no further along in the general expansion of humanity into space than we were 50 years ago. Something fundamental has to change if we are to see common access to space in our lifetime. What I'm going to show you next are a couple of controversial ideas. And I hope you'll bear with me and have some faith that there's credibility behind what we're going to say here. There are three underpinnings of working in space privately. One of them is the requirement for economical earth-to-space transport. The Bert Rutans and Richard Bransons of this world have got this in their sights and I salute them. Go, go, go. The next thing we need are places to stay on orbit. Orbital hotels to start with, but workshops for the rest of us later on. The final missing piece, the real paradigm-buster, is this: a gas station on orbit. It's not going to look like that. If it existed, it would change all future spacecraft design and space mission planning. Now, to give you a chance to understand why there is power in that statement, I've got to give you the basics of Space 101. And the first thing is everything you do in space you pay by the kilogram. Anybody drink one of these here this week? You'd pay 10,000 dollars for that in orbit. That's more than you pay for TED, if Google dropped their sponsorship. (Laughter) The second is more than 90 percent of the weight of a vehicle is in propellant. Thus, every time you'd want to do anything in space, you are literally blowing away enormous sums of money every time you hit the accelerator. Not even the guys at Tesla can fight that physics. So, what if you could get your gas at a 10th the price? There is a place where you can. In fact, you can get it better β you can get it at 14 times lower if you can find propellant on the moon. There is a little-known mission that was launched by the Pentagon, 13 years ago now, called Clementine. And the most amazing thing that came out of that mission was a strong hydrogen signature at Shackleton crater on the south pole of the moon. That signal was so strong, it could only have been produced by 10 trillion tons of water buried in the sediment, collected over millions and billions of years by the impact of asteroids and comet material. If we're going to get that, and make that gas station possible, we have to figure out ways to move large volumes of payload through space. We can't do that right now. The way you normally build a system right now is you have a tube stack that has to be launched from the ground, and resist all kinds of aerodynamic forces. We have to beat that. We can do it because in space there are no aerodynamics. We can go and use inflatable systems for almost everything. This is an idea that, again, came out of Livermore back in 1989, with Dr. Lowell Wood's group. And we can extend that now to just about everything. Bob Bigelow currently has a test article in the orbit. We can go much further. We can build space tugs, orbiting platforms for holding cryogens and water. There's another thing. When you're coming back from the moon, you have to deal with orbital mechanics. It says you're moving 10,000 feet per second faster than you really want to be to get back to your gas station. You got two choices. You can burn rocket fuel to get there, or you can do something really incredible. You can dive into the stratosphere, and precisely dissipate that velocity, and come back out to the space station. It has never been done. It's risky and it's going to be one hell of a ride β better than Disney. The traditional approach to space exploration has been that you carry all the fuel you need to get everybody back in case of an emergency. If you try to do that for the moon, you're going to burn a billion dollars in fuel alone sending a crew out there. But if you send a mining team there, without the return propellant, first β (Laughter) Did any of you guys hear the story of Cortez? This is not like that. I'm much more like Scotty. I like this equipment, you know, and I really value it so we're not going to burn the gear. But, if you were truly bold you could get it there, manufacture it, and it would be the most dramatic demonstration that you could do something worthwhile off this planet that has ever been done. There's a myth that you can't do anything in space for less than a trillion dollars and 20 years. That's not true. In seven years, we could pull off an industrial mission to Shackleton and demonstrate that you could provide commercial reality out of this in low-earth orbit. We're living in one of the most exciting times in history. We're at a magical confluence where private wealth and imagination are driving the demand for access to space. The orbital refueling stations I've just described could create an entirely new industry and provide the final key for opening space to the general exploration. To bust the paradigm a radically different approach is needed. We can do it by jump-starting with an industrial Lewis and Clark expedition to Shackleton crater, to mine the moon for resources, and demonstrate they can form the basis for a profitable business on orbit. Talk about space always seems to be hung on ambiguities of purpose and timing. I would like to close here by putting a stake in the sand at TED. I intend to lead that expedition. (Applause) It can be done in seven years with the right backing. Those who join me in making it happen will become a part of history and join other bold individuals from time past who, had they been here today, would have heartily approved. There was once a time when people did bold things to open the frontier. We have collectively forgotten that lesson. Now we're at a time when boldness is required to move forward. 100 years after Sir Ernest Shackleton wrote these words, I intend to plant an industrial flag on the moon and complete the final piece that will open the space frontier, in our time, for all of us. Thank you. (Applause) |
Dangerous memes | {0: 'Dan Dennett thinks that human consciousness and free will are the result of physical processes.'} | TED2002 | How many Creationists do we have in the room? Probably none. I think we're all Darwinians. And yet many Darwinians are anxious, a little uneasy β would like to see some limits on just how far the Darwinism goes. It's all right. You know spiderwebs? Sure, they are products of evolution. The World Wide Web? Not so sure. Beaver dams, yes. Hoover Dam, no. What do they think it is that prevents the products of human ingenuity from being themselves, fruits of the tree of life, and hence, in some sense, obeying evolutionary rules? And yet people are interestingly resistant to the idea of applying evolutionary thinking to thinking β to our thinking. And so I'm going to talk a little bit about that, keeping in mind that we have a lot on the program here. So you're out in the woods, or you're out in the pasture, and you see this ant crawling up this blade of grass. It climbs up to the top, and it falls, and it climbs, and it falls, and it climbs β trying to stay at the very top of the blade of grass. What is this ant doing? What is this in aid of? What goals is this ant trying to achieve by climbing this blade of grass? What's in it for the ant? And the answer is: nothing. There's nothing in it for the ant. Well then, why is it doing this? Is it just a fluke? Yeah, it's just a fluke. It's a lancet fluke. It's a little brain worm. It's a parasitic brain worm that has to get into the stomach of a sheep or a cow in order to continue its life cycle. Salmon swim upstream to get to their spawning grounds, and lancet flukes commandeer a passing ant, crawl into its brain, and drive it up a blade of grass like an all-terrain vehicle. So there's nothing in it for the ant. The ant's brain has been hijacked by a parasite that infects the brain, inducing suicidal behavior. Pretty scary. Well, does anything like that happen with human beings? This is all on behalf of a cause other than one's own genetic fitness, of course. Well, it may already have occurred to you that Islam means "surrender," or "submission of self-interest to the will of Allah." Well, it's ideas β not worms β that hijack our brains. Now, am I saying that a sizable minority of the world's population has had their brain hijacked by parasitic ideas? No, it's worse than that. Most people have. (Laughter) There are a lot of ideas to die for. Freedom, if you're from New Hampshire. (Laughter) Justice. Truth. Communism. Many people have laid down their lives for communism, and many have laid down their lives for capitalism. And many for Catholicism. And many for Islam. These are just a few of the ideas that are to die for. They're infectious. Yesterday, Amory Lovins spoke about "infectious repititis." It was a term of abuse, in effect. This is unthinking engineering. Well, most of the cultural spread that goes on is not brilliant, new, out-of-the-box thinking. It's "infectious repetitis," and we might as well try to have a theory of what's going on when that happens so that we can understand the conditions of infection. Hosts work hard to spread these ideas to others. I myself am a philosopher, and one of our occupational hazards is that people ask us what the meaning of life is. And you have to have a bumper sticker, you know. You have to have a statement. So, this is mine. The secret of happiness is: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it. Most of us β now that the "Me Decade" is well in the past β now we actually do this. One set of ideas or another have simply replaced our biological imperatives in our own lives. This is what our summum bonum is. It's not maximizing the number of grandchildren we have. Now, this is a profound biological effect. It's the subordination of genetic interest to other interests. And no other species does anything at all like it. Well, how are we going to think about this? It is, on the one hand, a biological effect, and a very large one. Unmistakable. Now, what theories do we want to use to look at this? Well, many theories. But how could something tie them together? The idea of replicating ideas; ideas that replicate by passing from brain to brain. Richard Dawkins, whom you'll be hearing later in the day, invented the term "memes," and put forward the first really clear and vivid version of this idea in his book "The Selfish Gene." Now here am I talking about his idea. Well, you see, it's not his. Yes β he started it. But it's everybody's idea now. And he's not responsible for what I say about memes. I'm responsible for what I say about memes. Actually, I think we're all responsible for not just the intended effects of our ideas, but for their likely misuses. So it is important, I think, to Richard, and to me, that these ideas not be abused and misused. They're very easy to misuse. That's why they're dangerous. And it's just about a full-time job trying to prevent people who are scared of these ideas from caricaturing them and then running off to one dire purpose or another. So we have to keep plugging away, trying to correct the misapprehensions so that only the benign and useful variants of our ideas continue to spread. But it is a problem. We don't have much time, and I'm going to go over just a little bit of this and cut out, because there's a lot of other things that are going to be said. So let me just point out: memes are like viruses. That's what Richard said, back in '93. And you might think, "Well, how can that be? I mean, a virus is β you know, it's stuff! What's a meme made of?" Yesterday, Negroponte was talking about viral telecommunications but β what's a virus? A virus is a string of nucleic acid with attitude. (Laughter) That is, there is something about it that tends to make it replicate better than the competition does. And that's what a meme is. It's an information packet with attitude. What's a meme made of? What are bits made of, Mom? Not silicon. They're made of information, and can be carried in any physical medium. What's a word made of? Sometimes when people say, "Do memes exist?" I say, "Well, do words exist? Are they in your ontology?" If they are, words are memes that can be pronounced. Then there's all the other memes that can't be pronounced. There are different species of memes. Remember the Shakers? Gift to be simple? Simple, beautiful furniture? And, of course, they're basically extinct now. And one of the reasons is that among the creed of Shaker-dom is that one should be celibate. Not just the priests. Everybody. Well, it's not so surprising that they've gone extinct. (Laughter) But in fact that's not why they went extinct. They survived as long as they did at a time when the social safety nets weren't there. And there were lots of widows and orphans, people like that, who needed a foster home. And so they had a ready supply of converts. And they could keep it going. And, in principle, it could've gone on forever, with perfect celibacy on the part of the hosts. The idea being passed on through proselytizing, instead of through the gene line. So the ideas can live on in spite of the fact that they're not being passed on genetically. A meme can flourish in spite of having a negative impact on genetic fitness. After all, the meme for Shaker-dom was essentially a sterilizing parasite. There are other parasites that do this β which render the host sterile. It's part of their plan. They don't have to have minds to have a plan. I'm just going to draw your attention to just one of the many implications of the memetic perspective, which I recommend. I've not time to go into more of it. In Jared Diamond's wonderful book, "Guns, Germs and Steel," he talks about how it was germs, more than guns and steel, that conquered the new hemisphere β the Western hemisphere β that conquered the rest of the world. When European explorers and travelers spread out, they brought with them the germs that they had become essentially immune to, that they had learned how to tolerate over hundreds and hundreds of years, thousands of years, of living with domesticated animals who were the sources of those pathogens. And they just wiped out β these pathogens just wiped out the native people, who had no immunity to them at all. And we're doing it again. We're doing it this time with toxic ideas. Yesterday, a number of people β Nicholas Negroponte and others β spoke about all the wonderful things that are happening when our ideas get spread out, thanks to all the new technology all over the world. And I agree. It is largely wonderful. Largely wonderful. But among all those ideas that inevitably flow out into the whole world thanks to our technology, are a lot of toxic ideas. Now, this has been realized for some time. Sayyid Qutb is one of the founding fathers of fanatical Islam, one of the ideologues that inspired Osama bin Laden. "One has only to glance at its press films, fashion shows, beauty contests, ballrooms, wine bars and broadcasting stations." Memes. These memes are spreading around the world and they are wiping out whole cultures. They are wiping out languages. They are wiping out traditions and practices. And it's not our fault, anymore than it's our fault when our germs lay waste to people that haven't developed the immunity. We have an immunity to all of the junk that lies around the edges of our culture. We're a free society, so we let pornography and all these things β we shrug them off. They're like a mild cold. They're not a big deal for us. But we should recognize that for many people in the world, they are a big deal. And we should be very alert to this. As we spread our education and our technology, one of the things that we are doing is we're the vectors of memes that are correctly viewed by the hosts of many other memes as a dire threat to their favorite memes β the memes that they are prepared to die for. Well now, how are we going to tell the good memes from the bad memes? That is not the job of the science of memetics. Memetics is morally neutral. And so it should be. This is not the place for hate and anger. If you've had a friend who's died of AIDS, then you hate HIV. But the way to deal with that is to do science, and understand how it spreads and why in a morally neutral perspective. Get the facts. Work out the implications. There's plenty of room for moral passion once we've got the facts and can figure out the best thing to do. And, as with germs, the trick is not to try to annihilate them. You will never annihilate the germs. What you can do, however, is foster public health measures and the like that will encourage the evolution of avirulence. That will encourage the spread of relatively benign mutations of the most toxic varieties. That's all the time I have, so thank you very much for your attention. |
The potential of regenerative medicine | {0: 'In the fight against disease, defect and injury, Alan Russell has a novel argument: Why not engineer new tissue and organs to replace sick ones?'} | TED2006 | I'm going to talk to you today about hopefully converting fear into hope. When we go to the physician today β when we go to the doctor's office and we walk in, there are words that we just don't want to hear. There are words that we're truly afraid of. Diabetes, cancer, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, heart failure, lung failure β things that we know are debilitating diseases, for which there's relatively little that can be done. And what I want to lay out for you today is a different way of thinking about how to treat debilitating disease, why it's important, why without it perhaps our health care system will melt down if you think it already hasn't, and where we are clinically today, and where we might go tomorrow, and what some of the hurdles are. And we're going to do all of that in 18 minutes, I promise. I want to start with this slide, because this slide sort of tells the story the way Science Magazine thinks of it. This was an issue from 2002 that they published with a lot of different articles on the bionic human. It was basically a regenerative medicine issue. Regenerative medicine is an extraordinarily simple concept that everybody can understand. It's simply accelerating the pace at which the body heals itself to a clinically relevant timescale. So we know how to do this in many of the ways that are up there. We know that if we have a damaged hip, you can put an artificial hip in. And this is the idea that Science Magazine used on their front cover. This is the complete antithesis of regenerative medicine. This is not regenerative medicine. Regenerative medicine is what Business Week put up when they did a story about regenerative medicine not too long ago. The idea is that instead of figuring out how to ameliorate symptoms with devices and drugs and the like β and I'll come back to that theme a few times β instead of doing that, we will regenerate lost function of the body by regenerating the function of organs and damaged tissue. So that at the end of the treatment, you are the same as you were at the beginning of the treatment. Very few good ideas β if you agree that this is a good idea β very few good ideas are truly novel. And this is just the same. If you look back in history, Charles Lindbergh, who was better known for flying airplanes, was actually one of the first people along with Alexis Carrel, one of the Nobel Laureates from Rockefeller, to begin to think about, could you culture organs? And they published this book in 1937, where they actually began to think about, what could you do in bio-reactors to grow whole organs? We've come a long way since then. I'm going to share with you some of the exciting work that's going on. But before doing that, what I'd like to do is share my depression about the health care system and the need for this with you. Many of the talks yesterday talked about improving the quality of life, and reducing poverty, and essentially increasing life expectancy all around the globe. One of the challenges is that the richer we are, the longer we live. And the longer we live, the more expensive it is to take care of our diseases as we get older. This is simply the wealth of a country versus the percent of population over the age of 65. And you can basically see that the richer a country is, the older the people are within it. Why is this important? And why is this a particularly dramatic challenge right now? If the average age of your population is 30, then the average kind of disease that you have to treat is maybe a broken ankle every now and again, maybe a little bit of asthma. If the average age in your country is 45 to 55, now the average person is looking at diabetes, early-onset diabetes, heart failure, coronary artery disease β things that are inherently more difficult to treat, and much more expensive to treat. Just have a look at the demographics in the U.S. here. This is from "The Untied States of America." In 1930, there were 41 workers per retiree. 41 people who were basically outside of being really sick, paying for the one retiree who was experiencing debilitating disease. In 2010, two workers per retiree in the U.S. And this is matched in every industrialized, wealthy country in the world. How can you actually afford to treat patients when the reality of getting old looks like this? This is age versus cost of health care. And you can see that right around age 45, 40 to 45, there's a sudden spike in the cost of health care. It's actually quite interesting. If you do the right studies, you can look at how much you as an individual spend on your own health care, plotted over your lifetime. And about seven years before you're about to die, there's a spike. And you can actually β (Laughter) β we won't get into that. (Laughter) There are very few things, very few things that you can really do that will change the way that you can treat these kinds of diseases and experience what I would call healthy aging. I'd suggest there are four things, and none of these things include an insurance system or a legal system. All those things do is change who pays. They don't actually change what the actual cost of the treatment is. One thing you can do is not treat. You can ration health care. We won't talk about that anymore. It's too depressing. You can prevent. Obviously a lot of monies should be put into prevention. But perhaps most interesting, to me anyway, and most important, is the idea of diagnosing a disease much earlier on in the progression, and then treating the disease to cure the disease instead of treating a symptom. Think of it in terms of diabetes, for instance. Today, with diabetes, what do we do? We diagnose the disease eventually, once it becomes symptomatic, and then we treat the symptom for 10, 20, 30, 40 years. And we do OK. Insulin's a pretty good therapy. But eventually it stops working, and diabetes leads to a predictable onset of debilitating disease. Why couldn't we just inject the pancreas with something to regenerate the pancreas early on in the disease, perhaps even before it was symptomatic? And it might be a little bit expensive at the time that we did it, but if it worked, we would truly be able to do something different. This video, I think, gets across the concept that I'm talking about quite dramatically. This is a newt re-growing its limb. If a newt can do this kind of thing, why can't we? I'll actually show you some more important features about limb regeneration in a moment. But what we're talking about in regenerative medicine is doing this in every organ system of the body, for tissues and for organs themselves. So today's reality is that if we get sick, the message is we will treat your symptoms, and you need to adjust to a new way of life. I would pose to you that tomorrow β and when tomorrow is we could debate, but it's within the foreseeable future β we will talk about regenerative rehabilitation. There's a limb prosthetic up here, similar actually one on the soldier that's come back from Iraq. There are 370 soldiers that have come back from Iraq that have lost limbs. Imagine if instead of facing that, they could actually face the regeneration of that limb. It's a wild concept. I'll show you where we are at the moment in working towards that concept. But it's applicable, again, to every organ system. How can we do that? The way to do that is to develop a conversation with the body. We need to learn to speak the body's language. And to switch on processes that we knew how to do when we were a fetus. A mammalian fetus, if it loses a limb during the first trimester of pregnancy, will re-grow that limb. So our DNA has the capacity to do these kinds of wound-healing mechanisms. It's a natural process, but it is lost as we age. In a child, before the age of about six months, if they lose their fingertip in an accident, they'll re-grow their fingertip. By the time they're five, they won't be able to do that anymore. So to engage in that conversation with the body, we need to speak the body's language. And there are certain tools in our toolbox that allow us to do this today. I'm going to give you an example of three of these tools through which to converse with the body. The first is cellular therapies. Clearly, we heal ourselves in a natural process, using cells to do most of the work. Therefore, if we can find the right cells and implant them in the body, they may do the healing. Secondly, we can use materials. We heard yesterday about the importance of new materials. If we can invent materials, design materials, or extract materials from a natural environment, then we might be able to have those materials induce the body to heal itself. And finally, we may be able to use smart devices that will offload the work of the body and allow it to heal. I'm going to show you an example of each of these, and I'm going to start with materials. Steve Badylak β who's at the University of Pittsburgh β about a decade ago had a remarkable idea. And that idea was that the small intestine of a pig, if you threw away all the cells, and if you did that in a way that allowed it to remain biologically active, may contain all of the necessary factors and signals that would signal the body to heal itself. And he asked a very important question. He asked the question, if I take that material, which is a natural material that usually induces healing in the small intestine, and I place it somewhere else on a person's body, would it give a tissue-specific response, or would it make small intestine if I tried to make a new ear? I wouldn't be telling you this story if it weren't compelling. The picture I'm about to show you is a compelling picture. (Laughter) However, for those of you that are even the slightest bit squeamish β even though you may not like to admit it in front of your friends β the lights are down. This is a good time to look at your feet, check your Blackberry, do anything other than look at the screen. (Laughter) What I'm about to show you is a diabetic ulcer. And although β it's good to laugh before we look at this. This is the reality of diabetes. I think a lot of times we hear about diabetics, diabetic ulcers, we just don't connect the ulcer with the eventual treatment, which is amputation, if you can't heal it. So I'm going to put the slide up now. It won't be up for long. This is a diabetic ulcer. It's tragic. The treatment for this is amputation. This is an older lady. She has cancer of the liver as well as diabetes, and has decided to die with what' s left of her body intact. And this lady decided, after a year of attempted treatment of that ulcer, that she would try this new therapy that Steve invented. That's what the wound looked like 11 weeks later. That material contained only natural signals. And that material induced the body to switch back on a healing response that it didn't have before. There's going to be a couple more distressing slides for those of you β I'll let you know when you can look again. This is a horse. The horse is not in pain. If the horse was in pain, I wouldn't show you this slide. The horse just has another nostril that's developed because of a riding accident. Just a few weeks after treatment β in this case, taking that material, turning it into a gel, and packing that area, and then repeating the treatment a few times β and the horse heals up. And if you took an ultrasound of that area, it would look great. Here's a dolphin where the fin's been re-attached. There are now 400,000 patients around the world who have used that material to heal their wounds. Could you regenerate a limb? DARPA just gave Steve 15 million dollars to lead an eight-institution project to begin the process of asking that question. And I'll show you the 15 million dollar picture. This is a 78 year-old man who's lost the end of his fingertip. Remember that I mentioned before the children who lose their fingertips. After treatment that's what it looks like. This is happening today. This is clinically relevant today. There are materials that do this. Here are the heart patches. But could you go a little further? Could you, say, instead of using material, can I take some cells along with the material, and remove a damaged piece of tissue, put a bio-degradable material on there? You can see here a little bit of heart muscle beating in a dish. This was done by Teruo Okano at Tokyo Women's Hospital. He can actually grow beating tissue in a dish. He chills the dish, it changes its properties and he peels it right out of the dish. It's the coolest stuff. Now I'm going to show you cell-based regeneration. And what I'm going to show you here is stem cells being removed from the hip of a patient. Again, if you're squeamish, you don't want to watch. But this one's kind of cool. So this is a bypass operation, just like what Al Gore had, with a difference. In this case, at the end of the bypass operation, you're going to see the stem cells from the patient that were removed at the beginning of the procedure being injected directly into the heart of the patient. And I'm standing up here because at one point I'm going to show you just how early this technology is. Here go the stem cells, right into the beating heart of the patient. And if you look really carefully, it's going to be right around this point you'll actually see a back-flush. You see the cells coming back out. We need all sorts of new technology, new devices, to get the cells to the right place at the right time. Just a little bit of data, a tiny bit of data. This was a randomized trial. At this time this was an N of 20. Now there's an N of about 100. Basically, if you take an extremely sick patient and you give them a bypass, they get a little bit better. If you give them stem cells as well as their bypass, for these particular patients, they became asymptomatic. These are now two years out. The coolest thing would be is if you could diagnose the disease early, and prevent the onset of the disease to a bad state. This is the same procedure, but now done minimally invasively, with only three holes in the body where they're taking the heart and simply injecting stem cells through a laparoscopic procedure. There go the cells. We don't have time to go into all of those details, but basically, that works too. You can take patients who are less sick, and bring them back to an almost asymptomatic state through that kind of therapy. Here's another example of stem-cell therapy that isn't quite clinical yet, but I think very soon will be. This is the work of Kacey Marra from Pittsburgh, along with a number of colleagues around the world. They've decided that liposuction fluid, which β in the United States, we have a lot of liposuction fluid. (Laughter) It's a great source of stem cells. Stem cells are packed in that liposuction fluid. So you could go in, you could get your tummy-tuck. Out comes the liposuction fluid, and in this case, the stem cells are isolated and turned into neurons. All done in the lab. And I think fairly soon, you will see patients being treated with their own fat-derived, or adipose-derived, stem cells. I talked before about the use of devices to dramatically change the way we treat disease. Here's just one example before I close up. This is equally tragic. We have a very abiding and heartbreaking partnership with our colleagues at the Institute for Surgical Research in the US Army, who have to treat the now 11,000 kids that have come back from Iraq. Many of those patients are very severely burned. And if there's anything that's been learned about burn, it's that we don't know how to treat it. Everything that is done to treat burn β basically we do a sodding approach. We make something over here, and then we transplant it onto the site of the wound, and we try and get the two to take. In this case here, a new, wearable bio-reactor has been designed β it should be tested clinically later this year at ISR β by Joerg Gerlach in Pittsburgh. And that bio-reactor will lay down in the wound bed. The gun that you see there sprays cells. That's going to spray cells over that area. The reactor will serve to fertilize the environment, deliver other things as well at the same time, and therefore we will seed that lawn, as opposed to try the sodding approach. It's a completely different way of doing it. So my 18 minutes is up. So let me finish up with some good news, and maybe a little bit of bad news. The good news is that this is happening today. It's very powerful work. Clearly the images kind of get that across. It's incredibly difficult because it's highly inter-disciplinary. Almost every field of science engineering and clinical practice is involved in trying to get this to happen. A number of governments, and a number of regions, have recognized that this is a new way to treat disease. The Japanese government were perhaps the first, when they decided to invest first 3 billion, later another 2 billion in this field. It's no coincidence. Japan is the oldest country on earth in terms of its average age. They need this to work or their health system dies. So they're putting a lot of strategic investment focused in this area. The European Union, same thing. China, the same thing. China just launched a national tissue-engineering center. The first year budget was 250 million US dollars. In the United States we've had a somewhat different approach. (Laughter) Oh, for Al Gore to come and be in the real world as president. We've had a different approach. And the approach has basically been to just sort of fund things as they come along. But there's been no strategic investment to bring all of the necessary things to bear and focus them in a careful way. And I'm going to finish up with a quote, maybe a little cheap shot, at the director of the NIH, who's a very charming man. Myself and Jay Vacanti from Harvard went to visit with him and a number of his directors of his institute just a few months ago, to try and convince him that it was time to take just a little piece of that 27.5 billion dollars that he's going to get next year and focus it, in a strategic way, to make sure we can accelerate the pace at which these things get to patients. And at the end of a very testy meeting, what the NIH director said was, "Your vision is larger than our appetite." I'd like to close by saying that no one's going to change our vision, but together we can change his appetite. Thank you. |
The Web's secret stories | {0: "Artist and computer scientist Jonathan Harris makes online art that captures the world's expression -- and gives us a glimpse of the soul of the Internet."} | TED2007 | So I really consider myself a storyteller. But I don't really tell stories in the usual way, in the sense that I don't usually tell my own stories. Instead, I'm really interested in building tools that allow large numbers of other people to tell their stories, people all around the world. I do this because I think that people actually have a lot in common. I think people are very similar, but I also think that we have trouble seeing that. You know, as I look around the world I see a lot of gaps, and I think we all see a lot of gaps. And we define ourselves by our gaps. There's language gaps, there's ethnicity and racial gaps, there's age gaps, there's gender gaps, there's sexuality gaps, there's wealth and money gaps, there's education gaps, there's also religious gaps. You know, we have all these gaps and I think we like our gaps because they make us feel like we identify with something, some smaller community. But I think that actually, despite our gaps, we really have a lot in common. And I think one thing we have in common is a very deep need to express ourselves. I think this is a very old human desire. It's nothing new. But the thing about self-expression is that there's traditionally been this imbalance between the desire that we have to express ourselves and the number of sympathetic friends who are willing to stand around and listen. (Laughter) This, also, is nothing new. Since the dawn of human history, we've tried to rectify this imbalance by making art, writing poems, singing songs, scripting editorials and sending them in to a newspaper, gossiping with friends. This is nothing new. What's new is that in the last several years a lot of these very traditional physical human activities, these acts of self-expression, have been moving onto the Internet. And as that's happened, people have been leaving behind footprints, footprints that tell stories of their moments of self-expression. And so what I do is, I write computer programs that study very large sets of these footprints, and then try to draw conclusions about the people who left them β what they feel, what they think, what's different in the world today than usual, these sorts of questions. One project that explores these ideas, which was made about a year ago, is a piece called We Feel Fine. This is a piece that every two or three minutes scans the world's newly-posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" or "I am feeling." And when it finds one of those phrases, it grabs the sentence up to the period, and then automatically tries to deduce the age, gender and geographical location of the person that wrote that sentence. Then, knowing the geographical location and the time, we can also then figure out the weather when that person wrote the sentence. All of this information is saved in a database that collects about 20,000 feelings a day. It's been running for about a year and a half. It's reached about seven-and-a-half million human feelings now. And I'll show you a glimpse of how this information is then visualized. So this is We Feel Fine. What you see here is a madly swarming mass of particles, each of which represents a single human feeling that was stated in the last few hours. The color of each particle corresponds to the type of feeling inside β so that happy, positive feelings are brightly colored. And sad, negative feelings are darkly colored. The diameter of each dot represents the length of the sentence inside, so that the large dots contain large sentences, and the small dots contain small sentences. Any dot can be clicked and expanded. And we see here, "I would just feel so much better if I could curl up in his arms right now and feel his affection for me in the embrace of his body and the tenderness of his lips." So it gets pretty hot and steamy sometimes in the world of human emotions. And all of these are stated by people: "I know that objectively it really doesn't mean much, but after spending so many years as a small fish in a big pond, it's nice to feel bigger again." The dots exhibit human qualities. They kind of have their own physics, and they swarm wildly around, kind of exploring the world of life. And then they also exhibit curiosity. You can see a few of them are swarming around the cursor right now. You can see some other ones are swarming around the bottom left corner of the screen around six words. Those six words represent the six movements of We Feel Fine. We're currently seeing Madness. There's also Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics and Mounds. And I'll walk you through a few of those now. Murmurs causes all of the feelings to fly to the ceiling. And then, one by one, in reverse chronological order, they excuse themselves, entering the scrolling list of feelings. "I feel a bit better now." (Laughter) "I feel confused and unsure of what the hell I want to do." "I feel gypped out of something awesome here." "I feel so free; I feel so good." "I feel like I'm in this fog of depression that I can't get out of." And you can click any of these to go out and visit the blog from which it was collected. And in that way, you can connect with the authors of these statements if you feel some degree of empathy. The next movement is called Montage. Montage causes all of the feelings that contain photographs to become extracted and display themselves in a grid. This grid is then said to represent the picture of the world's feelings in the last few hours, if you will. Each of these can be clicked and we can blow it up. We see, "I just feel like I'm not going to have fun if it's not the both of us." That was from someone in Michigan. We see, "I feel like I have been at a computer all day." (Laughter) These are automatically constructed using the found objects: "I think I feel a little full." The next movement is called mobs. Mobs provides different statistical breakdowns of the population of the world's feelings in the last few hours. We see that "better" is the most frequent feeling right now, followed by "good," "bad," "guilty," "right," "down," "sick" and so on. We can also get a gender breakdown. And we see that women are slightly more prolific talking about their emotions in the last few hours than men. We can do an age breakdown, which gives us a histogram of the world's emotional distribution by age. We see people in their twenties are the most prolific, followed by teenagers, and then people in their thirties, and it dies out very quickly from there. In weather, the feelings assume the physical characteristics of the weather that they represent, so that the ones collected on a sunny day swirl around as if they're part of the sun. The cloudy ones float along as if they're on a breeze. The rainy ones fall down as if they're in a rainstorm, and the snowy ones kind of flutter to the ground. Finally, location causes the feelings to move to their positions on a world map showing the geographical distribution of feelings. Metrics provides more numerical views on the data. We see that the world is feeling "used" at 3.3 times the normal level right now. (Laughter) They're feeling "warm" at 2.9 times the normal level, and so on. Other views are also available. Here are gender, age, weather, location. The final movement is called Mounds. It's a bit different from the others. Mounds visualizes the entire dataset as large, gelatinous blobs which kind of jiggle. And if I hold down my cursor, they do a little dance. We see "better" is the most frequent feeling, followed by "bad." And then if I go over here, the list begins to scroll, and there are actually thousands of feelings that have been collected. You can see the little pink cursor moving along, representing our position. Here we see people that feel "slipping," "nauseous," "responsible." There's also a search capability, if you're interested in finding out about a certain population. For instance, you could find women who feel "addicted" in their 20s when it was cloudy in Bangladesh. (Laughter) But I'll spare you that. So here are some of my favorite montages that have been collected: "I feel so much of my dad alive in me that there isn't even room for me." "I feel very lonely." "I need to be in some backwoods redneck town so that I can feel beautiful." "I feel invisible to you." "I wouldn't hide it if society didn't make me feel like I needed to." "I feel in love with Carolyn." "I feel so naughty." "I feel these weirdoes are actually an asset to college life." (Laughter) "I love how I feel today." So as you can see, We Feel Fine uses a technique that I call "passive observation." What I mean by that is that it passively observes people as they live their lives. It scans the world's blogs and looks at what people are writing, and these people don't know they're being watched or interviewed. And because of that, you end up getting very honest, candid, sincere responses that are often very moving. And this is a technique that I usually prefer in my work because people don't know they're being interviewed. They're just living life, and they end up just acting like that. Another technique is directly questioning people. And this is a technique that I explored in a different project, the Yahoo! Time Capsule, which was designed to take a fingerprint of the world in 2006. It was divided into ten very simple themes β love, anger, sadness and so on β each of which contained a single, very open-ended question put to the world: What do you love? What makes you angry? What makes you sad? What do you believe in? And so on. The time capsule was available for one month online, translated into 10 languages, and this is what it looked like. It's a spinning globe, the surface of which is entirely composed of the pictures and words and drawings of people that submitted to the time capsule. The ten themes radiate out and orbit the time capsule. You can sift through this data and see what people have submitted. This is in response to, What's beautiful? "Miss World." There are two modes to the time capsule. There's One World, which presents the spinning globe, and Many Voices, which splits the data out into film strips and lets you sift through them one by one. So this project was punctuated by a really amazing event, which was held in the desert outside Albuquerque in New Mexico at the Jemez Pueblo, where for three consecutive nights, the contents of the capsule were projected onto the sides of the ancient Red Rock Canyon walls, which stand about 200 feet tall. It was really incredible. And we also projected the contents of the time capsule as binary code using a 35-watt laser into outer space. You can see the orange line leaving the desert floor at about a 45 degree angle there. This was amazing because the first night I looked at all this information and really started seeing the gaps that I talked about earlier β the differences in age, gender and wealth and so on. But, you know, as I looked at this more and more and more, and saw these images go across the rocks, I realized I was seeing the same archetypal events depicted again and again and again. You know: weddings, births, funerals, the first car, the first kiss, the first camel or horse β depending on the culture. And it was really moving. And this picture here was taken the final night from a distant cliff about two miles away, where the contents of the capsule were being beamed into space. And there was something very moving about all of this human expression being shot off into the night sky. And it started to make me think a lot about the night sky, and how humans have always used the night sky to project their great stories. You know, as a child in Vermont, on a farm where I grew up, I would often look up into the dark sky and see the three star belt of Orion, the Hunter. And as an adult, I've been more aware of the great Greek myths playing out in the sky overhead every night. You know, Orion facing the roaring bull. Perseus flying to the rescue of Andromeda. Zeus battling Chronos for control of Mount Olympus. I mean, these are the great tales of the Greeks. And it caused me to wonder about our world today. And it caused me to wonder specifically, if we could make new constellations today, what would those look like? What would those be? If we could make new pictures in the sky, what would we draw? What are the great stories of today? And those are the questions that inspired my new project, which is debuting here today at TED. Nobody's seen this yet, publicly. It's called Universe: Revealing Our Modern Mythology. And it uses this metaphor of an interactive night sky. So, it's my great pleasure now to show this to you. So, Universe will open here. And you'll see that it leads with a shifting star field, and there's an Aurora Borealis in the background, kind of morphing with color. The color of the Aurora Borealis can be controlled using this single bar of color at the bottom, and we'll put it down here to red. So you see this kind of β these stars moving along. Now, these aren't just little points of light, little pixels. Each of those stars actually represents a specific event in the real world β a quote that was stated by somebody, an image, a news story, a person, a company. You know, some kind of heroic personality. And you might notice that as the cursor begins to touch some of these stars, that shapes begin to emerge. We see here there's a little man walking along, or maybe a woman. And we see here a photograph with a head. You can start to see words emerging here. And those are the constellations of today. And I can turn them all on, and you can see them moving across the sky now. This is the universe of 2007, the last two months. The data from this is global news coverage from thousands of news sources around the world. It's using the API of a really great company that I work with in New York, actually, called Daylife. And it's kind of the zeitgeist view at this level of the world's current mythology over the last couple of months. So we can see where it's emerging here, like President Ford, Iraq, Bush. And we can actually isolate just the words β I call them secrets β and we can cause them to form an alphabetical list. And we see Anna Nicole Smith playing a big role recently. President Ford β this is Gerald Ford's funeral. We can actually click anything in Universe and have it become the center of the universe, and everything else will enter its orbit. So, we'll click Ford, and now that becomes the center. And the things that relate to Ford enter its orbit and swirl around it. We can isolate just the photographs, and we now see those. We can click on one of those and have the photograph be the center of the universe. Now the things that relate to it are swirling around. We can click on this and we see this iconic image of Betty Ford kissing her husband's coffin. In Universe, there's kind of no end. It just goes infinitely, and you can just kind of click on stuff. This is a photographic representation, called Snapshots. But we can actually be more specific in defining our universe. So, if we want to, let's check out what Bill Clinton's universe looks like. And let's see, in the past week, what he's been up to. So now, we have a new universe, which is just constrained to all things Bill Clinton. We can have his constellations emerge here. We can pull out his secrets, and we see that it has a lot to do with candidates, Hillary, presidential, Barack Obama. We can see the stories that Bill Clinton is taking part in right now. Any of those can be opened up. So we see Obama and the Clintons meet in Alabama. You can see that this is an important story; there are a lot of things in its orbit. If we open this up, we get different perspectives on this story. You can click any of those to go out and read the article at the source. This one's from Al Jazeera. We can also see the superstars. These would be the people that are kind of the looming heroes and heroines in the universe of Bill Clinton. So there's Bill Clinton, Hillary, Iraq, George Bush, Barack Obama, Scooter Libby β these are kind of the people of Bill Clinton. We can also see a world map, so this shows us the geographic reach of Bill Clinton in the last week or so. We can see he's been focused in America because he's been campaigning, probably, but a little bit of action over here in the Middle East. And then we can also see a timeline. So we see that he was a bit quiet on Saturday, but he was back to work on Sunday morning, and actually been tapering off since then this week. And it's not limited to just people or dates, but we can actually put in concepts also. So if I put in climate change for all of 2006, we'll see what that universe looks like. Here we have our star field. Here we have our shapes. Here we have our secrets. So we see again, climate change is large: Nairobi, global conference, environmental. And there are also quotes that you can see, if you're interested in reading about quotes on climate change. You know, this is really an infinite thing. The superstars of climate change in 2006: United States, Britain, China. You know, these are the towering countries that kind of define this concept. So this is a piece that demands exploration. This will be online in several days, probably next Tuesday. And you'll all be able to use it and kind of explore what your own personal mythology might be. You'll notice that in Daylife β rather, in Universe β it supports both the notion of a global mythology, which is represented by something as broad as, say, 2007, and also a personal mythology. As you search for the things that are important to you in your world, and then see what the constellations of those might look like. So it's been a pleasure. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Flip your thinking on AIDS in Africa | {0: 'Emily Oster has a history of rethinking conventional wisdom.'} | TED2007 | So I want to talk to you today about AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. And this is a pretty well-educated audience, so I imagine you all know something about AIDS. You probably know that roughly 25 million people in Africa are infected with the virus, that AIDS is a disease of poverty, and that if we can bring Africa out of poverty, we would decrease AIDS as well. If you know something more, you probably know that Uganda, to date, is the only country in sub-Saharan Africa that has had success in combating the epidemic. Using a campaign that encouraged people to abstain, be faithful, and use condoms β the ABC campaign β they decreased their prevalence in the 1990s from about 15 percent to 6 percent over just a few years. If you follow policy, you probably know that a few years ago the president pledged 15 billion dollars to fight the epidemic over five years, and a lot of that money is going to go to programs that try to replicate Uganda and use behavior change to encourage people and decrease the epidemic. So today I'm going to talk about some things that you might not know about the epidemic, and I'm actually also going to challenge some of these things that you think that you do know. To do that I'm going to talk about my research as an economist on the epidemic. And I'm not really going to talk much about the economy. I'm not going to tell you about exports and prices. But I'm going to use tools and ideas that are familiar to economists to think about a problem that's more traditionally part of public health and epidemiology. And I think in that sense, this fits really nicely with this lateral thinking idea. Here I'm really using the tools of one academic discipline to think about problems of another. So we think, first and foremost, AIDS is a policy issue. And probably for most people in this room, that's how you think about it. But this talk is going to be about understanding facts about the epidemic. It's going to be about thinking about how it evolves, and how people respond to it. I think it may seem like I'm ignoring the policy stuff, which is really the most important, but I'm hoping that at the end of this talk you will conclude that we actually cannot develop effective policy unless we really understand how the epidemic works. And the first thing that I want to talk about, the first thing I think we need to understand is: how do people respond to the epidemic? So AIDS is a sexually transmitted infection, and it kills you. So this means that in a place with a lot of AIDS, there's a really significant cost of sex. If you're an uninfected man living in Botswana, where the HIV rate is 30 percent, if you have one more partner this year β a long-term partner, girlfriend, mistress β your chance of dying in 10 years increases by three percentage points. That is a huge effect. And so I think that we really feel like then people should have less sex. And in fact among gay men in the US we did see that kind of change in the 1980s. So if we look in this particularly high-risk sample, they're being asked, "Did you have more than one unprotected sexual partner in the last two months?" Over a period from '84 to '88, that share drops from about 85 percent to 55 percent. It's a huge change in a very short period of time. We didn't see anything like that in Africa. So we don't have quite as good data, but you can see here the share of single men having pre-marital sex, or married men having extra-marital sex, and how that changes from the early '90s to late '90s, and late '90s to early 2000s. The epidemic is getting worse. People are learning more things about it. We see almost no change in sexual behavior. These are just tiny decreases β two percentage points β not significant. This seems puzzling. But I'm going to argue that you shouldn't be surprised by this, and that to understand this you need to think about health the way than an economist does β as an investment. So if you're a software engineer and you're trying to think about whether to add some new functionality to your program, it's important to think about how much it costs. It's also important to think about what the benefit is. And one part of that benefit is how much longer you think this program is going to be active. If version 10 is coming out next week, there's no point in adding more functionality into version nine. But your health decisions are the same. Every time you have a carrot instead of a cookie, every time you go to the gym instead of going to the movies, that's a costly investment in your health. But how much you want to invest is going to depend on how much longer you expect to live in the future, even if you don't make those investments. AIDS is the same kind of thing. It's costly to avoid AIDS. People really like to have sex. But, you know, it has a benefit in terms of future longevity. But life expectancy in Africa, even without AIDS, is really, really low: 40 or 50 years in a lot of places. I think it's possible, if we think about that intuition, and think about that fact, that maybe that explains some of this low behavior change. But we really need to test that. And a great way to test that is to look across areas in Africa and see: do people with more life expectancy change their sexual behavior more? And the way that I'm going to do that is, I'm going to look across areas with different levels of malaria. So malaria is a disease that kills you. It's a disease that kills a lot of adults in Africa, in addition to a lot of children. And so people who live in areas with a lot of malaria are going to have lower life expectancy than people who live in areas with limited malaria. So one way to test to see whether we can explain some of this behavior change by differences in life expectancy is to look and see is there more behavior change in areas where there's less malaria. So that's what this figure shows you. This shows you β in areas with low malaria, medium malaria, high malaria β what happens to the number of sexual partners as you increase HIV prevalence. If you look at the blue line, the areas with low levels of malaria, you can see in those areas, actually, the number of sexual partners is decreasing a lot as HIV prevalence goes up. Areas with medium levels of malaria it decreases some β it doesn't decrease as much. And areas with high levels of malaria β actually, it's increasing a little bit, although that's not significant. This is not just through malaria. Young women who live in areas with high maternal mortality change their behavior less in response to HIV than young women who live in areas with low maternal mortality. There's another risk, and they respond less to this existing risk. So by itself, I think this tells a lot about how people behave. It tells us something about why we see limited behavior change in Africa. But it also tells us something about policy. Even if you only cared about AIDS in Africa, it might still be a good idea to invest in malaria, in combating poor indoor air quality, in improving maternal mortality rates. Because if you improve those things, then people are going to have an incentive to avoid AIDS on their own. But it also tells us something about one of these facts that we talked about before. Education campaigns, like the one that the president is focusing on in his funding, may not be enough, at least not alone. If people have no incentive to avoid AIDS on their own, even if they know everything about the disease, they still may not change their behavior. So the other thing that I think we learn here is that AIDS is not going to fix itself. People aren't changing their behavior enough to decrease the growth in the epidemic. So we're going to need to think about policy and what kind of policies might be effective. And a great way to learn about policy is to look at what worked in the past. The reason that we know that the ABC campaign was effective in Uganda is we have good data on prevalence over time. In Uganda we see the prevalence went down. We know they had this campaign. That's how we learn about what works. It's not the only place we had any interventions. Other places have tried things, so why don't we look at those places and see what happened to their prevalence? Unfortunately, there's almost no good data on HIV prevalence in the general population in Africa until about 2003. So if I asked you, "Why don't you go and find me the prevalence in Burkina Faso in 1991?" You get on Google, you Google, and you find, actually the only people tested in Burkina Faso in 1991 are STD patients and pregnant women, which is not a terribly representative group of people. Then if you poked a little more, you looked a little more at what was going on, you'd find that actually that was a pretty good year, because in some years the only people tested are IV drug users. But even worse β some years it's only IV drug users, some years it's only pregnant women. We have no way to figure out what happened over time. We have no consistent testing. Now in the last few years, we actually have done some good testing. In Kenya, in Zambia, and a bunch of countries, there's been testing in random samples of the population. But this leaves us with a big gap in our knowledge. So I can tell you what the prevalence was in Kenya in 2003, but I can't tell you anything about 1993 or 1983. So this is a problem for policy. It was a problem for my research. And I started thinking about how else might we figure out what the prevalence of HIV was in Africa in the past. And I think that the answer is, we can look at mortality data, and we can use mortality data to figure out what the prevalence was in the past. To do this, we're going to have to rely on the fact that AIDS is a very specific kind of disease. It kills people in the prime of their lives. Not a lot of other diseases have that profile. And you can see here β this is a graph of death rates by age in Botswana and Egypt. Botswana is a place with a lot of AIDS, Egypt is a place without a lot of AIDS. And you see they have pretty similar death rates among young kids and old people. That suggests it's pretty similar levels of development. But in this middle region, between 20 and 45, the death rates in Botswana are much, much, much higher than in Egypt. But since there are very few other diseases that kill people, we can really attribute that mortality to HIV. But because people who died this year of AIDS got it a few years ago, we can use this data on mortality to figure out what HIV prevalence was in the past. So it turns out, if you use this technique, actually your estimates of prevalence are very close to what we get from testing random samples in the population, but they're very, very different than what UNAIDS tells us the prevalences are. So this is a graph of prevalence estimated by UNAIDS, and prevalence based on the mortality data for the years in the late 1990s in nine countries in Africa. You can see, almost without exception, the UNAIDS estimates are much higher than the mortality-based estimates. UNAIDS tell us that the HIV rate in Zambia is 20 percent, and mortality estimates suggest it's only about 5 percent. And these are not trivial differences in mortality rates. So this is another way to see this. You can see that for the prevalence to be as high as UNAIDS says, we have to really see 60 deaths per 10,000 rather than 20 deaths per 10,000 in this age group. I'm going to talk a little bit in a minute about how we can use this kind of information to learn something that's going to help us think about the world. But this also tells us that one of these facts that I mentioned in the beginning may not be quite right. If you think that 25 million people are infected, if you think that the UNAIDS numbers are much too high, maybe that's more like 10 or 15 million. It doesn't mean that AIDS isn't a problem. It's a gigantic problem. But it does suggest that that number might be a little big. What I really want to do, is I want to use this new data to try to figure out what makes the HIV epidemic grow faster or slower. And I said in the beginning, I wasn't going to tell you about exports. When I started working on these projects, I was not thinking at all about economics, but eventually it kind of sucks you back in. So I am going to talk about exports and prices. And I want to talk about the relationship between economic activity, in particular export volume, and HIV infections. So obviously, as an economist, I'm deeply familiar with the fact that development, that openness to trade, is really good for developing countries. It's good for improving people's lives. But openness and inter-connectedness, it comes with a cost when we think about disease. I don't think this should be a surprise. On Wednesday, I learned from Laurie Garrett that I'm definitely going to get the bird flu, and I wouldn't be at all worried about that if we never had any contact with Asia. And HIV is actually particularly closely linked to transit. The epidemic was introduced to the US by actually one male steward on an airline flight, who got the disease in Africa and brought it back. And that was the genesis of the entire epidemic in the US. In Africa, epidemiologists have noted for a long time that truck drivers and migrants are more likely to be infected than other people. Areas with a lot of economic activity β with a lot of roads, with a lot of urbanization β those areas have higher prevalence than others. But that actually doesn't mean at all that if we gave people more exports, more trade, that that would increase prevalence. By using this new data, using this information about prevalence over time, we can actually test that. And so it seems to be β fortunately, I think β it seems to be the case that these things are positively related. More exports means more AIDS. And that effect is really big. So the data that I have suggests that if you double export volume, it will lead to a quadrupling of new HIV infections. So this has important implications both for forecasting and for policy. From a forecasting perspective, if we know where trade is likely to change, for example, because of the African Growth and Opportunities Act or other policies that encourage trade, we can actually think about which areas are likely to be heavily infected with HIV. And we can go and we can try to have pre-emptive preventive measures there. Likewise, as we're developing policies to try to encourage exports, if we know there's this externality β this extra thing that's going to happen as we increase exports β we can think about what the right kinds of policies are. But it also tells us something about one of these things that we think that we know. Even though it is the case that poverty is linked to AIDS, in the sense that Africa is poor and they have a lot of AIDS, it's not necessarily the case that improving poverty β at least in the short run, that improving exports and improving development β it's not necessarily the case that that's going to lead to a decline in HIV prevalence. So throughout this talk I've mentioned a few times the special case of Uganda, and the fact that it's the only country in sub-Saharan Africa with successful prevention. It's been widely heralded. It's been replicated in Kenya, and Tanzania, and South Africa and many other places. But now I want to actually also question that. Because it is true that there was a decline in prevalence in Uganda in the 1990s. It's true that they had an education campaign. But there was actually something else that happened in Uganda in this period. There was a big decline in coffee prices. Coffee is Uganda's major export. Their exports went down a lot in the early 1990s β and actually that decline lines up really, really closely with this decline in new HIV infections. So you can see that both of these series β the black line is export value, the red line is new HIV infections β you can see they're both increasing. Starting about 1987 they're both going down a lot. And then actually they track each other a little bit on the increase later in the decade. So if you combine the intuition in this figure with some of the data that I talked about before, it suggests that somewhere between 25 percent and 50 percent of the decline in prevalence in Uganda actually would have happened even without any education campaign. But that's enormously important for policy. We're spending so much money to try to replicate this campaign. And if it was only 50 percent as effective as we think that it was, then there are all sorts of other things maybe we should be spending our money on instead. Trying to change transmission rates by treating other sexually transmitted diseases. Trying to change them by engaging in male circumcision. There are tons of other things that we should think about doing. And maybe this tells us that we should be thinking more about those things. I hope that in the last 16 minutes I've told you something that you didn't know about AIDS, and I hope that I've gotten you questioning a little bit some of the things that you did know. And I hope that I've convinced you maybe that it's important to understand things about the epidemic in order to think about policy. But more than anything, you know, I'm an academic. And when I leave here, I'm going to go back and sit in my tiny office, and my computer, and my data. And the thing that's most exciting about that is every time I think about research, there are more questions. There are more things that I think that I want to do. And what's really, really great about being here is I'm sure that the questions that you guys have are very, very different than the questions that I think up myself. And I can't wait to hear about what they are. So thank you very much. |
The 4 a.m. mystery | {0: 'Performance artist and storyteller Rives has been called "the first 2.0 poet," using images, video and technology to bring his words to life. '} | TED2007 | This is a recent comic strip from the Los Angeles Times. The punch line? "On the other hand, I don't have to get up at four every single morning to milk my Labrador." This is a recent cover of New York Magazine. Best hospitals where doctors say they would go for cancer treatment, births, strokes, heart disease, hip replacements, 4 a.m. emergencies. And this is a song medley I put together β (Music) Did you ever notice that four in the morning has become some sort of meme or shorthand? It means something like you are awake at the worst possible hour. (Laughter) A time for inconveniences, mishaps, yearnings. A time for plotting to whack the chief of police, like in this classic scene from "The Godfather." Coppola's script describes these guys as, "exhausted in shirt sleeves. It is four in the morning." (Laughter) A time for even grimmer stuff than that, like autopsies and embalmings in Isabel Allende's "The House of the Spirits." After the breathtaking green-haired Rosa is murdered, the doctors preserve her with unguents and morticians' paste. They worked until four o'clock in the morning. A time for even grimmer stuff than that, like in last April's New Yorker magazine. This short fiction piece by Martin Amis starts out, "On September 11, 2001, he opened his eyes at 4 a.m. in Portland, Maine, and Mohamed Atta's last day began." For a time that I find to be the most placid and uneventful hour of the day, four in the morning sure gets an awful lot of bad press β (Laughter) across a lot of different media from a lot of big names. And it made me suspicious. I figured, surely some of the most creative artistic minds in the world, really, aren't all defaulting back to this one easy trope like they invented it, right? Could it be there is something more going on here? Something deliberate, something secret, and who got the four in the morning bad rap ball rolling anyway? I say this guy β Alberto Giacometti, shown here with some of his sculptures on the Swiss 100 franc note. He did it with this famous piece from the New York Museum of Modern Art. Its title β "The Palace at Four in the Morning β (Laughter) 1932. Not just the earliest cryptic reference to four in the morning I can find. I believe that this so-called first surrealist sculpture may provide an incredible key to virtually every artistic depiction of four in the morning to follow it. I call this The Giacometti Code, a TED exclusive. No, feel free to follow along on your Blackberries or your iPhones if you've got them. It works a little something like β this is a recent Google search for four in the morning. Results vary, of course. This is pretty typical. The top 10 results yield you four hits for Faron Young's song, "It's Four in the Morning," three hits for Judi Dench's film, "Four in the Morning," one hit for Wislawa Szymborska's poem, "Four in the Morning." But what, you may ask, do a Polish poet, a British Dame, a country music hall of famer all have in common besides this totally excellent Google ranking? Well, let's start with Faron Young β who was born incidentally in 1932. (Laughter) In 1996, he shot himself in the head on December ninth β which incidentally is Judi Dench's birthday. (Laughter) But he didn't die on Dench's birthday. He languished until the following afternoon when he finally succumbed to a supposedly self-inflicted gunshot wound at the age of 64 β which incidentally is how old Alberto Giacometti was when he died. Where was Wislawa Szymborska during all this? She has the world's most absolutely watertight alibi. On that very day, December 10, 1996 while Mr. Four in the Morning, Faron Young, was giving up the ghost in Nashville, Tennessee, Ms. Four in the Morning β or one of them anyway β Wislawa Szymborska was in Stockholm, Sweden, accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature. 100 years to the day after the death of Alfred Nobel himself. Coincidence? No, it's creepy. (Laughter) Coincidence to me has a much simpler metric. That's like me telling you, "Hey, you know the Nobel Prize was established in 1901, which coincidentally is the same year Alberto Giacometti was born?" No, not everything fits so tidily into the paradigm, but that does not mean there's not something going on at the highest possible levels. In fact there are people in this room who may not want me to show you this clip we're about to see. (Laughter) Video: Homer Simpson: We have a tennis court, a swimming pool, a screening room β You mean if I want pork chops, even in the middle of the night, your guy will fry them up? Herbert Powell: Sure, that's what he's paid for. Now do you need towels, laundry, maids? HS: Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait β let me see if I got this straight. It is Christmas Day, 4 a.m. There's a rumble in my stomach. Marge Simpson: Homer, please. Rives: Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Let me see if I got this straight, Matt. (Laughter) When Homer Simpson needs to imagine the most remote possible moment of not just the clock, but the whole freaking calendar, he comes up with 0400 on the birthday of the Baby Jesus. And no, I don't know how it works into the whole puzzling scheme of things, but obviously I know a coded message when I see one. (Laughter) I said, I know a coded message when I see one. And folks, you can buy a copy of Bill Clinton's "My Life" from the bookstore here at TED. Parse it cover to cover for whatever hidden references you want. Or you can go to the Random House website where there is this excerpt. And how far down into it you figure we'll have to scroll to get to the golden ticket? Would you believe about a dozen paragraphs? This is page 474 on your paperbacks if you're following along: "Though it was getting better, I still wasn't satisfied with the inaugural address. My speechwriters must have been tearing their hair out because as we worked between one and four in the morning on Inauguration Day, I was still changing it." Sure you were, because you've prepared your entire life for this historic quadrennial event that just sort of sneaks up on you. And then β (Laughter) three paragraphs later we get this little beauty: "We went back to Blair House to look at the speech for the last time. It had gotten a lot better since 4 a.m." Well, how could it have? By his own writing, this man was either asleep, at a prayer meeting with Al and Tipper or learning how to launch a nuclear missile out of a suitcase. What happens to American presidents at 0400 on inauguration day? What happened to William Jefferson Clinton? We might not ever know. And I noticed, he's not exactly around here today to face any tough questions. (Laughter) It could get awkward, right? I mean after all, this whole business happened on his watch. But if he were here β (Laughter) he might remind us, as he does in the wrap-up to his fine autobiography, that on this day Bill Clinton began a journey β a journey that saw him go on to become the first Democrat president elected to two consecutive terms in decades. In generations. The first since this man, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who began his own unprecedented journey way back at his own first election, way back in a simpler time, way back in 1932 β (Laughter) the year Alberto Giacometti (Laughter) made "The Palace at Four in the Morning." The year, let's remember, that this voice, now departed, first came a-cryin' into this big old crazy world of ours. (Music) (Applause) |
Spore, birth of a game | {0: 'Will Wright invented a genre of computer game that involves neither winning nor shooting, yet has generated colossal hits. Among them: SimCity (which earned its publisher $230 million), The Sims, and Spore.'} | TED2007 | I've always wanted to be a cyborg. One of my favorite shows as a kid was "The Six Million Dollar Man," and this is a little bit closer to the 240-dollar man or so, but β (Laughter) At any rate, I would normally feel very self-conscious and geeky wearing this around, but a few days ago I saw one world-renowned statistician swallowing swords on stage here, so I figure it's OK amongst this group. But that's not what I want to talk about today. I want to talk about toys, and the power that I see inherent in them. When I was a kid, I attended Montessori school up to sixth grade in Atlanta, Georgia. And at the time I didn't think much about it, but then later, I realized that that was the high point of my education. From that point on, everything else was pretty much downhill. And it wasn't until later, as I started making games, that β I really actually think of them more as toys. People call me a game designer, but I really think of these things more as toys. I started getting very interested in Maria Montessori and her methods, and the way she went about things, and the way she thought it very valuable for kids to discover things on their own rather than being taught these things overtly. And she would design these toys, where kids in playing with the toys would come to understand these deep principles of life and nature through play. And since they discovered this, it stuck with them so much more, and also they would experience their own failures. There was a failure-based aspect to learning there. It was very important. And so, the games that I do, I think of really more as modern Montessori toys. And I really kind of want them to be presented in a way to where kids can kind of explore and discover their own principles. So a few years ago, I started getting very interested in the SETI program. And that's the way I work. I get interested in different subjects, I dive in, research them, and then try to figure out how to craft a toy around that, so that other people can experience the same sense of discovery that I did as I was learning that subject. And it led me to astrobiology, the study of possible life in the universe. And then Drake's equation, looking at the probability of life arising on planets, how long it might last, how many planets are out there. And I started looking at how interesting Drake's equation was, because it spanned all these different subjects β physics, chemistry, sociology, economics, astronomy. And another thing that really impressed me a long time ago was "Powers of Ten," Charles and Ray Eames' film. And I started putting those two together and wondering, could I build a toy where kids would trip across all these interesting principles of life, as it exists and as it might go in the future. Things where you might trip across things like the Copernican principle, the Fermi paradox, the anthropic principle, the origin of life. And so I'm going to show you a toy today that I've been working on, that I think of more as kind of a philosophy toy. Playing this toy will bring up philosophical questions in you. The game is "Spore." I've been working on it for several years. It's getting pretty close to finished now. It occurs at all these different scales, from very small to very large. I'm going to pop in at the start of the game. And you actually start this game in a drop of water, as a very, very small single-cell creature, and right off the bat you basically just have to live, survive, reproduce. So here we are, at a very microscopic scale, swimming around. And I actually realize that cells don't have eyes, but it helps to make it cute. The players are going to play through every generation of this species, and as you play the game, the creature is actually growing bit by bit. And as we start growing, the camera will actually start zooming out, and things that you see in the background there will start slowly pulling into the foreground, showing you a little bit of what you'll be interacting with as you grow. So as we eat, the camera starts pulling out, and then we start interacting with larger and larger organisms. We actually play through many generations here, at the cellular scale. I'm going to skip ahead here. At some point we get larger, and we actually get to a macroevolution scale. Now, at this point we're leaving the water, and one thing that's kind of important about this game is that, at every level, the player is designing their creature, and that's a fundamental aspect of this. Now, in the evolution game here, the creature scale, basically you have to eat, survive, and then reproduce. You know, very Darwinian. One thing we noticed with "The Sims," a game I did earlier, is that players love making stuff. When they were able to make stuff in the game, they had a lot of empathy in connection to it. Even if it wasn't as pretty as a professional artist would make for games, it really stuck with them and they really cared about what would happen to it. At this point, we've left the water, and now with this little creature β we could bring up the volume a little bit β and now we might try to eat. We might sneak up on this little guy over here maybe, and try and eat him. OK, well, we fight. (Creatures grunting) OK, we got him. Now we get a meal. So really, at this part of the game, what we're doing is we're running around and surviving, and also getting to the next generation, because we're going to play through every generation of this creature. We can mate, so I'm going to see if one of these creatures wants to mate with me. Yeah. (Creatures grunting) We didn't want to replay actual evolution with humans and all that, because it's almost more interesting to look at alternate possibilities in evolution. Evolution is usually presented as this one path that we took through, but really it represents this huge set of possibilities. Now, once we mate, we click on the egg. And this is where the game starts getting interesting, because one of the things we really focused on here was giving the players very high-leverage tools, so that for very little effort, the player can make something very cool. And it involves a lot of intelligence on the tool side. But basically, this is the editor where we're going to design the next generation. So it has a little spine. I can move around, I can extend. I can also inflate or deflate it with the mouse wheel, so you sculpt it like clay. We have parts here that I can put on or pull off. The idea is that the player can basically design anything they can think of in this editor, and we'll basically bring it to life. So I might put some limbs on the character here. I'll inflate them kind of large. And in this case I might decide I'm going to put β I'll put mouths on the limbs. So pretty much players are encouraged to be very creative in the game. Here, I'll give it one eye in the middle, maybe scale it up a bit. Point it down. And I'll also give it a few legs. So in some sense we want this to feel like an amplifier for the player's imagination, so that with a very small number of clicks a player can create something that they didn't really think was possible before. This is almost like designing something like Maya β that an eight-year-old can use. But really the goal here was, within about a minute, I wanted somebody to replicate what typically takes a pictorial artist several weeks to create. OK, now I'll put some hands on it. OK, so here I've basically thrown together a little creature. Let me give it a little weapon on the tail here, so it can fight. OK, so that's the complete model. Now we can actually go to the painting phase. At this phase, the program has some understanding of the topology of this creature. It knows where the backbone is, where the spine, the limbs are, how stripes should run, how it should be shaded. And so we're procedurally generating the texture map, something a texture artist would take many days to work on. And then we can test it out, and see how it would move around. And so at this point the computer is procedurally animating this creature. It's looking at whatever I've designed. It will actually bring it to life. And I can see how it might dance. (Laughter) How it might show emotions, how it might fight. So it's acting with its two mouths there. I can even have it pose for a photo. Snap a little photo of it. (Laughter) So then I bring this back into the game. It's born, and I play the next generation of my creature through evolution. Now again, the empathy that the players have when they create the content is tremendous. When players create content in this game, it's automatically sent up to a server and then redistributed to all the other players transparently. So in fact, as I'm interacting in this world with other creatures, these creatures are transparently coming from other players as they play. So the process of playing the game is a process of building up this huge database of content. And pretty much everything you're going to see in this game, there's an editor for that the player can create, up through civilization. This is my baby. When I eat, I'll actually start growing. This is the next generation. But I'm going to skip ahead here. Normally what would happen is these creatures would work their way up, eventually become intelligent. I'd start dealing with tribes, cities and civilizations of them over time. I'm going to skip way ahead to the space phase. Eventually they would go out into space, and start colonizing and exploring the universe. Now, really, in some sense, I want the players to be building this world in their imagination, and then extracting it from them with the least amount of pain. So that's kind of what these tools are about. How do we make the gameplay, you know, basically the player's imagination amplifier? And how do we make these tools, these editors, something that are just as fun as the game itself? So this is the planet that we've been playing on up to this point in the game. So far the entire game has been played on the surface of this little world here. At this point we're actually dealing with a very little toy planet. Almost, again, like the Montessori toy idea. What happens if you give somebody a toy planet, and let them play with a lot of dynamics on it? What could they discover? What might they learn on this? This world was actually extracted from the player's imagination. So, this is the planet that the player evolved on. Things like the buildings, the vehicles, the architecture, civilizations were all designed by the player up to this point. So here's a little city with some of our guys walking around in it. And most games put the player in the role of Luke Skywalker, this protagonist playing through this story. This is more about putting the player in the role of George Lucas. I want them, after they've played this game, to have extracted an entire world that they're now interacting with. As we pull down here, we still have a whole set of creatures living on the surface of the planet. All these different dynamics going on here. I can look over here, and this is a little simplified food web that's going on with the creatures. I can open this up and then scan what exists on the surface. You get some sense of the diversity of creatures that were brought in. Some of these were created by the player, others by other players, automatically sent over here. But there's a very simple calculation of what's required, how many plants are required for the herbivores to live, how many herbivores for the carnivores to eat, etc., that you have to balance actively. Also with this phase, we're getting more and more God-like powers for the player, and you can experiment with this planet as a toy. So I can come in and I can do things, and just treat this planet as a lump of clay. We have very simple weather systems, simple geology. For instance, I could open one of my tools here and then carve out rivers. So this whole thing is kind of like a big lump of clay, a sculpture. I can also play with the dynamics in this world over time. So one of the things I can do is start pumping more CO2 gases into the atmosphere, and so that's what I'm doing here. There's actually a little readout down there of our planetary atmosphere, pressure and temperature. So as I start pumping in more atmosphere, we're going to start pushing up the greenhouse gases here and if you'll start noticing, we start seeing the ocean levels rise over time. And our cities are going to be at risk too, because a lot of these are coastal cities. You can see the ocean levels are rising now and as they encroach upon the cities, I'll start losing cities here. So basically, I want the players to be able to experiment and explore a huge amount of failure space. So there goes one city. Now, over time, this is going to heat up the planet. So at first what we're going to see is a global ocean rise here on this little toy planet, but then over time β I can speed it up β we'll see the heat impact of that as well. Not only will it get hotter, but at some point it's going to get so hot the oceans will evaporate. They'll go up, and then they'll evaporate, and that'll be my planet. So basically, what we're getting here is the sequel to "An Inconvenient Truth," in about two minutes, and that actually brings up an interesting point about games. Now here, our entire oceans are evaporating off the surface, and as it keeps getting hotter, at some point the entire planet is going to melt down. Here it goes. So we're not only simulating biological dynamics β food webs and all that β but also geologic, you know, on a very simple core scale. And what's interesting to me about games is that I think we can take a lot of long-term dynamics and compress them into very short-term experiences. Because it's so hard for people to think 50 or 100 years out, but when you can give them a toy, and they can experience these long-term dynamics in just a few minutes, I think it's an entirely different point of view, where we're actually using the game to remap our intuition. It's almost in the same way that a telescope or microscope recalibrates your eyesight; I think computer simulations can recalibrate your instinct across vast scales of both space and time. So here's our little solar system, as we pull away from our melted planet here. We actually have a couple of other planets in this solar system. Let's fly to another one. We're going to have this unlimited number of worlds you can explore here. As we move into the future, and we start going out into space and doing stuff, we're drawing a lot from things like science fiction. And all my favorite science fiction movies I want to play out here as different dynamics. This planet actually has some life on it. Here it is, some indigenous life down here. One of the tools I can eventually earn for my UFO is a monolith that I can drop down. (Laughter) Now, as you can see, these guys are actually starting to go up and bow to it, and over time, once they touch it, they will become intelligent. So I can actually pick a species on a planet and then make them sentient. Now they've actually gone to tribal dynamics. And now, because I'm actually the one here, I can get out of the UFO and walk up, and they should be worshipping me at this point as a god. At first they're a little freaked out. OK, well maybe they're not worshipping me. (Laughter) I think I'll leave before they get hostile. But we basically want a diversity of activities the players can play through this. I want to be able to play "The Day the Earth Stood Still," "2001: A Space Odyssey," "Star Trek," "War Of the Worlds." Now, as we pull away from this world β we're going to keep pulling away from the star now. One of the things that always frustrated me about astronomy when I was a kid is how it was always presented so two-dimensionally and so static. As we pull away from the star here, we're actually going now out into interstellar space, and we're getting a sense of the space around our home star. What I really wanted to do is to present this, basically, as wonderfully 3D as it is actually is. And also show the dynamics, and a lot of the interesting objects that you might find, like, in the Hubble, at pretty much realistic frequencies and scales. So most people have no idea of the difference between an emission nebula and a planetary nebula. But these are the things that we can put in this little galaxy here. So we're flying over here to what looks like a black hole. I want to basically have the entire zoo of Hubble objects that people can interact with and play with, again, as toys. So here's a little black hole that we probably don't want to get too close to. But we also have stars and things as well. If we pull all the way back, we start seeing the entire galaxy here, kind of slowly in motion. Typically, when people present galaxies, it's always beautiful photos, but they're always static. And when you bring it forward in time and start animating it, it's amazing what a galaxy would look like fast forwarded. This would be about a million years a second, because you have about one supernova every century. And so you'd have this wonderful sparkling thing, with the disk slowly rotating, and this is roughly what it would look like. Part of this is about bringing the beauty of the natural world to somebody in a very imaginative way, so that they can start calibrating their instinct across these vast scales of space and time. Chris was wondering what kind of gods the players would become. Because if you think about it, you're going to have 15-year-olds, 20-year-olds flying around this universe. They might be a nurturing god. They might be bootstrapping life on planets, trying to terraform and spread civilization. You might be a vengeful god, conquesting, because you actually can do that, you can attack other intelligent races. You might be a networking god, building alliances, or just curious, going around and wanting to explore as much as you possibly can. But basically, the reason why I make toys like this is because I think if there's one difference I could possibly make in the world, that I would choose to make, it's that I would like to somehow give people just a little bit better calibration on long-term thinking. Because I think most of the problems that our world is facing right now are the result of short-term thinking, and the fact that it is so hard for us to think 50, 100, or 1,000 years out. And I think by giving kids toys like this and letting them replay dynamics, very long-term dynamics over the short term, and getting some sense of what we're doing now, what it's going to be like in 100 years, I think probably is the most effective thing I can be doing to help the world. And so that's why I think that toys can change the world. Thank you. |
Visualizing the wonder of a living cell | {0: "David Bolinsky and his team illustrate scientific and medical concepts with high-drama animation. You've never seen the life of a cell quite like this."} | TED2007 | I'm a medical illustrator, and I come from a slightly different point of view. I've been watching, since I grew up, the expressions of truth and beauty in the arts and truth and beauty in the sciences. And while these are both wonderful things in their own right β they both have very wonderful things going for them β truth and beauty as ideals that can be looked at by the sciences and by math are almost like the ideal conjoined twins that a scientist would want to date. (Laughter) These are expressions of truth as awe-full things, by meaning they are things you can worship. They are ideals that are powerful. They are irreducible. They are unique. They are useful β sometimes, often a long time after the fact. And you can actually roll some of the pictures now, because I don't want to look at me on the screen. Truth and beauty are things that are often opaque to people who are not in the sciences. They are things that describe beauty in a way that is often only accessible if you understand the language and the syntax of the person who studies the subject in which truth and beauty is expressed. If you look at the math, E=mc squared, if you look at the cosmological constant, where there's an anthropic ideal, where you see that life had to evolve from the numbers that describe the universe β these are things that are really difficult to understand. And what I've tried to do since I had my training as a medical illustrator β since I was taught animation by my father, who was a sculptor and my visual mentor β I wanted to figure out a way to help people understand truth and beauty in the biological sciences by using animation, by using pictures, by telling stories so that the things that are not necessarily evident to people can be brought forth, and can be taught, and can be understood. Students today are often immersed in an environment where what they learn is subjects that have truth and beauty embedded in them, but the way they're taught is compartmentalized and it's drawn down to the point where the truth and beauty are not always evident. It's almost like that old recipe for chicken soup where you boil the chicken until the flavor is just gone. We don't want to do that to our students. So we have an opportunity to really open up education. And I had a telephone call from Robert Lue at Harvard, in the Molecular and Cellular Biology Department, a couple of years ago. He asked me if my team and I would be interested and willing to really change how medical and scientific education is done at Harvard. So we embarked on a project that would explore the cell β that would explore the truth and beauty inherent in molecular and cellular biology so that students could understand a larger picture that they could hang all of these facts on. They could have a mental image of the cell as a large, bustling, hugely complicated city that's occupied by micro-machines. And these micro-machines really are at the heart of life. These micro-machines, which are the envy of nanotechnologists the world over, are self-directed, powerful, precise, accurate devices that are made out of strings of amino acids. And these micro-machines power how a cell moves. They power how a cell replicates. They power our hearts. They power our minds. And so what we wanted to do was to figure out how we could make this story into an animation that would be the centerpiece of BioVisions at Harvard, which is a website that Harvard has for its molecular and cellular biology students that will β in addition to all the textual information, in addition to all the didactic stuff β put everything together visually, so that these students would have an internalized view of what a cell really is in all of its truth and beauty, and be able to study with this view in mind, so that their imaginations would be sparked, so that their passions would be sparked and so that they would be able to go on and use these visions in their head to make new discoveries and to be able to find out, really, how life works. So we set out by looking at how these molecules are put together. We worked with a theme, which is, you've got macrophages that are streaming down a capillary, and they're touching the surface of the capillary wall, and they're picking up information from cells that are on the capillary wall, and they are given this information that there's an inflammation somewhere outside, where they can't see and sense. But they get the information that causes them to stop, causes them to internalize that they need to make all of the various parts that will cause them to change their shape, and try to get out of this capillary and find out what's going on. So these molecular motors β we had to work with the Harvard scientists and databank models of the atomically accurate molecules and figure out how they moved, and figure out what they did. And figure out how to do this in a way that was truthful in that it imparted what was going on, but not so truthful that the compact crowding in a cell would prevent the vista from happening. And so what I'm going to show you is a three-minute Reader's Digest version of the first aspect of this film that we produced. It's an ongoing project that's going to go another four or five years. And I want you to look at this and see the paths that the cell manufactures β these little walking machines, they're called kinesins β that take these huge loads that would challenge an ant in relative size. Run the movie, please. But these machines that power the inside of the cells are really quite amazing, and they really are the basis of all life because all of these machines interact with each other. They pass information to each other. They cause different things to happen inside the cell. And the cell will actually manufacture the parts that it needs on the fly, from information that's brought from the nucleus by molecules that read the genes. No life, from the smallest life to everybody here, would be possible without these little micro-machines. In fact, it would really, in the absence of these machines, have made the attendance here, Chris, really quite sparse. (Laughter) (Music) This is the FedEx delivery guy of the cell. This little guy is called the kinesin, and he pulls a sack that's full of brand new manufactured proteins to wherever it's needed in the cell β whether it's to a membrane, whether it's to an organelle, whether it's to build something or repair something. And each of us has about 100,000 of these things running around, right now, inside each one of your 100 trillion cells. So no matter how lazy you feel, you're not really intrinsically doing nothing. (Laughter) So what I want you to do when you go home is think about this, and think about how powerful our cells are. And think about some of the things that we're learning about cellular mechanics. Once we figure out all that's going on β and believe me, we know almost a percent of what's going on β once we figure out what's going on, we're really going to be able to have a lot of control over what we do with our health, with what we do with future generations, and how long we're going to live. And hopefully we'll be able to use this to discover more truth, and more beauty. (Music) But it's really quite amazing that these cells, these micro-machines, are aware enough of what the cell needs that they do their bidding. They work together. They make the cell do what it needs to do. And their working together helps our bodies β huge entities that they will never see β function properly. Enjoy the rest of the show. Thank you. (Applause) |
How to get (a new) hip | {0: 'Allison Hunt has worked in advertising and marketing for 20 years, developing human insight and persuasion into an art for her clients. Six years after getting an artificial hip, she decided to try something new.'} | TED2007 | Allison Hunt: My three minutes hasn't started yet, has it? Chris Anderson: No, you can't start the three minutes. Reset the three minutes, that's just not fair. AH: Oh my God, it's harsh up here. I mean I'm nervous enough as it is. But I am not as nervous as I was five weeks ago. Five weeks ago I had total hip replacement surgery. Do you know that surgery? Electric saw, power drill, totally disgusting unless you're David Bolinsky, in which case it's all truth and beauty. Sure David, if it's not your hip, it's truth and beauty. Anyway, I did have a really big epiphany around the situation, so Chris invited me to tell you about it. But first you need to know two things about me. Just two things. I'm Canadian, and I'm the youngest of seven kids. Now, in Canada, we have that great healthcare system. That means we get our new hips for free. And being the youngest of seven, I have never been at the front of the line for anything. OK? So my hip had been hurting me for years. I finally went to the doctor, which was free. And she referred me to an orthopedic surgeon, also free. Finally got to see him after 10 months of waiting β almost a year. That is what free gets you. I met the surgeon, and he took some free X-rays, and I got a good look at them. And you know, even I could tell my hip was bad, and I actually work in marketing. So he said, "Allison, we've got to get you on the table. I'm going to replace your hip β it's about an 18-month wait." 18 more months. I'd already waited 10 months, and I had to wait 18 more months. You know, it's such a long wait that I actually started to even think about it in terms of TEDs. I wouldn't have my new hip for this TED. I wouldn't have my new hip for TEDGlobal in Africa. I would not have my new hip for TED2008. I would still be on my bad hip. That was so disappointing. So, I left his office and I was walking through the hospital, and that's when I had my epiphany. This youngest of seven had to get herself to the front of the line. Oh yeah. Can I tell you how un-Canadian that is? We do not think that way. We don't talk about it. It's not even a consideration. In fact, when we're traveling abroad, it's how we identify fellow Canadians. "After you." "Oh, no, no. After you." Hey, are you from Canada? "Oh, me too! Hi!" "Great! Excellent!" So no, suddenly I wasn't averse to butting any geezer off the list. Some 70-year-old who wanted his new hip so he could be back golfing, or gardening. No, no. Front of the line. So by now I was walking the lobby, and of course, that hurt, because of my hip, and I kind of needed a sign. And I saw a sign. In the window of the hospital's tiny gift shop there was a sign that said, "Volunteers Needed." Hmm. Well, they signed me up immediately. No reference checks. None of the usual background stuff, no. They were desperate for volunteers because the average age of the volunteer at the hospital gift shop was 75. Yeah. They needed some young blood. So, next thing you know, I had my bright blue volunteer vest, I had my photo ID, and I was fully trained by my 89-year-old boss. I worked alone. Every Friday morning I was at the gift shop. While ringing in hospital staff's Tic Tacs, I'd casually ask, "What do you do?" Then I'd tell them, "Well, I'm getting my hip replaced β in 18 months. It's gonna be so great when the pain stops. Ow!" All the staff got to know the plucky, young volunteer. My next surgeon's appointment was, coincidentally, right after a shift at the gift shop. So, naturally, I had my vest and my identification. I draped them casually over the chair in the doctor's office. And you know, when he walked in, I could just tell that he saw them. Moments later, I had a surgery date just weeks away, and a big fat prescription for Percocet. Now, word on the street was that it was actually my volunteering that got me to the front of the line. And, you know, I'm not even ashamed of that. Two reasons. First of all, I am going to take such good care of this new hip. But also I intend to stick with the volunteering, which actually leads me to the biggest epiphany of them all. Even when a Canadian cheats the system, they do it in a way that benefits society. |
Africa's cheetahs versus hippos | {0: "Economist George Ayittey sees Africa's future as a fight between Hippos -- complacent, greedy bureaucrats wallowing in the muck -- and Cheetahs, the fast-moving, entrepreneurial leaders and citizens who will rebuild Africa."} | TEDGlobal 2007 | Well, first of all, let me thank Emeka β as a matter of fact, TED Global β for putting this conference together. This conference is going to rank as the most important in the beginning of the 21st century. Think African governments will put together a conference like this? You think the A.U. will put together a conference like this? Even before they do that they will ask for foreign aid. I would also like to pay homage and honor to the TED Fellows June Arunga, James Shikwati, Andrew, and the other TED Fellows. I call them the Cheetah Generation. The Cheetah Generation is a new breed of Africans who brook no nonsense about corruption. They understand what accountability and democracy is. They're not going to wait for government to do things for them. That's the Cheetah Generation, and Africa's salvation rests on the backs of these Cheetahs. In contrast, of course, we have the Hippo Generation. (Laughter) The Hippo Generation are the ruling elites. They are stuck in their intellectual patch. Complaining about colonialism and imperialism, they wouldn't move one foot. If you ask them to reform the economies, they're not going to reform it because they benefit from the rotten status quo. Now, there are a lot of Africans who are very angry, angry at the condition of Africa. Now, we're talking about a continent that is not poor. It is rich in mineral resources, natural mineral resources. But the mineral wealth of Africa is not being utilized to lift its people out of poverty. That's what makes a lot of Africans very angry. And in a way, Africa is more than a tragedy, in more ways than one. There's another enduring tragedy, and that tragedy is that there are so many people, so many governments, so many organizations who want to help the people in Africa. They don't understand. Now, we're not saying don't help Africa. Helping Africa is noble. But helping Africa has been turned into a theater of the absurd. It's like the blind leading the clueless. (Laughter) There are certain things that we need to recognize. Africa's begging-bowl leaks. Did you know that 40 percent of the wealth created in Africa is not invested here in Africa? It's taken out of Africa. That's what the World Bank says. Look at Africa's begging-bowl. It leaks horribly. There are people who think that we should pour more money, more aid into this bowl which leaks. What are the leakages? Corruption alone costs Africa 148 billion dollars a year. Yes, put that aside. Capital flight out of Africa, 80 billion a year. Put that aside. Let's take food imports. Every year Africa spends 20 billion dollars to import food. Just add that up, all these leakages. That's far more than the 50 billion Tony Blair wants to raise for Africa. Now, back in the 1960s Africa not only fed itself, it also exported food. Not anymore. We know that something has gone fundamentally wrong. You know it, I know it, but let's not waste our time talking about these mistakes because we'll spend all day here. Let's move on, and flip over to the next chapter, and that's what this conference is all about β the next chapter. The next chapter begins with first of all, asking ourselves this fundamental question, "Whom do we want to help in Africa?" There is the people, and then there is the government or leaders. Now, the previous speaker before me, Idris Mohammed, indicated that we've had abysmal leadership in Africa. That characterization, in my view, is even more charitable. (Laughter) I belong to an Internet discussion forum, an African Internet discussion forum, and I asked them, I said, "Since 1960, we've had exactly 204 African heads of state, since 1960." And I asked them to name me just 20 good leaders, just 20 good leaders β you may want to take this leadership challenge yourself. I asked them to name me just 20. Everybody mentioned Nelson Mandela, of course. Kwame Nkrumah, Nyerere, Kenyatta β somebody mentioned Idi Amin. (Laughter) I let that pass. (Laughter) My point is, they couldn't go beyond 15. Even if they had been able to name me 20, what does that tell you? 20 out of 204 means that the vast majority of the African leaders failed their people. And if you look at them, the slate of the post-colonial leaders β an assortment of military fufu heads, Swiss-bank socialists, crocodile liberators, vampire elites, quack revolutionaries. (Applause) Now, this leadership is a far cry from the traditional leaders that Africans have known for centuries. The second false premise that we make when we're trying to help Africa is that sometimes we think that there is something called a government in Africa that cares about its people, serves the interests of the people, and represents the people. There is one particular quote β a Lesotho chief once said that "Here in Lesotho, we've got two problems: rats and the government." (Laughter) What you and I understand as a government doesn't exist in many African countries. In fact, what we call our governments are vampire states. Vampires because they suck the economic vitality out of their people. Government is the problem in Africa. A vampire state is the government β (Applause) β which has been hijacked by a phalanx of bandits and crooks who use the instruments of state power to enrich themselves, their cronies, and tribesmen and exclude everybody else. The richest people in Africa are heads-of-state and ministers, and quite often the chief bandit is the head-of-state himself. Where do they get their money? By creating wealth? No. By raking it off the backs of their suffering people. That's not wealth creation. It's wealth redistribution. The third fundamental issue that we have to recognize is that if we want to help the African people, we must know where the African people are. Take any African economy. An African economy can be broken up into three sectors. There is the modern sector, there is the informal sector and the traditional sector. The modern sector is the abode of the elites. It's the seat of government. In many African countries the modern sector is lost. It's dysfunctional. It is a meretricious fandango of imported systems, which the elites themselves don't understand. That is the source of many of Africa's problems where the struggles for political power emanate and then spill over onto the informal and the traditional sector, claiming innocent lives. Now the modern sector, of course, is where a lot of the development aid and resources went into. More than 80 percent of Ivory Coast's development went into the modern sector. The other sectors, the informal and the traditional sectors, are where you find the majority of the African people, the real people in Africa. That's where you find them. Now, obviously it makes common sense that if you want to help the people, you go where the people are. But that's not what we did. As a matter of fact, we neglected the informal and the traditional sectors. Now, traditional sector is where Africa produces its agriculture, which is one of the reasons why Africa can't feed itself, and that's why it must import food. All right, you cannot develop Africa by ignoring the informal and the traditional sectors. And you can't develop the informal and the traditional sectors without an operational understanding of how these two sectors work. These two sectors, let me describe to you, have their own indigenous institutions. First one is the political system. Traditionally, Africans hate governments. They hate tyranny. If you look into their traditional systems, Africans organize their states in two types. The first one belongs to those ethnic societies who believe that the state was necessarily tyrannous, so they didn't want to have anything to do with any centralized authority. These societies are the Ibo, the Somali, the Kikuyus, for example. They have no chiefs. The other ethnic groups, which did have chiefs, made sure that they surrounded the chiefs with councils upon councils upon councils to prevent them from abusing their power. In Ashanti tradition, for example, the chief cannot make any decision without the concurrence of the council of elders. Without the council the chief can't pass any law, and if the chief doesn't govern according to the will of the people he will be removed. If not, the people will abandon the chief, go somewhere else and set up a new settlement. And even if you look in ancient African empires, they were all organized around one particular principle β the confederacy principle, which is characterized by a great deal of devolution of authority, decentralization of power. Now, this is what I have described to you. This is part of Africa's indigenous political heritage. Now, compare that to the modern systems the ruling elites established on Africa. It is a total far cry. In the economic system in traditional Africa, the means of production is privately owned. It's owned by extended families. You see, in the West, the basic economic and social unit is the individual. The American will say, "I am because I am, and I can damn well do anything I want, anytime." The accent is on the "I." In Africa, the Africans say, "I am, because we are." The "we" connotes community β the extended family system. The extended family system pools its resources together. They own farms. They decide what to do, what to produce. They don't take any orders from their chiefs. They decide what to do. And when they produce their crops, they sell the surplus on marketplaces. When they make a profit it is theirs to keep, not for the chief to sequester it from them. So, in a nutshell, what we had in traditional Africa was a free-market system. There were markets in Africa before the colonialists stepped foot on the continent. Timbuktu was one great big market town. Kano, Salaga β they were all there. Even if you go to West Africa, you notice that market activity in West Africa has always been dominated by women. So, it's quite appropriate that this section is called a marketplace. The market is not alien to Africa. What Africans practiced was a different form of capitalism, but then after independence, all of a sudden, markets, capitalism became a western institution, and the leaders said Africans were ready for socialism. Nonsense. And even then, what kind of socialism did they practice? The socialism that they practiced was a peculiar form of Swiss-bank socialism, which allowed the heads of states and the ministers to rape and plunder Africa's treasuries for deposit in Switzerland. That is not the kind of system Africans had known for centuries. What do we do now? Go back to Africa's indigenous institutions, and this is where we charge the Cheetahs to go into the informal sectors, the traditional sectors. That's where you find the African people. And I'd like to show you a quick little video about the informal sector, about the boat-building that I, myself, tried to mobilize Africans in the Diaspora to invest in. Could you please show that? The men are going fishing in these small boats. Yes, it's an enterprise. This is by a local Ghanaian entrepreneur, using his own capital. He's getting no assistance from the government, and he's building a second, bigger boat. A bigger boat will mean more fish will be caught and landed. It means that he will be able to employ more Ghanaians. It also means that he will be able to generate wealth. And then it will have what economists call external effects on a local economy. All that you need to do, all that the elites need to do, is to move this operation into something that is enclosed so that the operation can be made more efficient. Now, it is not just this informal sector. There is also traditional medicine. 80 percent of Africans still rely on traditional medicine. The modern healthcare sector has totally collapsed. Now, this is an area β I mean, there is a treasure trove of wealth in the traditional medicine area. This is where we need to mobilize Africans, in the Diaspora especially, to invest in this. We also need to mobilize Africans in the Diaspora, not only to go into the traditional sectors, but to go into agriculture and also to instigate change from within. We were able to mobilize Ghanaians in the Diaspora to instigate change in Ghana and bring about democracy in Ghana. And I know that with the Cheetahs, we can take Africa back one village at a time. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
How I built a windmill | {0: 'To power his family\'s home, young William Kamkwamba built an electricity-producing windmill from spare parts and scrap -- starting him on a journey detailed in the book and film "The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind."'} | TEDGlobal 2007 | Chris Anderson: William, hi. Good to see you. William Kamkwamba: Thanks. CA: So, we've got a picture, I think? Where is this? WK: This is my home. This is where I live. CA: Where? What country? WK: In Malawi, Kasungu. In Kasungu. Yeah, Mala. CA: OK. Now, you're 19 now? WK: Yeah. I'm 19 years now. CA: Five years ago you had an idea. What was that? WK: I wanted to make a windmill. CA: A windmill? WK: Yeah. CA: What, to power β for lighting and stuff? WK: Yeah. CA: So what did you do? How did you realize that? WK: After I dropped out of school, I went to library, and I read a book that would β "Using Energy," and I get information about doing the mill. And I tried, and I made it. (Applause) CA: So you copied β you exactly copied the design in the book. WK: Ah, no. I just β CA: What happened? WK: In fact, a design of the windmill that was in the book, it has got four β ah β three blades, and mine has got four blades. CA: The book had three, yours had four. WK: Yeah. CA: And you made it out of what? WK: I made four blades, just because I want to increase power. CA: OK. WK: Yeah. CA: You tested three, and found that four worked better? WK: Yeah. I test. CA: And what did you make the windmill out of? What materials did you use? WK: I use a bicycle frame, and a pulley, and plastic pipe, what then pulls β CA: Do we have a picture of that? Can we have the next slide? WK: Yeah. The windmill. CA: And so, and that windmill, what β it worked? WK: When the wind blows, it rotates and generates. CA: How much electricity? WK: 12 watts. CA: And so, that lit a light for the house? How many lights? WK: Four bulbs and two radios. CA: Wow. WK: Yeah. (Applause) CA: Next slide β so who's that? WK: This is my parents, holding the radio. CA: So what did they make of β that you were 14, 15 at the time β what did they make of this? They were impressed? WK: Yeah. CA: And so what's your β what are you going to do with this? WK: Um β CA: What do you β I mean β do you want to build another one? WK: Yeah, I want to build another one β to pump water and irrigation for crops. CA: So this one would have to be bigger? WK: Yeah. CA: How big? WK: I think it will produce more than 20 the watts. CA: So that would produce irrigation for the entire village? WK: Yeah. CA: Wow. And so you're talking to people here at TED to get people who might be able to help in some way to realize this dream? WK: Yeah, if they can help me with materials, yeah. CA: And as you think of your life going forward, you're 19 now, do you picture continuing with this dream of working in energy? WK: Yeah. I'm still thinking to work on energy. CA: Wow. William, it's a real honor to have you at the TED conference. Thank you so much for coming. WK: Thank you. (Applause) |
Aid versus trade | {0: 'Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is a respected global economist.'} | TEDGlobal 2007 | It's very, very difficult to speak at the end of a conference like this, because everyone has spoken. Everything has been said. So I thought that what may be useful is to remind us of some of the things that have gone on here, and then maybe offer some ideas which we can take away, and take forward and work on. That's what I'd like to try and do. We came here saying we want to talk about "Africa: the Next Chapter." But we are talking about "Africa: the Next Chapter" because we are looking at the old and the present chapter β that we're looking at, and saying it's not such a good thing. The picture I showed you before, and this picture, of drought, death and disease is what we usually see. What we want to look at is "Africa: the Next Chapter," and that's this: a healthy, smiling, beautiful African. And I think it's worth remembering what we've heard through the conference right from the first day, where I heard that all the important statistics have been given β about where we are now, about how the continent is doing much better. And the importance of that is that we have a platform to build on. So I'm not going to spend too much time β just to show you, refresh your memories that we are here for "Africa: the Next Chapter" because for the first time there really is a platform to build on. We really do have it going right that the continent is growing at rates that people had thought would not happen. After decades of 2 percent, we are now at 5 percent, and it's going to β projected β 6 and 7 percent even. And inflation has come down. External debt β something that I can tell you a long story about because I personally worked on one of the biggest debts on the continent β has come down dramatically. You know, as you can see, from almost 50 billion down to about 12 or 13 billion. Now this is a huge achievement. You know, we've built up reserves. Why is that important? It's because it shows off our economies, shows off our currencies and gives a platform on which people can plan and build, including businesses. We've also seen some evidence that all this is making a difference because private investment flows have increased. I want to remind you again β I know you saw these statistics before β from almost 6 billion we are now at about 18 billion. In 2005, remittances β I just took one country, Nigeria skyrocketing β skyrocketing is too dramatic, but increasing dramatically. And in many other countries this is happening. Why is this important? Because it shows confidence. People are now confident to bring β if your people in the diaspora bring their money back, it shows other people that, look, there is emerging confidence in your country. And instead of an outflow, you are now getting a net inflow. Now, why is all this important, to have to go really fast? It's important that we build this platform, that we have the president, Kikwete, and others of our leaders who are saying, "Look, we must do something different." Because we are confronted with a challenge. 62 percent of our population is below the age of 24. What does this mean? This means that we have to focus on how our youth are going to be engaged in productive endeavor in their lives. You have to focus on how to create jobs, make sure they don't fall into disease, and that they get an education. But most of all that they are productively engaged in life, and that they are creating the kind of productive environment in our countries that will make things happen. And to support this, I just recently β one of the things I've done since leaving government is to start an opinion research organization in Nigeria. Most of our countries don't even have any opinion research. People don't have voice. There is no way you can know what people want. One of the things we asked them recently was what's their top issue. Like in every other country where this has been done, jobs is the top issue. I want to leave this up here and come back to it. But before I get to this slide, I just wanted to run you through this. And to say that for me, the next stage of building this platform that now enables us to move forward β and we mustn't make light of it. It was only 5, 6, 7 years ago we couldn't even talk about the next chapter, because we were in the old chapter. We were going nowhere. The economies were not growing. We were having negative per capita growth. The microeconomic framework and foundation for moving forward was not even there. So let's not forget that it's taken a lot to build this, including all those things that we tried to do in Nigeria that Dele referred to. Creating our own program to solve problems, like fighting corruption, building institutions, stabilizing the micro economy. So now we have this platform we can build on. And it brings us to the debate that has been going on here: aid versus private sector, aid versus trade, etc. And someone stood up to say that one of the frustrating things is that it's been a simplistic debate. And that's not what the debate should be about. That's engaging in the wrong debate. The issue here is how do we get a partnership that involves government donors, the private sector and ordinary African people taking charge of their own lives? How do we combine all this? To move our continent forward, to do the things that need doing that I talked about β getting young people employed. Getting the creative juices flowing on this continent, much of what you have seen here. So I'm afraid we've been engaging a little bit in the wrong debate. We need to bring it back to say, what is the combination of all these factors that is going to yield what we want? (Applause) And I want to tell you something. For me, the issue about aid β I don't think that Africans need to now go all the way over to the other side and feel bad about aid. Africa has been giving the other countries aid. Mo Ibrahim said at a debate we were at that he dreams one day when Africa will be giving aid. And I said, "Mo, you're right. We have β no, but we've already been doing it! The U.K. and the U.S. could not have been built today without Africa's aid." (Applause) It is all the resources that were taken from Africa, including human, that built these countries today! So when they try to give back, we shouldn't be on the defensive. The issue is not that. The issue is how are we using what has been given back. How are we using it? Is it being directed effectively? I want to tell you a little story. Why I don't mind if we get aid, but we use it well. From 1967 to '70, Nigeria fought a war β the Nigeria-Biafra war. And in the middle of that war, I was 14 years old. We spent much of our time with my mother cooking. For the army β my father joined the army as a brigadier β the Biafran army. We were on the Biafran side. And we were down to eating one meal a day, running from place to place, but wherever we could help we did. At a certain point in time, in 1969, things were really bad. We were down to almost nothing in terms of a meal a day. People, children were dying of kwashiorkor. I'm sure some of you who are not so young will remember those pictures. Well, I was in the middle of it. In the midst of all this, my mother fell ill with a stomach ailment for two or three days. We thought she was going to die. My father was not there. He was in the army. So I was the oldest person in the house. My sister fell very ill with malaria. She was three years old and I was 15. And she had such a high fever. We tried everything. It didn't look like it was going to work. Until we heard that 10 kilometers away there was a doctor, who was looking at people and giving them meds. Now I put my sister on my back β burning β and I walked 10 kilometers with her strapped on my back. It was really hot. I was very hungry. I was scared because I knew her life depended on my getting to this woman. We heard there was a woman doctor who was treating people. I walked 10 kilometers, putting one foot in front of the other. I got there and I saw huge crowds. Almost a thousand people were there, trying to break down the door. She was doing this in a church. How was I going to get in? I had to crawl in between the legs of these people with my sister strapped on my back, find a way to a window. And while they were trying to break down the door, I climbed in through the window, and jumped in. This woman told me it was in the nick of time. By the time we jumped into that hall, she was barely moving. She gave a shot of her chloroquine β what I learned was the chloroquine then β gave her some β it must have been a re-hydration β and some other therapies, and put us in a corner. In about two to three hours, she started to move. And then they toweled her down because she started sweating, which was a good sign. And then my sister woke up. And about five or six hours later, she said we could go home. I strapped her on my back. I walked the 10 kilometers back and it was the shortest walk I ever had. I was so happy β (Applause) β that my sister was alive! Today she's 41 years old, a mother of three, and she's a physician saving other lives. Why am I telling that? I'm telling you that because β when it is you or your person involved β you don't care where β whether it's aid. You don't care what it is! (Applause) You just want the person to be alive! And now let me become less sentimental, and say that saving lives β which some of the aid we get does on this continent β when you save the life of anyone, a farmer, a teacher, a mother, they are contributing productively into the economy. And as an economist, we can also look at that side of the story. These are people who are productive agents in the economy. So if we save people from HIV/AIDS, if we save them from malaria, it means they can form the base of production for our economy. And by the same token β as someone said yesterday β if we don't and they die, their children will become a burden on the economy. So even from an economic standpoint, if we leave the social and the humanitarian, we need to save lives now. So that's one of the reasons, from a personal experience, that I say let's channel these resources we get into something productive. However, I will also tell you that I'm one of those who doesn't believe that this is the sole answer. That's why I said the debate has to get more sophisticated. You know, we have to use it well. What has happened in Europe? Do you all know that Spain β part of the EU β got 10 billion dollars in aid from the rest of the EU? Resources that were transferred to them β and were the Spanish ashamed of this? No! The EU transferred 10 billion. Where did they use it? Have you been to southern Spain lately? There are roads everywhere. Infrastructure everywhere. It is on the back of this that the whole of southern Spain has developed into a services economy. Did you know that Ireland got 3 billion dollars in aid? Ireland is one of the fastest-growing economies in the European Union today. For which many people, even from other parts of the world, are going there to find jobs. What did they do with the 3 billion dollars in aid? They used it to build an information superhighway, gain infrastructure that enables them to participate in the information technology revolution, and to create jobs in their economy. They didn't say, "No, you know, we're not going to take this." Today, the European Union is busy transferring aid. My frustration is if they can build infrastructure in Spain β which is roads, highways, other things that they can build β I say then, why do they refuse to use the same aid to build the same infrastructure in our countries? (Applause) When we ask them and tell them what we need, one of my worries today is that we have many foundations now. Now we talk about the World Bank, IMF, and accountability, all that and the EU. We also have private citizens now who have a lot of money β some of them in this audience, with private foundations. And one day, these foundations have so much money, they will overtake the official aid that is being given. But I fear β and I'm very grateful to all of them for what they are trying to do on the continent β but I'm also worried. I wake up with a gnawing in my belly because I see a new set of aid entrepreneurs on the continent. And they're also going from country to country, and many times trying to find what to do. But I'm not really sure that their assistance is also being channeled in the right way. And many of them are not really familiar with the continent. They are just discovering. And many times I don't see Africans working with them. They are just going alone! (Applause) And many times I get the impression that they are not really even interested in hearing from Africans who might know. They want to visit us, see what's happening on the ground and make a decision. And now I'm maybe being harsh. But I worry because this money is so important. Now, who are they accountable to? Are we on their boards when they make decisions about where to channel money? Are we there? Will we make the same mistake that we made before? Have our presidents and our leaders β everyone is talking about β have they ever called these people together and said, "Look, your foundation and your foundation β you have so much money, we are grateful. Let's sit down and really tell you where the money should be channeled and where this aid should go." Have we done that? The answer is no. And each one is making their own individual effort. And then 10 years from now, billions will again have gone into Africa, and we would still have the same problems. This is what gives us the hopeless image. Our inability to take charge and say to all these people bringing their money, "Sit down." And we don't do it because there are so many of us. We don't coordinate. We've not called the Bill Gates, and the Soros, and everybody else who is helping and say, "Sit down. Let's have a conference with you. As a continent, here are our priorities. Here is where we want you to channel this money." Each one should not be an entrepreneur going out and finding what is best. We're not trying to stop them at all! But to help them help us better. And what is disappointing me is that we are not doing this. Ten years from now we will have the same story, and we will be repeating the same things. So our problem right now is, how can we leverage all this good will that is coming towards our way? How can we get government to combine properly with these private foundations, with the international organizations, and with our private sector. I firmly believe in that private sector thing too. But it cannot do it alone. So there might be a few ideas we could think of that could work. They said this is about proliferating and sharing ideas. So why don't we think of using some of this aid? Well, why don't we first say to those helping us out, "Don't be shy about infrastructure. That health that you're working on cannot be sustainable without infrastructure. That education will work better if we've got electricity and railroads, and so on. That agriculture will work better if there are railroads to get the goods to market. Don't be shy of it. Invest some of your resources in that, too." And then we can see that this is one combination of private, international, multilateral money, private sector and the African that we can put together as a partnership, so that aid can be a facilitator. That is all aid can be. Aid cannot solve our problems, I'm firmly convinced about that. But it can be catalytic. And if we fail to use it as catalytic, we would have failed. One of the reasons why China is a bit popular with Africans now β one of the reasons is not only just that, you know, these people are stupid and China is coming to take resources. It's because there's a little more leverage in terms of the Chinese. If you tell them, "We need a road here," they will help you build it. They don't shy away from infrastructure. In fact, the Chinese minister of finance said to me, when I asked him what are we doing wrong in Nigeria. He said, "There are two things you need only. Infrastructure, infrastructure, infrastructure and discipline. You are undisciplined." (Applause) And I repeat it for the continent. It's the same. We need infrastructure, infrastructure and discipline. So we can make a catalytic to help us provide some of that. Now I realize β I'm not saying β health and education β no, you can also provide that as well. But I'm saying it's not either or. Let's see how aid can be a facilitator in partnership. One idea. Second thing, for the private sector, people are afraid to take risks on the continent. Why can't some of this aid be used as a kind of guarantee mechanisms, to enable people to take risk? (Applause) And finally, because they are both standing at my β I'm out of time. Am I out of time? OK, so let me not forget my punchline. One of the things I want everybody to collaborate on is to support women, to create jobs. (Applause) A lot has been said here about women, I don't need to repeat it. But there are people β women β creating jobs. And we know, studies have shown that when you put resources in the hand of the woman β in fact, there's an econometric study, the World Bank Review, done in 2000, showing that transfers into the hands of women result in healthier children, more for the household, more for the economy and all that. So I'm saying that one of the takeaways from here β I'm not saying the men are not important β obviously, if you leave the husbands out, what will they do? They'll come back home and get disgruntled, and it will result in difficulties we don't want. We don't want men beating their wives because they don't have a job, and so on. But at the margin, we also β I want to push this, because the reason is the men automatically β they get β not automatically, but they tend to get more support. But I want you to realize that resources in the hands of African women is a powerful tool. There are people creating jobs. Beatrice Gakuba has created 200 jobs from her flower business in Rwanda. We have Ibukun Awosika in Nigeria, with the chair company. She wants to expand. She needs another 20 million. She will create another 100, 200 more jobs. So take away from here is how are you going to put together the resources to put money in the hands of women in the middle who are ready β business people who want to expand and create more jobs. And lastly, what are you going to do to be part of this partnership of aid, government, private sector and the African as an individual? Thank you. (Applause) |
Why invest in Africa | {0: "As leading advocate for Western Investment into Africa, BCG's Euvin Naidoo works with leading corporations and governments to strengthen trans-Atlantic economic ties."} | TEDGlobal 2007 | Welcome to Africa! Or rather, I should say, welcome home. Because this is where it all really began, isn't it? Looking at fossils dating back several millions of years β it all points to evidence that life for the human species as we know it began right here. We are on an amazing journey the next four days. You're going to hear stories of "Africa: The Next Chapter." Fantastic tales, anecdotes from speakers. But I want to turn that upside down for a moment, and get something out on the table and clear the air so to say. What's the worst thing you've ever heard about Africa? And this is not a rhetorical question. I actually want answers from you. Go for it! The worst. Famine. Corruption. More. Genocide. AIDS. Slavery. That's enough. We've all heard these things. But this is about Africa, the story we have not heard. The stories that we want to know, and the stories that do exist about positive tales. A part of my talk is going to be about investment opportunities that exist on this continent, to separate the rhetoric from the reality, the fact from the fiction. To go to the actual data and statistics that exist about the actual things that are happening on the ground that make Africa a realistic investment opportunity and option for you. So let's get going because Africa, to some degree, is on a turnaround. A turnaround in terms of how it manages its image, and how it takes control of its own destiny. And turnarounds are part and parcel of what I have focused on for most of my professional career. And it all started almost a decade ago, as a young consultant at McKinsey & Company at their first African office in Johannesburg. And there we worked with leading CEOs on African issues, and African companies on turnarounds, making the companies not just the best in Africa but the best globally. But I really formalized this focus on turnarounds when I was completing my MBA in the United States. It all began with a fantastic phone call. It was from Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Harvard Business School guru and a professor of mine. And she said, "I want to write a case, Euvin β a case on a public-sector leader that has lessons for the corporate world." And the leader that came to mind was Nelson Mandela. Because Nelson Mandela, as he took over power as the first democratically-elected president of South Africa, faced a situation of a country that could have slid into the abyss of chaos. But he started the country on a path of a positive cycle. Now the case, "Nelson Mandela: Change Leader," became part of the research base for a chapter in Rosabeth's new book called "Confidence." And "Confidence" became a New York Times bestseller and topped Business Week's hardcover bestseller list. And why I tell you this story is because later, when I was interviewed on SABC Africa, on a pan-African broadcast, they asked, "What is your key lesson, or the key thing you enjoy the most?" β because it was a huge privilege to be part of such a project. The lesson from that was that it was Africa β an African story β that was used to share news with the rest of the world of what the benchmark can be for corporate turnarounds. Africa was being used as a success story! So I want to share with you a personal story about a turnaround or a transformation. And that has to do with me because in 1994, I packed a few things into a backpack and headed off for a year of travel in the middle of my university career. You should have seen my parents' reaction! (Laughter) But very soon, I found myself from the southern part of Africa, in South Africa β at the very north, in Egypt. And I sought out the most remote places. I went to the Siwa Oasis. That was one of my stops. And the Siwa Oasis is famous for several things, but the key thing is that it was the place that Alexander the Great went to when he wanted to find out what his destiny had in store for him. And legend has it that Alexander trekked through this desert. Half his battalion was wiped out in the sandstorm. And myth says that he had an audience with the oracle, and it foretold his destiny of greatness. This was 300 BC. So Africa had long been seen as a place to go to for answers. Now, the thing I remember about Siwa was the magical view of the sky at night. With no natural light source, Siva is one of these amazing places that when you look up you see a perfect tapestry. Fast forward to 2002. I'm sitting in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the Healthcare Development Conference. And I see the same picture, but from the opposite side. A satellite picture looking down at the earth. And it was that picture that made such a profound impact on me because I'll never forget it. I remember the very moment. And I wanted to share that image with you of what I saw at that point. The first thing that I saw was North America at night β glowing, in all its glory. A warm feeling. Light. And then I saw it β Africa. Quite literally the "Dark Continent." And while Africa may be dark, the thing that brought the message home to me was that this is the challenge we are facing, but it's also the opportunity. Because whilst Africa may be dark β other than the few specks that exist north and in the south and other areas β it's aglow with the light in the hearts of the millions of people that are there. Entrepreneurs, dynamic people, people with hope. It was George Kimble, the geographer, who said that, "The only thing dark about Africa is our ignorance of it." So let's start shedding light on this amazing eclectic continent that has so much to offer. Let's start unpacking it. Africa is the second-largest continent, a landmass second from Asia. It also is the second most populated continent, with 900 million people. In fact β coming back to the land mass β Africa is so big that you could fit in the continental United States, China, and the entire Europe into Africa, and still have space. Africa is home to over 1,000 languages β 2,000 is another estimate that's out there β with over 2,000 languages and dialects. But you could say, "Invest in Africa in over 1,000 languages, and it wouldn't make a difference." What does the data say? As an investment banker, I'm in the cross-flow of information and the changes that are taking place in capital markets. So I want to share with you some of these bellwether signals, or signs, and winds of change that are sweeping this continent. So let's start on that. And let's start at the high level, on the macro-factors. Inflation, in general, is coming down across Africa β that's the first sign β in many countries reaching double-digit figures. So let's start looking at some of those. I call it my Z.E.N. cluster. Zambia: from 2004 to 2006, moves from the 18 percent in inflation to the nine percent. Egypt: from the 16 percent to about 8.4 percent. Nigeria: a similar situation, from the 16 percent to the eight percent. Single digits. More fascinating, you have other countries β South Africa, Mauritius, Namibia β all in single digits. But that's just part of the story. You have a similar trend with currencies β currencies going through an extreme time of stability. But that's looking at the big picture. And the first myth to dispel is that Africa is not a country. It's made up β (Applause) It's made up of 53 different countries. So the very definition β to say "invest in Africa" is a no-go. It's meaningless. Each country has a unique value proposition. You can make money, you can lose money in Africa. But opportunities, boy oh boy, they exist. And this is what today is about β it's about discussing those very opportunities. So let's start getting into the countries and into the specific material and data. I was recently elected, as Emeka mentioned, as the President of the South African Chamber of Commerce in America. And I'm very proud and happy to be in that role because it is a fascinating position to be in. To hear this dialogue that's just increasing in tenor and velocity, of decisions about trade and companies wanting to come. So the first port of call: let's talk a little bit about South Africa. But not the South Africa we always talk about β the gold, the minerals, the First World infrastructure β a bit about the other side of it. For example, South Africa was recently voted as the top destination for the top 1,000 UK companies for offshore call-centers. Same language, timeline, et cetera. Makes sense. Other headlines that have recently reached South Africa were Bain Capital and KKR, the big boys of private equity. Headline in South Africa: "They have landed." Quite ominous. But what were they there for? To acquire assets. Bing Capital's acquisition of Edcon, a large retailer, is testimony to the confidence they are starting to place in the economy. Because it is actually a long-term play. Being a retailer, it is a play on the belief that this middle-class that's growing will continue to grow, that the boom and the confidence in consumer spending will continue. But the story of Africa, and my focus, is beyond South Africa because there's so much happening. Undoubtedly, Nigeria is clearly a hot spot. Challenges β and we will hear a lot about Nigeria in these four days. But looking at Goldman Sachs' work β we had the famous BRIC Report. The new report, "The Next Eleven," highlights that by 2020 Nigeria is going to be amongst the top 10 economies in the world. It's an investment opportunity. Think about that. Is anyone β our banks, our investors β seriously thinking about going to Nigeria? If you haven't, why not? What's going on in Nigeria? A couple of things. I want to talk about it from the perspective of capital markets. Bellwether signs again. Guarantee Trust Bank recently issued the first Euro Bond out of Africa, and this excludes South Africa. But the first Eurobond, the raising of international capital offshore, off its own balance sheet, without any sovereign backing β that is an indication of the confidence that is taking place in that economy. Without any sovereign backing, a Nigerian company raising capital offshore. It's just a sign of things to come. Looking at the oil industry, Africa provides 18 percent of the U.S.'s oil supply, with the Middle East just 16 percent. It's an important strategic partner. Let's put Nigeria in perspective. 2.2 to 2.4 million barrels of oil a day β the same league as Kuwait, the same league as Venezuela. But with Africa, let's start being careful about this. And Emeka and I have had these discussions. We have to move away from what's called "the curse of the commodities." Because it's not about oil, it's not about commodities. For Africa to truly be sustainable, we have to move beyond to other industries. So let's unpack those very quickly, and I'm going to move through these very, very, very fast because I can see that clock counting down. What else is going on there? Egypt. Egypt is launching a first large industrial zone β 2.8 billion investment. The announcement just came out the last few weeks. Close to the Mediterranean, near Alexandria β textiles, petrochemicals. It's being managed by a Singaporean-based management company. So they want to emerge as an industrial powerhouse across the industries β away from oil. Let's look at agriculture. Let's look at forestry. What's going on there? In Tanzania last week, we had the launch of the East African Organic Produce Standard. Again, gathering together farmers, gathering together stakeholders in East Africa to get standards for organic produce. Better prices. It ties in with small-scale farmers in terms of no pesticides, no fertilizers. Again, opportunity to tackle markets to get that higher price. Uganda: the New Forest Company, replanting and redeveloping their forests. Why is that important? As the energy needs are met and electricity is needed [we will need] poles for rolling out electricity. But here is the sweetener in the deal. They're going to be tapping into carbon credits. Let's go back to Nigeria. The banking sector has undergone tremendous transformation, from over 80 banks to 25 banks. Strengthening of the system. But what's going on there? Only 10 percent of the country is banked. The largest population in Africa is in Nigeria. 135 million-plus people. Think about that. There are only 700 ATMs in the country. Opportunity. The same for telecoms across the country. Now let's look at the continent as a whole. People look at the roads, for example, and they'd say, "Angola: 90 percent of roads are untarred. Ah, problem!" It's more expensive to transport goods. Prices of goods go up, inflation is affected. Nigeria: 70 percent of roads are untarred. Zambia: 80 percent. In general, more than 50 percent of roads are untarred. This is an opportunity! Energy needs β it's an opportunity. So what are the signs that things are fundamentally changing? Let's look at the stock markets in Africa. If I had to ask you, "In 2005 what was the best performing stock market or stock exchange in the world?" Would Egypt come to mind? In 2005, the Egyptian stock exchange returned over 145 percent. What's going on in some of the other countries? Let's look at some 2006 numbers. Kenya: over 60 percent. Nigeria: over 40 percent. South Africa: in the 20 percents. High ones. These are the trends that are taking place. But in any investment decision, the key question is, "What is my alternative investment?" Because in Africa today, we are competing globally for capital. And global capital is agnostic β it has no loyalties. There's an overhang of capital in the U.S., and the key is yield pickup. What Africa is providing is a diversification play, and also opportunities for yield pickup for the investor that's aware of what he or she is doing. Now, when looking at Africa vis-a-vis other things, and countries in Africa vis-a-vis other things, comparisons become important. 10 years ago there, were very few countries that received sovereign ratings from the Standard & Poors, Moody's and Fitch's. Today, 16 African countries and growing have sovereign country ratings. What does this mean? Take Nigeria again: double B-minus β in the league of Ukraine and Turkey. Immediately we have a comparison. The backbone of making investment decisions for global holders of capital. Some other figures. South Africa: triple B-plus. Botswana: A-plus. Bakino Faso: B-minus. And so on. In fact, one of the big agencies is setting up an office in Africa. Why are they doing that? Because they expect investment to follow. So one of the big bellwethers, and one of my final points I want to mention, is the interesting thing I read is that CNBC has launched their first African channel. Why is CNBC doing this? It's the 24-hour rolling African news channel. They're doing it because they are expecting things to happen. Me and you, the investments we are going to be making, the investments the world is going to be making β that's the 24-hour news channel dedicated to Africa. So that's the change that's coming down the pipeline. So in conclusion, I want to turn back to that very slide that made such a deep impact on me all those years ago. This time [I'll] give you the entire picture that I saw in 2002, and ask you that when you think about what your role can be in Africa, think about your journey in terms of bringing light to this continent. Because there are amazing opportunities available. And think about the concept of transformation in the back of your mind because things can be turned around rather quickly. In 1899, Joseph Conrad released "The Heart of Darkness," a tale of grim horror along the Congo River. If one looks carefully, on the Congo River is one of those bright lights. And that's the very Congo river generating light β the old heart of darkness now generating light with hydro-electric power. That is a transformation in power of ideas. So the next step, over the next four days, is us exploring more of these ideas. And perchance, if you can always keep this picture in your mind, that when we convene maybe in the distant future, in 2020, that picture will look very different. Thank you. (Applause) |
How to educate leaders? Liberal arts | {0: "After working at Microsoft for almost a decade, Patrick Awuah returned home to Ghana and cofounded Ashesi University, a small liberal arts college that aims to educate Africa's next generation of leaders. Its first class of students graduated in 2006."} | TEDGlobal 2007 | Like many of you here, I am trying to contribute towards a renaissance in Africa. The question of transformation in Africa really is a question of leadership. Africa can only be transformed by enlightened leaders. And it is my contention that the manner in which we educate our leaders is fundamental to progress on this continent. I want to tell you some stories that explain my view. We all heard about the importance of stories yesterday. An American friend of mine this year volunteered as a nurse in Ghana, and in a period of three months she came to a conclusion about the state of leadership in Africa that had taken me over a decade to reach. Twice she was involved in surgeries where they lost power at the hospital. The emergency generators did not start. There was not a flashlight, not a lantern, not a candle β pitch black. The patient's cut open, twice. The first time it was a C-section. Thankfully, baby was out β mother and child survived. The second time was a procedure that involved local anesthesia. Anesthetic wears off. The patient feels pain. He's crying. He's screaming. He's praying. Pitch black. Not a candle, not a flashlight. And that hospital could have afforded flashlights. They could have afforded to purchase these things, but they didn't. And it happened twice. Another time, she watched in horror as nurses watched a patient die because they refused to give her oxygen that they had. And so three months later, just before she returned to the United States, nurses in Accra go on strike. And her recommendation is take this opportunity to fire everyone, start all over again. Start all over again. Now what does this have to do with leadership? You see, the folks at the ministry of health, the hospital administrators, the doctors, the nurses β they are among just five percent of their peers who get an education after secondary school. They are the elite. They are our leaders. Their decisions, their actions matter. And when they fail, a nation literally suffers. So when I speak of leadership, I'm not talking about just political leaders. We've heard a lot about that. I'm talking about the elite. Those who've been trained, whose job it is to be the guardians of their society. The lawyers, the judges, the policemen, the doctors, the engineers, the civil servants β those are the leaders. And we need to train them right. Now, my first pointed and memorable experience with leadership in Ghana occurred when I was 16 years old. We had just had a military coup, and soldiers were pervasive in our society. They were a pervasive presence. And one day I go to the airport to meet my father, and as I walk up this grassy slope from the car park to the terminal building, I'm stopped by two soldiers wielding AK-47 assault weapons. And they asked me to join a crowd of people that were running up and down this embankment. Why? Because the path I had taken was considered out of bounds. No sign to this effect. Now, I was 16. I was very worried about what my peers at school might think if they saw me running up and down this hill. I was especially concerned of what the girls might think. And so I started to argue with these men. It was a little reckless, but you know, I was 16. I got lucky. A Ghana Airways pilot falls into the same predicament. Because of his uniform they speak to him differently, and they explain to him that they're just following orders. So he takes their radio, talks to their boss, and gets us all released. What lessons would you take from an experience like this? Several, for me. Leadership matters. Those men are following the orders of a superior officer. I learned something about courage. It was important not to look at those guns. And I also learned that it can be helpful to think about girls. (Laughter) So a few years after this event, I leave Ghana on a scholarship to go to Swarthmore College for my education. It was a breath of fresh air. You know, the faculty there didn't want us to memorize information and repeat back to them as I was used to back in Ghana. They wanted us to think critically. They wanted us to be analytical. They wanted us to be concerned about social issues. In my economics classes I got high marks for my understanding of basic economics. But I learned something more profound than that, which is that the leaders β the managers of Ghana's economy β were making breathtakingly bad decisions that had brought our economy to the brink of collapse. And so here was this lesson again β leadership matters. It matters a great deal. But I didn't really fully understand what had happened to me at Swarthmore. I had an inkling, but I didn't fully realize it until I went out into the workplace and I went to work at Microsoft Corporation. And I was part of this team β this thinking, learning team whose job it was to design and implement new software that created value in the world. And it was brilliant to be part of this team. It was brilliant. And I realized just what had happened to me at Swarthmore, this transformation β the ability to confront problems, complex problems, and to design solutions to those problems. The ability to create is the most empowering thing that can happen to an individual. And I was part of that. Now, while I was at Microsoft, the annual revenues of that company grew larger than the GDP of the Republic of Ghana. And by the way, it's continued to. The gap has widened since I left. Now, I've already spoken about one of the reasons why this has occurred. I mean, it's the people there who are so hardworking, persistent, creative, empowered. But there were also some external factors: free markets, the rule of law, infrastructure. These things were provided by institutions run by the people that I call leaders. And those leaders did not emerge spontaneously. Somebody trained them to do the work that they do. Now, while I was at Microsoft, this funny thing happened. I became a parent. And for the first time, Africa mattered more to me than ever before. Because I realized that the state of the African continent would matter to my children and their children. That the state of the world β the state of the world depends on what's happening to Africa, as far as my kids would be concerned. And at this time, when I was going through what I call my "pre-mid-life crisis," Africa was a mess. Somalia had disintegrated into anarchy. Rwanda was in the throes of this genocidal war. And it seemed to me that that was the wrong direction, and I needed to be back helping. I couldn't just stay in Seattle and raise my kids in an upper-middle class neighborhood and feel good about it. This was not the world that I'd want my children to grow up in. So I decided to get engaged, and the first thing that I did was to come back to Ghana and talk with a lot of people and really try to understand what the real issues were. And three things kept coming up for every problem: corruption, weak institutions and the people who run them β the leaders. Now, I was a little scared because when you see those three problems, they seem really hard to deal with. And they might say, "Look, don't even try." But, for me, I asked the question, "Well, where are these leaders coming from? What is it about Ghana that produces leaders that are unethical or unable to solve problems?" So I went to look at what was happening in our educational system. And it was the same β learning by rote β from primary school through graduate school. Very little emphasis on ethics, and the typical graduate from a university in Ghana has a stronger sense of entitlement than a sense of responsibility. This is wrong. So I decided to engage this particular problem. Because it seems to me that every society, every society, must be very intentional about how it trains its leaders. And Ghana was not paying enough attention. And this is true across sub-Saharan Africa, actually. So this is what I'm doing now. I'm trying to bring the experience that I had at Swarthmore to Africa. I wish there was a liberal arts college in every African country. I think it would make a huge difference. And what Ashesi University is trying to do is to train a new generation of ethical, entrepreneurial leaders. We're trying to train leaders of exceptional integrity, who have the ability to confront the complex problems, ask the right questions, and come up with workable solutions. I'll admit that there are times when it seems like "Mission: Impossible," but we must believe that these kids are smart. That if we involve them in their education, if we have them discuss the real issues that they confront β that our whole society confronts β and if we give them skills that enable them to engage the real world, that magic will happen. Now, a month into this project, we'd just started classes. And a month into it, I come to the office, and I have this email from one of our students. And it said, very simply, "I am thinking now." And he signs off, "Thank you." It's such a simple statement. But I was moved almost to tears because I understood what was happening to this young man. And it is an awesome thing to be a part of empowering someone in this way. I am thinking now. This year we challenged our students to craft an honor code themselves. There's a very vibrant debate going on on campus now over whether they should have an honor code, and if so, what it should look like. One of the students asked a question that just warmed my heart. Can we create a perfect society? Her understanding that a student-crafted honor code constitutes a reach towards perfection is incredible. Now, we cannot achieve perfection, but if we reach for it, then we can achieve excellence. I don't know ultimately what they will do. I don't know whether they will decide to have this honor code. But the conversation they're having now β about what their good society should look like, what their excellent society should look like, is a really good thing. Am I out of time? OK. Now, I just wanted to leave that slide up because it's important that we think about it. I'm very excited about the fact that every student at Ashesi University does community service before they graduate. That for many of them, it has been a life-altering experience. These young future leaders are beginning to understand the real business of leadership, the real privilege of leadership, which is after all to serve humanity. I am even more thrilled by the fact that least year our student body elected a woman to be the head of Student Government. It's the first time in the history of Ghana that a woman has been elected head of Student Government at any university. It says a lot about her. It says a lot about the culture that's forming on campus. It says a lot about her peers who elected her. She won with 75 percent of the vote. And it gives me a lot of hope. It turns out that corporate West Africa also appreciates what's happening with our students. We've graduated two classes of students to date. And every single one of them has been placed. And we're getting great reports back from corporate Ghana, corporate West Africa, and the things that they're most impressed about is work ethic. You know, that passion for what they're doing. The persistence, their ability to deal with ambiguity, their ability to tackle problems that they haven't seen before. This is good because over the past five years, there have been times when I've felt this is "Mission: Impossible." And it's just wonderful to see these glimmers of the promise of what can happen if we train our kids right. I think that the current and future leaders of Africa have an incredible opportunity to drive a major renaissance on the continent. It's an incredible opportunity. There aren't very many more opportunities like this in the world. I believe that Africa has reached an inflection point with a march of democracy and free markets across the continent. We have reached a moment from which can emerge a great society within one generation. It will depend on inspired leadership. And it is my contention that the manner in which we train our leaders will make all the difference. Thank you, and God bless. (Applause) |
Telling stories from Africa | {0: 'Imprisoned three times by the Nigerian government, Chris Abani turned his experience into poems that Harold Pinter called "the most naked, harrowing expression of prison life and political torture imaginable." His novels include <em>GraceLand</em> (2004) and <em>The Virgin of Flames</em> (2007).'} | TEDGlobal 2007 | I just heard the best joke about Bond Emeruwa. I was having lunch with him just a few minutes ago, and a Nigerian journalist comes β and this will only make sense if you've ever watched a James Bond movie β and a Nigerian journalist comes up to him and goes, "Aha, we meet again, Mr. Bond!" (Laughter) It was great. So, I've got a little sheet of paper here, mostly because I'm Nigerian and if you leave me alone, I'll talk for like two hours. I just want to say good afternoon, good evening. It's been an incredible few days. It's downhill from now on. I wanted to thank Emeka and Chris. But also, most importantly, all the invisible people behind TED that you just see flitting around the whole place that have made sort of this space for such a diverse and robust conversation. It's really amazing. I've been in the audience. I'm a writer, and I've been watching people with the slide shows and scientists and bankers, and I've been feeling a bit like a gangsta rapper at a bar mitzvah. (Laughter) Like, what have I got to say about all this? And I was watching Jane [Goodall] yesterday, and I thought it was really great, and I was watching those incredible slides of the chimpanzees, and I thought, "Wow. What if a chimpanzee could talk, you know? What would it say?" My first thought was, "Well, you know, there's George Bush." But then I thought, "Why be rude to chimpanzees?" I guess there goes my green card. (Laughter) There's been a lot of talk about narrative in Africa. And what's become increasingly clear to me is that we're talking about news stories about Africa; we're not really talking about African narratives. And it's important to make a distinction, because if the news is anything to go by, 40 percent of Americans can't β either can't afford health insurance or have the most inadequate health insurance, and have a president who, despite the protest of millions of his citizens β even his own Congress β continues to prosecute a senseless war. So if news is anything to go by, the U.S. is right there with Zimbabwe, right? Which it isn't really, is it? And talking about war, my girlfriend has this great t-shirt that says, "Bombing for peace is like fucking for virginity." It's amazing, isn't it? The truth is, everything we know about America, everything Americans come to know about being American, isn't from the news. I live there. We don't go home at the end of the day and think, "Well, I really know who I am now because the Wall Street Journal says that the Stock Exchange closed at this many points." What we know about how to be who we are comes from stories. It comes from the novels, the movies, the fashion magazines. It comes from popular culture. In other words, it's the agents of our imagination who really shape who we are. And this is important to remember, because in Africa the complicated questions we want to ask about what all of this means has been asked from the rock paintings of the San people, through the Sundiata epics of Mali, to modern contemporary literature. If you want to know about Africa, read our literature β and not just "Things Fall Apart," because that would be like saying, "I've read 'Gone with the Wind' and so I know everything about America." That's very important. There's a poem by Jack Gilbert called "The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart." He says, "When the Sumerian tablets were first translated, they were thought to be business records. But what if they were poems and psalms? My love is like twelve Ethiopian goats standing still in the morning light. Shiploads of thuja are what my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this desire in the dark." This is important. It's important because misreading is really the chance for complication and opportunity. The first Igbo Bible was translated from English in about the 1800s by Bishop Crowther, who was a Yoruba. And it's important to know Igbo is a tonal language, and so they'll say the word "igwe" and "igwe": same spelling, one means "sky" or "heaven," and one means "bicycle" or "iron." So "God is in heaven surrounded by His angels" was translated as β [Igbo]. And for some reason, in Cameroon, when they tried to translate the Bible into Cameroonian patois, they chose the Igbo version. And I'm not going to give you the patois translation; I'm going to make it standard English. Basically, it ends up as "God is on a bicycle with his angels." This is good, because language complicates things. You know, we often think that language mirrors the world in which we live, and I find that's not true. The language actually makes the world in which we live. Language is not β I mean, things don't have any mutable value by themselves; we ascribe them a value. And language can't be understood in its abstraction. It can only be understood in the context of story, and everything, all of this is story. And it's important to remember that, because if we don't, then we become ahistorical. We've had a lot of β a parade of amazing ideas here. But these are not new to Africa. Nigeria got its independence in 1960. The first time the possibility for independence was discussed was in 1922, following the Aba women's market riots. In 1967, in the middle of the Biafran-Nigerian Civil War, Dr. Njoku-Obi invented the Cholera vaccine. So, you know, the thing is to remember that because otherwise, 10 years from now, we'll be back here trying to tell this story again. So, what it says to me then is that it's not really β the problem isn't really the stories that are being told or which stories are being told, the problem really is the terms of humanity that we're willing to bring to complicate every story, and that's really what it's all about. Let me tell you a Nigerian joke. Well, it's just a joke, anyway. So there's Tom, Dick and Harry and they're working construction. And Tom opens up his lunch box and there's rice in it, and he goes on this rant about, "Twenty years, my wife has been packing rice for lunch. If she does it again tomorrow, I'm going to throw myself off this building and kill myself." And Dick and Harry repeat this. The next day, Tom opens his lunchbox, there's rice, so he throws himself off and kills himself, and Tom, Dick and Harry follow. And now the inquest β you know, Tom's wife and Dick's wife are distraught. They wished they'd not packed rice. But Harry's wife is confused, because she said, "You know, Harry had been packing his own lunch for 20 years." (Laughter) This seemingly innocent joke, when I heard it as a child in Nigeria, was told about Igbo, Yoruba and Hausa, with the Hausa being Harry. So what seems like an eccentric if tragic joke about Harry becomes a way to spread ethnic hatred. My father was educated in Cork, in the University of Cork, in the '50s. In fact, every time I read in Ireland, people get me all mistaken and they say, "Oh, this is Chris O'Barney from Cork." But he was also in Oxford in the '50s, and yet growing up as a child in Nigeria, my father used to say to me, "You must never eat or drink in a Yoruba person's house because they will poison you." It makes sense now when I think about it, because if you'd known my father, you would've wanted to poison him too. (Laughter) So I was born in 1966, at the beginning of the Biafran-Nigerian Civil War, and the war ended after three years. And I was growing up in school and the federal government didn't want us taught about the history of the war, because they thought it probably would make us generate a new generation of rebels. So I had a very inventive teacher, a Pakistani Muslim, who wanted to teach us about this. So what he did was to teach us Jewish Holocaust history, and so huddled around books with photographs of people in Auschwitz, I learned the melancholic history of my people through the melancholic history of another people. I mean, picture this β really picture this. A Pakistani Muslim teaching Jewish Holocaust history to young Igbo children. Story is powerful. Story is fluid and it belongs to nobody. And it should come as no surprise that my first novel at 16 was about Neo-Nazis taking over Nigeria to institute the Fourth Reich. It makes perfect sense. And they were to blow up strategic targets and take over the country, and they were foiled by a Nigerian James Bond called Coyote Williams, and a Jewish Nazi hunter. And it happened over four continents. And when the book came out, I was heralded as Africa's answer to Frederick Forsyth, which is a dubious honor at best. But also, the book was launched in time for me to be accused of constructing the blueprint for a foiled coup attempt. So at 18, I was bonded off to prison in Nigeria. I grew up very privileged, and it's important to talk about privilege, because we don't talk about it here. A lot of us are very privileged. I grew up β servants, cars, televisions, all that stuff. My story of Nigeria growing up was very different from the story I encountered in prison, and I had no language for it. I was completely terrified, completely broken, and kept trying to find a new language, a new way to make sense of all of this. Six months after that, with no explanation, they let me go. Now for those of you who have seen me at the buffet tables know that it was because it was costing them too much to feed me. (Laughter) But I mean, I grew up with this incredible privilege, and not just me β millions of Nigerians grew up with books and libraries. In fact, we were talking last night about how all of the steamy novels of Harold Robbins had done more for sex education of horny teenage boys in Africa than any sex education programs ever had. All of those are gone. We are squandering the most valuable resource we have on this continent: the valuable resource of the imagination. In the film, "Sometimes in April" by Raoul Peck, Idris Elba is poised in a scene with his machete raised, and he's being forced by a crowd to chop up his best friend β fellow Rwandan Army officer, albeit a Tutsi β played by Fraser James. And Fraser's on his knees, arms tied behind his back, and he's crying. He's sniveling. It's a pitiful sight. And as we watch it, we are ashamed. And we want to say to Idris, "Chop him up. Shut him up." And as Idris moves, Fraser screams, "Stop! Please stop!" Idris pauses, then he moves again, and Fraser says, "Please! Please stop!" And it's not the look of horror and terror on Fraser's face that stops Idris or us; it's the look in Fraser's eyes. It's one that says, "Don't do this. And I'm not saying this to save myself, although this would be nice. I'm doing it to save you, because if you do this, you will be lost." To be so afraid that you're standing in the face of a death you can't escape and that you're soiling yourself and crying, but to say in that moment, as Fraser says to Idris, "Tell my girlfriend I love her." In that moment, Fraser says, "I am lost already, but not you ... not you." This is a redemption we can all aspire to. African narratives in the West, they proliferate. I really don't care anymore. I'm more interested in the stories we tell about ourselves β how as a writer, I find that African writers have always been the curators of our humanity on this continent. The question is, how do I balance narratives that are wonderful with narratives of wounds and self-loathing? And this is the difficulty that I face. I am trying to move beyond political rhetoric to a place of ethical questioning. I am asking us to balance the idea of our complete vulnerability with the complete notion of transformation of what is possible. As a young middle-class Nigerian activist, I launched myself along with a whole generation of us into the campaign to stop the government. And I asked millions of people, without questioning my right to do so, to go up against the government. And I watched them being locked up in prison and tear gassed. I justified it, and I said, "This is the cost of revolution. Have I not myself been imprisoned? Have I not myself been beaten?" It wasn't until later, when I was imprisoned again, that I understood the real meaning of torture, and how easy your humanity can be taken from you, for the time I was engaged in war, righteous, righteous war. Excuse me. Sometimes I can stand before the world β and when I say this, transformation is a difficult and slow process β sometimes I can stand before the world and say, "My name is Chris Abani. I have been human six days, but only sometimes." But this is a good thing. It's never going to be easy. There are no answers. As I was telling Rachel from Google Earth, that I had challenged my students in America β I said, "You don't know anything about Africa, you're all idiots." And so they said, "Tell me about Africa, Professor Abani." So I went to Google Earth and learned about Africa. And the truth be told, this is it, isn't it? There are no essential Africans, and most of us are as completely ignorant as everyone else about the continent we come from, and yet we want to make profound statements about it. And I think if we can just admit that we're all trying to approximate the truth of our own communities, it will make for a much more nuanced and a much more interesting conversation. I want to believe that we can be agnostic about this, that we can rise above all of this. When I was 10, I read James Baldwin's "Another Country," and that book broke me. Not because I was encountering homosexual sex and love for the first time, but because the way James wrote about it made it impossible for me to attach otherness to it. "Here," Jimmy said. "Here is love, all of it." The fact that it happens in "Another Country" takes you quite by surprise. My friend Ronald Gottesman says there are three kinds of people in the world: those who can count, and those who can't. (Laughter) He also says that the cause of all our trouble is the belief in an essential, pure identity: religious, ethnic, historical, ideological. I want to leave you with a poem by Yusef Komunyakaa that speaks to transformation. It's called "Ode to the Drum," and I'll try and read it the way Yusef would be proud to hear it read. "Gazelle, I killed you for your skin's exquisite touch, for how easy it is to be nailed to a board weathered raw as white butcher paper. Last night I heard my daughter praying for the meat here at my feet. You know it wasn't anger that made me stop my heart till the hammer fell. Weeks ago, you broke me as a woman once shattered me into a song beneath her weight, before you slouched into that grassy hush. And now I'm tightening lashes, shaped in hide as if around a ribcage, shaped like five bowstrings. Ghosts cannot slip back inside the body's drum. You've been seasoned by wind, dusk and sunlight. Pressure can make everything whole again. Brass nails tacked into the ebony wood, your face has been carved five times. I have to drive trouble in the hills. Trouble in the valley, and trouble by the river too. There is no palm wine, fish, salt, or calabash. Kadoom. Kadoom. Kadoom. Ka-doooom. Now I have beaten a song back into you. Rise and walk away like a panther." Thank you. (Applause) |
Patient capitalism | {0: 'Jacqueline Novogratz works to enable human flourishing. Her organization, Acumen, invests in people, companies and ideas that see capital and networks as means, not ends, to solving the toughest issues of poverty.'} | TEDGlobal 2007 | I really am honored to be here, and as Chris said, it's been over 20 years since I started working in Africa. My first introduction was at the Abidjan airport on a sweaty, Ivory Coast morning. I had just left Wall Street, cut my hair to look like Margaret Mead, given away most everything that I owned, and arrived with all the essentials β some poetry, a few clothes, and, of course, a guitar β because I was going to save the world, and I thought I would just start with the African continent. But literally within days of arriving I was told, in no uncertain terms, by a number of West African women, that Africans didn't want saving, thank you very much, least of all not by me. I was too young, unmarried, I had no children, didn't really know Africa, and besides, my French was pitiful. And so, it was an incredibly painful time in my life, and yet it really started to give me the humility to start listening. I think that failure can be an incredibly motivating force as well, so I moved to Kenya and worked in Uganda, and I met a group of Rwandan women, who asked me, in 1986, to move to Kigali to help them start the first microfinance institution there. And I did, and we ended up naming it Duterimbere, meaning "to go forward with enthusiasm." And while we were doing it, I realized that there weren't a lot of businesses that were viable and started by women, and so maybe I should try to run a business, too. And so I started looking around, and I heard about a bakery that was run by 20 prostitutes. And, being a little intrigued, I went to go meet this group, and what I found was 20 unwed mothers who were trying to survive. And it was really the beginning of my understanding the power of language, and how what we call people so often distances us from them, and makes them little. I also found out that the bakery was nothing like a business, that, in fact, it was a classic charity run by a well-intentioned person, who essentially spent 600 dollars a month to keep these 20 women busy making little crafts and baked goods, and living on 50 cents a day, still in poverty. So, I made a deal with the women. I said, "Look, we get rid of the charity side, and we run this as a business and I'll help you." They nervously agreed. I nervously started, and, of course, things are always harder than you think they're going to be. First of all, I thought, well, we need a sales team, and we clearly aren't the A-Team here, so let's β I did all this training. And the epitome was when I literally marched into the streets of Nyamirambo, which is the popular quarter of Kigali, with a bucket, and I sold all these little doughnuts to people, and I came back, and I was like, "You see?" And the women said, "You know, Jacqueline, who in Nyamirambo is not going to buy doughnuts out of an orange bucket from a tall American woman?" And like β (Laughter) β it's a good point. So then I went the whole American way, with competitions, team and individual. Completely failed, but over time, the women learnt to sell on their own way. And they started listening to the marketplace, and they came back with ideas for cassava chips, and banana chips, and sorghum bread, and before you knew it, we had cornered the Kigali market, and the women were earning three to four times the national average. And with that confidence surge, I thought, "Well, it's time to create a real bakery, so let's paint it." And the women said, "That's a really great idea." And I said, "Well, what color do you want to paint it?" And they said, "Well, you choose." And I said, "No, no, I'm learning to listen. You choose. It's your bakery, your street, your country β not mine." But they wouldn't give me an answer. So, one week, two weeks, three weeks went by, and finally I said, "Well, how about blue?" And they said, "Blue, blue, we love blue. Let's do it blue." So, I went to the store, I brought Gaudence, the recalcitrant one of all, and we brought all this paint and fabric to make curtains, and on painting day, we all gathered in Nyamirambo, and the idea was we would paint it white with blue as trim, like a little French bakery. But that was clearly not as satisfying as painting a wall of blue like a morning sky. So, blue, blue, everything became blue. The walls were blue, the windows were blue, the sidewalk out front was painted blue. And Aretha Franklin was shouting "R-E-S-P-E-C-T," the women's hips were swaying and little kids were trying to grab the paintbrushes, but it was their day. And at the end of it, we stood across the street and we looked at what we had done, and I said, "It is so beautiful." And the women said, "It really is." And I said, "And I think the color is perfect," and they all nodded their head, except for Gaudence, and I said, "What?" And she said, "Nothing." And I said, "What?" And she said, "Well, it is pretty, but, you know, our color, really, it is green." And β (Laughter) β I learned then that listening isn't just about patience, but that when you've lived on charity and dependent your whole life long, it's really hard to say what you mean. And, mostly because people never really ask you, and when they do, you don't really think they want to know the truth. And so then I learned that listening is not only about waiting, but it's also learning how better to ask questions. And so, I lived in Kigali for about two and a half years, doing these two things, and it was an extraordinary time in my life. And it taught me three lessons that I think are so important for us today, and certainly in the work that I do. The first is that dignity is more important to the human spirit than wealth. As Eleni has said, when people gain income, they gain choice, and that is fundamental to dignity. But as human beings, we also want to see each other, and we want to be heard by each other, and we should never forget that. The second is that traditional charity and aid are never going to solve the problems of poverty. I think Andrew pretty well covered that, so I will move to the third point, which is that markets alone also are not going to solve the problems of poverty. Yes, we ran this as a business, but someone needed to pay the philanthropic support that came into the training, and the management support, the strategic advice and, maybe most important of all, the access to new contacts, networks and new markets. And so, on a micro level, there's a real role for this combination of investment and philanthropy. And on a macro level β some of the speakers have inferred that even health should be privatized. But, having had a father with heart disease, and realizing that what our family could afford was not what he should have gotten, and having a good friend step in to help, I really believe that all people deserve access to health at prices they can afford. I think the market can help us figure that out, but there's got to be a charitable component, or I don't think we're going to create the kind of societies we want to live in. And so, it was really those lessons that made me decide to build Acumen Fund about six years ago. It's a nonprofit, venture capital fund for the poor, a few oxymorons in one sentence. It essentially raises charitable funds from individuals, foundations and corporations, and then we turn around and we invest equity and loans in both for-profit and nonprofit entities that deliver affordable health, housing, energy, clean water to low income people in South Asia and Africa, so that they can make their own choices. We've invested about 20 million dollars in 20 different enterprises, and have, in so doing, created nearly 20,000 jobs, and delivered tens of millions of services to people who otherwise would not be able to afford them. I want to tell you two stories. Both of them are in Africa. Both of them are about investing in entrepreneurs who are committed to service, and who really know the markets. Both of them live at the confluence of public health and enterprise, and both of them, because they're manufacturers, create jobs directly, and create incomes indirectly, because they're in the malaria sector, and Africa loses about 13 billion dollars a year because of malaria. And so as people get healthier, they also get wealthier. The first one is called Advanced Bio-Extracts Limited. It's a company built in Kenya about seven years ago by an incredible entrepreneur named Patrick Henfrey and his three colleagues. These are old-hand farmers who've gone through all the agricultural ups and downs in Kenya over the last 30 years. Now, this plant is an Artemisia plant; it's the basic component for artemisinin, which is the best-known treatment for malaria. It's indigenous to China and the Far East, but given that the prevalence of malaria is here in Africa, Patrick and his colleagues said, "Let's bring it here, because it's a high value-add product." The farmers get three to four times the yields that they would with maize. And so, using patient capital β money that they could raise early on, that actually got below market returns and was willing to go the long haul and be combined with management assistance, strategic assistance β they've now created a company where they purchase from 7,500 farmers. So that's about 50,000 people affected. And I think some of you may have visited β these farmers are helped by KickStart and TechnoServe, who help them become more self-sufficient. They buy it, they dry it and they bring it to this factory, which was purchased in part by, again, patient capital from Novartis, who has a real interest in getting the powder so that they can make Coartem. Acumen's been working with ABE for the past year, year and a half, both on looking at a new business plan, and what does expansion look like, helping with management support and helping to do term sheets and raise capital. And I really understood what patient capital meant emotionally in the last month or so. Because the company was literally 10 days away from proving that the product they produced was at the world-quality level needed to make Coartem, when they were in the biggest cash crisis of their history. And we called all of the social investors we know. Now, some of these same social investors are really interested in Africa and understand the importance of agriculture, and they even helped the farmers. And even when we explained that if ABE goes away, all those 7,500 jobs go away too, we sometimes have this bifurcation between business and the social. And it's really time we start thinking more creatively about how they can be fused. So Acumen made not one, but two bridge loans, and the good news is they did indeed meet world-quality classification and are now in the final stages of closing a 20-million-dollar round, to move it to the next level, and I think that this will be one of the more important companies in East Africa. This is Samuel. He's a farmer. He was actually living in the Kibera slums when his father called him and told him about Artemisia and the value-add potential. So he moved back to the farm, and, long story short, they now have seven acres under cultivation. Samuel's kids are in private school, and he's starting to help other farmers in the area also go into Artemisia production β dignity being more important than wealth. The next one, many of you know. I talked about it a little at Oxford two years ago, and some of you visited A to Z manufacturing, which is one of the great, real companies in East Africa. It's another one that lives at the confluence of health and enterprise. And this is really a story about a public-private solution that has really worked. It started in Japan. Sumitomo had developed a technology essentially to impregnate a polyethylene-based fiber with organic insecticide, so you could create a bed net, a malaria bed net, that would last five years and not need to be re-dipped. It could alter the vector, but like Artemisia, it had been produced only in East Asia. And as part of its social responsibility, Sumitomo said, "Why don't we experiment with whether we can produce it in Africa, for Africans?" UNICEF came forward and said, "We'll buy most of the nets, and then we'll give them away, as part of the global fund's and the U.N.'s commitment to pregnant women and children, for free." Acumen came in with the patient capital, and we also helped to identify the entrepreneur that we would all partner with here in Africa, and Exxon provided the initial resin. Well, in looking around for entrepreneurs, there was none better that we could find on earth than Anuj Shah, in A to Z manufacturing company. It's a 40-year-old company, it understands manufacturing. It's gone from socialist Tanzania into capitalist Tanzania, and continued to flourish. It had about 1,000 employees when we first found it. And so, Anuj took the entrepreneurial risk here in Africa to produce a public good that was purchased by the aid establishment to work with malaria. And, long story short, again, they've been so successful. In our first year, the first net went off the line in October of 2003. We thought the hitting-it-out-of-the-box number was 150,000 nets a year. This year, they are now producing eight million nets a year, and they employ 5,000 people, 90 percent of whom are women, mostly unskilled. They're in a joint venture with Sumitomo. And so, from an enterprise perspective for Africa, and from a public health perspective, these are real successes. But it's only half the story if we're really looking at solving problems of poverty, because it's not long-term sustainable. It's a company with one big customer. And if avian flu hits, or for any other reason the world decides that malaria is no longer as much of a priority, everybody loses. And so, Anuj and Acumen have been talking about testing the private sector, because the assumption that the aid establishment has made is that, look, in a country like Tanzania, 80 percent of the population makes less than two dollars a day. It costs, at manufacturing point, six dollars to produce these, and it costs the establishment another six dollars to distribute it, so the market price in a free market would be about 12 dollars per net. Most people can't afford that, so let's give it away free. And we said, "Well, there's another option. Let's use the market as the best listening device we have, and understand at what price people would pay for this, so they get the dignity of choice. We can start building local distribution, and actually, it can cost the public sector much less." And so we came in with a second round of patient capital to A to Z, a loan as well as a grant, so that A to Z could play with pricing and listen to the marketplace, and found a number of things. One, that people will pay different prices, but the overwhelming number of people will come forth at one dollar per net and make a decision to buy it. And when you listen to them, they'll also have a lot to say about what they like and what they don't like. And that some of the channels we thought would work didn't work. But because of this experimentation and iteration that was allowed because of the patient capital, we've now found that it costs about a dollar in the private sector to distribute, and a dollar to buy the net. So then, from a policy perspective, when you start with the market, we have a choice. We can continue going along at 12 dollars a net, and the customer pays zero, or we could at least experiment with some of it, to charge one dollar a net, costing the public sector another six dollars a net, give the people the dignity of choice, and have a distribution system that might, over time, start sustaining itself. We've got to start having conversations like this, and I don't think there's any better way to start than using the market, but also to bring other people to the table around it. Whenever I go to visit A to Z, I think of my grandmother, Stella. She was very much like those women sitting behind the sewing machines. She grew up on a farm in Austria, very poor, didn't have very much education. She moved to the United States, where she met my grandfather, who was a cement hauler, and they had nine children. Three of them died as babies. My grandmother had tuberculosis, and she worked in a sewing machine shop, making shirts for about 10 cents an hour. She, like so many of the women I see at A to Z, worked hard every day, understood what suffering was, had a deep faith in God, loved her children and would never have accepted a handout. But because she had the opportunity of the marketplace, and she lived in a society that provided the safety of having access to affordable health and education, her children and their children were able to live lives of real purpose and follow real dreams. I look around at my siblings and my cousins β and as I said, there are a lot of us β and I see teachers and musicians, hedge fund managers, designers. One sister who makes other people's wishes come true. And my wish, when I see those women, I meet those farmers, and I think about all the people across this continent who are working hard every day, is that they have that sense of opportunity and possibility, and that they also can believe and get access to services, so that their children, too, can live those lives of great purpose. It shouldn't be that difficult. But what it takes is a commitment from all of us to essentially refuse trite assumptions, get out of our ideological boxes. It takes investing in those entrepreneurs that are committed to service as well as to success. It takes opening your arms, both, wide, and expecting very little love in return, but demanding accountability, and bringing the accountability to the table as well. And most of all, most of all, it requires that all of us have the courage and the patience, whether we are rich or poor, African or non-African, local or diaspora, left or right, to really start listening to each other. Thank you. (Applause) |
"Thula Mama" | {0: 'South African singer-songwriter Vusi Mahlasela was a crucial artistic voice during the fight against apartheid, and now in the new modern-day nation. Blending traditional African music with soul and blues, his music showcases powerful vocals and poetic lyrics.'} | TEDGlobal 2007 | Iβd like to dedicate this one to all the women in South Africa β those women who refused to dwindle in the midst of apartheid. And, of course, Iβm dedicating it also to my grandmother, whom I think really played quite a lot of important roles, especially for me when I was an activist, and being harassed by the police. You will recall that in 1976, June 16, the students of South Africa boycotted the language of Afrikaans as the medium of the oppressor, as they were sort of like really told that they must do everything in Afrikaans β biology, mathematics β and what about our languages? And the students wanted to speak to the government, and police answered with bullets. So every year, June 16, we will commemorate all those comrades or students who died. And I was very young then. I think I was 11 years, and I started asking questions, and thatβs when my political education started. And I joined, later on, the youth organization under the African National Congress. So as part of organizing this and whatever, this commemoration, the police will round us up as they call us leaders. And I used to run away from home, when I know that maybe the police might be coming around the ninth or 10th of June or so. And my grandmother one time said, "No, look, youβre not going to run away. This is your place, you stay here." And indeed, the police came β because theyβll just arrest us and put us in jail and release us whenever they feel like, after the 20th or so. So it was on the 10th of June, and they came, and they surrounded the house, and my grandmother switched off all the lights in the house, and opened the kitchen door. And she said to them, "Vusi's here, and you're not going to take him tonight. I'm tired of you having to come here, harassing us, while your children are sleeping peacefully in your homes. He is here, and you're not going to take him. I've got a bowl full of boiling water β the first one who comes in here, gets it." And they left. (Applause) (Music) β« Thula Mama, Thula Mama, Thula Mama, Thula Mama. β« β« Through the mist of the tears in your eyes on my childhood memory, β« β« I know the truth in your smile, β« β« I know the truth in your smile, β« β« piercing through the gloom of my ignorance. β« β« Oh, there is a mama lying down sleeping β« β« you're very ill and your heart crying. β« β« Wondering, wondering, wondering, wondering where is this world coming to. β« β« Is it right the children have to fend for themselves? No, no, no, no, no. no. β« β« Is it right heaping trouble on an old lady's head? β« β« So unlucky faceless people. β« β« Thula Mama Mama, Thula Mama. Thula Mama Mama. β« β« Thula Mama, Thula Mama, Thula Mama Mama, Thula Mama β« β« Tomorrow itβs going to be better. β« β« Tomorrow it's going to be better to climb, Mama. β« β« Thula Mama, Thula Mama. β« β« Am I to break into the song like the blues man or troubadour. β« β« And then from long distance in no blues club am I to sing, β« β« baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby. β« β« Should I now stop singing of love, β« β« now that my memoryβs surrounded by blood? β« β« Sister, why oh why do we at times mistake a pimple for a cancer? β« β« So who are they who says, no more love poems now? β« β« I want to sing a song of love β« β« for that woman who jumped the fences pregnant β« β« and still gave birth to a healthy child. β« β« Softly I walk into the sun rays of the smile β« β« that will ignite my love song, my song of life, β« β« my song of love, my song of life, my song of love, β« β« my song of life, my song of love, my song of life. β« β« Ooh, Iβve not tried to run away from song, β« β« I hear a persistent voice, more powerful than the enemy bombs. β« β« The song that washed our lives and the rains of our blood. β« β« My song of love and my song of life, my song of love, β« β« my song of life, my song of love, β« β« my song of life, my song of love β I want everybody to sing with me β β« β« my song of life, my song of love, my song of life β everybody sing with me β β« β« my song of life, my song of love β I canβt hear you β β« β« my song of love, my song of life β you can do better β β« β« my song of life, my song of love β keep singing, keep singing β β« β« my song of love, my song of life, yes, my song of love β β« β« you can do better than that β β« β« my song of life, yes, my song of love, my song of life, my song of love β β« β« keep singing, keep singing, keep singing β my song of love. β« β« Oh yeah. My song of β a love song, my song of life. Sing. A love song, my song of life. Sing. β« β« Love song, my song of life. Sing. Love song, my song of life. Sing. β« β« Love song, my song of life. Sing. Love song, my song of life. β« β« Love song, my song of life. β« (Applause) |
My journey into movies that matter | {0: 'Jeff Skoll was the first president of eBay; he used his dot-com fortune to found the film house Participant Productions, making movies to inspire social change, including <em>Syriana</em>; <em>Good Night, and Good Luck</em>; <em>Murderball</em>; <em>An Inconvenient Truth</em> ...'} | TED2007 | I've actually been waiting by the phone for a call from TED for years. And in fact, in 2000, I was ready to talk about eBay, but no call. In 2003, I was ready to do a talk about the Skoll Foundation and social entrepreneurship. No call. In 2004, I started Participant Productions and we had a really good first year, and no call. And finally, I get a call last year, and then I have to go up after J.J. Abrams. (Laughter) You've got a cruel sense of humor, TED. (Laughter) When I first moved to Hollywood from Silicon Valley, I had some misgivings. But I found that there were some advantages to being in Hollywood. (Laughter) And, in fact, some advantages to owning your own media company. And I also found that Hollywood and Silicon Valley have a lot more in common than I would have dreamed. Hollywood has its sex symbols, and the Valley has its sex symbols. (Laughter) Hollywood has its rivalries, and the Valley has its rivalries. Hollywood gathers around power tables, and the Valley gathers around power tables. So it turned out there was a lot more in common than I would have dreamed. But I'm actually here today to tell a story. And part of it is a personal story. When Chris invited me to speak, he said, people think of you as a bit of an enigma, and they want to know what drives you a bit. And what really drives me is a vision of the future that I think we all share. It's a world of peace and prosperity and sustainability. And when we heard a lot of the presentations over the last couple of days, Ed Wilson and the pictures of James Nachtwey, I think we all realized how far we have to go to get to this new version of humanity that I like to call "Humanity 2.0." And it's also something that resides in each of us, to close what I think are the two big calamities in the world today. One is the gap in opportunity β this gap that President Clinton last night called uneven, unfair and unsustainable β and, out of that, comes poverty and illiteracy and disease and all these evils that we see around us. But perhaps the other, bigger gap is what we call the hope gap. And someone, at some point, came up with this very bad idea that an ordinary individual couldn't make a difference in the world. And I think that's just a horrible thing. And so chapter one really begins today, with all of us, because within each of us is the power to equal those opportunity gaps and to close the hope gaps. And if the men and women of TED can't make a difference in the world, I don't know who can. And for me, a lot of this started when I was younger and my family used to go camping in upstate New York. And there really wasn't much to do there for the summer, except get beaten up by my sister or read books. And so I used to read authors like James Michener and James Clavell and Ayn Rand. And their stories made the world seem a very small and interconnected place. And it struck me that if I could write stories that were about this world as being small and interconnected, that maybe I could get people interested in the issues that affected us all, and maybe engage them to make a difference. I didn't think that was necessarily the best way to make a living, so I decided to go on a path to become financially independent, so I could write these stories as quickly as I could. I then had a bit of a wake-up call when I was 14. And my dad came home one day and announced that he had cancer, and it looked pretty bad. And what he said was, he wasn't so much afraid that he might die, but that he hadn't done the things that he wanted to with his life. And knock on wood, he's still alive today, many years later. But for a young man that made a real impression on me, that one never knows how much time one really has. So I set out in a hurry. I studied engineering. I started a couple of businesses that I thought would be the ticket to financial freedom. One of those businesses was a computer rental business called Micros on the Move, which is very well named, because people kept stealing the computers. (Laughter) So I figured I needed to learn a little bit more about business, so I went to Stanford Business School and studied there. And while I was there, I made friends with a fellow named Pierre Omidyar, who is here today. And Pierre, I apologize for this. This is a photo from the old days. And just after I'd graduated, Pierre came to me with this idea to help people buy and sell things online with each other. And with the wisdom of my Stanford degree, I said, "Pierre, what a stupid idea." (Laughter) And needless to say, I was right. (Laughter) But right after that, Pierre β in '96, Pierre and I left our full-time jobs to build eBay as a company. And the rest of that story, you know. The company went public two years later and is today one of the best known companies in the world. Hundreds of millions of people use it in hundreds of countries, and so on. But for me, personally, it was a real change. I went from living in a house with five guys in Palo Alto and living off their leftovers, to all of a sudden having all kinds of resources. And I wanted to figure out how I could take the blessing of these resources and share it with the world. And around that time, I met John Gardner, who is a remarkable man. He was the architect of the Great Society programs under Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s. And I asked him what he felt was the best thing I could do, or anyone could do, to make a difference in the long-term issues facing humanity. And John said, "Bet on good people doing good things. Bet on good people doing good things." And that really resonated with me. I started a foundation to bet on these good people doing good things. These leading, innovative, nonprofit folks, who are using business skills in a very leveraged way to solve social problems. People today we call social entrepreneurs. And to put a face on it, people like Muhammad Yunus, who started the Grameen Bank, has lifted 100 million people plus out of poverty around the world, won the Nobel Peace Prize. But there's also a lot of people that you don't know. Folks like Ann Cotton, who started a group called CAMFED in Africa, because she felt girls' education was lagging. And she started it about 10 years ago, and today, she educates over a quarter million African girls. And somebody like Dr. Victoria Hale, who started the world's first nonprofit pharmaceutical company, and whose first drug will be fighting visceral leishmaniasis, also known as black fever. And by 2010, she hopes to eliminate this disease, which is really a scourge in the developing world. And so this is one way to bet on good people doing good things. And a lot of this comes together in a philosophy of change that I find really is powerful. It's what we call, "Invest, connect and celebrate." And invest: if you see good people doing good things, invest in them. Invest in their organizations, or in business. Invest in these folks. Connecting them together through conferences β like a TED β brings so many powerful connections, or through the World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship that my foundation does at Oxford every year. And celebrate them: tell their stories, because not only are there good people doing good work, but their stories can help close these gaps of hope. And it was this last part of the mission, the celebrate part, that really got me back to thinking when I was a kid and wanted to tell stories to get people involved in the issues that affect us all. And a light bulb went off, which was, first, that I didn't actually have to do the writing myself, I could find writers. And then the next light bulb was, better than just writing, what about film and TV, to get out to people in a big way? And I thought about the films that inspired me, films like "Gandhi" and "Schindler's List." And I wondered who was doing these kinds of films today. And there really wasn't a specific company that was focused on the public interest. So, in 2003, I started to make my way around Los Angeles to talk about the idea of a pro-social media company and I was met with a lot of encouragement. One of the lines of encouragement that I heard over and over was, "The streets of Hollywood are littered with the carcasses of people like you, who think you're going to come to this town and make movies." And then of course, there was the other adage. "The surest way to become a millionaire is to start by being a billionaire and go into the movie business." (Laughter) Undeterred, in January of 2004, I started Participant Productions with the vision to be a global media company focused on the public interest. And our mission is to produce entertainment that creates and inspires social change. And we don't just want people to see our movies and say, that was fun, and forget about it. We want them to actually get involved in the issues. In 2005, we launched our first slate of films, "Murder Ball," "North Country," "Syriana" and "Good Night and Good Luck." And much to my surprise, they were noticed. We ended up with 11 Oscar nominations for these films. And it turned out to be a pretty good year for this guy. Perhaps more importantly, tens of thousands of people joined the advocacy programs and the activism programs that we created to go around the movies. And we had an online component of that, our community sect called Participate.net. But with our social sector partners, like the ACLU and PBS and the Sierra Club and the NRDC, once people saw the film, there was actually something they could do to make a difference. One of these films in particular, called "North Country," was actually kind of a box office disaster. But it was a film that starred Charlize Theron and it was about women's rights, women's empowerment, domestic violence and so on. And we released the film at the same time that the Congress was debating the renewal of the Violence Against Women Act. And with screenings on the Hill, and discussions, and with our social sector partners, like the National Organization of Women, the film was widely credited with influencing the successful renewal of the act. And that to me, spoke volumes, because it's β the film started about a true-life story about a woman who was harassed, sued her employer, led to a landmark case that led to the Equal Opportunity Act, and the Violence Against Women Act and others. And then the movie about this person doing these things, then led to this greater renewal. And so again, it goes back to betting on good people doing good things. Speaking of which, our fellow TEDster, Al β I first saw Al do his slide show presentation on global warming in May of 2005. At that point, I thought I knew something about global warming. I thought it was a 30 to 50 year problem. And after we saw his slide show, it became clear that it was much more urgent. And so right afterwards, I met backstage with Al, and with Lawrence Bender, who was there, and Laurie David, and Davis Guggenheim, who was running documentaries for Participant at the time. And with Al's blessing, we decided on the spot to turn it into a film, because we felt that we could get the message out there far more quickly than having Al go around the world, speaking to audiences of 100 or 200 at a time. And you know, there's another adage in Hollywood, that nobody knows nothing about anything. And I really thought this was going to be a straight-to-PBS charitable initiative. And so it was a great shock to all of us when the film really captured the public interest, and today is mandatory viewing in schools in England and Scotland, and most of Scandinavia. We've sent 50,000 DVDs to high school teachers in the U.S. and it's really changed the debate on global warming. It was also a pretty good year for this guy. We now call Al the George Clooney of global warming. (Laughter) And for Participant, this is just the start. Everything we do looks at the major issues in the world. And we have 10 films in production right now, and dozens others in development. I'll quickly talk about a few coming up. One is "Charlie Wilson's War," with Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts. And it's the true story of Congressman Charlie Wilson, and how he funded the Taliban to fight the Russians in Afghanistan. And we're also doing a movie called "The Kite Runner," based on the book "The Kite Runner," also about Afghanistan. And we think once people see these films, they'll have a much better understanding of that part of the world and the Middle East in general. We premiered a film called "The Chicago 10" at Sundance this year. It's based on the protesters at the Democratic Convention in 1968, Abby Hoffman and crew, and, again, a story about a small group of individuals who did make change in the world. And a documentary that we're doing on Jimmy Carter and his Mid-East peace efforts over the years. And in particular, we've been following him on his recent book tour, which, as many of you know, has been very non-controversial β (Laughter) β which is really bad for getting people to come see a movie. In closing, I'd like to say that everybody has the opportunity to make change in their own way. And all the people in this room have done so through their business lives, or their philanthropic work, or their other interests. And one thing that I've learned is that there's never one right way to make change. One can do it as a tech person, or as a finance person, or a nonprofit person, or as an entertainment person, but every one of us is all of those things and more. And I believe if we do these things, we can close the opportunity gaps, we can close the hope gaps. And I can imagine, if we do this, the headlines in 10 years might read something like these: "New AIDS Cases in Africa Fall to Zero," "U.S. Imports its Last Barrel of Oil" β (Applause) β "Israelis and Palestinians Celebrate 10 Years of Peaceful Coexistence." (Applause) And I like this one, "Snow Has Returned to Kilimanjaro." (Laughter) And finally, an eBay listing for one well-traveled slide show, now obsolete, museum piece. Please contact Al Gore. And I believe that, working together, we can make all of these things happen. And I want to thank you all for having me here today. It's been a real honor. Thank you. (Applause) Oh, thank you. |
Luke, a new prosthetic arm for soldiers | {0: 'Dean Kamen landed in the limelight with the Segway, but he has been innovating since high school, with more than 150 patents under his belt. Recent projects include portable energy and water purification for the developing world, and a prosthetic arm for maimed soldiers.'} | TED2007 | I got a visit almost exactly a year ago, a little over a year ago, from a very senior person at the Department of Defense. Came to see me and said, "1,600 of the kids that we've sent out have come back missing at least one full arm. Whole arm. Shoulder disarticulation. And we're doing the same thing we did for β more or less, that we've done since the Civil War, a stick and a hook. And they deserve more than that." And literally, this guy sat in my office in New Hampshire and said, "I want you to give me something that we can put on these kids that'll pick up a raisin or a grape off a table, they'll be able to put it in their mouth without destroying either one, and they'll be able to know the difference without looking at it." You know, had efferent, afferent, and haptic response. He finishes explaining that, and I'm waiting for the big 300 pound paper proposal, and he said, "That's what I want from you." I said, "Look, you're nuts. That technology's just not available right now. And it can't be done. Not in an envelope of a human arm, with 21 degrees of freedom, from your shoulder to your fingertips." He said, "About two dozen of these 1,600 kids have come back bilateral. You think it's bad to lose one arm? That's an inconvenience compared to having both of them gone." I got a day job, and my nights and weekends are already filled up with things like, let's supply water to the world, and power to the world, and educate all the kids, which, Chris, I will not talk about. I don't need another mission. I keep thinking about these kids with no arms. He says to me, "We've done some work around the country. We've got some pretty amazing neurology and other people." I said, "I'll take a field trip, I'll go see what you got." Over the next month I visited lots of places, some out here, around the country, found the best of the best. I went down to Washington. I saw these guys, and said, "I did what you asked me. I looked at what's out there. I still think you're nuts. But not as nuts as I thought." I put a team together, a little over 13 months ago, got up to 20 some-odd people. We said, we're going to build a device that does what he wants. We have 14 out of the 21 degrees of freedom; you don't need the ones in the last two fingers. We put this thing together. A couple of weeks ago we took it down to Walter Reed, which is unfortunately more in the news these days. We showed it to a bunch of guys. One guy who described himself as being lucky, because he lost his left arm, and he's a righty. He sat at a table with seven or eight of these other guys. Said he was lucky, because he had his good arm, and then he pushed himself back from the table. He had no legs. These kids have attitudes that you just can't believe. So I'm going to show you now, without the skin on it, a 30-second piece, and then I'm done. But understand what you're looking at we made small enough to fit on a 50th percentile female, so that we could put it in any of these people. It's going to go inside something that we use in CAT scans and MRIs of whatever is their good arm, to make silicon rubber, then coat it, and paint it in 3D β exact mirror image of their other limb. So, you won't see all the really cool stuff that's in this series elastic set of 14 actuators, each one which has its own capability to sense temperature and pressure. It also has a pneumatic cuff that holds it on, so the more they put themselves under load, the more it attaches. They take the load off, and it becomes, again, compliant. I'm going to show you a guy doing a couple of simple things with this that we demonstrated in Washington. Can we look at this thing? Watch the fingers grab. The thumb comes up. Wrist. This weighs 6.9 pounds. Going to scratch his nose. It's got 14 active degrees of freedom. Now he's going to pick up a pen with his opposed thumb and index finger. Now he's going to put that down, pick up a piece of paper, rotate all the degrees of freedom in his hand and wrist, and read it. (Applause) |
The joy of lexicography | {0: 'As the co-founder of Reverb Technologies, the maker of the online dictionary Wordnik, Erin McKean is reshaping how we interact with language itself.'} | TED2007 | Now, have any of y'all ever looked up this word? You know, in a dictionary? (Laughter) Yeah, that's what I thought. How about this word? Here, I'll show it to you. Lexicography: the practice of compiling dictionaries. Notice β we're very specific β that word "compile." The dictionary is not carved out of a piece of granite, out of a lump of rock. It's made up of lots of little bits. It's little discrete β that's spelled D-I-S-C-R-E-T-E β bits. And those bits are words. Now one of the perks of being a lexicographer β besides getting to come to TED β is that you get to say really fun words, like lexicographical. Lexicographical has this great pattern: it's called a double dactyl. And just by saying double dactyl, I've sent the geek needle all the way into the red. (Laughter) (Applause) But "lexicographical" is the same pattern as "higgledy-piggledy." Right? It's a fun word to say, and I get to say it a lot. Now, one of the non-perks of being a lexicographer is that people don't usually have a kind of warm, fuzzy, snuggly image of the dictionary. Right? Nobody hugs their dictionaries. But what people really often think about the dictionary is, they think more like this. Just to let you know, I do not have a lexicographical whistle. But people think that my job is to let the good words make that difficult left-hand turn into the dictionary, and keep the bad words out. But the thing is, I don't want to be a traffic cop. For one thing, I just do not do uniforms. And for another, deciding what words are good and what words are bad is actually not very easy. And it's not very fun. And when parts of your job are not easy or fun, you kind of look for an excuse not to do them. So if I had to think of some kind of occupation as a metaphor for my work, I would much rather be a fisherman. I want to throw my big net into the deep, blue ocean of English and see what marvelous creatures I can drag up from the bottom. But why do people want me to direct traffic, when I would much rather go fishing? Well, I blame the Queen. Why do I blame the Queen? Well, first of all, I blame the Queen because it's funny. But secondly, I blame the Queen because dictionaries have really not changed. Our idea of what a dictionary is has not changed since her reign. The only thing that Queen Victoria would not be amused by in modern dictionaries is our inclusion of the F-word, which has happened in American dictionaries since 1965. So, there's this guy, right? Victorian era. James Murray, first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. I do not have that hat. I wish I had that hat. So he's really responsible for a lot of what we consider modern in dictionaries today. When a guy who looks like that, in that hat, is the face of modernity, you have a problem. And so, James Murray could get a job on any dictionary today. There'd be virtually no learning curve. And of course, a few of us are saying: okay, computers! Computers! What about computers? The thing about computers is, I love computers. I mean, I'm a huge geek, I love computers. I would go on a hunger strike before I let them take away Google Book Search from me. But computers don't do much else other than speed up the process of compiling dictionaries. They don't change the end result. Because what a dictionary is, is it's Victorian design merged with a little bit of modern propulsion. It's steampunk. What we have is an electric velocipede. You know, we have Victorian design with an engine on it. That's all! The design has not changed. And OK, what about online dictionaries, right? Online dictionaries must be different. This is the Oxford English Dictionary Online, one of the best online dictionaries. This is my favorite word, by the way. Erinaceous: pertaining to the hedgehog family; of the nature of a hedgehog. Very useful word. So, look at that. Online dictionaries right now are paper thrown up on a screen. This is flat. Look how many links there are in the actual entry: two! Right? Those little buttons, I had them all expanded except for the date chart. So there's not very much going on here. There's not a lot of clickiness. And in fact, online dictionaries replicate almost all the problems of print, except for searchability. And when you improve searchability, you actually take away the one advantage of print, which is serendipity. Serendipity is when you find things you weren't looking for, because finding what you are looking for is so damned difficult. So β (Laughter) (Applause) β now, when you think about this, what we have here is a ham butt problem. Does everyone know the ham butt problem? Woman's making a ham for a big, family dinner. She goes to cut the butt off the ham and throw it away, and she looks at this piece of ham and she's like, "This is a perfectly good piece of ham. Why am I throwing this away?" She thought, "Well, my mom always did this." So she calls up mom, and she says, "Mom, why'd you cut the butt off the ham, when you're making a ham?" She says, "I don't know, my mom always did it!" So they call grandma, and grandma says, "My pan was too small!" (Laughter) So, it's not that we have good words and bad words. We have a pan that's too small! You know, that ham butt is delicious! There's no reason to throw it away. The bad words β see, when people think about a place and they don't find a place on the map, they think, "This map sucks!" When they find a nightspot or a bar, and it's not in the guidebook, they're like, "Ooh, this place must be cool! It's not in the guidebook." When they find a word that's not in the dictionary, they think, "This must be a bad word." Why? It's more likely to be a bad dictionary. Why are you blaming the ham for being too big for the pan? So, you can't get a smaller ham. The English language is as big as it is. So, if you have a ham butt problem, and you're thinking about the ham butt problem, the conclusion that it leads you to is inexorable and counterintuitive: paper is the enemy of words. How can this be? I mean, I love books. I really love books. Some of my best friends are books. But the book is not the best shape for the dictionary. Now they're going to think "Oh, boy. People are going to take away my beautiful, paper dictionaries?" No. There will still be paper dictionaries. When we had cars β when cars became the dominant mode of transportation, we didn't round up all the horses and shoot them. You know, there're still going to be paper dictionaries, but it's not going to be the dominant dictionary. The book-shaped dictionary is not going to be the only shape dictionaries come in. And it's not going to be the prototype for the shapes dictionaries come in. So, think about it this way: if you've got an artificial constraint, artificial constraints lead to arbitrary distinctions and a skewed worldview. What if biologists could only study animals that made people go, "Aww." Right? What if we made aesthetic judgments about animals, and only the ones we thought were cute were the ones that we could study? We'd know a whole lot about charismatic megafauna, and not very much about much else. And I think this is a problem. I think we should study all the words, because when you think about words, you can make beautiful expressions from very humble parts. Lexicography is really more about material science. We are studying the tolerances of the materials that you use to build the structure of your expression: your speeches and your writing. And then, often people say to me, "Well, OK, how do I know that this word is real?" They think, "OK, if we think words are the tools that we use to build the expressions of our thoughts, how can you say that screwdrivers are better than hammers? How can you say that a sledgehammer is better than a ball-peen hammer?" They're just the right tools for the job. And so people say to me, "How do I know if a word is real?" You know, anybody who's read a children's book knows that love makes things real. If you love a word, use it. That makes it real. Being in the dictionary is an artificial distinction. It doesn't make a word any more real than any other way. If you love a word, it becomes real. So if we're not worrying about directing traffic, if we've transcended paper, if we are worrying less about control and more about description, then we can think of the English language as being this beautiful mobile. And any time one of those little parts of the mobile changes, is touched, any time you touch a word, you use it in a new context, you give it a new connotation, you verb it, you make the mobile move. You didn't break it. It's just in a new position, and that new position can be just as beautiful. Now, if you're no longer a traffic cop β the problem with being a traffic cop is there can only be so many traffic cops in any one intersection, or the cars get confused. Right? But if your goal is no longer to direct the traffic, but maybe to count the cars that go by, then more eyeballs are better. You can ask for help! If you ask for help, you get more done. And we really need help. Library of Congress: 17 million books, of which half are in English. If only one out of every 10 of those books had a word that's not in the dictionary in it, that would be equivalent to more than two unabridged dictionaries. And I find an un-dictionaried word β a word like "un-dictionaried," for example β in almost every book I read. What about newspapers? Newspaper archive goes back to 1759, 58.1 million newspaper pages. If only one in 100 of those pages had an un-dictionaried word on it, it would be an entire other OED. That's 500,000 more words. So that's a lot. And I'm not even talking about magazines. I'm not talking about blogs β and I find more new words on BoingBoing in a given week than I do Newsweek or Time. There's a lot going on there. And I'm not even talking about polysemy, which is the greedy habit some words have of taking more than one meaning for themselves. So if you think of the word "set," a set can be a badger's burrow, a set can be one of the pleats in an Elizabethan ruff, and there's one numbered definition in the OED. The OED has 33 different numbered definitions for set. Tiny, little word, 33 numbered definitions. One of them is just labeled "miscellaneous technical senses." Do you know what that says to me? That says to me, it was Friday afternoon and somebody wanted to go down the pub. (Laughter) That's a lexicographical cop out, to say, "miscellaneous technical senses." So, we have all these words, and we really need help! And the thing is, we could ask for help β asking for help's not that hard. I mean, lexicography is not rocket science. See, I just gave you a lot of words and a lot of numbers, and this is more of a visual explanation. If we think of the dictionary as being the map of the English language, these bright spots are what we know about, and the dark spots are where we are in the dark. If that was the map of all the words in American English, we don't know very much. And we don't even know the shape of the language. If this was the dictionary β if this was the map of American English β look, we have a kind of lumpy idea of Florida, but there's no California! We're missing California from American English. We just don't know enough, and we don't even know that we're missing California. We don't even see that there's a gap on the map. So again, lexicography is not rocket science. But even if it were, rocket science is being done by dedicated amateurs these days. You know? It can't be that hard to find some words! So, enough scientists in other disciplines are really asking people to help, and they're doing a good job of it. For instance, there's eBird, where amateur birdwatchers can upload information about their bird sightings. And then, ornithologists can go and help track populations, migrations, etc. And there's this guy, Mike Oates. Mike Oates lives in the U.K. He's a director of an electroplating company. He's found more than 140 comets. He's found so many comets, they named a comet after him. It's kind of out past Mars. It's a hike. I don't think he's getting his picture taken there anytime soon. But he found 140 comets without a telescope. He downloaded data from the NASA SOHO satellite, and that's how he found them. If we can find comets without a telescope, shouldn't we be able to find words? Now, y'all know where I'm going with this. Because I'm going to the Internet, which is where everybody goes. And the Internet is great for collecting words, because the Internet's full of collectors. And this is a little-known technological fact about the Internet, but the Internet is actually made up of words and enthusiasm. And words and enthusiasm actually happen to be the recipe for lexicography. Isn't that great? So there are a lot of really good word-collecting sites out there right now, but the problem with some of them is that they're not scientific enough. They show the word, but they don't show any context. Where did it come from? Who said it? What newspaper was it in? What book? Because a word is like an archaeological artifact. If you don't know the provenance or the source of the artifact, it's not science, it's a pretty thing to look at. So a word without its source is like a cut flower. You know, it's pretty to look at for a while, but then it dies. It dies too fast. So, this whole time I've been saying, "The dictionary, the dictionary, the dictionary, the dictionary." Not "a dictionary," or "dictionaries." And that's because, well, people use the dictionary to stand for the whole language. They use it synecdochically. And one of the problems of knowing a word like "synecdochically" is that you really want an excuse to say "synecdochically." This whole talk has just been an excuse to get me to the point where I could say "synecdochically" to all of you. So I'm really sorry. But when you use a part of something β like the dictionary is a part of the language, or a flag stands for the United States, it's a symbol of the country β then you're using it synecdochically. But the thing is, we could make the dictionary the whole language. If we get a bigger pan, then we can put all the words in. We can put in all the meanings. Doesn't everyone want more meaning in their lives? And we can make the dictionary not just be a symbol of the language β we can make it be the whole language. You see, what I'm really hoping for is that my son, who turns seven this month β I want him to barely remember that this is the form factor that dictionaries used to come in. This is what dictionaries used to look like. I want him to think of this kind of dictionary as an eight-track tape. It's a format that died because it wasn't useful enough. It wasn't really what people needed. And the thing is, if we can put in all the words, no longer have that artificial distinction between good and bad, we can really describe the language like scientists. We can leave the aesthetic judgments to the writers and the speakers. If we can do that, then I can spend all my time fishing, and I don't have to be a traffic cop anymore. Thank you very much for your kind attention. |
Aid for Africa? No thanks. | {0: 'Journalist Andrew Mwenda has spent his career fighting for free speech and economic empowerment throughout Africa. He argues that aid makes objects of the poor -- they become passive recipients of charity rather than active participants in their own economic betterment.'} | TEDGlobal 2007 | I am very, very happy to be amidst some of the most β the lights are really disturbing my eyes and they're reflecting on my glasses. I am very happy and honored to be amidst very, very innovative and intelligent people. I have listened to the three previous speakers, and guess what happened? Every single thing I planned to say, they have said it here, and it looks and sounds like I have nothing else to say. (Laughter) But there is a saying in my culture that if a bud leaves a tree without saying something, that bud is a young one. So, I will β since I am not young and am very old, I still will say something. We are hosting this conference at a very opportune moment, because another conference is taking place in Berlin. It is the G8 Summit. The G8 Summit proposes that the solution to Africa's problems should be a massive increase in aid, something akin to the Marshall Plan. Unfortunately, I personally do not believe in the Marshall Plan. One, because the benefits of the Marshall Plan have been overstated. Its largest recipients were Germany and France, and it was only 2.5 percent of their GDP. An average African country receives foreign aid to the tune of 13, 15 percent of its GDP, and that is an unprecedented transfer of financial resources from rich countries to poor countries. But I want to say that there are two things we need to connect. How the media covers Africa in the West, and the consequences of that. By displaying despair, helplessness and hopelessness, the media is telling the truth about Africa, and nothing but the truth. However, the media is not telling us the whole truth. Because despair, civil war, hunger and famine, although they're part and parcel of our African reality, they are not the only reality. And secondly, they are the smallest reality. Africa has 53 nations. We have civil wars only in six countries, which means that the media are covering only six countries. Africa has immense opportunities that never navigate through the web of despair and helplessness that the Western media largely presents to its audience. But the effect of that presentation is, it appeals to sympathy. It appeals to pity. It appeals to something called charity. And, as a consequence, the Western view of Africa's economic dilemma is framed wrongly. The wrong framing is a product of thinking that Africa is a place of despair. What should we do with it? We should give food to the hungry. We should deliver medicines to those who are ill. We should send peacekeeping troops to serve those who are facing a civil war. And in the process, Africa has been stripped of self-initiative. I want to say that it is important to recognize that Africa has fundamental weaknesses. But equally, it has opportunities and a lot of potential. We need to reframe the challenge that is facing Africa, from a challenge of despair, which is called poverty reduction, to a challenge of hope. We frame it as a challenge of hope, and that is worth creation. The challenge facing all those who are interested in Africa is not the challenge of reducing poverty. It should be a challenge of creating wealth. Once we change those two things β if you say the Africans are poor and they need poverty reduction, you have the international cartel of good intentions moving onto the continent, with what? Medicines for the poor, food relief for those who are hungry, and peacekeepers for those who are facing civil war. And in the process, none of these things really are productive because you are treating the symptoms, not the causes of Africa's fundamental problems. Sending somebody to school and giving them medicines, ladies and gentlemen, does not create wealth for them. Wealth is a function of income, and income comes from you finding a profitable trading opportunity or a well-paying job. Now, once we begin to talk about wealth creation in Africa, our second challenge will be, who are the wealth-creating agents in any society? They are entrepreneurs. [Unclear] told us they are always about four percent of the population, but 16 percent are imitators. But they also succeed at the job of entrepreneurship. So, where should we be putting the money? We need to put money where it can productively grow. Support private investment in Africa, both domestic and foreign. Support research institutions, because knowledge is an important part of wealth creation. But what is the international aid community doing with Africa today? They are throwing large sums of money for primary health, for primary education, for food relief. The entire continent has been turned into a place of despair, in need of charity. Ladies and gentlemen, can any one of you tell me a neighbor, a friend, a relative that you know, who became rich by receiving charity? By holding the begging bowl and receiving alms? Does any one of you in the audience have that person? Does any one of you know a country that developed because of the generosity and kindness of another? Well, since I'm not seeing the hand, it appears that what I'm stating is true. (Bono: Yes!) Andrew Mwenda: I can see Bono says he knows the country. Which country is that? (Bono: It's an Irish land.) (Laughter) (Bono: [unclear]) AM: Thank you very much. But let me tell you this. External actors can only present to you an opportunity. The ability to utilize that opportunity and turn it into an advantage depends on your internal capacity. Africa has received many opportunities. Many of them we haven't benefited much. Why? Because we lack the internal, institutional framework and policy framework that can make it possible for us to benefit from our external relations. I'll give you an example. Under the Cotonou Agreement, formerly known as the Lome Convention, African countries have been given an opportunity by Europe to export goods, duty-free, to the European Union market. My own country, Uganda, has a quota to export 50,000 metric tons of sugar to the European Union market. We haven't exported one kilogram yet. We import 50,000 metric tons of sugar from Brazil and Cuba. Secondly, under the beef protocol of that agreement, African countries that produce beef have quotas to export beef duty-free to the European Union market. None of those countries, including Africa's most successful nation, Botswana, has ever met its quota. So, I want to argue today that the fundamental source of Africa's inability to engage the rest of the world in a more productive relationship is because it has a poor institutional and policy framework. And all forms of intervention need support, the evolution of the kinds of institutions that create wealth, the kinds of institutions that increase productivity. How do we begin to do that, and why is aid the bad instrument? Aid is the bad instrument, and do you know why? Because all governments across the world need money to survive. Money is needed for a simple thing like keeping law and order. You have to pay the army and the police to show law and order. And because many of our governments are quite dictatorial, they need really to have the army clobber the opposition. The second thing you need to do is pay your political hangers-on. Why should people support their government? Well, because it gives them good, paying jobs, or, in many African countries, unofficial opportunities to profit from corruption. The fact is no government in the world, with the exception of a few, like that of Idi Amin, can seek to depend entirely on force as an instrument of rule. Many countries in the [unclear], they need legitimacy. To get legitimacy, governments often need to deliver things like primary education, primary health, roads, build hospitals and clinics. If the government's fiscal survival depends on it having to raise money from its own people, such a government is driven by self-interest to govern in a more enlightened fashion. It will sit with those who create wealth. Talk to them about the kind of policies and institutions that are necessary for them to expand a scale and scope of business so that it can collect more tax revenues from them. The problem with the African continent and the problem with the aid industry is that it has distorted the structure of incentives facing the governments in Africa. The productive margin in our governments' search for revenue does not lie in the domestic economy, it lies with international donors. Rather than sit with Ugandan β (Applause) β rather than sit with Ugandan entrepreneurs, Ghanaian businessmen, South African enterprising leaders, our governments find it more productive to talk to the IMF and the World Bank. I can tell you, even if you have ten Ph.Ds., you can never beat Bill Gates in understanding the computer industry. Why? Because the knowledge that is required for you to understand the incentives necessary to expand a business β it requires that you listen to the people, the private sector actors in that industry. Governments in Africa have therefore been given an opportunity, by the international community, to avoid building productive arrangements with your own citizens, and therefore allowed to begin endless negotiations with the IMF and the World Bank, and then it is the IMF and the World Bank that tell them what its citizens need. In the process, we, the African people, have been sidelined from the policy-making, policy-orientation, and policy- implementation process in our countries. We have limited input, because he who pays the piper calls the tune. The IMF, the World Bank, and the cartel of good intentions in the world has taken over our rights as citizens, and therefore what our governments are doing, because they depend on aid, is to listen to international creditors rather than their own citizens. But I want to put a caveat on my argument, and that caveat is that it is not true that aid is always destructive. Some aid may have built a hospital, fed a hungry village. It may have built a road, and that road may have served a very good role. The mistake of the international aid industry is to pick these isolated incidents of success, generalize them, pour billions and trillions of dollars into them, and then spread them across the whole world, ignoring the specific and unique circumstances in a given village, the skills, the practices, the norms and habits that allowed that small aid project to succeed β like in Sauri village, in Kenya, where Jeffrey Sachs is working β and therefore generalize this experience as the experience of everybody. Aid increases the resources available to governments, and that makes working in a government the most profitable thing you can have, as a person in Africa seeking a career. By increasing the political attractiveness of the state, especially in our ethnically fragmented societies in Africa, aid tends to accentuate ethnic tensions as every single ethnic group now begins struggling to enter the state in order to get access to the foreign aid pie. Ladies and gentlemen, the most enterprising people in Africa cannot find opportunities to trade and to work in the private sector because the institutional and policy environment is hostile to business. Governments are not changing it. Why? Because they don't need to talk to their own citizens. They talk to international donors. So, the most enterprising Africans end up going to work for government, and that has increased the political tensions in our countries precisely because we depend on aid. I also want to say that it is important for us to note that, over the last 50 years, Africa has been receiving increasing aid from the international community, in the form of technical assistance, and financial aid, and all other forms of aid. Between 1960 and 2003, our continent received 600 billion dollars of aid, and we are still told that there is a lot of poverty in Africa. Where has all the aid gone? I want to use the example of my own country, called Uganda, and the kind of structure of incentives that aid has brought there. In the 2006-2007 budget, expected revenue: 2.5 trillion shillings. The expected foreign aid: 1.9 trillion. Uganda's recurrent expenditure β by recurrent what do I mean? Hand-to-mouth is 2.6 trillion. Why does the government of Uganda budget spend 110 percent of its own revenue? It's because there's somebody there called foreign aid, who contributes for it. But this shows you that the government of Uganda is not committed to spending its own revenue to invest in productive investments, but rather it devotes this revenue to paying structure of public expenditure. Public administration, which is largely patronage, takes 690 billion. The military, 380 billion. Agriculture, which employs 18 percent of our poverty-stricken citizens, takes only 18 billion. Trade and industry takes 43 billion. And let me show you, what does public expenditure β rather, public administration expenditure β in Uganda constitute? There you go. 70 cabinet ministers, 114 presidential advisers, by the way, who never see the president, except on television. (Laughter) (Applause) And when they see him physically, it is at public functions like this, and even there, it is him who advises them. (Laughter) We have 81 units of local government. Each local government is organized like the central government β a bureaucracy, a cabinet, a parliament, and so many jobs for the political hangers-on. There were 56, and when our president wanted to amend the constitution and remove term limits, he had to create 25 new districts, and now there are 81. Three hundred thirty-three members of parliament. You need Wembley Stadium to host our parliament. One hundred thirty-four commissions and semi-autonomous government bodies, all of which have directors and the cars. And the final thing, this is addressed to Mr. Bono. In his work, he may help us on this. A recent government of Uganda study found that there are 3,000 four-wheel drive motor vehicles at the Minister of Health headquarters. Uganda has 961 sub-counties, each of them with a dispensary, none of which has an ambulance. So, the four-wheel drive vehicles at the headquarters drive the ministers, the permanent secretaries, the bureaucrats and the international aid bureaucrats who work in aid projects, while the poor die without ambulances and medicine. Finally, I want to say that before I came to speak here, I was told that the principle of TEDGlobal is that the good speech should be like a miniskirt. It should be short enough to arouse interest, but long enough to cover the subject. I hope I have achieved that. (Laughter) Thank you very much. (Applause) |
My creations, a new form of life | {0: 'Theo Jansen is a Dutch artist who builds walking kinetic sculptures that he calls a new form of life. His "Strandbeests" walk the coastline of Holland, feeding on wind and fleeing from water.'} | TED2007 | I would like to tell you about a project which I started about 16 years ago. It's about making new forms of life. And these are made of this kind of tube β electricity tube, we call it in Holland. And we can start a film about that, and we can see a little bit backwards in time. (Video) Narrator: Eventually, these beasts are going to live in herds on the beaches. Theo Jansen is working hard on this evolution. Theo Jansen: I want to put these forms of life on the beaches. And they should survive over there, on their own, in the future. Learning to live on their own β and it'll take couple of more years to let them walk on their own. Narrator: The mechanical beasts will not get their energy from food, but from the wind. The wind will move feathers on their back, which will drive their feet. The beast walks sideways on the wet sand of the beach, with its nose pointed into the wind. As soon as it walks into either the rolling surf or the dry sand, it stops, and walks in the opposite direction. Evolution has generated many species. (Music) This is the Animaris Currens Ventosa. (Music) (Laughter) (Applause) TJ: This is a herd, and it is built according to genetic codes. And it is a sort of race, and each and every animal is different, and the winning codes will multiply. This is the wave, going from left to right. You can see this one. Yes, and now it goes from left to right. This is a new generation, a new family, which is able to store the wind. So, the wings pump up air in lemonade bottles, which are on top of that. And they can use that energy in case the wind falls away, and the tide is coming up, and there is still a little bit of energy to reach the dunes and save their lives, because they are drowned very easily. (Laughter) I could show you this animal. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) So, the proportion of the tubes in this animal is very important for the walking. There are 11 numbers, which I call The 11 Holy Numbers. These are the distances of the tubes which make it walk that way. In fact, it's a new invention of the wheel. It works the same as a wheel. The axis of a wheel stays on the same level, and this hip is staying on the same level as well. In fact, this is better than a wheel, because when you try to drive your bicycle on the beach, you will notice it's very hard to do. And the feet just step over the sand, and the wheel has to touch every piece of the ground in-between. So 5,000 years after the invention of the wheel, we have a new wheel. I will show you, in the next video β can you start it, please? β that very heavy loads can be moved. There's a guy pushing there, behind, but it can also walk on the wind very well. It's 3.2 tons. This is working on the stored wind in the bottles. It has a feeler, where it can feel obstacles and turn around. You see, it's going the other way. Can I have the feeler here? OK. Good. So, they have to survive all the dangers of the beach, and one of the big dangers is the sea. This is the sea. And it must feel the water of the sea. And this is the water feeler, and what's very important is this tube. It sucks in air normally, but when it swallows water, it feels the resistance of it. So, imagine that the animal is walking towards the sea. As soon as it touches the water β you should hear a sound of running air. (Sound of running air) Yes! So if it doesn't feel, it will be drowned, OK? Here we have the brain of the animal. In fact, it is a step counter, and it counts the steps. It's a binary step counter. So as soon it has been to the sea, it changes the pattern of zeroes and ones here. And it always knows where it is on the beach. So it's very simple brain. It says, well, there's the sea, there are dunes, and I'm here. So it's a sort of imagination of the simple world of the beach animal. Thank you. One of the biggest enemies are the storms. This is a part of the nose of the Animaris Percipiere. When the nose of the animal is fixed, the whole animal is fixed. So when the storm is coming up, it drives a pin into the ground. (Laughter) Audience member: Wow! The nose is fixed, the whole animal is fixed. The wind may turn, but the animal will always turn its nose into the wind. Now, another couple of years, and these animals will survive on their own. I still have to help them a lot. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. (Applause) |
What our language habits reveal | {0: 'Steven Pinker is a professor of cognitive science (the study of the human mind) who writes about language, mind and human nature. '} | TEDGlobal 2005 | This is a picture of Maurice Druon, the Honorary Perpetual Secretary of L'Academie francaise, the French Academy. He is splendidly attired in his 68,000-dollar uniform, befitting the role of the French Academy as legislating the correct usage in French and perpetuating the language. The French Academy has two main tasks: it compiles a dictionary of official French. They're now working on their ninth edition, which they began in 1930, and they've reached the letter P. They also legislate on correct usage, such as the proper term for what the French call "email," which ought to be "courriel." The World Wide Web, the French are told, ought to be referred to as "la toile d'araignee mondiale" β the Global Spider Web β recommendations that the French gaily ignore. Now, this is one model of how language comes to be: namely, it's legislated by an academy. But anyone who looks at language realizes that this is a rather silly conceit, that language, rather, emerges from human minds interacting from one another. And this is visible in the unstoppable change in language β the fact that by the time the Academy finishes their dictionary, it will already be well out of date. We see it in the constant appearance of slang and jargon, of the historical change in languages, in divergence of dialects and the formation of new languages. So language is not so much a creator or shaper of human nature, so much as a window onto human nature. In a book that I'm currently working on, I hope to use language to shed light on a number of aspects of human nature, including the cognitive machinery with which humans conceptualize the world and the relationship types that govern human interaction. And I'm going to say a few words about each one this morning. Let me start off with a technical problem in language that I've worried about for quite some time β and indulge me in my passion for verbs and how they're used. The problem is, which verbs go in which constructions? The verb is the chassis of the sentence. It's the framework onto which the other parts are bolted. Let me give you a quick reminder of something that you've long forgotten. An intransitive verb, such as "dine," for example, can't take a direct object. You have to say, "Sam dined," not, "Sam dined the pizza." A transitive verb mandates that there has to be an object there: "Sam devoured the pizza." You can't just say, "Sam devoured." There are dozens or scores of verbs of this type, each of which shapes its sentence. So, a problem in explaining how children learn language, a problem in teaching language to adults so that they don't make grammatical errors, and a problem in programming computers to use language is which verbs go in which constructions. For example, the dative construction in English. You can say, "Give a muffin to a mouse," the prepositional dative. Or, "Give a mouse a muffin," the double-object dative. "Promise anything to her," "Promise her anything," and so on. Hundreds of verbs can go both ways. So a tempting generalization for a child, for an adult, for a computer is that any verb that can appear in the construction, "subject-verb-thing-to-a-recipient" can also be expressed as "subject-verb-recipient-thing." A handy thing to have, because language is infinite, and you can't just parrot back the sentences that you've heard. You've got to extract generalizations so you can produce and understand new sentences. This would be an example of how to do that. Unfortunately, there appear to be idiosyncratic exceptions. You can say, "Biff drove the car to Chicago," but not, "Biff drove Chicago the car." You can say, "Sal gave Jason a headache," but it's a bit odd to say, "Sal gave a headache to Jason." The solution is that these constructions, despite initial appearance, are not synonymous, that when you crank up the microscope on human cognition, you see that there's a subtle difference in meaning between them. So, "give the X to the Y," that construction corresponds to the thought "cause X to go to Y." Whereas "give the Y the X" corresponds to the thought "cause Y to have X." Now, many events can be subject to either construal, kind of like the classic figure-ground reversal illusions, in which you can either pay attention to the particular object, in which case the space around it recedes from attention, or you can see the faces in the empty space, in which case the object recedes out of consciousness. How are these construals reflected in language? Well, in both cases, the thing that is construed as being affected is expressed as the direct object, the noun after the verb. So, when you think of the event as causing the muffin to go somewhere β where you're doing something to the muffin β you say, "Give the muffin to the mouse." When you construe it as "cause the mouse to have something," you're doing something to the mouse, and therefore you express it as, "Give the mouse the muffin." So which verbs go in which construction β the problem with which I began β depends on whether the verb specifies a kind of motion or a kind of possession change. To give something involves both causing something to go and causing someone to have. To drive the car only causes something to go, because Chicago's not the kind of thing that can possess something. Only humans can possess things. And to give someone a headache causes them to have the headache, but it's not as if you're taking the headache out of your head and causing it to go to the other person, and implanting it in them. You may just be loud or obnoxious, or some other way causing them to have the headache. So, that's an example of the kind of thing that I do in my day job. So why should anyone care? Well, there are a number of interesting conclusions, I think, from this and many similar kinds of analyses of hundreds of English verbs. First, there's a level of fine-grained conceptual structure, which we automatically and unconsciously compute every time we produce or utter a sentence, that governs our use of language. You can think of this as the language of thought, or "mentalese." It seems to be based on a fixed set of concepts, which govern dozens of constructions and thousands of verbs β not only in English, but in all other languages β fundamental concepts such as space, time, causation and human intention, such as, what is the means and what is the ends? These are reminiscent of the kinds of categories that Immanuel Kant argued are the basic framework for human thought, and it's interesting that our unconscious use of language seems to reflect these Kantian categories. Doesn't care about perceptual qualities, such as color, texture, weight and speed, which virtually never differentiate the use of verbs in different constructions. An additional twist is that all of the constructions in English are used not only literally, but in a quasi-metaphorical way. For example, this construction, the dative, is used not only to transfer things, but also for the metaphorical transfer of ideas, as when we say, "She told a story to me" or "told me a story," "Max taught Spanish to the students" or "taught the students Spanish." It's exactly the same construction, but no muffins, no mice, nothing moving at all. It evokes the container metaphor of communication, in which we conceive of ideas as objects, sentences as containers, and communication as a kind of sending. As when we say we "gather" our ideas, to "put" them "into" words, and if our words aren't "empty" or "hollow," we might get these ideas "across" to a listener, who can "unpack" our words to "extract" their "content." And indeed, this kind of verbiage is not the exception, but the rule. It's very hard to find any example of abstract language that is not based on some concrete metaphor. For example, you can use the verb "go" and the prepositions "to" and "from" in a literal, spatial sense. "The messenger went from Paris to Istanbul." You can also say, "Biff went from sick to well." He needn't go anywhere. He could have been in bed the whole time, but it's as if his health is a point in state space that you conceptualize as moving. Or, "The meeting went from three to four," in which we conceive of time as stretched along a line. Likewise, we use "force" to indicate not only physical force, as in, "Rose forced the door to open," but also interpersonal force, as in, "Rose forced Sadie to go," not necessarily by manhandling her, but by issuing a threat. Or, "Rose forced herself to go," as if there were two entities inside Rose's head, engaged in a tug of a war. Second conclusion is that the ability to conceive of a given event in two different ways, such as "cause something to go to someone" and "causing someone to have something," I think is a fundamental feature of human thought, and it's the basis for much human argumentation, in which people don't differ so much on the facts as on how they ought to be construed. Just to give you a few examples: "ending a pregnancy" versus "killing a fetus;" "a ball of cells" versus "an unborn child;" "invading Iraq" versus "liberating Iraq;" "redistributing wealth" versus "confiscating earnings." And I think the biggest picture of all would take seriously the fact that so much of our verbiage about abstract events is based on a concrete metaphor and see human intelligence itself as consisting of a repertoire of concepts β such as objects, space, time, causation and intention β which are useful in a social, knowledge-intensive species, whose evolution you can well imagine, and a process of metaphorical abstraction that allows us to bleach these concepts of their original conceptual content β space, time and force β and apply them to new abstract domains, therefore allowing a species that evolved to deal with rocks and tools and animals, to conceptualize mathematics, physics, law and other abstract domains. Well, I said I'd talk about two windows on human nature β the cognitive machinery with which we conceptualize the world, and now I'm going to say a few words about the relationship types that govern human social interaction, again, as reflected in language. And I'll start out with a puzzle, the puzzle of indirect speech acts. Now, I'm sure most of you have seen the movie "Fargo." And you might remember the scene in which the kidnapper is pulled over by a police officer, is asked to show his driver's license and holds his wallet out with a 50-dollar bill extending at a slight angle out of the wallet. And he says, "I was just thinking that maybe we could take care of it here in Fargo," which everyone, including the audience, interprets as a veiled bribe. This kind of indirect speech is rampant in language. For example, in polite requests, if someone says, "If you could pass the guacamole, that would be awesome," we know exactly what he means, even though that's a rather bizarre concept being expressed. (Laughter) "Would you like to come up and see my etchings?" I think most people understand the intent behind that. And likewise, if someone says, "Nice store you've got there. It would be a real shame if something happened to it" β (Laughter) β we understand that as a veiled threat, rather than a musing of hypothetical possibilities. So the puzzle is, why are bribes, polite requests, solicitations and threats so often veiled? No one's fooled. Both parties know exactly what the speaker means, and the speaker knows the listener knows that the speaker knows that the listener knows, etc., etc. So what's going on? I think the key idea is that language is a way of negotiating relationships, and human relationships fall into a number of types. There's an influential taxonomy by the anthropologist Alan Fiske, in which relationships can be categorized, more or less, into communality, which works on the principle "what's mine is thine, what's thine is mine," the kind of mindset that operates within a family, for example; dominance, whose principle is "don't mess with me;" reciprocity, "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours;" and sexuality, in the immortal words of Cole Porter, "Let's do it." Now, relationship types can be negotiated. Even though there are default situations in which one of these mindsets can be applied, they can be stretched and extended. For example, communality applies most naturally within family or friends, but it can be used to try to transfer the mentality of sharing to groups that ordinarily would not be disposed to exercise it. For example, in brotherhoods, fraternal organizations, sororities, locutions like "the family of man," you try to get people who are not related to use the relationship type that would ordinarily be appropriate to close kin. Now, mismatches β when one person assumes one relationship type, and another assumes a different one β can be awkward. If you went over and you helped yourself to a shrimp off your boss' plate, for example, that would be an awkward situation. Or if a dinner guest after the meal pulled out his wallet and offered to pay you for the meal, that would be rather awkward as well. In less blatant cases, there's still a kind of negotiation that often goes on. In the workplace, for example, there's often a tension over whether an employee can socialize with the boss, or refer to him or her on a first-name basis. If two friends have a reciprocal transaction, like selling a car, it's well known that this can be a source of tension or awkwardness. In dating, the transition from friendship to sex can lead to, notoriously, various forms of awkwardness, and as can sex in the workplace, in which we call the conflict between a dominant and a sexual relationship "sexual harassment." Well, what does this have to do with language? Well, language, as a social interaction, has to satisfy two conditions. You have to convey the actual content β here we get back to the container metaphor. You want to express the bribe, the command, the promise, the solicitation and so on, but you also have to negotiate and maintain the kind of relationship you have with the other person. The solution, I think, is that we use language at two levels: the literal form signals the safest relationship with the listener, whereas the implicated content β the reading between the lines that we count on the listener to perform β allows the listener to derive the interpretation which is most relevant in context, which possibly initiates a changed relationship. The simplest example of this is in the polite request. If you express your request as a conditional β "if you could open the window, that would be great" β even though the content is an imperative, the fact that you're not using the imperative voice means that you're not acting as if you're in a relationship of dominance, where you could presuppose the compliance of the other person. On the other hand, you want the damn guacamole. By expressing it as an if-then statement, you can get the message across without appearing to boss another person around. And in a more subtle way, I think, this works for all of the veiled speech acts involving plausible deniability: the bribes, threats, propositions, solicitations and so on. One way of thinking about it is to imagine what it would be like if language β where it could only be used literally. And you can think of it in terms of a game-theoretic payoff matrix. Put yourself in the position of the kidnapper wanting to bribe the officer. There's a high stakes in the two possibilities of having a dishonest officer or an honest officer. If you don't bribe the officer, then you will get a traffic ticket β or, as is the case of "Fargo," worse β whether the honest officer is honest or dishonest. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. In that case, the consequences are rather severe. On the other hand, if you extend the bribe, if the officer is dishonest, you get a huge payoff of going free. If the officer is honest, you get a huge penalty of being arrested for bribery. So this is a rather fraught situation. On the other hand, with indirect language, if you issue a veiled bribe, then the dishonest officer could interpret it as a bribe, in which case you get the payoff of going free. The honest officer can't hold you to it as being a bribe, and therefore, you get the nuisance of the traffic ticket. So you get the best of both worlds. And a similar analysis, I think, can apply to the potential awkwardness of a sexual solicitation, and other cases where plausible deniability is an asset. I think this affirms something that's long been known by diplomats β namely, that the vagueness of language, far from being a bug or an imperfection, actually might be a feature of language, one that we use to our advantage in social interactions. So to sum up: language is a collective human creation, reflecting human nature, how we conceptualize reality, how we relate to one another. And then by analyzing the various quirks and complexities of language, I think we can get a window onto what makes us tick. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
The surprising decline in violence | {0: 'Steven Pinker is a professor of cognitive science (the study of the human mind) who writes about language, mind and human nature. '} | TED2007 | Images like this, from the Auschwitz concentration camp, have been seared into our consciousness during the twentieth century and have given us a new understanding of who we are, where we've come from and the times we live in. During the twentieth century, we witnessed the atrocities of Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Rwanda and other genocides, and even though the twenty-first century is only seven years old, we have already witnessed an ongoing genocide in Darfur and the daily horrors of Iraq. This has led to a common understanding of our situation, namely that modernity has brought us terrible violence, and perhaps that native peoples lived in a state of harmony that we have departed from, to our peril. Here is an example from an op-ed on Thanksgiving, in the Boston Globe a couple of years ago, where the writer wrote, "The Indian life was a difficult one, but there were no employment problems, community harmony was strong, substance abuse unknown, crime nearly non-existent, what warfare there was between tribes was largely ritualistic and seldom resulted in indiscriminate or wholesale slaughter." Now, you're all familiar with this treacle. We teach it to our children. We hear it on television and in storybooks. Now, the original title of this session was, "Everything You Know Is Wrong," and I'm going to present evidence that this particular part of our common understanding is wrong, that, in fact, our ancestors were far more violent than we are, that violence has been in decline for long stretches of time, and that today we are probably living in the most peaceful time in our species' existence. Now, in the decade of Darfur and Iraq, a statement like that might seem somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene. But I'm going to try to convince you that that is the correct picture. The decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon. You can see it over millennia, over centuries, over decades and over years, although there seems to have been a tipping point at the onset of the Age of Reason in the sixteenth century. One sees it all over the world, although not homogeneously. It's especially evident in the West, beginning with England and Holland around the time of the Enlightenment. Let me take you on a journey of several powers of 10 β from the millennium scale to the year scale β to try to persuade you of this. Until 10,000 years ago, all humans lived as hunter-gatherers, without permanent settlements or government. And this is the state that's commonly thought to be one of primordial harmony. But the archaeologist Lawrence Keeley, looking at casualty rates among contemporary hunter-gatherers, which is our best source of evidence about this way of life, has shown a rather different conclusion. Here is a graph that he put together showing the percentage of male deaths due to warfare in a number of foraging, or hunting and gathering societies. The red bars correspond to the likelihood that a man will die at the hands of another man, as opposed to passing away of natural causes, in a variety of foraging societies in the New Guinea Highlands and the Amazon Rainforest. And they range from a rate of almost a 60 percent chance that a man will die at the hands of another man to, in the case of the Gebusi, only a 15 percent chance. The tiny, little blue bar in the lower left-hand corner plots the corresponding statistic from United States and Europe in the twentieth century, and includes all the deaths of both World Wars. If the death rate in tribal warfare had prevailed during the 20th century, there would have been two billion deaths rather than 100 million. Also at the millennium scale, we can look at the way of life of early civilizations such as the ones described in the Bible. And in this supposed source of our moral values, one can read descriptions of what was expected in warfare, such as the following from Numbers 31: "And they warred against the Midianites as the Lord commanded Moses, and they slew all the males. And Moses said unto them, 'Have you saved all the women alive? Now, therefore, kill every male among the little ones and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him, but all the women children that have not know a man by lying with him keep alive for yourselves.'" In other words, kill the men; kill the children; if you see any virgins, then you can keep them alive so that you can rape them. You can find four or five passages in the Bible of this ilk. Also in the Bible, one sees that the death penalty was the accepted punishment for crimes such as homosexuality, adultery, blasphemy, idolatry, talking back to your parents β (Laughter) β and picking up sticks on the Sabbath. Well, let's click the zoom lens down one order of magnitude, and look at the century scale. Although we don't have statistics for warfare throughout the Middle Ages to modern times, we know just from conventional history β the evidence was under our nose all along that there has been a reduction in socially sanctioned forms of violence. For example, any social history will reveal that mutilation and torture were routine forms of criminal punishment. The kind of infraction today that would give you a fine, in those days would result in your tongue being cut out, your ears being cut off, you being blinded, a hand being chopped off and so on. There were numerous ingenious forms of sadistic capital punishment: burning at the stake, disemboweling, breaking on the wheel, being pulled apart by horses and so on. The death penalty was a sanction for a long list of non-violent crimes: criticizing the king, stealing a loaf of bread. Slavery, of course, was the preferred labor-saving device, and cruelty was a popular form of entertainment. Perhaps the most vivid example was the practice of cat burning, in which a cat was hoisted on a stage and lowered in a sling into a fire, and the spectators shrieked in laughter as the cat, howling in pain, was burned to death. What about one-on-one murder? Well, there, there are good statistics, because many municipalities recorded the cause of death. The criminologist Manuel Eisner scoured all of the historical records across Europe for homicide rates in any village, hamlet, town, county that he could find, and he supplemented them with national data, when nations started keeping statistics. He plotted on a logarithmic scale, going from 100 deaths per 100,000 people per year, which was approximately the rate of homicide in the Middle Ages. And the figure plummets down to less than one homicide per 100,000 people per year in seven or eight European countries. Then, there is a slight uptick in the 1960s. The people who said that rock 'n' roll would lead to the decline of moral values actually had a grain of truth to that. But there was a decline from at least two orders of magnitude in homicide from the Middle Ages to the present, and the elbow occurred in the early sixteenth century. Let's click down now to the decade scale. According to non-governmental organizations that keep such statistics, since 1945, in Europe and the Americas, there has been a steep decline in interstate wars, in deadly ethnic riots or pogroms, and in military coups, even in South America. Worldwide, there's been a steep decline in deaths in interstate wars. The yellow bars here show the number of deaths per war per year from 1950 to the present. And, as you can see, the death rate goes down from 65,000 deaths per conflict per year in the 1950s to less than 2,000 deaths per conflict per year in this decade, as horrific as it is. Even in the year scale, one can see a decline of violence. Since the end of the Cold War, there have been fewer civil wars, fewer genocides β indeed, a 90 percent reduction since post-World War II highs β and even a reversal of the 1960s uptick in homicide and violent crime. This is from the FBI Uniform Crime Statistics. You can see that there is a fairly low rate of violence in the '50s and the '60s, then it soared upward for several decades, and began a precipitous decline, starting in the 1990s, so that it went back to the level that was last enjoyed in 1960. President Clinton, if you're here, thank you. (Laughter) So the question is, why are so many people so wrong about something so important? I think there are a number of reasons. One of them is we have better reporting. The Associated Press is a better chronicler of wars over the surface of the Earth than sixteenth-century monks were. There's a cognitive illusion. We cognitive psychologists know that the easier it is to recall specific instances of something, the higher the probability that you assign to it. Things that we read about in the paper with gory footage burn into memory more than reports of a lot more people dying in their beds of old age. There are dynamics in the opinion and advocacy markets: no one ever attracted observers, advocates and donors by saying things just seem to be getting better and better. (Laughter) There's guilt about our treatment of native peoples in modern intellectual life, and an unwillingness to acknowledge there could be anything good about Western culture. And of course, our change in standards can outpace the change in behavior. One of the reasons violence went down is that people got sick of the carnage and cruelty in their time. That's a process that seems to be continuing, but if it outstrips behavior by the standards of the day, things always look more barbaric than they would have been by historic standards. So today, we get exercised β and rightly so β if a handful of murderers get executed by lethal injection in Texas after a 15-year appeal process. We don't consider that a couple of hundred years ago, they may have been burned at the stake for criticizing the king after a trial that lasted 10 minutes, and indeed, that that would have been repeated over and over again. Today, we look at capital punishment as evidence of how low our behavior can sink, rather than how high our standards have risen. Well, why has violence declined? No one really knows, but I have read four explanations, all of which, I think, have some grain of plausibility. The first is, maybe Thomas Hobbes got it right. He was the one who said that life in a state of nature was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." Not because, he argued, humans have some primordial thirst for blood or aggressive instinct or territorial imperative, but because of the logic of anarchy. In a state of anarchy, there's a constant temptation to invade your neighbors preemptively, before they invade you. More recently, Thomas Schelling gives the analogy of a homeowner who hears a rustling in the basement. Being a good American, he has a pistol in the nightstand, pulls out his gun, and walks down the stairs. And what does he see but a burglar with a gun in his hand. Now, each one of them is thinking, "I don't really want to kill that guy, but he's about to kill me. Maybe I had better shoot him, before he shoots me, especially since, even if he doesn't want to kill me, he's probably worrying right now that I might kill him before he kills me." And so on. Hunter-gatherer peoples explicitly go through this train of thought, and will often raid their neighbors out of fear of being raided first. Now, one way of dealing with this problem is by deterrence. You don't strike first, but you have a publicly announced policy that you will retaliate savagely if you are invaded. The only thing is that it's liable to having its bluff called, and therefore can only work if it's credible. To make it credible, you must avenge all insults and settle all scores, which leads to the cycles of bloody vendetta. Life becomes an episode of "The Sopranos." Hobbes' solution, the "Leviathan," was that if authority for the legitimate use of violence was vested in a single democratic agency β a leviathan β then such a state can reduce the temptation of attack, because any kind of aggression will be punished, leaving its profitability as zero. That would remove the temptation to invade preemptively, out of fear of them attacking you first. It removes the need for a hair trigger for retaliation to make your deterrent threat credible. And therefore, it would lead to a state of peace. Eisner β the man who plotted the homicide rates that you failed to see in the earlier slide β argued that the timing of the decline of homicide in Europe coincided with the rise of centralized states. So that's a bit of a support for the leviathan theory. Also supporting it is the fact that we today see eruptions of violence in zones of anarchy, in failed states, collapsed empires, frontier regions, mafias, street gangs and so on. The second explanation is that in many times and places, there is a widespread sentiment that life is cheap. In earlier times, when suffering and early death were common in one's own life, one has fewer compunctions about inflicting them on others. And as technology and economic efficiency make life longer and more pleasant, one puts a higher value on life in general. This was an argument from the political scientist James Payne. A third explanation invokes the concept of a nonzero-sum game, and was worked out in the book "Nonzero" by the journalist Robert Wright. Wright points out that in certain circumstances, cooperation or non-violence can benefit both parties in an interaction, such as gains in trade when two parties trade their surpluses and both come out ahead, or when two parties lay down their arms and split the so-called peace dividend that results in them not having to fight the whole time. Wright argues that technology has increased the number of positive-sum games that humans tend to be embroiled in, by allowing the trade of goods, services and ideas over longer distances and among larger groups of people. The result is that other people become more valuable alive than dead, and violence declines for selfish reasons. As Wright put it, "Among the many reasons that I think that we should not bomb the Japanese is that they built my mini-van." (Laughter) The fourth explanation is captured in the title of a book called "The Expanding Circle," by the philosopher Peter Singer, who argues that evolution bequeathed humans with a sense of empathy, an ability to treat other peoples' interests as comparable to one's own. Unfortunately, by default we apply it only to a very narrow circle of friends and family. People outside that circle are treated as sub-human, and can be exploited with impunity. But, over history, the circle has expanded. One can see, in historical record, it expanding from the village, to the clan, to the tribe, to the nation, to other races, to both sexes, and, in Singer's own arguments, something that we should extend to other sentient species. The question is, if this has happened, what has powered that expansion? And there are a number of possibilities, such as increasing circles of reciprocity in the sense that Robert Wright argues for. The logic of the golden rule β the more you think about and interact with other people, the more you realize that it is untenable to privilege your interests over theirs, at least not if you want them to listen to you. You can't say that my interests are special compared to yours, anymore than you can say that the particular spot that I'm standing on is a unique part of the universe because I happen to be standing on it that very minute. It may also be powered by cosmopolitanism, by histories, and journalism, and memoirs, and realistic fiction, and travel, and literacy, which allows you to project yourself into the lives of other people that formerly you may have treated as sub-human, and also to realize the accidental contingency of your own station in life, the sense that "there but for fortune go I." Whatever its causes, the decline of violence, I think, has profound implications. It should force us to ask not just, why is there war? But also, why is there peace? Not just, what are we doing wrong? But also, what have we been doing right? Because we have been doing something right, and it sure would be good to find out what it is. Thank you very much. (Applause). Chris Anderson: I loved that talk. I think a lot of people here in the room would say that that expansion of β that you were talking about, that Peter Singer talks about, is also driven by, just by technology, by greater visibility of the other, and the sense that the world is therefore getting smaller. I mean, is that also a grain of truth? Steven Pinker: Very much. It would fit both in Wright's theory, that it allows us to enjoy the benefits of cooperation over larger and larger circles. But also, I think it helps us imagine what it's like to be someone else. I think when you read these horrific tortures that were common in the Middle Ages, you think, how could they possibly have done it, how could they have not have empathized with the person that they're disemboweling? But clearly, as far as they're concerned, this is just an alien being that does not have feelings akin to their own. Anything, I think, that makes it easier to imagine trading places with someone else means that it increases your moral consideration to that other person. CA: Well, Steve, I would love every news media owner to hear that talk at some point in the next year. I think it's really important. Thank you so much. SP: My pleasure. |
An Iraq war movie crowd-sourced from soldiers | {0: 'The director of the award-winning documentary <em>The War Tapes,</em> Deborah Scranton is committed to using new technology to give people power to tell their own stories. '} | TED2007 | Three years ago, I got a phone call, based on an earlier film I had made, with an offer to embed the New Hampshire National Guard. My idea β and literally, I woke up in the middle of the night, and we've all have those moments. You know, you go to sleep β I was excited, with this phone call. I was thinking, I just finished making another film about World War II vets, and I realized I'd gotten to know their stories, and I realized this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to tell a warrior's story as it unfolded. So I went to bed that night pretty excited. Not sure of all the details, but excited. It wasn't at four in the morning, but it was closer to midnight. Woke straight up. Wide-awake as could be. And I had this idea: what if I could, in effect, virtually embed, and create a permeable relationship with the soldiers? To tell the story from the inside out, versus the outside in? So, I called back Major Heilshorn, who's the public affairs officer of the New Hampshire National Guard. And he knew me, so I was like, "Greg?" He's like, "Yes, Deborah?" Told him my idea, and you know, he is one of the bravest men in the world, as is General Blair, who, in the end, gave me permission to try this experiment. Within 10 days, I was down at Fort Dix. He gave me my pick of units. I picked one unit β Charlie Company, Third of the 172nd, they're mountain infantry β for two reasons. One, they're infantry. Number two, they were going to be based at LSA Anaconda, so I knew they would have Internet access. The caveat for my access was I had to get the soldiers to volunteer. This was a big thing that I think when Major H told me, I wasn't really totally gathering what that would mean. So what that meant was, when I went down to Fort Dix, I had to hop out in front of 180 guys and tell them of my vision. You can imagine the hailstorm of questions I got. The opening one was, "What the fuck do you know about the National Guard?" I started with the 1607 Massachusetts Bay Colony Pequot Indian Wars. Gave them about a nine minute response, and there we went. So, I'd like to show the clip of the film. It's our trailer, because I know, obviously you guys are busy, many of you may not have had a chance to see it. So, I want to show the trailer, and then I'm going to take apart one scene in detail. If we could roll? (Video) Stephen Pink: This is Sergeant Stephen Pink. Michael Moriarty: Specialist Michael Moriarty. Zack Bazzi: Do I really want to go? Probably not. Soldier: We're not supposed to talk to the media. SP: I'm not the media, dammit! MM: The day is here. Life will change. Voice: The real deal, man! Narrator: You ready? Soldier: Bring it on! Narrator: You ready? Voice 2: Iraq, here we come! ZB: Every soldier eventually wants to go in combat. It's natural instinct. SP: If you let fear get to you, then you're not going to be doing your job. MM: Every single time you go out there, there's attacks. It's unbelievable. ZB: Hey, Nestor, your ass crack is right in my face. Soldiers: IV! Are we on fire? IV! Man down! Man down! MM: Keep going, brother. You wanna play? Michael Moriarty's Wife: It's really hard for him to not have his dad. MM: This little kid is in the middle of a war zone. Stephen Pink's Girlfriend: In the beginning, he's like, "Write something dirty!" George W. Bush: The world's newest democracy. MM: They're shooting at me. SP: You don't put 150,000 troops in there, and say we're there to create democracy. Soldier: We've got a drive through window at Burger King now. SP: We're here to create money. MM: I support George Bush. We're not there for the oil. Jon Baril: The worst thing in my life. SP: Baril, don't look at it, bud. Michael Moriarty's Wife: He's not the same person anymore. MM: I will not go back. Kevin Shangraw: The Iraqi people are who we are there to help β and we just killed one. Soldiers: Sergeant Smith is down! Sergeant Smith is down? There they are! Right there! Fire, fire! JB: It'll be a better country in 20 years, 'cause we were there. I hope. (Applause) Deborah Scranton: Thank you. One of the things I'd like to talk to you about is having a conversation about something that is difficult to talk about. And I'd like to relate an experience I had here at TED. I don't know how many of you might imagine it, but there's actually a TEDster who recently got back from Iraq. Paul? Come on, stand up. This is Paul Anthony. He served β (Applause) β with the Marines, and I want to tell you a little, brief story. We were one of the lucky ones to get in the class with the Sony cameras and the Vista software. Right? And we started talking. People will see my tag, and they'll see "The War Tapes," and then we'll start talking about war. We got in a conversation with some other people in the class, and it went on and on. I mean, we were there for an hour, talking. And it really highlighted something that I would like to ask you guys to think about and hopefully to help with, which is, I think a lot of us are very afraid to have conversations about war, and about politics. And really β because maybe we're going to disagree. Maybe it's going to get uncomfortable. How do we open it up to really be able to have a conversation? And you know, Paul was talking, and he then turned to Constance and said, "You know, I wouldn't have this conversation if she weren't here, because I know she has my back." And I want to say, I was nervous. Because I'm used to doing Q&As. I really related to what James was saying yesterday, because I'm behind the camera. You know, I can answer questions about my movie, but for me to come up and talk for 18 minutes is a really long time. So, I wanted to say, Paul, I'm happy you're here, because I know you have my back. This film was not about the Internet, but it could not have been made without it. The guys' tapes on average took two weeks to get from Iraq to me. In the meantime, the soldiers β we would email and IM. I didn't save all of them, because I didn't realize at the beginning that it would be something that I would want to keep track of. But there were 3,211 emails and IMs and text messages that I was able to save. The reason I quantify that is because we really embarked on this as a mutual journey to really get inside of it. So I wanted to show you a clip, and then I was going tell you a little bit of how it got put together. If we could roll the clip. (Video) SP: Today is sport. [Unclear] Radio: [Unclear] Christian soldiers. SP: We like to give these insurgents a fair chance. So, what we do, we ride with the windows down. Because, you know, we obviously have the advantage. I'm just kidding. We don't fucking ride with the goddam windows down. It's not true. Very unsafe. Whoa. Soldier: Right there. SP: All right, let's get over to that site. Be advised, we're leaving Taji right now. We believe that the blast was right outside the gate of Taji, we're heading to that location now. Soldier: That's a fucking car bomb! Soldier: Motherfuckers! Soldiers: Get your vest on! Hey, get over the fucking β yeah, yeah. Any one-four elements get to the gate! SP: Sheriff one-six, or any one-four elements, we need you at the gate of Taji right now, over. Soldier: I'll walk you through it. (Voices) SP: Stay low. Head over to the right. Get your bag, get your bag! (Screams) SP: It was mass casualties. Probably 20 dead, at least 20 or 30 wounded Iraqis. SP: It just looked like, you know, someone had thrown a quarter through a guy, and it was just like β there was no blood coming from the shrapnel wounds. Everything was cauterized, and it was just like there was a void going through the body. This is the scene north. They just removed a burnt body, or half a body from here. I don't think there was anything left from his abdominal down. This is blood. And you know, you walk, and you hear the pieces of skin. And that's it, that's all that's left. I remember giving three IVs, bandaging several wounded. Soldiers sitting in the corner of a sandbag wall, shaking and screaming. Medics who were terrified and couldn't perform. I later heard that Iraqi casualties were not to be treated in Taji. They can work on the post for pennies, but can't die there. They've got to die outside. If one of those incompetent medical officers told me to stop treatment, I would've slit his throat right there. 21:00 hours, and it's just our squad going through today's events in our heads, whether we want to or not. News Anchor: More violence in Iraq. Twin suicide car bombings killed eight Iraqis and wounded dozens more near a coalition base north of Baghdad. SP: We made the news. I feel exploited and proud at the same time. I've lost all faith in the media β a hapless joke I would much rather laugh at than become a part of. I should really thank God for saving my lucky ass. I'll do that, then I'm gonna jerk off. Because these pages smell like Linds, and there won't be any time for jerking off tomorrow. Another mission at 06:00. DS: Now β (Applause) β thanks. When I said earlier, to try and tell a story from the inside out, versus the outside in β part of what Chris said so eloquently in his introduction β is this melding. It's a new way of trying to make a documentary. When I met the guys, and 10 of them agreed to take cameras β in total, 21 ended up filming. Five soldiers filmed the entire time. There are three featured in the film. The way I learned about Taji was Steve Pink sent me an email, and in it, attached a photo of that burned body out at the car. And the tone from the email was, you know, it had been a very bad day, obviously. And I saw in my IM window that Mike Moriarty was at the base. So, I pinged Mike and I said, "Mike, can you please go get that interview with Pink?" Because the thing that very often is missing is, in the military what they call "hot wash." It's that immediate interview after something immediately happens, you know. And if you let time go by, it kind of softens and smooths the edges. And for me, I really wanted that. So, in order to get the intimacy, to share that experience with you, the guys β the two most popular mounts β there was a camera on the turret, the gun turret, and then on the dashboard of the Humvee. Most of the Humvees, we ended up mounting two cameras in them. So you get to experience that in real time, right? The interview that you see is the one that Mike went and did within 24 hours of that episode happening. Steve Pink reading his journal happened five months after he came home. I knew about that journal, but it was very, very private. And you know, you earn someone's trust, especially in doc filmmaking, through your relationship. So, it wasn't until five months after he was home that he would read that journal. Now, the news footage I put in there to try to show β you know, I think mainstream media tries to do the best they can in the format that they have. But the thing that I know you all have heard a lot of times, American soldiers saying, "Why don't they talk about the good stuff that we do?" OK, this is a perfect example. Pink's squad and another squad spent their entire day outside the wire. They didn't have to go outside the wire. There were not Americans hurt out there. They spent their entire day outside the wire trying to save Iraqi lives β the Iraqis who work on the post. So, when you may hear soldiers complaining, that's what they're talking about, you know? And I think it's such an amazing gift that they would share this as a way of bridging. And when I talk about that polarity I get at so many different Q&As, and people are really opinionated. But it seems like people don't want to hear so much, or listen, or try to have an exchange. And I'm as fiery as the next person, but I really think β you know, different speakers have talked about their concern for the world, and my concern is that we have to have these conversations. And we have to be able to go into scary places where we may, you know, we think we know. But we just have to leave that little bit of openness, to know. There's such a disconnect. And for me, it's trying to bridge that disconnect. I'll share one story. I get β I'm often asked, you know, for me, what have been some of the special moments from having worked on this film. And at screenings, inevitably β you know, as I'm sure all of you obviously do speaking stuff β usually you have people who hang around and want to ask you more questions. And usually, the first questions are, "Oh, what kind of cameras did you use?" Or you know, these things. But there's always a few guys, almost always, who are the last ones. And I've learned over time that those are always the soldiers. And they wait until pretty much everybody's gone. And for me, one of the most profound stories someone shared with me, that then became my story, was β for those of you who haven't seen the film, and it's not a spoiler β it's very common there are a lot of civilian accidents, where people get in front of Humvees and they get killed. In this film, there is a scene where an Iraqi woman is killed. A soldier came up to me and stood, you know really, pretty close, a foot away from me. He's a big guy. And he looked at me, and I smiled, and then I saw the tears start welling up in his eyes. And he wasn't going to blink. And he said, "My gunner was throwing candy." And I knew what he was going to say. The gunner was throwing candy. They used to throw candy to the kids. Kids got too close, very often. And he said, "I killed a child. And I'm a father. I have children. I haven't been able to tell my wife. I'm afraid she's going to think I'm a monster." I hugged him, of course, and I said, you know, "It's going to be OK." And he said, "I'm going to bring her to see your film. And then I'm going to tell her." So when I talk about a disconnect, it's not only for maybe those people who don't know a soldier, which there obviously are. You know, these days, it's not like World War II, where there was a war front and a home front, and everybody seemed involved. You can go for days here and not feel like there's a war going on. And often, I'll hear people say, who maybe know that I did this film, and they say, "Oh, you know, I'm against the war, but I support the soldiers." And I've started to ask them, "Well, that's nice. What are you doing? Are you volunteering at a VA? You go and see anybody? Do you, if you find out your neighbor's been, do you spend some time? Not necessarily ask questions, but see if they want to talk? Do you give money to any of the charities?" You know, obviously, like Dean Kamen's working on that amazing thing, but there's charities where you can sponsor computers for wounded soldiers. I think, I challenge us to say β to operationalize those terms, when we say we support someone, you know? Are you a friend to them? Do you really care? And I would just say it's my hope, and I would ask you guys to please, you know, reach out a hand. And really do give them a hug. Thank you. |
The search for humanity's roots | {0: 'Zeresenay "Zeray" Alemseged digs in the Ethiopian desert, looking for the earliest signs of humanity. His most exciting find: the 3.3-million-year-old bones of Selam, a 3-year-old hominid child, from the species <em>Australopithecus afarensis.</em>'} | TEDGlobal 2007 | I have 18 minutes to tell you what happened over the past six million years. All right. We all have come from a long way, here in Africa, and converged in this region of Africa, which is a place where 90 percent of our evolutionary process took place. And I say that not because I am African, but it's in Africa that you find the earliest evidence for human ancestors, upright walking traces, even the first technologies in the form of stone tools. So we all are Africans, and welcome home. All right. I'm a paleoanthropologist, and my job is to define man's place in nature and explore what makes us human. And today, I will use Selam, the earliest child ever discovered, to tell you a story of all of us. Selam is our most complete skeleton of a three-year-old girl who lived and died 3.3 million years ago. She belongs to the species known as Australopithecus afarensis. You don't need to remember that. That's the Lucy species, and was found by my research team in December of 2000 in an area called Dikika. It's in the northeastern part of Ethiopia. And Selam means peace in many Ethiopian languages. We use that name to celebrate peace in the region and in the planet. And the fact that it was the cover story of all these famous magazines gives you already an idea of her significance, I think. After I was invited by TED, I did some digging, because that's what we do, to know about my host. You don't just jump into an invitation. And I learned that the first technology appeared in the form of stone tools, 2.6 million years ago. First entertainment comes evidence from flutes that are 35,000 years old. And evidence for first design comes 75,000 years old β beads. And you can do the same with your genes and track them back in time. And DNA analysis of living humans and chimpanzees teaches us today that we diverged sometime around seven million years ago and that these two species share over 98 percent of the same genetic material. I think knowing this is a very useful context within which we can think of our ancestry. However, DNA analysis informs us only about the beginning and the end, telling us nothing about what happened in the middle. So, for us, paleoanthropologists, our job is to find the hard evidence, the fossil evidence, to fill in this gap and see the different stages of development. Because it's only when you do that, that you can talk about β (Laughter) β it's only when you do that, [that] you can talk about how we looked like and how we behaved at different times, and how those likes and looks and behaviors changed through time. That then gives you an access to explore the biological mechanisms and forces that are responsible for this gradual change that made us what we are today. But finding the hard evidence is a very complicated endeavor. It's a systematic and scientific approach, which takes you to places that are remote, hot, hostile and often with no access. Just to give you an example, when I went to Dikika, where Selam was found, in '99 β and it's about 500 kilometers from Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia. It took us only seven hours to do the first 470 kilometers of the 500, but took four, solid hours to do the last only 30 kilometers. With the help of the locals and using just shovels and picks, I made my way. I was the first person to actually drive a car to the spot. When you get there, this is what you see, and it's the vastness of the place which makes you feel helpless and vulnerable. And once you make it there, the big question is where to start. (Laughter) And you find nothing for years and years. When I go to places like this, which are paleontological sites, it's like going to a game park, an extinct game park. But what you find are not the human remains, such as Selam and Lucy, on a day-to-day basis. You find elephants, rhinos, monkeys, pigs, etc. But you could ask, how could these large mammals live in this desert environment? Of course, they cannot, but I'm telling you already that the environment and the carrying capacity of this region was drastically different from what we have today. A very important environmental lesson could be learned from this. Anyway, once we made it there, then it's a game park, as I said, an extinct game park. And our ancestors lived in that game park, but were just the minorities. They were not as successful and as widespread as the Homo sapiens that we are. To tell you just an example, an anecdote about their rarity, I was going to this place every year and would do fieldwork here, and the assistants, of course, helped me do the surveys. They would find a bone and tell me, "Here is what you're looking for." I would say, "No, that's an elephant." Again, another one, "That's a monkey." "That's a pig," etc. So one of my assistants, who never went to school, said to me, "Listen, Zeray. You either don't know what you're looking for, or you're looking in the wrong place," he said. (Laughter) And I said, "Why?" "Because there were elephants and lions, and the people were scared and went somewhere else. Let's go somewhere else." Well, he was very tired, and it's really tiring. It was then, after such hard work and many frustrating years that we found Selam, and you see the face here covered by sandstone. And here is actually the spinal column and the whole torso encased in a sandstone block, because she was buried by a river. What you have here seems to be nothing, but contains an incredible amount of scientific information that helps us explore what makes us human. This is the earliest and most complete juvenile human ancestor ever found in the history of paleoanthropology, an amazing piece of our long, long history. There were these three people and me, and I am taking the pictures, that's why I am not in. How would you feel if you were me? You have something extraordinary in your hand, but you are in the middle of nowhere? The feeling I had was a deep and quiet happiness and excitement, of course accompanied by a huge sense of responsibility, of making sure everything is safe. Here is a close-up of the fossil, after five years of cleaning, preparation and description, which was very long, as I had to expose the bones from the sandstone block I just showed you in the previous slide. It took five years. In a way, this was like the second birth for the child, after 3.3 million years, but the labor was very long. And here is full scale β it's a tiny bone. And in the middle is the minister of Ethiopian tourism, who came to visit the National Museum of Ethiopia while I was working there. And you see me worried and trying to protect my child, because you don't leave anyone with this kind of child, even a minister. So then, once you've done that, the next stage is to know what it is. (Laughter) Once that was done, then it was possible to compare. We were able to tell that she belonged to the human family tree because the legs, the foot, and some features clearly showed that she walked upright, and upright walking is a hallmark in humanity. But in addition, if you compare the skull with a comparably aged chimpanzee and little George Bush here, you see that you have vertical forehead. And you see that in humans, because of the development of the pre-frontal cortex, it's called. You don't see that in chimpanzees, and you don't see this very projecting canine. So she belongs to our family tree, but within that, of course, you do detailed analysis, and we know now that she belongs to the Lucy species, known as Australopithecus afarensis. The next exciting question is, girl or boy? And how old was she when she died? You can determine the sex of the individual based on the size of the teeth. How? You know, in primates, there is this phenomenon called sexual dimorphism, which simply means males are larger than females and males have larger teeth than the females. But to do that, you need the permanent dentition, which you don't see here, because what you have here are the baby teeth. But using the CT scanning technology, which is normally used for medical purposes, you can go deep into the mouth and come up with this beautiful image showing you both the baby teeth here and the still-growing adult teeth here. So when you measure those teeth, it was clear that she turned out to be a girl with very small canine teeth. And to know how old she was when she died, what you do is you do an informed estimate, and you say, how much time would be required to form this amount of teeth, and the answer was three. So, this girl died when she was about three, 3.3 million years ago. So, with all that information, the big question is β what do we actually β what does she tell us? To answer this question, we can phrase another question. What do we actually know about our ancestors? We want to know how they looked like, how they behaved, how they walked around, and how they lived and grew up. And among the answers that you can get from this skeleton are included: first, this skeleton documents, for the first time, how infants looked over three million years ago. And second, she tells us that she walked upright, but had some adaptation for tree climbing. And more interesting, however, is the brain in this child was still growing. At age three, if you have a still-growing brain, it's a human behavior. In chimps, by age three, the brain is formed over 90 percent. That's why they can cope with their environment very easily after birth β faster than us, anyway. But in humans, we continue to grow our brains. That's why we need care from our parents. But that care means also you learn. You spend more time with your parents. And that's very characteristic of humans and it's called childhood, which is this extended dependence of human children on their family or parents. So, the still-growing brain in this individual tells us that childhood, which requires an incredible social organization, a very complex social organization, emerged over three million years ago. So, by being at the cusp of our evolutionary history, Selam unites us all and gives us a unique account on what makes us human. But not everything was human, and I will give you a very exciting example. This is called the hyoid bone. It's a bone which is right here. It supports your tongue from behind. It's, in a way, your voice box. It determines the type of voice you produce. It was not known in the fossil record, and we have it in this skeleton. When we did the analysis of this bone, it was clear that it looked very chimp-like, chimpanzee-like. So if you were there 3.3 million years ago, to hear when this girl was crying out for her mother, she would have sounded more like a chimpanzee than a human. Maybe you're wondering, "So, you see this ape feature, human feature, ape feature. What does that tell us?" You know, that is very exciting for us, because it demonstrates that things were changing slowly and progressively, and that evolution is in the making. To summarize the significance of this fossil, we can say the following. Up to now, the knowledge that we had about our ancestors came essentially from adult individuals because the fossils, the baby fossils, were missing. They don't preserve well, as you know. So the knowledge that we had about our ancestors, on how they looked like, how they behaved, was kind of biased toward adults. Imagine somebody coming from Mars and his job is to report on the type of people occupying our planet Earth, and you hide all the babies, the children, and he goes back and reports. Can you imagine how much biased his report would be? That's what somehow we were doing so far in the absence of the fossil children, so I think the new fossil fixes this problem. So, I think the most important question at the end is, what do we actually learn from specimens like this and from our past in general? Of course, in addition to extracting this huge amount of scientific information as to what makes us human, you know, the many human ancestors that have existed over the past six million years β and there are more than 10 β they did not have the knowledge, the technology and sophistications that we, Homo sapiens, have today. But if this species, ancient species, would travel in time and see us today, they would very much be very proud of their legacy, because they became the ancestors of the most successful species in the universe. And they were probably not aware of this future legacy, but they did great. Now the question is, we Homo sapiens today are in a position to decide about the future of our planet, possibly more. So the question is, are we up to the challenge? And can we really do better than these primitive, small-brained ancestors? Among the most pressing challenges that our species is faced with today are the chronic problems of Africa. Needless to list them here, and there are more competent people to talk about this. Still, in my opinion, we have two choices. One is to continue to see a poor, ill, crying Africa, carrying guns, that depends on other people forever, or to promote an Africa which is confident, peaceful, independent, but cognizant of its huge problems and great values at the same time. I am for the second option, and I'm sure many of you are. And the key is to promote a positive African attitude towards Africa. That's because we Africans concentrate β I am from Ethiopia, by the way β we concentrate too much on how we are seen from elsewhere, or from outside. I think it's important to promote in a more positive way on how we see ourselves. That's what I call positive African attitude. So finally, I would like to say, so let's help Africa walk upright and forward, then we all can be proud of our future legacy as a species. Thank you. (Applause) |
Designing for simplicity | {0: 'John Maeda, the former president of the Rhode Island School of Design, is dedicated to linking design and technology. Through the software tools, web pages and books he creates, he spreads his philosophy of elegant simplicity.'} | TED2007 | On simplicity. What a great way to start. First of all, I've been watching this trend where we have these books like such and such "For Dummies." Do you know these books, these such and such "For Dummies?" My daughters pointed out that I'm very similar looking, so this is a bit of a problem. (Laughter) But I was looking online at Amazon.com for other books like this. You know, there's also something called the "Complete Idiot's Guide?" There's a sort of business model around being stupid in some sense. We like to have technology make us feel bad, for some strange reason. But I really like that, so I wrote a book called "The Laws of Simplicity." I was in Milan last week, for the Italian launch. It's kind of a book about questions, questions about simplicity. Very few answers. I'm also wondering myself, what is simplicity? Is it good? Is it bad? Is complexity better? I'm not sure. After I wrote "The Laws of Simplicity," I was very tired of simplicity, as you can imagine. And so in my life, I've discovered that vacation is the most important skill for any kind of over-achiever. Because your companies will always take away your life, but they can never take away your vacation β in theory. (Laughter) So, I went to the Cape last summer to hide from simplicity, and I went to the Gap, because I only have black pants. So I went and bought khaki shorts or whatever, and unfortunately, their branding was all about "Keep It Simple." (Laughter) I opened up a magazine, and Visa's branding was, "Business Takes Simplicity." I develop photographs, and Kodak said, "Keep It Simple." So, I felt kind of weird that simplicity was sort of following me around. So, I turned on the TV, and I don't watch TV very much, but you know this person? This is Paris Hilton, apparently. And she has this show, "The Simple Life." So I watched this. It's not very simple, a little bit confusing. (Laughter) So, I looked for a different show to watch. So, I opened up this TV Guide thing, and on the E! channel, this "Simple Life" show is very popular. They'll play it over, and over, and over. (Laughter) So it was traumatizing, actually. So, I wanted to escape again, so I went out to my car. And Cape Cod, there are idyllic roads, and all of us can drive in this room. And when you drive, these signs are very important. It's a very simple sign, it says, "road" and "road approaching." So I'm mostly driving along, okay, and then I saw this sign. (Laughter) So, I thought complexity was attacking me suddenly, so I thought, "Ah, simplicity. Very important." But then I thought, "Oh, simplicity. What would that be like on a beach? What if the sky was 41 percent gray? Wouldn't that be the perfect sky?" I mean that simplicity sky. But in reality, the sky looked like this. It was a beautiful, complex sky. You know, with the pinks and blues. We can't help but love complexity. We're human beings: we love complex things. We love relationships β very complex. So we love this kind of stuff. I'm at this place called the Media Lab. Maybe some of you guys have heard of this place. It's designed by I. M. Pei, one of the premier modernist architects. Modernism means white box, and it's a perfect white box. (Laughter) And some of you guys are entrepreneurs, etc., whatever. Last month, I was at Google, and, boy, that cafeteria, man. You guys have things here in Silicon Valley like stock options. See, in academia, we get titles, lots of titles. Last year at TED, these were all my titles. I had a lot of titles. I have a default title as a father of a bunch of daughters. This year at TED, I'm happy to report that I have new titles, in addition to my previous titles. Another "Associate Director of Research." And this also happened, so I have five daughters now. (Laughter) That's my baby Reina. (Applause) Thank you. And so, my life is much more complex because of the baby, actually, but that's okay. We will still stay married, I think. But looking way back, when I was a child β you see, I grew up in a tofu factory in Seattle. Many of you may not like tofu because you haven't had good tofu, but tofu's a good food. It's a very simple kind of food. It's very hard work to make tofu. As a child, we used to wake up at 1 a.m. and work till 6 p.m., six days a week. My father was kind of like Andy Grove, paranoid of the competition. So often, seven days a week. Family business equals child labor. We were a great model. So, I loved going to school. School was great, and maybe going to school helped me get to this Media Lab place, I'm not sure. (Laughter) Thank you. But the Media Lab is an interesting place, and it's important to me because as a student, I was a computer science undergrad, and I discovered design later on in my life. And there was this person, Muriel Cooper. Who knows Muriel Cooper? Muriel Cooper? Wasn't she amazing? Muriel Cooper. She was wacky. And she was a TEDster, exactly, and she showed us, she showed the world how to make the computer beautiful again. And she's very important in my life, because she's the one that told me to leave MIT and go to art school. It was the best advice I ever got. So I went to art school, because of her. She passed away in 1994, and I was hired back to MIT to try to fill her shoes, but it's so hard. This amazing person, Muriel Cooper. When I was in Japan β I went to an art school in Japan β I had a nice sort of situation, because somehow I was connected to Paul Rand. Some of you guys know Paul Rand, the greatest graphic designer β I'm sorry β out there. The great graphic designer Paul Rand designed the IBM logo, the Westinghouse logo. He basically said, "I've designed everything." And also Ikko Tanaka was a very important mentor in my life β the Paul Rand of Japan. He designed most of the major icons of Japan, like Issey Miyake's brand and also Muji. When you have mentors β and yesterday, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar talked about mentors, these people in your life β the problem with mentors is that they all die. This is a sad thing, but it's actually a happy thing in a way, because you can remember them in their pure form. I think that the mentors that we all meet sort of humanize us. When you get older, and you're all freaked out, whatever, the mentors calm us down. And I'm grateful for my mentors, and I'm sure all of you are too. Because the human thing is very hard when you're at MIT. The T doesn't stand for "human," it stands for "technology." And because of that, I always wondered about this human thing. So, I've always been Googling this word, "human," to find out how many hits I get. And in 2001, I had 26 million hits, and for "computer," because computers are against humans a bit, I have 42 million hits. Let me do an Al Gore here. So, if you sort of compare that, like this, you'll see that computer versus human β I've been tracking this for the last year β computer versus human over the last year has changed. It used to be kind of two to one. Now, humans are catching up. Very good, us humans! We're catching up with the computers. In the simplicity realm, it's also interesting. So if you compare complexities to simplicity, it's also catching up in a way, too. So, somehow humans and simplicity are intertwined, I think. I have a confession: I'm not a man of simplicity. I spent my entire early career making complex stuff. Lots of complex stuff. I wrote computer programs to make complex graphics like this. I had clients in Japan to make really complex stuff like this. And I've always felt bad about it, in a sense. So, I hid in a time dimension. I built things in a time-graphics dimension. I did this series of calendars for Shiseido. This is a floral theme calendar in 1997, and this is a firework calendar. So, you launch the number into space, because the Japanese believe that when you see fireworks, you're cooler for some reason. This is why they have fireworks in the summer. A very extreme culture. Lastly, this is a fall-based calendar, because I have so many leaves in my yard. So this is the leaves in my yard, essentially. And so I made a lot of these types of things. I've been lucky to have been there before people made these kind of things, and so I made all this kind of stuff that messes with your eyes. I feel kind of bad about that. Tomorrow, Paola Antonelli is speaking. I love Paola. She has this show right now at MoMA, where some of these early works are here on display at MoMA, on the walls. If you're in New York, please go and see that. But I've had a problem, because I make all this flying stuff and people say, "Oh, I know your work. You're the guy that makes eye candy." And when you're told this, you feel kind of weird. "Eye candy" β sort of pejorative, don't you think? So, I say, "No, I make eye meat," instead. (Laughter) And eye meat is something different, something more fibrous, something more powerful, perhaps. But what could that be, eye meat? I've been interested in computer programs all my life, actually. Computer programs are essentially trees, and when you make art with a computer program, there's kind of a problem. Whenever you make art with a computer program, you're always on the tree, and the paradox is that for excellent art, you want to be off the tree. So, this is sort of a complication I've found. So, to get off the tree, I began to use my old computers. I took these to Tokyo in 2001 to make computer objects. This is a new way to type, on my old, color Classic. You can't type very much on this. I also discovered that an IR mouse responds to CRT emissions and starts to move by itself, so this is a self-drawing machine. And also, one year, the G3 Bondi Blue thing β that caddy would come out, like, dangerous, like, "whack," like that. But I thought, "This is very interesting. What if I make like a car crash test?" So I have a crash test. (Laughter) And sort of measure the impact. Stuff like this are things I made, just to sort of understand what these things are. (Laughter) Shortly after this, 9/11 happened, and I was very depressed. I was concerned with contemporary art that was all about piss, and sort of really sad things, and so I wanted to think about something happy. So I focused on food as my area β these sort of clementine peel things. In Japan, it's a wonderful thing to remove the clementine peel just in one piece. Who's done that before? One-piece clementine? Oh, you guys are missing out, if you haven't done it yet. It was very good, and I discovered I can make sculptures out of this, actually, in different forms. If you dry them quick, you can make, like, elephants and steers and stuff, and my wife didn't like these, because they mold, so I had to stop that. So, I went back to the computer, and I bought five large fries, and scanned them all. And I was looking for some kind of food theme, and I wrote some software to automatically lay out french-fry images. And as a child, I'd hear that song, you know, "Oh, beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain," so I made this amber waves image. It's sort of a Midwest cornfield out of french fries. And also, as a child, I was the fattest kid in class, so I used to love Cheetos. Oh, I love Cheetos, yummy. So, I wanted to play with Cheetos in some way. I wasn't sure where to go with this. I invented Cheeto paint. Cheeto paint is a very simple way to paint with Cheetos. (Laughter) I discovered that Cheetos are good, expressive material. And with these Cheetos, I began to think, "What can I make with these Cheetos?" And so, I began to crinkle up potato chip flecks, and also pretzels. I was looking for some kind of form, and in the end, I made 100 butter-fries. Do you get it? (Laughter) And each butter-fry is composed of different pieces. People ask me how they make the antenna. Sometimes, they find a hair in the food. That's my hair. My hair's clean β it's okay. I'm a tenured professor, which means, basically, I don't have to work anymore. It's a strange business model. I can come into work everyday and staple five pieces of paper and just stare at it with my latte. End of story. (Laughter) But I realized that life could be very boring, so I've been thinking about life, and I notice that my camera β my digital camera versus my car, a very strange thing. The car is so big, the camera is so small, yet the manual for the camera is so much bigger than the car manual. It doesn't make any sense. (Laughter) So, I was in the Cape one time, and I typed the word "simplicity," and I discovered, in this weird, M. Night Shyamalan way, that I discovered [the] letters, M, I, T. You know the word? In the words "simplicity" and "complexity," M, I, T occur in perfect sequence. It's a bit eerie, isn't it? So, I thought, maybe I'll do this for the next twenty years or something. And I wrote this book, "The Laws of Simplicity." It's a very short, simple book. There are ten laws and three keys. The ten laws and three keys β I won't go over them because that's why I have a book, and also that's why it's on the Web for free. But the laws are kind of like sushi in a way: there are all kinds. In Japan, they say that sushi is challenging. You know the uni is the most challenging, so number ten is challenging. People hate number ten like they hate uni, actually. The three keys are easy to eat, so this is anago, cooked already, so easy to eat. So enjoy your sushi meal later, with the laws of simplicity. Because I want to simplify them for you. Because that's what this is about. I have to simplify this thing. So, if I simplify the laws of simplicity, I have what's called the cookie versus laundry thing. Anyone who has kids knows that if you offer a kid a big cookie or a small cookie, which cookie are they going to take? The big cookie. You can say the small cookie has Godiva chocolate bits in it, but it doesn't work. They want the big cookie. But if you offer kids two piles of laundry to fold, the small pile or the big pile, which will they choose? Strangely, not the big pile. So, I think it's as simple as this. You know, when you want more, it's because you want to enjoy it. When you want less, it's because it's about work. And so, to boil it all down, simplicity is about living life with more enjoyment and less pain. I think this is sort of simple more versus less. Basically, it always depends. This book I wrote because I want to figure out life. I love life. I love being alive. I like to see things. And so life is a big question, I think, in simplicity, because you're trying to simplify your life. And I just love to see the world. The world is an amazing place. By being at TED, we see so many things at one time. And I can't help but enjoy looking at everything in the world. Like everything you see, every time you wake up. It's such a joy to sort of experience everything in the world. From everything from a weird hotel lobby, to Saran wrap placed over your window, to this moment where I had my road in front of my house paved dark black, and this white moth was sitting there dying in the sun. And so, this whole thing has struck me as exciting to be here, because life is finite. This was given to me by the chairman of Shiseido. He's an expert in aging. This horizontal axis is how old you are β twelve years old, twenty-four years old, seventy-four, ninety-six years old β and this is some medical data. So, brain strength increases up to 60, and then after 60, it sort of goes down. Kind of depressing in a way. Also, if you look at your physical strength. You know, I have a lot of cocky freshmen at MIT, so I tell them, "Oh, your bodies are really getting stronger and stronger, but in your late twenties and mid-thirties, cells, they die." OK. It gets them to work harder, sometimes. And if you have your vision, vision is interesting. As you age from infant age, your vision gets better, and maybe in your late teens, early twenties, you're looking for a mate, and your vision goes after that. (Laughter) Your social responsibility is very interesting. So, as you get older, you may, like, have kids, whatever. And then the kids graduate, and you have no responsibility any more β that's very good, too. But if any of you people ask, "What actually goes up? Does anything go up? What's the positive part of this, you know?" I think wisdom always goes up. I love these eighty-year-old, ninety-year-old guys and women. They have so many thoughts, and they have so much wisdom, and I think β you know, this TED thing, I've come here. And this is the fourth time, and I come here for this wisdom, I think. This whole TED effect, it sort of ups your wisdom, somehow. And I'm so glad to be here, and I'm very grateful to be here, Chris. And this is an amazing experience for me as well. |
10 ways the world could end | {0: 'Stephen Petranek untangles emerging technologies to predict which will become fixtures of our future lives -- and which could potentially save them. '} | TED2002 | The advances that have taken place in astronomy, cosmology and biology, in the last 10 years, are really extraordinary β to the point where we know more about our universe and how it works than many of you might imagine. But there was something else that I've noticed as those changes were taking place, as people were starting to find out that hmm ... yeah, there really is a black hole at the center of every galaxy. The science writers and editors β I shouldn't say science writers, I should say people who write about science β and editors would sit down over a couple of beers, after a hard day of work, and start talking about some of these incredible perceptions about how the universe works. And they would inevitably end up in what I thought was a very bizarre place, which is ways the world could end very suddenly. And that's what I want to talk about today. (Laughter) Ah, you laugh, you fools. (Laughter) (Voice: Can we finish up a little early?) (Laughter) Yeah, we need the time! Stephen Petranek: At first, it all seemed a little fantastical to me, but after challenging a lot of these ideas, I began to take a lot of them seriously. And then September 11 happened, and I thought, ah, God, I can't go to the TED conference and talk about how the world is going to end. Nobody wants to hear that. Not after this! And that got me into a discussion with some other people, other scientists, about maybe some other subjects, and one of the guys I talked to, who was a neuroscientist, said, "You know, I think there are a lot of solutions to the problems you brought up," and reminds me of Michael's talk yesterday and his mother saying you can't have a solution if you don't have a problem. So, we went out looking for solutions to ways that the world might end tomorrow, and lo and behold, we found them. Which leads me to a videotape of a President Bush press conference from a couple of weeks ago. Can we run that, Andrew? President George W. Bush: Whatever it costs to defend our security, and whatever it costs to defend our freedom, we must pay it. SP: I agree with the president. He wants two trillion dollars to protect us from terrorists next year, a two-trillion-dollar federal budget, which will land us back into deficit spending real fast. But terrorists aren't the only threat we face. There are really serious calamities staring us in the eye that we're in the same kind of denial about that we were about terrorism, and what could've happened on September 11. I would propose, therefore, that if we took 10 billion dollars from that 2.13 trillion dollar budget β which is two one hundredths of that budget β and we doled out a billion dollars to each one of these problems I'm going to talk to you about, the vast majority could be solved, and the rest we could deal with. So, I hope you find this both fascinating β I'm fascinated by this kind of stuff, I gotta admit β to me these are Richard's cockroaches. But I also hope, because I think the people in this room can literally change the world, I hope you take some of this stuff away with you, and when you have an opportunity to be influential, that you try to get some heavy-duty money spent on some of these ideas. So let's start. Number 10: we lose the will to survive. We live in an incredible age of modern medicine. We are all much healthier than we were 20 years ago. People around the world are getting better medicine β but mentally, we're falling apart. The World Health Organization now estimates that one out of five people on the planet is clinically depressed. And the World Health Organization also says that depression is the biggest epidemic that humankind has ever faced. Soon, genetic breakthroughs and even better medicine are going to allow us to think of 100 as a normal lifespan. A female child born tomorrow, on average β median β will live to age 83. Our life longevity is going up almost a year for every year that passes. Now the problem with all of this, getting older, is that people over 65 are the most likely people to commit suicide. So, what are the solutions? We don't really have mental health insurance in this country, and it's β (Applause) β it's really a crime. Something like 98 percent of all people with depression, and I mean really severe depression β I have a friend with stunningly severe depression β this is a curable disease, with present medicine and present technology. But it is often a combination of talk therapy and pills. Pills alone don't do it, especially in clinically depressed people. You ought to be able to go to a psychiatrist or a psychologist, and put down your 10-dollar copay, and get treated, just like you do when you got a cut on your arm. It's ridiculous. Secondly, drug companies are not going to develop really sophisticated psychoactive drugs. We know that most mental illnesses have a biological component that can be dealt with. And we know just an amazing amount more about the brain now than we did 10 years ago. We need a pump-push from the federal government, through NIH and National Science β NSF β and places like that to start helping the drug companies develop some advanced psychoactive drugs. Moving on. Number nine β don't laugh β aliens invade Earth. Ten years ago, you couldn't have found an astronomer β well, very few astronomers β in the world who would've told you that there are any planets anywhere outside our solar system. 1995, we found three. The count now is up to 80 β we're finding about two or three a month. All of the ones we've found, by the way, are in this little, teeny, tiny corner where we live, in the Milky Way. There must be millions of planets in the Milky Way, and as Carl Sagan insisted for many years, and was laughed at for it, there must be billions and billions in the universe. In a few years, NASA is going to launch four or five telescopes out to Jupiter, where there's less dust, and start looking for Earth-like planets, which we cannot see with present technology, nor detect. It's becoming obvious that the chance that life does not exist elsewhere in the universe, and probably fairly close to us, is a fairly remote idea. And the chance that some of it isn't more intelligent than ours is also a remote idea. Remember, we've only been an advanced civilization β an industrial civilization, if you would β for 200 years. Although every time I go to Pompeii, I'm amazed that they had the equivalent of a McDonald's on every street corner, too. So, I don't know how much civilization really has progressed since AD 79, but there's a great likelihood. I really believe this, and I don't believe in aliens, and I don't believe there are any aliens on the Earth or anything like that. But there's a likelihood that we will confront a civilization that is more intelligent than our own. Now, what will happen? What if they come to, you know, suck up our oceans for the hydrogen? And swat us away like flies, the way we swat away flies when we go into the rainforest and start logging it. We can look at our own history. The late physicist Gerard O'Neill said, "Advanced Western civilization has had a destructive effect on all primitive civilizations it has come in contact with, even in those cases where every attempt was made to protect and guard the primitive civilization." If the aliens come visiting, we're the primitive civilization. So, what are the solutions to this? (Laughter) Thank God you can all read! It may seem ridiculous, but we have a really lousy history of anticipating things like this and actually being prepared for them. How much energy and money does it take to actually have a plan to negotiate with an advanced species? Secondly β and you're going to hear more from me about this β we have to become an outward-looking, space-faring nation. We have got to develop the idea that the Earth doesn't last forever, our sun doesn't last forever. If we want humanity to last forever, we have to colonize the Milky Way. And that is not something that is beyond comprehension at this point. (Applause) It'll also help us a lot, if we meet an advanced civilization along the way, if we're trying to be an advanced civilization. Number eight β (Voice: Steve, that's what I'm doing after TED.) (Laughter) (Applause) SP: You've got it! You've got the job. Number eight: the ecosystem collapses. Last July, in Science, the journal Science, 19 oceanographers published a very, very unusual article. It wasn't really a research report; it was a screed. They said, we've been looking at the oceans for a long time now, and we want to tell you they're not in trouble, they're near collapse. Many other ecosystems on Earth are in real, real danger. We're living in a time of mass extinctions that exceeds the fossil record by a factor of 10,000. We have lost 25 percent of the unique species in Hawaii in the last 20 years. California is expected to lose 25 percent of its species in the next 40 years. Somewhere in the Amazon forest is the marginal tree. You cut down that tree, the rain forest collapses as an ecosystem. There's really a tree like that out there. That's really what it comes to. And when that ecosystem collapses, it could take a major ecosystem with it, like our atmosphere. So, what do we do about this? What are the solutions? There is some modeling of ecosystems going on now. The problem with ecosystems is that we understand them so poorly, that we don't know they're really in trouble until it's almost too late. We need to know earlier that they're getting in trouble, and we need to be able to pump possible solutions into models. And with the kind of computing power we have now, there is, as I say, some of this going on, but it needs money. National Science Foundation needs to say β you know, almost all the money that's spent on science in this country comes from the federal government, one way or another. And they get to prioritize, you know? There are people at the National Science Foundation who get to say, this is the most important thing. This is one of the things they ought to be thinking more about. Secondly, we need to create huge biodiversity reserves on the planet, and start moving them around. There's been an experiment for the last four or five years on the Georges Bank, or the Grand Banks off of Newfoundland. It's a no-take fishing zone. They can't fish there for a radius of 200 miles. And an amazing thing has happened: almost all the fish have come back, and they're reproducing like crazy. We're going to have to start doing this around the globe. We're going to have to have no-take zones. We're going to have to say, no more logging in the Amazon for 20 years. Let it recover, before we start logging again. (Applause) Number seven: particle accelerator mishap. You all remember Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber? One of the things he raved about was that a particle accelerator experiment could go haywire and set off a chain reaction that would destroy the world. A lot of very sober-minded physicists, believe it or not, have had exactly the same thought. This spring β there's a collider at Brookhaven, on Long Island β this spring, it's going to have an experiment in which it creates black holes. They are expecting to create little, tiny black holes. They expect them to evaporate. (Laughter) I hope they're right. (Laughter) Other collider experiments β there's one that's going to take place next summer at CERN β have the possibility of creating something called strangelets, which are kind of like antimatter. Whenever they hit other matter, they destroy it and obliterate it. Most physicists say that the accelerators we have now are not really powerful enough to create black holes and strangelets that we need to worry about, and they're probably right. But, all around the world, in Japan, in Canada, there's talk about this, of reviving this in the United States. We shut one down that was going to be big. But there's talk of building very big accelerators. What can we do about this? What are the solutions? We've got the fox watching the henhouse here. We need to β we need the advice of particle physicists to talk about particle physics and what should be done in particle physics, but we need some outside thinking and watchdogging of what's going on with these experiments. Secondly, we have a natural laboratory surrounding the Earth. We have an electromagnetic field around the Earth, and it's constantly bombarded by high-energy particles, like protons. And in my opinion, we don't spend enough time looking at that natural laboratory and figuring out first what's safe to do on Earth. Number six: biotech disaster. It's one of my favorite ones, because we've done several stories on Bt corn. Bt corn is a corn that creates its own pesticide to kill a corn borer. You may of heard of it β heard it called StarLink, especially when all those taco shells were taken out of the supermarkets about a year and a half ago. This stuff was supposed to only be feed for animals in the United States, and it got into the human food supply, and somebody should've figured out that it would get in the human food supply very easily. But the thing that's alarming is a couple of months ago, in Mexico, where Bt corn and all genetically altered corn is totally illegal, they found Bt corn genes in wild corn plants. Now, corn originated, we think, in Mexico. This is the genetic biodiversity storehouse of corn. This brings back a skepticism that has gone away recently, that superweeds and superpests could spread around the world, from biotechnology, that literally could destroy the world's food supply in very short order. So, what do we do about that? We treat biotechnology with the same scrutiny we apply to nuclear power plants. It's that simple. This is an amazingly unregulated field. When the StarLink disaster happened, there was a battle between the EPA and the FDA over who really had authority, and over what parts of this, and they didn't get it straightened out for months. That's kind of crazy. Number five, one of my favorites: reversal of the Earth's magnetic field. Believe it or not, this happens every few hundred thousand years, and has happened many times in our history. North Pole goes to the South, South Pole goes to the North, and vice versa. But what happens, as this occurs, is that we lose our magnetic field around the Earth over the period of about 100 years, and that means that all these cosmic rays and particles that are to come streaming at us from the sun, that this field protects us from, are β well, basically, we're gonna fry. (Laughter) (Voice: Steve, I have some additional hats downstairs.) SP: So, what can we do about this? Oh, by the way, we're overdue. It's been 780,000 years since this happened. So, it should have happened about 480,000 years ago. Oh, and here's one other thing. Scientists think now our magnetic field may be diminished by about five percent. So, maybe we're in the throes of it. One of the problems of trying to figure out how healthy the Earth is, is that we have β you know, we don't have good weather data from 60 years ago, much less data on things like the ozone layer. So, there's a fairly simple solution to this. There's going to be a lot of cheap rocketry that's going to come online in about six or seven years that gets us into the low atmosphere very cheaply. You know, we can make ozone from car tailpipes. It's not hard: it's just three oxygen atoms. If you brought the entire ozone layer down to the surface of the Earth, it would be the thickness of two pennies, at 14 pounds per square inch. You don't need that much up there. We need to learn how to repair and replenish the Earth's ozone layer. (Applause) Number four: giant solar flares. Solar flares are enormous magnetic outbursts from the Sun that bombard the Earth with high-speed subatomic particles. So far, our atmosphere has done, and our magnetic field has done pretty well protecting us from this. Occasionally, we get a flare from the Sun that causes havoc with communications and so forth, and electricity. But the alarming thing is that astronomers recently have been studying stars that are similar to our Sun, and they've found that a number of them, when they're about the age of our Sun, brighten by a factor of as much as 20. Doesn't last for very long. And they think these are super-flares, millions of times more powerful than any flares we've had from our Sun so far. Obviously, we don't want one of those. (Laughter) There's a flip side to it. In studying stars like our Sun, we've found that they go through periods of diminishment, when their total amount of energy that's expelled from them goes down by maybe one percent. One percent doesn't sound like a lot, but it would cause one hell of an ice age here. So, what can we do about this? (Laughter) Start terraforming Mars. This is one of my favorite subjects. I wrote a story about this in Life magazine in 1993. This is rocket science, but it's not hard rocket science. Everything that we need to make an atmosphere on Mars, and to make a livable planet on Mars, is probably there. And you just, literally, have to send little nuclear factories up there that gobble up the iron oxide on the surface of Mars and spit out the oxygen. The problem is it takes 300 years to terraform Mars, minimum. Really more like 500 years to do it right. There's no reason why we shouldn't start now. (Laughter) Number three β isn't this stuff cool? (Laughter) A new global epidemic. People have been at war with germs ever since there have been people, and from time to time, the germs sure get the upper hand. In 1918, we had a flu epidemic in the United States that killed 20 million people. That was back when the population was around 100 million people. The bubonic plague in Europe, in the Middle Ages, killed one out of four Europeans. AIDS is coming back. Ebola seems to be rearing its head with much too much frequency, and old diseases like cholera are becoming resistant to antibiotics. We've all learned what β the kind of panic that can occur when an old disease rears its head, like anthrax. The worst possibility is that a very simple germ, like staph, for which we have one antibiotic that still works, mutates. And we know staph can do amazing things. A staph cell can be next to a muscle cell in your body and borrow genes from it when antibiotics come, and change and mutate. The danger is that some germ like staph will be β will mutate into something that's really virulent, very contagious, and will sweep through populations before we can do anything about it. That's happened before. About 12,000 years ago, there was a massive wave of mammal extinctions in the Americas, and that is thought to have been a virulent disease. So, what can we do about it? It is nuts. We give antibiotics β (Applause) β every cow, every lamb, every chicken, they get antibiotics every day, all. You know, you go to a restaurant, you eat fish, I got news for you, it's all farmed. You know, you gotta ask when you go to a restaurant if it's a wild fish, cause they're not going to tell you. We're giving away the code. This is like being at war and giving somebody your secret code. We're telling the germs out there how to fight us. We gotta fix that. We gotta outlaw that right away. Secondly, our public health system, as we saw with anthrax, is a real disaster. We have a real, major outbreak of disease in the United States, we are not prepared to cope with it. Now, there is money in the federal budget, next year, to build up the public health service. But I don't think to any extent that it really needs to be done. Number two β my favorite β we meet a rogue black hole. You know, 10 years ago, or 15 years ago, really, you walk into an astronomy convention, and you say, "You know, there's probably a black hole at the center of every galaxy," and they're going to hoot you off the stage. And now, if you went into one of those conventions and you said, "Well, I don't think black holes are out there," they'd hoot you off the stage. Our comprehension of the way the universe works is really β has just gained unbelievably in recent years. We think that there are about 10 million dead stars in the Milky Way alone, our galaxy. And these stars have compressed down to maybe something like 12, 15 miles wide, and they are black holes. And they are gobbling up everything around them, including light, which is why we can't see them. Most of them should be in orbit around something. But galaxies are very violent places, and things can be spun out of orbit. And also, space is incredibly vast. So even if you flung a million of these things out of orbit, the chances that one would actually hit us is fairly remote. But it only has to get close, about a billion miles away, one of these things. About a billion miles away, here's what happens to Earth's orbit: it becomes elliptical instead of circular. And for three months out of the year, the surface temperatures go up to 150 to 180. For three months out of the year, they go to 50 below zero. That won't work too well. What can we do about this? And this is my scariest. (Laughter) I don't have a good answer for this one. Again, we gotta think about being a colonizing race. And finally, number one: biggest danger to life as we know it, I think, a really big asteroid heads for Earth. The important thing to remember here β this is not a question of if, this is a question of when, and how big. In 1908, just a 200-foot piece of a comet exploded over Siberia and flattened forests for maybe 100 miles. It had the effect of about 1,000 Hiroshima bombs. Astronomers estimate that little asteroids like that come about every hundred years. In 1989, a large asteroid passed 400,000 miles away from Earth. Nothing to worry about, right? It passed directly through Earth's orbit. We were in that that spot six hours earlier. A small asteroid, say a half mile wide, would touch off firestorms followed by severe global cooling from the debris kicked up β Carl Sagan's nuclear winter thing. An asteroid five miles wide causes major extinctions. We think the one that got the dinosaurs was about five miles wide. Where are they? There's something called the Kuiper belt, which β some people think Pluto's not a planet, that's where Pluto is, it's in the Kuiper belt. There's also something a little farther out, called the Oort cloud. There are about 100,000 balls of ice and rock β comets, really β out there, that are 50 miles in diameter or more, and they regularly take a little spin, in towards the Sun and pass reasonably close to us. Of more concern, I think, is the asteroids that exist between Mars and Jupiter. The folks at the Sloan Digital Sky Survey told us last fall β they're making the first map of the universe, three-dimensional map of the universe β that there are probably 700,000 asteroids between Mars and Jupiter that are a half a mile big or bigger. So you say, yeah, well, what are really the chances of this happening? Andrew, can you put that chart up? This is a chart that Dr. Clark Chapman at the Southwest Research Institute presented to Congress a few years ago. You'll notice that the chance of an asteroid-slash-comet impact killing you is about one in 20,000, according to the work they've done. Now look at the one right below that. Passenger aircraft crash, one in 20,000. We spend an awful lot of money trying to be sure that we don't die in airplane accidents, and we're not spending hardly anything on this. And yet, this is completely preventable. We finally have, just in the last year, the technology to stop this cold. Could we have the solutions? NASA's spending three million dollars a year, three million bucks β that is like pocket change β to search for asteroids. Because we can actually figure out every asteroid that's out there, and if it might hit Earth, and when it might hit Earth. And they're trying to do that. But it's going to take them 10 years, at spending three million dollars a year, and even then, they claim they'll only have about 80 percent of them catalogued. Comets are a tougher act. We don't really have the technology to predict comet trajectories, or when one with our name on it might arrive. But we would have lots of time, if we see it coming. We really need a dedicated observatory. You'll notice that a lot of comets are named after people you never heard of, amateur astronomers? That's because nobody's looking for them, except amateurs. We need a dedicated observatory that looks for comets. Part two of the solutions: we need to figure out how to blow up an asteroid, or alter its trajectory. Now, a year ago, we did an amazing thing. We sent a probe out to this asteroid belt, called NEAR, Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous. And these guys orbited a 30 β or no, about a 22-mile long asteroid called Eros. And then, of course, you know, they pulled one of those sneaky NASA things, where they had extra batteries and extra gas aboard and everything, and then, at the last minute, they landed. When the mission was over, they actually landed on the thing. We have landed a rocket ship on an asteroid. It's not a big deal. Now, the trouble with just sending a bomb out for this thing is that you don't have anything to push against in space, because there's no air. A nuclear explosion is just as hot, but we don't really have anything big enough to melt a 22-mile long asteroid, or vaporize it, would be more like it. But we can learn to land on these asteroids that have our name on them and put something like a small ion propulsion motor on it, which would gently, slowly, after a period of time, push it into a different trajectory, which, if we've done our math right, would keep it from hitting Earth. This is just a matter of finding 'em, going there, and doing something about it. I know your head is spinning from all this stuff. Yikes! So many big threats! The thing, I think, to remember, is September 11. We don't want to get caught flat-footed again. We know about this stuff. Science has the power to predict the future in many cases now. Knowledge is power. The worst thing we can do is say, jeez, I got enough to worry about without worrying about an asteroid. (Laughter) That's a mistake that could literally cost us our future. Thank you. |
A flight on solar wings | {0: 'Paul MacCready, an aircraft designer and environmentalist, is a pioneer of human-powered flight, alternative energy for transportation, and environmentally responsible design.'} | TED2003 | I am known best for human-powered flight, but that was just one thing that got me going in the sort of things that I'm working in now. As a youngster, I was very interested in model airplanes, ornithopters, autogyros, helicopters, gliders, power planes, indoor models, outdoor models, everything, which I just thought was a lot of fun, and wondered why most other people didn't share my same enthusiasm with them. And then, navy pilot training, and, after college, I got into sailplane flying, power plane flying, and considered the sailplanes as a sort of hobby and fun, but got tangled up with some great professor types, who convinced me and everybody else in the field that this was a good way to get into really deep science. While this was all going on, I was in the field of weather modification, although getting a Ph.D. in aeronautics. The weather modification subject was getting started, and as a graduate student, I could go around to the various talks that were being given, on a hitchhiker ride to the East Coast, and so on. And everybody would talk to me, but all the professionals in the field hated each other, and they wouldn't communicate. And as a result, I got the absolutely unique background in that field, and started a company, which did more research in weather modification than anybody, and there are a lot of things that I just can't go into. But then, 1971 started AeroVironment, with no employees β then one or two, three, and sort of fumbled along on trying to get interesting projects. We had AirDynamisis, who, like I, did not want to work for aerospace companies on some big, many year project, and so we did our small projects, and the company slowly grew. The thing that is exciting was, in 1976, I suddenly got interested in the human-powered airplane because I'd made a made a loan to a friend of 100,000 dollars, or I guaranteed the money at the bank. He needed them β he needed the money for starting a company. The company did not succeed, and he couldn't pay the money back, and I was the guarantor of the note. So, I had a $100,000 debt, and I noticed that the Kramer prize for human-powered flight, which had then been around for β (Laughter) β 17 years at the time, was 50,000 pounds, which, at the exchange rate, was just about 100,000 dollars. So suddenly, I was interested in human-powered flight β (Laughter) β and did not β the way I approached it, first, thinking about ways to make the planes, was just like they'd been doing in England, and not succeeding, and I gave it up. I figured, nah, there isn't any simple, easy way. But then, got off on a vacation trip, and was studying bird flight, just for the fun of it, and you can watch a bird soaring around in circles, and measure the time, and estimate the bank angle, and immediately, figure out its speed, and the turning radius, and so on, which I could do in the car, as we're driving along on a vacation trip β (Laughter) β with my three sons, young sons, helping me, but ridiculing the whole thing very much. But that began thinking about how birds went around, and then how airplanes would, how hang gliders would fly, and then other planes, and the idea of the Gossamer-Condor-type airplane quickly emerged, was so logical, one should have thought of it in the first place, but one didn't. And it was just, keep the weight down β 70 pounds was all it weighed β but let the size swell up, like a hang glider, but three times the span, three times the cord. You're down to a third of the speed, a third of the power, and a good bicyclist can put out that power, and that worked, and we won the prize a year later. We didn't β a lot of flying, a lot of experiments, a lot of things that didn't work, and ones that did work, and the plane kept getting a little better, a little better. Got a good pilot, Brian Allen, to operate it, and finally, succeeded. But unfortunately, about 65,000 dollars was spent on the project. (Laughter) And there was only about 30 to help retire the debt. But fortunately, Henry Kramer, who put up the prize for β that was a one-mile flight β put up a new prize for flying the English Channel, 21 miles. And he thought it would take another 18 years for somebody to win that. We realized that if you just cleaned up our Gossamer Condor a little bit, the power to fly would be decreased a little bit, and if you decrease the power required a little, the pilot can fly a much longer period of time. And Brian Allen was able, in a miraculous flight, to get the Gossamer Albatross across the English Channel, and we won the 100,000-pound, 200,000-dollar prize for that. And when all expenses were paid, the debt was handled, and everything was fine. It turned out that giving the planes to the museum was worth much more than the debt, so for five years, six years, I only had to pay one third income tax. So, there were good economic reasons for the project, but β (Laughter) β that's not, well, the project was done entirely for economic reasons, and we have not been involved in any human-powered flight since then β (Laughter) β because the prizes are all over. (Laughter) But that sure started me thinking about various things, and immediately, we began making a solar-powered plane because we felt solar power was going to be so important for the country and the world, we didn't want the small funding in the government to be decreased, which is what the government was trying to do with it. And we thought a solar-powered plane wouldn't really make sense, but you could do it and it would get a lot of publicity for solar power and maybe help that field. And that project continued, did succeed, and we then got into other projects in aviation and mechanical things and ground devices. But while this was going on, in 1982, I got a prize from the Lindbergh Foundation β their annual prize β and I had to prepare a paper on it, which collected all my varied thoughts and varied interests over the years. This was the one chance that I had to focus on what I, really, was after, and what was important. And to my surprise, I realized the importance of environmental issues, which Charles Lindbergh devoted the last third of his life to, and preparing that paper did me a lot of good. I thought back about if I was a space traveler, and came and visited Earth every 5,000 years. And for a few thousand visits, I would see the same thing every time, the little differences in the Earth. But this last time, just coming round, right now, suddenly, there'd be huge changes in the environment, in the concentration of people, and it was just unbelievable, the amount of β all the change in it. I wanted to β well, one of the biggest changes is, 200 years ago, we began using coal from underground, which has a lot of pollution, and 100 years ago, began getting gasoline from underground, with a lot of pollution. And gasoline consumption, or production, will reach its limit in about ten years, and then go down, and we wonder what's going to happen with transportation. I wanted to show the slide β this slide, I think, is the most important one any of you will see, ever, because β (Laughter) (Applause) β it shows nature versus humans, and goes from 1850 to 2050. And so, the year 2000, you see there. And this is the weight of all air and land vertebrates. Humans and muskrats and giraffes and birds and so on, are β the red line goes up. That's the humans and livestock and pets portion. The green line goes down. That's the wild nature portion. Humans, livestock and pets are, now, 98 percent of the total world's mass of vertebrates on land and air. And you don't know what the future will hold, but it's not going to get a lower percentage. Ten thousand years ago, the humans and livestock and pets were not even one tenth of one percent and wouldn't even have been visible on such a curve. Now they are 98 percent, and it, I think, shows human domination of the Earth. I give a talk to some remarkable high school students each summer, and ask them, after they've asked me questions, and I give them a talk and so on. Then I ask them questions. What's the population of the Earth? What's the population of the Earth going to be when you're the age of your parents? Which I'd never, really β they had never, really, thought about but, now, they think about it. And then, what population of the Earth would be an equilibrium that could continue on, and be for 2050, 2100, 2150? And they form little groups, all fighting with each other, and when I leave, two hours later, most of them are saying about 2 billion people, and they don't have any clue about how to get down to 2 billion, nor do I, but I think they're right and this is a serious problem. Rachel Carson was thinking of these, and came out with "Silent Spring," way back. "Solar Manifesto" by Hermann Scheer, in Germany, claims all energy on Earth can be derived, for every country, from solar energy and water, and so on. You don't need to dig down for these chemicals, and we can do things much more efficiently. Let's have the next slide. So this just summarizes it. "Over billions of years, on a unique sphere, chance has painted a thin covering of life β complex and probable, wonderful and fragile. Suddenly, we humans, a recently arrived species, no longer subject to the checks and balances inherent in nature, have grown in population, technology and intelligence to a position of terrible power. We, now, wield the paintbrush." We're in charge. It's frightening. And I do a painting every 20 or 25 years. This is the last one. (Laughter) And [it] shows the Earth in a time flag: on the right, in trilobites and dinosaurs and so on; and over the triangle, we now get to civilization and TV and traffic jams and so on. I have no idea of what comes next, so I just used robotic and natural cockroaches as the future, as a little warning. And two weeks after this drawing was done, we actually had our first project contract, at AeroVironment, on robotic cockroaches, which was very frightening to me. (Laughter) (Paper rustling) Well, that'll be all the slides. As time went on, we stopped our environmental programs. We focused more on the really serious energy problems of the future, and we produced products for the company. And we developed the impact car that General Motors made, the EV1, out of β and got the Air Resources Board to have the regulations that stimulated the electric cars, but they've since come apart. And we've done a lot of things, small drone airplanes and so on. I have a Helios. We have the first video. (Video) Narrator: With a wingspan of 247 feet, this makes her larger than a Boeing 747. (Music) Her designers' attention to detail and her construction gives Helios' structure the flexibility and strength to deal with the turbulence encountered in the atmosphere. This enables her to easily ride through the air currents as if she's sliding along on the ocean waves. Paul MacCready: The wings could touch together on top and not break. We think. (Laughter) Narrator: And Helios now begins the process of turning her back to the sun, to maximize the power from her solar array. (Music) As the sky gets darker, and the outside air temperatures drop below minus 100 degrees Fahrenheit, the most environmentally hostile segment of Helios's journey has gone by without notice, except for being recorded by specially designed data acquisition systems and their associated sensors. Approaching a peak radar altitude of 96,863 feet, at 4:12 p.m., Helios is standing on top of 98 percent of the Earth's atmosphere. This is more than 10,000 feet higher than the previous world's altitude record held by the SR-71 Blackbird. (Applause) PM: That plane has many purposes, but it's aimed for communications, and it can fly so slowly that it'll just stay up at 65,000 feet. Eventually, it will be able to have to stay up day, night, day, night, for six months at a time, acting like the synchronous satellite, but only ten miles above the Earth. Let's have the next video. This shows the other end of the spectrum. (Video) Narrator: A tiny airplane, the AV Pointer serves for surveillance. In effect a pair of roving eyeglasses, a cutting-edge example of where miniaturization can lead if the operator is remote from the vehicle. It is convenient to carry, assemble, and launch by hand. Battery-powered, it is silent and rarely noticed. It sends high-resolution video pictures back to the operator. With on-board GPS, it can navigate autonomously, and it is rugged enough to self-land without damage. PM: Okay, and let's have the next. (Applause) That plane is widely used by the military, now, in all their operations. Let's have the next video. (Video) (Music) Alan Alda: He's got it, he's got it, he's got it on his head. (Music) We're going to end our visit with Paul MacCready's flying circus by meeting his son, Tyler, who, with his two brothers, helped build the Gossamer Condor, 25 years ago. Tyler MacCready: You can chase it, like this, for hours. AA: When they got bored with their father's project, they invented an extraordinary little plane of their own. TM: And I can control it by putting the lift on one side of the wing, or on the other. AA: They called it their Walkalong Glider. (Music) I've never seen anything like that. How old were you when you invented that? TM: Oh, 10, 11. (AA: Oh my God.) TM: 12, something like that. (AA: That's amazing.) PM: And Tyler's here to show you the Walkalong. (Applause) TM: All right. You all got a couple of these in your gift bags, and one of the first things, the production version seemed to dive a little bit, and so I would just suggest you bend the wing tips up a little bit before you try flying it. I'll give you a demonstration of how it works. The idea is that it soars on the lift over your body, like a seagull soaring on a cliff. As the wind comes up, it has to go over the cliff, so as you walk through the air, it goes around your body, some has to go over you. And so you just keep the glider positioned in that up current. The launch is the difficult part: you've got to hold it high up, over your head, and you start walking forward, and just let go of it, and you can control it like that. (Laughter) And then also, like it said in the video, you can turn it left or right just by putting the lift under one wing or another. So I can do it β oops, that was going to be a right turn. (Laughter) Okay, this one will be a left turn. Here, but β (Applause) β anyway. (Applause) And that's it, so you can just control it, wherever you want, and it's just hours of fun. And these are no longer in production, so you have real collector's items. (Laughter) And this, we just wanted to show you β if we can get the video running on this, yeah β just an example of a little video surveillance. (Laughter) This was flying around in the party last night, and β (Laughter) β you can see how it just can fly around, and you can spy on anybody you want. (Laughter) And that's it. I was going to bring an airplane, but I was worried about hitting people in here, so I thought this would be a little bit more gentle. And that's it, yeah, just a few inventions. (Applause) All right. |
This is Saturn | {0: 'As the leader of the Imaging Team on the Cassini mission to Saturn, Carolyn Porco interprets and shares the pictures coming back from this fascinating planet, its rings and its moons.'} | TED2007 | In the next 18 minutes, I'm going to take you on a journey. And it's a journey that you and I have been on for many years now, and it began some 50 years ago, when humans first stepped off our planet. And in those 50 years, not only did we literally, physically set foot on the moon, but we have dispatched robotic spacecraft to all the planets β all eight of them β and we have landed on asteroids, we have rendezvoused with comets, and, at this point in time, we have a spacecraft on its way to Pluto, the body formerly known as a planet. And all of these robotic missions are part of a bigger human journey: a voyage to understand something, to get a sense of our cosmic place, to understand something of our origins, and how Earth, our planet, and we, living on it, came to be. And of all the places in the solar system that we might go to and search for answers to questions like this, there's Saturn. And we have been to Saturn before β we visited Saturn in the early 1980s β but our investigations of Saturn have become far more in-depth in detail since the Cassini spacecraft, traveling across interplanetary space for seven years, glided into orbit around Saturn in the summer of 2004, and became at that point the farthest robotic outpost that humanity had ever established around the Sun. Now, the Saturn system is a rich planetary system. It offers mystery, scientific insight and obviously splendor beyond compare, and the investigation of this system has enormous cosmic reach. In fact, just studying the rings alone, we stand to learn a lot about the discs of stars and gas that we call the spiral galaxies. And here's a beautiful picture of the Andromeda Nebula, which is our closest, largest spiral galaxy to the Milky Way. And then, here's a beautiful composite of the Whirlpool Galaxy, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. So the journey back to Saturn is really part of and is also a metaphor for a much larger human voyage to understand the interconnectedness of everything around us, and also how humans fit into that picture. And it pains me that I can't tell you all that we have learned with Cassini. I can't show you all the beautiful pictures that we've taken in the last two and a half years, because I simply don't have the time. So I'm going to concentrate on two of the most exciting stories that have emerged out of this major exploratory expedition that we are conducting around Saturn, and have been for the past two and a half years. Saturn is accompanied by a very large and diverse collection of moons. They range in size from a few kilometers across to as big across as the U.S. Most of the beautiful pictures we've taken of Saturn, in fact, show Saturn in accompaniment with some of its moons. Here's Saturn with Dione, and then, here's Saturn showing the rings edge-on, showing you just how vertically thin they are, with the moon Enceladus. Now, two of the 47 moons that Saturn has are standouts. And those are Titan and Enceladus. Titan is Saturn's largest moon, and, until Cassini had arrived there, was the largest single expanse of unexplored terrain that we had remaining in our solar system. And it is a body that has long intrigued people who've watched the planets. It has a very large, thick atmosphere, and in fact, its surface environment was believed to be more like the environment we have here on the Earth, or at least had in the past, than any other body in the solar system. Its atmosphere is largely molecular nitrogen, like you are breathing here in this room, except that its atmosphere is suffused with simple organic materials like methane and propane and ethane. And these molecules high up in the atmosphere of Titan get broken down, and their products join together to make haze particles. This haze is ubiquitous. It's completely global and enveloping Titan. And that's why you cannot see down to the surface with our eyes in the visible region of the spectrum. But these haze particles, it was surmised, before we got there with Cassini, over billions and billions of years, gently drifted down to the surface and coated the surface in a thick organic sludge. So like the equivalent, the Titan equivalent, of tar, or oil, or what β we didn't know what. But this is what we suspected. And these molecules, especially methane and ethane, can be liquids at the surface temperatures of Titan. And so it turns out that methane is to Titan what water is to the Earth. It's a condensable in the atmosphere, and so recognizing this circumstance brought to the fore a whole world of bizarre possibilities. You can have methane clouds, OK, and above those clouds, you have this hundreds of kilometers of haze, which prevent any sunlight from getting to the surface. The temperature at the surface is some 350 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. But despite that cold, you could have rain falling down on the surface of Titan. And doing on Titan what rain does on the Earth: it carves gullies; it forms rivers and cataracts; it can create canyons; it can pool in large basins and craters. It can wash the sludge off high mountain peaks and hills, down into the lowlands. So stop and think for a minute. Try to imagine what the surface of Titan might look like. It's dark. High noon on Titan is as dark as deep earth twilight on the Earth. It's cold, it's eerie, it's misty, it might be raining, and you might be standing on the shores of Lake Michigan brimming with paint thinner. (Laughter) That is the view that we had of the surface of Titan before we got there with Cassini, and I can tell you that what we have found on Titan, though it is not the same in detail, is every bit as fascinating as that story is. And for us, it has been like β the Cassini people β it has been like a Jules Verne adventure come true. As I said, it has a thick, extensive atmosphere. This is a picture of Titan, backlit by the Sun, with the rings as a beautiful backdrop. And yet another moon there β I don't even know which one it is. It's a very extensive atmosphere. We have instruments on Cassini which can see down to the surface through this atmosphere, and my camera system is one of them. And we have taken pictures like this. And what you see is bright and dark regions, and that's about as far as it got for us. It was so mystifying: we couldn't make out what we were seeing on Titan. When you look closer at this region, you start to see things like sinuous channels β we didn't know. You see a few round things. This, we later found out, is, in fact, a crater, but there are very few craters on the surface of Titan, meaning it's a very young surface. And there are features that look tectonic. They look like they've been pulled apart. Whenever you see anything linear on a planet, it means there's been a fracture, like a fault. And so it's been tectonically altered. But we couldn't make sense of our images, until, six months after we got into orbit, an event occurred that many have regarded as the highlight of Cassini's investigation of Titan. And that was the deployment of the Huygens probe, the European-built Huygens probe that Cassini had carried for seven years across the solar system. We deployed it to the atmosphere of Titan, it took two and a half hours to descend, and it landed on the surface. And I just want to emphasize how significant an event this is. This is a device of human making, and it landed in the outer solar system for the first time in human history. It is so significant that, in my mind, this was an event that should have been celebrated with ticker tape parades in every city across the U.S. and Europe, and sadly, that wasn't the case. (Laughter). It was significant for another reason. This is an international mission, and this event was celebrated in Europe, in Germany, and the celebratory presentations were given in English accents, and American accents, and German accents, and French and Italian and Dutch accents. It was a moving demonstration of what the words "united nations" are supposed to mean: a true union of nations joined together in a colossal effort for good. And, in this case, it was a massive undertaking to explore a planet, and to come to understand a planetary system that, for all of human history, had been unreachable, and now humans had actually touched it. So it was β I mean, I'm getting goose bumps just talking about it. It was a tremendously emotional event, and it's something that I will personally never forget, and you shouldn't either. (Applause). But anyway, the probe took measurements of the atmosphere on the way down, and it also took panoramic pictures. And I can't tell you what it was like to see the first pictures of Titan's surface from the probe. And this is what we saw. And it was a shocker, because it was everything we wanted those other pictures taken from orbit to be. It was an unambiguous pattern, a geological pattern. It's a dendritic drainage pattern that can be formed only by the flow of liquids. And you can follow these channels and you can see how they all converge. And they converge into this channel here, which drains into this region. You are looking at a shoreline. Was this a shoreline of fluids? We didn't know. But this is somewhat of a shoreline. This picture is taken at 16 kilometers. This is the picture taken at eight kilometers, OK? Again, the shoreline. Okay, now, 16 kilometers, eight kilometers β this is roughly an airline altitude. If you were going to take an airplane trip across the U.S., you would be flying at these altitudes. So, this is the picture you would have at the window of Titanian Airlines as you fly across the surface of Titan. (Laughter) And then finally, the probe came to rest on the surface, and I'm going to show you, ladies and gentlemen, the first picture ever taken from the surface of a moon in the outer solar system. And here is the horizon, OK? These are probably water ice pebbles, yes? (Applause). And obviously, it landed in one of these flat, dark regions and it didn't sink out of sight. So it wasn't fluid that we landed in. What the probe came down in was basically the Titan equivalent of a mud flat. This is an unconsolidated ground that is suffused with liquid methane. And it's probably the case that this material has washed off the highlands of Titan through these channels that we saw, and has drained over billions of years to fill in low-lying basins. And that is what the Huygens probe landed in. But still, there was no sign in our images, or even in the Huygens' images, of any large, open bodies of fluids. Where were they? It got even more puzzling when we found dunes. OK, so this is our movie of the equatorial region of Titan, showing these dunes. These are dunes that are 100 meters tall, separated by a few kilometers, and they go on for miles and miles and miles. There's hundreds, up to a 1,000 or 1,200 miles of dunes. This is the Saharan desert of Titan. It's obviously a place which is very dry, or you wouldn't get dunes. So again, it got puzzling that there were no bodies of fluid, until finally, we saw lakes in the polar regions. And there is a lake scene in the south polar region of Titan. It's about the size of Lake Ontario. And then, only a week and a half ago, we flew over the north pole of Titan and found, again, we found a feature here the size of the Caspian Sea. So it seems that the liquids, for some reason we don't understand, or during at least this season, are apparently at the poles of Titan. And I think you would agree that we have found Titan is a remarkable, mystical place. It's exotic, it's alien, but yet strangely Earth-like, and having Earth-like geological formations and a tremendous geographical diversity, and is a fascinating world whose only rival in the solar system for complexity and richness is the Earth itself. And so now we go onto Enceladus. Enceladus is a small moon, it's about a tenth the size of Titan. And you can see it here next to England, just to show you the size. This is not meant to be a threat. (Laughter). And Enceladus is very white, it's very bright, and its surface is obviously wrecked with fractures. It is a very geologically active body. But the mother lode of discoveries on Enceladus was found at the south pole β and we're looking at the south pole here β where we found this system of fractures. And they're a different color because they're a different composition. They are coated. These fractures are coated with organic materials. Moreover, this whole, entire region, the south polar region, has elevated temperatures. It's the hottest place on the planet, on the body. That's as bizarre as finding that the Antarctic on the Earth is hotter than the tropics. And then, when we took additional pictures, we discovered that from these fractures are issuing jets of fine, icy particles extending hundreds of miles into space. And when we color-code this image, to bring out the faint light levels, we see that these jets feed a plume that, in fact, we see, in other images, goes thousands of miles into the space above Enceladus. My team and I have examined images like this, and like this one, and have thought about the other results from Cassini. And we have arrived at the conclusion that these jets may be erupting from pockets of liquid water under the surface of Enceladus. So we have, possibly, liquid water, organic materials and excess heat. In other words, we have possibly stumbled upon the holy grail of modern day planetary exploration, or in other words, an environment that is potentially suitable for living organisms. And I don't think I need to tell you that the discovery of life elsewhere in our solar system, whether it be on Enceladus or elsewhere, would have enormous cultural and scientific implications. Because if we could demonstrate that genesis had occurred not once, but twice, independently, in our solar system, then that means, by inference, it has occurred a staggering number of times throughout the universe and its 13.7 billion year history. Right now, Earth is the only planet still that we know is teeming with life. It is precious, it is unique, it is still, so far, the only home we've ever known. And if any of you were alert and coherent during the 1960s β and we'd forgive you, if you weren't, OK β you would remember this very famous picture taken by the Apollo 8 astronauts in 1968. It was the first time that Earth was imaged from space, and it had an enormous impact on our sense of place in the universe, and our sense of responsibility for the protection of our own planet. Well, we on Cassini have taken an equivalent first, a picture that no human eye has ever seen before. It is a total eclipse of the Sun, seen from the other side of Saturn. And in this impossibly beautiful picture, you see the main rings backlit by the Sun, you see the refracted image of the Sun and you see this ring created, in fact, by the exhalations of Enceladus. But as if that weren't brilliant enough, we can spot, in this beautiful image, sight of our own planet, cradled in the arms of Saturn's rings. Now, there is something deeply moving about seeing ourselves from afar, and capturing the sight of our little, blue-ocean planet in the skies of other worlds. And that, and the perspective of ourselves that we gain from that, may be, in the end, the finest reward that we earn from this journey of discovery that started half a century ago. And thank you very much. (Applause) |
My magic moves | {0: '2013 "America\'s Got Talent" winner Kenichi Ebina blends hip-hop, martial arts, modern dance, magic and a blast of pop culture in his mesmerizing performances.'} | TED2007 | (Applause) (Music) (Applause) |
Life at 30,000 feet | {0: "Richard Branson bootstrapped his way from record-shop owner to head of the Virgin empire. Now he's focusing his boundless energy on saving our environment. "} | TED2007 | Chris Anderson: Welcome to TED. Richard Branson: Thank you very much. The first TED has been great. CA: Have you met anyone interesting? RB: Well, the nice thing about TED is everybody's interesting. I was very glad to see Goldie Hawn, because I had an apology to make to her. I'd had dinner with her about two years ago and I'd β she had this big wedding ring and I put it on my finger and I couldn't get it off. And I went home to my wife that night and she wanted to know why I had another woman's big, massive, big wedding ring on my finger. And, anyway, the next morning we had to go along to the jeweler and get it cut off. So β (Laughter) β so apologies to Goldie. CA: That's pretty good. So, we're going to put up some slides of some of your companies here. You've started one or two in your time. So, you know, Virgin Atlantic, Virgin Records β I guess it all started with a magazine called Student. And then, yes, all these other ones as well. I mean, how do you do this? RB: I read all these sort of TED instructions: you must not talk about your own business, and this, and now you ask me. So I suppose you're not going to be able to kick me off the stage, since you asked the question. (Laughter) CA: It depends what the answer is though. RB: No, I mean, I think I learned early on that if you can run one company, you can really run any companies. I mean, companies are all about finding the right people, inspiring those people, you know, drawing out the best in people. And I just love learning and I'm incredibly inquisitive and I love taking on, you know, the status quo and trying to turn it upside down. So I've seen life as one long learning process. And if I see β you know, if I fly on somebody else's airline and find the experience is not a pleasant one, which it wasn't, 21 years ago, then I'd think, well, you know, maybe I can create the kind of airline that I'd like to fly on. And so, you know, so got one secondhand 747 from Boeing and gave it a go. CA: Well, that was a bizarre thing, because you made this move that a lot of people advised you was crazy. And in fact, in a way, it almost took down your empire at one point. I had a conversation with one of the investment bankers who, at the time when you basically sold Virgin Records and invested heavily in Virgin Atlantic, and his view was that you were trading, you know, the world's fourth biggest record company for the twenty-fifth biggest airline and that you were out of your mind. Why did you do that? RB: Well, I think that there's a very thin dividing line between success and failure. And I think if you start a business without financial backing, you're likely to go the wrong side of that dividing line. We had β we were being attacked by British Airways. They were trying to put our airline out of business, and they launched what's become known as the dirty tricks campaign. And I realized that the whole empire was likely to come crashing down unless I chipped in a chip. And in order to protect the jobs of the people who worked for the airline, and protect the jobs of the people who worked for the record company, I had to sell the family jewelry to protect the airline. CA: Post-Napster, you're looking like a bit of a genius, actually, for that as well. RB: Yeah, as it turned out, it proved to be the right move. But, yeah, it was sad at the time, but we moved on. CA: Now, you use the Virgin brand a lot and it seems like you're getting synergy from one thing to the other. What does the brand stand for in your head? RB: Well, I like to think it stands for quality, that you know, if somebody comes across a Virgin company, they β CA: They are quality, Richard. Come on now, everyone says quality. Spirit? RB: No, but I was going to move on this. We have a lot of fun and I think the people who work for it enjoy it. As I say, we go in and shake up other industries, and I think, you know, we do it differently and I think that industries are not quite the same as a result of Virgin attacking the market. CA: I mean, there are a few launches you've done where the brand maybe hasn't worked quite as well. I mean, Virgin Brides β what happened there? (Laughter) RB: We couldn't find any customers. (Laughter) (Applause) CA: I was actually also curious why β I think you missed an opportunity with your condoms launch. You called it Mates. I mean, couldn't you have used the Virgin brand for that as well? Ain't virgin no longer, or something. RB: Again, we may have had problems finding customers. I mean, we had β often, when you launch a company and you get customer complaints, you know, you can deal with them. But about three months after the launch of the condom company, I had a letter, a complaint, and I sat down and wrote a long letter back to this lady apologizing profusely. But obviously, there wasn't a lot I could do about it. And then six months later, or nine months after the problem had taken, I got this delightful letter with a picture of the baby asking if I'd be godfather, which I became. So, it all worked out well. CA: Really? You should have brought a picture. That's wonderful. RB: I should have. CA: So, just help us with some of the numbers. I mean, what are the numbers on this? I mean, how big is the group overall? How much β what's the total revenue? RB: It's about 25 billion dollars now, in total. CA: And how many employees? RB: About 55,000. CA: So, you've been photographed in various ways at various times and never worrying about putting your dignity on the line or anything like that. What was that? Was that real? RB: Yeah. We were launching a megastore in Los Angeles, I think. No, I mean, I think β CA: But is that your hair? RB: No. CA: What was that one? RB: Dropping in for tea. CA: OK. (Laughter) RB: Ah, that was quite fun. That was a wonderful car-boat in which β CA: Oh, that car that we β actually we β it was a TEDster event there, I think. Is that β could you still pause on that one actually, for a minute? (Laughter) RB: It's a tough job, isn't it? CA: I mean, it is a tough job. (Laughter) When I first came to America, I used to try this with employees as well and they kind of β they have these different rules over here, it's very strange. RB: I know, I have β the lawyers say you mustn't do things like that, but β CA: I mean, speaking of which, tell us about β RB: "Pammy" we launched, you know β mistakenly thought we could take on Coca-Cola, and we launched a cola bottle called "The Pammy" and it was shaped a bit like Pamela Anderson. But the trouble is, it kept on tipping over, but β (Laughter) CA: Designed by Philippe Starck perhaps? RB: Of course. CA: So, we'll just run a couple more pictures here. Virgin Brides. Very nice. And, OK, so stop there. This was β you had some award I think? RB: Yeah, well, 25 years earlier, we'd launched the Sex Pistols' "God Save The Queen," and I'd certainly never expected that 25 years later β that she'd actually knight us. But somehow, she must have had a forgetful memory, I think. CA: Well, God saved her and you got your just reward. Do you like to be called Sir Richard, or how? RB: Nobody's ever called me Sir Richard. Occasionally in America, I hear people saying Sir Richard and think there's some Shakespearean play taking place. But nowhere else anyway. CA: OK. So can you use your knighthood for anything or is it just ... RB: No. I suppose if you're having problems getting a booking in a restaurant or something, that might be worth using it. CA: You know, it's not Richard Branson. It's Sir Richard Branson. RB: I'll go get the secretary to use it. CA: OK. So let's look at the space thing. I think, with us, we've got a video that shows what you're up to, and Virgin Galactic up in the air. (Video) So that's the Bert Rutan designed spaceship? RB: Yeah, it'll be ready in β well, ready in 12 months and then we do 12 months extensive testing. And then 24 months from now, people will be able to take a ride into space. CA: So this interior is Philippe Starcke designed? RB: Philippe has done the β yeah, quite a bit of it: the logos and he's building the space station in New Mexico. And basically, he's just taken an eye and the space station will be one giant eye, so when you're in space, you ought to be able to see this massive eye looking up at you. And when you land, you'll be able to go back into this giant eye. But he's an absolute genius when it comes to design. CA: But you didn't have him design the engine? RB: Philippe is quite erratic, so I think that he wouldn't be the best person to design the engine, no. CA: He gave a wonderful talk here two days ago. RB: Yeah? No, he is a β CA: Well, some people found it wonderful, some people found it completely bizarre. But, I personally found it wonderful. RB: He's a wonderful enthusiast, which is why I love him. But ... CA: So, now, you've always had this exploration bug in you. Have you ever regretted that? RB: Many times. I mean, I think with the ballooning and boating expeditions we've done in the past. Well, I got pulled out of the sea I think six times by helicopters, so β and each time, I didn't expect to come home to tell the tale. So in those moments, you certainly wonder what you're doing up there or β CA: What was the closest you got to β when did you think, this is it, I might be on my way out? RB: Well, I think the balloon adventures were β each one was, each one, actually, I think we came close. And, I mean, first of all we β nobody had actually crossed the Atlantic in a hot air balloon before, so we had to build a hot air balloon that was capable of flying in the jet stream, and we weren't quite sure, when a balloon actually got into the jet stream, whether it would actually survive the 200, 220 miles an hour winds that you can find up there. And so, just the initial lift off from Sugarloaf to cross the Atlantic, as we were pushing into the jet stream, this enormous balloon β the top of the balloon ended up going at a couple of hundred miles an hour, the capsule that we were in at the bottom was going at maybe two miles an hour, and it just took off. And it was like holding onto a thousand horses. And we were just crossing every finger, praying that the balloon would hold together, which, fortunately, it did. But the ends of all those balloon trips were, you know β something seemed to go wrong every time, and on that particular occasion, the more experienced balloonist who was with me jumped, and left me holding on for dear life. (Laughter) CA: Did he tell you to jump, or he just said, "I'm out of here!" and ... RB: No, he told me jump, but once his weight had gone, the balloon just shot up to 12,000 feet and I ... CA: And you inspired an Ian McEwan novel I think with that. RB: Yeah. No, I put on my oxygen mask and stood on top of the balloon, with my parachute, looking at the swirling clouds below, trying to pluck up my courage to jump into the North Sea, which β and it was a very, very, very lonely few moments. But, anyway, we managed to survive it. CA: Did you jump? Or it came down in the end? RB: Well, I knew I had about half an hour's fuel left, and I also knew that the chances were that if I jumped, I would only have a couple of minutes of life left. So I climbed back into the capsule and just desperately tried to make sure that I was making the right decision. And wrote some notes to my family. And then climbed back up again, looked down at those clouds again, climbed back into the capsule again. And then finally, just thought, there's a better way. I've got, you know, this enormous balloon above me, it's the biggest parachute ever, why not use it? And so I managed to fly the balloon down through the clouds, and about 50 feet, before I hit the sea, threw myself over. And the balloon hit the sea and went shooting back up to 10,000 feet without me. But it was a wonderful feeling being in that water and β CA: What did you write to your family? RB: Just what you would do in a situation like that: just I love you very much. And I'd already written them a letter before going on this trip, which β just in case anything had happened. But fortunately, they never had to use it. CA: Your companies have had incredible PR value out of these heroics. The years β and until I stopped looking at the polls, you were sort of regarded as this great hero in the U.K. and elsewhere. And cynics might say, you know, this is just a smart business guy doing what it takes to execute his particular style of marketing. How much was the PR value part of this? RB: Well, of course, the PR experts said that as an airline owner, the last thing you should be doing is heading off in balloons and boats, and crashing into the seas. (Laughter) CA: They have a point, Richard. RB: In fact, I think our airline took a full page ad at the time saying, you know, come on, Richard, there are better ways of crossing the Atlantic. (Laughter) CA: To do all this, you must have been a genius from the get-go, right? RB: Well, I won't contradict that. (Laughter) CA: OK, this isn't exactly hardball. OK. Didn't β weren't you just terrible at school? RB: I was dyslexic. I had no understanding of schoolwork whatsoever. I certainly would have failed IQ tests. And it was one of the reasons I left school when I was 15 years old. And if I β if I'm not interested in something, I don't grasp it. As somebody who's dyslexic, you also have some quite bizarre situations. I mean, for instance, I've had to β you know, I've been running the largest group of private companies in Europe, but haven't been able to know the difference between net and gross. And so the board meetings have been fascinating. (Laughter) And so, it's like, good news or bad news? And generally, the people would say, oh, well that's bad news. CA: But just to clarify, the 25 billion dollars is gross, right? That's gross? (Laughter) RB: Well, I hope it's net actually, having β (Laughter) β I've got it right. CA: No, trust me, it's gross. (Laughter) RB: So, when I turned 50, somebody took me outside the boardroom and said, "Look Richard, here's a β let me draw on a diagram. Here's a net in the sea, and the fish have been pulled from the sea into this net. And that's the profits you've got left over in this little net, everything else is eaten." And I finally worked it all out. (Laughter) (Applause) CA: But, I mean, at school β so as well as being, you know, doing pretty miserably academically, but you were also the captain of the cricket and football teams. So you were kind of a β you were a natural leader, but just a bit of a ... Were you a rebel then, or how would you ... RB: Yeah, I think I was a bit of a maverick and β but I ... And I was, yeah, I was fortunately good at sport, and so at least I had something to excel at, at school. CA: And some bizarre things happened just earlier in your life. I mean, there's the story about your mother allegedly dumping you in a field, aged four, and saying "OK, walk home." Did this really happen? RB: She was, you know, she felt that we needed to stand on our own two feet from an early age. So she did things to us, which now she'd be arrested for, such as pushing us out of the car, and telling us to find our own way to Granny's, about five miles before we actually got there. And making us go on wonderful, long bike rides. And we were never allowed to watch television and the like. CA: But is there a risk here? I mean, there's a lot of people in the room who are wealthy, and they've got kids, and we've got this dilemma about how you bring them up. Do you look at the current generation of kids coming up and think they're too coddled, they don't know what they've got, we're going to raise a generation of privileged ... RB: No, I think if you're bringing up kids, you just want to smother them with love and praise and enthusiasm. So I don't think you can mollycoddle your kids too much really. CA: You didn't turn out too bad, I have to say, I'm ... Your headmaster said to you β I mean he found you kind of an enigma at your school β he said, you're either going to be a millionaire or go to prison, and I'm not sure which. Which of those happened first? (Laughter) RB: Well, I've done both. I think I went to prison first. I was actually prosecuted under two quite ancient acts in the U.K. I was prosecuted under the 1889 Venereal Diseases Act and the 1916 Indecent Advertisements Act. On the first occasion, for mentioning the word venereal disease in public, which β we had a center where we would help young people who had problems. And one of the problems young people have is venereal disease. And there's an ancient law that says you can't actually mention the word venereal disease or print it in public. So the police knocked on the door, and told us they were going to arrest us if we carried on mentioning the word venereal disease. We changed it to social diseases and people came along with acne and spots, but nobody came with VD any more. So, we put it back to VD and promptly got arrested. And then subsequently, "Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols," the word bollocks, the police decided was a rude word and so we were arrested for using the word bollocks on the Sex Pistols' album. And John Mortimer, the playwright, defended us. And he asked if I could find a linguistics expert to come up with a different definition of the word bollocks. And so I rang up Nottingham University, and I asked to talk to the professor of linguistics. And he said, "Look, bollocks is not a β has nothing to do with balls whatsoever. It's actually a nickname given to priests in the eighteenth century." (Laughter) And he went, "Furthermore, I'm a priest myself." And so I said, "Would you mind coming to the court?" And he said he'd be delighted. And I said β and he said, "Would you like me to wear my dog collar?" And I said, "Yes, definitely. Please." (Laughter) CA: That's great. RB: So our key witness argued that it was actually "Never Mind the Priest, Here's the Sex Pistols." (Laughter) And the judge found us β reluctantly found us not guilty, so ... (Laughter) CA: That is outrageous. (Applause) So seriously, is there a dark side? A lot of people would say there's no way that someone could put together this incredible collection of businesses without knifing a few people in the back, you know, doing some ugly things. You've been accused of being ruthless. There was a nasty biography written about you by someone. Is any of it true? Is there an element of truth in it? RB: I don't actually think that the stereotype of a businessperson treading all over people to get to the top, generally speaking, works. I think if you treat people well, people will come back and come back for more. And I think all you have in life is your reputation and it's a very small world. And I actually think that the best way of becoming a successful business leader is dealing with people fairly and well, and I like to think that's how we run Virgin. CA: And what about the people who love you and who see you spending β you keep getting caught up in these new projects, but it almost feels like you're addicted to launching new stuff. You get excited by an idea and, kapow! I mean, do you think about life balance? How do your family feel about each time you step into something big and new? RB: I also believe that being a father's incredibly important, so from the time the kids were very young, you know, when they go on holiday, I go on holiday with them. And so we spend a very good sort of three months away together. Yes, I'll, you know, be in touch. We're very lucky, we have this tiny little island in the Caribbean and we can β so I can take them there and we can bring friends, and we can play together, but I can also keep in touch with what's going on. CA: You started talking in recent years about this term capitalist philanthropy. What is that? RB: Capitalism has been proven to be a system that works. You know, the alternative, communism, has not worked. But the problem with capitalism is extreme wealth ends up in the hands of a few people, and therefore extreme responsibility, I think, goes with that wealth. And I think it's important that the individuals, who are in that fortunate position, do not end up competing for bigger and bigger boats, and bigger and bigger cars, but, you know, use that money to either create new jobs or to tackle issues around the world. CA: And what are the issues that you worry about most, care most about, want to turn your resources toward? RB: Well, there's β I mean there's a lot of issues. I mean global warming certainly is a massive threat to mankind and we are putting a lot of time and energy into, A, trying to come up with alternative fuels and, B, you know, we just launched this prize, which is really a prize in case we don't get an answer on alternative fuels, in case we don't actually manage to get the carbon emissions cut down quickly, and in case we go through the tipping point. We need to try to encourage people to come up with a way of extracting carbon out of the Earth's atmosphere. And we just β you know, there weren't really people working on that before, so we wanted people to try to β all the best brains in the world to start thinking about that, and also to try to extract the methane out of the Earth's atmosphere as well. And actually, we've had about 15,000 people fill in the forms saying they want to give it a go. And so we only need one, so we're hopeful. CA: And you're also working in Africa on a couple of projects? RB: Yes, I mean, we've got β we're setting up something called the war room, which is maybe the wrong word. We're trying to β maybe we'll change it β but anyway, it's a war room to try to coordinate all the attack that's going on in Africa, all the different social problems in Africa, and try to look at best practices. So, for instance, there's a doctor in Africa that's found that if you give a mother antiretroviral drugs at 24 weeks, when she's pregnant, that the baby will not have HIV when it's born. And so disseminating that information to around the rest of Africa is important. CA: The war room sounds, it sounds powerful and dramatic. And is there a risk that the kind of the business heroes of the West get so excited about β I mean, they're used to having an idea, getting stuff done, and they believe profoundly in their ability to make a difference in the world. Is there a risk that we go to places like Africa and say, we've got to fix this problem and we can do it, I've got all these billions of dollars, you know, da, da, da β here's the big idea. And kind of take a much more complex situation and actually end up making a mess of it. Do you worry about that? RB: Well, first of all, on this particular situation, we're actually β we're working with the government on it. I mean, Thabo Mbeki's had his problems with accepting HIV and AIDS are related, but this is a way, I think, of him tackling this problem and instead of the world criticizing him, it's a way of working with him, with his government. It's important that if people do go to Africa and do try to help, they don't just go in there and then leave after a few years. It's got to be consistent. But I think business leaders can bring their entrepreneurial know-how and help governments approach things slightly differently. For instance, we're setting up clinics in Africa where we're going to be giving free antiretroviral drugs, free TB treatment and free malaria treatment. But we're also trying to make them self-sustaining clinics, so that people pay for some other aspects. CA: I mean a lot of cynics say about someone like yourself, or Bill Gates, or whatever, that this is really being β it's almost driven by some sort of desire again, you know, for the right image, for guilt avoidance and not like a real philanthropic instinct. What would you say to them? RB: Well, I think that everybody β people do things for a whole variety of different reasons and I think that, you know, when I'm on me deathbed, I will want to feel that I've made a difference to other people's lives. And that may be a selfish thing to think, but it's the way I've been brought up. I think if I'm in a position to radically change other people's lives for the better, I should do so. CA: How old are you? RB: I'm 56. CA: I mean, the psychologist Erik Erikson says that β as I understand him and I'm a total amateur β but that during 30s, 40s people are driven by this desire to grow and that's where they get their fulfillment. 50s, 60s, the mode of operation shifts more to the quest for wisdom and a search for legacy. I mean, it seems like you're still a little bit in the growth phases, you're still doing these incredible new plans. How much do you think about legacy, and what would you like your legacy to be? RB: I don't think I think too much about legacy. I mean, I like to β you know, my grandmother lived to 101, so hopefully I've got another 30 or 40 years to go. No, I just want to live life to its full. You know, if I can make a difference, I hope to be able to make a difference. And I think one of the positive things at the moment is you've got Sergey and Larry from Google, for instance, who are good friends. And, thank God, you've got two people who genuinely care about the world and with that kind of wealth. If they had that kind of wealth and they didn't care about the world, it would be very worrying. And you know they're going to make a hell of a difference to the world. And I think it's important that people in that kind of position do make a difference. CA: Well, Richard, when I was starting off in business, I knew nothing about it and I also was sort of β I thought that business people were supposed to just be ruthless and that that was the only way you could have a chance of succeeding. And you actually did inspire me. I looked at you, I thought, well, he's made it. Maybe there is a different way. So I would like to thank you for that inspiration, and for coming to TED today. Thank you. Thank you so much. (Applause) |
Building "self-aware" robots | {0: 'Hod Lipson works at the intersection of engineering and biology, studying robots and the way they "behave" and evolve. His work has exciting implications for design and manufacturing -- and serves as a window to understand our own behavior and evolution.'} | TED2007 | So, where are the robots? We've been told for 40 years already that they're coming soon. Very soon they'll be doing everything for us. They'll be cooking, cleaning, buying things, shopping, building. But they aren't here. Meanwhile, we have illegal immigrants doing all the work, but we don't have any robots. So what can we do about that? What can we say? So I want to give a little bit of a different perspective of how we can perhaps look at these things in a little bit of a different way. And this is an x-ray picture of a real beetle, and a Swiss watch, back from '88. You look at that β what was true then is certainly true today. We can still make the pieces. We can make the right pieces. We can make the circuitry of the right computational power, but we can't actually put them together to make something that will actually work and be as adaptive as these systems. So let's try to look at it from a different perspective. Let's summon the best designer, the mother of all designers. Let's see what evolution can do for us. So we threw in β we created a primordial soup with lots of pieces of robots β with bars, with motors, with neurons. Put them all together, and put all this under kind of natural selection, under mutation, and rewarded things for how well they can move forward. A very simple task, and it's interesting to see what kind of things came out of that. So if you look, you can see a lot of different machines come out of this. They all move around. They all crawl in different ways, and you can see on the right, that we actually made a couple of these things, and they work in reality. These are not very fantastic robots, but they evolved to do exactly what we reward them for: for moving forward. So that was all done in simulation, but we can also do that on a real machine. Here's a physical robot that we actually have a population of brains, competing, or evolving on the machine. It's like a rodeo show. They all get a ride on the machine, and they get rewarded for how fast or how far they can make the machine move forward. And you can see these robots are not ready to take over the world yet, but they gradually learn how to move forward, and they do this autonomously. So in these two examples, we had basically machines that learned how to walk in simulation, and also machines that learned how to walk in reality. But I want to show you a different approach, and this is this robot over here, which has four legs. It has eight motors, four on the knees and four on the hip. It has also two tilt sensors that tell the machine which way it's tilting. But this machine doesn't know what it looks like. You look at it and you see it has four legs, the machine doesn't know if it's a snake, if it's a tree, it doesn't have any idea what it looks like, but it's going to try to find that out. Initially, it does some random motion, and then it tries to figure out what it might look like. And you're seeing a lot of things passing through its minds, a lot of self-models that try to explain the relationship between actuation and sensing. It then tries to do a second action that creates the most disagreement among predictions of these alternative models, like a scientist in a lab. Then it does that and tries to explain that, and prune out its self-models. This is the last cycle, and you can see it's pretty much figured out what its self looks like. And once it has a self-model, it can use that to derive a pattern of locomotion. So what you're seeing here are a couple of machines β a pattern of locomotion. We were hoping that it wass going to have a kind of evil, spidery walk, but instead it created this pretty lame way of moving forward. But when you look at that, you have to remember that this machine did not do any physical trials on how to move forward, nor did it have a model of itself. It kind of figured out what it looks like, and how to move forward, and then actually tried that out. (Applause) So, we'll move forward to a different idea. So that was what happened when we had a couple of β that's what happened when you had a couple of β OK, OK, OK β (Laughter) β they don't like each other. So there's a different robot. That's what happened when the robots actually are rewarded for doing something. What happens if you don't reward them for anything, you just throw them in? So we have these cubes, like the diagram showed here. The cube can swivel, or flip on its side, and we just throw 1,000 of these cubes into a soup β this is in simulation βand don't reward them for anything, we just let them flip. We pump energy into this and see what happens in a couple of mutations. So, initially nothing happens, they're just flipping around there. But after a very short while, you can see these blue things on the right there begin to take over. They begin to self-replicate. So in absence of any reward, the intrinsic reward is self-replication. And we've actually built a couple of these, and this is part of a larger robot made out of these cubes. It's an accelerated view, where you can see the robot actually carrying out some of its replication process. So you're feeding it with more material β cubes in this case β and more energy, and it can make another robot. So of course, this is a very crude machine, but we're working on a micro-scale version of these, and hopefully the cubes will be like a powder that you pour in. OK, so what can we learn? These robots are of course not very useful in themselves, but they might teach us something about how we can build better robots, and perhaps how humans, animals, create self-models and learn. And one of the things that I think is important is that we have to get away from this idea of designing the machines manually, but actually let them evolve and learn, like children, and perhaps that's the way we'll get there. Thank you. (Applause) |
The illustrated woman | {0: "Maira Kalman's wise, witty drawings have appeared on numberless <em>New Yorker</em> covers, in a dozen children's books, and throughout the pages of the <em>Elements of Style.</em> Her latest book, <em>The Principles of Uncertainty</em>, is the result of a year-long illustrated blog she kept for the <em>New York Times.</em>"} | TED2007 | What I am always thinking about is what this session is about, which is called simplicity. And almost, I would almost call it being simple-minded, but in the best sense of the word. I'm trying to figure out two very simple things: how to live and how to die, period. That's all I'm trying to do, all day long. And I'm also trying to have some meals, and have some snacks, and, you know, and yell at my children, and do all the normal things that keep you grounded. So, I was fortunate enough to be born a very dreamy child. My older sister was busy torturing my parents, and they were busy torturing her. I was lucky enough to be completely ignored, which is a fabulous thing, actually, I want to tell you. So, I was able to completely daydream my way through my life. And I finally daydreamed my way into NYU, at a very good time, in 1967, where I met a man who was trying to blow up the math building of NYU. And I was writing terrible poetry and knitting sweaters for him. And feminists hated us, and the whole thing was wretched from beginning to end. But I kept writing bad poetry, and he didn't blow up the math building, but he went to Cuba. But I gave him the money, because I was from Riverdale so I had more money than he did. (Laughter) And that was a good thing to help, you know, the cause. But, then he came back, and things happened, and I decided I really hated my writing, that it was awful, awful, purple prose. And I decided that I wanted to tell β but I still wanted to tell a narrative story and I still wanted to tell my stories. So I decided that I would start to draw. How hard could that be? And so what happened was that I started just becoming an editorial illustrator through, you know, sheer whatever, sheer ignorance. And we started a studio. Well, Tibor really started the studio, called M&Co. And the premise of M&Co was, we don't know anything, but that's all right, we're going to do it anyway. And as a matter of fact, it's better not to know anything, because if you know too much, you're stymied. So, the premise in the studio was, there are no boundaries, there is no fear. And I β and my full-time job, I landed the best job on Earth, was to daydream, and to actually come up with absurd ideas that β fortunately, there were enough people there, and it was a team, it was a collective, it was not just me coming up with crazy ideas. But the point was that I was there as myself, as a dreamer. And so some of the things β I mean, it was a long history of M&Co, and clearly we also needed to make some money, so we decided we would create a series of products. And some of the watches there, attempting to be beautiful and humorous β maybe not attempting, hopefully succeeding. That to be able to talk about content, to break apart what you normally expect, to use humor and surprise, elegance and humanity in your work was really important to us. It was a very high, it was a very impersonal time in design and we wanted to say, the content is what's important, not the package, not the wrapping. You really have to be journalists, you have to be inventors, you have to use your imagination more importantly than anything. So, the good news is that I have a dog and, though I don't know if I believe in luck β I don't know what I believe in, it's a very complicated question, but I do know that before I go away, I crank his tail seven times. So, whenever he sees a suitcase in the house, because everybody's always, you know, leaving, they're always cranking this wonderful dog's tail, and he runs to the other room. But I am able to make the transition from working for children and β from working for adults to children, and back and forth, because, you know, I can say that I'm immature, and in a way, that's true. I don't really β I mean, I could tell you that I didn't understand, I'm not proud of it, but I didn't understand let's say 95 percent of the talks at this conference. But I have been taking beautiful notes of drawings and I have a gorgeous onion from Murray Gell-Mann's talk. And I have a beautiful page of doodles from Jonathan Woodham's talk. So, good things come out of, you know, incomprehension β (Laughter) β which I will do a painting of, and then it will end up in my work. So, I'm open to the possibilities of not knowing and finding out something new. So, in writing for children, it seems simple, and it is. You have to condense a story into 32 pages, usually. And what you have to do is, you really have to edit down to what you want to say. And hopefully, you're not talking down to kids and you're not talking in such a way that you, you know, couldn't stand reading it after one time. So, I hopefully am writing, you know, books that are good for children and for adults. But the painting reflects β I don't think differently for children than I do for adults. I try to use the same kind of imagination, the same kind of whimsy, the same kind of love of language. So, you know, and I have lots of wonderful-looking friends. This is Andrew Gatz, and he walked in through the door and I said, "You! Sit down there." You know, I take lots of photos. And the Bertoia chair in the background is my favorite chair. So, I get to put in all of the things that I love. Hopefully, a dialog between adults and children will happen on many different levels, and hopefully different kinds of humor will evolve. And the books are really journals of my life. I never β I don't like plots. I don't know what a plot means. I can't stand the idea of anything that starts in the beginning, you know, beginning, middle and end. It really scares me, because my life is too random and too confused, and I enjoy it that way. But anyway, so we were in Venice, and this is our room. And I had this dream that I was wearing this fantastic green gown, and I was looking out the window, and it was really a beautiful thing. And so, I was able to put that into this story, which is an alphabet, and hopefully go on to something else. The letter C had other things in it. I was fortunate also, to meet the man who's sitting on the bed, though I gave him hair over here and he doesn't have hair. Well, he has some hair but β well, he used to have hair. And with him, I was able to do a project that was really fantastic. I work for the New Yorker, and I do covers, and 9/11 happened and it was, you know, a complete and utter end of the world as we knew it. And Rick and I were on our way to a party in the Bronx, and somebody said Bronxistan, and somebody said Ferreristan, and we came up with this New Yorker cover, which we were able to β we didn't know what we were doing. We weren't trying to be funny, we weren't trying to be β well, we were trying to be funny actually, that's not true. We hoped we'd be funny, but we didn't know it would be a cover, and we didn't know that that image, at the moment that it happened, would be something that would be so wonderful for a lot of people. And it really became the β I don't know, you know, it was one of those moments people started laughing at what was going on. And from, you know, Fattushis, to Taxistan to, you know, for the Fashtoonks, Botoxia, Pashmina, Khlintunisia, you know, we were able to take the city and make fun of this completely foreign, who are β what's going on over here? Who are these people? What are these tribes? And David Remnick, who was really wonderful about it, had one problem. He didn't like Al Zheimers, because he thought it would insult people with Alzheimer's. But you know, we said, "David, who's going to know? They're not." (Laughter) So it stayed in, and it was, and, you know, it was a good thing. You know, in the course of my life, I never know what's going to happen and that's kind of the beauty part. And we were on Cape Cod, a place, obviously, of great inspiration, and I picked up this book, "The Elements of Style," at a yard sale. And I didn't β and I'd never used it in school, because I was too busy writing poems, and flunking out, and I don't know what, sitting in cafes. But I picked it up and I started reading it and I thought, this book is amazing. I said, people should know about this book. (Laughter) So I decided it needed a few β it needed a lift, it needed a few illustrations. And basically, I called the, you know, I convinced the White Estate, and what an intersection of like, you know, Polish Jew, you know, main WASP family. Here I am, saying, I'd like to do something to this book. And they said yes, and they left me completely alone, which was a gorgeous, wonderful thing. And I took the examples that they gave, and just did 56 paintings, basically. So, this is, I don't know if you can read this. "Well, Susan, this is a fine mess you are in." And when you're dealing with grammar, which is, you know, incredibly dry, E.B. White wrote such wonderful, whimsical β and actually, Strunk β and then you come to the rules and, you know, there are lots of grammar things. "Do you mind me asking a question? Do you mind my asking a question?" "Would, could, should, or would, should, could." And "would" is Coco Chanel's lover, "should" is Edith Sitwell, and "could" is an August Sander subject. And, "He noticed a large stain in the center of the rug." (Laughter) So, there's a kind of British understatement, murder-mystery theme that I really love very much. And then, "Be obscure clearly! Be wild of tongue in a way we can understand." E.B. White wrote us a number of rules, which can either paralyze you and make you loathe him for the rest of time, or you can ignore them, which I do, or you can, I don't know what, you know, eat a sandwich. So, what I did when I was painting was I started singing, because I really adore singing, and I think that music is the highest form of all art. So, I commissioned a wonderful composer, Nico Muhly, who wrote nine songs using the text, and we performed this fantastic evening of β he wrote music for both amateurs and professionals. I played the clattering teacup and the slinky in the main reading room of the New York Public Library, where you're supposed to be very, very quiet, and it was a phenomenally wonderful event, which we hopefully will do some more. Who knows? The New York TimesSelect, the op-ed page, asked me to do a column, and they said, you can do whatever you want. So, once a month for the last year, I've been doing a column called "The Principles of Uncertainty," which, you know, I don't know who Heisenberg is, but I know I can throw that around now. You know, it's the principles of uncertainty, so, you know. I'm going to read quickly β and probably I'm going to edit some, because I don't have that much time left β a few of the columns. And basically, I was so, you know, it was so amusing, because I said, "Well, how much space do I have?" And they said, "Well, you know, it's the Internet." And I said, "Yes, but how much space do I have?" And they said, "It's unlimited, it's unlimited." OK. So, the first one I was very timid, and I'll begin. "How can I tell you everything that is in my heart? Impossible to begin. Enough. No. Begin with the hapless dodo." And I talk about the dodo, and how the dodo became extinct, and then I talk about Spinoza. "As the last dodo was dying, Spinoza was looking for a rational explanation for everything, called eudaemonia. And then he breathed his last, with loved ones around him, and I know that he had chicken soup also, as his last meal." I happen to know it for a fact. And then he died, and there was no more Spinoza. Extinct. And then, we don't have a stuffed Spinoza, but we do have a stuffed Pavlov's dog, and I visited him in the Museum of Hygiene in St. Petersburg, in Russia. And there he is, with this horrible electrical box on his rump in this fantastic, decrepit palace. "And I think it must have been a very, very dark day when the Bolsheviks arrived. Maybe amongst themselves they had a few good laughs, but Stalin was a paranoid man, even more than my father." (Laughter) You don't even know. "And decided his top people had to be extinctified." Which I think I made up, which is a good thing. And so, this is a chart of, you know, just a small chart, because the chart would go on forever of all the people that he killed. So, shot dead, smacked over the head, you know, thrown away. "Nabokov's family fled Russia. How could the young Nabokov, sitting innocently and elegantly in a red chair, leafing through a book and butterflies, imagine such displacement, such loss?" And then I want to tell you that this is a map. So, "My beautiful mother's family fled Russia as well. Too many pogroms. Leaving the shack, the wild blueberry woods, the geese, the River Sluch, they went to Palestine and then America." And my mother drew this map for me of the United States of America, and that is my DNA over here, because that person who I grew up with had no use for facts whatsoever. Facts were actually banished from our home. And so, if you see that Texas β you know, Texas and California are under Canada, and that South Carolina is on top of North Carolina, this is the home that I grew up in, OK? So, it's a miracle that I'm here today. But actually, it's not. It's actually a wonderful thing. But then she says Tel Aviv and Lenin, which is the town they came from, and, "Sorry, the rest unknown, thank you." But in her lexicon, "sorry, the rest unknown, thank you" is "sorry, the rest unknown, go to hell," because she couldn't care less. (Laughter) "The Impossibility of February" is that February's a really wretched month in New York and the images for me conjure up these really awful things. Well, not so awful. I received a box in the mail and it was wrapped with newspaper and there was the picture of the man on the newspaper and he was dead. And I say, "I hope he's not really dead, just enjoying a refreshing lie-down in the snow, but the caption says he is dead." And actually, he was. I think he's dead, though I don't know, maybe he's not dead. "And this woman leans over in anguish, not about that man, but about all sad things. It happens quite often in February." There's consoling. This man is angry because somebody threw onions all over the staircase, and basically β you know, I guess onions are a theme here. And he says, "It is impossible not to lie. It is February and not lying is impossible." And I really spend a lot of time wondering, how much truth do we tell? What is it that we're actually β what story are we actually telling? How do we know when we are ourselves? How do we actually know that these sentences coming out of our mouths are real stories, you know, are real sentences? Or are they fake sentences that we think we ought to be saying? I'm going to quickly go through this. A quote by Bertrand Russell, "All the labor of all the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius are destined to extinction. So now, my friends, if that is true, and it is true, what is the point?" A complicated question. And so, you know, I talk to my friends and I go to plays where they're singing Russian songs. Oh my God, you know what? Could we have β no, we don't have time. I taped my aunt. I taped my aunt singing a song in Russian from the β you know, could we have it for a second? Do you have that? (Music) OK. I taped my β my aunt used to swim in the ocean every day of the year until she was about 85. So β and that's a song about how everybody's miserable because, you know, we're from Russia. (Laughter) I went to visit Kitty Carlisle Hart, and she is 96, and when I brought her a copy of "The Elements of Style," she said she would treasure it. And then I said β oh, and she was talking about Moss Hart, and I said, "When you met him, you knew it was him." And she said, "I knew it was he." (Laughter) So, I was the one who should have kept the book, but it was a really wonderful moment. And she dated George Gershwin, so, you know, get out. Gershwin died at the age of 38. He's buried in the same cemetery as my husband. I don't want to talk about that now. I do want to talk β the absolute icing on this cemetery cake is the Barricini family mausoleum nearby. I think the Barricini family should open a store there and sell chocolate. (Laughter) And I would like to run it for them. And I went to visit Louise Bourgeoise, who's also still working, and I looked at her sink, which is really amazing, and left. And then I photograph and do a painting of a sofa on the street. And a woman who lives on our street, Lolita. And then I go and have some tea. And then my Aunt Frances dies, and before she died, she tried to pay with Sweet'N Low packets for her bagel. (Laughter) And I wonder what the point is and then I know, and I see that Hy Meyerowitz, Rick Meyerowitz's father, a dry-cleaning supply salesman from the Bronx, won the Charlie Chaplin look-alike contest in 1931. That's actually Hy. And I look at a beautiful bowl of fruit, and I look at a dress that I sewed for friends of mine. And it says, "Ich habe genug," which is a Bach cantata, which I once thought meant "I've had it, I can't take it anymore, give me a break," but I was wrong. It means "I have enough." And that is utterly true. I happen to be alive, end of discussion. Thank you. (Applause) |
The anthropology of mobile phones | {0: "As Executive Creative Director of global insights for frog design, Jan Chipchase travels around the world and inside our pockets in search of behavioral patterns that will inform the design of products we don't even know we want. Yet."} | TED2007 | I live and work from Tokyo, Japan. And I specialize in human behavioral research, and applying what we learn to think about the future in different ways, and to design for that future. And you know, to be honest, I've been doing this for seven years, and I haven't got a clue what the future is going to be like. But I've got a pretty good idea how people will behave when they get there. This is my office. It's out there. It's not in the lab, and it's increasingly in places like India, China, Brazil, Africa. We live on a planet β 6.3 billion people. About three billion people, by the end of this year, will have cellular connectivity. And it'll take about another two years to connect the next billion after that. And I mention this because, if we want to design for that future, we need to figure out what those people are about. And that's, kind of, where I see what my job is and what our team's job is. Our research often starts with a very simple question. So I'll give you an example. What do you carry? If you think of everything in your life that you own, when you walk out that door, what do you consider to take with you? When you're looking around, what do you consider? Of that stuff, what do you carry? And of that stuff, what do you actually use? So this is interesting to us, because the conscious and subconscious decision process implies that the stuff that you do take with you and end up using has some kind of spiritual, emotional or functional value. And to put it really bluntly, you know, people are willing to pay for stuff that has value, right? So I've probably done about five years' research looking at what people carry. I go in people's bags. I look in people's pockets, purses. I go in their homes. And we do this worldwide, and we follow them around town with video cameras. It's kind of like stalking with permission. And we do all this β and to go back to the original question, what do people carry? And it turns out that people carry a lot of stuff. OK, that's fair enough. But if you ask people what the three most important things that they carry are β across cultures and across gender and across contexts β most people will say keys, money and, if they own one, a mobile phone. And I'm not saying this is a good thing, but this is a thing, right? I mean, I couldn't take your phones off you if I wanted to. You'd probably kick me out, or something. OK, it might seem like an obvious thing for someone who works for a mobile phone company to ask. But really, the question is, why? Right? So why are these things so important in our lives? And it turns out, from our research, that it boils down to survival β survival for us and survival for our loved ones. So, keys provide an access to shelter and warmth β transport as well, in the U.S. increasingly. Money is useful for buying food, sustenance, among all its other uses. And a mobile phone, it turns out, is a great recovery tool. If you prefer this kind of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, those three objects are very good at supporting the lowest rungs in Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Yes, they do a whole bunch of other stuff, but they're very good at this. And in particular, it's the mobile phone's ability to allow people to transcend space and time. And what I mean by that is, you know, you can transcend space by simply making a voice call, right? And you can transcend time by sending a message at your convenience, and someone else can pick it up at their convenience. And this is fairly universally appreciated, it turns out, which is why we have three billion plus people who have been connected. And they value that connectivity. But actually, you can do this kind of stuff with PCs. And you can do them with phone kiosks. And the mobile phone, in addition, is both personal β and so it also gives you a degree of privacy β and it's convenient. You don't need to ask permission from anyone, you can just go ahead and do it, right? However, for these things to help us survive, it depends on them being carried. But β and it's a pretty big but β we forget. We're human, that's what we do. It's one of our features. I think, quite a nice feature. So we forget, but we're also adaptable, and we adapt to situations around us pretty well. And so we have these strategies to remember, and one of them was mentioned yesterday. And it's, quite simply, the point of reflection. And that's that moment when you're walking out of a space, and you turn around, and quite often you tap your pockets. Even women who keep stuff in their bags tap their pockets. And you turn around, and you look back into the space, and some people talk aloud. And pretty much everyone does it at some point. OK, the next thing is β most of you, if you have a stable home life, and what I mean is that you don't travel all the time, and always in hotels, but most people have what we call a center of gravity. And a center of gravity is where you keep these objects. And these things don't stay in the center of gravity, but over time, they gravitate there. It's where you expect to find stuff. And in fact, when you're turning around, and you're looking inside the house, and you're looking for this stuff, this is where you look first, right? OK, so when we did this research, we found the absolutely, 100 percent, guaranteed way to never forget anything ever, ever again. And that is, quite simply, to have nothing to remember. (Laughter) OK, now, that sounds like something you get on a Chinese fortune cookie, right? But is, in fact, about the art of delegation. And from a design perspective, it's about understanding what you can delegate to technology and what you can delegate to other people. And it turns out, delegation β if you want it to be β can be the solution for pretty much everything, apart from things like bodily functions, going to the toilet. You can't ask someone to do that on your behalf. And apart from things like entertainment, you wouldn't pay for someone to go to the cinema for you and have fun on your behalf, or, at least, not yet. Maybe sometime in the future, we will. So, let me give you an example of delegation in practice, right. So this is β probably the thing I'm most passionate about is the research that we've been doing on illiteracy and how people who are illiterate communicate. So, the U.N. estimated β this is 2004 figures β that there are almost 800 million people who can't read and write, worldwide. So, we've been conducting a lot of research. And one of the things we were looking at is β if you can't read and write, if you want to communicate over distances, you need to be able to identify the person that you want to communicate with. It could be a phone number, it could be an e-mail address, it could be a postal address. Simple question: if you can't read and write, how do you manage your contact information? And the fact is that millions of people do it. Just from a design perspective, we didn't really understand how they did it, and so that's just one small example of the kind of research that we were doing. And it turns out that illiterate people are masters of delegation. So they delegate that part of the task process to other people, the stuff that they can't do themselves. Let me give you another example of delegation. This one's a little bit more sophisticated, and this is from a study that we did in Uganda about how people who are sharing devices, use those devices. Sente is a word in Uganda that means money. It has a second meaning, which is to send money as airtime. OK? And it works like this. So let's say, June, you're in a village, rural village. I'm in Kampala and I'm the wage earner. I'm sending money back, and it works like this. So, in your village, there's one person in the village with a phone, and that's the phone kiosk operator. And it's quite likely that they'd have a quite simple mobile phone as a phone kiosk. So what I do is, I buy a prepaid card like this. And instead of using that money to top up my own phone, I call up the local village operator. And I read out that number to them, and they use it to top up their phone. So, they're topping up the value from Kampala, and it's now being topped up in the village. You take a 10 or 20 percent commission, and then you β the kiosk operator takes 10 or 20 percent commission, and passes the rest over to you in cash. OK, there's two things I like about this. So the first is, it turns anyone who has access to a mobile phone β anyone who has a mobile phone β essentially into an ATM machine. It brings rudimentary banking services to places where there's no banking infrastructure. And even if they could have access to the banking infrastructure, they wouldn't necessarily be considered viable customers, because they're not wealthy enough to have bank accounts. There's a second thing I like about this. And that is that despite all the resources at my disposal, and despite all our kind of apparent sophistication, I know I could never have designed something as elegant and as totally in tune with the local conditions as this. OK? And, yes, there are things like Grameen Bank and micro-lending. But the difference between this and that is, there's no central authority trying to control this. This is just street-up innovation. So, it turns out the street is a never-ending source of inspiration for us. And OK, if you break one of these things here, you return it to the carrier. They'll give you a new one. They'll probably give you three new ones, right? I mean, that's buy three, get one free. That kind of thing. If you go on the streets of India and China, you see this kind of stuff. And this is where they take the stuff that breaks, and they fix it, and they put it back into circulation. This is from a workbench in Jilin City, in China, and you can see people taking down a phone and putting it back together. They reverse-engineer manuals. This is a kind of hacker's manual, and it's written in Chinese and English. They also write them in Hindi. You can subscribe to these. There are training institutes where they're churning out people for fixing these things as well. But what I like about this is, it boils down to someone on the street with a small, flat surface, a screwdriver, a toothbrush for cleaning the contact heads β because they often get dust on the contact heads β and knowledge. And it's all about the social network of the knowledge, floating around. And I like this because it challenges the way that we design stuff, and build stuff, and potentially distribute stuff. It challenges the norms. OK, for me the street just raises so many different questions. Like, this is Viagra that I bought from a backstreet sex shop in China. And China is a country where you get a lot of fakes. And I know what you're asking β did I test it? I'm not going to answer that, OK. But I look at something like this, and I consider the implications of trust and confidence in the purchase process. And we look at this and we think, well, how does that apply, for example, for the design of β the lessons from this β apply to the design of online services, future services in these markets? This is a pair of underpants from β (Laughter) β from Tibet. And I look at something like this, and honestly, you know, why would someone design underpants with a pocket, right? And I look at something like this and it makes me question, if we were to take all the functionality in things like this, and redistribute them around the body in some kind of personal area network, how would we prioritize where to put stuff? And yes, this is quite trivial, but actually the lessons from this can apply to that kind of personal area networks. And what you see here is a couple of phone numbers written above the shack in rural Uganda. This doesn't have house numbers. This has phone numbers. So what does it mean when people's identity is mobile? When those extra three billion people's identity is mobile, it isn't fixed? Your notion of identity is out-of-date already, OK, for those extra three billion people. This is how it's shifting. And then I go to this picture here, which is the one that I started with. And this is from Delhi. It's from a study we did into illiteracy, and it's a guy in a teashop. You can see the chai being poured in the background. And he's a, you know, incredibly poor teashop worker, on the lowest rungs in the society. And he, somehow, has the appreciation of the values of Livestrong. And it's not necessarily the same values, but some kind of values of Livestrong, to actually go out and purchase them, and actually display them. For me, this kind of personifies this connected world, where everything is intertwined, and the dots are β it's all about the dots joining together. OK, the title of this presentation is "Connections and Consequences," and it's really a kind of summary of five years of trying to figure out what it's going to be like when everyone on the planet has the ability to transcend space and time in a personal and convenient manner, right? When everyone's connected. And there are four things. So, the first thing is the immediacy of ideas, the speed at which ideas go around. And I know TED is about big ideas, but actually, the benchmark for a big idea is changing. If you want a big idea, you need to embrace everyone on the planet, that's the first thing. The second thing is the immediacy of objects. And what I mean by that is, as these become smaller, as the functionality that you can access through this becomes greater β things like banking, identity β these things quite simply move very quickly around the world. And so the speed of the adoption of things is just going to become that much more rapid, in a way that we just totally cannot conceive, when you get it to 6.3 billion and the growth in the world's population. The next thing is that, however we design this stuff β carefully design this stuff β the street will take it, and will figure out ways to innovate, as long as it meets base needs β the ability to transcend space and time, for example. And it will innovate in ways that we cannot anticipate. In ways that, despite our resources, they can do it better than us. That's my feeling. And if we're smart, we'll look at this stuff that's going on, and we'll figure out a way to enable it to inform and infuse both what we design and how we design. And the last thing is that β actually, the direction of the conversation. With another three billion people connected, they want to be part of the conversation. And I think our relevance and TED's relevance is really about embracing that and learning how to listen, essentially. And we need to learn how to listen. So thank you very, very much. (Applause) |
3 clues to understanding your brain | {0: 'Neurologist V.S. Ramachandran looks deep into the brainβs most basic mechanisms. By working with those who have very specific mental disabilities caused by brain injury or stroke, he can map functions of the mind to physical structures of the brain. '} | TED2007 | Well, as Chris pointed out, I study the human brain, the functions and structure of the human brain. And I just want you to think for a minute about what this entails. Here is this mass of jelly, three-pound mass of jelly you can hold in the palm of your hand, and it can contemplate the vastness of interstellar space. It can contemplate the meaning of infinity and it can contemplate itself contemplating on the meaning of infinity. And this peculiar recursive quality that we call self-awareness, which I think is the holy grail of neuroscience, of neurology, and hopefully, someday, we'll understand how that happens. OK, so how do you study this mysterious organ? I mean, you have 100 billion nerve cells, little wisps of protoplasm, interacting with each other, and from this activity emerges the whole spectrum of abilities that we call human nature and human consciousness. How does this happen? Well, there are many ways of approaching the functions of the human brain. One approach, the one we use mainly, is to look at patients with sustained damage to a small region of the brain, where there's been a genetic change in a small region of the brain. What then happens is not an across-the-board reduction in all your mental capacities, a sort of blunting of your cognitive ability. What you get is a highly selective loss of one function, with other functions being preserved intact, and this gives you some confidence in asserting that that part of the brain is somehow involved in mediating that function. So you can then map function onto structure, and then find out what the circuitry's doing to generate that particular function. So that's what we're trying to do. So let me give you a few striking examples of this. In fact, I'm giving you three examples, six minutes each, during this talk. The first example is an extraordinary syndrome called Capgras syndrome. If you look at the first slide there, that's the temporal lobes, frontal lobes, parietal lobes, OK β the lobes that constitute the brain. And if you look, tucked away inside the inner surface of the temporal lobes β you can't see it there β is a little structure called the fusiform gyrus. And that's been called the face area in the brain, because when it's damaged, you can no longer recognize people's faces. You can still recognize them from their voice and say, "Oh yeah, that's Joe," but you can't look at their face and know who it is, right? You can't even recognize yourself in the mirror. I mean, you know it's you because you wink and it winks, and you know it's a mirror, but you don't really recognize yourself as yourself. OK. Now that syndrome is well known as caused by damage to the fusiform gyrus. But there's another rare syndrome, so rare, in fact, that very few physicians have heard about it, not even neurologists. This is called the Capgras delusion, and that is a patient, who's otherwise completely normal, has had a head injury, comes out of coma, otherwise completely normal, he looks at his mother and says, "This looks exactly like my mother, this woman, but she's an impostor. She's some other woman pretending to be my mother." Now, why does this happen? Why would somebody β and this person is perfectly lucid and intelligent in all other respects, but when he sees his mother, his delusion kicks in and says, it's not mother. Now, the most common interpretation of this, which you find in all the psychiatry textbooks, is a Freudian view, and that is that this chap β and the same argument applies to women, by the way, but I'll just talk about guys. When you're a little baby, a young baby, you had a strong sexual attraction to your mother. This is the so-called Oedipus complex of Freud. I'm not saying I believe this, but this is the standard Freudian view. And then, as you grow up, the cortex develops, and inhibits these latent sexual urges towards your mother. Thank God, or you would all be sexually aroused when you saw your mother. And then what happens is, there's a blow to your head, damaging the cortex, allowing these latent sexual urges to emerge, flaming to the surface, and suddenly and inexplicably you find yourself being sexually aroused by your mother. And you say, "My God, if this is my mom, how come I'm being sexually turned on? She's some other woman. She's an impostor." It's the only interpretation that makes sense to your damaged brain. This has never made much sense to me, this argument. It's very ingenious, as all Freudian arguments are β (Laughter) β but didn't make much sense because I have seen the same delusion, a patient having the same delusion, about his pet poodle. (Laughter) He'll say, "Doctor, this is not Fifi. It looks exactly like Fifi, but it's some other dog." Right? Now, you try using the Freudian explanation there. (Laughter) You'll start talking about the latent bestiality in all humans, or some such thing, which is quite absurd, of course. Now, what's really going on? So, to explain this curious disorder, we look at the structure and functions of the normal visual pathways in the brain. Normally, visual signals come in, into the eyeballs, go to the visual areas in the brain. There are, in fact, 30 areas in the back of your brain concerned with just vision, and after processing all that, the message goes to a small structure called the fusiform gyrus, where you perceive faces. There are neurons there that are sensitive to faces. You can call it the face area of the brain, right? I talked about that earlier. Now, when that area's damaged, you lose the ability to see faces, right? But from that area, the message cascades into a structure called the amygdala in the limbic system, the emotional core of the brain, and that structure, called the amygdala, gauges the emotional significance of what you're looking at. Is it prey? Is it predator? Is it mate? Or is it something absolutely trivial, like a piece of lint, or a piece of chalk, or a β I don't want to point to that, but β or a shoe, or something like that? OK? Which you can completely ignore. So if the amygdala is excited, and this is something important, the messages then cascade into the autonomic nervous system. Your heart starts beating faster. You start sweating to dissipate the heat that you're going to create from muscular exertion. And that's fortunate, because we can put two electrodes on your palm and measure the change in skin resistance produced by sweating. So I can determine, when you're looking at something, whether you're excited or whether you're aroused, or not, OK? And I'll get to that in a minute. So my idea was, when this chap looks at an object, when he looks at his β any object for that matter, it goes to the visual areas and, however, and it's processed in the fusiform gyrus, and you recognize it as a pea plant, or a table, or your mother, for that matter, OK? And then the message cascades into the amygdala, and then goes down the autonomic nervous system. But maybe, in this chap, that wire that goes from the amygdala to the limbic system, the emotional core of the brain, is cut by the accident. So because the fusiform is intact, the chap can still recognize his mother, and says, "Oh yeah, this looks like my mother." But because the wire is cut to the emotional centers, he says, "But how come, if it's my mother, I don't experience a warmth?" Or terror, as the case may be? Right? (Laughter) And therefore, he says, "How do I account for this inexplicable lack of emotions? This can't be my mother. It's some strange woman pretending to be my mother." How do you test this? Well, what you do is, if you take any one of you here, and put you in front of a screen, and measure your galvanic skin response, and show pictures on the screen, I can measure how you sweat when you see an object, like a table or an umbrella. Of course, you don't sweat. If I show you a picture of a lion, or a tiger, or a pinup, you start sweating, right? And, believe it or not, if I show you a picture of your mother β I'm talking about normal people β you start sweating. You don't even have to be Jewish. (Laughter) Now, what happens if you show this patient? You take the patient and show him pictures on the screen and measure his galvanic skin response. Tables and chairs and lint, nothing happens, as in normal people, but when you show him a picture of his mother, the galvanic skin response is flat. There's no emotional reaction to his mother, because that wire going from the visual areas to the emotional centers is cut. So his vision is normal because the visual areas are normal, his emotions are normal β he'll laugh, he'll cry, so on and so forth β but the wire from vision to emotions is cut and therefore he has this delusion that his mother is an impostor. It's a lovely example of the sort of thing we do: take a bizarre, seemingly incomprehensible, neural psychiatric syndrome and say that the standard Freudian view is wrong, that, in fact, you can come up with a precise explanation in terms of the known neural anatomy of the brain. By the way, if this patient then goes, and mother phones from an adjacent room β phones him β and he picks up the phone, and he says, "Wow, mom, how are you? Where are you?" There's no delusion through the phone. Then, she approaches him after an hour, he says, "Who are you? You look just like my mother." OK? The reason is there's a separate pathway going from the hearing centers in the brain to the emotional centers, and that's not been cut by the accident. So this explains why through the phone he recognizes his mother, no problem. When he sees her in person, he says it's an impostor. OK, how is all this complex circuitry set up in the brain? Is it nature, genes, or is it nurture? And we approach this problem by considering another curious syndrome called phantom limb. And you all know what a phantom limb is. When an arm is amputated, or a leg is amputated, for gangrene, or you lose it in war β for example, in the Iraq war, it's now a serious problem β you continue to vividly feel the presence of that missing arm, and that's called a phantom arm or a phantom leg. In fact, you can get a phantom with almost any part of the body. Believe it or not, even with internal viscera. I've had patients with the uterus removed β hysterectomy β who have a phantom uterus, including phantom menstrual cramps at the appropriate time of the month. And in fact, one student asked me the other day, "Do they get phantom PMS?" (Laughter) A subject ripe for scientific enquiry, but we haven't pursued that. OK, now the next question is, what can you learn about phantom limbs by doing experiments? One of the things we've found was, about half the patients with phantom limbs claim that they can move the phantom. It'll pat his brother on the shoulder, it'll answer the phone when it rings, it'll wave goodbye. These are very compelling, vivid sensations. The patient's not delusional. He knows that the arm is not there, but, nevertheless, it's a compelling sensory experience for the patient. But however, about half the patients, this doesn't happen. The phantom limb β they'll say, "But doctor, the phantom limb is paralyzed. It's fixed in a clenched spasm and it's excruciatingly painful. If only I could move it, maybe the pain will be relieved." Now, why would a phantom limb be paralyzed? It sounds like an oxymoron. But when we were looking at the case sheets, what we found was, these people with the paralyzed phantom limbs, the original arm was paralyzed because of the peripheral nerve injury. The actual nerve supplying the arm was severed, was cut, by say, a motorcycle accident. So the patient had an actual arm, which is painful, in a sling for a few months or a year, and then, in a misguided attempt to get rid of the pain in the arm, the surgeon amputates the arm, and then you get a phantom arm with the same pains, right? And this is a serious clinical problem. Patients become depressed. Some of them are driven to suicide, OK? So, how do you treat this syndrome? Now, why do you get a paralyzed phantom limb? When I looked at the case sheet, I found that they had an actual arm, and the nerves supplying the arm had been cut, and the actual arm had been paralyzed, and lying in a sling for several months before the amputation, and this pain then gets carried over into the phantom itself. Why does this happen? When the arm was intact, but paralyzed, the brain sends commands to the arm, the front of the brain, saying, "Move," but it's getting visual feedback saying, "No." Move. No. Move. No. Move. No. And this gets wired into the circuitry of the brain, and we call this learned paralysis, OK? The brain learns, because of this Hebbian, associative link, that the mere command to move the arm creates a sensation of a paralyzed arm. And then, when you've amputated the arm, this learned paralysis carries over into your body image and into your phantom, OK? Now, how do you help these patients? How do you unlearn the learned paralysis, so you can relieve him of this excruciating, clenching spasm of the phantom arm? Well, we said, what if you now send the command to the phantom, but give him visual feedback that it's obeying his command, right? Maybe you can relieve the phantom pain, the phantom cramp. How do you do that? Well, virtual reality. But that costs millions of dollars. So, I hit on a way of doing this for three dollars, but don't tell my funding agencies. (Laughter) OK? What you do is you create what I call a mirror box. You have a cardboard box with a mirror in the middle, and then you put the phantom β so my first patient, Derek, came in. He had his arm amputated 10 years ago. He had a brachial avulsion, so the nerves were cut and the arm was paralyzed, lying in a sling for a year, and then the arm was amputated. He had a phantom arm, excruciatingly painful, and he couldn't move it. It was a paralyzed phantom arm. So he came there, and I gave him a mirror like that, in a box, which I call a mirror box, right? And the patient puts his phantom left arm, which is clenched and in spasm, on the left side of the mirror, and the normal hand on the right side of the mirror, and makes the same posture, the clenched posture, and looks inside the mirror. And what does he experience? He looks at the phantom being resurrected, because he's looking at the reflection of the normal arm in the mirror, and it looks like this phantom has been resurrected. "Now," I said, "now, look, wiggle your phantom β your real fingers, or move your real fingers while looking in the mirror." He's going to get the visual impression that the phantom is moving, right? That's obvious, but the astonishing thing is, the patient then says, "Oh my God, my phantom is moving again, and the pain, the clenching spasm, is relieved." And remember, my first patient who came in β (Applause) β thank you. (Applause) My first patient came in, and he looked in the mirror, and I said, "Look at your reflection of your phantom." And he started giggling, he says, "I can see my phantom." But he's not stupid. He knows it's not real. He knows it's a mirror reflection, but it's a vivid sensory experience. Now, I said, "Move your normal hand and phantom." He said, "Oh, I can't move my phantom. You know that. It's painful." I said, "Move your normal hand." And he says, "Oh my God, my phantom is moving again. I don't believe this! And my pain is being relieved." OK? And then I said, "Close your eyes." He closes his eyes. "And move your normal hand." "Oh, nothing. It's clenched again." "OK, open your eyes." "Oh my God, oh my God, it's moving again!" So, he was like a kid in a candy store. So, I said, OK, this proves my theory about learned paralysis and the critical role of visual input, but I'm not going to get a Nobel Prize for getting somebody to move his phantom limb. (Laughter) (Applause) It's a completely useless ability, if you think about it. (Laughter) But then I started realizing, maybe other kinds of paralysis that you see in neurology, like stroke, focal dystonias β there may be a learned component to this, which you can overcome with the simple device of using a mirror. So, I said, "Look, Derek" β well, first of all, the guy can't just go around carrying a mirror to alleviate his pain β I said, "Look, Derek, take it home and practice with it for a week or two. Maybe, after a period of practice, you can dispense with the mirror, unlearn the paralysis, and start moving your paralyzed arm, and then, relieve yourself of pain." So he said OK, and he took it home. I said, "Look, it's, after all, two dollars. Take it home." So, he took it home, and after two weeks, he phones me, and he said, "Doctor, you're not going to believe this." I said, "What?" He said, "It's gone." I said, "What's gone?" I thought maybe the mirror box was gone. (Laughter) He said, "No, no, no, you know this phantom I've had for the last 10 years? It's disappeared." And I said β I got worried, I said, my God, I mean I've changed this guy's body image, what about human subjects, ethics and all of that? And I said, "Derek, does this bother you?" He said, "No, last three days, I've not had a phantom arm and therefore no phantom elbow pain, no clenching, no phantom forearm pain, all those pains are gone away. But the problem is I still have my phantom fingers dangling from the shoulder, and your box doesn't reach." (Laughter) "So, can you change the design and put it on my forehead, so I can, you know, do this and eliminate my phantom fingers?" He thought I was some kind of magician. Now, why does this happen? It's because the brain is faced with tremendous sensory conflict. It's getting messages from vision saying the phantom is back. On the other hand, there's no proprioception, muscle signals saying that there is no arm, right? And your motor command saying there is an arm, and, because of this conflict, the brain says, to hell with it, there is no phantom, there is no arm, right? It goes into a sort of denial β it gates the signals. And when the arm disappears, the bonus is, the pain disappears because you can't have disembodied pain floating out there, in space. So, that's the bonus. Now, this technique has been tried on dozens of patients by other groups in Helsinki, so it may prove to be valuable as a treatment for phantom pain, and indeed, people have tried it for stroke rehabilitation. Stroke you normally think of as damage to the fibers, nothing you can do about it. But, it turns out some component of stroke paralysis is also learned paralysis, and maybe that component can be overcome using mirrors. This has also gone through clinical trials, helping lots and lots of patients. OK, let me switch gears now to the third part of my talk, which is about another curious phenomenon called synesthesia. This was discovered by Francis Galton in the nineteenth century. He was a cousin of Charles Darwin. He pointed out that certain people in the population, who are otherwise completely normal, had the following peculiarity: every time they see a number, it's colored. Five is blue, seven is yellow, eight is chartreuse, nine is indigo, OK? Bear in mind, these people are completely normal in other respects. Or C sharp β sometimes, tones evoke color. C sharp is blue, F sharp is green, another tone might be yellow, right? Why does this happen? This is called synesthesia. Galton called it synesthesia, a mingling of the senses. In us, all the senses are distinct. These people muddle up their senses. Why does this happen? One of the two aspects of this problem are very intriguing. Synesthesia runs in families, so Galton said this is a hereditary basis, a genetic basis. Secondly, synesthesia is about β and this is what gets me to my point about the main theme of this lecture, which is about creativity β synesthesia is eight times more common among artists, poets, novelists and other creative people than in the general population. Why would that be? I'm going to answer that question. It's never been answered before. OK, what is synesthesia? What causes it? Well, there are many theories. One theory is they're just crazy. Now, that's not really a scientific theory, so we can forget about it. Another theory is they are acid junkies and potheads, right? Now, there may be some truth to this, because it's much more common here in the Bay Area than in San Diego. (Laughter) OK. Now, the third theory is that β well, let's ask ourselves what's really going on in synesthesia. All right? So, we found that the color area and the number area are right next to each other in the brain, in the fusiform gyrus. So we said, there's some accidental cross wiring between color and numbers in the brain. So, every time you see a number, you see a corresponding color, and that's why you get synesthesia. Now remember β why does this happen? Why would there be crossed wires in some people? Remember I said it runs in families? That gives you the clue. And that is, there is an abnormal gene, a mutation in the gene that causes this abnormal cross wiring. In all of us, it turns out we are born with everything wired to everything else. So, every brain region is wired to every other region, and these are trimmed down to create the characteristic modular architecture of the adult brain. So, if there's a gene causing this trimming and if that gene mutates, then you get deficient trimming between adjacent brain areas. And if it's between number and color, you get number-color synesthesia. If it's between tone and color, you get tone-color synesthesia. So far, so good. Now, what if this gene is expressed everywhere in the brain, so everything is cross-connected? Well, think about what artists, novelists and poets have in common, the ability to engage in metaphorical thinking, linking seemingly unrelated ideas, such as, "It is the east, and Juliet is the Sun." Well, you don't say, Juliet is the sun, does that mean she's a glowing ball of fire? I mean, schizophrenics do that, but it's a different story, right? Normal people say, she's warm like the sun, she's radiant like the sun, she's nurturing like the sun. Instantly, you've found the links. Now, if you assume that this greater cross wiring and concepts are also in different parts of the brain, then it's going to create a greater propensity towards metaphorical thinking and creativity in people with synesthesia. And, hence, the eight times more common incidence of synesthesia among poets, artists and novelists. OK, it's a very phrenological view of synesthesia. The last demonstration β can I take one minute? (Applause) OK. I'm going to show you that you're all synesthetes, but you're in denial about it. Here's what I call Martian alphabet. Just like your alphabet, A is A, B is B, C is C. Different shapes for different phonemes, right? Here, you've got Martian alphabet. One of them is Kiki, one of them is Bouba. Which one is Kiki and which one is Bouba? How many of you think that's Kiki and that's Bouba? Raise your hands. Well, it's one or two mutants. (Laughter) How many of you think that's Bouba, that's Kiki? Raise your hands. Ninety-nine percent of you. Now, none of you is a Martian. How did you do that? It's because you're all doing a cross-model synesthetic abstraction, meaning you're saying that that sharp inflection β ki-ki, in your auditory cortex, the hair cells being excited β Kiki, mimics the visual inflection, sudden inflection of that jagged shape. Now, this is very important, because what it's telling you is your brain is engaging in a primitive β it's just β it looks like a silly illusion, but these photons in your eye are doing this shape, and hair cells in your ear are exciting the auditory pattern, but the brain is able to extract the common denominator. It's a primitive form of abstraction, and we now know this happens in the fusiform gyrus of the brain, because when that's damaged, these people lose the ability to engage in Bouba Kiki, but they also lose the ability to engage in metaphor. If you ask this guy, what β "all that glitters is not gold," what does that mean?" The patient says, "Well, if it's metallic and shiny, it doesn't mean it's gold. You have to measure its specific gravity, OK?" So, they completely miss the metaphorical meaning. So, this area is about eight times the size in higher β especially in humans β as in lower primates. Something very interesting is going on here in the angular gyrus, because it's the crossroads between hearing, vision and touch, and it became enormous in humans. And something very interesting is going on. And I think it's a basis of many uniquely human abilities like abstraction, metaphor and creativity. All of these questions that philosophers have been studying for millennia, we scientists can begin to explore by doing brain imaging, and by studying patients and asking the right questions. Thank you. (Applause) Sorry about that. (Laughter) |
A commodities exchange for Ethiopia | {0: "Eleni Gabre-Madhin is working to build Ethiopia's first commodities market. Re-establishing the profit motive for farmers, she believes, could help turn the world's largest recipient of food aid into a regional food basket."} | TEDGlobal 2007 | You know, there's a small country nestled in the Himalayan Mountains, far from these beautiful mountains, where the people of the Kingdom of Bhutan have decided to do something different, which is to measure their gross national happiness rather than their gross national product. And why not? After all, happiness is not just a privilege for the lucky few, but a fundamental human right for all. And what is happiness? Happiness is the freedom of choice. The freedom to chose where to live, what to do, what to buy, what to sell, from whom, to whom, when and how. Where does choice come from? And who gets to express it, and how do we express it? Well, one way to express choice is through the market. Well-functioning markets provide choices, and ultimately, the ability to express one's pursuit for happiness. The great Indian economist, Amartya Sen, was awarded the Nobel prize for demonstrating that famine is not so much about the availability of food supply, but rather the ability to acquire or entitle oneself to that food through the market. In 1984, in what can only be considered one of the greatest crimes of humanity, nearly one million people died of starvation in my country of birth, Ethiopia. Not because there was not enough food β because there was actually a surplus of food in the fertile regions of the south parts of the country β but because in the north, people could not access or entitle themselves to that food. That was a turning point for my life. Most Africans today, by far, are farmers. And most of Africa's farmers are, by and large, small farmers in terms of land that they operate, and very, very small farmers in terms of the capital they have at their disposal. African agriculture today is among, or is, the most under-capitalized in the world. Only seven percent of arable land in Africa is irrigated, compared to 40 percent in Asia. African farmers only use some 22 kilograms of fertilizer per hectare, compared to 144 in Asia. Road density is six times greater in Asia than it is in rural Africa. There are eight times more tractors in Latin America, and three times more tractors in Asia, than in Africa. The small farmer in Africa today lives a life without much choice, and therefore without much freedom. His livelihood is predetermined by the conditions of grinding poverty. He comes to the market when prices are lowest, with the meager fruits of his hard labor, just after the harvest, because he has no choice. She comes back to the market some months later, when prices are highest, in what we call the lean season β when food is scarce β because she has to feed her family and has no choice. The real question is, how can markets be developed in rural Africa to harness the power of innovation and entrepreneurship that we know exists? Another notable economist, Theodore Schultz, in 1974 won the Nobel prize for demonstrating that farmers are efficient, but poor. Meaning, in fact, that farmers are rational and profit-minded just like everybody else. Well, we don't need, now, any more Nobel prizes to know that farmers want a fair shake at the market and want to make money, just like everyone else. And one thing is clear, which is at least now we know that Africa is open for business. And that business is agriculture. Over two decades ago, the world insisted to Africa that markets must be liberalized, that economies must be structurally adjusted. This meant that governments were to remove themselves from the business of buying and selling β which they did rather inefficiently β and let the private market do its magic. Well, what happened over the last 25 years? Did Africa feed itself? Did our farmers turn into highly productive commercial actors? I think we're all in this room, probably, because we know that, in fact, Africa is the only region in the world where hunger and malnutrition are projected to go up over the next 10 years, where the food import bill is now double what it was 20 years ago, where food production per capita has stagnated, and where fertilizer use has declined rather than increased. So why didn't agriculture markets perform to expectations? The market reforms prompted by the West β and I've spent some 15 years traveling around the continent doing research on agricultural markets, and have interviewed traders in 10 to 15 countries in this continent, hundreds of traders β trying to understand what went wrong with our market reform. And it seems to me that the reforms might have thrown the baby out with the bath water. Like its agriculture, Africa's markets are highly under-capitalized and inefficient. We know from our work around the continent that transaction costs of reaching the market, and the risks of transacting in rural, agriculture markets, are extremely high. In fact, only one third of agricultural output produced in Africa even reaches the market. Africa's markets are weak not only because of weak infrastructure in terms of roads and telecommunications, but also because of the virtual absence of necessary market institutions, such as market information, grades and standards, and reliable ways to connect buyers and sellers. Because of this, commodity buyers and sellers typically transact in small circles, in narrow networks of people they know and trust. And because of that, as grain changes hands β and I've measured that it changes hands four, five times in its trajectory from the farmer to the consumer β every time it changes hands β and I've seen this all over rural Africa β it also changes sacks. And I thought that was incredibly peculiar. And really realized that that was because β as traders would tell me over and over β that's the only way people know what they're getting in terms of the quantity and the product quality. And that actually has huge implications for the ability of markets to quickly respond to price signals, and situations where there are deficits, for example. It also has very high cost implications. I have measured that 26 percent of the marketing margin is simply due to the fact that, because of the absence of grades and standards and market information, sacks have to be constantly changed. And this leads to very high handling costs. For their part, small farmers, who produce the bulk of our agricultural output in Africa, come to the market with virtually no information at all β blind β trusting that they're going to have some sort of demand for their produce, and completely at the mercy of the merchants in the only market, the nearest local market they know β where they're unable to negotiate better prices or reduce their risk. Speaking of risk, we have seen that price volatility of food crops in Africa is the highest in the world. In Africa, small farmers bear the brunt of this risk. In fact, in my view, there is no region of the world and no period in history that farmers have been expected to bear the kind of market risk that Africa's farmers have to bear. And in my view, there is simply no place in the world that has grown its agriculture on the kind of risk that our farmers in Africa today face. In Ethiopia, for example, the variation in maize prices from year to year is as much as 50 percent annually. This kind of market risk is mind-boggling, and has direct implications for not only the incentives of farmers to invest in higher productivity technology, such as modern seeds and fertilizers, but also direct implications for food security. To give you an example, between 2001 and 2002, Ethiopian maize farmers produced two years of bumper harvest. That in turn, because of the weak marketing system, led to an 80 percent collapse in maize prices in the country. This made it unprofitable for some farmers to even harvest the grain from the fields. And we calculated that some 300,000 tons of grain was left in the fields to rot in early 2002. Not six months later, in July 2002, Ethiopia announced a major food crisis, to the same proportions as 1984: 14 million people at risk of starvation. What also happened that year is in the areas where there were good rains, and where farmers had previously produced surplus grain, farmers had decided to withdraw from the fertilizer market, not use fertilizer and actually had dropped their use of fertilizer by 27 percent. This is a tragic example of arrested development, or a budding green revolution stopped in its tracks. And this is not just specific to Ethiopia, but happens over and over, all over Africa. Well, I'm not here today to lament about the situation, or wring my hands. I am here to tell you that change is in the air. Africa today is not the Africa waiting for aid solutions, or cookie-cutter foreign expert policy prescriptions. Africa has learned, or is learning somewhat slowly, that markets don't happen by themselves. In the 1980s, it was very fashionable to talk about getting prices right. There was a very influential book about that, which was mainly about getting governments out of the market. We now recognize that getting markets right is about not just price incentives, but also investing in the right infrastructure and the appropriate and necessary institutions to create the conditions to unleash the power of innovation in the market. When conditions are right, we know and see that that innovation is ready to explode in rural Africa, just like anywhere else. Nearly three years ago, I decided to leave my comfortable job as a World Bank senior economist in Washington and come back to my country of birth, Ethiopia, after nearly 30 years abroad. I did so for a simple reason. After having spent more than a decade understanding, studying, and trying to convince policymakers and donors about what was wrong with Africa's agricultural markets, I decided it was time to do something about it. I currently lead, in Ethiopia, an exciting new initiative to establish the first Ethiopia Commodity Exchange, or ECX. Now, the commodity exchange itself, that concept, is not new to the world. In fact, in 1848, 82 grain merchants and farmers got together in a small town at the crossroads of the Illinois River and Lake Michigan to establish a way to trade better amongst themselves. That was, of course, the birth of the Chicago Board of Trade, which is the most famous commodity exchange in the world. The Chicago Board of Trade was established then for precisely the same reasons that our farmers today would benefit from a commodity exchange. In the American Midwest, farmers used to load grain onto barges and send it upriver to the Chicago market. But once it arrived, if no buyer was to be found, or if prices suddenly dropped, farmers would incur tremendous losses. And in fact, would even dump the grain in Lake Michigan, rather than spend more money transporting it back to their farms. Well, the need to avoid these huge risks and tremendous losses led to the birth of the futures market, and the underlying system of grading grain and receipting β issuing warehouse receipts on the basis of which trade could be done. From there, the greatest innovation of all came about in this market, which is that buyers and sellers could transact grain without actually having to physically or visually inspect the grain. That meant that grain could be traded across tremendous distances, and even across time β as far forward as 18 months into the future. This innovation is at the heart of the transformation of American agriculture, and the rise of Chicago to a global market, agricultural market, superpower from where it was, a small regional town. Now, over the last century, we tend to think of commodity exchanges as the purview of Western industrialized countries, and that the reference prices for cotton, coffee, cocoa β products produced mainly in the south β are actually a reference price, or a price discovered in these organized commodity exchanges in the northern countries. But that is actually changing. And we're seeing a shift β powered mainly because of information technology β a shift in market dominance towards the emerging markets. And over the last decade, you see that the share of Western exchanges β and this is the U.S. share of exchanges in the world β has gone down by nearly half in just the last decade. Similarly, there's been explosive growth in India, for example, where rural farmers are using exchanges β growing here over the last three years by 270 percent a year. This is powered by low-cost VSAT technology, aggressively trying to reach farmers to bring them into the market. China's Dalian Commodity Exchange, three years ago, 2004, overtook the Chicago Board of Trade to become the second largest commodity exchange in the world. Now, in Ethiopia, we're in the process of designing the first organized Ethiopia Commodity Exchange. We're not trying to cut and paste the Chicago model or the India model, but creating a system uniquely tailored to Ethiopia's needs and realities, Ethiopia's small farmers. So, the ECX is an Ethiopian exchange for Ethiopia. We're creating a system that serves all market actors, that creates integrity, trust, efficiency, transparency and enables small farmers to manage the risks that I have described. In the design of our commodity exchange in Ethiopia, we've done something rather unique, which is to take the approach of an integrated perspective, or what we call the ECX Edge. The ECX Edge pretty much creates the entire ecosystem in which the market will develop itself. And this is because one of the things we've learned over the last decade of studying market development in Africa is that the piecemeal approach does not work. You've got one donor trying to develop market information, another trying to work on or sponsor grades and standards, another ICT, and yet another on warehousing, or warehouse receipts. In our approach in Ethiopia, we've decided to put together the entire ecosystem, or environment, in which trade takes place. That means that the exchange will operate a trading system, which will initially start as an open outcry, because we don't think the country's ready for full electronic trading. But at the same time, we'll do something which I think no exchange in the world has ever done, which is itself to operate something like an Internet cafe in the rural areas. So that farmers and small traders can actually come to a terminal center β what we call the remote access terminal centers β and actually, without having to buy a computer or figure out how to dial up or any of those things, simply see the trading that's happening on the Addis Ababa trading floor. At the same time, what's very fundamental to this market is that β and again, an innovation that we've designed for our exchange β is that the exchange will operate warehouses around the country, in which grade certification and warehouse receipting will be done. And in turn, we'll operate an in-house clearing system, to assure that payment is done appropriately, in the right amount and at the right time, so that basically, we create trust and integrity in the system. Obviously, we work with exchange actors, and as we're developing the exchange market itself, we're also developing the regulatory infrastructure and legal framework, the overarching legal framework for making this market work. So, in fact, our proclamation is going to parliament next month. What's really important is that the ECX will operate a market information system to disseminate prices in real time to farmers around the country, using VSAT technology to bring an electronic price dissemination directly to farmers. What this does is transforms, fundamentally, the farmers' relationship to the market. Whereas before the farmer used to think local β meaning that he or she would go to the nearest local market, eight to 10 kilometers away on average, and sell whatever they happened to have, without any idea of what the price premium or anything else was β now farmers come with knowledge of what prices are at the national market. And they start to think national, and even global. They start to make not only commercial marketing decisions, but also planting decisions, on the basis of information coming from the futures price market. And they come to the market knowing what grades their products will achieve in terms of a price premium. So all of this will transform farmers. It will also transform the way traders do business. It will stop them from doing simple, back-to-back, limited arbitrage to really thinking strategically about how to move grain across long distances from [surplus regions] to [deficit areas]. Can Ethiopia do this? It seems very ambitious. But it will create new opportunities. We believe that this initiative requires great political will, and we'll have to align the financial sector, as well as the ICT sector, and really even the underlying legal framework. We believe that the winds of change are here, and that we can do it. ECX is the market for Ethiopia's new millennium, which starts in about eight months. The last parliament of our century opened with our president announcing to the country that this was the most important economic initiative for the country today. We believe that the stakes are high, but that the returns will be even greater. ECX, moreover, can become a trading platform for a pan-African market in agricultural commodities. Ethiopia's domestic market is about one billion dollars of value. And we feel that over the next five years, if Ethiopia can capture even 40 percent, just 40 percent, of the domestic market, and add just 25 percent value to that market, the value of the market doubles. Ethiopia's agricultural market is 30 percent higher than South Africa's grain production, and, in fact, Ethiopia is the second largest maize producer in Africa. So the potential is there. The will is there. The commitment is there. So we feel that we have a winning value proposition to transform farmers' choices, to grow our agriculture, and to change Africa. So, we are in the business of finding our happiness. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
How electroshock therapy changed me | {0: 'A practicing surgeon for three decades, Sherwin Nuland witnessed life and death in every variety. Then he turned to writing, exploring what there is to people beyond just anatomy.'} | TED2001 | I'd like to do pretty much what I did the first time, which is to choose a lighthearted theme. Last time, I talked about death and dying. (Laughter) This time, I'm going to talk about mental illness. (Laughter) But it has to be technological, so I'll talk about electroshock therapy. (Laughter) You know, ever since man had any notion that some of his other people, his colleagues, could be different, could be strange, could be severely depressed or what we now recognize as schizophrenia, he was certain that this kind of illness had to come from evil spirits getting into the body. So the way of treating these diseases in early times was to, in some way or other, exorcise those evil spirits. And this is still going on, as you know. But it wasn't enough to use the priests. When medicine became somewhat scientific, in about 450 BC, with Hippocrates and those boys, they tried to look for herbs, plants that would literally shake the bad spirits out. So they found certain plants that could cause convulsions. And the herbals, the botanical books of up to the late Middle Ages, the Renaissance, are filled with prescriptions for causing convulsions to shake the evil spirits out. Finally, in about the 16th century, a physician whose name was Theophrastus Bombastus Aureolus von Hohenheim β called Paracelsus, a name probably familiar to some people here β (Laughter) good old Paracelsus β found that he could predict the degree of convulsion by using a measured amount of camphor to produce the convulsion. Can you imagine going to your closet, pulling out a mothball and chewing on it if you're feeling depressed? It's better than Prozac, but I wouldn't recommend it. (Laughter) So, what we see in the 17th, 18th century is the continued search for medications other than camphor that'll do the trick. Well, along comes Benjamin Franklin, and he comes close to convulsing himself with a bolt of electricity off the end of his kite. And so people begin thinking in terms of electricity to produce convulsions. And then we fast-forward to about 1932, when three Italian psychiatrists who were largely treating depression began to notice among their patients, who were also epileptics, that if they had a series of epileptic fits, a lot of them in a row β the depression would very frequently lift. Not only would it lift, but it might never return. So they got very interested in producing convulsions, measured types of convulsions. And they thought, "Well, we've got electricity, we'll plug somebody into the wall. That always makes hair stand up and people shake a lot." So they tried it on a few pigs, and none of the pigs were killed. So they went to the police and they said, "We know that at the Rome railroad station, there are all these lost souls wandering around, muttering gibberish. Can you bring one of them to us?" Someone who is, as the Italians say, "gagootz." So they found this "gagootz" guy, a 39-year-old man who was really hopelessly schizophrenic, who was known, had been known for months, to be literally defecating on himself, talking nothing that made any sense, and they brought him into the hospital. So these three psychiatrists, after about two or three weeks of observation, laid him down on a table, connected his temples to a very small source of current. They thought, "Well, we'll try 55 volts, two-tenths of a second. That's not going to do anything terrible to him." So they did that. Well, I have the following from a firsthand observer, who told me this about 35 years ago, when I was thinking about these things for some research project of mine. He said, "This fellow" β remember, he wasn't even put to sleep β "after this major grand mal convulsion, sat right up, looked at these three fellas and said, 'What the fuck are you assholes trying to do?'" (Laughter) If I could only say that in Italian. (Laughter) Well, they were happy as could be, because he hadn't said a rational word in the weeks of observation. (Laughter) So they plugged him in again, and this time, they used 110 volts for half a second. And to their amazement, after it was over, he began speaking like he was perfectly well. He relapsed a little bit, they gave him a series of treatments, and he was essentially cured. But of course, having schizophrenia, within a few months, it returned. But they wrote a paper about this, and everybody in the western world began using electricity to convulse people who were either schizophrenic or severely depressed. It didn't work very well on the schizophrenics, but it was pretty clear in the '30s and by the middle of the '40s that electroconvulsive therapy was very, very effective in the treatment of depression. And of course, in those days, there were no antidepressant drugs, and it became very, very popular. They would anesthetize people, convulse them ... But the real difficulty was that there was no way to paralyze muscles. So people would have a real grand mal seizure. Bones were broken; especially in old, fragile people, you couldn't use it. And then in the late 1950s, the so-called "muscle relaxants" were developed by pharmacologists, and it got so that you could induce a complete convulsion, an electroencephalographic convulsion β you could see it on the brain waves β without causing any convulsion in the body except a little bit of twitching of the toes. So again, it was very, very popular and very, very useful. Well, you know, in the middle '60s, the first antidepressants came out. Tofranil was the first. In the late '70s, early '80s, there were others, and they were very effective. And patients' rights groups seemed to get very upset about the kinds of things that they would witness, so the whole idea of electroconvulsive, electroshock therapy disappeared, but has had a renaissance in the last 10 years. And the reason that it has had a renaissance is that probably about 10 percent of the people, severe depressives, do not respond, regardless of what is done for them. Now why am I telling you this story at this meeting? I'm telling you this story because, actually, ever since Richard called me and asked me to talk about β as he asked all of his speakers β to talk about something that would be new to this audience that we had never talked about, never written about. I've been planning this moment. This reason really is that I am a man who, almost 30 years ago, had his life saved by two long courses of electroshock therapy. And let me tell you this story. I was, in the 1960s, in a marriage. To use the word "bad" would be perhaps the understatement of the year. It was dreadful. There are, I'm sure, enough divorced people in this room to know about the hostility, the anger, who knows what. Being someone who had had a very difficult childhood, a very difficult adolescence β it had to do with not quite poverty, but close. It had to do with being brought up in a family where no one spoke English, no one could read or write English. It had to do with death and disease and lots of other things. I was a little prone to depression. So, as things got worse, as we really began to hate each other, I became progressively depressed over a period of a couple of years trying to save this marriage, which was inevitably not to be saved. Finally, I would schedule β all my major surgical cases, I was scheduling them for 12, one o'clock in the afternoon, because I couldn't get out of bed before about 11 o'clock. Anybody who's been depressed here knows what that's like. I couldn't even pull the covers off myself. Well, you're in a university medical center, where everybody knows everybody. And it's perfectly clear to my colleagues, so my referrals began to decrease. As my referrals began to decrease, I clearly became increasingly depressed, until I thought, "My God, I can't work anymore." And, in fact, it didn't make any difference, because I didn't have any patients anymore. So, with the advice of my physician, I had myself admitted to the acute care psychiatric unit of our university hospital. And my colleagues, who had known me since medical school, in that place, said, "Don't worry, Shep. Six weeks, you're back in the operating room. Everything's going to be great." Well, you know what bovine stercus is? That proved to be a lot of bovine stercus. (Laughter) I know some people who got tenure in that place with lies like that. (Laughter) (Laughter and applause) So I was one of their failures. But it wasn't that simple, because by the time I got out of that unit, I was not functional at all. I could hardly see five feet in front of myself. I shuffled when I walked. I was bowed over. I rarely bathed. I sometimes didn't shave. It was dreadful. And it was clear β not to me, because nothing was clear to me at that time anymore β that I would need long-term hospitalization in that awful place called a "mental hospital." So I was admitted, in the spring of 1973, to the Institute of Living, which used to be called the Hartford Retreat. It was founded in the 18th century, the largest psychiatric hospital in the state of Connecticut, other than the huge public hospitals that existed at that time. And they tried everything they had. They tried the usual psychotherapy. They tried every medication available in those days. And they did have Tofranil and other things β Mellaril, who knows what. Nothing happened except that I got jaundiced from one of these things. And finally, because I was well-known in Connecticut, they decided they better have a meeting of the senior staff. All the senior staff got together, and I later found out what happened. They put all their heads together, and they decided that there was nothing that could be done for this surgeon who had essentially separated himself from the world, who by that time had become so overwhelmed, not just with depression and feelings of worthlessness and inadequacy, but with obsessional thinking, obsessional thinking about coincidences. And there were particular numbers that every time I saw them, just got me dreadfully upset, all kinds of ritualistic observances ... just awful, awful stuff. Remember when you were a kid, and you had to step on every line? Well, I was a grown man who had all of these rituals, and it got so there was a throbbing, there was a ferocious fear in my head. You've seen this painting by Edvard Munch, "The Scream." Every moment was a scream; it was impossible. So they decided there was no therapy, there was no treatment. But there was one treatment, which actually had been pioneered at the Hartford Hospital in the early 1940s, and you can imagine what it was: it was prefrontal lobotomy. (Imitates a popping sound) So they decided β I didn't know this, again, I found this out later β that the only thing that could be done was for this 43-year-old man to have a prefrontal lobotomy. Well, as in all hospitals, there was a resident assigned to my case. He was 27 years old, and he would meet with me two or three times a week. And of course, I had been there, what, three or four months at the time. He asked to meet with the senior staff, and they agreed to meet with him, because he was very well thought of in that place. They thought he had a really extraordinary future. And he dug in his heels and said, "No. I know this man better than any of you. I have met with him over and over again. You've just seen him from time to time. You've read reports and so forth. I really honestly believe that the basic problem here is pure depression, and all of the obsessional thinking comes out of it. And you know, of course, what'll happen if you do a prefrontal lobotomy. Any of the results along the spectrum, from pretty bad to terrible, terrible, terrible, is going to happen. If he does the best he can, he will have no further obsessions, probably no depression, but his affect will be dulled, he will never go back to surgery, he will never be the loving father that he was to his two children, his life will be changed. If he has the usual result, he'll end up like 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.' And you know about that, just essentially in a stupor the rest of his life." "Well," he said, "can't we try a course of electroshock therapy?" And you know why they agreed? They agreed to humor him. They just thought, "Well, we'll give a course of 10. So we'll lose a little time. Big deal. It doesn't make any difference." So they gave the course of 10, and the first β the usual course, incidentally, was six to eight, and still is six to eight β plugged me into the wires, put me to sleep, gave me the muscle relaxant. Six didn't work. Seven didn't work. Eight didn't work. At nine, I noticed β it's wonderful that I could notice anything β I noticed a change. And at 10, I noticed a real change. And he went back to them, and they agreed to do another 10. Again, not a single one of them β I think there are about seven or eight of them β thought this would do any good. They thought this was a temporary change. But, lo and behold, by 16, by 17, there were demonstrable differences in the way I felt. By 18 and 19, I was sleeping through the night. And by 20, I had the sense, I really had the sense, that I could overcome this, that I was now strong enough that by an act of will, I could blow the obsessional thinking away. I could blow the depression away. And I've never forgotten β I never will forget β standing in the kitchen of the unit β it was a Sunday morning in January of 1974 β standing in the kitchen by myself and thinking, "I've got the strength now to do this." It was as though those tightly coiled wires in my head had been disconnected, and I could think clearly. But I need a formula. I need some thing to say to myself when I begin thinking obsessionally, obsessively. Well, the Gilbert and Sullivan fans in this room will remember "Ruddigore," and they will remember Mad Margaret, and they will remember that she was married to a fella named Sir Despard Murgatroyd. And she used to go nuts every five minutes or so in the play. And he said to her, "We must have a word to bring you back to reality, and the word, my dear, will be 'Basingstoke.'" So every time she got a little nuts, he would say, "Basingstoke!" And she would say, "Basingstoke, it is!" And she'd be fine for a little while. (Laughter) Well, you know, I'm from the Bronx. I can't say "Basingstoke." (Laughter) But I had something better. And it was very simple. It was, "Ah, fuck it!" (Laughter) Much better than "Basingstoke," at least for me. And it worked! My God, it worked. Every time I would begin thinking obsessionally β again, once more, after 20 shock treatments β I would say, "Ah, fuck it." And things got better and better, and within three or four months, I was discharged from that hospital. I joined a group of surgeons, where I could work with other people, in a community, not in New Haven, but fairly close by. I stayed there for three years. At the end of three years, I went back to New Haven, had remarried by that time. I brought my wife with me, actually, to make sure I could get through this. My children came back to live with us. We had two more children after that. Resuscitated the career, even better than it had been before. Went right back into the university and began to write books. Well, you know, it's been a wonderful life. It's been, as I said, close to 30 years. I stopped doing surgery about six years ago and became a full-time writer, as many people know. But it's been very exciting. It's been very happy. Every once in a while, I have to say, "Ah, fuck it." Every once in a while, I get somewhat depressed and a little obsessional. So, I'm not free of all of this. But it's worked. It's always worked. Why have I chosen, after never, ever talking about this, to talk about it now? Well, those of you who know some of these books know that one is about death and dying, one is about the human body and the human spirit, one is about the way mystical thoughts are constantly in our minds. And they have always to do with my own personal experiences. One might think reading these books β and I've gotten thousands of letters about them by people who do think this β that, based on my life's history as I portray it in the books, my early life's history, I am someone who has overcome adversity, that I am someone who has drunk β drank? β drunk of the bitter dregs of near-disaster in childhood and emerged not just unscathed but strengthened. I really have it figured out so that I can advise people about death and dying, so that I can talk about mysticism and the human spirit. And I've always felt guilty about that. I've always felt that somehow I was an impostor, because my readers don't know what I have just told you. It's known by some people in New Haven, obviously, but it is not generally known. So one of the reasons that I have come here to talk about this today is to β frankly, selfishly β unburden myself and let it be known that this is not an untroubled mind that has written all of these books. But more importantly, I think, is the fact that a very significant proportion of people in this audience are under 30, and there are many, of course, who are well over 30. For people under 30, and it looks to me like almost all of you, I would say all of you, are either on the cusp of a magnificent and exciting career or right into a magnificent and exciting career: anything can happen to you. Things change. Accidents happen. Something from childhood comes back to haunt you. You can be thrown off the track. I hope it happens to none of you, but it will probably happen to a small percentage of you. To those to whom it doesn't happen, there will be adversities. If I, with the bleakness of spirit β with no spirit β that I had in the 1970s, and no possibility of recovery as far as that group of very experienced psychiatrists thought, if I can find my way back from this, believe me, anybody can find their way back from any adversity that exists in their lives. And for those who are older, who have lived through perhaps not something as bad as this, but who have lived through difficult times, perhaps where they lost everything, as I did, and started out all over again: some of these things will seem very familiar. There is recovery. There is redemption. And there is resurrection. There are resurrection themes in every society that has ever been studied, and it is because not just only do we fantasize about the possibility of resurrection and recovery, but it actually happens. And it happens a lot. Perhaps the most popular resurrection theme, outside of specifically religious ones, is the one about the phoenix, the ancient story of the phoenix, who, every 500 years, resurrects itself from its own ashes to go on to live a life that is even more beautiful than it was before. Richard, thanks very much. |
The habits of happiness | {0: 'Sometimes called the "happiest man in the world," Matthieu Ricard is a Buddhist monk, author and photographer.'} | TED2004 | So, I guess it is a result of globalization that you can find Coca-Cola tins on top of Everest and a Buddhist monk in Monterey. (Laughter) And so I just came, two days ago, from the Himalayas to your kind invitation. So I would like to invite you, also, for a while, to the Himalayas themselves. And to show the place where meditators, like me, who began with being a molecular biologist in Pasteur Institute, and found their way to the mountains. So these are a few images I was lucky to take and be there. There's Mount Kailash in Eastern Tibet β wonderful setting. This is from Marlboro country. (Laughter) This is a turquoise lake. A meditator. This is the hottest day of the year somewhere in Eastern Tibet, on August 1. And the night before, we camped, and my Tibetan friends said, "We are going to sleep outside." And I said, "Why? We have enough space in the tent." They said, "Yes, but it's summertime." (Laughter) So now, we are going to speak of happiness. As a Frenchman, I must say that there are a lot of French intellectuals that think happiness is not at all interesting. (Laughter) I just wrote an essay on happiness, and there was a controversy. And someone wrote an article saying, "Don't impose on us the dirty work of happiness." (Laughter) "We don't care about being happy. We need to live with passion. We like the ups and downs of life. We like our suffering because it's so good when it ceases for a while." (Laughter) This is what I see from the balcony of my hermitage in the Himalayas. It's about two meters by three, and you are all welcome any time. (Laughter) Now, let's come to happiness or well-being. And first of all, you know, despite what the French intellectuals say, it seems that no one wakes up in the morning thinking, "May I suffer the whole day?" (Laughter) Which means that somehow, consciously or not, directly or indirectly, in the short or the long term, whatever we do, whatever we hope, whatever we dream β somehow, is related to a deep, profound desire for well-being or happiness. As Pascal said, even the one who hangs himself, somehow, is looking for cessation of suffering. He finds no other way. But then, if you look in the literature, East and West, you can find incredible diversity of definition of happiness. Some people say, I only believed in remembering the past, imagining the future, never the present. Some people say happiness is right now; it's the quality of the freshness of the present moment. And that led Henri Bergson, the French philosopher, to say, "All the great thinkers of humanity have left happiness in the vague so that each of them could define their own terms." Well, that would be fine if it was just a secondary preoccupation in life. But now, if it is something that is going to determine the quality of every instant of our life, then we better know what it is, have some clearer idea. And probably, the fact that we don't know that is why, so often, although we seek happiness, it seems we turn our back to it. Although we want to avoid suffering, it seems we are running somewhat towards it. And that can also come from some kind of confusions. One of the most common ones is happiness and pleasure. But if you look at the characteristics of those two, pleasure is contingent upon time, upon its object, upon the place. It is something that β changes of nature. Beautiful chocolate cake: first serving is delicious, second one not so much, then we feel disgust. (Laughter) That's the nature of things. We get tired. I used to be a fan of Bach. I used to play it on the guitar, you know. I can hear it two, three, five times. If I had to hear it 24 hours, non-stop, it might be very tiring. If you are feeling very cold, you come near a fire, it's so wonderful. After some moments, you just go a little back, and then it starts burning. It sort of uses itself as you experience it. And also, again, it can β also, it's something that you β it is not something that is radiating outside. Like, you can feel intense pleasure and some others around you can be suffering a lot. Now, what, then, will be happiness? And happiness, of course, is such a vague word, so let's say well-being. And so, I think the best definition, according to the Buddhist view, is that well-being is not just a mere pleasurable sensation. It is a deep sense of serenity and fulfillment. A state that actually pervades and underlies all emotional states, and all the joys and sorrows that can come one's way. For you, that might be surprising. Can we have this kind of well-being while being sad? In a way, why not? Because we are speaking of a different level. Look at the waves coming near the shore. When you are at the bottom of the wave, you hit the bottom. You hit the solid rock. When you are surfing on the top, you are all elated. So you go from elation to depression β there's no depth. Now, if you look at the high sea, there might be beautiful, calm ocean, like a mirror. There might be storms, but the depth of the ocean is still there, unchanged. So now, how is that? It can only be a state of being, not just a fleeting emotion, sensation. Even joy β that can be the spring of happiness. But there's also wicked joy, you can rejoice in someone's suffering. So how do we proceed in our quest for happiness? Very often, we look outside. We think that if we could gather this and that, all the conditions, something that we say, "Everything to be happy β to have everything to be happy." That very sentence already reveals the doom, destruction of happiness. To have everything. If we miss something, it collapses. And also, when things go wrong, we try to fix the outside so much, but our control of the outer world is limited, temporary, and often, illusory. So now, look at inner conditions. Aren't they stronger? Isn't it the mind that translates the outer condition into happiness and suffering? And isn't that stronger? We know, by experience, that we can be what we call "a little paradise," and yet, be completely unhappy within. The Dalai Lama was once in Portugal, and there was a lot of construction going on everywhere. So one evening, he said, "Look, you are doing all these things, but isn't it nice, also, to build something within?" And he said, "[Without] that β even if you get a high-tech flat on the 100th floor of a super-modern and comfortable building, if you are deeply unhappy within, all you are going to look for is a window from which to jump." So now, at the opposite, we know a lot of people who, in very difficult circumstances, manage to keep serenity, inner strength, inner freedom, confidence. So now, if the inner conditions are stronger β of course, the outer conditions do influence, and it's wonderful to live longer, healthier, to have access to information, education, to be able to travel, to have freedom. It's highly desirable. However, this is not enough. Those are just auxiliary, help conditions. The experience that translates everything is within the mind. So then, when we ask oneself how to nurture the condition for happiness, the inner conditions, and which are those which will undermine happiness. So then, this just needs to have some experience. We have to know from ourselves, there are certain states of mind that are conducive to this flourishing, to this well-being, what the Greeks called eudaimonia, flourishing. There are some which are adverse to this well-being. And so, if we look from our own experience, anger, hatred, jealousy, arrogance, obsessive desire, strong grasping, they don't leave us in such a good state after we have experienced it. And also, they are detrimental to others' happiness. So we may consider that the more those are invading our mind, and, like a chain reaction, the more we feel miserable, we feel tormented. At the opposite, everyone knows deep within that an act of selfless generosity, if from the distance, without anyone knowing anything about it, we could save a child's life, make someone happy. We don't need the recognition. We don't need any gratitude. Just the mere fact of doing that fills such a sense of adequation with our deep nature. And we would like to be like that all the time. So is that possible, to change our way of being, to transform one's mind? Aren't those negative emotions, or destructive emotions, inherent to the nature of mind? Is change possible in our emotions, in our traits, in our moods? For that we have to ask, what is the nature of mind? And if we look from the experiential point of view, there is a primary quality of consciousness that's just the mere fact to be cognitive, to be aware. Consciousness is like a mirror that allows all images to rise on it. You can have ugly faces, beautiful faces in the mirror. The mirror allows that, but the mirror is not tainted, is not modified, is not altered by those images. Likewise, behind every single thought there is the bare consciousness, pure awareness. This is the nature. It cannot be tainted intrinsically with hatred or jealousy because then, if it was always there β like a dye that would permeate the whole cloth β then it would be found all the time, somewhere. We know we're not always angry, always jealous, always generous. So, because the basic fabric of consciousness is this pure cognitive quality that differentiates it from a stone, there is a possibility for change because all emotions are fleeting. That is the ground for mind training. Mind training is based on the idea that two opposite mental factors cannot happen at the same time. You could go from love to hate. But you cannot, at the same time, toward the same object, the same person, want to harm and want to do good. You cannot, in the same gesture, shake hand and give a blow. So, there are natural antidotes to emotions that are destructive to our inner well-being. So that's the way to proceed. Rejoicing compared to jealousy. A kind of sense of inner freedom as opposite to intense grasping and obsession. Benevolence, loving kindness against hatred. But, of course, each emotion then would need a particular antidote. Another way is to try to find a general antidote to all emotions, and that's by looking at the very nature. Usually, when we feel annoyed, hatred or upset with someone, or obsessed with something, the mind goes again and again to that object. Each time it goes to the object, it reinforces that obsession or that annoyance. So then, it's a self-perpetuating process. So what we need to look for now is, instead of looking outward, we look inward. Look at anger itself. It looks very menacing, like a billowing monsoon cloud or thunderstorm. We think we could sit on the cloud, but if you go there, it's just mist. Likewise, if you look at the thought of anger, it will vanish like frost under the morning sun. If you do this again and again, the propensity, the tendencies for anger to arise again will be less and less each time you dissolve it. And, at the end, although it may rise, it will just cross the mind, like a bird crossing the sky without leaving any track. So this is the principal of mind training. Now, it takes time, because it took time for all those faults in our mind, the tendencies, to build up, so it will take time to unfold them as well. But that's the only way to go. Mind transformation β that is the very meaning of meditation. It means familiarization with a new way of being, new way of perceiving things, which is more in adequation with reality, with interdependence, with the stream and continuous transformation, which our being and our consciousness is. So, the interface with cognitive science, since we need to come to that, it was, I suppose, the subject of β we have to deal in such a short time β with brain plasticity. The brain was thought to be more or less fixed. All the nominal connections, in numbers and quantities, were thought, until the last 20 years, to be more or less fixed when we reached adult age. Now, recently, it has been found that it can change a lot. A violinist, as we heard, who has done 10,000 hours of violin practice, some area that controls the movements of fingers in the brain changes a lot, increasing reinforcement of the synaptic connections. So can we do that with human qualities? With loving kindness, with patience, with openness? So that's what those great meditators have been doing. Some of them who came to the labs, like in Madison, Wisconsin, or in Berkeley, did 20 to 40,000 hours of meditation. They do, like, three years' retreat, where they do meditate 12 hours a day. And then, the rest of their life, they will do three or four hours a day. They are real Olympic champions of mind training. (Laughter) This is the place where the meditators β you can see it's kind of inspiring. Now, here with 256 electrodes. (Laughter) So what did they find? Of course, same thing. The scientific embargo β a paper has been submitted to "Nature," hopefully, it will be accepted. It deals with the state of compassion, unconditional compassion. We asked meditators, who have been doing that for years and years, to put their mind in a state where there's nothing but loving kindness, total availability to sentient being. Of course, during the training, we do that with objects. We think of people suffering, of people we love, but at some point, it can be a state which is all pervading. Here is the preliminary result, which I can show because it's already been shown. The bell curve shows 150 controls, and what is being looked at is the difference between the right and the left frontal lobe. In very short, people who have more activity in the right side of the prefrontal cortex are more depressed, withdrawn. They don't describe a lot of positive affect. It's the opposite on the left side: more tendency to altruism, to happiness, to express, and curiosity and so forth. So there's a basic line for people. And also, it can be changed. If you see a comic movie, you go off to the left side. If you are happy about something, you'll go more to the left side. If you have a bout of depression, you'll go to the right side. Here, the -0.5 is the full standard deviation of a meditator who meditated on compassion. It's something that is totally out of the bell curve. So, I've no time to go into all the different scientific results. Hopefully, they will come. But they found that β this is after three and a half hours in an fMRI, it's like coming out of a space ship. Also, it has been shown in other labs β for instance, Paul Ekman's labs in Berkeley β that some meditators are able, also, to control their emotional response more than it could be thought. Like the startle experiments, for example. If you sit a guy on a chair with all this apparatus measuring your physiology, and there's kind of a bomb that goes off, it's such an instinctive response that, in 20 years, they never saw anyone who would not jump. Some meditators, without trying to stop it, but simply by being completely open, thinking that that bang is just going to be a small event like a shooting star, they are able not to move at all. So the whole point of that is not, sort of, to make, like, a circus thing of showing exceptional beings who can jump, or whatever. It's more to say that mind training matters. That this is not just a luxury. This is not a supplementary vitamin for the soul. This is something that's going to determine the quality of every instant of our lives. We are ready to spend 15 years achieving education. We love to do jogging, fitness. We do all kinds of things to remain beautiful. Yet, we spend surprisingly little time taking care of what matters most β the way our mind functions β which, again, is the ultimate thing that determines the quality of our experience. Now, compassion is supposed to be put in action. That's what we try to do in different places. Just this one example is worth a lot of work. This lady with bone TB, left alone in a tent, was going to die with her only daughter. One year later, how she is. Different schools and clinics we've been doing in Tibet. And just, I leave you with the beauty of those looks that tells more about happiness than I could ever say. (Laughter) And jumping monks of Tibet. (Laughter) Flying monks. Thank you very much. |
Laws that choke creativity | {0: "Lawrence Lessig has already transformed intellectual-property law with his Creative Commons innovation. Now he's focused on an even bigger problem: The US' broken political system."} | TED2007 | (Applause) I want to talk to you a little bit about user-generated content. I'm going to tell you three stories on the way to one argument that's going to tell you a little bit about how we open user-generated content up for business. So, here's the first story. 1906. This man, John Philip Sousa, traveled to this place, the United States Capitol, to talk about this technology, what he called the, quote, "talking machines." Sousa was not a fan of the talking machines. This is what he had to say. "These talking machines are going to ruin artistic development of music in this country. When I was a boy, in front of every house in the summer evenings, you would find young people together singing the songs of the day, or the old songs. Today, you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal chord left," Sousa said. "The vocal chords will be eliminated by a process of evolution as was the tail of man when he came from the ape." Now, this is the picture I want you to focus on. This is a picture of culture. We could describe it using modern computer terminology as a kind of read-write culture. It's a culture where people participate in the creation and the re-creation of their culture. In that sense, it's read-write. Sousa's fear was that we would lose that capacity because of these, quote, "infernal machines." They would take it away. And in its place, we'd have the opposite of read-write culture, what we could call read-only culture. Culture where creativity was consumed but the consumer is not a creator. A culture which is top-down, owned, where the vocal chords of the millions have been lost. Now, as you look back at the twentieth century, at least in what we think of as the, quote, "developed world" β hard not to conclude that Sousa was right. Never before in the history of human culture had it been as professionalized, never before as concentrated. Never before has creativity of the millions been as effectively displaced, and displaced because of these, quote, "infernal machines." The twentieth century was that century where, at least for those places we know the best, culture moved from this read-write to read-only existence. So, second. Land is a kind of property β it is property. It's protected by law. As Lord Blackstone described it, land is protected by trespass law, for most of the history of trespass law, by presuming it protects the land all the way down below and to an indefinite extent upward. Now, that was a pretty good system for most of the history of the regulation of land, until this technology came along, and people began to wonder, were these instruments trespassers as they flew over land without clearing the rights of the farms below as they traveled across the country? Well, in 1945, Supreme Court got a chance to address that question. Two farmers, Thomas Lee and Tinie Causby, who raised chickens, had a significant complaint because of these technologies. The complaint was that their chickens followed the pattern of the airplanes and flew themselves into the walls of the barn when the airplanes flew over the land. And so they appealed to Lord Blackstone to say these airplanes were trespassing. Since time immemorial, the law had said, you can't fly over the land without permission of the landowner, so this flight must stop. Well, the Supreme Court considered this 100-years tradition and said, in an opinion written by Justice Douglas, that the Causbys must lose. The Supreme Court said the doctrine protecting land all the way to the sky has no place in the modern world, otherwise every transcontinental flight would subject the operator to countless trespass suits. Common sense, a rare idea in the law, but here it was. Common sense β (Laughter) β Revolts at the idea. Common sense. Finally. Before the Internet, the last great terror to rain down on the content industry was a terror created by this technology. Broadcasting: a new way to spread content, and therefore a new battle over the control of the businesses that would spread content. Now, at that time, the entity, the legal cartel, that controlled the performance rights for most of the music that would be broadcast using these technologies was ASCAP. They had an exclusive license on the most popular content, and they exercised it in a way that tried to demonstrate to the broadcasters who really was in charge. So, between 1931 and 1939, they raised rates by some 448 percent, until the broadcasters finally got together and said, okay, enough of this. And in 1939, a lawyer, Sydney Kaye, started something called Broadcast Music Inc. We know it as BMI. And BMI was much more democratic in the art that it would include within its repertoire, including African American music for the first time in the repertoire. But most important was that BMI took public domain works and made arrangements of them, which they gave away for free to their subscribers. So that in 1940, when ASCAP threatened to double their rates, the majority of broadcasters switched to BMI. Now, ASCAP said they didn't care. The people will revolt, they predicted, because the very best music was no longer available, because they had shifted to the second best public domain provided by BMI. Well, they didn't revolt, and in 1941, ASCAP cracked. And the important point to recognize is that even though these broadcasters were broadcasting something you would call second best, that competition was enough to break, at that time, this legal cartel over access to music. Okay. Three stories. Here's the argument. In my view, the most significant thing to recognize about what this Internet is doing is its opportunity to revive the read-write culture that Sousa romanticized. Digital technology is the opportunity for the revival of these vocal chords that he spoke so passionately to Congress about. User-generated content, spreading in businesses in extraordinarily valuable ways like these, celebrating amateur culture. By which I don't mean amateurish culture, I mean culture where people produce for the love of what they're doing and not for the money. I mean the culture that your kids are producing all the time. For when you think of what Sousa romanticized in the young people together, singing the songs of the day, of the old songs, you should recognize what your kids are doing right now. Taking the songs of the day and the old songs and remixing them to make them something different. It's how they understand access to this culture. So, let's have some very few examples to get a sense of what I'm talking about here. Here's something called Anime Music Video, first example, taking anime captured from television re-edited to music tracks. (Music) This one you should be β confidence. Jesus survives. Don't worry. (Music) (Laughter) And this is the best. (Music) My love ... There's only you in my life ... The only thing that's bright ... My first love ... You're every breath that I take ... You're every step I make ... And I .... I want to share all my love with you ... No one else will do ... And your eyes ... They tell me how much you care ... (Music) So, this is remix, right? (Applause) And it's important to emphasize that what this is not is not what we call, quote, "piracy." I'm not talking about nor justifying people taking other people's content in wholesale and distributing it without the permission of the copyright owner. I'm talking about people taking and recreating using other people's content, using digital technologies to say things differently. Now, the importance of this is not the technique that you've seen here. Because, of course, every technique that you've seen here is something that television and film producers have been able to do for the last 50 years. The importance is that that technique has been democratized. It is now anybody with access to a $1,500 computer who can take sounds and images from the culture around us and use it to say things differently. These tools of creativity have become tools of speech. It is a literacy for this generation. This is how our kids speak. It is how our kids think. It is what your kids are as they increasingly understand digital technologies and their relationship to themselves. Now, in response to this new use of culture using digital technologies, the law has not greeted this Sousa revival with very much common sense. Instead, the architecture of copyright law and the architecture of digital technologies, as they interact, have produced the presumption that these activities are illegal. Because if copyright law at its core regulates something called copies, then in the digital world the one fact we can't escape is that every single use of culture produces a copy. Every single use therefore requires permission; without permission, you are a trespasser. You're a trespasser with about as much sense as these people were trespassers. Common sense here, though, has not yet revolted in response to this response that the law has offered to these forms of creativity. Instead, what we've seen is something much worse than a revolt. There's a growing extremism that comes from both sides in this debate, in response to this conflict between the law and the use of these technologies. One side builds new technologies, such as one recently announced that will enable them to automatically take down from sites like YouTube any content that has any copyrighted content in it, whether or not there's a judgment of fair use that might be applied to the use of that content. And on the other side, among our kids, there's a growing copyright abolitionism, a generation that rejects the very notion of what copyright is supposed to do, rejects copyright and believes that the law is nothing more than an ass to be ignored and to be fought at every opportunity possible. The extremism on one side begets extremism on the other, a fact we should have learned many, many times over, and both extremes in this debate are just wrong. Now, the balance that I try to fight for, I, as any good liberal, try to fight for first by looking to the government. Total mistake, right? (Laughter) Looked first to the courts and the legislatures to try to get them to do something to make the system make more sense. It failed partly because the courts are too passive, partly because the legislatures are corrupted, by which I don't mean that there's bribery operating to stop real change, but more the economy of influence that governs how Congress functions means that policymakers here will not understand this until it's too late to fix it. So, we need something different, we need a different kind of solution. And the solution here, in my view, is a private solution, a solution that looks to legalize what it is to be young again, and to realize the economic potential of that, and that's where the story of BMI becomes relevant. Because, as BMI demonstrated, competition here can achieve some form of balance. The same thing can happen now. We don't have a public domain to draw upon now, so instead what we need is two types of changes. First, that artists and creators embrace the idea, choose that their work be made available more freely. So, for example, they can say their work is available freely for non-commercial, this amateur-type of use, but not freely for any commercial use. And second, we need the businesses that are building out this read-write culture to embrace this opportunity expressly, to enable it, so that this ecology of free content, or freer content, can grow on a neutral platform where they both exist simultaneously, so that more-free can compete with less-free, and the opportunity to develop the creativity in that competition can teach one the lessons of the other. Now, I would talk about one particular such plan that I know something about, but I don't want to violate TED's first commandment of selling, so I'm not going to talk about this at all. I'm instead just going to remind you of the point that BMI teaches us. That artist choice is the key for new technology having an opportunity to be open for business, and we need to build artist choice here if these new technologies are to have that opportunity. But let me end with something I think much more important β much more important than business. It's the point about how this connects to our kids. We have to recognize they're different from us. This is us, right? (Laughter) We made mixed tapes; they remix music. We watched TV; they make TV. It is technology that has made them different, and as we see what this technology can do, we need to recognize you can't kill the instinct the technology produces. We can only criminalize it. We can't stop our kids from using it. We can only drive it underground. We can't make our kids passive again. We can only make them, quote, "pirates." And is that good? We live in this weird time. It's kind of age of prohibitions, where in many areas of our life, we live life constantly against the law. Ordinary people live life against the law, and that's what I β we are doing to our kids. They live life knowing they live it against the law. That realization is extraordinarily corrosive, extraordinarily corrupting. And in a democracy, we ought to be able to do better. Do better, at least for them, if not for opening for business. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Playing with DNA that self-assembles | {0: 'Paul Rothemund folds DNA into shapes and patterns. Which is a simple enough thing to say, but the process he has developed has vast implications for computing and manufacturing -- allowing us to create things we can now only dream of.'} | TED2007 | There's an ancient and universal concept that words have power, that spells exist, and that if we could only pronounce the right words, then β whoosh! β you know, an avalanche would come and wipe out the hobbits, right? So this is a very attractive idea, because we're very lazy, like the Sorcerer's Apprentice, or the world's greatest computer programmer. This idea has a lot of traction with us. We love the idea that words, when pronounced, are little more than pure information, but they evoke physical action in the real world that helps us do work. So, of course, with lots of programmable computers and robots around, this is an easy thing to picture. How many of you know what I'm talking about? Raise your right hand. How many don't know what I'm talking about? Raise your left hand. So that's great. So that was too easy. You guys have very insecure computers, OK? So now the thing is, this is a different kind of spell. This is a computer program made of zeros and ones. It can be pronounced on a computer, does something like this. The important thing is we can write it in a high-level language. A computer magician can write this thing. It can be compiled into zeros and ones and pronounced by a computer. And that's what makes computers powerful, these high-level languages that can be compiled. And so, I'm here to tell you, you don't need a computer to actually have a spell. In fact, what you can do at the molecular level is that if you encode information β you encode a spell or program as molecules β then physics can actually directly interpret that information and run a program. It's what happens in proteins. When this amino-acid sequence gets pronounced as atoms, these little letters are sticky for each other. It collapses into a three-dimensional shape that turns it into a nanomachine that actually cuts DNA. The interesting thing is that if you change the sequence, you change the three-dimensional folding. You get, now, a DNA stapler, instead. These are the kind of molecular programs we want to be able to write. The problem is, we don't know the machine language of proteins or have a compiler for proteins. So I've joined a growing band of people that try to make molecular spells using DNA. We use DNA because it's cheaper, it's easier to handle, it's something we understand really well β so well, in fact, that we think we can actually write programming languages for DNA and have molecular compilers. So then, we think we can do that. One of my first questions doing this was: How can you make an arbitrary shape or pattern out of DNA? I decided to use a type of DNA origami, where you take a long strand of DNA and fold it into whatever shape or pattern you might want. So here's a shape. I actually spent about a year in my home in my underwear, coding, like Linus [Torvalds], in that picture before. This program takes a shape and spits out 250 DNA sequences. These short DNA sequences are what are going to fold the long strand into this shape that we want to make. So you send an e-mail with these sequences in it to a company, and the company pronounces them on a DNA synthesizer, a machine about the size of a photocopier. And they take your e-mail, and every letter in your e-mail, they replace with a 30-atom cluster β one for each letter, A, T, C and G in DNA. They string them up in the right sequence, and then they send them back to you via FedEx. So you get 250 of these in the mail in little tubes. I mix them together, add a little bit of salt water, and then add this long strand I was telling you about, that I've stolen from a virus. And then what happens is, you heat this whole thing up to about boiling. You cool it down to room temperature, and as you do, those short strands do the following thing: each one of them binds that long strand in one place, and then has a second half that binds that long strand in a distant place, and brings those two parts of the long strand close together so they stick together. So the net effect of all 250 of these strands is to fold the long strand into the shape you're looking for. It'll approximate that shape. We do this for real, in the test tube. In each little drop of water, you get 50 billion of these guys. With a microscope, you can see them on a surface. The neat thing is if you change the sequence and change the spell, just change the sequence of the staples, you can make a molecule that looks like this. And, you know, he likes to hang out with his buddies. A lot of them are actually pretty good. If you change the spell again, you change the sequence again, you get really nice, 130-nanometer triangles. If you do it again, you can get arbitrary patterns. So on a rectangle, you can paint patterns of North and South America, or the words, "DNA." So that's DNA origami. That's one way. There are many ways of casting molecular spells using DNA. What we really want to do in the end is learn how to program self-assembly so we can build anything, right? We want to be able to build technological artifacts that are maybe good for the world. We want to learn how to build biological artifacts, like people and whales and trees. And if it's the case that we can reach that level of complexity, if our ability to program molecules gets to be that good, then that will truly be magic. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
A critical look at geoengineering against climate change | {0: "David Keith studies our climate, and the many ideas we've come up with to fix it. A wildly original thinker, he challenges us to look at climate solutions that may seem daring, sometimes even shocking."} | TEDSalon 2007 Hot Science | You've all seen lots of articles on climate change, and here's yet another New York Times article, just like every other darn one you've seen. It says all the same stuff as all the other ones you've seen. It even has the same amount of headline as all the other ones you've seen. What's unusual about this one, maybe, is that it's from 1953. And the reason I'm saying this is that you may have the idea this problem is relatively recent. That people have just sort of figured out about it, and now with Kyoto and the Governator and people beginning to actually do something, we may be on the road to a solution. The fact is β uh-uh. We've known about this problem for 50 years, depending on how you count it. We have talked about it endlessly over the last decade or so. And we've accomplished close to zip. This is the growth rate of CO2 in the atmosphere. You've seen this in various forms, but maybe you haven't seen this one. What this shows is that the rate of growth of our emissions is accelerating. And that it's accelerating even faster than what we thought was the worst case just a few years back. So that red line there was something that a lot of skeptics said the environmentalists only put in the projections to make the projections look as bad as possible, that emissions would never grow as fast as that red line. But in fact, they're growing faster. Here's some data from actually just 10 days ago, which shows this year's minimum of the Arctic Sea ice, and it's the lowest by far. And the rate at which the Arctic Sea ice is going away is a lot quicker than models. So despite all sorts of experts like me flying around the planet and burning jet fuel, and politicians signing treaties β in fact, you could argue the net effect of all this has been negative, because it's just consumed a lot of jet fuel. (Laughter) No, no! In terms of what we really need to do to put the brakes on this very high inertial thing β our big economy β we've really hardly started. Really, we're doing this, basically. Really, not very much. I don't want to depress you too much. The problem is absolutely soluble, and even soluble in a way that's reasonably cheap. Cheap meaning sort of the cost of the military, not the cost of medical care. Cheap meaning a few percent of GDP. No, this is really important to have this sense of scale. So the problem is soluble, and the way we should go about solving it is, say, dealing with electricity production, which causes something like 43-or-so percent and rising of CO2 emissions. And we could do that by perfectly sensible things like conservation, and wind power, nuclear power and coal to CO2 capture, which are all things that are ready for giant scale deployment, and work. All we lack is the action to actually spend the money to put those into place. Instead, we spend our time talking. But nevertheless, that's not what I'm going to talk to you about tonight. What I'm going to talk to you about tonight is stuff we might do if we did nothing. And it's this stuff in the middle here, which is what you do if you don't stop the emissions quickly enough. And you need to deal β somehow break the link between human actions that change climate, and the climate change itself. And that's particularly important because, of course, while we can adapt to climate change β and it's important to be honest here, there will be some benefits to climate change. Oh, yes, I think it's bad. I've spent my whole life working to stop it. But one of the reasons it's politically hard is there are winners and losers β not all losers. But, of course, the natural world, polar bears. I spent time skiing across the sea ice for weeks at a time in the high Arctic. They will completely lose. And there's no adaption. So this problem is absolutely soluble. This geo-engineering idea, in it's simplest form, is basically the following. You could put signed particles, say sulfuric acid particles β sulfates β into the upper atmosphere, the stratosphere, where they'd reflect away sunlight and cool the planet. And I know for certain that that will work. Not that there aren't side effects, but I know for certain it will work. And the reason is, it's been done. And it was done not by us, not by me, but by nature. Here's Mount Pinatubo in the early '90s. That put a whole bunch of sulfur in the stratosphere with a sort of atomic bomb-like cloud. The result of that was pretty dramatic. After that, and some previous volcanoes we have, you see a quite dramatic cooling of the atmosphere. So this lower bar is the upper atmosphere, the stratosphere, and it heats up after these volcanoes. But you'll notice that in the upper bar, which is the lower atmosphere and the surface, it cools down because we shielded the atmosphere a little bit. There's no big mystery about it. There's lots of mystery in the details, and there's some bad side effects, like it partially destroys the ozone layer β and I'll get to that in a minute. But it clearly cools down. And one other thing: it's fast. It's really important to say. So much of the other things that we ought to do, like slowing emissions, are intrinsically slow, because it takes time to build all the hardware we need to reduce emissions. And not only that, when you cut emissions, you don't cut concentrations, because concentrations, the amount of CO2 in the air, is the sum of emissions over time. So you can't step on the brakes very quickly. But if you do this, it's quick. And there are times you might like to do something quick. Another thing you might wonder about is, does it work? Can you shade some sunlight and effectively compensate for the added CO2, and produce a climate sort of back to what it was originally? And the answer seems to be yes. So here are the graphs you've seen lots of times before. That's what the world looks like, under one particular climate model's view, with twice the amount of CO2 in the air. The lower graph is with twice the amount of CO2 and 1.8 percent less sunlight, and you're back to the original climate. And this graph from Ken Caldeira. It's important to say came, because Ken β at a meeting that I believe Marty Hoffart was also at in the mid-'90s β Ken and I stood up at the back of the meeting and said, "Geo-engineering won't work." And to the person who was promoting it said, "The atmosphere's much more complicated." Gave a bunch of physical reasons why it wouldn't do a very good compensation. Ken went and ran his models, and found that it did. This topic is also old. That report that landed on President Johnson's desk when I was two years old β 1965. That report, in fact, which had all the modern climate science β the only thing they talked about doing was geo-engineering. It didn't even talk about cutting emissions, which is an incredible shift in our thinking about this problem. I'm not saying we shouldn't cut emissions. We should, but it made exactly this point. So, in a sense, there's not much new. The one new thing is this essay. So I should say, I guess, that since the time of that original President Johnson report, and the various reports of the U.S. National Academy β 1977, 1982, 1990 β people always talked about this idea. Not as something that was foolproof, but as an idea to think about. But when climate became, politically, a hot topic β if I may make the pun β in the last 15 years, this became so un-PC, we couldn't talk about it. It just sunk below the surface. We weren't allowed to speak about it. But in the last year, Paul Crutzen published this essay saying roughly what's all been said before: that maybe, given our very slow rate of progress in solving this problem and the uncertain impacts, we should think about things like this. He said roughly what's been said before. The big deal was he happened to have won the Nobel prize for ozone chemistry. And so people took him seriously when he said we should think about this, even though there will be some ozone impacts. And in fact, he had some ideas to make them go away. There was all sorts of press coverage, all over the world, going right down to "Dr. Strangelove Saves the Earth," from the Economist. And that got me thinking. I've worked on this topic on and off, but not so much technically. And I was actually lying in bed thinking one night. And I thought about this child's toy β hence, the title of my talk β and I wondered if you could use the same physics that makes that thing spin 'round in the child's radiometer, to levitate particles into the upper atmosphere and make them stay there. One of the problems with sulfates is they fall out quickly. The other problem is they're right in the ozone layer, and I'd prefer them above the ozone layer. And it turns out, I woke up the next morning, and I started to calculate this. It was very hard to calculate from first principles. I was stumped. But then I found out that there were all sorts of papers already published that addressed this topic because it happens already in the natural atmosphere. So it seems there are already fine particles that are levitated up to what we call the mesosphere, about 100 kilometers up, that already have this effect. I'll tell you very quickly how the effect works. There are a lot of fun complexities that I'd love to spend the whole evening on, but I won't. But let's say you have sunlight hitting some particle and it's unevenly heated. So the side facing the sun is warmer; the side away, cooler. Gas molecules that bounce off the warm side bounce away with some extra velocity because it's warm. And so you see a net force away from the sun. That's called the photophoretic force. There are a bunch of other versions of it that I and some collaborators have thought about how to exploit. And of course, we may be wrong β this hasn't all been peer reviewed, we're in the middle of thinking about it β but so far, it seems good. But it looks like we could achieve long atmospheric lifetimes β much longer than before β because they're levitated. We can move things out of the stratosphere into the mesosphere, in principle solving the ozone problem. I'm sure there will be other problems that arise. Finally, we could make the particles migrate to over the poles, so we could arrange the climate engineering so it really focused on the poles. Which would have minimal bad impacts in the middle of the planet, where we live, and do the maximum job of what we might need to do, which is cooling the poles in case of planetary emergency, if you like. This is a new idea that's crept up that may be, essentially, a cleverer idea than putting sulfates in. Whether this idea is right or some other idea is right, I think it's almost certain we will eventually think of cleverer things to do than just putting sulfur in. That if engineers and scientists really turned their minds to this, it's amazing how we can affect the planet. The one thing about this is it gives us extraordinary leverage. This improved science and engineering will, whether we like it or not, give us more and more leverage to affect the planet, to control the planet, to give us weather and climate control β not because we plan it, not because we want it, just because science delivers it to us bit by bit, with better knowledge of the way the system works and better engineering tools to effect it. Now, suppose that space aliens arrived. Maybe they're going to land at the U.N. headquarters down the road here, or maybe they'll pick a smarter spot β but suppose they arrive and they give you a box. And the box has two knobs. One knob is the knob for controlling global temperature. Maybe another knob is a knob for controlling CO2 concentrations. You might imagine that we would fight wars over that box. Because we have no way to agree about where to set the knobs. We have no global governance. And different people will have different places they want it set. Now, I don't think that's going to happen. It's not very likely. But we're building that box. The scientists and engineers of the world are building it piece by piece, in their labs. Even when they're doing it for other reasons. Even when they're thinking they're just working on protecting the environment. They have no interest in crazy ideas like engineering the whole planet. They develop science that makes it easier and easier to do. And so I guess my view on this is not that I want to do it β I do not β but that we should move this out of the shadows and talk about it seriously. Because sooner or later, we'll be confronted with decisions about this, and it's better if we think hard about it, even if we want to think hard about reasons why we should never do it. I'll give you two different ways to think about this problem that are the beginning of my thinking about how to think about it. But what we need is not just a few oddballs like me thinking about this. We need a broader debate. A debate that involves musicians, scientists, philosophers, writers, who get engaged with this question about climate engineering and think seriously about what its implications are. So here's one way to think about it, which is that we just do this instead of cutting emissions because it's cheaper. I guess the thing I haven't said about this is, it is absurdly cheap. It's conceivable that, say, using the sulfates method or this method I've come up with, you could create an ice age at a cost of .001 percent of GDP. It's very cheap. We have a lot of leverage. It's not a good idea, but it's just important. (Laughter) I'll tell you how big the lever is: the lever is that big. And that calculation isn't much in dispute. You might argue about the sanity of it, but the leverage is real. (Laughter) So because of this, we could deal with the problem simply by stopping reducing emissions, and just as the concentrations go up, we can increase the amount of geo-engineering. I don't think anybody takes that seriously. Because under this scenario, we walk further and further away from the current climate. We have all sorts of other problems, like ocean acidification that come from CO2 in the atmosphere, anyway. Nobody but maybe one or two very odd folks really suggest this. But here's a case which is harder to reject. Let's say that we don't do geo-engineering, we do what we ought to do, which is get serious about cutting emissions. But we don't really know how quickly we have to cut them. There's a lot of uncertainty about exactly how much climate change is too much. So let's say that we work hard, and we actually don't just tap the brakes, but we step hard on the brakes and really reduce emissions and eventually reduce concentrations. And maybe someday β like 2075, October 23 β we finally reach that glorious day where concentrations have peaked and are rolling down the other side. And we have global celebrations, and we've actually started to β you know, we've seen the worst of it. But maybe on that day we also find that the Greenland ice sheet is really melting unacceptably fast, fast enough to put meters of sea level on the oceans in the next 100 years, and remove some of the biggest cities from the map. That's an absolutely possible scenario. We might decide at that point that even though geo-engineering was uncertain and morally unhappy, that it's a lot better than not geo-engineering. And that's a very different way to look at the problem. It's using this as risk control, not instead of action. It's saying that you do some geo-engineering for a little while to take the worst of the heat off, not that you'd use it as a substitute for action. But there is a problem with that view. And the problem is the following: knowledge that geo-engineering is possible makes the climate impacts look less fearsome, and that makes a weaker commitment to cutting emissions today. This is what economists call a moral hazard. And that's one of the fundamental reasons that this problem is so hard to talk about, and, in general, I think it's the underlying reason that it's been politically unacceptable to talk about this. But you don't make good policy by hiding things in a drawer. I'll leave you with three questions, and then one final quote. Should we do serious research on this topic? Should we have a national research program that looks at this? Not just at how you would do it better, but also what all the risks and downsides of it are. Right now, you have a few enthusiasts talking about it, some in a positive side, some in a negative side β but that's a dangerous state to be in because there's very little depth of knowledge on this topic. A very small amount of money would get us some. Many of us β maybe now me β think we should do that. But I have a lot of reservations. My reservations are principally about the moral hazard problem, and I don't really know how we can best avoid the moral hazard. I think there is a serious problem: as you talk about this, people begin to think they don't need to work so hard to cut emissions. Another thing is, maybe we need a treaty. A treaty that decides who gets to do this. Right now we may think of a big, rich country like the U.S. doing this. But it might well be that, in fact, if China wakes up in 2030 and realizes that the climate impacts are just unacceptable, they may not be very interested in our moral conversations about how to do this, and they may just decide they'd really rather have a geo-engineered world than a non-geo-engineered world. And we'll have no international mechanism to figure out who makes the decision. So here's one last thought, which was said much, much better 25 years ago in the U.S. National Academy report than I can say today. And I think it really summarizes where we are here. That the CO2 problem, the climate problem that we've heard about, is driving lots of things β innovations in the energy technologies that will reduce emissions β but also, I think, inevitably, it will drive us towards thinking about climate and weather control, whether we like it or not. And it's time to begin thinking about it, even if the reason we're thinking about it is to construct arguments for why we shouldn't do it. Thank you very much. |
Using biology to rethink the energy challenge | {0: 'Juan Enriquez thinks and writes about the profound changes that genomics and brain research will bring about in business, technology, politics and society.'} | TEDSalon 2007 Hot Science | What is bioenergy? Bioenergy is not ethanol. Bioenergy isn't global warming. Bioenergy is something which seems counterintuitive. Bioenergy is oil. It's gas. It's coal. And part of building that bridge to the future, to the point where we can actually see the oceans in a rational way, or put up these geo-spatial orbits that will twirl or do microwaves or stuff, is going to depend on how we understand bioenergy and manage it. And to do that, you really have to look first at agriculture. So we've been planting stuff for 11,000 years. And in the measure that we plant stuff, what we learn from agriculture is you've got to deal with pests, you've got to deal with all types of awful things, you've got to cultivate stuff. In the measure that you learn how to use water to cultivate, then you're going to be able to spread beyond the Nile. You're going to be able to power stuff, so irrigation makes a difference. Irrigation starts to make you be allowed to plant stuff where you want it, as opposed to where the rivers flood. You start getting this organic agriculture; you start putting machinery onto this stuff. Machinery, with a whole bunch of water, leads to very large-scale agriculture. You put together machines and water, and you get landscapes that look like this. And then you get sales that look like this. It's brute force. So what you've been doing in agriculture is you start out with something that's a reasonably natural system. You start taming that natural system. You put a lot of force behind that natural system. You put a whole bunch of pesticides and herbicides β (Laughter) β behind that natural system, and you end up with systems that look like this. And it's all brute force. And that's the way we've been approaching energy. So the lesson in agriculture is that you can actually change the system that's based on brute force as you start merging that system and learning that system and actually applying biology. And you move from a discipline of engineering, you move from a discipline of chemistry, into a discipline of biology. And probably one of the most important human beings on the planet is this guy behind me. This is a guy called Norman Borlaug. He won the Nobel Prize. He's got the Congressional Medal of Honor. He deserves all of this stuff. And he deserves this stuff because he probably has fed more people than any other human being alive because he researched how to put biology behind seeds. He did this in Mexico. The reason why India and China no longer have these massive famines is because Norman Borlaug taught them how to grow grains in a more efficient way and launched the Green Revolution. That is something that a lot of people have criticized. But of course, those are people who don't realize that China and India, instead of having huge amounts of starving people, are exporting grains. And the irony of this particular system is the place where he did the research, which was Mexico, didn't adopt this technology, ignored this technology, talked about why this technology should be thought about, but not really applied. And Mexico remains one of the largest grain importers on the planet because it doesn't apply technology that was discovered in Mexico. And in fact, hasn't recognized this man, to the point where there aren't statues of this man all over Mexico. There are in China and India. And the Institute that this guy ran has now moved to India. That is the difference between adopting technologies and discussing technologies. Now, it's not just that this guy fed a huge amount of people in the world. It's that this is the net effect in terms of what technology does, if you understand biology. What happened in agriculture? Well, if you take agriculture over a century, agriculture in about 1900 would have been recognizable to somebody planting a thousand years earlier. Yeah, the plows look different. The machines were tractors or stuff instead of mules, but the farmer would have understood: this is what the guy's doing, this is why he's doing it, this is where he's going. What really started to change in agriculture is when you started moving from this brute force engineering and chemistry into biology, and that's where you get your productivity increases. And as you do that stuff, here's what happens to productivity. Basically, you go from 250 hours to produce 100 bushels, to 40, to 15, to five. Agricultural labor productivity increased seven times, 1950 to 2000, whereas the rest of the economy increased about 2.5 times. This is an absolutely massive increase in how much is produced per person. The effect of this, of course, is it's not just amber waves of grain, it is mountains of stuff. And 50 percent of the EU budget is going to subsidize agriculture from mountains of stuff that people have overproduced. This would be a good outcome for energy. And of course, by now, you're probably saying to yourself, "Self, I thought I came to a talk about energy and here's this guy talking about biology." So where's the link between these two things? One of the ironies of this whole system is we're discussing what to do about a system that we don't understand. We don't even know what oil is. We don't know where oil comes from. I mean, literally, it's still a source of debate what this black river of stuff is and where it comes from. The best assumption, and one of the best guesses in this stuff, is that this stuff comes out of this stuff, that these things absorb sunlight, rot under pressure for millions of years, and you get these black rivers. Now, the interesting thing about that thesis β if that thesis turns out to be true β is that oil, and all hydrocarbons, turned out to be concentrated sunlight. And if you think of bioenergy, bioenergy isn't ethanol. Bioenergy is taking the sun, concentrating it in amoebas, concentrating it in plants, and maybe that's why you get these rainbows. And as you're looking at this system, if hydrocarbons are concentrated sunlight, then bioenergy works in a different way. And we've got to start thinking of oil and other hydrocarbons as part of these solar panels. Maybe that's one of the reasons why if you fly over west Texas, the types of wells that you're beginning to see don't look unlike those pictures of Kansas and those irrigated plots. This is how you farm oil. And as you think of farming oil and how oil has evolved, we started with this brute force approach. And then what did we learn? Then we learned we had to go bigger. And then what'd we learn? Then we have to go even bigger. And we are getting really destructive as we're going out and farming this bioenergy. These are the Athabasca tar sands, and there's an enormous amount β first of mining, the largest trucks in the world are working here, and then you've got to pull out this black sludge, which is basically oil that doesn't flow. It's tied to the sand. And then you've got to use a lot of steam to separate it, which only works at today's oil prices. Coal. Coal turns out to be virtually the same stuff. It is probably plants, except that these have been burned and crushed under pressure. So you take something like this, you burn it, you put it under pressure, and likely as not, you get this. Although, again, I stress: we don't know. Which is curious as we debate all this stuff. But as you think of coal, this is what burned wheat kernels look like. Not entirely unlike coal. And of course, coalmines are very dangerous places because in some of these coalmines, you get gas. When that gas blows up, people die. So you're producing a biogas out of coal in some mines, but not in others. Any place you see a differential, there're some interesting questions. There's some questions as to what you should be doing with this stuff. But again, coal. Maybe the same stuff, maybe the same system, maybe bioenergy, and you're applying exactly the same technology. Here's your brute force approach. Once you get through your brute force approach, then you just rip off whole mountaintops. And you end up with the single largest source of carbon emissions, which are coal-fired gas plants. That is probably not the best use of bioenergy. As you think of what are the alternatives to this system β it's important to find alternatives because it turns out that the U.S. is dwindling in its petroleum reserves, but it is not dwindling in its coal reserves, nor is China. There are huge coal reserves that are sitting out there, and we've got to start thinking of them as biological energy, because if we keep treating them as chemical energy, or engineering energy, we're going to be in deep doo-doo. Gas is a similar issue. Gas is also a biological product. And as you think of gas, well, you're familiar with gas. And here's a different way of mining coal. This is called coal bed methane. Why is this picture interesting? Because if coal turns out to be concentrated plant life, the reason why you may get a differential in gas output between one mine and another β the reason why one mine may blow up and another one may not blow up β may be because there's stuff eating that stuff and producing gas. This is a well-known phenomenon. (Laughter) You eat certain things, you produce a lot of gas. It may turn out that biological processes in coalmines have the same process. If that is true, then one of the ways of getting the energy out of coal may not be to rip whole mountaintops off, and it may not be to burn coal. It may be to have stuff process that coal in a biological fashion as you did in agriculture. That is what bioenergy is. It is not ethanol. It is not subsidies to a few companies. It is not importing corn into Iowa because you've built so many of these ethanol plants. It is beginning to understand the transition that occurred in agriculture, from brute force into biological force. And in the measure that you can do that, you can clean some stuff, and you can clean it pretty quickly. We already have some indicators of productivity on this stuff. OK, if you put steam into coal fields or petroleum fields that have been running for decades, you can get a really substantial increase, like an eight-fold increase, in your output. This is just the beginning stages of this stuff. And as you think of biomaterials, this guy β who did part of the sequencing of the human genome, who just doubled the databases of genes and proteins known on earth by sailing around the world β has been thinking about how you structure this. And there's a series of smart people thinking about this. And they've been putting together companies like Synthetic Genomics, like, a Cambria, like Codon, and what those companies are trying to do is to think of, how do you apply biological principles to avoid brute force? Think of it in the following terms. Think of it as beginning to program stuff for specific purposes. Think of the cell as a hardware. Think of the genes as a software. And in the measure that you begin to think of life as code that is interchangeable, that can become energy, that can become food, that can become fiber, that can become human beings, that can become a whole series of things, then you've got to shift your approach as to how you're going to structure and deal and think about energy in a very different way. What are the first principles of this stuff and where are we heading? This is one of the gentle giants on the planet. He's one of the nicest human beings you've ever met. His name is Hamilton Smith. He won the Nobel for figuring out how to cut genes β something called restriction enzymes. He was at Hopkins when he did this, and he's such a modest guy that the day he won, his mother called him and said, "I didn't realize there was another Ham Smith at Hopkins. Do you know he just won the Nobel?" (Laughter) I mean, that was Mom, but anyway, this guy is just a class act. You find him at the bench every single day, working on a pipette and building stuff. And one of the things this guy just built are these things. What is this? This is the first transplant of naked DNA, where you take an entire DNA operating system out of one cell, insert it into a different cell, and have that cell boot up as a separate species. That's one month old. You will see stuff in the next month that will be just as important as this stuff. And as you think about this stuff and what the implications of this are, we're going to start not just converting ethanol from corn with very high subsidies. We're going to start thinking about biology entering energy. It is very expensive to process this stuff, both in economic terms and in energy terms. This is what accumulates in the tar sands of Alberta. These are sulfur blocks. Because as you separate that petroleum from the sand, and use an enormous amount of energy inside that vapor β steam to separate this stuff β you also have to separate out the sulfur. The difference between light crude and heavy crude β well, it's about 14 bucks a barrel. That's why you're building these pyramids of sulfur blocks. And by the way, the scale on these things is pretty large. Now, if you can take part of the energy content out of doing this, you reduce the system, and you really do start applying biological principles to energy. This has to be a bridge to the point where you can get to wind, to the point where you can get to solar, to the point where you can get to nuclear β and hopefully you won't build the next nuclear plant on a beautiful seashore next to an earthquake fault. (Laughter) Just a thought. But in the meantime, for the next decade at least, the name of the game is hydrocarbons. And be that oil, be that gas, be that coal, this is what we're dealing with. And before I make this talk too long, here's what's happening in the current energy system. 86 percent of the energy we consume are hydrocarbons. That means 86 percent of the stuff we're consuming are probably processed plants and amoebas and the rest of the stuff. And there's a role in here for conservation. There's a role in here for alternative stuff, but we've also got to get that other portion right. How we deal with that other portion is our bridge to the future. And as we think of this bridge to the future, one of the things you should ponder is: we are leaving about two-thirds of the oil today inside those wells. So we're spending an enormous amount of money and leaving most of the energy down there. Which, of course, requires more energy to go out and get energy. The ratios become idiotic by the time you get to ethanol. It may even be a one-to-one ratio on the energy input and the energy output. That is a stupid way of managing this system. Last point, last graph. One of the things that we've got to do is to stabilize oil prices. This is what oil prices look like, OK? This is a very bad system because what happens is your hurdle rate gets set very low. People come up with really smart ideas for solar panels, or for wind, or for something else, and then guess what? The oil price goes through the floor. That company goes out of business, and then you can bring the oil price back up. So if I had one closing and modest suggestion, let's set a stable oil price in Europe and the United States. How do you do that? Well, let's put a tax on oil that is a non-revenue tax, and it basically says for the next 20 years, the price of oil will be β whatever you want, 35 bucks, 40 bucks. If the OPEC price falls below that, we tax it. If the OPEC price goes above that, the tax goes away. What does that do for entrepreneurs? What does it do for companies? It tells people, if you can produce energy for less than 35 bucks a barrel, or less than 40 bucks a barrel, or less than 50 bucks a barrel β let's debate it β you will have a business. But let's not put people through this cycle where it doesn't pay to research because your company will go out of business as OPEC drives alternatives and keeps bioenergy from happening. Thank you. |
The case for optimism | {0: "TED Prize winner Larry Brilliant has spent his career solving the world's biggest problems, from overseeing the last smallpox cases to saving millions from blindness."} | Skoll World Forum 2007 | I'm going to try to give you a view of the world as I see it, the problems and the opportunities that we face, and then ask the question if we should be optimistic or pessimistic. And then I'll let you in on a secret, which is why I am an incurable optimist. Let me start off showing you an Al Gore movie that you may have seen before. Now, you've all seen "Inconvenient Truth." This is a little more inconvenient. (Video): Man: ... extremely dangerous questions. Because, with our present knowledge, we have no idea what would happen. Even now, man may be unwittingly changing the world's climate through the waste products of his civilization. Due to our release, through factories and automobiles every year, of more than six billion tons of carbon dioxide β which helps air absorb heat from the sun β our atmosphere seems to be getting warmer. This is bad? Well, it's been calculated a few degrees' rise in the earth's temperature would melt the polar ice caps. And if this happens, an inland sea would fill a good portion of the Mississippi Valley. Tourists in glass-bottomed boats would be viewing the drowned towers of Miami through 150 feet of tropical water. For, in weather, we're not only dealing with forces of a far greater variety than even the atomic physicist encounters, but with life itself. Larry Brilliant: Should we feel good, or should we feel bad that 50 years of foreknowledge accomplished so little? Well, it depends, really, on what your goals are. And I think, as my goals, I always go back to Gandhi's talisman. When Mahatma Gandhi was asked, "How do you know if the next act that you are about to do is the right one or the wrong one?" he said, "Consider the face of the poorest, most vulnerable human being that you ever chanced upon, and ask yourself if the act that you contemplate will be of benefit to that person. And if it will be, it's the right thing to do, and if not, rethink it." For those of us in this room, it's not just the poorest and the most vulnerable individual, it's the community, it's the culture, it's the world itself. And the trends for those who are at the periphery of our society, who are the poorest and the most vulnerable, the trends give rise to a great case for pessimism. But there's also a wonderful case for optimism. Let's review them both. First of all, the megatrends. There's two degrees, or three degrees of climate change baked into the system. It will cause rising seas. It will cause saline deposited into wells and into lands. It will disproportionately harm the poorest and the most vulnerable, as will the increasing rise of population. Even though we've dodged Paul Ehrlich's population bomb, and we will not see 20 billion people in this decade, as he had forecast, we eat as if we were 20 billion. And we consume so much that again, a rise of 6.5 billion to 9.5 billion in our grandchildren's lifetime will disproportionately hurt the poorest and the most vulnerable. That's why they migrate to cities. That's why in June of this year, we passed, as a species, 51 percent of us living in cities, and bustees, and slums, and shantytowns. The rural areas are no longer producing as much food as they did. The green revolution never reached Africa. And with desertification, sandstorms, the Gobi Desert, the Ogaden, we are finding increasing difficulty of a hectare to produce as many calories as it did even 15 years ago. So humans are turning more towards animal consumption. In Africa last year, Africans ate 600 million wild animals, and consumed two billion kilograms of bush meat. And every kilogram of bush meat contained hundreds of thousands of novel viruses that have never been charted, the genomic sequences of which we don't know. Their fitness for creating pandemics we are unaware of, but we are ripe for zoonotic-borne, emerging communicable diseases. Increasingly, I would say explosive growth of technology. Most of us are the beneficiaries of that growth. But it has a dark side β in bioweapons, and in technology that puts us on a collision course to magnify any anger, hatred or feeling of marginalization. And in fact, with increasing globalization β for which there are big winners and even bigger losers β today the world is more diverse and unfair than perhaps it has ever been in history. One percent of us own 40 percent of all the goods and services. What will happen if the billion people today who live on less than one dollar a day rise to three billion in the next 30 years? The one percent will own even more than 40 percent of all the world's goods and services. Not because they've grown richer, but because the rest of the world has grown increasingly poorer. Last week, Bill Clinton at the TED Awards said, "This situation is unprecedented, unequal, unfair and unstable." So there's lots of reason for pessimism. Darfur is, at its origin, a resource war. Last year, there were 85,000 riots in China, 230 a day, that required police or military intervention. Most of them were about resources. We are facing an unprecedented number, scale of disasters. Some are weather-related, human-rights related, epidemics. And the newly emerging diseases may make H5N1 and bird flu a quaint forerunner of things to come. It's a destabilized world. And unlike destabilized world in the past, it will be broadcast to you on YouTube, you will see it on digital television and on your cell phones. What will that lead to? For some, it will lead to anger, religious and sectarian violence and terrorism. For others, withdrawal, nihilism, materialism. For us, where does it take us, as social activists and entrepreneurs? As we look at these trends, do we become despondent, or will we become energized? Let's look at one case, the case of Bangladesh. First, even if carbon dioxide emissions stopped today, global warming would continue. And even with global warming β if you can see these blue lines, the dotted line shows that even if emissions of greenhouse gasses stopped today, the next decades will see rising sea levels. A minimum of 20 to 30 inches of increase in sea levels is the best case that we can hope for, and it could be 10 times that. What will that do to Bangladesh? Let's take a look. So here's Bangladesh. 70 percent of Bangladesh is at less than five feet above sea level. Let's go up and take a look at the Himalayas. And we'll watch as global warming makes them melt. More water comes down, the deforested areas, here in the Tarai, will be unable to absorb the effluent, because trees are like straws that suck up the extra seasonal water. Now we're looking down south, through the Kali Gandaki. Many of you, I think, have probably trekked here. And we're going to cruise down and take a look at Bangladesh and see what the impact will be of twin increases in water coming from the north, and in the seas rising from the south. Looking at the five major rivers that feed Bangladesh. And now let's look from the south, looking up, and let's see this in relief. A minimum of 20 to 40 inches of increase in seas, coupled with increasing flows from the Himalayas. And take a look at this. As many as 100 million refugees from Bangladesh could be expected to migrate into India and into China. This is the difficulty that one country faces. But if you look at the globe, all around the earth, wherever there is low-lying area, populated areas near the water, you will find increase in sea level that will challenge our way of life. Sub-Saharan Africa, and even our own San Francisco Bay Area. We're all in this together. This is not something that happens far away to people that we don't know. Global warming is something that happens to all of us, all at once. As are these newly emerging communicable diseases, names that you hadn't heard 20 years ago: ebola, lhasa fever, monkey pox. With the erosion of the green belt separating animals from humans, we live in each other's viral environment. Do you remember, 20 years ago, no one had ever heard of West Nile fever? And then we watched, as one case arrived on the East Coast of the United States and it marched every year, westwardly. Do you remember no one had heard of ebola until we heard of hundreds of people dying in Central Africa from it? It's just the beginning, unfortunately. There have been 30 novel emerging communicable diseases that begin in animals that have jumped species in the last 30 years. It's more than enough reason for pessimism. But now let's look at the case for optimism. (Laughter) Enough of the bad news. Human beings have always risen to the challenge. You just need to look at the list of Nobel laureates to remind ourselves. We've been here before, paralyzed by fear, paralyzed into inaction, when some β probably one of you in this room β jumped into the breach and created an organization like Physicians for Social Responsibility, which fought against the nuclear threat, Medicins Sans Frontieres, that renewed our commitment to disaster relief, Mohamed ElBaradei, and the tremendous hope and optimism that he brought all of us, and our own Muhammad Yunus. We've seen the eradication of smallpox. We may see the eradication of polio this year. Last year, there were only 2,000 cases in the world. We may see the eradication of guinea worm next year β there are only 35,000 cases left in the world. 20 years ago, there were three and a half million. And we've seen a new disease, not like the 30 novel emerging communicable diseases. This disease is called sudden wealth syndrome. (Laughter) It's an amazing phenomenon. All throughout the technology world, we're seeing young people bitten by this disease of sudden wealth syndrome. But they're using their wealth in a way that their forefathers never did. They're not waiting until they die to create foundations. They're actively guiding their money, their resources, their hearts, their commitments, to make the world a better place. Certainly, nothing can give you more optimism than that. More reasons to be optimistic: in the '60s, and I am a creature of the '60s, there was a movement. We all felt that we were part of it, that a better world was right around the corner, that we were watching the birth of a world free of hatred and violence and prejudice. Today, there's another kind of movement. It's a movement to save the earth. It's just beginning. Five weeks ago, a group of activists from the business community gathered together to stop a Texas utility from building nine coal-fired electrical plants that would have contributed to destroying the environment. Six months ago, a group of business activists gathered together to join with the Republican governor in California to pass AB 32, the most far-reaching legislation in environmental history. Al Gore made presentations in the House and the Senate as an expert witness. Can you imagine? (Laughter) We're seeing an entente cordiale between science and religion that five years ago I would not have believed, as the evangelical community has understood the desperate situation of global warming. And now 4,000 churches have joined the environmental movement. It is something to be greatly optimistic about. The European 20-20-20 plan is an amazing breakthrough, something that should make all of us feel that hope is on the horizon. And on April 14th, there will be Step Up Day, where there will be a thousand individual mobilized social activist movements in the United States on protest against legislation β pushing for legislation to stop global warming. And on July 7th, around the world, I learned only yesterday, there will be global Live Earth concerts. And you can feel this optimistic move to save the earth in the air. Now, that doesn't mean that people understand that global warming hurts the poorest and the weakest the most. That means that people are beginning the first step, which is acting out of their own self-interest. But I am seeing in the major funders, in CARE, Rockefeller, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Hewlett, Mercy Corps, you guys, Google, so many other organizations, a beginning of understanding that we need to work not just on primary prevention of global warming, but on the secondary prevention of the consequences of global warming on the poorest and the most vulnerable. But for me, I have another reason to be an incurable optimist. And you've heard so many inspiring stories here, and I heard so many last night that I thought I would share a little bit of mine. My background is not exactly conventional medical training. And I lived in a Himalayan monastery, and I studied with a very wise teacher, who kicked me out of the monastery one day and told me that it was my destiny β it felt like Yoda β it is your destiny to go to work for WHO and to help eradicate smallpox, at a time when there was no smallpox program. It should make you optimistic that smallpox no longer exists because it was the worst disease in history. In the last century β that's the one that was seven years ago β half a billion people died from smallpox: more than all the wars in history, more than any other infectious disease in the history of the world. In the Summer of Love, in 1967, two million people, children, died of smallpox. It's not ancient history. When you read the biblical plague of boils, that was smallpox. Pharaoh Ramses the Fifth, whose picture is here, died of smallpox. To eradicate smallpox, we had to gather the largest United Nations army in history. We visited every house in India, searching for smallpox β 120 million houses, once every month, for nearly two years. In a cruel reversal, after we had almost conquered smallpox β and this is what you must learn as a social entrepreneur, the realm of the final inch. When we had almost eradicated smallpox, it came back again, because the company town of Tatanagar drew laborers, who could come there and get employment. And they caught smallpox in the one remaining place that had smallpox, and they went home to die. And when they did, they took smallpox to 10 other countries and reignited the epidemic. And we had to start all over again. But, in the end, we succeeded, and the last case of smallpox: this little girl, Rahima Banu β Barisal, in Bangladesh β when she coughed or breathed, and the last virus of smallpox left her lungs and fell on the dirt and the sun killed that last virus, thus ended a chain of transmission of history's greatest horror. How can that not make you optimistic? A disease which killed hundreds of thousands in India, and blinded half of all of those who were made blind in India, ended. And most importantly for us here in this room, a bond was created. Doctors, health workers, from 30 different countries, of every race, every religion, every color, worked together, fought alongside each other, fought against a common enemy, didn't fight against each other. How can that not make you feel optimistic for the future? Thank you very much. (Applause) |
The sticky wonder of gecko feet | {0: "Robert Full studies cockroach legs and gecko feet. His research is helping build tomorrow's robots, based on evolution's ancient engineering."} | TED2005 | I want you to imagine that you're a student in my lab. What I want you to do is to create a biologically inspired design. And so here's the challenge: I want you to help me create a fully 3D, dynamic, parameterized contact model. The translation of that is, could you help me build a foot? And it is a true challenge, and I do want you to help me. Of course, in the challenge there is a prize. It's not quite the TED Prize, but it is an exclusive t-shirt from our lab. So please send me your ideas about how to design a foot. Now if we want to design a foot, what do we have to do? We have to first know what a foot is. If we go to the dictionary, it says, "It's the lower extremity of a leg that is in direct contact with the ground in standing or walking" That's the traditional definition. But if you wanted to really do research, what do you have to do? You have to go to the literature and look up what's known about feet. So you go to the literature. (Laughter) Maybe you're familiar with this literature. The problem is, there are many, many feet. How do you do this? You need to survey all feet and extract the principles of how they work. And I want you to help me do that in this next clip. As you see this clip, look for principles, and also think about experiments that you might design in order to understand how a foot works. See any common themes? Principles? What would you do? What experiments would you run? Wow. (Applause) Our research on the biomechanics of animal locomotion has allowed us to make a blueprint for a foot. It's a design inspired by nature, but it's not a copy of any specific foot you just looked at, but it's a synthesis of the secrets of many, many feet. Now it turns out that animals can go anywhere. They can locomote on substrates that vary as you saw β in the probability of contact, the movement of that surface and the type of footholds that are present. If you want to study how a foot works, we're going to have to simulate those surfaces, or simulate that debris. When we did that, here's a new experiment that we did: we put an animal and had it run β this grass spider β on a surface with 99 percent of the contact area removed. But it didn't even slow down the animal. It's still running at the human equivalent of 300 miles per hour. Now how could it do that? Well, look more carefully. When we slow it down 50 times we see how the leg is hitting that simulated debris. The leg is acting as a foot. And in fact, the animal contacts other parts of its leg more frequently than the traditionally defined foot. The foot is distributed along the whole leg. You can do another experiment where you can take a cockroach with a foot, and you can remove its foot. I'm passing some cockroaches around. Take a look at their feet. Without a foot, here's what it does. It doesn't even slow down. It can run the same speed without even that segment. No problem for the cockroach β they can grow them back, if you care. How do they do it? Look carefully: this is slowed down 100 times, and watch what it's doing with the rest of its leg. It's acting, again, as a distributed foot β very effective. Now, the question we had is, how general is a distributed foot? And the next behavior I'll show you of this animal just stunned us the first time that we saw it. Journalists, this is off the record; it's embargoed. Take a look at what that is! That's a bipedal octopus that's disguised as a rolling coconut. It was discovered by Christina Huffard and filmed by Sea Studios, right here from Monterey. We've also described another species of bipedal octopus. This one disguises itself as floating algae. It walks on two legs and it holds the other arms up in the air so that it can't be seen. (Applause) And look what it does with its foot to get over challenging terrain. It uses that beautiful distributed foot to make it as if those obstacles are not even there β truly extraordinary. In 1951, Escher made this drawing. He thought he created an animal fantasy. But we know that art imitates life, and it turns out nature, three million years ago, evolved the next animal. It's a shrimp-like animal called the stomatopod, and here's how it moves on the beaches of Panama: it actually rolls, and it can even roll uphill. It's the ultimate distributed foot: its whole body in this case is acting like its foot. So, if we want to then, to our blueprint, add the first important feature, we want to add distributed foot contact. Not just with the traditional foot, but also the leg, and even of the body. Can this help us inspire the design of novel robots? We biologically inspired this robot, named RHex, built by these extraordinary engineers over the last few years. RHex's foot started off to be quite simple, then it got tuned over time, and ultimately resulted in this half circle. Why is that? The video will show you. Watch where the robot, now, contacts its leg in order to deal with this very difficult terrain. What you'll see, in fact, is that it's using that half circle leg as a distributed foot. Watch it go over this. You can see it here well on this debris. Extraordinary. No sensing, all the control is built right into the tuned legs. Really simple, but beautiful. Now, you might have noticed something else about the animals when they were running over the rough terrain. And my assistant's going to help me here. When you touched the cockroach leg β can you get the microphone for him? When you touched the cockroach leg, what did it feel like? Did you notice something? Boy: Spiny. Robert Full: It's spiny, right? It's really spiny, isn't it? It sort of hurts. Maybe we could give it to our curator and see if he'd be brave enough to touch the cockroach. (Laughter) Chris Anderson: Did you touch it? RF: So if you look carefully at this, what you see is that they have spines and until a few weeks ago, no one knew what they did. They assumed that they were for protection and for sensory structures. We found that they're for something else β here's a segment of that spine. They're tuned such that they easily collapse in one direction to pull the leg out from debris, but they're stiff in the other direction so they capture disparities in the surface. Now crabs don't miss footholds, because they normally move on sand β until they come to our lab. And where they have a problem with this kind of mesh, because they don't have spines. The crabs are missing spines, so they have a problem in this kind of rough terrain. But of course, we can deal with that because we can produce artificial spines. We can make spines that catch on simulated debris and collapse on removal to easily pull them out. We did that by putting these artificial spines on crabs, as you see here, and then we tested them. Do we really understand that principle of tuning? The answer is, yes! This is slowed down 20-fold, and the crab just zooms across that simulated debris. (Laughter) (Applause) A little better than nature. So to our blueprint, we need to add tuned spines. Now will this help us think about the design of more effective climbing robots? Well, here's RHex: RHex has trouble on rails β on smooth rails, as you see here. So why not add a spine? My colleagues did this at U. Penn. Dan Koditschek put some steel nails β very simple version β on the robot, and here's RHex, now, going over those steel β those rails. No problem! How does it do it? Let's slow it down and you can see the spines in action. Watch the leg come around, and you'll see it grab on right there. It couldn't do that before; it would just slip and get stuck and tip over. And watch again, right there β successful. Now just because we have a distributed foot and spines doesn't mean you can climb vertical surfaces. This is really, really difficult. But look at this animal do it! One of the ones I'm passing around is climbing up this vertical surface that's a smooth metal plate. It's extraordinary how fast it can do it β but if you slow it down, you see something that's quite extraordinary. It's a secret. The animal effectively climbs by slipping and look β and doing, actually, terribly, with respect to grabbing on the surface. It looks, in fact, like it's swimming up the surface. We can actually model that behavior better as a fluid, if you look at it. The distributed foot, actually, is working more like a paddle. The same is true when we looked at this lizard running on fluidized sand. Watch its feet. It's actually functioning as a paddle even though it's interacting with a surface that we normally think of as a solid. This is not different from what my former undergraduate discovered when she figured out how lizards can run on water itself. Can you use this to make a better robot? Martin Buehler did β who's now at Boston Dynamics β he took this idea and made RHex to be Aqua RHex. So here's RHex with paddles, now converted into an incredibly maneuverable swimming robot. For rough surfaces, though, animals add claws. And you probably feel them if you grabbed it. Did you touch it? CA: I did. RF: And they do really well at grabbing onto surfaces with these claws. Mark Cutkosky at Stanford University, one of my collaborators, is an extraordinary engineer who developed this technique called Shape Deposition Manufacturing, where he can imbed claws right into an artificial foot. And here's the simple version of a foot for a new robot that I'll show you in a bit. So to our blueprint, let's attach claws. Now if we look at animals, though, to be really maneuverable in all surfaces, the animals use hybrid mechanisms that include claws, and spines, and hairs, and pads, and glue, and capillary adhesion and a whole bunch of other things. These are all from different insects. There's an ant crawling up a vertical surface. Let's look at that ant. This is the foot of an ant. You see the hairs and the claws and this thing here. This is when its foot's in the air. Watch what happens when the foot goes onto your sandwich. You see what happens? That pad comes out. And that's where the glue is. Here from underneath is an ant foot, and when the claws don't dig in, that pad automatically comes out without the ant doing anything. It just extrudes. And this was a hard shot to get β I think this is the shot of the ant foot on the superstrings. So it's pretty tough to do. This is what it looks like close up β here's the ant foot, and there's the glue. And we discovered this glue may be an interesting two-phase mixture. It certainly helps it to hold on. So to our blueprint, we stick on some sticky pads. Now you might think for smooth surfaces we get inspiration here. Now we have something better here. The gecko's a really great example of nanotechnology in nature. These are its feet. They're β almost look alien. And the secret, which they stick on with, involves their hairy toes. They can run up a surface at a meter per second, take 30 steps in that one second β you can hardly see them. If we slow it down, they attach their feet at eight milliseconds, and detach them in 16 milliseconds. And when you watch how they detach it, it is bizarre. They peel away from the surface like you'd peel away a piece of tape. Very strange. How do they stick? If you look at their feet, they have leaf-like structures called linalae with millions of hairs. And each hair has the worst case of split ends possible. It has a hundred to a thousand split ends, and that's the secret, because it allows intimate contact. The gecko has a billion of these 200-nanometer-sized split ends. And they don't stick by glue, or they don't work like Velcro, or they don't work with suction. We discovered they work by intermolecular forces alone. So to our blueprint, we split some hairs. This has inspired the design of the first self-cleaning dry adhesive β the patent issued, we're happy to say. And here's the simplest version in nature, and here's my collaborator Ron Fearing's attempt at an artificial version of this dry adhesive made from polyurethane. And here's the first attempt to have it work on some load. There's enormous interest in this in a variety of different fields. You could think of a thousand possible uses, I'm sure. Lots of people have, and we're excited about realizing this as a product. We have imagined products; for example, this one: we imagined a bio-inspired Band-Aid, where we took the glue off the Band-Aid. We took some hairs from a molting gecko; put three rolls of them on here, and then made this Band-Aid. This is an undergraduate volunteer β we have 30,000 undergraduates so we can choose among them β that's actually just a red pen mark. But it makes an incredible Band-Aid. It's aerated, it can be peeled off easily, it doesn't cause any irritation, it works underwater. I think this is an extraordinary example of how curiosity-based research β we just wondered how they climbed up something β can lead to things that you could never imagine. It's just an example of why we need to support curiosity-based research. Here you are, pulling off the Band-Aid. So we've redefined, now, what a foot is. The question is, can we use these secrets, then, to inspire the design of a better foot, better than one that we see in nature? Here's the new project: we're trying to create the first climbing search-and-rescue robot β no suction or magnets β that can only move on limited kinds of surfaces. I call the new robot RiSE, for "Robot in Scansorial Environment" β that's a climbing environment β and we have an extraordinary team of biologists and engineers creating this robot. And here is RiSE. It's six-legged and has a tail. Here it is on a fence and a tree. And here are RiSE's first steps on an incline. You have the audio? You can hear it go up. And here it is coming up at you, in its first steps up a wall. Now it's only using its simplest feet here, so this is very new. But we think we got the dynamics right of the robot. Mark Cutkosky, though, is taking it a step further. He's the one able to build this shape-deposition manufactured feet and toes. The next step is to make compliant toes, and try to add spines and claws and set it for dry adhesives. So the idea is to first get the toes and a foot right, attempt to make that climb, and ultimately put it on the robot. And that's exactly what he's done. He's built, in fact, a climbing foot-bot inspired by nature. And here's Cutkosky's and his amazing students' design. So these are tuned toes β there are six of them, and they use the principles that I just talked about collectively for the blueprint. So this is not using any suction, any glue, and it will ultimately, when it's attached to the robot β it's as biologically inspired as the animal β hopefully be able to climb any kind of a surface. Here you see it, next, going up the side of a building at Stanford. It's sped up β again, it's a foot climbing. It's not the whole robot yet, we're working on it β now you can see how it's attaching. These tuned structures allow the spines, friction pads and ultimately the adhesive hairs to grab onto very challenging, difficult surfaces. And so they were able to get this thing β this is now sped up 20 times β can you imagine it trying to go up and rescue somebody at that upper floor? OK? You can visualize this now; it's not impossible. It's a very challenging task. But more to come later. To finish: we've gotten design secrets from nature by looking at how feet are built. We've learned we should distribute control to smart parts. Don't put it all in the brain, but put some of the control in tuned feet, legs and even body. That nature uses hybrid solutions, not a single solution, to these problems, and they're integrated and beautifully robust. And third, we believe strongly that we do not want to mimic nature but instead be inspired by biology, and use these novel principles with the best engineering solutions that are out there to make β potentially β something better than nature. So there's a clear message: whether you care about a fundamental, basic research of really interesting, bizarre, wonderful animals, or you want to build a search-and-rescue robot that can help you in an earthquake, or to save someone in a fire, or you care about medicine, we must preserve nature's designs. Otherwise these secrets will be lost forever. Thank you. |
The fractals at the heart of African designs | {0: 'Ron Eglash is an ethno-mathematician: he studies the way math and cultures intersect. He has shown that many aspects of African design -- in architecture, art, even hair braiding -- are based on perfect fractal patterns.'} | TEDGlobal 2007 | I want to start my story in Germany, in 1877, with a mathematician named Georg Cantor. And Cantor decided he was going to take a line and erase the middle third of the line, and then take those two resulting lines and bring them back into the same process, a recursive process. So he starts out with one line, and then two, and then four, and then 16, and so on. And if he does this an infinite number of times, which you can do in mathematics, he ends up with an infinite number of lines, each of which has an infinite number of points in it. So he realized he had a set whose number of elements was larger than infinity. And this blew his mind. Literally. He checked into a sanitarium. (Laughter) And when he came out of the sanitarium, he was convinced that he had been put on earth to found transfinite set theory because the largest set of infinity would be God Himself. He was a very religious man. He was a mathematician on a mission. And other mathematicians did the same sort of thing. A Swedish mathematician, von Koch, decided that instead of subtracting lines, he would add them. And so he came up with this beautiful curve. And there's no particular reason why we have to start with this seed shape; we can use any seed shape we like. And I'll rearrange this and I'll stick this somewhere β down there, OK β and now upon iteration, that seed shape sort of unfolds into a very different looking structure. So these all have the property of self-similarity: the part looks like the whole. It's the same pattern at many different scales. Now, mathematicians thought this was very strange because as you shrink a ruler down, you measure a longer and longer length. And since they went through the iterations an infinite number of times, as the ruler shrinks down to infinity, the length goes to infinity. This made no sense at all, so they consigned these curves to the back of the math books. They said these are pathological curves, and we don't have to discuss them. (Laughter) And that worked for a hundred years. And then in 1977, Benoit Mandelbrot, a French mathematician, realized that if you do computer graphics and used these shapes he called fractals, you get the shapes of nature. You get the human lungs, you get acacia trees, you get ferns, you get these beautiful natural forms. If you take your thumb and your index finger and look right where they meet β go ahead and do that now β β and relax your hand, you'll see a crinkle, and then a wrinkle within the crinkle, and a crinkle within the wrinkle. Right? Your body is covered with fractals. The mathematicians who were saying these were pathologically useless shapes? They were breathing those words with fractal lungs. It's very ironic. And I'll show you a little natural recursion here. Again, we just take these lines and recursively replace them with the whole shape. So here's the second iteration, and the third, fourth and so on. So nature has this self-similar structure. Nature uses self-organizing systems. Now in the 1980s, I happened to notice that if you look at an aerial photograph of an African village, you see fractals. And I thought, "This is fabulous! I wonder why?" And of course I had to go to Africa and ask folks why. So I got a Fulbright scholarship to just travel around Africa for a year asking people why they were building fractals, which is a great job if you can get it. (Laughter) And so I finally got to this city, and I'd done a little fractal model for the city just to see how it would sort of unfold β but when I got there, I got to the palace of the chief, and my French is not very good; I said something like, "I am a mathematician and I would like to stand on your roof." But he was really cool about it, and he took me up there, and we talked about fractals. And he said, "Oh yeah, yeah! We knew about a rectangle within a rectangle, we know all about that." And it turns out the royal insignia has a rectangle within a rectangle within a rectangle, and the path through that palace is actually this spiral here. And as you go through the path, you have to get more and more polite. So they're mapping the social scaling onto the geometric scaling; it's a conscious pattern. It is not unconscious like a termite mound fractal. This is a village in southern Zambia. The Ba-ila built this village about 400 meters in diameter. You have a huge ring. The rings that represent the family enclosures get larger and larger as you go towards the back, and then you have the chief's ring here towards the back and then the chief's immediate family in that ring. So here's a little fractal model for it. Here's one house with the sacred altar, here's the house of houses, the family enclosure, with the humans here where the sacred altar would be, and then here's the village as a whole β a ring of ring of rings with the chief's extended family here, the chief's immediate family here, and here there's a tiny village only this big. Now you might wonder, how can people fit in a tiny village only this big? That's because they're spirit people. It's the ancestors. And of course the spirit people have a little miniature village in their village, right? So it's just like Georg Cantor said, the recursion continues forever. This is in the Mandara mountains, near the Nigerian border in Cameroon, Mokoulek. I saw this diagram drawn by a French architect, and I thought, "Wow! What a beautiful fractal!" So I tried to come up with a seed shape, which, upon iteration, would unfold into this thing. I came up with this structure here. Let's see, first iteration, second, third, fourth. Now, after I did the simulation, I realized the whole village kind of spirals around, just like this, and here's that replicating line β a self-replicating line that unfolds into the fractal. Well, I noticed that line is about where the only square building in the village is at. So, when I got to the village, I said, "Can you take me to the square building? I think something's going on there." And they said, "Well, we can take you there, but you can't go inside because that's the sacred altar, where we do sacrifices every year to keep up those annual cycles of fertility for the fields." And I started to realize that the cycles of fertility were just like the recursive cycles in the geometric algorithm that builds this. And the recursion in some of these villages continues down into very tiny scales. So here's a Nankani village in Mali. And you can see, you go inside the family enclosure β you go inside and here's pots in the fireplace, stacked recursively. Here's calabashes that Issa was just showing us, and they're stacked recursively. Now, the tiniest calabash in here keeps the woman's soul. And when she dies, they have a ceremony where they break this stack called the zalanga and her soul goes off to eternity. Once again, infinity is important. Now, you might ask yourself three questions at this point. Aren't these scaling patterns just universal to all indigenous architecture? And that was actually my original hypothesis. When I first saw those African fractals, I thought, "Wow, so any indigenous group that doesn't have a state society, that sort of hierarchy, must have a kind of bottom-up architecture." But that turns out not to be true. I started collecting aerial photographs of Native American and South Pacific architecture; only the African ones were fractal. And if you think about it, all these different societies have different geometric design themes that they use. So Native Americans use a combination of circular symmetry and fourfold symmetry. You can see on the pottery and the baskets. Here's an aerial photograph of one of the Anasazi ruins; you can see it's circular at the largest scale, but it's rectangular at the smaller scale, right? It is not the same pattern at two different scales. Second, you might ask, "Well, Dr. Eglash, aren't you ignoring the diversity of African cultures?" And three times, the answer is no. First of all, I agree with Mudimbe's wonderful book, "The Invention of Africa," that Africa is an artificial invention of first colonialism, and then oppositional movements. No, because a widely shared design practice doesn't necessarily give you a unity of culture β and it definitely is not "in the DNA." And finally, the fractals have self-similarity β so they're similar to themselves, but they're not necessarily similar to each other β you see very different uses for fractals. It's a shared technology in Africa. And finally, well, isn't this just intuition? It's not really mathematical knowledge. Africans can't possibly really be using fractal geometry, right? It wasn't invented until the 1970s. Well, it's true that some African fractals are, as far as I'm concerned, just pure intuition. So some of these things, I'd wander around the streets of Dakar asking people, "What's the algorithm? What's the rule for making this?" and they'd say, "Well, we just make it that way because it looks pretty, stupid." (Laughter) But sometimes, that's not the case. In some cases, there would actually be algorithms, and very sophisticated algorithms. So in Manghetu sculpture, you'd see this recursive geometry. In Ethiopian crosses, you see this wonderful unfolding of the shape. In Angola, the Chokwe people draw lines in the sand, and it's what the German mathematician Euler called a graph; we now call it an Eulerian path β you can never lift your stylus from the surface and you can never go over the same line twice. But they do it recursively, and they do it with an age-grade system, so the little kids learn this one, and then the older kids learn this one, then the next age-grade initiation, you learn this one. And with each iteration of that algorithm, you learn the iterations of the myth. You learn the next level of knowledge. And finally, all over Africa, you see this board game. It's called Owari in Ghana, where I studied it; it's called Mancala here on the East Coast, Bao in Kenya, Sogo elsewhere. Well, you see self-organizing patterns that spontaneously occur in this board game. And the folks in Ghana knew about these self-organizing patterns and would use them strategically. So this is very conscious knowledge. Here's a wonderful fractal. Anywhere you go in the Sahel, you'll see this windscreen. And of course fences around the world are all Cartesian, all strictly linear. But here in Africa, you've got these nonlinear scaling fences. So I tracked down one of the folks who makes these things, this guy in Mali just outside of Bamako, and I asked him, "How come you're making fractal fences? Because nobody else is." And his answer was very interesting. He said, "Well, if I lived in the jungle, I would only use the long rows of straw because they're very quick and they're very cheap. It doesn't take much time, doesn't take much straw." He said, "but wind and dust goes through pretty easily. Now, the tight rows up at the very top, they really hold out the wind and dust. But it takes a lot of time, and it takes a lot of straw because they're really tight." "Now," he said, "we know from experience that the farther up from the ground you go, the stronger the wind blows." Right? It's just like a cost-benefit analysis. And I measured out the lengths of straw, put it on a log-log plot, got the scaling exponent, and it almost exactly matches the scaling exponent for the relationship between wind speed and height in the wind engineering handbook. So these guys are right on target for a practical use of scaling technology. The most complex example of an algorithmic approach to fractals that I found was actually not in geometry, it was in a symbolic code, and this was Bamana sand divination. And the same divination system is found all over Africa. You can find it on the East Coast as well as the West Coast, and often the symbols are very well preserved, so each of these symbols has four bits β it's a four-bit binary word β you draw these lines in the sand randomly, and then you count off, and if it's an odd number, you put down one stroke, and if it's an even number, you put down two strokes. And they did this very rapidly, and I couldn't understand where they were getting β they only did the randomness four times β I couldn't understand where they were getting the other 12 symbols. And they wouldn't tell me. They said, "No, no, I can't tell you about this." And I said, "Well look, I'll pay you, you can be my teacher, and I'll come each day and pay you." They said, "It's not a matter of money. This is a religious matter." And finally, out of desperation, I said, "Well, let me explain Georg Cantor in 1877." And I started explaining why I was there in Africa, and they got very excited when they saw the Cantor set. And one of them said, "Come here. I think I can help you out here." And so he took me through the initiation ritual for a Bamana priest. And of course, I was only interested in the math, so the whole time, he kept shaking his head going, "You know, I didn't learn it this way." But I had to sleep with a kola nut next to my bed, buried in sand, and give seven coins to seven lepers and so on. And finally, he revealed the truth of the matter. And it turns out it's a pseudo-random number generator using deterministic chaos. When you have a four-bit symbol, you then put it together with another one sideways. So even plus odd gives you odd. Odd plus even gives you odd. Even plus even gives you even. Odd plus odd gives you even. It's addition modulo 2, just like in the parity bit check on your computer. And then you take this symbol, and you put it back in so it's a self-generating diversity of symbols. They're truly using a kind of deterministic chaos in doing this. Now, because it's a binary code, you can actually implement this in hardware β what a fantastic teaching tool that should be in African engineering schools. And the most interesting thing I found out about it was historical. In the 12th century, Hugo of Santalla brought it from Islamic mystics into Spain. And there it entered into the alchemy community as geomancy: divination through the earth. This is a geomantic chart drawn for King Richard II in 1390. Leibniz, the German mathematician, talked about geomancy in his dissertation called "De Combinatoria." And he said, "Well, instead of using one stroke and two strokes, let's use a one and a zero, and we can count by powers of two." Right? Ones and zeros, the binary code. George Boole took Leibniz's binary code and created Boolean algebra, and John von Neumann took Boolean algebra and created the digital computer. So all these little PDAs and laptops β every digital circuit in the world β started in Africa. And I know Brian Eno says there's not enough Africa in computers, but you know, I don't think there's enough African history in Brian Eno. (Laughter) (Applause) So let me end with just a few words about applications that we've found for this. And you can go to our website, the applets are all free; they just run in the browser. Anybody in the world can use them. The National Science Foundation's Broadening Participation in Computing program recently awarded us a grant to make a programmable version of these design tools, so hopefully in three years, anybody'll be able to go on the Web and create their own simulations and their own artifacts. We've focused in the U.S. on African-American students as well as Native American and Latino. We've found statistically significant improvement with children using this software in a mathematics class in comparison with a control group that did not have the software. So it's really very successful teaching children that they have a heritage that's about mathematics, that it's not just about singing and dancing. We've started a pilot program in Ghana. We got a small seed grant, just to see if folks would be willing to work with us on this; we're very excited about the future possibilities for that. We've also been working in design. I didn't put his name up here β my colleague, Kerry, in Kenya, has come up with this great idea for using fractal structure for postal address in villages that have fractal structure, because if you try to impose a grid structure postal system on a fractal village, it doesn't quite fit. Bernard Tschumi at Columbia University has finished using this in a design for a museum of African art. David Hughes at Ohio State University has written a primer on Afrocentric architecture in which he's used some of these fractal structures. And finally, I just wanted to point out that this idea of self-organization, as we heard earlier, it's in the brain. It's in the β it's in Google's search engine. Actually, the reason that Google was such a success is because they were the first ones to take advantage of the self-organizing properties of the web. It's in ecological sustainability. It's in the developmental power of entrepreneurship, the ethical power of democracy. It's also in some bad things. Self-organization is why the AIDS virus is spreading so fast. And if you don't think that capitalism, which is self-organizing, can have destructive effects, you haven't opened your eyes enough. So we need to think about, as was spoken earlier, the traditional African methods for doing self-organization. These are robust algorithms. These are ways of doing self-organization β of doing entrepreneurship β that are gentle, that are egalitarian. So if we want to find a better way of doing that kind of work, we need look only no farther than Africa to find these robust self-organizing algorithms. Thank you. |
Design and destiny | {0: 'Philippe Starck designs deluxe objects and posh condos and hotels around the world. Always witty and engaged, he takes special delight in rethinking everyday objects. '} | TED2007 | You will understand nothing with my type of English. It's good for you because you can have a break after all these fantastic people. I must tell you I am like that, not very comfortable, because usually, in life, I think my job is absolutely useless. I mean, I feel useless. Now after Carolyn, and all the other guys, I feel like shit. And definitively, I don't know why I am here, but β you know the nightmare you can have, like you are an impostor, you arrive at the opera, and they push you, "You must sing!" I don't know. (Laughter) So, so, because I have nothing to show, nothing to say, we shall try to speak about something else. We can start, if you want, by understanding β it's just to start, it's not interesting, but β how I work. When somebody comes to me and ask for what I am known, I mean, yes, lemon squeezer, toilet brush, toothpick, beautiful toilet seats, and why not β a toothbrush? I don't try to design the toothbrush. I don't try to say, "Oh, that will be a beautiful object," or something like that. That doesn't interest me. Because there is different types of design. The one, we can call it the cynical design, that means the design invented by Raymond Loewy in the '50s, who said, what is ugly is a bad sale, la laideur se vend mal, which is terrible. It means the design must be just the weapon for marketing, for producer to make product more sexy, like that, they sell more: it's shit, it's obsolete, it's ridiculous. I call that the cynical design. After, there is the narcissistic design: it's a fantastic designer who designs only for other fantastic designers. (Laughter) After, there is people like me, who try to deserve to exist, and who are so ashamed to make this useless job, who try to do it in another way, and they try, I try, to not make the object for the object but for the result, for the profit for the human being, the person who will use it. If we take the toothbrush β I don't think about the toothbrush. I think, "What will be the effect of the brush in the mouth?" And to understand what will be the effect of the toothbrush in the mouth, I must imagine: Who owns this mouth? What is the life of the owner of this mouth? In what society [does] this guy live? What civilization creates this society? What animal species creates this civilization? When I arrive β and I take one minute, I am not so intelligent β when I arrive at the level of animal species, that becomes real interesting. Me, I have strictly no power to change anything. But when I come back, I can understand why I shall not do it, because today to not do it, it's more positive than do it, or how I shall do it. But to come back, where I am at the animal species, there is things to see. There is things to see, there is the big challenge. The big challenge in front of us. Because there is not a human production which exists outside of what I call "the big image." The big image is our story, our poetry, our romanticism. Our poetry is our mutation, our life. We must remember, and we can see that in any book of my son of 10 years old, that life appears four billion years ago, around β four billion point two? Voice offstage: Four point five. Yes, point five, OK, OK, OK! (Laughter) I'm a designer, that's all, of Christmas gifts. And before, there was this soup, called "soupe primordiale," this first soup β bloop bloop bloop β sort of dirty mud, no life, nothing. So then β pshoo-shoo β lightning β pshoo β arrive β pshoo-shoo β makes life β bloop bloop β and that dies. Some million years after β pshoo-shoo, bloop-bloop β ah, wake up! At the end, finally, that succeeds, and life appears. We was so, so stupid. The most stupid bacteria. Even, I think, we copy our way to reproduce, you know what I mean, and something of β oh no, forget it. After, we become a fish; after, we become a frog; after, we become a monkey; after, we become what we are today: a super-monkey, and the fun is, the super-monkey we are today, is at half of the story. Can you imagine? From that stupid bacteria to us, with a microphone, with a computer, with an iPod: four billion years. And we know, and especially Carolyn knows, that when the sun will implode, the earth will burn, explode, I don't know what, and this is scheduled for four, four billion years? Yes, she said, something like that. OK, that means we are at half of the story. Fantastic! It's a beauty! Can you imagine? It's very symbolic. Because the bacteria we was had no idea of what we are today. And today, we have no idea of what we shall be in four billion years. And this territory is fantastic. That is our poetry. That is our beautiful story. It's our romanticism. Mu-ta-tion. We are mutants. And if we don't deeply understand, if we don't integrate that we are mutants, we completely miss the story. Because every generation thinks we are the final one. We have a way to look at Earth like that, you know, "I am the man. The final man. You know, we mutate during four billion years before, but now, because it's me, we stop. Fin. (Laughter) For the end, for the eternity, it is one with a red jacket." Something like that. I am not sure of that. (Laughter) Because that is our intelligence of mutation and things like that. There is so many things to do; it's so fresh. And here is something: nobody is obliged to be a genius, but everybody is obliged to participate. And to participate, for a mutant, there is a minimum of exercise, a minimum of sport. We can say that. The first, if you want β there is so many β but one which is very easy to do, is the duty of vision. I can explain you. I shall try. If you walk like that, it's OK, it's OK, you can walk, but perhaps, because you walk with the eyes like that, you will not see, oh, there is a hole. And you will fall, and you will die. Dangerous. That's why, perhaps, you will try to have this angle of vision. OK, I can see, if I found something, up, up, and they continue, up up up. I raise the angle of vision, but it's still very β selfish, selfish, egoiste β yes, selfish. You, you survive. It's OK. If you raise the level of your eyes a little more you go, "I see you, oh my God you are here, how are you, I can help you, I can design for you a new toothbrush, new toilet brush," something like that. I live in society; I live in community. It's OK. You start to be in the territory of intelligence, we can say. From this level, the more you can raise this angle of view, the more you will be important for the society. The more you will rise, the more you will be important for the civilization. The more you will rise, to see far and high, like that, the more you will be important for the story of our mutation. That means intelligent people are in this angle. That is intelligence. From this to here, that, it's genius. Ptolemy, Eratosthenes, Einstein, things like that. Nobody's obliged to be a genius. It's better, but nobody. Take care, in this training, to be a good mutant. There is some danger, there is some trap. One trap: the vertical. Because at the vertical of us, if you look like that, "Ah! my God, there is God. Ah! God!" God is a trap. God is the answer when we don't know the answer. That means, when your brain is not enough big, when you don't understand, you go, "Ah, it's God, it's God." That's ridiculous. That's why β jump, like that? No, don't jump. Come back. Because, after, there is another trap. If you look like that, you look to the past, or you look inside if you are very flexible, inside yourself. It's called schizophrenia, and you are dead also. That's why every morning, now, because you are a good mutant, you will raise your angle of view. Out, more of the horizontal. You are an intelligence. Never forget β like that, like that. It's very, very, very important. What, what else we can say about that? Why do that? It's because we β if we look from far, we see our line of evolution. This line of evolution is clearly positive. From far, this line looks very smooth, like that. But if you take a lens, like that, this line is ack, ack, ack, ack, ack. Like that. It's made of light and shadow. We can say light is civilization, shadow is barbaria. And it's very important to know where we are. Because some cycle, there is a spot in the cycle, and you have not the same duty in the different parts of the cycle. That means, we can imagine β I don't say it was fantastic, but in the '80s, there was not too much war, like that, it was β we can imagine that the civilization can become civilized. In this case, people like me are acceptable. We can say, "It's luxurious time." We have time to think, we have time to I don't know what, speak about art and things like that. It's OK. We are in the light. But sometimes, like today, we fall, we fall so fast, so fast to shadow, we fall so fast to barbaria. With many, many, many, many face of barbaria. Because it's not, the barbaria we have today, it's perhaps not the barbaria we think. There is different type of barbaria. That's why we must adapt. That means, when barbaria is back, forget the beautiful chairs, forget the beautiful hotel, forget design, even β I'm sorry to say β forget art. Forget all that. There is priority; there is urgency. You must go back to politics, you must go back to radicalization, I'm sorry if that's not very English. You must go back to fight, to battle. That's why today I'm so ashamed to make this job. That's why I am here, to try to do it the best possible. But I know that even I do it the best possible β that's why I'm the best β it's nothing. Because it's not the right time. That's why I say that. I say that, because, I repeat, nothing exist if it's not in the good rhythym, the rhythym of our beautiful dream, of this civilization. And because we must all work to finish this story. Because the scenario of this civilization β about love, progress, and things like that β it's OK, but there is so many different, other scenarios of other civilizations. This scenario, of this civilization, was about becoming powerful, intelligent, like this idea we have invented, this concept of God. We are God now. We are. It's almost done. We have just to finish the story. That is very, very important. And when you don't understand really what's happened, you cannot go and fight and work and build and things like that. You go to the future back, back, back, back, like that. And you can fall, and it's very dangerous. No, you must really understand that. Because we have almost finished, I'll repeat this story. And the beauty of this, in perhaps 50 years, 60 years, we can finish completely this civilization, and offer to our children the possibility to invent a new story, a new poetry, a new romanticism. With billions of people who have been born, worked, lived and died before us, these people who have worked so much, we have now bring beautiful things, beautiful gifts, we know so many things. We can say to our children, OK, done, that was our story. That passed. Now you have a duty: invent a new story. Invent a new poetry. The only rule is, we have not to have any idea about the next story. We give you white pages. Invent. We give you the best tools, the best tools, and now, do it. That's why I continue to work, even if it's for toilet brush. |
Beauty, truth and ... physics? | {0: "Murray Gell-Mann brings visibility to a crucial aspect of our existence that we can't actually see: elemental particles. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics for introducing quarks, one of two fundamental ingredients for all matter in the universe."} | TED2007 | Thank you for putting up these pictures of my colleagues over here. (Laughter) We'll be talking about them. Now, I'm going try an experiment. I don't do experiments, normally. I'm a theorist. But I'm going see what happens if I press this button. Sure enough. OK. I used to work in this field of elementary particles. What happens to matter if you chop it up very fine? What is it made of? And the laws of these particles are valid throughout the universe, and they're very much connected with the history of the universe. We know a lot about four forces. There must be a lot more, but those are at very, very small distances, and we haven't really interacted with them very much yet. The main thing I want to talk about is this: that we have this remarkable experience in this field of fundamental physics that beauty is a very successful criterion for choosing the right theory. And why on earth could that be so? Well, here's an example from my own experience. It's fairly dramatic, actually, to have this happen. Three or four of us, in 1957, put forward a partially complete theory of one of these forces, this weak force. And it was in disagreement with seven β seven, count them, seven experiments. Experiments were all wrong. And we published before knowing that, because we figured it was so beautiful, it's gotta be right! The experiments had to be wrong, and they were. Now our friend over there, Albert Einstein, used to pay very little attention when people said, "You know, there's a man with an experiment that seems to disagree with special relativity. DC Miller. What about that?" And he would say, "Aw, that'll go away." (Laughter) Now, why does stuff like that work? That's the question. Now, yeah, what do we mean by beautiful? That's one thing. I'll try to make that clear β partially clear. Why should it work, and is this something to do with human beings? I'll let you in on the answer to the last one that I offer, and that is, it has nothing to do with human beings. Somewhere in some other planet, orbiting some very distant star, maybe in a another galaxy, there could well be entities that are at least as intelligent as we are, and are interested in science. It's not impossible; I think there probably are lots. Very likely, none is close enough to interact with us. But they could be out there, very easily. And suppose they have, you know, very different sensory apparatus, and so on. They have seven tentacles, and they have 14 little funny-looking compound eyes, and a brain shaped like a pretzel. Would they really have different laws? There are lots of people who believe that, and I think it is utter baloney. I think there are laws out there, and we of course don't understand them at any given time very well β but we try. And we try to get closer and closer. And someday, we may actually figure out the fundamental unified theory of the particles and forces, what I call the "fundamental law." We may not even be terribly far from it. But even if we don't run across it in our lifetimes, we can still think there is one out there, and we're just trying to get closer and closer to it. I think that's the main point to be made. We express these things mathematically. And when the mathematics is very simple β when in terms of some mathematical notation, you can write the theory in a very brief space, without a lot of complication β that's essentially what we mean by beauty or elegance. Here's what I was saying about the laws. They're really there. Newton certainly believed that. And he said, here, "It is the business of natural philosophy to find out those laws." The basic law, let's say β here's an assumption. The assumption is that the basic law really takes the form of a unified theory of all the particles. Now, some people call that a theory of everything. That's wrong because the theory is quantum mechanical. And I won't go into a lot of stuff about quantum mechanics and what it's like, and so on. You've heard a lot of wrong things about it anyway. (Laughter) There are even movies about it with a lot of wrong stuff. But the main thing here is that it predicts probabilities. Now, sometimes those probabilities are near certainties. And in a lot of familiar cases, they of course are. But other times they're not, and you have only probabilities for different outcomes. So what that means is that the history of the universe is not determined just by the fundamental law. It's the fundamental law and this incredibly long series of accidents, or chance outcomes, that are there in addition. And the fundamental theory doesn't include those chance outcomes; they are in addition. So it's not a theory of everything. And in fact, a huge amount of the information in the universe around us comes from those accidents, and not just from the fundamental laws. Now, it's often said that getting closer and closer to the fundamental laws by examining phenomena at low energies, and then higher energies, and then higher energies, or short distances, and then shorter distances, and then still shorter distances, and so on, is like peeling the skin of an onion. And we keep doing that, and build more powerful machines, accelerators for particles. We look deeper and deeper into the structure of particles, and in that way we get probably closer and closer to this fundamental law. Now, what happens is that as we do that, as we peel these skins of the onion, and we get closer and closer to the underlying law, we see that each skin has something in common with the previous one, and with the next one. We write them out mathematically, and we see they use very similar mathematics. They require very similar mathematics. That is absolutely remarkable, and that is a central feature of what I'm trying to say today. Newton called it β that's Newton, by the way β that one. This one is Albert Einstein. Hi, Al! And anyway, he said, "nature conformable to herself" β personifying nature as a female. And so what happens is that the new phenomena, the new skins, the inner skins of the slightly smaller skins of the onion that we get to, resemble the slightly larger ones. And the kind of mathematics that we had for the previous skin is almost the same as what we need for the next skin. And that's why the equations look so simple. Because they use mathematics we already have. A trivial example is this: Newton found the law of gravity, which goes like one over the square of the distance between the things gravitated. Coulomb, in France, found the same law for electric charges. Here's an example of this similarity. You look at gravity, you see a certain law. Then you look at electricity. Sure enough. The same rule. It's a very simple example. There are lots of more sophisticated examples. Symmetry is very important in this discussion. You know what it means. A circle, for example, is symmetric under rotations about the center of the circle. You rotate around the center of the circle, the circle remains unchanged. You take a sphere, in three dimensions, you rotate around the center of the sphere, and all those rotations leave the sphere alone. They are symmetries of the sphere. So we say, in general, that there's a symmetry under certain operations if those operations leave the phenomenon, or its description, unchanged. Maxwell's equations are of course symmetrical under rotations of all of space. Doesn't matter if we turn the whole of space around by some angle, it doesn't leave the β doesn't change the phenomenon of electricity or magnetism. There's a new notation in the 19th century that expressed this, and if you use that notation, the equations get a lot simpler. Then Einstein, with his special theory of relativity, looked at a whole set of symmetries of Maxwell's equations, which are called special relativity. And those symmetries, then, make the equations even shorter, and even prettier, therefore. Let's look. You don't have to know what these things mean, doesn't make any difference. But you can just look at the form. (Laughter) You can look at the form. You see above, at the top, a long list of equations with three components for the three directions of space: x, y and z. Then, using vector analysis, you use rotational symmetry, and you get this next set. Then you use the symmetry of special relativity and you get an even simpler set down here, showing that symmetry exhibits better and better. The more and more symmetry you have, the better you exhibit the simplicity and elegance of the theory. The last two, the first equation says that electric charges and currents give rise to all the electric and magnetic fields. The next β second β equation says that there is no magnetism other than that. The only magnetism comes from electric charges and currents. Someday we may find some slight hole in that argument. But for the moment, that's the case. Now, here is a very exciting development that many people have not heard of. They should have heard of it, but it's a little tricky to explain in technical detail, so I won't do it. I'll just mention it. (Laughter) But Chen Ning Yang, called by us "Frank" Yang β (Laughter) β and Bob Mills put forward, 50 years ago, this generalization of Maxwell's equations, with a new symmetry. A whole new symmetry. Mathematics very similar, but there was a whole new symmetry. They hoped that this would contribute somehow to particle physics β didn't. It didn't, by itself, contribute to particle physics. But then some of us generalized it further. And then it did! And it gave a very beautiful description of the strong force and of the weak force. So here we say, again, what we said before: that each skin of the onion shows a similarity to the adjoining skins. So the mathematics for the adjoining skins is very similar to what we need for the new one. And therefore it looks beautiful because we already know how to write it in a lovely, concise way. So here are the themes. We believe there is a unified theory underlying all the regularities. Steps toward unification exhibit the simplicity. Symmetry exhibits the simplicity. And then there is self-similarity across the scales β in other words, from one skin of the onion to another one. Proximate self-similarity. And that accounts for this phenomenon. That will account for why beauty is a successful criterion for selecting the right theory. Here's what Newton himself said: "Nature is very consonant and conformable to her self." One thing he was thinking of is something that most of us take for granted today, but in his day it wasn't taken for granted. There's the story, which is not absolutely certain to be right, but a lot of people told it. Four sources told it. That when they had the plague in Cambridge, and he went down to his mother's farm β because the university was closed β he saw an apple fall from a tree, or on his head or something. And he realized suddenly that the force that drew the apple down to the earth could be the same as the force regulating the motions of the planets and the moon. That was a big unification for those days, although today we take it for granted. It's the same theory of gravity. So he said that this principle of nature, consonance: "This principle of nature being very remote from the conceptions of philosophers, I forbore to describe it in that book, lest I should be accounted an extravagant freak ... " That's what we all have to watch out for, (Laughter) especially at this meeting. " ... and so prejudice my readers against all those things which were the main design of the book." Now, who today would claim that as a mere conceit of the human mind? That the force that causes the apple to fall to the ground is the same force that causes the planets and the moon to move around, and so on? Everybody knows that. It's a property of gravitation. It's not something in the human mind. The human mind can, of course, appreciate it and enjoy it, use it, but it's not β it doesn't stem from the human mind. It stems from the character of gravity. And that's true of all the things we're talking about. They are properties of the fundamental law. The fundamental law is such that the different skins of the onion resemble one another, and therefore the math for one skin allows you to express beautifully and simply the phenomenon of the next skin. I say here that Newton did a lot of things that year: gravity, the laws of motion, the calculus, white light composed of all the colors of the rainbow. And he could have written quite an essay on "What I Did Over My Summer Vacation." (Laughter) So we don't have to assume these principles as separate metaphysical postulates. They follow from the fundamental theory. They are what we call emergent properties. You don't need β you don't need something more to get something more. That's what emergence means. Life can emerge from physics and chemistry, plus a lot of accidents. The human mind can arise from neurobiology and a lot of accidents, the way the chemical bond arises from physics and certain accidents. It doesn't diminish the importance of these subjects to know that they follow from more fundamental things, plus accidents. That's a general rule, and it's critically important to realize that. You don't need something more in order to get something more. People keep asking that when they read my book, "The Quark and the Jaguar," and they say, "Isn't there something more beyond what you have there?" Presumably, they mean something supernatural. Anyway, there isn't. (Laughter) You don't need something more to explain something more. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Winning the oil endgame | {0: 'In his new book, "Reinventing Fire," Amory Lovins shares ingenious ideas for the next era of energy.'} | TED2005 | The old story about climate protection is that it's costly, or it would have been done already. So government needs to make us do something painful to fix it. The new story about climate protection is that it's not costly, but profitable. This was a simple sign error, because it's cheaper to save fuel than to buy fuel, as is well known to companies that do it all the time β for example, Dupont, SD micro electronics. Many other firms β IBM β are reducing their energy intensity routinely six percent a year by fixing up their plants, and they get their money back in two or three years. That's called a profit. Now, similarly, the old story about oil is that if we wanted to save very much of it, it would be expensive, or we would have done it already, because markets are essentially perfect. If, of course, that were true, there would be no innovation, and nobody could make any money. But the new story about oil is the government doesn't have to force us to do painful things to get off oil β not just incrementally, but completely β quite the contrary. The United States, for example, can completely eliminate its use of oil and rejuvenate the economy at the same time, led by business for profit, because it's so much cheaper to save and substitute for the oil than to keep on buying it. This process will also be catalyzed by the military for its own reasons of combat effectiveness and preventing conflict, particularly over oil. This thesis is set out in a book called "Winning the Oil Endgame" that four colleagues and I wrote and have posted for free at Oilendgame.com β about 170,000 downloads so far. And it was co-sponsored by the Pentagon β it's independent, it's peer-reviewed and all of the backup calculations are transparently posted for your perusal. Now, a bit of economic history, I think, may be helpful here. Around 1850, one of the biggest U.S. industries was whaling. And whale oil lit practically every building. But in the nine years before Drake struck oil, in 1859, at least five-sixths of that whale oil-illuminating market disappeared, thanks to fatal competitors, chiefly oil and gas made from coal, to which the whalers had not been paying attention. So, very unexpectedly, they ran out of customers before they ran out of whales. The remnant whale populations were saved by technological innovators and profit-maximizing capitalists. (Laughter) And it's funny β it feels a bit like this now for oil. We've been spending the last few decades accumulating a very powerful backlog of technologies for saving and substituting for oil, and no one had bothered to add them up before. So when we did, we found some very surprising things. Now, there are two big reasons to be concerned about oil. Both national competitiveness and national security are at risk. On the competitiveness front, we all know that Toyota has more market cap than the big three put together. And serious competition from Europe, from Korea, and next is China, which will soon be a major net exporter of cars. How long do you think it will take before you can drive home your new wally-badged Shanghai automotive super-efficient car? Maybe a decade, according to my friends in Detroit. China has an energy policy based on radical energy efficiency and leap-frog technology. They're not going to export your uncle's Buick. And after that comes India. The point here is, these cars are going to be made super efficient. The question is, who will make them? Will we in the United States continue to import efficient cars to replace foreign oil, or will we make efficient cars and import neither the oil nor the cars? That seems to make more sense. The more we keep on using the oil, particularly the imported oil, the more we face a very obvious array of problems. Our analysis assumes that they all cost nothing, but nothing is not the right number. It could well be enough to double the oil price, for example. And one of the worst of these is what it does to our standing in the world if other countries think that everything we do is about oil, if we have to treat countries that have oil differently than countries that don't have oil. And our military get quite unhappy with having to stand guard on pipelines in Far-off-istan when what they actually signed up for was to protect American citizens. They don't like fighting over oil, they don't like being in the sands and they don't like where the oil money goes and what sort of instability it creates. Now, in order to avoid these problems, whatever you think they're worth, it's actually not that complicated. We can save half the oil by using it more efficiently, at a cost of 12 dollars per saved barrel. And then we can replace the other half with a combination of advanced bio-fuels and safe natural gas. And that costs on average under 18 dollars a barrel. And compared with the official forecast, that oil will cost 26 dollars a barrel in 2025, which is half of what we've been paying lately, that will save 70 billion dollars a year, starting quite soon. Now, in order to do this we need to invest about 180 billion dollars: half of it to retool the car, truck and plane industries; half of it to build the advanced bio-fuel industry. In the process, we will gain about a million good jobs, mainly rural. And protect another million jobs now at risk, mainly in auto-making. And we'll also get returns over 150 billion dollars a year. So that's a very handsome return. It's financeable in the private capital market. But if you want it for the reasons I just mentioned, to happen sooner and with higher confidence, then β and also to expand choice and manage risk β then you might like some light-handed public policies that support rather than distorting or opposing the business logic. And these policies work fine without taxes, subsidies or mandates. They make a little net money for the treasury. They have a broad trans-ideological appeal, and because we want them actually to happen, we figured out ways to do them that do not require much, if any, federal legislation, and can, indeed, be done administratively or at a state level. Just to illustrate what to do about the nub of the problem, namely, light vehicles, here are four ultra-light carbon-composite concept cars with low drag, and all but the one at the upper left have hybrid drive. You can sort of have it all with these things. For example, this Opel two-seater does 155 miles an hour at 94 miles a gallon. This muscle car from Toyota: 408 horsepower in an ultra-light that does zero to 60 in well under four seconds, and still gets 32 miles a gallon. I'll say more later about this. And in the upper left, a pioneering effort 14 years ago by GM β 84 miles a gallon without even using a hybrid, in a four-seater. Well, saving that fuel, 69 percent of the fuel in light vehicles costs about 57 cents per saved gallon. But it's even a better deal for heavy trucks, where you save a similar amount at 25 cents a gallon, with better aerodynamics and tires and engines, and so on, and taking out weight so you can put it into payload. So you can double efficiency with a 60 percent internal rate of return. Then you can go even further, almost tripling efficiency with some operational improvements, double the big haulers' margins. And we intend to use those numbers to create demand pull, and flip the market. In the airplane business, it's again a similar story where the first 20 percent fuel saving is free, as Boeing is now demonstrating in its new Dreamliner. But then the next generation of planes saves about half. Again, much cheaper than buying the fuel. And if you go over the next 15 years or so to a blended-wing body, kind of a flying wing with internal engines, then you get about a factor three efficiency improvement at comparable or lower cost. Let me focus a minute on the light vehicles, the cars and light trucks, because we all know the most about those; probably everybody here drives one. And yet we may not realize that in a standard sedan, of all the fuel energy you feed into the car, seven-eighths never gets to the wheels; it's lost first in the engine, idling at zero miles a gallon, the power train and accessories. So then of the energy that does get to the wheels, only an eighth of it, half of that, goes to heat the tires on the road, or to heat the air the car pushes aside. And only this little bit, only six percent actually ends up accelerating the car and then heating the brakes when you stop. In fact, since 95 percent of the weight you're moving is the car not the driver, less than one percent of the fuel energy ends up moving the driver. This is not very gratifying after more than a century of devoted engineering effort. (Laughter) (Applause) Moreover, three-fourths of the fuel use is caused by the weight of the car. And it's obvious from the diagram that every unit of energy you save at the wheels is going to avoid wasting another seven units of energy getting that energy to the wheels. So there's huge leverage for making the car a lot lighter. And the reason this has not been very seriously examined before is there was a common assumption in the industry that β well, then it might not be safe if you got whacked by a heavy car, and it would cost a lot more to make, because the only way we know how to make cars much lighter was to use expensive light metals like aluminum and magnesium. But these objections are now vanishing through advances in materials. For example, we use a lot of carbon-fiber composites in sporting goods. And it turns out that these are quite remarkable for safety. Here's a handmade McLaren SLR carbon car that got t-boned by a Golf. The Golf was totaled. The McLaren just popped off and scratched the side panel. They'll pop it back on and fix the scratch later. But if this McLaren were to run into a wall at 65 miles an hour, the entire crash energy would be absorbed by a couple of woven carbon-fiber composite cones, weighing a total of 15 pounds, hidden in the front end. Because these materials could actually absorb six to 12 times as much energy per pound as steel, and do so a lot more smoothly. And this means we've just cracked the conundrum of safety and weight. We could make cars bigger, which is protective, but make them light. Whereas if we made them heavy, they'd be both hostile and inefficient. And when you make them light in the right way, that can be simpler and cheaper to make. You can end up saving money, and lives, and oil, all at the same time. I showed here two years ago a little bit about a design of your basic, uncompromised, quintupled-efficiency suburban-assault vehicle β (Laughter) β and this is a complete virtual design that is production-costed manufacturable. And the process needed to make it is actually coming toward the market quite nicely. We figured out a kind of a digital inkjet printer for this very stiff, strong, carbon-composite material, and then ways to thermoform it, because it's a combination of carbon and nylon, into whatever complex shapes you want, like the one just shown at the auto show by one of the tier-one suppliers. And the manufacturing you can do this way gets radically simplified. Because the auto body has only, say, 14 parts, instead of 100, 150. Each one is formed by one fairly cheap die set, instead of four expensive ones for stamping steel. Each of the parts can be easily lifted with no hoist. They snap together like a kid's toy. So you got rid of the body shop. And if you want, you can lay color in the mold, and get rid of the paint shop. Those are the two hardest and costliest parts of making a car. So you end up with at least two-fifths lower capital intensity than the leanest plant in the industry, which GM has in Lansing. The plant also gets smaller. Now, when you go through a similar analysis for every way we use oil, including buildings, industry, feedstocks and so on, you find that of the 28 million barrels a day the government says we will need in 2025, well, about eight of that can be removed by efficiency by then, with another seven still being saved as the vehicle stocks turn over, at an average cost of only 12 bucks a barrel, instead of 26 for buying the oil. And then another six can be made robustly, competitively, from cellulosic ethanol and a little bio-diesel, without interfering at all with the water or land needs of crop production. There is a huge amount of gas to be saved, about half the projected gas at about an eighth of its price. And here are some no-brainer substitutions of it, with lots left over. So much, in fact, that after you've handled the domestic oil forecast from areas already approved, you have only this little bit left, and let's see how we can meet that, because there's a pretty flexible menu of ways. We could, of course, buy more efficiency. Maybe you ought to buy efficiency at 26 bucks instead of 12. Or wait to capture the second half of it. Or we could, of course, just get this little bit by continuing to import some Canadian and Mexican oil, or the ethanol the Brazilians would love to sell us. But they'll sell it to Japan and China instead, because we have tariff barriers to protect our corn farmers, and they don't. Or we could use the saved gas directly to cover all of this balance, or if we used it as hydrogen, which is more profitable and efficient, we'd get rid of the domestic oil too. And that doesn't even count, for example, that available land in the Dakotas can cost effectively make enough wind power to run every highway vehicle in the country. So we have lots of options. And the choice of menu and timing is quite flexible. Now, to make this happen quicker and with higher confidence, there is a few ways government could help. For example, fee-bates, a combination of a fee and a rebate in any size class of vehicle you want, can increase the price of inefficient vehicles and correspondingly pay you a rebate for efficient vehicles. You're not paid to change size class. You are paid to pick efficiency within a size class, in a way equivalent to looking at all fourteen years of life-cycle fuel savings rather than just the first two or three. This expands choice rapidly in the market, and actually makes more money for automakers as well. I'd like to deal with the lack of affordable personal mobility in this country by making it very cheaply possible for low-income families to get efficient, reliable, warranted new cars that they could otherwise never get. And for each car so financed, scrap almost one clunker, preferably the dirtiest ones. This creates a new million-car-a-year market for Detroit from customers they weren't going to get otherwise, because they weren't creditworthy and could never afford a new car. And Detroit will make money on every unit. It turns out that if, say, African-American and white households had the same car ownership, it would cut employment disparity about in half by providing better access to job opportunities. So this is a huge social win, too. Governments buy hundreds of thousands of cars a year. There are smart ways to buy them and to aggregate that purchasing power to bring very efficient vehicles into the market faster. And we could even do an X Prize-style golden carrot that's worth stretching further for. For example, a billion-dollar prize for the first U.S. automaker to sell 200,000 really advanced vehicles, like some you saw earlier. Then the legacy airlines can't afford to buy the efficient new planes they desperately need to cut their fuel bills, but if you felt philosophically you wanted to do anything about that, there are ways to finance it. And at the same time to scrap inefficient old planes, so that if they were otherwise to come back in the air, they would waste more oil, and block the uptake of efficient, new planes. Those part inefficient planes are worth more to society dead than alive. We ought to take them out back and shoot them, and put bounty hunters after them. Then there's an important military role. That in creating the move to high-volume, low-cost commercial production of these kinds of materials, or for that matter, ultra-light steels that are a good backup technology, the military can do the trick it did in turning DARPAnet into the Internet. Just turn it over to the private sector, and we have an Internet. The same for GPS. The same for the modern semi-conductor industry. That is, military science and technology that they need can create the advanced materials-industrial cluster that transforms its civilian economy and gets the country off oil, which would be a huge contribution to eliminating conflict over oil and advancing national and global security. Then we need to retool the car industry and do retraining, and shift the convergence of the energy and ag-value chains to shift faster from hydrocarbons to carbohydrates, and get out of our own way in other ways. And make the transition to more efficient vehicles go faster. But here's how the whole thing fits together. Instead of official forecasts of oil use and oil imports going forever up, they can turn down with the 12 dollars a barrel efficiency, down steeply by adding the supply-side substitutions at 18 bucks, all implemented at slower rates than we've done before when we paid attention. And if we start adding tranches of hydrogen in there, we are rapidly off imports and completely off oil in the 2040s. And the one thing I'd like to point out here is that we've done this before. In this eight-year period, 1977 to 85, when we last paid attention, the economy grew 27 percent, oil use fell 17 percent, oil imports fell 50 percent, oil imports from the Persian Gulf fell 87 percent. They would have been gone if we'd kept that up one more year. Well, that was with very old technologies and delivery methods. We could rerun that play a lot better now. And yet what we proved then is the U.S. has more market power than OPEC. Ours is on the demand side. We are the Saudi Arabia of "nega-barrels." (Laughter) We can use less oil faster than they can conveniently sell less oil. (Applause) Whatever your reason for wanting to do this, whether you're concerned about national security or price volatility β (Laughter) β or jobs, or the planet, or your grand-kids, it seems to me that this is an oil endgame that we should all be playing to win. Please download your copy, and thank you very much. (Applause) |
A performance of "Mathemagic" | {0: 'Using daring displays of algorithmic trickery, lightning calculator and number wizard Arthur Benjamin mesmerizes audiences with mathematical mystery and beauty.'} | TED2005 | Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Art Benjamin, and I am a "mathemagician." What that means is, I combine my loves of math and magic to do something I call "mathemagics." But before I get started, I have a quick question for the audience. By any chance, did anyone happen to bring with them this morning a calculator? Seriously, if you have a calculator with you, raise your hand. Raise your hand. Did your hand go up? Now bring it out, bring it out. Anybody else? I see, I see one way in the back. You sir, that's three. And anybody on this side here? OK, over there on the aisle. Would the four of you please bring out your calculators, then join me up on stage. Let's give them a nice round of applause. (Applause) That's right. Now, since I haven't had the chance to work with these calculators, I need to make sure that they are all working properly. Would somebody get us started by giving us a two-digit number, please? How about a two-digit number? Audience: 22. AB: 22. And another two-digit number, sir? Audience: 47. AB: Multiply 22 times 47, make sure you get 1,034, or the calculators are not working. Do all of you get 1,034? 1,034? Volunteer: No. AB: 594. Let's give three of them a nice round of applause there. (Applause) Would you like to try a more standard calculator, just in case? OK, great. What I'm going to try and do then β I notice it took some of you a little bit of time to get your answer. That's OK. I'll give you a shortcut for multiplying even faster on the calculator. There is something called the square of a number, which most of you know is taking a number and multiplying it by itself. For instance, five squared would be? Audience: 25. AB: 25. The way we can square on most calculators β let me demonstrate with this one β is by taking the number, such as five, hitting "times" and then "equals," and on most calculators that will give you the square. On some of these ancient RPN calculators, you've got an "x squared" button on it, will allow you to do the calculation even faster. What I'm going to try and do now is to square, in my head, four two-digit numbers faster than they can do on their calculators, even using the shortcut method. What I'll use is the second row this time, and I'll get four of you to each yell out a two-digit number, and if you would square the first number, and if you would square the second, the third and the fourth, I will try and race you to the answer. OK? So quickly, a two-digit number please. Audience: 37. Arthur Benjamin: 37 squared, OK. Audience: 23. AB: 23 squared, OK. Audience: 59. AB: 59 squared, OK, and finally? Audience: 93. AB: 93 squared. Would you call out your answers, please? Volunteer: 1369. AB: 1369. Volunteer: 529. AB: 529. Volunteer: 3481. AB: 3481. Volunteer: 8649. AB: Thank you very much. (Applause) Let me try to take this one step further. I'm going to try to square some three-digit numbers this time. I won't even write these down β I'll just call them out as they're called out to me. Anyone I point to, call out a three-digit number. Anyone on our panel, verify the answer. Just give some indication if it's right. A three-digit number, sir, yes? Audience: 987. AB: 987 squared is 974,169. (Laughter) AB: Yes? Good. Another three-digit β (Applause) β another three-digit number, sir? Audience: 457. AB: 457 squared is 205,849. 205,849? AB: Yes? OK, another, another three-digit number, sir? Audience: 321. AB: 321 is 103,041. 103,041. Yes? One more three-digit number please. Audience: Oh, 722. AB: 722 is 500, that's a harder one. Is that 513,284? Volunteer: Yes. AB: Yes? Oh, one more, one more three-digit number please. Audience: 162. 162 squared is 26,244. Volunteer: Yes. Thank you very much. (Applause) (Applause ends) Let me try to take this one step further. (Laughter) I'm going to try to square a four-digit number this time. You can all take your time on this; I will not beat you to the answer on this one, but I will try to get the answer right. To make this a little bit more random, let's take the fourth row this time, let's say, one, two, three, four. If each of you would call out a single digit between zero and nine, that will be the four-digit number that I'll square. Nine. Seven. Five. Eight. 9,758, this will take me a little bit of time, so bear with me. 95 million β (Sighs) 218,564? Volunteer: Yes! AB: Thank you very much. (Applause) (Applause ends) Now, I would attempt to square a five-digit number β and I can β but unfortunately, most calculators cannot. (Laughter) Eight-digit capacity β don't you hate that? So, since we've reached the limits of our calculators β what's that? Does yours go higher? Volunteer: I don't know. AB: Oh, yours does? Volunteer: I can probably do it. AB: I'll talk to you later. In the meanwhile, let me conclude the first part of my show by doing something a little trickier. Let's take the largest number on the board here, 8649. Would you each enter that on your calculator? And instead of squaring it this time, I want you to take that number and multiply it by any three-digit number that you want, but don't tell me what you're multiplying by β just multiply it by any random three-digit number. So you should have as an answer either a six-digit or probably a seven-digit number. How many digits do you have, six or seven? Seven, and yours? Seven? Seven? And, uncertain. Seven. Is there any possible way that I could know what seven-digit numbers you have? Say "No." (Laughter) Good, then I shall attempt the impossible β or at least the improbable. What I'd like each of you to do is to call out for me any six of your seven digits, any six of them, in any order you'd like. (Laughter) One digit at a time, I shall try and determine the digit you've left out. Starting with your seven-digit number, call out any six of them please. Volunteer: 1, 9, 7, 0, 4, 2. AB: Did you leave out the number 6? Good, OK, that's one. You have a seven-digit number, call out any six of them please. Volunteer: 4, 4, 8, 7, 5. I think I only heard five numbers. I β wait β 44875 β did you leave out the number 6? Same as she did, OK. You've got a seven-digit number β call out any six of them loud and clear. Volunteer: 0, 7, 9, 0, 4, 4. I think you left out the number 3? AB: That's three. The odds of me getting all four of these right by random guessing would be one in 10,000: 10 to the fourth power. OK, any six of them. (Laughter) Really scramble them up this time, please. Volunteer: 2, 6, 3, 9, 7, 2. Did you leave out the number 7? And let's give all four of these people a nice round of applause. Thank you very much. (Applause) (Applause ends) For my next number β (Laughter) while I mentally recharge my batteries, I have one more question for the audience. By any chance, does anybody here happen to know the day of the week that they were born on? If you think you know your birth day, raise your hand. Let's see, starting with β let's start with a gentleman first. What year was it, first of all? That's why I pick a gentleman first. Audience: 1953. 1953, and the month? November what? 23rd β was that a Monday? Audience: Yes. Good. Somebody else? I haven't seen any women's hands up. OK, how about you, what year? 1949, and the month? October what? Fifth β was that a Wednesday? Yes! I'll go way to the back right now, how about you? Yell it out, what year? Audience: 1959. 1959, OK β and the month? Audience: February. February what? Sixth β was that a Friday? Audience: Yes. Good, how about the person behind her? Call out, what year was it? Audience: 1947. AB: 1947, and the month? Audience: May. AB: May what? Seventh β would that be a Wednesday? Audience: Yes. AB: Thank you very much. (Applause) Anybody here who'd like to know the day of the week they were born? We can do it that way. Of course, I could just make up an answer and you wouldn't know, so I come prepared for that. I brought with me a book of calendars. It goes as far back into the past as 1800, because you never know. (Laughter) I didn't mean to look at you, sir β you were just sitting there. (Laughter) Anyway, Chris, you can help me out here, if you wouldn't mind. This is a book of calendars. Who wanted to know their birth day? What year was it, first of all? Audience: 1966. 66 β turn to the calendar with 1966. And what month? Audience: April. AB: April what? Audience: 17th. I believe that was a Sunday. Can you confirm, Chris? Chris Anderson: Yes. AB: I'll tell you what, Chris: as long as you have that book in front of you, do me a favor, turn to a year outside of the 1900s, either into the 1800s or way into the 2000s β that'll be a much greater challenge for me. AB: What year would you like? CA: 1824. AB: 1824, OK. AB: And what month? CA: June. AB: June what? CA: Sixth. AB: Was that a Sunday? CA: It was. AB: And it was cloudy. (Laughter) Good, thank you very much. (Applause) (Applause ends) But I'd like to wrap things up now by alluding to something from earlier in the presentation. There was a gentleman up here who had a 10-digit calculator. Where is he, would you stand up, 10-digit guy? OK, stand up for me just for a second, so I can see where you are. You have a 10-digit calculator, sir, as well? OK, what I'm going to try and do, is to square in my head a five-digit number requiring a 10-digit calculator. But to make my job more interesting for you, as well as for me, I'm going to do this problem thinking out loud. So you can actually, honestly hear what's going on in my mind while I do a calculation of this size. Now, I have to apologize to our magician friend Lennart Green. I know as a magician we're not supposed to reveal our secrets, but I'm not too afraid that people are going to start doing my show next week, so β I think we're OK. (Laughter) (Applause) So, let's see, let's take a different row of people, starting with you. I'll get five digits: one, two, three, four. Oh, I did this row already. Let's do the row before you, starting with you: one, two, three, four, five. Call out a single digit β that will be the five-digit number that I will try to square, go ahead. Five. Seven. Six. Eight. Three. 57,683 β squared. Yuck. Let me explain to you how I'm going to attempt this problem. I'm going to break the problem down into three parts. I'll do 57,000 squared, plus 683 squared, plus 57,000 times 683 times two. Add all those numbers together, and with any luck, arrive at the answer. Now, let me recap. (Laughter) Thank you. (Laughter) While I explain something else β (Laughter) β I know, that you can use, right? (Laughter) While I do these calculations, you might hear certain words, as opposed to numbers, creep into the calculation. Let me explain what that is. This is a phonetic code, a mnemonic device that I use, that allows me to convert numbers into words. I store them as words, and later on retrieve them as numbers. I know it sounds complicated; it's not. I don't want you to think you're seeing something out of "Rain Man." (Laughter) There's definitely a method to my madness β definitely, definitely. Sorry. (Laughter) If you want to talk to me about ADHD afterwards, you can talk to me then. By the way, one last instruction, for my judges with the calculators β you know who you are β there is at least a 50 percent chance that I will make a mistake here. If I do, don't tell me what the mistake is; just say, "you're close," or something like that, and I'll try and figure out the answer β which could be pretty entertaining in itself. If, however, I am right, whatever you do, don't keep it to yourself, OK? (Laughter) Make sure everybody knows that I got the answer right, because this is my big finish, OK. So, without any more stalling, here we go. I'll start the problem in the middle, with 57 times 683. 57 times 68 is 3,400, plus 476 is 3876, that's 38,760 plus 171, 38,760 plus 171 is 38,931. 38,931; double that to get 77,862. 77,862 becomes cookie fission, cookie fission is 77,822. That seems right, I'll go on. Cookie fission, OK. Next, I do 57 squared, which is 3,249, so I can say, three billion. Take the 249, add that to cookie, 249, oops, but I see a carry coming β 249 β add that to cookie, 250 plus 77, is 327 million β fission, fission, OK, finally, we do 683 squared, that's 700 times 666, plus 17 squared is 466,489, rev up if I need it, rev up, take the 466, add that to fission, to get, oh gee β 328,489. Audience: Yeah! AB: Good. Thank you very much. (Applause) I hope you enjoyed mathemagics. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why aren't we more compassionate? | {0: 'Daniel Goleman, psychologist and award-winning author of <em>Emotional Intelligence</em> and other books on EI, challenges traditional measures of intelligence as a predictor of life success.'} | TED2007 | You know, I'm struck by how one of the implicit themes of TED is compassion, these very moving demonstrations we've just seen: HIV in Africa, President Clinton last night. And I'd like to do a little collateral thinking, if you will, about compassion and bring it from the global level to the personal. I'm a psychologist, but rest assured, I will not bring it to the scrotal. (Laughter) There was a very important study done a while ago at Princeton Theological Seminary that speaks to why it is that when all of us have so many opportunities to help, we do sometimes, and we don't other times. A group of divinity students at the Princeton Theological Seminary were told that they were going to give a practice sermon and they were each given a sermon topic. Half of those students were given, as a topic, the parable of the Good Samaritan: the man who stopped the stranger in β to help the stranger in need by the side of the road. Half were given random Bible topics. Then one by one, they were told they had to go to another building and give their sermon. As they went from the first building to the second, each of them passed a man who was bent over and moaning, clearly in need. The question is: Did they stop to help? The more interesting question is: Did it matter they were contemplating the parable of the Good Samaritan? Answer: No, not at all. What turned out to determine whether someone would stop and help a stranger in need was how much of a hurry they thought they were in β were they feeling they were late, or were they absorbed in what they were going to talk about. And this is, I think, the predicament of our lives: that we don't take every opportunity to help because our focus is in the wrong direction. There's a new field in brain science, social neuroscience. This studies the circuitry in two people's brains that activates while they interact. And the new thinking about compassion from social neuroscience is that our default wiring is to help. That is to say, if we attend to the other person, we automatically empathize, we automatically feel with them. There are these newly identified neurons, mirror neurons, that act like a neuro Wi-Fi, activating in our brain exactly the areas activated in theirs. We feel "with" automatically. And if that person is in need, if that person is suffering, we're automatically prepared to help. At least that's the argument. But then the question is: Why don't we? And I think this speaks to a spectrum that goes from complete self-absorption, to noticing, to empathy and to compassion. And the simple fact is, if we are focused on ourselves, if we're preoccupied, as we so often are throughout the day, we don't really fully notice the other. And this difference between the self and the other focus can be very subtle. I was doing my taxes the other day, and I got to the point where I was listing all of the donations I gave, and I had an epiphany, it was β I came to my check to the Seva Foundation and I noticed that I thought, boy, my friend Larry Brilliant would really be happy that I gave money to Seva. Then I realized that what I was getting from giving was a narcissistic hit β that I felt good about myself. Then I started to think about the people in the Himalayas whose cataracts would be helped, and I realized that I went from this kind of narcissistic self-focus to altruistic joy, to feeling good for the people that were being helped. I think that's a motivator. But this distinction between focusing on ourselves and focusing on others is one that I encourage us all to pay attention to. You can see it at a gross level in the world of dating. I was at a sushi restaurant a while back and I overheard two women talking about the brother of one woman, who was in the singles scene. And this woman says, "My brother is having trouble getting dates, so he's trying speed dating." I don't know if you know speed dating? Women sit at tables and men go from table to table, and there's a clock and a bell, and at five minutes, bingo, the conversation ends and the woman can decide whether to give her card or her email address to the man for follow up. And this woman says, "My brother's never gotten a card, and I know exactly why. The moment he sits down, he starts talking non-stop about himself; he never asks about the woman." And I was doing some research in the Sunday Styles section of The New York Times, looking at the back stories of marriages β because they're very interesting β and I came to the marriage of Alice Charney Epstein. And she said that when she was in the dating scene, she had a simple test she put people to. The test was: from the moment they got together, how long it would take the guy to ask her a question with the word "you" in it. And apparently Epstein aced the test, therefore the article. (Laughter) Now this is a β it's a little test I encourage you to try out at a party. Here at TED there are great opportunities. The Harvard Business Review recently had an article called "The Human Moment," about how to make real contact with a person at work. And they said, well, the fundamental thing you have to do is turn off your BlackBerry, close your laptop, end your daydream and pay full attention to the person. There is a newly coined word in the English language for the moment when the person we're with whips out their BlackBerry or answers that cell phone, and all of a sudden we don't exist. The word is "pizzled": it's a combination of puzzled and pissed off. (Laughter) I think it's quite apt. It's our empathy, it's our tuning in which separates us from Machiavellians or sociopaths. I have a brother-in-law who's an expert on horror and terror β he wrote the Annotated Dracula, the Essential Frankenstein β he was trained as a Chaucer scholar, but he was born in Transylvania and I think it affected him a little bit. At any rate, at one point my brother-in-law, Leonard, decided to write a book about a serial killer. This is a man who terrorized the very vicinity we're in many years ago. He was known as the Santa Cruz strangler. And before he was arrested, he had murdered his grandparents, his mother and five co-eds at UC Santa Cruz. So my brother-in-law goes to interview this killer and he realizes when he meets him that this guy is absolutely terrifying. For one thing, he's almost seven feet tall. But that's not the most terrifying thing about him. The scariest thing is that his IQ is 160: a certified genius. But there is zero correlation between IQ and emotional empathy, feeling with the other person. They're controlled by different parts of the brain. So at one point, my brother-in-law gets up the courage to ask the one question he really wants to know the answer to, and that is: how could you have done it? Didn't you feel any pity for your victims? These were very intimate murders β he strangled his victims. And the strangler says very matter-of-factly, "Oh no. If I'd felt the distress, I could not have done it. I had to turn that part of me off. I had to turn that part of me off." And I think that that is very troubling, and in a sense, I've been reflecting on turning that part of us off. When we focus on ourselves in any activity, we do turn that part of ourselves off if there's another person. Think about going shopping and think about the possibilities of a compassionate consumerism. Right now, as Bill McDonough has pointed out, the objects that we buy and use have hidden consequences. We're all unwitting victims of a collective blind spot. We don't notice and don't notice that we don't notice the toxic molecules emitted by a carpet or by the fabric on the seats. Or we don't know if that fabric is a technological or manufacturing nutrient; it can be reused or does it just end up at landfill? In other words, we're oblivious to the ecological and public health and social and economic justice consequences of the things we buy and use. In a sense, the room itself is the elephant in the room, but we don't see it. And we've become victims of a system that points us elsewhere. Consider this. There's a wonderful book called Stuff: The Hidden Life of Everyday Objects. And it talks about the back story of something like a t-shirt. And it talks about where the cotton was grown and the fertilizers that were used and the consequences for soil of that fertilizer. And it mentions, for instance, that cotton is very resistant to textile dye; about 60 percent washes off into wastewater. And it's well known by epidemiologists that kids who live near textile works tend to have high rates of leukemia. There's a company, Bennett and Company, that supplies Polo.com, Victoria's Secret β they, because of their CEO, who's aware of this, in China formed a joint venture with their dye works to make sure that the wastewater would be properly taken care of before it returned to the groundwater. Right now, we don't have the option to choose the virtuous t-shirt over the non-virtuous one. So what would it take to do that? Well, I've been thinking. For one thing, there's a new electronic tagging technology that allows any store to know the entire history of any item on the shelves in that store. You can track it back to the factory. Once you can track it back to the factory, you can look at the manufacturing processes that were used to make it, and if it's virtuous, you can label it that way. Or if it's not so virtuous, you can go into β today, go into any store, put your scanner on a palm onto a barcode, which will take you to a website. They have it for people with allergies to peanuts. That website could tell you things about that object. In other words, at point of purchase, we might be able to make a compassionate choice. There's a saying in the world of information science: ultimately everybody will know everything. And the question is: will it make a difference? Some time ago when I was working for The New York Times, it was in the '80s, I did an article on what was then a new problem in New York β it was homeless people on the streets. And I spent a couple of weeks going around with a social work agency that ministered to the homeless. And I realized seeing the homeless through their eyes that almost all of them were psychiatric patients that had nowhere to go. They had a diagnosis. It made me β what it did was to shake me out of the urban trance where, when we see, when we're passing someone who's homeless in the periphery of our vision, it stays on the periphery. We don't notice and therefore we don't act. One day soon after that β it was a Friday β at the end of the day, I went down β I was going down to the subway. It was rush hour and thousands of people were streaming down the stairs. And all of a sudden as I was going down the stairs I noticed that there was a man slumped to the side, shirtless, not moving, and people were just stepping over him β hundreds and hundreds of people. And because my urban trance had been somehow weakened, I found myself stopping to find out what was wrong. The moment I stopped, half a dozen other people immediately ringed the same guy. And we found out that he was Hispanic, he didn't speak any English, he had no money, he'd been wandering the streets for days, starving, and he'd fainted from hunger. Immediately someone went to get orange juice, someone brought a hotdog, someone brought a subway cop. This guy was back on his feet immediately. But all it took was that simple act of noticing, and so I'm optimistic. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
The lost art of letter-writing | {0: 'Lakshmi Pratury is the host of The INK Conference and was the co-host of TEDIndia 2009.'} | TED2007 | So I thought, "I will talk about death." Seemed to be the passion today. Actually, it's not about death. It's inevitable, terrible, but really what I want to talk about is, I'm just fascinated by the legacy people leave when they die. That's what I want to talk about. So Art Buchwald left his legacy of humor with a video that appeared soon after he died, saying, "Hi! I'm Art Buchwald, and I just died." And Mike, who I met at Galapagos, a trip which I won at TED, is leaving notes on cyberspace where he is chronicling his journey through cancer. And my father left me a legacy of his handwriting through letters and a notebook. In the last two years of his life, when he was sick, he filled a notebook with his thoughts about me. He wrote about my strengths, weaknesses, and gentle suggestions for improvement, quoting specific incidents, and held a mirror to my life. After he died, I realized that no one writes to me anymore. Handwriting is a disappearing art. I'm all for email and thinking while typing, but why give up old habits for new? Why can't we have letter writing and email exchange in our lives? There are times when I want to trade all those years that I was too busy to sit with my dad and chat with him, and trade all those years for one hug. But too late. But that's when I take out his letters and I read them, and the paper that touched his hand is in mine, and I feel connected to him. So maybe we all need to leave our children with a value legacy, and not a financial one. A value for things with a personal touch β an autographed book, a soul-searching letter. If a fraction of this powerful TED audience could be inspired to buy a beautiful paper β John, it'll be a recycled one β and write a beautiful letter to someone they love, we actually may start a revolution where our children may go to penmanship classes. So what do I plan to leave for my son? I collect autographed books, and those of you authors in the audience know I hound you for them β and CDs too, Tracy. I plan to publish my own notebook. As I witnessed my father's body being swallowed by fire, I sat by his funeral pyre and wrote. I have no idea how I'm going to do it, but I am committed to compiling his thoughts and mine into a book, and leave that published book for my son. I'd like to end with a few verses of what I wrote at my father's cremation. And those linguists, please pardon the grammar, because I've not looked at it in the last 10 years. I took it out for the first time to come here. "Picture in a frame, ashes in a bottle, boundless energy confined in the bottle, forcing me to deal with reality, forcing me to deal with being grown up. I hear you and I know that you would want me to be strong, but right now, I am being sucked down, surrounded and suffocated by these raging emotional waters, craving to cleanse my soul, trying to emerge on a firm footing one more time, to keep on fighting and flourishing just as you taught me. Your encouraging whispers in my whirlpool of despair, holding me and heaving me to shores of sanity, to live again and to love again." Thank you. |
5 dangerous things you should let your kids do | {0: 'The founder of the Tinkering School, Gever Tulley likes to build things with kids.'} | TED2007 | Welcome to "Five Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Children Do." I don't have children. I borrow my friends' children, so β (Laughter) take all this advice with a grain of salt. I'm Gever Tulley. I'm a contract computer scientist by trade, but I'm the founder of something called the Tinkering School. It's a summer program which aims to help kids learn how to build the things that they think of. So we build a lot of things, and I do put power tools into the hands of second-graders. So if you're thinking about sending your kid to Tinkering School, they do come back bruised, scraped and bloody. (Laughter) You know, we live in a world that's subjected to ever more stringent child safety regulations. There doesn't seem to be any limit on how crazy child safety regulations can get. We put suffocation warnings on every piece of plastic film manufactured in the United States, or for sale with an item in the United States. We put warnings on coffee cups to tell us that the contents may be hot. And we seem to think that any item sharper than a golf ball is too sharp for children under the age of 10. So where does this trend stop? When we round every corner and eliminate every sharp object, every pokey bit in the world, then the first time that kids come in contact with anything sharp, or not made out of round plastic, they'll hurt themselves with it. So, as the boundaries of what we determine as the safety zone grow ever smaller, we cut off our children from valuable opportunities to learn how to interact with the world around them. And despite all of our best efforts and intentions, kids are always going to figure out how to do the most dangerous thing they can, in whatever environment they can. (Laughter) So despite the provocative title, this presentation is really about safety, and about some simple things that we can do to raise our kids to be creative, confident and in control of the environment around them. And what I now present to you is an excerpt from a book in progress. The book is called "50 Dangerous Things." This is "Five Dangerous Things." Thing number one: Play with fire. Learning to control one of the most elemental forces in nature is a pivotal moment in any child's personal history. Whether we remember it or not, it's the first time we really get control of one of these mysterious things. These mysteries are only revealed to those who get the opportunity to play with it. So, playing with fire. This is like one of the great things we ever discovered, fire. From playing with it, they learn some basic principles about fire, about intake, combustion, exhaust. These are the three working elements of fire that you have to have for a good, controlled fire. And you can think of the open-pit fire as a laboratory. You don't know what they're going to learn from playing with it. Let them fool around with it on their own terms and trust me, they're going to learn things that you can't get out of playing with Dora the Explorer toys. (Laughter) Number two: Own a pocketknife. Pocketknives are kind of drifting out of our cultural consciousness, which I think is a terrible thing. (Laughter) Your first pocketknife is like the first universal tool that you're given. You know, it's a spatula, it's a pry bar, it's a screwdriver and it's a blade, yeah. And it's a powerful and empowering tool. And in a lot of cultures they give knives β like, as soon as they're toddlers, they have knives. These are Inuit children cutting whale blubber. I first saw this in a Canadian Film Board film when I was 10, and it left a lasting impression, to see babies playing with knives. And it shows that kids can develop an extended sense of self through a tool at a very young age. You lay down a couple of very simple rules β always cut away from your body, keep the blade sharp, never force it β and these are things kids can understand and practice with. And yeah, they're going to cut themselves. I have some terrible scars on my legs from where I stabbed myself. But you know, they're young. They heal fast. (Laughter) Number three: Throw a spear. It turns out that our brains are actually wired for throwing things, and like muscles, if you don't use parts of your brain, they tend to atrophy over time. But when you exercise them, any given muscle adds strength to the whole system, and that applies to your brain, too. So practicing throwing things has been shown to stimulate the frontal and parietal lobes, which have to do with visual acuity, 3D understanding, and structural problem solving, so it helps develop their visualization skills and their predictive ability. And throwing is a combination of analytical and physical skill, so it's very good for that kind of whole-body training. These kinds of target-based practices also help kids develop attention and concentration skills, so those are great. Number [four]: Deconstruct appliances. There is a world of interesting things inside your dishwasher. Next time you're about to throw out an appliance, don't throw it out. Take it apart with your kid, or send him to my school, and we'll take it apart with them. Even if you don't know what the parts are, puzzling out what they might be for is a really good practice for the kids to get sort of the sense that they can take things apart, and no matter how complex they are, they can understand parts of them. And that means that eventually, they can understand all of them. It's a sense of knowability, that something is knowable. So these black boxes that we live with and take for granted are actually complex things made by other people, and you can understand them. Number five: Two-parter. Break the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. (Laughter) There are laws beyond safety regulations that attempt to limit how we can interact with the things that we own β in this case, digital media. It's a very simple exercise: Buy a song on iTunes, write it to a CD, then rip the CD to an MP3, and play it on your very same computer. You've just broken a law. Technically, the RIAA could come and prosecute you. It's an important lesson for kids to understand, that some of these laws get broken by accident, and that laws have to be interpreted. That's something we often talk about with the kids when we're fooling around with things and breaking them open, and taking them apart and using them for other things. And also when we go out and drive a car. Driving a car is a really empowering act for a young child, so this is the alternate β (Laughter) For those of you who aren't comfortable actually breaking the law, you can drive a car with your child. This is a great stage for a kid. This happens about the same time that they get latched onto things like dinosaurs, these big things in the outside world, that they're trying to get a grip on. A car is a similar object, and they can get in a car and drive it. And that really gives them a handle on a world in a way that they don't often have access to. And it's perfectly legal. Find a big empty lot, make sure there's nothing in it, and that it's on private property, and let them drive your car. It's very safe actually. And it's fun for the whole family. (Laughter) Let's see, I think that's it. That's number five and a half. OK. |
Tales of passion | {0: 'Isabel Allende writes stories of passion. Her novels and memoirs, including <em>The House of the Spirits</em> and <em>Eva Luna</em>, tell the stories of women and men who live with passionate commitment -- to love, to their world, to an ideal. '} | TED2007 | Thank you so much. It's really scary to be here among the smartest of the smart. I'm here to tell you a few tales of passion. There's a Jewish saying that I love. What is truer than truth? Answer: The story. I'm a storyteller. I want to convey something that is truer than truth about our common humanity. All stories interest me, and some haunt me until I end up writing them. Certain themes keep coming up: justice, loyalty, violence, death, political and social issues, freedom. I'm aware of the mystery around us, so I write about coincidences, premonitions, emotions, dreams, the power of nature, magic. In the last 20 years I have published a few books, but I have lived in anonymity until February of 2006, when I carried the Olympic flag in the Winter Olympics in Italy. That made me a celebrity. Now people recognize me in Macy's, and my grandchildren think that I'm cool. (Laughter) Allow me to tell you about my four minutes of fame. One of the organizers of the Olympic ceremony, of the opening ceremony, called me and said that I had been selected to be one of the flag-bearers. I replied that surely this was a case of mistaken identity because I'm as far as you can get from being an athlete. Actually, I wasn't even sure that I could go around the stadium without a walker. (Laughter) I was told that this was no laughing matter. This would be the first time that only women would carry the Olympic flag. Five women, representing five continents, and three Olympic gold medal winners. My first question was, naturally, what was I going to wear? (Laughter) A uniform, she said, and asked for my measurements. My measurements. I had a vision of myself in a fluffy anorak, looking like the Michelin Man. (Laughter) By the middle of February, I found myself in Turin, where enthusiastic crowds cheered when any of the 80 Olympic teams was in the street. Those athletes had sacrificed everything to compete in the games. They all deserved to win, but there's the element of luck. A speck of snow, an inch of ice, the force of the wind, can determine the result of a race or a game. However, what matters most β more than training or luck β is the heart. Only a fearless and determined heart will get the gold medal. It is all about passion. The streets of Turin were covered with red posters announcing the slogan of the Olympics. Passion lives here. Isn't it always true? Heart is what drives us and determines our fate. That is what I need for my characters in my books: a passionate heart. I need mavericks, dissidents, adventurers, outsiders and rebels, who ask questions, bend the rules and take risks. People like all of you in this room. Nice people with common sense do not make interesting characters. (Laughter) They only make good former spouses. (Laughter) (Applause) In the green room of the stadium, I met the other flag bearers: three athletes, and the actresses Susan Sarandon and Sophia Loren. Also, two women with passionate hearts: Wangari Maathai, the Nobel prizewinner from Kenya who has planted 30 million trees. And by doing so, she has changed the soil, the weather, in some places in Africa, and of course the economic conditions in many villages. And Somaly Mam, a Cambodian activist who fights passionately against child prostitution. When she was 14 years old, her grandfather sold her to a brothel. She told us of little girls raped by men who believe that having sex with a very young virgin will cure them from AIDS. And of brothels where children are forced to receive five, 15 clients per day, and if they rebel, they are tortured with electricity. In the green room I received my uniform. It was not the kind of outfit that I normally wear, but it was far from the Michelin Man suit that I had anticipated. Not bad, really. I looked like a refrigerator. (Laughter) But so did most of the flag-bearers, except Sophia Loren, the universal symbol of beauty and passion. Sophia is over 70 and she looks great. She's sexy, slim and tall, with a deep tan. Now, how can you have a deep tan and have no wrinkles? I don't know. When asked in a TV interview, "How could she look so good?" She replied, "Posture. My back is always straight, and I don't make old people's noises." (Laughter) So, there you have some free advice from one of the most beautiful women on earth. No grunting, no coughing, no wheezing, no talking to yourselves, no farting. (Laughter) Well, she didn't say that exactly. (Laughter) At some point around midnight, we were summoned to the wings of the stadium, and the loudspeakers announced the Olympic flag, and the music started β by the way, the same music that starts here, the Aida March. Sophia Loren was right in front of me β she's a foot taller than I am, not counting the poofy hair. (Laughter) She walked elegantly, like a giraffe on the African savannah, holding the flag on her shoulder. I jogged behind (Laughter) β on my tiptoes β holding the flag on my extended arm, so that my head was actually under the damn flag. (Laughter) All the cameras were, of course, on Sophia. That was fortunate for me, because in most press photos I appear too, although often between Sophia's legs. (Laughter) A place where most men would love to be. (Laughter) (Applause) The best four minutes of my entire life were those in the Olympic stadium. My husband is offended when I say this β although I have explained to him that what we do in private usually takes less than four minutes β (Laughter) β so he shouldn't take it personally. I have all the press clippings of those four magnificent minutes, because I don't want to forget them when old age destroys my brain cells. I want to carry in my heart forever the key word of the Olympics β passion. So here's a tale of passion. The year is 1998, the place is a prison camp for Tutsi refugees in Congo. By the way, 80 percent of all refugees and displaced people in the world are women and girls. We can call this place in Congo a death camp, because those who are not killed will die of disease or starvation. The protagonists of this story are a young woman, Rose Mapendo, and her children. She's pregnant and a widow. Soldiers have forced her to watch as her husband was tortured and killed. Somehow she manages to keep her seven children alive, and a few months later, she gives birth to premature twins. Two tiny little boys. She cuts the umbilical cord with a stick, and ties it with her own hair. She names the twins after the camp's commanders to gain their favor, and feeds them with black tea because her milk cannot sustain them. When the soldiers burst in her cell to rape her oldest daughter, she grabs hold of her and refuses to let go, even when they hold a gun to her head. Somehow, the family survives for 16 months, and then, by extraordinary luck, and the passionate heart of a young American man, Sasha Chanoff, who manages to put her in a U.S. rescue plane, Rose Mapendo and her nine children end up in Phoenix, Arizona, where they're now living and thriving. Mapendo, in Swahili, means great love. The protagonists of my books are strong and passionate women like Rose Mapendo. I don't make them up. There's no need for that. I look around and I see them everywhere. I have worked with women and for women all my life. I know them well. I was born in ancient times, at the end of the world, in a patriarchal Catholic and conservative family. No wonder that by age five I was a raging feminist β although the term had not reached Chile yet, so nobody knew what the heck was wrong with me. (Laughter) I would soon find out that there was a high price to pay for my freedom, and for questioning the patriarchy. But I was happy to pay it, because for every blow that I received, I was able to deliver two. (Laughter) Once, when my daughter Paula was in her twenties, she said to me that feminism was dated, that I should move on. We had a memorable fight. Feminism is dated? Yes, for privileged women like my daughter and all of us here today, but not for most of our sisters in the rest of the world who are still forced into premature marriage, prostitution, forced labor β they have children that they don't want or they cannot feed. They have no control over their bodies or their lives. They have no education and no freedom. They are raped, beaten up and sometimes killed with impunity. For most Western young women of today, being called a feminist is an insult. Feminism has never been sexy, but let me assure you that it never stopped me from flirting, and I have seldom suffered from lack of men. (Laughter) Feminism is not dead, by no means. It has evolved. If you don't like the term, change it, for Goddess' sake. Call it Aphrodite, or Venus, or bimbo, or whatever you want; the name doesn't matter, as long as we understand what it is about, and we support it. So here's another tale of passion, and this is a sad one. The place is a small women's clinic in a village in Bangladesh. The year is 2005. Jenny is a young American dental hygienist who has gone to the clinic as a volunteer during her three-week vacation. She's prepared to clean teeth, but when she gets there, she finds out that there are no doctors, no dentists, and the clinic is just a hut full of flies. Outside, there is a line of women who have waited several hours to be treated. The first patient is in excruciating pain because she has several rotten molars. Jenny realizes that the only solution is to pull out the bad teeth. She's not licensed for that; she has never done it. She risks a lot and she's terrified. She doesn't even have the proper instruments, but fortunately she has brought some Novocaine. Jenny has a brave and passionate heart. She murmurs a prayer and she goes ahead with the operation. At the end, the relieved patient kisses her hands. That day the hygienist pulls out many more teeth. The next morning, when she comes again to the so-called clinic, her first patient is waiting for her with her husband. The woman's face looks like a watermelon. It is so swollen that you can't even see the eyes. The husband, furious, threatens to kill the American. Jenny is horrified at what she has done, but then the translator explains that the patient's condition has nothing to do with the operation. The day before, her husband beat her up because she was not home in time to prepare dinner for him. Millions of women live like this today. They are the poorest of the poor. Although women do two-thirds of the world's labor, they own less than one percent of the world's assets. They are paid less than men for the same work if they're paid at all, and they remain vulnerable because they have no economic independence, and they are constantly threatened by exploitation, violence and abuse. It is a fact that giving women education, work, the ability to control their own income, inherit and own property, benefits the society. If a woman is empowered, her children and her family will be better off. If families prosper, the village prospers, and eventually so does the whole country. Wangari Maathai goes to a village in Kenya. She talks with the women and explains that the land is barren because they have cut and sold the trees. She gets the women to plant new trees and water them, drop by drop. In a matter of five or six years, they have a forest, the soil is enriched, and the village is saved. The poorest and most backward societies are always those that put women down. Yet this obvious truth is ignored by governments and also by philanthropy. For every dollar given to a women's program, 20 dollars are given to men's programs. Women are 51 percent of humankind. Empowering them will change everything β more than technology and design and entertainment. I can promise you that women working together β linked, informed and educated β can bring peace and prosperity to this forsaken planet. In any war today, most of the casualties are civilians, mainly women and children. They are collateral damage. Men run the world, and look at the mess we have. What kind of world do we want? This is a fundamental question that most of us are asking. Does it make sense to participate in the existing world order? We want a world where life is preserved and the quality of life is enriched for everybody, not only for the privileged. In January I saw an exhibit of Fernando Botero's paintings at the UC Berkeley library. No museum or gallery in the United States, except for the New York gallery that carries Botero's work, has dared to show the paintings because the theme is the Abu Ghraib prison. They are huge paintings of torture and abuse of power, in the voluminous Botero style. I have not been able to get those images out of my mind or my heart. What I fear most is power with impunity. I fear abuse of power, and the power to abuse. In our species, the alpha males define reality, and force the rest of the pack to accept that reality and follow the rules. The rules change all the time, but they always benefit them, and in this case, the trickle-down effect, which does not work in economics, works perfectly. Abuse trickles down from the top of the ladder to the bottom. Women and children, especially the poor, are at the bottom. Even the most destitute of men have someone they can abuse β a woman or a child. I'm fed up with the power that a few exert over the many through gender, income, race, and class. I think that the time is ripe to make fundamental changes in our civilization. But for real change, we need feminine energy in the management of the world. We need a critical number of women in positions of power, and we need to nurture the feminine energy in men. I'm talking about men with young minds, of course. Old guys are hopeless; we have to wait for them to die off. (Laughter) Yes, I would love to have Sophia Loren's long legs and legendary breasts. But given a choice, I would rather have the warrior hearts of Wangari Maathai, Somaly Mam, Jenny and Rose Mapendo. I want to make this world good. Not better, but to make it good. Why not? It is possible. Look around in this room β all this knowledge, energy, talent and technology. Let's get off our fannies, roll up our sleeves and get to work, passionately, in creating an almost perfect world. Thank you. |
We're worried about local warming ... in your lap | {0: "Investor Yossi Vardi is godfather to more than 40 startups, mostly in the jumping Israeli high-tech sector. He's a legendary community-builder, connector and prankster."} | TED2007 | We are going to talk today about the sequel of "Inconvenient Truth." It's time again to talk about "Inconvenient Truth," a truth that everyone is concerned about, but nobody is willing to talk about. Somebody has to take the lead, and I decided to do it. If you are scared by global warming, wait until we learn about local warming. We will talk today about local warming. Important health message: blogging may be hazardous to your health, especially if you are a male. This message is given as a public service. Blogging affects your posture. We start with the posture. This is the posture of ladies who are not blogging; this is the posture of ladies who are blogging. (Laughter) This is the natural posture of a man sitting, squatting for ventilation purposes. (Laughter) And this is the natural posture of a standing man, and I think this picture inspired Chris to insert me into the lateral thinking session. This is male blogging posture sitting, and the result is, "For greater comfort, men naturally sit with their legs farther apart than women, when working on laptop. However, they will adopt a less natural posture in order to balance it on their laps, which resulted in a significant rise of body heat between their thighs." This is the issue of local warming. (Laughter) This is a very serious newspaper; it's Times of England β very serious. This is a very β (Laughter) β gentlemen and ladies, be serious. This is a very serious research, that you should read the underline. And be careful, your genes are in danger. Will geeks become endangered species? The fact: population growth in countries with high laptop β (Laughter) I need Hans Rosling to give me a graph. (Applause) Global warming fun. (Laughter) But let's keep things in proportion. How to take care in five easy steps: first of all, you can use natural ventilation. You can use body breath. You should stay cool with the appropriate clothing. You should care about your posture β this is not right. Can you extract from Chris another minute and a half for me, because I have a video I have to show you. (Applause) You are great. This is the correct posture. Another benefit of Wi-Fi, we learned yesterday about the benefits of Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi enables you to avoid the processor. And there are some enhanced protection measures, which I would like to share with you, and I would like, in a minute, to thank Philips for helping. This is a research which was done in '86, but it's still valid. Scrotal temperature reflects intratesticular temperature and is lowered by shaving. By the way, I must admit, my English is not so good, I didn't know what is scrotal; I understand it's a scrotum. I guess in plural it's scrotal, like medium and media. Digital scrotum, digital media. And only last year I recognized that I'm a proud scrotum owner. (Laughter) And this research is being precipitated by the U.S. government, so you can see that your tax man is working for good causes. Video: Man: The Philips Bodygroom has a sleek, ergonomic design for a safe and easy way to trim those scruffy underarm hairs, the untidy curls on and around your [bleep], as well as the hard to reach locks on the underside of your [bleep] and [bleep]. Once you use the Bodygroom, the world looks different. And so does your [bleep]. These days, with a hair-free back, well-groomed shoulders and an extra optical inch on my [bleep], well, let's just say life has gotten pretty darn cozy. Yossi Vardi: This is one of the most popular viral advertisement of last year, known as the optical inch by Philips. Let's applaud Philips β (Applause) β for this gesture for humanity. And this is how they are promoting the product. This is β I didn't touch it, this is original. Laptop use to solve overpopulation. And if everything failed, there are some secondary uses. And then our next talk, our next TED if you invite me will be why you should not carry a cell phone in your pocket. And this is what the young generation says. (Applause) And I just want to show you that I'm not just preaching, but I also practice. (Laughter) 4 am in the morning. (Laughter) You cannot use this picture. (Applause) Now, I have some mini TED Prizes, this is the Philips Bodygroom, one for our leader. (Applause) Anybody feels threatened, anybody really need it? (Laughter) Any lady, any lady? Thank you very much. (Applause) |
The emergent genius of ant colonies | {0: 'By studying how ant colonies work without any one leader, Deborah Gordon has identified striking similarities in how ant colonies, brains, cells and computer networks regulate themselves.'} | TED2003 | I study ants, and that's because I like to think about how organizations work. And in particular, how the simple parts of organizations interact to create the behavior of the whole organization. So, ant colonies are a good example of an organization like that, and there are many others. The web is one. There are many biological systems like that β brains, cells, developing embryos. There are about 10,000 species of ants. They all live in colonies consisting of one or a few queens, and then all the ants you see walking around are sterile female workers. And all ant colonies have in common that there's no central control. Nobody tells anybody what to do. The queen just lays the eggs. There's no management. No ant directs the behavior of any other ant. And I try to figure out how that works. And I've been working for the past 20 years on a population of seed-eating ants in southeastern Arizona. Here's my study site. This is really a picture of ants, and the rabbit just happens to be there. And these ants are called harvester ants because they eat seeds. This is the nest of the mature colony, and there's the nest entrance. And they forage maybe for about 20 meters away, gather up the seeds and bring them back to the nest, and store them. And every year I go there and make a map of my study site. This is just a road. And it's not very big: it's about 250 meters on one side, 400 on the other. And every colony has a name, which is a number, which is painted on a rock. And I go there every year and look for all the colonies that were alive the year before, and figure out which ones have died, and put all the new ones on the map. And by doing this I know how old they all are. And because of that, I've been able to study how their behavior changes as the colony gets older and larger. So I want to tell you about the life cycle of a colony. Ants never make more ants; colonies make more colonies. And they do that by each year sending out the reproductives β those are the ones with wings β on a mating flight. So every year, on the same day β and it's a mystery exactly how that happens β each colony sends out its virgin, unmated queens with wings, and the males, and they all fly to a common place. And they mate. And this shows a recently virgin queen. Here's her wings. And she's in the process of mating with this male, and there's another male on top waiting his turn. Often the queens mate more than once. And after that, the males all die. That's it for them. (Laughter) And then the newly mated queens fly off somewhere, drop their wings, dig a hole and go into that hole and start laying eggs. And they will live for 15 or 20 years, continuing to lay eggs using the sperm from that original mating. So the queen goes down in there. She lays eggs, she feeds the larvae β so an ant starts as an egg, then it's a larva. She feeds the larvae by regurgitating from her fat reserves. Then, as soon as the ants β the first group of ants β emerge, they're larvae. Then they're pupae. Then they come out as adult ants. They go out, they get the food, they dig the nest, and the queen never comes out again. So this is a one-year-old colony β this happens to be 536. There's the nest entrance, there's a pencil for scale. So this is the colony founded by a queen the previous summer. This is a three-year-old colony. There's the nest entrance, there's a pencil for scale. They make a midden, a pile of refuse β mostly the husks of the seeds that they eat. This is a five-year-old colony. This is the nest entrance, here's a pencil for scale. This is about as big as they get, about a meter across. And then this is how colony size and numbers of worker ants changes β so this is about 10,000 worker ants β changes as a function of colony age, in years. So it starts out with zero ants, just the founding queen, and it grows to a size of about 10 or 12 thousand ants when the colony is five. And it stays that size until the queen dies and there's nobody to make more ants, when she's about 15 or 20 years old. And it's when they reach this stable size, in numbers of ants, that they start to reproduce. That is, to send more winged queens and males to that year's mating flight. And I know how colony size changes as a function of colony age because I've dug up colonies of known age and counted all the ants. (Laughter) So that's not the most fun part of this research, although it's interesting. (Laughter) Really the question that I think about with these ants is what I call task allocation. That's not just how is the colony organized, but how does it change what it's doing? How is it that the colony manages to adjust the numbers of workers performing each task as conditions change? So, things happen to an ant colony. When it rains in the summer, it floods in the desert. There's a lot of damage to the nest, and extra ants are needed to clean up that mess. When extra food becomes available β and this is what everybody knows about picnics β then extra ants are allocated to collect the food. So, with nobody telling anybody what to do, how is it that the colony manages to adjust the numbers of workers performing each task? And that's the process that I call task allocation. And in harvester ants, I divide the tasks of the ants I see just outside the nest into these four categories: where an ant is foraging, when it's out along the foraging trail, searching for food or bringing food back. The patrollers β that's supposed to be a magnifying glass β are an interesting group that go out early in the morning before the foragers are active. They somehow choose the direction that the foragers will go, and by coming back β just by making it back β they tell the foragers that it's safe to go out. Then the nest maintenance workers work inside the nest, and I wanted to say that the nests look a lot like Bill Lishman's house. That is, that there are chambers inside, they line the walls of the chambers with moist soil and it dries to a kind of an adobe-like surface in it. It also looks very similar to some of the cave dwellings of the Hopi people that are in that area. And the nest maintenance workers do that inside the nest, and then they come out of the nest carrying bits of dry soil in their mandibles. So you see the nest maintenance workers come out with a bit of sand, put it down, turn around, and go back in. And finally, the midden workers put some kind of territorial chemical in the garbage. So what you see the midden workers doing is making a pile of refuse. On one day, it'll all be here, and then the next day they'll move it over there, and then they'll move it back. So that's what the midden workers do. And these four groups are just the ants outside the nest. So that's only about 25 percent of the colony, and they're the oldest ants. So, an ant starts out somewhere near the queen. And when we dig up nests we find they're about as deep as the colony is wide, so about a meter deep for the big old nests. And then there's another long tunnel and a chamber, where we often find the queen, after eight hours of hacking away at the rock with pickaxes. I don't think that chamber has evolved because of me and my backhoe and my crew of students with pickaxes, but instead because when there's flooding, occasionally the colony has to go down deep. So there's this whole network of chambers. The queen's in there somewhere; she just lays eggs. There's the larvae, and they consume most of the food. And this is true of most ants β that the ants you see walking around don't do much eating. They bring it back and feed it to the larvae. When the foragers come in with food, they just drop it into the upper chamber, and other ants come up from below, get the food, bring it back, husk the seeds, and pile them up. There are nest maintenance workers working throughout the nest. And curiously, and interestingly, it looks as though at any time about half the ants in the colony are just doing nothing. So, despite what it says in the Bible, about, you know, "Look to the ant, thou sluggard," in fact, you could think of those ants as reserves. That is to say, if something happened β and I've never seen anything like this happen, but I've only been looking for 20 years β if something happened, they might all come out if they were needed. But in fact, mostly they're just hanging around in there. And I think it's a very interesting question β what is there about the way the colony is organized that might give some function to a reserve of ants who are doing nothing? And they sort of stand as a buffer in between the ants working deep inside the nest and the ants working outside. And if you mark ants that are working outside, and dig up a colony, you never see them deep down. So what's happening is that the ants work inside the nest when they're younger. They somehow get into this reserve. And then eventually they get recruited to join this exterior workforce. And once they belong to the ants that work outside, they never go back down. Now ants β most ants, including these, don't see very well. They have eyes, they can distinguish between light and dark, but they mostly work by smell. So just to reinforce that what you might have thought about ant queens isn't true β you know, even if the queen did have the intelligence to send chemical messages through this whole network of chambers to tell the ants outside what to do, there is no way that such messages could make it in time to see the shifts in the allocation of workers that we actually see outside the nest. So that's one way that we know the queen isn't directing the behavior of the colony. So when I first set out to work on task allocation, my first question was, "What's the relationship between the ants doing different tasks? Does it matter to the foragers what the nest maintenance workers are doing? Does it matter to the midden workers what the patrollers are doing?" And I was working in the context of a view of ant colonies in which each ant was somehow dedicated to its task from birth and sort of performed independently of the others, knowing its place on the assembly line. And instead I wanted to ask, "How are the different task groups interdependent?" So I did experiments where I changed one thing. So for example, I created more work for the nest maintenance workers by putting out a pile of toothpicks near the nest entrance, early in the morning when the nest maintenance workers are first active. This is what it looks like about 20 minutes later. Here it is about 40 minutes later. And the nest maintenance workers just take all the toothpicks to the outer edge of the nest mound and leave them there. And what I wanted to know was, "OK, here's a situation where extra nest maintenance workers were recruited β is this going to have any effect on the workers performing other tasks?" Then we repeated all those experiments with the ants marked. So here's some blue nest maintenance workers. And lately we've gotten more sophisticated and we have this three-color system. And we can mark them individually so we know which ant is which. We started out with model airplane paint and then we found these wonderful little Japanese markers, and they work really well. And so just to summarize the result, well it turns out that yes, the different tasks are interdependent. So, if I change the numbers performing one task, it changes the numbers performing another. So for example, if I make a mess that the nest maintenance workers have to clean up, then I see fewer ants out foraging. And this was true for all the pair-wise combinations of tasks. And the second result, which was surprising to a lot of people, was that ants actually switch tasks. The same ant doesn't do the same task over and over its whole life. So for example, if I put out extra food, everybody else β the midden workers stop doing midden work and go get the food, they become foragers. The nest maintenance workers become foragers. The patrollers become foragers. But not every transition is possible. And this shows how it works. Like I just said, if there is more food to collect, the patrollers, the midden workers, the nest maintenance workers will all change to forage. If there's more patrolling to do β so I created a disturbance, so extra patrollers were needed β the nest maintenance workers will switch to patrol. But if more nest maintenance work is needed β for example, if I put out a bunch of toothpicks β then nobody will ever switch back to nest maintenance, they have to get nest maintenance workers from inside the nest. So foraging acts as a sink, and the ants inside the nest act as a source. And finally, it looks like each ant is deciding moment to moment whether to be active or not. So, for example, when there's extra nest maintenance work to do, it's not that the foragers switch over. I know that they don't do that. But the foragers somehow decide not to come out. And here was the most intriguing result: the task allocation. This process changes with colony age, and it changes like this. When I do these experiments with older colonies β so ones that are five years or older β they're much more consistent from one time to another and much more homeostatic. The worse things get, the more I hassle them, the more they act like undisturbed colonies. Whereas the young, small colonies β the two-year-old colonies of just 2,000 ants β are much more variable. And the amazing thing about this is that an ant lives only a year. It could be this year, or this year. So, the ants in the older colony that seem to be more stable are not any older than the ants in the younger colony. It's not due to the experience of older, wiser ants. Instead, something about the organization must be changing as the colony gets older. And the obvious thing that's changing is its size. So since I've had this result, I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out what kinds of decision rules β very simple, local, probably olfactory, chemical rules could an ant could be using, since no ant can assess the global situation β that would have the outcome that I see, these predictable dynamics, in who does what task. And it would change as the colony gets larger. And what I've found out is that ants are using a network of antennal contact. So anybody who's ever looked at ants has seen them touch antennae. They smell with their antennae. When one ant touches another, it's smelling it, and it can tell, for example, whether the other ant is a nest mate because ants cover themselves and each other, through grooming, with a layer of grease, which carries a colony-specific odor. And what we're learning is that an ant uses the pattern of its antennal contacts, the rate at which it meets ants of other tasks, in deciding what to do. And so what the message is, is not any message that they transmit from one ant to another, but the pattern. The pattern itself is the message. And I'll tell you a little bit more about that. But first you might be wondering: how is it that an ant can tell, for example, I'm a forager. I expect to meet another forager every so often. But if instead I start to meet a higher number of nest maintenance workers, I'm less likely to forage. So it has to know the difference between a forager and a nest maintenance worker. And we've learned that, in this species β and I suspect in others as well β these hydrocarbons, this layer of grease on the outside of ants, is different as ants perform different tasks. And we've done experiments that show that that's because the longer an ant stays outside, the more these simple hydrocarbons on its surface change, and so they come to smell different by doing different tasks. And they can use that task-specific odor in cuticular hydrocarbons β they can use that in their brief antennal contacts to somehow keep track of the rate at which they're meeting ants of certain tasks. And we've just recently demonstrated this by putting extract of hydrocarbons on little glass beads, and dropping the beads gently down into the nest entrance at the right rate. And it turns out that ants will respond to the right rate of contact with a glass bead with hydrocarbon extract on it, as they would to contact with real ants. So I want now to show you a bit of film β and this will start out, first of all, showing you the nest entrance. So the idea is that ants are coming in and out of the nest entrance. They've gone out to do different tasks, and the rate at which they meet as they come in and out of the nest entrance determines, or influences, each ant's decision about whether to go out, and which task to perform. This is taken through a fiber optics microscope. It's down inside the nest. In the beginning you see the ants just kind of engaging with the fiber optics microscope. But the idea is that the ants are in there, and each ant is experiencing a certain flow of ants past it β a stream of contacts with other ants. And the pattern of these interactions determines whether the ant comes back out, and what it does when it comes back out. You can also see this in the ants just outside the nest entrance like these. Each ant, then, as it comes back in, is contacting other ants. And the ants that are waiting just inside the nest entrance to decide whether to go out on their next trip, are contacting the ants coming in. So, what's interesting about this system is that it's messy. It's variable. It's noisy. And, in particular, in two ways. The first is that the experience of the ant β of each ant β can't be very predictable. Because the rate at which ants come back depends on all the little things that happen to an ant as it goes out and does its task outside. And the second thing is that an ant's ability to assess this pattern must be very crude because no ant can do any sophisticated counting. So, we do a lot of simulation and modeling, and also experimental work, to try to figure out how those two kinds of noise combine to, in the aggregate, produce the predictable behavior of ant colonies. Again, I don't want to say that this kind of haphazard pattern of interactions produces a factory that works with the precision and efficiency of clockwork. In fact, if you watch ants at all, you end up trying to help them because they never seem to be doing anything exactly the way that you think that they ought to be doing it. So it's not really that out of these haphazard contacts, perfection arises. But it works pretty well. Ants have been around for several hundred million years. They cover the earth, except for Antarctica. Something that they're doing is clearly successful enough that this pattern of haphazard contacts, in the aggregate, produces something that allows ants to make a lot more ants. And one of the things that we're studying is how natural selection might be acting now to shape this use of interaction patterns β this network of interaction patterns β to perhaps increase the foraging efficiency of ant colonies. So the one thing, though, that I want you to remember about this is that these patterns of interactions are something that you'd expect to be closely connected to colony size. The simplest idea is that when an ant is in a small colony β and an ant in a large colony can use the same rule, like "I expect to meet another forager every three seconds." But in a small colony, it's likely to meet fewer foragers, just because there are fewer other foragers there to meet. So this is the kind of rule that, as the colony develops and gets older and larger, will produce different behavior in an old colony and a small young one. Thank you. (Applause) |
The mystery box | {0: "Writer, director and producer J.J. Abrams makes smart, addictive dramas like TV's <em>Lost</em>, and films like <em>Cloverfield</em> and the new <em>Star Trek</em>."} | TED2007 | Here's my thing. Hold on. There I go. Hey. I want to start today β talk about the structure of a polypeptide. (Laughter) I get a lot of people asking me, in terms of "Lost," you know, "What the hell's that island?" You know, it's usually followed by, "No, seriously, what the hell is that island?" Why so many mysteries? What is it about mystery that I seem to be drawn to? And I was thinking about this, what to talk about at TED. When I talked to the kind rep from TED, and I said, "Listen, you know, what should I talk about?" He said, "Don't worry about it. Just be profound." (Laughter) And I took enormous comfort in that. So thank you, if you're here. I was trying to think, what do I talk about? Good question. Why do I do so much stuff that involves mystery? And I started trying to figure it out. And I started thinking about why do I do any of what I do, and I started thinking about my grandfather. I loved my grandfather. Harry Kelvin was his name, my mother's father. He died in 1986. He was an amazing guy. And one of the reasons he was amazing: After World War II, he began an electronics company. He started selling surplus parts, kits, to schools and stuff. So he had this incredible curiosity. As a kid, I saw him come over to me with radios and telephones and all sorts of things. And he'd open them up, he'd unscrew them and reveal the inner workings β which many of us, I'm sure, take for granted. But it's an amazing gift to give a kid. To open up this thing and show how it works and why it works and what it is. He was the ultimate deconstructor, in many ways. And my grandfather was a kind of guy who would not only take things apart, but he got me interested in all sorts of different odd crafts, like, you know, printing, like the letter press. I'm obsessed with printing. I'm obsessed with silk-screening and bookbinding and box making. When I was a kid, I was always, like, taking apart boxes and stuff. And last night in the hotel, I took apart the Kleenex box. I was just looking at it. And I'm telling you β (Laughter) It's a beautiful thing. I swear to God. I mean, when you look at the box and you sort of see how it works. Rives is here, and I met him years ago at a book fair; he does pop-up books. And I'm obsessed with engineering of paper. The scoring of it, the printing of it, where the thing gets glued, the registration marks for the ink. I just love boxes. My grandfather was the guy who kind of got me into all sorts of these things. He would also supply me with tools. He was this amazing encourager β this patron, sort of, to make stuff. And he got me a Super 8 camera when I was 10 years old. And in 1976, that was sort of an anomaly, to be a 10-year-old kid that had access to a camera. And you know, he was so generous; I couldn't believe it. He wasn't doing it entirely without some manipulation. I mean, I would call him, and I'd be like, "Listen, Grandpa, I really need this camera. You don't understand. This is, like, I want to make movies. I'll get invited to TED one day β" (Laughter) And, you know, my grandmother was the greatest. Because she'd be like, you know β she'd get on the phone. She'd be like, "Harry, it's better than the drugs. She was fantastic. So I found myself getting this stuff, thanks to her assist, and suddenly, you know, I had a synthesizer when I was 14 years old β this kind of stuff. And it let me make things, which, to me, was sort of the dream. He sort of humored my obsession to other things too, like magic. The thing is, we'd go to this magic store in New York City called Lou Tannen's Magic. It was this great magic store. It was a crappy little building in Midtown, but you'd be in the elevator, the elevator would open β there'd be this little, small magic store. You'd be in the magic store. And it was a magical place. So I got all these magic tricks. Here. I'll show you. This is the kind of thing. So it would be like, you know. Which is good, but now I can't move. Now, I have to do the rest of the thing like this. I'm like, "Oh, wow. Look at my computer over there!" (Laughter) So one of the things that I bought at the magic store was this: Tannen's Mystery Magic Box. The premise behind the Mystery Magic Box was the following: 15 dollars buys you 50 dollars worth of magic. Which is a savings. (Laughter) Now, I bought this decades ago and I'm not kidding. If you look at this, you'll see it's never been opened. But I've had this forever. Now, I was looking at this, it was in my office, as it always is, on the shelf, and I was thinking, why have I not opened this? And why have I kept it? Because I'm not a pack rat. I don't keep everything, but for some reason I haven't opened this box. And I felt like there was a key to this, somehow, in talking about something at TED that I haven't discussed before, and bored people elsewhere. So I thought, maybe there's something with this. And there was this giant question mark. I love the design, for what it's worth, of this thing. And I started thinking, why haven't I opened it? And I realized that I haven't opened it because it represents something important β to me. It represents my grandfather. Am I allowed to cry at TED? Because β no, I'm not going to cry. (Laughter) But β (Laughter) The thing is that it represents infinite possibility. It represents hope. It represents potential. And what I love about this box, and what I realize I sort of do in whatever it is that I do, is I find myself drawn to infinite possibility, that sense of potential. And I realize that mystery is the catalyst for imagination. Now, it's not the most ground-breaking idea, but when I started to think that maybe there are times when mystery is more important than knowledge. I started getting interested in this. And so I started thinking about "Lost" and the stuff that we do, and I realized, oh my God, mystery boxes are everywhere in what I do! In the creation of "Lost," Damon Lindelof and I, who created the show with me, we were basically tasked with creating this series that we had very little time to do. We had 11 and a half weeks to write it, cast it, crew it, shoot it, cut it, post it, turn in a two-hour pilot. So it was not a lot of time. And that sense of possibility β what could this thing be? There was no time to develop it. I'm sure you're all familiar with people who tell you what you can't do and what you should change. There was no time for that, which is kind of amazing. And so we did this show, and for those of you who haven't seen it, or don't know it, I can show you one little clip from the pilot, just to show you some stuff that we did. (Engine roaring) (Video) Claire: Help! Please help me! Help me! Please, help me! Jack: Get him out of here! Get him away from the engine! Get him out of here! (Engine roaring) C: Help me, please! I'm having contractions! J: How many months pregnant are you? C: I'm only eight months. J: And how far apart are they coming? C: I don't know. I think it just happened. Man: Hey! Hey! Hey, get away from β JJ Abrams: 10 years ago, if we wanted to do that, we'd have to kill a stuntman. (Laughter) It would be harder. Take two would be a bitch. (Laughter) So the amazing thing was, we were able to do this thing. And part of that was the amazing availability of technology, knowing we could do anything. I mean, we could never have done that. We might have been able to write it; we wouldn't have been able to depict it like we did. So part of the amazing thing for me is in the creative process, technology is mind-blowingly inspiring to me. I realize that that blank page is a magic box, you know? It needs to be filled with something fantastic. I used to have the "Ordinary People" script that I'd flip through. The romance was amazing to me; it would inspire me. I wanted to try and fill pages with the same kind of spirit and thought and emotion that that script did. So, you know, I love Apple computers. I'm obsessed. So the Apple computer β the PowerBook β this computer, it challenges me. It basically says, what are you going to write worthy of me? I feel this β I'm compelled. (Laughter) And I often am like, you know, dude, today I'm out. I got nothing. You know? So there's that. In terms of the content of it, you look at stories, you think, what are stories but mystery boxes? There's a fundamental question β in TV, the first act is called the teaser. It's literally the teaser. It's the big question. So you're drawn into it. Then there's another question. And it goes on. Look at "Star Wars." The droids meet the mysterious woman. Who's that? We don't know. Mystery box! Then you meet Luke Skywalker. He gets the droid, you see the holographic image. You learn it's a message. She wants to find Obi Wan Kenobi. He's her only hope. But who's Obi Wan Kenobi? Mystery box! So then he meets Ben Kenobi. Ben Kenobi is Obi Wan Kenobi. Holy shit! So it keeps us β (Laughter) Have you guys not seen that? (Laughter) It's huge! Anyway β So there's this thing with mystery boxes that I started feeling compelled. Then there's the thing of mystery in terms of imagination β the withholding of information. You know, doing that intentionally is much more engaging. Whether it's like the shark in "Jaws" β if Spielberg's mechanical shark, Bruce, had worked, it would not be remotely as scary; you would have seen it too much. In "Alien", they never really showed the alien: terrifying! Even in a movie like a romantic comedy, "The Graduate," they're having that date, and they're in the car, and it's loud, and so they put the top up. You don't hear anything they're saying! You can't hear a word! But it's the most romantic date ever. And you love it because you don't hear it. So to me, there's that. And then, finally, there's this idea β stretching the paradigm a little bit β but the idea of the mystery box. Meaning, what you think you're getting, then what you're really getting. And it's true in so many movies and stories. Look at "E.T.," for example β "E.T." is this unbelievable movie about what? It's about an alien who meets a kid, right? Well, it's not. "E.T." is about divorce. "E.T." is about a heartbroken, divorce-crippled family, and ultimately, this kid who can't find his way. "Die Hard," right? Crazy, great, fun, action-adventure movie in a building. It's about a guy who's on the verge of divorce. He's showing up to L.A., tail between his legs. There are great scenes β maybe not the most amazing dramatic scenes in the history of time, but pretty great scenes. There's a half an hour of investment in character before you get to the stuff that you're expecting. When you look at a movie like "Jaws," the scene that you expect β we have the screen? These are the kind of scenes that you remember and expect from "Jaws." And she's being eaten; there's a shark. (Woman screaming) The thing about "Jaws" is, it's really about a guy who is sort of dealing with his place in the world β with his masculinity, with his family, how he's going to, you know, make it work in this new town. This is one of my favorite scenes ever, and this is a scene that you wouldn't necessarily think of when you think of "Jaws." But it's an amazing scene. (Video) Father: C'mere. Give us a kiss. Son: Why? Father: 'Cause I need it. JJA: Come on. "Why? 'Cause I need it"? Best scene ever, right? (Laughter) Come on! So you think of "Jaws" β so that's the kind of stuff that, like, you know β the investment of character, which is the stuff that really is inside the box, you know? It's why when people do sequels, or rip off movies, you know, of a genre, they're ripping off the wrong thing. You're not supposed to rip off the shark or the monster. You know, if you rip something off β rip off the character. Rip off the stuff that matters. I mean, look inside yourself and figure out what is inside you. Because ultimately, the mystery box is all of us. So there's that. Then the distribution. What's a bigger mystery box than a movie theater? You know? You go to the theater, you're just so excited to see anything. The moment the lights go down is often the best part. And you're full of that amazing β that feeling of excited anticipation. And often, the movie's there and it's going, and then something happens and you go, "Oh β", and then, "Mmm ..." When it's a great movie, you're along for the ride because you're willing to give yourself to it. So to me, whether it's a TV, an iPod, computer, cell phone β It's funny, I'm an β as I said, Apple fanatic β and one day, about a year or so ago, I was signing on online in the morning to watch Steve Jobs' keynote, because I always do. And he came on, he was presenting the video iPod, and what was on the enormous iPod behind him? "Lost"! I had no idea! And I realized, holy shit, it'd come full circle. The inspiration I get from the technology is now using the stuff that I do to sell technology. It's nuts! (Laughter) I was going to show you a couple of other things I'm going to skip. I'll show you one other thing that has nothing to do with anything. This is something online; six years ago, they did this. This is an online thing done by guys who had some visual effects experience. But the point was, that they were doing things that were using these mystery boxes that they had β everyone has now. What I've realized is what my grandfather did for me when I was a kid, everyone has access to now. You don't need to have my grandfather, though you wish you had. But I have to tell you β this is a guy doing stuff on a Quadra 950 computer β the resolution's a little bit low β using Infinity software they stopped making 15 years ago. He's doing stuff that looks as amazing as stuff I've seen released from Hollywood. The most incredible sort of mystery, I think, is now the question of what comes next. Because it is now democratized. So now, the creation of media β it's everywhere. The stuff that I was lucky and begging for to get when I was a kid is now ubiquitous. And so, there's an amazing sense of opportunity out there. And when I think of the filmmakers who exist out there now who would have been silenced, you know β who have been silenced in the past β it's a very exciting thing. I used to say in classes and lectures and stuff, to someone who wants to write, "Go! Write! Do your thing." It's free, you don't need permission. But now I can say, "Go make your movie!" There's nothing stopping you from going out there and getting the technology. You can lease, rent, buy stuff off the shelf that is either as good, or just as good, as the stuff that's being used by the, you know, "legit people." No community is best served when only the elite have control. And I feel like this is an amazing opportunity to see what else is out there. When I did "Mission: Impossible III," we had amazing visual effects. ILM did the effects; it was incredible. And sort of my dream to be involved. And there are a couple of sequences in the movie, like these couple of moments I'll show you. There's that. (Video) Luther: Ethan, move! (Explosion) Obviously, I have an obsession with big crazy explosions. So my favorite visual effect in the movie is the one I'm about to show you. It's a scene in which Tom's character wakes up. He's drowsy. He's crazy. And the guy wakes up, and he shoves this gun in his nose and shoots this little capsule into his brain that he's going to use later to kill him, as bad guys do. (Video) Brownway: Good morning. JJA: OK, now. When we shot that scene, the actor who had the gun, an English actor, Eddie Marsan β sweetheart, great guy β he kept taking the gun and putting it into Tom's nose, and it was hurting Tom's nose. And I learned this very early on in my career: Don't hurt Tom's nose. (Laughter) There are three things you don't want to do. Number two is: Don't hurt Tom's nose. So Eddie has this gun β and he's this sweet English guy. He's like, "Sorry, I don't want to hurt you." I'm like, "We have to make this look good." And I realized that we had to do something because it wasn't working. And I thought back to what I would have done using the Super 8 camera that my grandfather got me sitting in that room, and I realized that hand didn't have to be Eddie Marsan's. It could be Tom's. And Tom would know just how hard to push the gun. He wouldn't hurt himself. So we took his hand and we painted it to look a little bit more like Eddie's. We put it in Eddie's sleeve, and so the hand that you see β that's not Eddie's hand, that's Tom's. So Tom is playing two roles. (Laughter) And he didn't ask for any more money. So here, here. Watch it again. There he is. He's waking up. He's drowsy, been through a lot. (Video) Brownway: Good morning. JJA: Tom's hand. Tom's hand. Tom's hand. Anyway. So ... (Applause) Thanks. (Applause) So you don't need the greatest technology to do things that can work in movies. And the mystery box, in honor of my grandfather, stays closed. Thank you. (Applause) |
Underwater astonishments | {0: 'A pioneer in ocean exploration, David Gallo is an enthusiastic ambassador between the sea and those of us on dry land.'} | TED2007 | We're going to go on a dive to the deep sea, and anyone that's had that lovely opportunity knows that for about two and half hours on the way down, it's a perfectly positively pitch-black world. And we used to see the most mysterious animals out the window that you couldn't describe: these blinking lights β a world of bioluminescence, like fireflies. Dr. Edith Widder β she's now at the Ocean Research and Conservation Association β was able to come up with a camera that could capture some of these incredible animals, and that's what you're seeing here on the screen. That's all bioluminescence. Like I said: just like fireflies. There's a flying turkey under a tree. (Laughter) I'm a geologist by training. But I love that. And you see, some of the bioluminescence they use to avoid being eaten, some they use to attract prey, but all of it, from an artistic point of view, is just positively amazing. And a lot of what goes on inside β There's a fish with glowing eyes, pulsating eyes. Some of the colors are designed to hypnotize, these lovely patterns. And then this last one, one of my favorites, this pinwheel design. Just absolutely amazing, every single dive. That's the unknown world, and today we've only explored about 3 percent of what's out there in the ocean. Already we've found the world's highest mountains, the world's deepest valleys, underwater lakes, underwater waterfalls β a lot of that we shared with you from the stage. And in a place where we thought no life at all, we find more life, we think, and diversity and density than the tropical rainforest, which tells us that we don't know much about this planet at all. There's still 97 percent, and either that 97 percent is empty or just full of surprises. But I want to jump up to shallow water now and look at some creatures that are positively amazing. Cephalopods β head-foots. As a kid I knew them as calamari, mostly. (Laughter) This is an octopus. This is the work of Dr. Roger Hanlon at the Marine Biological Lab, and it's just fascinating how cephalopods can, with their incredible eyes, sense their surroundings, look at light, look at patterns. Here's an octopus moving across the reef, finds a spot to settle down, curls up and then disappears into the background. Tough thing to do. In the next bit, we're going to see a couple squid. Now males, when they fight, if they're really aggressive, they turn white. And these two males are fighting. They do it by bouncing their butts together, which is an interesting concept. Now, here's a male on the left and a female on the right, and the male has managed to split his coloration so the female only always sees the kinder, gentler squid in him. (Laughter) Let's take a look at it again. Watch the coloration: white on the right, brown on the left. He takes a step back, he's keeping off the other males by splitting his body, and comes up on the other side β Bingo! Now, I'm told that's not not just a squid phenomenon with males, but I don't know. (Laughter) Cuttlefish. I love cuttlefish. This is a Giant Australian Cuttlefish. And there he is, his droopy little eyes up here. But they can do pretty amazing things, too. Here we're going to see one backing into a crevice, and watch his tentacles β he just pulls them in, makes them look just like algae. Disappears right into the background. Positively amazing. Here's two males fighting. Once again, they're smart enough, these cephalopods; they know not to hurt each other. But look at the patterns that they can do with their skin. That's an amazing thing. Here's an octopus. Sometimes they don't want to be seen when they move, because predators can see them. This guy can make himself look like a rock, and, looking at his environment, can actually slide across the bottom, using the waves and the shadows so he can't be seen. His motion blends right into the background β the moving rock trick. So, we're learning lots new from the shallow water. Still exploring the deep, but learning lots from the shallow water. There's a good reason why: the shallow water's full of predators β here's a barracuda β and if you're an octopus or a cephalopod, you need to really understand how to use your surroundings to hide. In the next scene, you're going to see a nice coral bottom. And you see that an octopus would stand out very easily there if you couldn't use your camouflage, use your skin to change color and texture. Here's some algae in the foreground β and an octopus. Ain't that amazing? Now, Roger spooked him, so he took off in a cloud of ink, and when he lands, the octopus says, "Oh, I've been seen. The best thing to do is to get as big as I can get." That big brown makes his eyespot very big. So, he's bluffing. Let's do it backwards. I thought he was joking when he first showed it to me. I thought it was all graphics. So here it is in reverse. Watch the skin color; watch the skin texture. Just an amazing animal, it can change color and texture to match the surroundings. Watch him blend right into this algae. One, two, three. (Applause) And now he's gone, and so am I. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Treat design as art | {0: "Paola Antonelli is on a mission to introduce -- and explain -- design to the world. With her shows at New York's Museum of Modern Art, she celebrates design's presence in every part of life."} | TED2007 | Those of us who believe in heaven have some sort of idea of what heaven would be. And in my idea, heaven is satisfied curiosity. I think of heaven as a really comfortable cloud where I can just lie down with my belly down, like I was watching TV when I was a child, and my elbows up. And I can basically look everywhere I want, see every movie I've always wanted to see. And in the same kind of trance that you can feel sometimes in the subway in New York when you're reading, there's something really soothing and easy. Well, the funny thing is that I already have that kind of life, in a way, because I discovered ... it took me a while to understand it, but when I discovered around 24 years of age that I was much more comfortable with objects than with people, I finally decided to really embrace this passion. And I basically live my life in sort of a trance, and I look around and everything I see is just the beginning of a long story. Just to give you an example: this is the exhibition, Humble Masterpieces, as it was at MoMA in 2004. We were in Queens, we were building the big, big, big, big building in Midtown, so we were in the small, small, small boondocks. That was one of the funnest moments of my career. But it's not only that. The typeface β the typeface is Helvetica; it's its 50th anniversary this year. And so I start thinking β Max Miedinger and all those Swiss designers together, trying to outdo Akzidenz-Grotesk, and come up with a new sans-serif typeface β and the movie starts playing in my head already. And of course, you can imagine, with Humble Masterpieces it was the same thing multiplied by a hundred. And I do hope, by the way, that the real goal of the exhibition is going to have the same effect on you. The exhibition was meant to be a way to have children think of doing ... you know when they do homeworks at home? Instead of having a tray with two peas, I was hoping that they would go into the kitchen cabinet or the mother's handbag and do their museum-quality design collection on a tray. So, everybody's always suggesting new humble masterpieces, and at MoMA we put out some books just for people to suggest their own humble masterpieces. And when you do that, usually you get 80 percent porn and 20 percent real suggestions, and instead it was all β almost β all good suggestions. And a lot of nationalism came in. For instance, I didn't know that the Spaniards invented the mop, but they were very proud so every Spaniard said "la frego." And Italians did the pizza. And I wanted to show you, also, the suggestions from Kentucky are pretty good β they had moonshine, laundry detergents and liquid nails. And I keep it going, and I just got, (Laughter) also, this suggestion from Milan: it's our traffic divider, which we call "panettone," and it's painted; it's these beautiful concrete things that you use around Milan to define all the lanes of traffic. So, think of your own, send them on if you want to β they're always welcome. But an exhibition like that made me understand even more what I've been thinking of for 13 years ever since I got to MoMA. I'm Italian. In Italy, design is normal. Different parts of the world have a knack for different things. I was just recently in Argentina and in Uruguay, and the default way of building homes in the country is a beautiful modernism that you don't see elsewhere, but the contemporary art was terrible. In Italy, in Milan especially, contemporary art really doesn't have that much of a place. But design β oh, my God. What you find at the store at the corner, without going to any kind of fancy store, is the kind of refined design that makes everybody think that we are all so sophisticated. It's just what you find at the store. And New York has another kind of knack for contemporary art. I'm always amazed β three-year-olds know who Richard Serra is and take you to the galleries. But design, for some reason, is still misunderstood for decoration. It's really interesting: what many people think when I say the word "design" is they think of this kind of overdesigned β in this case, it's overdesigned on purpose, but β decoration, interior decoration. They think of somebody choosing fabrics. Design can be that, of course, but it can also be this. It can be a school of design in Jerusalem that tries to find a better way to design gas masks for people, because, as you know, Israel deploys one gas mask per person including babies. So, what these designers do is they find a way to lower the neckline, so that instead of being completely strangled, a teenager can also sip a Coke. They tried to make a toddler's gas mask in such a way that the toddler can be held by the parent because proximity of the body is so important. And then they make a little tent for the baby. However cruel, however ruthless you can think this is it's a great design, and it is miles away from the fancy furniture, but still, it's part of my same field of passion. What I've been doing at MoMA since the beginning is to try to harness the power of MoMA because it's great to work there. You really have power in that people usually tend to know about your exhibition or see the exhibitions, and that is power because in a design museum I wouldn't have as many visitors. I'm very well aware that 80 percent of my public is there to see Picasso and Matisse, and then they stumble upon my show and I keep them there. But what I've been trying to do is something that the curators at MoMA in my department have been doing ever since the museum was founded in 1929, which is to try and see what's going on in the world and try to use that authority in order to make things better. There have been many episodes, and actually Eames Demetrius may be here in the audience, but in two instances, his great-grandfather, grandfather β I'm always a little perplexed about the relation, exactly β Charles Eames the first time and then Charles and Ray Eames the second time were involved in two competitions: one in 1940, it was about organic furniture, and the second one in 1948 was low-cost furniture for the GIs coming back from the war that then sparked a whole line of furniture. And then there was good design for very low price. There were a lot of programs in architecture and design that were about pointing people in the direction of a better design for a better life. So, I started out in '95 with this exhibition that was called Mutant Materials in Contemporary Design. It was about a new phase, in my opinion, in the world of design in that materials could be customized by the designers themselves. And that put me in touch with such diverse design examples as the aerogels from the Lawrence Livermore Lab in California; at that time, they were beginning to be brought into the civilian market. And at the same time, the gorgeous work of Takeshi Ishiguro, who did these beautiful salt-and-pepper containers that are made of rice dough. So you see, the range is really quite diverse. And then, for instance, this other exhibition that was entitled Workspheres in 2001, where I asked different designers to come up with ideas for the new type of work styles that were happening in the world at that time. And you see IDEO there. It was beautiful β it was called Personal Skies. The idea was that if you had a cubicle, you could project a sky on top of your head and have your own "Cielo in Una Stanza" β a sky in a room β it's a very famous Italian song. And other examples: this was Marti Guixe about working on the go, and Hella Jongerius, my favorite, about how to work at home. And this lets me introduce a very important idea about design: designers are the biggest synthesizers in the world. What they do best is make a synthesis of human needs, current conditions in economy, in materials, in sustainability issues, and then what they do at the end β if they are good β is much more than the sum of its parts. Hella Jongerius is a person that is able to make a synthesis that is really quite amazing and also quite hilarious. The idea behind her work was that at that time, everybody was saying you have to really divide your life. Instead, she said, "No, no. Work and leisure can be together." Yeah, that's particularly gorgeous β it's the TV dinner of 2001. There have been many other exhibitions in the meantime, but I don't want to focus on my shows. I would like, instead, to talk about how great some designers are. I've always had a hard time with the word "maverick." I came to the United States 13 years ago, and to this day I have to ask, "What does that mean?" So, this morning I went to see on the dictionary and it said that there was this gentleman that was not branding its cattle. Therefore, he was not following everybody's lead, and therefore, he was a maverick. So, designers do need to be mavericks, because the best way to design a successful object β and also an object that we were missing before β is to pretend that either it never existed or that people will be able to have a new behavior with it. So, Safe is the last exhibition that I did at MoMA and it ended at the beginning of last year. It was about design that deals with safety and deals with protection. It's a long story because it started before 2001 and it was called Emergency. And then when 9/11 happened, I had a shock and I canceled the exhibition until, slowly but surely, it came back β as a half-full glass instead of half-empty β and it was about protection and safety. But it ranged from such items as a complete de-mining equipment to these kind of water-sterilizing straws, so it was really wide-ranging. It also had ... you know, Cameron and I worked a little bit together, and some of the entries that you see in his website were actually in the exhibition. But what is interesting is that we don't need to talk about design and art anymore; design uses whatever tools it has at its disposal in order to make a point. It's a sense of economy and a sense, also, of humor. This is a beautiful project by Ralph Borland, who's South African. It's a suit for civil disobedience. The idea is that when you have a riot or a protest and the police comes towards you, you're wearing this thing β it's like a big heart and it has a loudspeaker over your heart so your heartbeat is amplified β and the police is reminded; it's like having a flower in front of the rifle. And also, you can imagine, a whole group of people with the same suit will have this mounting collective heartbeat that will be scary to the police. So, designers sometimes don't do things that are immediately functional, but they're functional to our understanding of issues. Tony Dunne and Fiona Raby did this series of objects that are about our anguish and our paranoia, like this hideaway furniture that's made in the same wood as your floor so it disappears completely and you can hide away; or even better, the huggable atomic mushroom, which got me an article on the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists of the United States β I don't think it ever happened before at MoMA; or this Faraday Chair that is supposed to protect you from radiations. But the interesting thing in the exhibition is the discovery that the ultimate shelter is your sense of self, and there are quite a few designers that are working on this particular topic. This is Cindy van den Bremen, who is a Dutch designer that's done this series of Capsters. They are athletic gear for Muslim women that enable them to ski, play tennis, do whatever they want to do without having to uncap themselves. And sometimes by doing this kind of research, you encounter such beautiful ideas of design. Twan Verdonck is really young, I think he's 27, and working together with some psychologist he did a series of toys that are for sensorial stimulation for children that have psychological impairments. They're quite beautiful. They range from this fluffy toy that is about hugging you β because autistic children like to be hugged tight, so it has a spring inside β all the way to this doll with a mirror so the child can see him or herself in the mirror and regain a sense of self. Design really looks upon the whole world and it considers the world in all of its different ranges. I was recently at a conference on luxury organized by the Herald Tribune in Istanbul. And it was really interesting because I was the last speaker and before me there were people that were really talking about luxury, and I didn't want to be a party pooper but at the same time I felt that I had to kind of bring back the discourse to reality. And the truth is that there are very different kinds of luxury, and there's luxury that is relative for people that don't have that much. I want to make this point by showing you two examples of design coming from a sense of economy β very, very clear limits. This is Cuba, and this is the recycling of a squeaky toy as a bicycle bell, and this is a raincoat that is made out of rice sacks. So they're quite beautiful, but they're beautiful because they're so smart and economical. And here is the work of two brothers from Sao Paulo, Fernando and Humberto Campana, who got inspired by the poverty and smartness that they saw around them to do pieces of furniture that now are selling for an enormous amount of money. But that's because of the kind of strangeness of the market itself. So really, design takes everything into account, and the interesting thing is that as the technology advances, as we become more and more wireless and impalpable, designers, instead, want us to be hands-on. Sometimes hammer-on. This is a whole series of furniture that wants to engage you physically. Even this chair that you have to open up and then sit on so that it takes your imprint, all the way to this beautiful series of objects that are considered design by Ana Mir in Barcelona. From this kind of bijou made with human hair to these chocolate nipples to these intra-toe candies that your lover is supposed to suck from your toes. (Laughter) It's quite beautiful because somehow, this is a gorgeous moment for design. Many years ago I heard a mathematician from Vienna, whose name was Marchetti, explain how the innovation in the military industry β therefore, secret innovation β and the innovation in the civilian society are two sinusoids that are kind of opposed. And that makes sense. In moments of war there's great technological innovation, and in the world you have to do without β well, during the Second World War, you had to do without steel, you had to do without aluminum. And then as peace comes, all of these technologies get all of a sudden available for the civilian market. Many of you might know that the Potato Chip Chair by Charles and Ray Eames comes exactly from that kind of instance: fiberglass was available for civilian use all of a sudden. I think that this is a strange moment. The rhythm of the sinusoids has changed tremendously, just like the rhythm of our life in the past 25 years, so I'm not sure anymore what the wavelength is. But it surely is a very important moment for design, because not only is the technology proceeding, not only is computing technology making open-source possible also in the world of design, but also the idea of sustainability β which is not only sustainability from the viewpoint of CO2 emissions and footprint, but also sustainability of human interrelationships β is very much part of the work of so many designers. And that's why designers, more and more, are working on behaviors rather than on objects. Especially the good ones, not all of them. I wanted to show you, for instance, the work of Mathieu Lehanneur, which is quite fantastic. He's another young designer from France who's working β and at this point he's working, also, with pharmaceutical companies β on new ways to engage patients, especially children, in taking their medicines with constancy and with certainty. For instance, this is a beautiful container for asthma medicine that kind of inflates itself when it's time for you to take the medicine, so the child has to go β pffff! β to release and relieve the container itself. And this other medicine is something that you can draw on your skin, so intradermal delivery enables you to joyfully be involved in this particular kind of delivery. Similarly, there's the work of people like Marti Guixe that tries to involve you in a way that is really about making everything pass through your mouth so that you learn from your mistakes or from your taste, orally. The next show that I'm going to work on β and I've been bugging a lot of you about this here β is about the relationship between design and science. I'm trying to find not the metaphors, but, rather, the points in common β the common gripes, the common issues, the common preoccupations β and I think that it will enable us to go a little further in this idea of design as an instruction, as a direction rather than a prescription of form. And I am hoping that many of you will respond to this. I've sent an email already to quite a few of you. But design and science and the possibility of visualizing different scales, and therefore, really work at the scale of the very small to make it very big and very meaningful. Thank you. (Applause) |
A master architect asks, Now what? | {0: "A living legend, Frank Gehry has forged his own language of architecture, creating astonishing buildings all over the world, such as the Guggenheim in Bilbao, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in LA, and Manhattan's new IAC building."} | TED2002 | Frank Gehry: I listened to this scientist this morning. Dr. Mullis was talking about his experiments, and I realized that I almost became a scientist. When I was 14 my parents bought me a chemistry set and I decided to make water. (Laughter) So, I made a hydrogen generator and I made an oxygen generator, and I had the two pipes leading into a beaker and I threw a match in. (Laughter) And the glass β luckily I turned around β I had it all in my back and I was about 15 feet away. The wall was covered with ... I had an explosion. Richard Saul Wurman: Really? FG: People on the street came and knocked on the door to see if I was okay. RSW: ... huh. (Laughter) I'd like to start this session again. The gentleman to my left is the very famous, perhaps overly famous, Frank Gehry. (Laughter) (Applause) And Frank, you've come to a place in your life, which is astonishing. I mean it is astonishing for an artist, for an architect, to become actually an icon and a legend in their own time. I mean you have become, whether you can giggle at it because it's a funny ... you know, it's a strange thought, but your building is an icon β you can draw a little picture of that building, it can be used in ads β and you've had not rock star status, but celebrity status in doing what you wanted to do for most of your life. And I know the road was extremely difficult. And it didn't seem, at least, that your sell outs, whatever they were, were very big. You kept moving ahead in a life where you're dependent on working for somebody. But that's an interesting thing for a creative person. A lot of us work for people; we're in the hands of other people. And that's one of the great dilemmas β we're in a creativity session β it's one of the great dilemmas in creativity: how to do work that's big enough and not sell out. And you've achieved that and that makes your win doubly big, triply big. It's not quite a question but you can comment on it. It's a big issue. FG: Well, I've always just ... I've never really gone out looking for work. I always waited for it to sort of hit me on the head. And when I started out, I thought that architecture was a service business and that you had to please the clients and stuff. And I realized when I'd come into the meetings with these corrugated metal and chain link stuff, and people would just look at me like I'd just landed from Mars. But I couldn't do anything else. That was my response to the people in the time. And actually, it was responding to clients that I had who didn't have very much money, so they couldn't afford very much. I think it was circumstantial. Until I got to my house, where the client was my wife. We bought this tiny little bungalow in Santa Monica and for like 50 grand I built a house around it. And a few people got excited about it. I was visiting with an artist, Michael Heizer, out in the desert near Las Vegas somewhere. He's building this huge concrete place. And it was late in the evening. We'd had a lot to drink. We were standing out in the desert all alone and, thinking about my house, he said, "Did it ever occur to you if you built stuff more permanent, somewhere in 2000 years somebody's going to like it?" (Laughter) So, I thought, "Yeah, that's probably a good idea." Luckily I started to get some clients that had a little more money, so the stuff was a little more permanent. But I just found out the world ain't going to last that long, this guy was telling us the other day. So where do we go now? Back to β everything's so temporary. I don't see it the way you characterized it. For me, every day is a new thing. I approach each project with a new insecurity, almost like the first project I ever did, and I get the sweats, I go in and start working, I'm not sure where I'm going β if I knew where I was going, I wouldn't do it. When I can predict or plan it, I don't do it. I discard it. So I approach it with the same trepidation. Obviously, over time I have a lot more confidence that it's going to be OK. I do run a kind of a business β I've got 120 people and you've got to pay them, so there's a lot of responsibility involved β but the actual work on the project is with, I think, a healthy insecurity. And like the playwright said the other day β I could relate to him: you're not sure. When Bilbao was finished and I looked at it, I saw all the mistakes, I saw ... They weren't mistakes; I saw everything that I would have changed and I was embarrassed by it. I felt an embarrassment β "How could I have done that? How could I have made shapes like that or done stuff like that?" It's taken several years to now look at it detached and say β as you walk around the corner and a piece of it works with the road and the street, and it appears to have a relationship β that I started to like it. RSW: What's the status of the New York project? FG: I don't really know. Tom Krens came to me with Bilbao and explained it all to me, and I thought he was nuts. I didn't think he knew what he was doing, and he pulled it off. So, I think he's Icarus and Phoenix all in one guy. (Laughter) He gets up there and then he ... comes back up. They're still talking about it. September 11 generated some interest in moving it over to Ground Zero, and I'm totally against that. I just feel uncomfortable talking about or building anything on Ground Zero I think for a long time. RSW: The picture on the screen, is that Disney? FG: Yeah. RSW: How much further along is it than that, and when will that be finished? FG: That will be finished in 2003 β September, October β and I'm hoping Kyu, and Herbie, and Yo-Yo and all those guys come play with us at that place. Luckily, today most of the people I'm working with are people I really like. Richard Koshalek is probably one of the main reasons that Disney Hall came to me. He's been a cheerleader for quite a long time. There aren't many people around that are really involved with architecture as clients. If you think about the world, and even just in this audience, most of us are involved with buildings. Nothing that you would call architecture, right? And so to find one, a guy like that, you hang on to him. He's become the head of Art Center, and there's a building by Craig Ellwood there. I knew Craig and respected him. They want to add to it and it's hard to add to a building like that β it's a beautiful, minimalist, black steel building β and Richard wants to add a library and more student stuff and it's a lot of acreage. I convinced him to let me bring in another architect from Portugal: Alvaro Siza. RSW: Why did you want that? FG: I knew you'd ask that question. It was intuitive. (Laughter) Alvaro Siza grew up and lived in Portugal and is probably considered the Portuguese main guy in architecture. I visited with him a few years ago and he showed me his early work, and his early work had a resemblance to my early work. When I came out of college, I started to try to do things contextually in Southern California, and you got into the logic of Spanish colonial tile roofs and things like that. I tried to understand that language as a beginning, as a place to jump off, and there was so much of it being done by spec builders and it was trivialized so much that it wasn't ... I just stopped. I mean, Charlie Moore did a bunch of it, but it didn't feel good to me. Siza, on the other hand, continued in Portugal where the real stuff was and evolved a modern language that relates to that historic language. And I always felt that he should come to Southern California and do a building. I tried to get him a couple of jobs and they didn't pan out. I like the idea of collaboration with people like that because it pushes you. I've done it with Claes Oldenburg and with Richard Serra, who doesn't think architecture is art. Did you see that thing? RSW: No. What did he say? FG: He calls architecture "plumbing." (Laughter) FG: Anyway, the Siza thing. It's a richer experience. It must be like that for Kyu doing things with musicians β it's similar to that I would imagine β where you ... huh? Audience: Liquid architecture. FG: Liquid architecture. (Laughter) Where you ... It's like jazz: you improvise, you work together, you play off each other, you make something, they make something. And I think for me, it's a way of trying to understand the city and what might happen in the city. RSW: Is it going to be near the current campus? Or is it going to be down near ... FG: No, it's near the current campus. Anyway, he's that kind of patron. It's not his money, of course. (Laughter) RSW: What's his schedule on that? FG: I don't know. What's the schedule, Richard? Richard Koshalek: [Unclear] starts from 2004. FG: 2004. You can come to the opening. I'll invite you. No, but the issue of city building in democracy is interesting because it creates chaos, right? Everybody doing their thing makes a very chaotic environment, and if you can figure out how to work off each other β if you can get a bunch of people who respect each other's work and play off each other, you might be able to create models for how to build sections of the city without resorting to the one architect. Like the Rockefeller Center model, which is kind of from another era. RSW: I found the most remarkable thing. My preconception of Bilbao was this wonderful building, you go inside and there'd be extraordinary spaces. I'd seen drawings you had presented here at TED. The surprise of Bilbao was in its context to the city. That was the surprise of going across the river, of going on the highway around it, of walking down the street and finding it. That was the real surprise of Bilbao. FG: But you know, Richard, most architects when they present their work β most of the people we know, you get up and you talk about your work, and it's almost like you tell everybody you're a good guy by saying, "Look, I'm worried about the context, I'm worried about the city, I'm worried about my client, I worry about budget, that I'm on time." Blah, blah, blah and all that stuff. And it's like cleansing yourself so that you can ... by saying all that, it means your work is good somehow. And I think everybody β I mean that should be a matter of fact, like gravity. You're not going to defy gravity. You've got to work with the building department. If you don't meet the budgets, you're not going to get much work. If it leaks β Bilbao did not leak. I was so proud. (Laughter) The MIT project β they were interviewing me for MIT and they sent their facilities people to Bilbao. I met them in Bilbao. They came for three days. RSW: This is the computer building? FG: Yeah, the computer building. They were there three days and it rained every day and they kept walking around β I noticed they were looking under things and looking for things, and they wanted to know where the buckets were hidden, you know? People put buckets out ... I was clean. There wasn't a bloody leak in the place, it was just fantastic. But you've got to β yeah, well up until then every building leaked, so this ... (Laughter) RSW: Frank had a sort of ... FG: Ask Miriam! RW: ... sort of had a fame. His fame was built on that in L.A. for a while. (Laughter) FG: You've all heard the Frank Lloyd Wright story, when the woman called and said, "Mr. Wright, I'm sitting on the couch and the water's pouring in on my head." And he said, "Madam, move your chair." (Laughter) So, some years later I was doing a building, a little house on the beach for Norton Simon, and his secretary, who was kind of a hell on wheels type lady, called me and said, "Mr. Simon's sitting at his desk and the water's coming in on his head." And I told her the Frank Lloyd Wright story. RSW: Didn't get a laugh. FG: No. Not now either. (Laughter) But my point is that ... and I call it the "then what?" OK, you solved all the problems, you did all the stuff, you made nice, you loved your clients, you loved the city, you're a good guy, you're a good person ... and then what? What do you bring to it? And I think that's what I've always been interested in, is that β which is a personal kind of expression. Bilbao, I think, shows that you can have that kind of personal expression and still touch all the bases that are necessary of fitting into the city. That's what reminded me of it. And I think that's the issue, you know; it's the "then what" that most clients who hire architects β most clients aren't hiring architects for that. They're hiring them to get it done, get it on budget, be polite, and they're missing out on the real value of an architect. RSW: At a certain point a number of years ago, people β when Michael Graves was a fashion, before teapots ... FG: I did a teapot and nobody bought it. (Laughter) RSW: Did it leak? FG: No. (Laughter) RSW: ... people wanted a Michael Graves building. Is that a curse, that people want a Bilbao building? FG: Yeah. Since Bilbao opened, which is now four, five years, both Krens and I have been called with at least 100 opportunities β China, Brazil, other parts of Spain β to come in and do the Bilbao effect. And I've met with some of these people. Usually I say no right away, but some of them come with pedigree and they sound well-intentioned and they get you for at least one or two meetings. In one case, I flew all the way to Malaga with a team because the thing was signed with seals and various very official seals from the city, and that they wanted me to come and do a building in their port. I asked them what kind of building it was. "When you get here we'll explain it." Blah, blah, blah. So four of us went. And they took us β they put us up in a great hotel and we were looking over the bay, and then they took us in a boat out in the water and showed us all these sights in the harbor. Each one was more beautiful than the other. And then we were going to have lunch with the mayor and we were going to have dinner with the most important people in Malaga. Just before going to lunch with the mayor, we went to the harbor commissioner. It was a table as long as this carpet and the harbor commissioner was here, and I was here, and my guys. We sat down, and we had a drink of water and everybody was quiet. And the guy looked at me and said, "Now what can I do for you, Mr. Gehry?" (Laughter) RSW: Oh, my God. FG: So, I got up. I said to my team, "Let's get out of here." We stood up, we walked out. They followed β the guy that dragged us there followed us and he said, "You mean you're not going to have lunch with the mayor?" I said, "Nope." "You're not going to have dinner at all?" They just brought us there to hustle this group, you know, to create a project. And we get a lot of that. Luckily, I'm old enough that I can complain I can't travel. (Laughter) I don't have my own plane yet. RSW: Well, I'm going to wind this up and wind up the meeting because it's been very long. But let me just say a couple words. FG: Can I say something? Are you going to talk about me or you? (Laughter) (Applause) RSW: Once a shit, always a shit! FG: Because I want to get a standing ovation like everybody, so ... RSW: You're going to get one! You're going to get one! (Laughter) I'm going to make it for you! FG: No, no. Wait a minute! (Applause) |
"Tembererana" | {0: 'Guitarist and singer Raul Midon blends flamenco, jazz and R&B to create a category-defying sound. His life story is as inspiring as his musical vision.'} | TED2007 | (Applause) It's really quite an honor to be here tonight, and I'm really glad that I stayed here and listened because I've really been inspired. And I'm going to play some songs for you tonight that are, literally, world premieres. I've been working on my new record and I've never played these songs for anybody except the microphone. This is a song that I wrote about the meaning of technology, which goes perfectly with this gathering. I started thinking about β when I was in college, especially as a blind person, doing a research paper was a major undertaking. You had to go to the library, see if you could get them to find the books for you, you know, footnotes and all that. Now you can just go on Google. Just look it up. I wish I had that when I was in college. Anyway, this is a song about: we have all this, but what are we going to do with it? It's called "All the Answers." β« What is the weather in Cincinnati? β« β« What is the time in Tokyo? β« β« Who is this little child's daddy? β« β« And who the hell needs to know? β« β« Why do memories of you linger β« β« when I'm trying to reach my goal? β« β« And why must I move my fingers β« β« to the music in my soul? β« β« I don't know. β« β« I don't have to know. β« β« 'Cause here I go ... β« β« and I got all the answers β« β« right here in my hand. β« β« And I got all the answers β« β« and I don't have to understand β« β« 'cause I got all the answers. β« β« Think I'll rummage through the century β« β« while I listen to the sea. β« β« Oh, it's good to be so free, β« β« so free. β« β« Who was mayor of Chicago β« β« back in 1964? β« β« And why did Shakespeare create Iago β« β« to tear apart a love so pure? β« β« How can my dreams be so vivid β« β« in a psychosonic way? β« β« Why must I become so livid β« β« about the news I hear today? β« β« I don't know. β« β« I don't have to know. β« β« And here I go ... β« β« 'cause I got all the answers β« β« right here in my hand. β« β« And I got all the answers. β« β« See, I don't have to understand β« β« 'cause I got all the answers. β« β« I think I'll browse on through β« β« the tabloid news β« β« while I sip my tea. β« β« Mm, it's good to be so free. β« (Trumpet sounds) β« I never ever have to be alone. β« β« I can do it all right here in my home. β« β« Yeah, mm-hmm ... β« β« Everything that's ever been known, β« β« I can punch it up right here on my phone. β« β« Freedom train, coming soon β« β« right here in my living room β« β« from Baton Rouge to Saskatoon β« β« and all points in between. β« β« 'Cause I got all the answers β« β« right here on my screen. β« β« And I got all the answers, yeah. β« β« I got every book and magazine. β« β« I got all, I got all, I got all ... β« β« I got all the answers, β« β« all the answers, oh yeah. β« β« Uh-huh ... β« β« But I tell you what I'm going to do: β« β« I'm going to find the capitol of Peru β« β« or the latitude of Kathmandu. β« β« I'm gonna Google it β« β« 'cause everybody's doing it. β« β« And then I'll rummage through the century. β« β« I got all, I got all, I got all ... β« β« I got all the answers. β« β« Yeah, yeah β« β« I got all the answers. β« (Applause) Thank you. Whew! It's a miracle I didn't make any mistakes on that song. That's the first time I've ever played it. (Applause) It's a "feel the fear and do it anyway" kind of thing. This next song is a song that started out as a dream β a childhood dream. It was one of the titles that I was sort of thinking about calling my record, except there's a couple of problems. One thing is, it's unpronounceable. And it's a made-up word. It's called "Tembererana." And the song is based on what I think was my first childhood attempts to think about invisible forces. So "tembererana" was these dreams, in which I would be running away from bad feelings β is the only way I can put it. So this is called "Tembererana." It's based on an Argentinian rhythm called "carnivalito." β« A dream within a dream, β« β« a world within a world, β« β« the sound of a primal scream β« β« travels out across the land. β« β« Images flickering, β« β« the sound of the war machine, β« β« a procession of limousines β« β« travels slowly across the land. β« β« Another child could use a hand. β« β« Reaching out from within β« β« tembererana, hey, tembererana ... β« β« Annihilation moves. β« β« The earth is an open tomb. β« β« The sound of the final boom β« β« rumbles fiercely across the land. β« β« Fear, you're the enemy. β« β« Obliterating all but thee. β« β« You see what you want to see. β« β« Before I'm blinded, I will toast β« β« the shade of power that I love most, β« β« the power of creation. β« β« Tembererana, hey, tembererana ... β« β« Da, da, da, da β« β« Da, da, da, da, da, da, da β« β« As a child, alone and afraid, β« β« escaping the impressions every feeling made, β« β« I would run, run away β« β« into a world where the good was the aim of the game β« β« and the sum of invisible power β« β« had a name. β« β« It's the same name. β« β« Tembererana, hey, tembererana ... β« β« Da, da, da, da, da, da, da β« β« Tembere, tembere, tembere, tembererana β« β« Tembere, tembere, tembere, tembererana, hey β« β« Tembererana, hey β« β« Tembererana ... β« (Applause) |
Rebuilding a neighborhood with beauty, dignity, hope | {0: "As a Pittsburgh youth besieged by racism in the crumbling remains of the steel economy, Bill Strickland should have been one of the Rust Belt's casualties. Instead, he discovered the potter's wheel, and the transforming power of fountains, irrepressible dreams, and the slide show."} | TED2002 | It's a great honor to be here with you. The good news is I'm very aware of my responsibilities to get you out of here because I'm the only thing standing between you and the bar. (Laughter) And the good news is I don't have a prepared speech, but I have a box of slides. I have some pictures that represent my life and what I do for a living. I've learned through experience that people remember pictures long after they've forgotten words, and so I hope you'll remember some of the pictures I'm going to share with you for just a few minutes. The whole story really starts with me as a high school kid in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in a tough neighborhood that everybody gave up on for dead. And on a Wednesday afternoon, I was walking down the corridor of my high school kind of minding my own business. And there was this artist teaching, who made a great big old ceramic vessel, and I happened to be looking in the door of the art room β and if you've ever seen clay done, it's magic β and I'd never seen anything like that before in my life. So, I walked in the art room and I said, "What is that?" And he said, "Ceramics. And who are you?" And I said, "I'm Bill Strickland. I want you to teach me that." And he said, "Well, get your homeroom teacher to sign a piece of paper that says you can come here, and I'll teach it to you." And so for the remaining two years of my high school, I cut all my classes. (Laughter) But I had the presence of mind to give the teachers' classes that I cut the pottery that I made, (Laughter) and they gave me passing grades. And that's how I got out of high school. And Mr. Ross said, "You're too smart to die and I don't want it on my conscience, so I'm leaving this school and I'm taking you with me." And he drove me out to the University of Pittsburgh where I filled out a college application and got in on probation. Well, I'm now a trustee of the university, and at my installation ceremony I said, "I'm the guy who came from the neighborhood who got into the place on probation. Don't give up on the poor kids, because you never know what's going to happen to those children in life." What I'm going to show you for a couple of minutes is a facility that I built in the toughest neighborhood in Pittsburgh with the highest crime rate. One is called Bidwell Training Center; it is a vocational school for ex-steel workers and single parents and welfare mothers. You remember we used to make steel in Pittsburgh? Well, we don't make any steel anymore, and the people who used to make the steel are having a very tough time of it. And I rebuild them and give them new life. Manchester Craftsmen's Guild is named after my neighborhood. I was adopted by the Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese during the riots, and he donated a row house. And in that row house I started Manchester Craftsmen's Guild, and I learned very quickly that wherever there are Episcopalians, there's money in very close proximity. (Laughter) And the Bishop adopted me as his kid. And last year I spoke at his memorial service and wished him well in this life. I went out and hired a student of Frank Lloyd Wright, the architect, and I asked him to build me a world class center in the worst neighborhood in Pittsburgh. And my building was a scale model for the Pittsburgh airport. And when you come to Pittsburgh β and you're all invited β you'll be flying into the blown-up version of my building. That's the building. Built in a tough neighborhood where people have been given up for dead. My view is that if you want to involve yourself in the life of people who have been given up on, you have to look like the solution and not the problem. As you can see, it has a fountain in the courtyard. And the reason it has a fountain in the courtyard is I wanted one and I had the checkbook, so I bought one and put it there. (Laughter) And now that I'm giving speeches at conferences like TED, I got put on the board of the Carnegie Museum. At a reception in their courtyard, I noticed that they had a fountain because they think that the people who go to the museum deserve a fountain. Well, I think that welfare mothers and at-risk kids and ex-steel workers deserve a fountain in their life. And so the first thing that you see in my center in the springtime is water that greets you β water is life and water of human possibility β and it sets an attitude and expectation about how you feel about people before you ever give them a speech. So, from that fountain I built this building. As you can see, it has world class art, and it's all my taste because I raised all the money. (Laughter) I said to my boy, "When you raise the money, we'll put your taste on the wall." That we have quilts and clay and calligraphy and everywhere your eye turns, there's something beautiful looking back at you, that's deliberate. That's intentional. In my view, it is this kind of world that can redeem the soul of poor people. We also created a boardroom, and I hired a Japanese cabinetmaker from Kyoto, Japan, and commissioned him to do 60 pieces of furniture for our building. We have since spun him off into his own business. He's making a ton of money doing custom furniture for rich people. And I got 60 pieces out of it for my school because I felt that welfare moms and ex-steel workers and single parents deserved to come to a school where there was handcrafted furniture that greeted them every day. Because it sets a tone and an attitude about how you feel about people long before you give them the speech. We even have flowers in the hallway, and they're not plastic. Those are real and they're in my building every day. And now that I've given lots of speeches, we had a bunch of high school principals come and see me, and they said, "Mr. Strickland, what an extraordinary story and what a great school. And we were particularly touched by the flowers and we were curious as to how the flowers got there." I said, "Well, I got in my car and I went out to the greenhouse and I bought them and I brought them back and I put them there." You don't need a task force or a study group to buy flowers for your kids. What you need to know is that the children and the adults deserve flowers in their life. The cost is incidental but the gesture is huge. And so in my building, which is full of sunlight and full of flowers, we believe in hope and human possibilities. That happens to be at Christmas time. And so the next thing you'll see is a million dollar kitchen that was built by the Heinz company β you've heard of them? They did all right in the ketchup business. And I happen to know that company pretty well because John Heinz, who was our U.S. senator β who was tragically killed in a plane accident β he had heard about my desire to build a new building, because I had a cardboard box and I put it in a garbage bag and I walking all over Pittsburgh trying to raise money for this site. And he called me into his office β which is the equivalent of going to see the Wizard of Oz (Laughter) β and John Heinz had 600 million dollars, and at the time I had about 60 cents. And he said, "But we've heard about you. We've heard about your work with the kids and the ex-steel workers, and we're inclined to want to support your desire to build a new building. And you could do us a great service if you would add a culinary program to your program." Because back then, we were building a trades program. He said, "That way we could fulfill our affirmative action goals for the Heinz company." I said, "Senator, I'm reluctant to go into a field that I don't know much about, but I promise you that if you'll support my school, I'll get it built and in a couple of years, I'll come back and weigh out that program that you desire." And Senator Heinz sat very quietly and he said, "Well, what would your reaction be if I said I'd give you a million dollars?" I said, "Senator, it appears that we're going into the food training business." (Laughter) And John Heinz did give me a million bucks. And most importantly, he loaned me the head of research for the Heinz company. And we kind of borrowed the curriculum from the Culinary Institute of America, which in their mind is kind of the Harvard of cooking schools, and we created a gourmet cooks program for welfare mothers in this million dollar kitchen in the middle of the inner city. And we've never looked back. I would like to show you now some of the food that these welfare mothers do in this million dollar kitchen. That happens to be our cafeteria line. That's puff pastry day. Why? Because the students made puff pastry and that's what the school ate every day. But the concept was that I wanted to take the stigma out of food. That good food's not for rich people β good food's for everybody on the planet, and there's no excuse why we all can't be eating it. So at my school, we subsidize a gourmet lunch program for welfare mothers in the middle of the inner city because we've discovered that it's good for their stomachs, but it's better for their heads. Because I wanted to let them know every day of their life that they have value at this place I call my center. We have students who sit together, black kids and white kids, and what we've discovered is you can solve the race problem by creating a world class environment, because people will have a tendency to show you world class behavior if you treat them in that way. These are examples of the food that welfare mothers are doing after six months in the training program. No sophistication, no class, no dignity, no history. What we've discovered is the only thing wrong with poor people is they don't have any money, which happens to be a curable condition. It's all in the way that you think about people that often determines their behavior. That was done by a student after seven months in the program, done by a very brilliant young woman who was taught by our pastry chef. I've actually eaten seven of those baskets and they're very good. (Laughter) They have no calories. That's our dining room. It looks like your average high school cafeteria in your average town in America. But this is my view of how students ought to be treated, particularly once they have been pushed aside. We train pharmaceutical technicians for the pharmacy industry, we train medical technicians for the medical industry, and we train chemical technicians for companies like Bayer and Calgon Carbon and Fisher Scientific and Exxon. And I will guarantee you that if you come to my center in Pittsburgh β and you're all invited β you'll see welfare mothers doing analytical chemistry with logarithmic calculators 10 months from enrolling in the program. There is absolutely no reason why poor people can't learn world class technology. What we've discovered is you have to give them flowers and sunlight and food and expectations and Herbie's music, and you can cure a spiritual cancer every time. We train corporate travel agents for the travel industry. We even teach people how to read. The kid with the red stripe was in the program two years ago β he's now an instructor. And I have children with high school diplomas that they can't read. And so you must ask yourself the question: how is it possible in the 21st century that we graduate children from schools who can't read the diplomas that they have in their hands? The reason is that the system gets reimbursed for the kids they spit out the other end, not the children who read. I can take these children and in 20 weeks, demonstrated aptitude; I can get them high school equivalent. No big deal. That's our library with more handcrafted furniture. And this is the arts program I started in 1968. Remember I'm the black kid from the '60s who got his life saved with ceramics. Well, I went out and decided to reproduce my experience with other kids in the neighborhood, the theory being if you get kids flowers and you give them food and you give them sunshine and enthusiasm, you can bring them right back to life. I have 400 kids from the Pittsburgh public school system that come to me every day of the week for arts education. And these are children who are flunking out of public school. And last year I put 88 percent of those kids in college and I've averaged over 80 percent for 15 years. We've made a fascinating discovery: there's nothing wrong with the kids that affection and sunshine and food and enthusiasm and Herbie's music can't cure. For that I won a big old plaque β Man of the Year in Education. I beat out all the Ph.D.'s because I figured that if you treat children like human beings, it increases the likelihood they're going to behave that way. And why we can't institute that policy in every school and in every city and every town remains a mystery to me. Let me show you what these people do. We have ceramics and photography and computer imaging. And these are all kids with no artistic ability, no talent, no imagination. And we bring in the world's greatest artists β Gordon Parks has been there, Chester Higgins has been there β and what we've learned is that the children will become like the people who teach them. In fact, I brought in a mosaic artist from the Vatican, an African-American woman who had studied the old Vatican mosaic techniques, and let me show you what they did with the work. These were children who the whole world had given up on, who were flunking out of public school, and that's what they're capable of doing with affection and sunlight and food and good music and confidence. We teach photography. And these are examples of some of the kids' work. That boy won a four-year scholarship on the strength of that photograph. This is our gallery. We have a world class gallery because we believe that poor kids need a world class gallery, so I designed this thing. We have smoked salmon at the art openings, we have a formal printed invitation, and I even have figured out a way to get their parents to come. I couldn't buy a parent 15 years ago so I hired a guy who got off on the Jesus big time. He was dragging guys out of bars and saving those lives for the Lord. And I said, "Bill, I want to hire you, man. You have to tone down the Jesus stuff a little bit, but keep the enthusiasm. (Laughter) (Applause) I can't get these parents to come to the school." He said, "I'll get them to come to the school." So, he jumped in the van, he went to Miss Jones' house and said, "Miss Jones, I knew you wanted to come to your kid's art opening but you probably didn't have a ride. So, I came to give you a ride." And he got 10 parents and then 20 parents. At the last show that we did, 200 parents showed up and we didn't pick up one parent. Because now it's become socially not acceptable not to show up to support your children at the Manchester Craftsmen's Guild because people think you're bad parents. And there is no statistical difference between the white parents and the black parents. Mothers will go where their children are being celebrated, every time, every town, every city. I wanted you to see this gallery because it's as good as it gets. And by the time I cut these kids loose from high school, they've got four shows on their resume before they apply to college because it's all up here. You have to change the way that people see themselves before you can change their behavior. And it's worked out pretty good up to this day. I even stuck another room on the building, which I'd like to show you. This is brand new. We just got this slide done in time for the TED Conference. I gave this little slide show at a place called the Silicon Valley and I did all right. And the woman came out of the audience, she said, "That was a great story and I was very impressed with your presentation. My only criticism is your computers are getting a little bit old." And I said, "Well, what do you do for a living?" She said, "Well, I work for a company called Hewlett-Packard." And I said, "You're in the computer business, is that right?" She said, "Yes, sir." And I said, "Well, there's an easy solution to that problem." Well, I'm very pleased to announce to you that HP and a furniture company called Steelcase have adopted us as a demonstration model for all of their technology and all their furniture for the United States of America. And that's the room that's initiating the relationship. We got it just done in time to show you, so it's kind of the world debut of our digital imaging center. (Applause) (Music) I only have a couple more slides, and this is where the story gets kind of interesting. So, I just want you to listen up for a couple more minutes and you'll understand why he's there and I'm here. In 1986, I had the presence of mind to stick a music hall on the north end of the building while I was building it. And a guy named Dizzy Gillespie showed up to play there because he knew this man over here, Marty Ashby. And I stood on that stage with Dizzy Gillespie on sound check on a Wednesday afternoon, and I said, "Dizzy, why would you come to a black-run center in the middle of an industrial park with a high crime rate that doesn't even have a reputation in music?" He said, "Because I heard you built the center and I didn't believe that you did it, and I wanted to see for myself. And now that I have, I want to give you a gift." I said, "You're the gift." He said, "No, sir. You're the gift. And I'm going to allow you to record the concert and I'm going to give you the music, and if you ever choose to sell it, you must sign an agreement that says the money will come back and support the school." And I recorded Dizzy. And he died a year later, but not before telling a fellow named McCoy Tyner what we were doing. And he showed up and said, "Dizzy talking about you all over the country, man, and I want to help you." And then a guy named Wynton Marsalis showed up. Then a bass player named Ray Brown, and a fellow named Stanley Turrentine, and a piano player named Herbie Hancock, and a band called the Count Basie Orchestra, and a fellow named Tito Puente, and a guy named Gary Burton, and Shirley Horn, and Betty Carter, and Dakota Staton and Nancy Wilson all have come to this center in the middle of an industrial park to sold out audiences in the middle of the inner city. And I'm very pleased to tell you that, with their permission, I have now accumulated 600 recordings of the greatest artists in the world, including Joe Williams, who died, but not before his last recording was done at my school. And Joe Williams came up to me and he put his hand on my shoulder and he said, "God's picked you, man, to do this work. And I want my music to be with you." And that worked out all right. When the Basie band came, the band got so excited about the school they voted to give me the rights to the music. And I recorded it and we won something called a Grammy. And like a fool, I didn't go to the ceremony because I didn't think we were going to win. Well, we did win, and our name was literally in lights over Madison Square Garden. Then the U.N. Jazz Orchestra dropped by and we recorded them and got nominated for a second Grammy back to back. So, we've become one of the hot, young jazz recording studios in the United States of America (Laughter) in the middle of the inner city with a high crime rate. That's the place all filled up with Republicans. (Laughter) (Applause) If you'd have dropped a bomb on that room, you'd have wiped out all the money in Pennsylvania because it was all sitting there. Including my mother and father, who lived long enough to see their kid build that building. And there's Dizzy, just like I told you. He was there. And he was there, Tito Puente. And Pat Metheny and Jim Hall were there and they recorded with us. And that was our first recording studio, which was the broom closet. We put the mops in the hallway and re-engineered the thing and that's where we recorded the first Grammy. And this is our new facility, which is all video technology. And that is a room that was built for a woman named Nancy Wilson, who recorded that album at our school last Christmas. And any of you who happened to have been watching Oprah Winfrey on Christmas Day, he was there and Nancy was there singing excerpts from this album, the rights to which she donated to our school. And I can now tell you with absolute certainty that an appearance on Oprah Winfrey will sell 10,000 CDs. (Laughter) We are currently number four on the Billboard Charts, right behind Tony Bennett. And I think we're going to be fine. This was burned out during the riots β this is next to my building β and so I had another cardboard box built and I walked back out in the streets again. And that's the building, and that's the model, and on the right's a high-tech greenhouse and in the middle's the medical technology building. And I'm very pleased to tell you that the building's done. It's also full of anchor tenants at 20 dollars a foot β triple that in the middle of the inner city. And there's the fountain. (Laughter) Every building has a fountain. And the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center are anchor tenants and they took half the building, and we now train medical technicians through all their system. And Mellon Bank's a tenant. And I love them because they pay the rent on time. (Laughter) And as a result of the association, I'm now a director of the Mellon Financial Corporation that bought Dreyfus. And this is in the process of being built as we speak. Multiply that picture times four and you will see the greenhouse that's going to open in October this year because we're going to grow those flowers in the middle of the inner city. And we're going to have high school kids growing Phalaenopsis orchids in the middle of the inner city. And we have a handshake with one of the large retail grocers to sell our orchids in all 240 stores in six states. And our partners are Zuma Canyon Orchids of Malibu, California, who are Hispanic. So, the Hispanics and the black folks have formed a partnership to grow high technology orchids in the middle of the inner city. And I told my United States senator that there was a very high probability that if he could find some funding for this, we would become a left-hand column in the Wall Street Journal, to which he readily agreed. And we got the funding and we open in the fall. And you ought to come and see it β it's going to be a hell of a story. And this is what I want to do when I grow up. (Laughter) The brown building is the one you guys have been looking at and I'll tell you where I made my big mistake. I had a chance to buy this whole industrial park β which is less than 1,000 feet from the riverfront β for four million dollars and I didn't do it. And I built the first building, and guess what happened? I appreciated the real estate values beyond everybody's expectations and the owners of the park turned me down for eight million dollars last year, and said, "Mr. Strickland, you ought to get the Civic Leader of the Year Award because you've appreciated our property values beyond our wildest expectations. Thank you very much for that." The moral of the story is you must be prepared to act on your dreams, just in case they do come true. And finally, there's this picture. This is in a place called San Francisco. And the reason this picture's in here is I did this slide show a couple years ago at a big economics summit, and there was a fellow in the audience who came up to me. He said, "Man, that's a great story. I want one of those." I said, "Well, I'm very flattered. What do you do for a living?" He says, "I run the city of San Francisco. My name's Willie Brown." And so I kind of accepted the flattery and the praise and put it out of my mind. And that weekend, I was going back home and Herbie Hancock was playing our center that night β first time I'd met him. And he walked in and he says, "What is this?" And I said, "Herbie, this is my concept of a training center for poor people." And he said, "As God as my witness, I've had a center like this in my mind for 25 years and you've built it. And now I really want to build one." I said, "Well, where would you build this thing?" He said, "San Francisco." I said, "Any chance you know Willie Brown?" (Laughter) As a matter of fact he did know Willie Brown, and Willie Brown and Herbie and I had dinner four years ago, and we started drawing out that center on the tablecloth. And Willie Brown said, "As sure as I'm the mayor of San Francisco, I'm going to build this thing as a legacy to the poor people of this city." And he got me five acres of land on San Francisco Bay and we got an architect and we got a general contractor and we got Herbie on the board, and our friends from HP, and our friends from Steelcase, and our friends from Cisco, and our friends from Wells Fargo and Genentech. And along the way, I met this real short guy at my slide show in the Silicon Valley. He came up to me afterwards, he said, "Man, that's a fabulous story. I want to help you." And I said, "Well, thank you very much for that. What do you do for a living?" He said, "Well, I built a company called eBay." I said, "Well, that's very nice. Thanks very much, and give me your card and sometime we'll talk." I didn't know eBay from that jar of water sitting on that piano, but I had the presence of mind to go back and talk to one of the techie kids at my center. I said, "Hey man, what is eBay?" He said, "Well, that's the electronic commerce network." I said, "Well, I met the guy who built the thing and he left me his card." So, I called him up on the phone and I said, "Mr. Skoll, I've come to have a much deeper appreciation of who you are (Laughter) and I'd like to become your friend." (Laughter) And Jeff and I did become friends, and he's organized a team of people and we're going to build this center. And I went down into the neighborhood called Bayview-Hunters Point, and I said, "The mayor sent me down here to work with you and I want to build a center with you, but I'm not going to build you anything if you don't want it. And all I've got is a box of slides." And so I stood up in front of 200 very angry, very disappointed people on a summer night, and the air conditioner had broken and it was 100 degrees outside, and I started showing these pictures. And after about 10 pictures they all settled down. And I ran the story and I said, "What do you think?" And in the back of the room, a woman stood up and she said, "In 35 years of living in this God forsaken place, you're the only person that's come down here and treated us with dignity. I'm going with you, man." And she turned that audience around on a pin. And I promised these people that I was going to build this thing, and we're going to build it all right. And I think we can get in the ground this year as the first replication of the center in Pittsburgh. But I met a guy named Quincy Jones along the way and I showed him the box of slides. And Quincy said, "I want to help you, man. Let's do one in L.A." And so he's assembled a group of people. And I've fallen in love with him, as I have with Herbie and with his music. And Quincy said, "Where did the idea for centers like this come from?" And I said, "It came from your music, man. Because Mr. Ross used to bring in your albums when I was 16 years old in the pottery class, when the world was all dark, and your music got me to the sunlight." And I said, "If I can follow that music, I'll get out into the sunlight and I'll be OK. And if that's not true, how did I get here?" I want you all to know that I think the world is a place that's worth living. I believe in you. I believe in your hopes and your dreams, I believe in your intelligence and I believe in your enthusiasm. And I'm tired of living like this, going into town after town with people standing around on corners with holes where eyes used to be, their spirits damaged. We won't make it as a country unless we can turn this thing around. In Pennsylvania it costs 60,000 dollars to keep people in jail, most of whom look like me. It's 40,000 dollars to build the University of Pittsburgh Medical School. It's 20,000 dollars cheaper to build a medical school than to keep people in jail. Do the math β it will never work. I am banking on you and I'm banking on guys like Herbie and Quincy and Hackett and Richard and very decent people who still believe in something. And I want to do this in my lifetime, in every city and in every town. And I don't think I'm crazy. I think we can get home on this thing and I think we can build these all over the country for less money than we're spending on prisons. And I believe we can turn this whole story around to one of celebration and one of hope. In my business it's very difficult work. You're always fighting upstream like a salmon β never enough money, too much need β and so there is a tendency to have an occupational depression that accompanies my work. And so I've figured out, over time, the solution to the depression: you make a friend in every town and you'll never be lonely. And my hope is that I've made a few here tonight. And thanks for listening to what I had to say. (Applause) |
The life-long learner | {0: 'Bernie Dunlap is a true polymath, whose talents span poetry, opera, ballet, literature and administration. He is the president of South Carolinaβs Wofford College.'} | TED2007 | "JΓ³ napot, pacΓ‘k" Which, as somebody here must surely know, means "What's up, guys?" in Magyar, that peculiar non-Indo-European language spoken by Hungarians for which, given the fact that cognitive diversity is at least as threatened as biodiversity on this planet, few would have imagined much of a future even a century or two ago. But there it is: "JΓ³ napot, pacΓ‘k" I said somebody here must surely know, because despite the fact that there aren't that many Hungarians to begin with, and the further fact that, so far as I know, there's not a drop of Hungarian blood in my veins, at every critical juncture of my life there has been a Hungarian friend or mentor there beside me. I even have dreams that take place in landscapes I recognize as the landscapes of Hungarian films, especially the early movies of Miklos Jancso. So, how do I explain this mysterious affinity? Maybe it's because my native state of South Carolina, which is not much smaller than present-day Hungary, once imagined a future for itself as an independent country. And as a consequence of that presumption, my hometown was burned to the ground by an invading army, an experience that has befallen many a Hungarian town and village throughout its long and troubled history. Or maybe it's because when I was a teenager back in the '50s, my uncle Henry β having denounced the Ku Klux Klan and been bombed for his trouble and had crosses burned in his yard, living under death threat β took his wife and children to Massachusetts for safety and went back to South Carolina to face down the Klan alone. That was a very Hungarian thing to do, as anyone will attest who remembers 1956. And of course, from time to time Hungarians have invented their own equivalent of the Klan. Well, it seems to me that this Hungarian presence in my life is difficult to account for, but ultimately I ascribe it to an admiration for people with a complex moral awareness, with a heritage of guilt and defeat matched by defiance and bravado. It's not a typical mindset for most Americans, but it is perforce typical of virtually all Hungarians. So, "JΓ³ napot, pacΓ‘k!" I went back to South Carolina after some 15 years amid the alien corn at the tail end of the 1960s, with the reckless condescension of that era thinking I would save my people. Never mind the fact that they were slow to acknowledge they needed saving. I labored in that vineyard for a quarter century before making my way to a little kingdom of the just in upstate South Carolina, a Methodist-affiliated institution of higher learning called Wofford College. I knew nothing about Wofford and even less about Methodism, but I was reassured on the first day that I taught at Wofford College to find, among the auditors in my classroom, a 90-year-old Hungarian, surrounded by a bevy of middle-aged European women who seemed to function as an entourage of Rhinemaidens. His name was Sandor Teszler. He was a puckish widower whose wife and children were dead and whose grandchildren lived far away. In appearance, he resembled Mahatma Gandhi, minus the loincloth, plus orthopedic boots. He had been born in 1903 in the provinces of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, in what later would become Yugoslavia. He was ostracized as a child, not because he was a Jew β his parents weren't very religious anyhow β but because he had been born with two club feet, a condition which, in those days, required institutionalization and a succession of painful operations between the ages of one and 11. He went to the commercial business high school as a young man in Budapest, and there he was as smart as he was modest and he enjoyed a considerable success. And after graduation when he went into textile engineering, the success continued. He built one plant after another. He married and had two sons. He had friends in high places who assured him that he was of great value to the economy. Once, as he had left instructions to have done, he was summoned in the middle of the night by the night watchman at one of his plants. The night watchman had caught an employee who was stealing socks β it was a hosiery mill, and he simply backed a truck up to the loading dock and was shoveling in mountains of socks. Mr. Teszler went down to the plant and confronted the thief and said, "But why do you steal from me? If you need money you have only to ask." The night watchman, seeing how things were going and waxing indignant, said, "Well, we're going to call the police, aren't we?" But Mr. Teszler answered, "No, that will not be necessary. He will not steal from us again." Well, maybe he was too trusting, because he stayed where he was long after the Nazi Anschluss in Austria and even after the arrests and deportations began in Budapest. He took the simple precaution of having cyanide capsules placed in lockets that could be worn about the necks of himself and his family. And then one day, it happened: he and his family were arrested and they were taken to a death house on the Danube. In those early days of the Final Solution, it was handcrafted brutality; people were beaten to death and their bodies tossed into the river. But none who entered that death house had ever come out alive. And in a twist you would not believe in a Steven Spielberg film β the Gauleiter who was overseeing this brutal beating was the very same thief who had stolen socks from Mr. Teszler's hosiery mill. It was a brutal beating. And midway through that brutality, one of Mr. Teszler's sons, Andrew, looked up and said, "Is it time to take the capsule now, Papa?" And the Gauleiter, who afterwards vanishes from this story, leaned down and whispered into Mr. Teszler's ear, "No, do not take the capsule. Help is on the way." And then resumed the beating. But help was on the way, and shortly afterwards a car arrived from the Swiss Embassy. They were spirited to safety. They were reclassified as Yugoslav citizens and they managed to stay one step ahead of their pursuers for the duration of the War, surviving burnings and bombings and, at the end of the War, arrest by the Soviets. Probably, Mr. Teszler had gotten some money into Swiss bank accounts because he managed to take his family first to Great Britain, then to Long Island and then to the center of the textile industry in the American South. Which, as chance would have it, was Spartanburg, South Carolina, the location of Wofford College. And there, Mr. Teszler began all over again and once again achieved immense success, especially after he invented the process for manufacturing a new fabric called double-knit. And then in the late 1950s, in the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education, when the Klan was resurgent all over the South, Mr. Teszler said, "I have heard this talk before." And he called his top assistant to him and asked, "Where would you say, in this region, racism is most virulent?" "Well, I don't rightly know, Mr. Teszler. I reckon that would be Kings Mountain." "Good. Buy us some land in Kings Mountain and announce we are going to build a major plant there." The man did as he was told, and shortly afterwards, Mr. Teszler received a visit from the white mayor of Kings Mountain. Now, you should know that at that time, the textile industry in the South was notoriously segregated. The white mayor visited Mr. Teszler and said, "Mr. Teszler, I trust youβre going to be hiring a lot of white workers." Mr. Teszler told him, "You bring me the best workers that you can find, and if they are good enough, I will hire them." He also received a visit from the leader of the black community, a minister, who said, "Mr. Teszler, I sure hope you're going to hire some black workers for this new plant of yours." He got the same answer: "You bring the best workers that you can find, and if they are good enough, I will hire them." As it happens, the black minister did his job better than the white mayor, but that's neither here or there. Mr. Teszler hired 16 men: eight white, eight black. They were to be his seed group, his future foremen. He had installed the heavy equipment for his new process in an abandoned store in the vicinity of Kings Mountain, and for two months these 16 men would live and work together, mastering the new process. He gathered them together after an initial tour of that facility and he asked if there were any questions. There was hemming and hawing and shuffling of feet, and then one of the white workers stepped forward and said, "Well, yeah. Weβve looked at this place and there's only one place to sleep, there's only one place to eat, there's only one bathroom, there's only one water fountain. Is this plant going to be integrated or what?" Mr. Teszler said, "You are being paid twice the wages of any other textile workers in this region and this is how we do business. Do you have any other questions?" "No, I reckon I don't." And two months later when the main plant opened and hundreds of new workers, white and black, poured in to see the facility for the first time, they were met by the 16 foremen, white and black, standing shoulder to shoulder. They toured the facility and were asked if there were any questions, and inevitably the same question arose: "Is this plant integrated or what?" And one of the white foremen stepped forward and said, "You are being paid twice the wages of any other workers in this industry in this region and this is how we do business. Do you have any other questions?" And there were none. In one fell swoop, Mr. Teszler had integrated the textile industry in that part of the South. It was an achievement worthy of Mahatma Gandhi, conducted with the shrewdness of a lawyer and the idealism of a saint. In his eighties, Mr. Teszler, having retired from the textile industry, adopted Wofford College, auditing courses every semester, and because he had a tendency to kiss anything that moved, becoming affectionately known as "Opi" β which is Magyar for grandfather β by all and sundry. Before I got there, the library of the college had been named for Mr. Teszler, and after I arrived in 1993, the faculty decided to honor itself by naming Mr. Teszler Professor of the College β partly because at that point he had already taken all of the courses in the catalog, but mainly because he was so conspicuously wiser than any one of us. To me, it was immensely reassuring that the presiding spirit of this little Methodist college in upstate South Carolina was a Holocaust survivor from Central Europe. Wise he was, indeed, but he also had a wonderful sense of humor. And once for an interdisciplinary class, I was screening the opening segment of Ingmar Bergman's "The Seventh Seal." As the medieval knight Antonius Block returns from the wild goose chase of the Crusades and arrives on the rocky shore of Sweden, only to find the specter of death waiting for him, Mr. Teszler sat in the dark with his fellow students. And as death opened his cloak to embrace the knight in a ghastly embrace, I heard Mr. Teszler's tremulous voice: "Uh oh," he said, "This doesn't look so good." (Laughter) But it was music that was his greatest passion, especially opera. And on the first occasion that I visited his house, he gave me honor of deciding what piece of music we would listen to. And I delighted him by rejecting "Cavalleria Rusticana" in favor of Bela Bartok's "Bluebeard's Castle." I love Bartok's music, as did Mr. Teszler, and he had virtually every recording of Bartok's music ever issued. And it was at his house that I heard for the first time Bartok's Third Piano Concerto and learned from Mr. Teszler that it had been composed in nearby Asheville, North Carolina in the last year of the composer's life. He was dying of leukemia and he knew it, and he dedicated this concerto to his wife, Dita, who was herself a concert pianist. And into the slow, second movement, marked "adagio religioso," he incorporated the sounds of birdsong that he heard outside his window in what he knew would be his last spring; he was imagining a future for her in which he would play no part. And clearly this composition is his final statement to her β it was first performed after his death β and through her to the world. And just as clearly, it is saying, "It's okay. It was all so beautiful. Whenever you hear this, I will be there." It was only after Mr. Teszler's death that I learned that the marker on the grave of Bela Bartok in Hartsdale, New York was paid for by Sandor Teszler. "JΓ³ napot, Bela!" Not long before Mr. Teszlerβs own death at the age of 97, he heard me hold forth on human iniquity. I delivered a lecture in which I described history as, on the whole, a tidal wave of human suffering and brutality, and Mr. Teszler came up to me afterwards with gentle reproach and said, "You know, Doctor, human beings are fundamentally good." And I made a vow to myself, then and there, that if this man who had such cause to think otherwise had reached that conclusion, I would not presume to differ until he released me from my vow. And now he's dead, so I'm stuck with my vow. "JΓ³ napot, Sandor!" I thought my skein of Hungarian mentors had come to an end, but almost immediately I met Francis Robicsek, a Hungarian doctor β actually a heart surgeon in Charlotte, North Carolina, then in his late seventies β who had been a pioneer in open-heart surgery, and, tinkering away in his garage behind his house, had invented many of the devices that are standard parts of those procedures. He's also a prodigious art collector, beginning as an intern in Budapest by collecting 16th- and 17th-century Dutch art and Hungarian painting, and when he came to this country moving on to Spanish colonial art, Russian icons and finally Mayan ceramics. He's the author of seven books, six of them on Mayan ceramics. It was he who broke the Mayan codex, enabling scholars to relate the pictographs on Mayan ceramics to the hieroglyphs of the Mayan script. On the occasion of my first visit, we toured his house and we saw hundreds of works of museum quality, and then we paused in front of a closed door and Dr. Robicsek said, with obvious pride, "Now for the piece De resistance." And he opened the door and we walked into a windowless 20-by-20-foot room with shelves from floor to ceiling, and crammed on every shelf his collection of Mayan ceramics. Now, I know absolutely nothing about Mayan ceramics, but I wanted to be as ingratiating as possible so I said, "But Dr. Robicsek, this is absolutely dazzling." "Yes," he said. "That is what the Louvre said. They would not leave me alone until I let them have a piece, but it was not a good one." (Laughter) Well, it occurred to me that I should invite Dr. Robicsek to lecture at Wofford College on β what else? β Leonardo da Vinci. And further, I should invite him to meet my oldest trustee, who had majored in French history at Yale some 70-odd years before and, at 89, still ruled the world's largest privately owned textile empire with an iron hand. His name is Roger Milliken. And Mr. Milliken agreed, and Dr. Robicsek agreed. And Dr. Robicsek visited and delivered the lecture and it was a dazzling success. And afterwards we convened at the President's House with Dr. Robicsek on one hand, Mr. Milliken on the other. And it was only at that moment, as we were sitting down to dinner, that I recognized the enormity of the risk I had created, because to bring these two titans, these two masters of the universe together β it was like introducing Mothra to Godzilla over the skyline of Tokyo. If they didn't like each other, we could all get trampled to death. But they did, they did like each other. They got along famously until the very end of the meal, and then they got into a furious argument. And what they were arguing about was this: whether the second Harry Potter movie was as good as the first. (Laughter) Mr. Milliken said it was not. Dr. Robicsek disagreed. I was still trying to take in the notion that these titans, these masters of the universe, in their spare time watch Harry Potter movies, when Mr. Milliken thought he would win the argument by saying, "You just think it's so good because you didn't read the book." And Dr. Robicsek reeled back in his chair, but quickly gathered his wits, leaned forward and said, "Well, that is true, but I'll bet you went to the movie with a grandchild." "Well, yes, I did," conceded Mr. Milliken. "Aha!" said Dr. Robicsek. "I went to the movie all by myself." (Laughter) (Applause) And I realized, in this moment of revelation, that what these two men were revealing was the secret of their extraordinary success, each in his own right. And it lay precisely in that insatiable curiosity, that irrepressible desire to know, no matter what the subject, no matter what the cost, even at a time when the keepers of the Doomsday Clock are willing to bet even money that the human race won't be around to imagine anything in the year 2100, a scant 93 years from now. "Live each day as if it is your last," said Mahatma Gandhi. "Learn as if you'll live forever." This is what I'm passionate about. It is precisely this. It is this inextinguishable, undaunted appetite for learning and experience, no matter how risible, no matter how esoteric, no matter how seditious it might seem. This defines the imagined futures of our fellow Hungarians β Robicsek, Teszler and Bartok β as it does my own. As it does, I suspect, that of everybody here. To which I need only add, "Ez a mi munkank; es nem is keves." This is our task; we know it will be hard. "Ez a mi munkank; es nem is keves. JΓ³ napot, pacΓ‘k!" (Applause) |
The music wars | {0: 'David Pogue is the personal technology columnist for the <em>New York Times</em> and a tech correspondent for CBS News. He\'s also one of the world\'s bestselling how-to authors, with titles in the For Dummies series and his own line of "Missing Manual" books. '} | TED2007 | Ladies and gentlemen, the history of music and television on the Internet in three minutes. A TED medley β a TEDley. β« It's nine o' clock on a Saturday β« β« The record store's closed for the night β« β« So I fire up the old iTunes music store β« β« And soon I am feelin' all right β« β« I know Steve Jobs can find me a melody β« β« With one dollar pricing that rocks β« β« I can type in the track and get album names back β« β« While still in my PJs and socks β« β« Sell us a song, you're the music man β« β« My iPod's still got 10 gigs to go β« β« Yes, we might prefer more compatibility β« β« But Steve likes to run the whole show β« β« I heard "Desperate Housewives" was great last night β« β« But I had a bad piece of cod β« β« As I threw up my meal, I thought, "It's no big deal" β« β« I'll watch it tonight on my 'Pod β« β« And now all of the networks are joining in β« β« Two bucks a show without ads β« β« It's a business those guys always wanted to try β« β« But only Steve Jobs had the 'nads β« β« They say we're young, don't watch TV β« β« They say the Internet is all we see β« β« But that's not true; they've got it wrong β« β« See, all our shows are just two minutes long β« β« Hey β« β« I got YouTube β« β« I got YouTube β« And now, ladies and gentlemen, a tribute to the Recording Industry Association of America β the RIAA! β« Young man, you were surfin' along β« β« And then, young man, you downloaded a song β« β« And then, dumb man, copied it to your 'Pod β« β« Then a phone call came to tell you ... β« β« You've just been sued by the R-I-A-A β« β« You've just been screwed by the R-I-A-A β« β« Their attorneys say you committed a crime β« β« And there'd better not be a next time β« β« They've lost their minds at the R-I-A-A β« β« Justice is blind at the R-I-A-A β« β« You're depriving the bands β« β« You are learning to steal β« β« You can't do whatever you feel β« β« CD sales have dropped every year β« β« They're not greedy, they're just quaking with fear β« β« Yes indeedy, what if their end is near β« β« And we download all our music β« β« Yeah, that would piss off the R-I-A-A β« β« No plastic discs from the R-I-A-A β« β« What a way to make friends β« β« It's a plan that can't fail β« β« All your customers off to jail β« β« Who'll be next for the R-I-A-A? β« β« What else is vexing the R-I-A-A? β« β« Maybe whistling a tune β« β« Maybe humming along β« β« Maybe mocking 'em in a song β« |
An unusual glimpse at celebrity | {0: "Why can't you make it through the checkout line without flipping through page after page of pregnant celebs in Us magazine? Alison Jackson knows why. And she photographs the people you think you recognize doing what you really want to see."} | TEDGlobal 2005 | I'm a contemporary artist and I show in art galleries and museums. I show a number of photographs and films, but I also make television programs, books and some advertising, all with the same concept. And it's about our fixation with celebrity and celebrity culture, and the importance of the image: celebrity is born of photography. I'm going to start with how I started with this concept seven years ago, when Princess Diana died. There was a sort of a standstill in Britain the moment of her death, and people decided to mourn her death in a sort of mass way. I was fascinated by this phenomenon, so I wondered: could one erase the image of Diana, actually quite crudely and physically? So, I got a gun and started to shoot at the image of Diana, but I couldn't erase this from my memory and certainly it was not being erased from the public psyche. Momentum was being built. The press wrote about her death in rather, I felt, pornographic ways β like, "Which bit of artery left which bit of body?" and "How did she die in the back of the car?" β and I was intrigued by this sort of mass voyeurism, so I made these rather gory images. I then went on wondering whether I could actually replace her image, so I got a look-alike of Diana and posed her in the right positions and angles and created something that was in, or existed in, the public imagination. So people were wondering: was she going to marry Dodi? Was she in love with him? Was she pregnant? Did she want his baby? Was she pregnant when she died? So I created this image of Diana, Dodi and their imaginary mixed-race child and this image came out, which caused a huge public outcry at the time. I then went on to make more comments on the media and press imagery, so I started making reference to media imagery β made it grainy, shot through doorways and so on and so forth β to titillate the public or the viewer further in terms of trying to make the viewer more aware of their own voyeurism. So, this is an image of Diana looking at Camilla kissing her husband, and this was a sequence of images. And this gets shown in art galleries like this, as a sequence. And similarly with the Di-Dodian baby imagery β this is another art gallery installation. I'm particularly interested in how you can't rely on your own perception. This is Jane Smith and Jo Bloggs, for instance, but you think it's Camilla and the Queen, and I'm fascinated how what you think is real isn't necessarily real. And the camera can lie, and it makes it very, very easy with the mass bombardment of imagery to tell untruths. So, I continued to work on this project of how photography seduces us and is more interesting to look at than the actual real subject matter. And at the same time, it removes us from the real subject matter, and this acts as a sort of titillating thing. So, the photograph becomes this teaser and incites desire and voyeurism; what you can't have, you want more. In the photograph, the real subject doesn't exist so it makes you want that person more. And that is the way, I think, that celebrity magazines work now: the more pictures you see of these celebrities, the more you feel you know them, but you don't know them and you want to know them further. Of course, the Queen goes to her stud often to watch her horses ... watch her horses. (Laughter). And then I was sort of making imagery. In England there's an expression: "you can't imagine the Queen on the loo." So I'm trying to penetrate that. Well, here is the image. All this imagery was creating a lot of fuss and I was cited as a disgusting artist. The press were writing about this, giving full pages about how terrible this was. Which I found very interesting that it was going full cycle: I was making comments about the press and about how we know facts and information only by media β because we don't know the real people; very few of us know the real people β but it was going back into the press and they were publicizing, effectively, my filthy work. So, these are broadsheets, tabloids, debates were being had all about this work, films were being banned before people had actually had the look at the work, politicians were getting involved β all sorts of things β great headlines. Then suddenly, it started to get on front pages. I was being asked and paid to do front covers. Suddenly I was becoming sort of acceptable, which I found also fascinating. How one moment β it was disgusting β journalists would lie to me to get a story or a photograph of me, saying my work was wonderful, and the next minute there were terrible headlines about me. But then this changed suddenly. I then started to work for magazines and newspapers. This was, for example, an image that went into Tatler. This was another newspaper image. It was an April fool actually, and to this day some people think it's real. I was sitting next to someone at dinner the other day, and they were saying there's this great image of the Queen sitting outside William Hill. They thought it was real. I was exploring, at the time, the hyperbole of icons β and Diana and Marilyn β and the importance of celebrity in our lives. How they wheedle their way into the collective psyche without us even knowing, and how that should happen. I explored with actually dressing up as the celebrities myself. There's me as Diana β I look like the mass murderer Myra Hindley, I think, in this one. (Laughter). And me as the Queen. I then continued on to make a whole body of work about Marilyn β the biggest icon of all β and trying to titillate by shooting through doorways and shutters and so on and so forth, and only showing certain angles to create a reality that, obviously, is completely constructed. This is the look-alike, so the crafting elements of this is completely enormous. She looks nothing like Marilyn, but by the time we've made her up and put wigs and makeup on, she looks exactly like Marilyn, to the extent that her husband couldn't recognize her β or recognize this look-alike β in these photographs, which I find quite interesting. So, all this work is getting shown in art galleries. Then I made a book. I was also making a TV series for the BBC at the time. Stills from the TV series went into this book. But there was a real legal problem because it looks real, but how do you get over that? Because obviously it's making a comment about our culture right now: that we can't tell what's real. How do we know when we're looking at something whether it's real or not? So, from my point of view, it's important to publish it, but at the same time it does cause a confusion β intentional on my behalf, but problematic for any outlet that I'm working with. So a big disclaimer is put on everything that I do, and I made narratives about all the European or Brit celebrities and comments about our public figures. You know, what does Tony Blair get up to in private with his fashion guru? And also dealing with the perceptions that are put about Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, the links that were put about pre-Iraq war. And what is going to happen to the monarchy? Because obviously the British public, I think, would prefer William to Charles on the throne. And it's that wish, or that desire, that I suppose I'm dealing with in my work. I'm not really interested in the celebrity themselves. I'm interested in the perception of the celebrity. And with some look-alikes, they are so good you don't know whether they're real or not. I did an advertising campaign for Schweppes, which is Coca-Cola, and so that was very interesting in terms of the legalities. It's highly commercial. But it was a difficulty for me β because this is my artwork; should I do advertising? β at the time. So I made sure the work was not compromised in any way and that the integrity of the work remained the same. But the meanings changed in the sense that with the logo on, you're closing all the lines of interpretation down to selling a product and that's all you're doing. When you take the logo off, you're opening up the interpretations and making the work inconclusive, opposed to conclusive when you are advertising. This image is quite interesting, actually, because I think we made it three years ago. And it's Camilla in her wedding dress, which, again, nearly got re-used now, recently prior to her wedding. Tony Blair and Cherie. And again, the legalities β we had to be very careful. It's obviously a very big commercial company, and so this little, "Shh β it's not really them," was put on the side of the imagery. And Margaret Thatcher visiting Jeffery Archer in jail. I then was asked by Selfridges to do a series of windows for them, so I built a sauna bath in one of their windows and created little scenes β live scenes with look-alikes inside the windows, and the windows were all steamed up. So, it's Tony Blair reading and practicing his speech; I've got them doing yoga inside there with Carole Caplin; Sven making out with Ulrika Jonsson, who he was having an affair with at that time. This was a huge success for them because the imagery got shown in the press the day after in every single newspaper, broadsheets and tabloids. It was a bit of a road stopper, which was problematic because the police kept on trying to clear away the crowds, but huge fun β it was great for me to do a performance. Also, people were taking photographs of this, so it was being texted around the world extremely quickly, all this imagery. And the press were interviewing, and I was signing my book. (Laughter). Further imagery. I'm making a new book now with Taschen that I'm working on really for a sort of global market β my previous book was only for the U.K. market β that I suppose it could be called humorous. I suppose I come from a sort of non-humorous background with serious intent, and then suddenly my work is funny. And I think it doesn't really matter that my work is considered humorous, in a way; I think it's a way in for me to deal with the importance of imagery and how we read all our information through imagery. It's an extremely fast way of getting information. It's extremely difficult if it's constructed correctly, and there are techniques of constructing iconic imagery. This image, for example, is sort of spot-on because it exactly sums up what Elton may be doing in private, and also what might be happening with Saddam Hussein, and George Bush reading the Koran upside-down. For example, George Bush target practice β shooting at Bin Laden and Michael Moore. And then you change the photograph he's shooting at, and it suddenly becomes rather grim and maybe less accessible. (Laughter). Tony Blair being used as a mounting block, and Rumsfeld and Bush laughing with some Abu Ghraib photos behind, and the seriousness, or the intellect, of Bush. And also, commenting on the behind the scenes β well, as we know now β what goes on in prisons. And in fact, George Bush and Tony Blair are having great fun during all of this. And really commenting, you know, based on the perception we have of the celebrities. What Jack Nicholson might be up to in his celebrity life, and the fact that he tried to ... he had a bit of road rage and golf-clubbed a driver the other day. I mean, it's extremely difficult to find these look-alikes, so I'm constantly going up to people in the street and trying to ask people to come and be in one of my photographs or films. And sometimes asking the real celebrity, mistaking them for someone who just looks like the real person, which is highly embarrassing. (Laughter). I've also been working with The Guardian on a topical basis β a page a week in their newspaper β which has been very interesting, working topically. So, Jamie Oliver and school dinners; Bush and Blair having difficulty getting alongside Muslim culture; the whole of the hunting issue, and the royal family refusing to stop hunting; and the tsunami issues; and obviously Harry; Blair's views on Gordon Brown, which I find very interesting; Condi and Bush. This image I've decided to show having a reservation about it. I made it a year ago. And just how meanings change, and there were a terrible thing that has happened, but the fear is lurking around in our minds prior to that. That's why this image was made one year ago, and what it means today. So, I'll leave you with these clips to have a look. (Music) Chris Anderson: Thank you. |
TED's nonprofit transition | {0: 'After a long career in journalism and publishing, Chris Anderson became the curator of the TED Conference in 2002 and has developed it as a platform for identifying and disseminating ideas worth spreading.'} | TED2002 | This is your conference, and I think you have a right to know a little bit right now, in this transition period, about this guy who's going to be looking after it for you for a bit. So, I'm just going to grab a chair here. Two years ago at TED, I think β I've come to this conclusion β I think I may have been suffering from a strange delusion. I think that I may have believed unconsciously, then, that I was kind of a business hero. I had this company that I'd spent 15 years building. It's called Future; it was a magazine publishing company. It had recently gone public and the market said that it was apparently worth two billion dollars, a number I didn't really understand. A magazine I'd recently launched called Business 2.0 was fatter than a telephone directory, busy pumping hot air into the bubble. (Laughter) And I was the 40 percent owner of a dotcom that was about to go public and no doubt be worth billions more. And all this had come from nothing. Fifteen years earlier, I was a science journalist who people just laughed at when I said, "I really would like to start my own computer magazine." And 15 years later, there are 100 of them and 2,000 people on staff and it was just such heady times. The date was February 2000. I thought the little graph of my business life that kind of looked a bit like Moore's Law β ever upward and to the right β it was going to go on forever. I mean, it had to. Right? I was in for quite a surprise. The dotcom, ironically called Snowball, was the very last consumer web company to go public the next month before NASDAQ exploded, and I entered 18 months of business hell. I watched everything that I'd built crumbling, and it looked like all this stuff was going to die and 15 years work would have come for nothing. And it was gut wrenching. It took eight years of blood, sweat and tears to reach 350 employees, something which I was very proud of in the business. February 2001 β in one day we laid off 350 people, and before the bloodshed was finished, 1,000 people had lost their jobs from my companies. I felt sick. I watched my own net worth falling by about a million dollars a day, every day, for 18 months. And worse than that, far worse than that, my sense of self-worth was kind of evaporating. I was going around with this big sign on my forehead: "LOSER." (Laughter) And I think what disgusts me more than anything, looking back, is how the hell did I let my personal happiness get so tied up with this business thing? Well, in the end, we were able to save Future and Snowball, but I was, at that point, ready to move on. And to cut a long story short, here's where I came to. And the reason I'm telling this story is that I believe, from many conversations, that a lot of people in this room have been through a similar kind of rollercoaster β emotional rollercoaster β in the last couple years. This has been a big, big transition time, and I believe that this conference can play a big part for all of us in taking us forward to the next stage to whatever's next. The theme next year is re-birth. It was at the same TED two years ago when Richard and I reached an agreement on the future of TED. And at about the same time, and I think partly because of that, I started doing something that I'd forgotten about in my business focus: I started to read again. And I discovered that while I'd been busy playing business games, there'd been this incredible revolution in so many areas of interest: cosmology to psychology to evolutionary psychology to anthropology to ... all this stuff had changed. And the way in which you could think about us as a species and us as a planet had just changed so much, and it was incredibly exciting. And what was really most exciting β and I think Richard Wurman discovered this at least 20 years before I did β was that all this stuff is connected. It's connected; it all hooks into each other. We talk about this a lot, and I thought about trying to give an example of this. So, just one example: Madame de Gaulle, the wife of the French president, was famously asked once, "What do you most desire?" And she answered, "A penis." And when you think about it, it's very true: what we all most desire is a penis β or "happiness" as we say in English. (Laughter) And something ... good luck with that one in the Japanese translation room. (Laughter) (Applause) But something as basic as happiness, which 20 years ago would have been just something for discussion in the church or mosque or synagogue, today it turns out that there's dozens of TED-like questions that you can ask about it, which are really interesting. You can ask about what causes it biochemically: neuroscience, serotonin, all that stuff. You can ask what are the psychological causes of it: nature? Nurture? Current circumstance? Turns out that the research done on that is absolutely mind-blowing. You can view it as a computing problem, an artificial intelligence problem: do you need to incorporate some sort of analog of happiness into a computer brain to make it work properly? You can view it in sort of geopolitical terms and say, why is it that a billion people on this planet are so desperately needy that they have no possibility of happiness, and whereas almost all the rest of them, regardless of how much money they have β whether it's two dollars a day or whatever β are almost equally happy on average? Or you can view it as an evolutionary psychology kind of thing: did our genes invent this as a kind of trick to get us to behave in certain ways? The ant's brain, parasitized, to make us behave in certain ways so that our genes would propagate? Are we the victims of a mass delusion? And so on, and so on. To understand even something as important to us as happiness, you kind of have to branch off in all these different directions, and there's nowhere that I've discovered β other than TED β where you can ask that many questions in that many different directions. And so, it's the profound thing that Richard talks about: to understand anything, you just need to understand the little bits; a little bit about everything that surrounds it. And so, gradually over these three days, you start off kind of trying to figure out, "Why am I listening to all this irrelevant stuff?" And at the end of the four days, your brain is humming and you feel energized, alive and excited, and it's because all these different bits have been put together. It's the total brain experience, we're going to ... it's the mental equivalent of the full body massage. (Laughter) Every mental organ addressed. It really is. Enough of the theory, Chris. Tell us what you're actually going to do, all right? So, I will. Here's the vision for TED. Number one: do nothing. This thing ain't broke, so I ain't gonna fix it. Jeff Bezos kindly remarked to me, "Chris, TED is a really great conference. You're going to have to fuck up really badly to make it bad." (Laughter) So, I gave myself the job title of TED Custodian for a reason, and I will promise you right here and now that the core values that make TED special are not going to be interfered with. Truth, curiosity, diversity, no selling, no corporate bullshit, no bandwagoning, no platforms. Just the pursuit of interest, wherever it lies, across all the disciplines that are represented here. That's not going to be changed at all. Number two: I am going to put together an incredible line up of speakers for next year. The time scale on which TED operates is just fantastic after coming out of a magazine business with monthly deadlines. There's a year to do this, and already β I hope to show you a bit later β there's 25 or so terrific speakers signed up for next year. And I'm getting fantastic help from the community; this is just such a great community. And combined, our contacts reach pretty much everyone who's interesting in the country, if not the planet. It's true. Number three: I do want to, if I can, find a way of extending the TED experience throughout the year a little bit. And one key way that we're going to do this is to introduce this book club. Books kind of saved me in the last couple years, and that's a gift that I would like to pass on. So, when you sign up for TED2003, every six weeks you'll get a care package with a book or two and a reason why they're linked to TED. They may well be by a TED speaker, and so we can get the conversation going during the year and come back next year having had the same intellectual, emotional journey. I think it will be great. And then, fourthly: I want to mention the Sapling Foundation, which is the new owner of TED. What Sapling's ownership means is that all of the proceeds of TED will go towards the causes that Sapling stands for. And more important, I think, the ideas that are exhibited and realized here are ideas that the foundation can use, because there's fantastic synergy. Already, just in the last few days, we've had so many people talking about stuff that they care about, that they're passionate about, that can make a difference in the world, and the idea of getting this group of people together β some of the causes that we believe in, the money that this conference can raise and the ideas β I really believe that that combination will, over time, make a difference. I'm incredibly excited about that. In fact, I don't think, overall, that I've been as excited by anything ever in my life. I'm in this for the long run, and I would be greatly honored and excited if you'll come on this journey with me. |
The idea behind Zipcar (and what comes next) | {0: "With Zipcar, Robin Chase introduced car-crazy America to the concept of non-ownership. Now she's flipping that model with Buzzcar, which lets you rent your own auto to your neighbors."} | TED2007 | I'm going to talk about two stories today. One is how we need to use market-based pricing to affect demand and use wireless technologies to dramatically reduce our emissions in the transportation sector. And the other is that there is an incredible opportunity if we choose the right wireless technologies; how we can generate a new engine for economic growth and dramatically reduce C02 in the other sectors. I'm really scared. We need to reduce C02 emissions in ten to fifteen years by 80 percent in order to avert catastrophic effects. And I am astounded that I'm standing here to tell you that. What are catastrophic effects? A three degree centigrade climate change rise that will result in 50 percent species extinction. It's not a movie. This is real life. And I'm really worried, because when people talk about cars β which I know something about β the press and politicians and people in this room are all thinking, "Let's use fuel-efficient cars." If we started today, 10 years from now, at the end of this window of opportunity, those fuel-efficient cars will reduce our fossil fuel needs by four percent. That is not enough. But now I'll talk about some more pleasant things. Here are some ways that we can make some dramatic changes. So, Zipcar is a company that I founded seven years ago, but it's an example of something called car sharing. What Zipcar does is we park cars throughout dense urban areas for members to reserve, by the hour and by the day, instead of using their own car. How does it feel to be a person using a Zipcar? It means that I pay only for what I need. All those hours when a car is sitting idle, I'm not paying for it. It means that I can choose a car exactly for that particular trip. So, here's a woman that reserved MiniMia, and she had her day. I can take a BMW when I'm seeing clients. I can drive my Toyota Element when I'm going to go on that surfing trip. And the other remarkable thing is it's, I think, the highest status of car ownership. Not only do I have a fleet of cars available to me in seven cities around the world that I can have at my beck and call, but heaven forbid I would ever maintain or deal with the repair or have anything to do with it. It's like the car that you always wanted that your mom said that you couldn't have. I get all the good stuff and none of the bad. So, what is the social result of this? The social result is that today's Zipcar has 100,000 members driving 3,000 cars parked in 3,000 parking spaces. Instead of driving 12,000 miles a year, which is what the average city dweller does, they drive 500 miles a year. Are they happy? The company has been doubling in size ever since I founded it, or greater. People adore the company. And it's better, you know? They like it. So, how is it that people went from the 12,000 miles a year to 500 miles? It's because they said, "It's eight to 10 dollars an hour and 65 dollars a day. If I'm going to go buy some ice cream, do I really want to spend eight dollars to go buy the ice cream? Or maybe I'll do without. Maybe I would have bought the ice cream when I did some other errand." So, people really respond very quickly to it, to prices. And the last point I want to make is Zipcar would never be possible without technology. It required that it was completely trivial: that it takes 30 seconds to reserve a car, go get it, drive it. And for me, as a service provider, I would never be able to provide you a car for an hour if the transaction cost was anything. So, without these wireless technologies, this, as a concept, could never happen. So, here's another example. This company is GoLoco β I'm launching it in about three weeks β and I hope to do for ridesharing what I did for car sharing. This will apply to people across all of America. Today, 75 percent of the trips are single-occupancy vehicles, yet 12 percent of trips to work are currently carpool. And I think that we can apply social networks and online payment systems to completely change how people feel about ridesharing and make that trip much more efficient. And so when I think about the future, people will be thinking that sharing the ride with someone is this incredibly great social event out of their day. You know, how did you get to TED? You went with other TEDsters. How fabulous. Why would you ever want to go by yourself in your own car? How did you go food shopping? You went with your neighbor, what a great social time. You know it's going to really transform how we feel about travel, and it will also, I think, enhance our freedom of mobility. Where can I go today and who can I do it with? Those are the types of things that you will look at and feel. And the social benefits: the rate of single-occupancy vehicles is, I told you, 75 percent; I think we can get that down to 50 percent. The demand for parking, of course, is down, congestion and the CO2 emissions. One last piece about this, of course, is that it's enabled by wireless technologies. And it's the cost of driving that's making people want to be able to do this. The average American spends 19 percent of their income on their car, and there's a pressure for them to reduce that cost, yet they have no outlet today. So, the last example of this is congestion pricing, very famously done in London. It's when you charge a premium for people to drive on congested roads. In London, the day they turned the congestion pricing on, there was a 25 percent decrease in congestion overnight, and that's persisted for the four years in which they've been doing congestion pricing. And again, do people like the outcome? Ken Livingstone was reelected. So again, we can see that price plays an enormous role in people's willingness to reduce their driving behavior. We've tripled the miles that we drive since 1970 and doubled them since 1982. There's a huge slack in that system; with the right pricing we can undo that. Congestion pricing is being discussed in every major city around the world and is, again, wirelessly enabled. You weren't going to put tollbooths around the city of London and open and shut those gates. And what congestion pricing is is that it's a technology trial and a psychological trial for something called road pricing. And road pricing is where we're all going to have to go, because today we pay for our maintenance and wear and tear on our cars with gas taxes. And as we get our cars more fuel-efficient, that's going to be reducing the amount of revenue that you get off of those gas taxes, so we need to charge people by the mile that they drive. Whatever happens with congestion pricing and those technologies will be happening with road pricing. Why do we travel too much? Car travel is underpriced and therefore we over-consumed. We need to put this better market feedback. And if we have it, you'll decide how many miles to drive, what mode of travel, where to live and work. And wireless technologies make this real-time loop possible. So, I want to move now to the second part of my story, which is: when are we going to start doing this congestion pricing? Road pricing is coming. When are we going to do it? Are we going to wait 10 to 15 years for this to happen or are we going to finally have this political will to make it happen in the next two years? Because I'm going to say, that is going to be the tool that's going to turn our usage overnight. And what kind of wireless technology are we going to use? This is my big vision. There is a tool that can help us bridge the digital divide, respond to emergencies, get traffic moving, provide a new engine for economic growth and dramatically reduce CO2 emissions in every sector. And this is a moment from "The Graduate." Do you remember this moment? You guys are going to be the handsome young guy and I'm going to be the wise businessman. "I want to say one word to you, just one word." "Yes, sir?" "Are you listening?" "Yes I am." "Ad-hoc peer-to-peer self-configuring wireless networks." (Laughter) These are also called mesh networks. And in a mesh, every device contributes to and expands the network, and I think you might have heard a little bit about it before. I'm going to give you some examples. You'll be hearing later today from Alan Kay. These laptops, when a child opens them up, they communicate with every single child in the classroom, within that school, within that village. And what is the cost of that communication system? Zero dollars a month. Here's another example: in New Orleans, video cameras were mesh-enabled so that they could monitor crime in the downtown French Quarter. When the hurricane happened, the only communication system standing was the mesh network. Volunteers flew in, added a whole bunch of devices, and for the next 12 months, mesh networks were the only wireless that was happening in New Orleans. Another example is in Portsmouth, U.K. They mesh-enabled 300 buses and they speak to these smart terminals. You can look at the terminal and be able to see precisely where your bus is on the street and when it's coming, and you can buy your tickets in real time. Again, all mesh-enabled. Monthly communication cost: zero. So, the beauty of mesh networks: you can have these very low-cost devices. Zero ongoing communication costs. Highly scalable; you can just keep adding them, and as in Katrina, you can keep subtracting them β as long as there's some, we can still communicate. They're resilient; their redundancy is built into this fabulous decentralized design. What are the incredible weaknesses? There isn't anybody in Washington lobbying to make it happen β or in those municipalities, to build out their cities with these wireless networks β because there's zero ongoing communications cost. So, the examples that I gave you are these islands of mesh networks, and networks are interesting only as they are big. How do we create a big network? Are you guys ready again β "The Graduate"? This time you will still play the handsome young thing, but I'll be the sexy woman. These are the next two lines in the movie. "Where did you do it?" "In his car." So you know, when you stick this idea ... (Laughter) where would we expect me, Robin Chase, to be thinking is imagine if we put a mesh-network device in every single car across America. We could have a coast-to-coast, free wireless communication system. I guess I just want you to think about that. And why is this going to happen? Because we're going to do congestion pricing, we are going to do road tolls, gas taxes are going to become road pricing. These things are going to happen. What's the wireless technology we're going to use? Maybe we should use a good one. When are we going to do it? Maybe we shouldn't wait for the 10 or 15 years for this to happen. We should pull it forward. So, I'd like us to launch the wireless Internet interstate wireless mesh system, and require that this network be accessible to everyone, with open standards. Right now in the transportation sector, we're creating these wireless devices β I guess you guys might have Fast Pass here or Easy Lane β that are single-purpose devices in these closed networks. What is the point? We're transferring just a few little data bits when we're doing road controlling, road pricing. We have this incredible excess capacity. So, we can provide the lowest-cost means of going wireless coast-to-coast, we can have resilient nationwide communication systems, we have a new tool for creating efficiencies in all sectors. Imagine what happens when the cost of getting information from anywhere to anywhere is close to zero. What you can do with that tool: we can create an economic engine. Information should be free, and access to information should be free, and we should be charging people for carbon. I think this is a more powerful tool than the Interstate Highway Act, and I think this is as important and world changing to our economy as electrification. And if I had my druthers, we would have an open-source version in addition to open standards. And this open-source version means that it could be β if we did a brilliant job of it β it could be used around the world very quickly. So, going back to one of my earlier thoughts. Imagine if every one of these buses in Lagos was part of the mesh network. When I went this morning to Larry Brilliant's TEDTalk prize β his fabulous networks β imagine if there was an open-source mesh communications device that can be put into those networks, to make all that happen. And we can be doing it if we could just get over the fact that this little slice of things is going to be for free. We could make billions of dollars on top of it, but this one particular slice of communications needs to be open source. So, let's take control of this nightmare: implement a gas tax immediately; transition across the nation to road-tolling with this wireless mesh; require that the mesh be open to all, with open standards; and, of course, use mesh networks. Thank you. (Applause) |
A song of the city | {0: 'From building opera houses with wire to mapping the connection between the automobile and your mother-in-law, Jaime Lerner delights in discovering eccentric solutions to vexing urban problems. In the process he has transformed the face of cities worldwide.'} | TED2007 | I hope you'll understand my English. In the mornings it is terrible, and the afternoon is worst. (Laughter) During many years, I made some speeches starting with this saying: "City is not a problem, it's a solution." And more and more, I'm convinced that it's not only a solution for a country, but it's a solution for the problem of climate change. But we have a very pessimistic approach about the cities. I'm working in cities for almost 40 years, and where every mayor is trying to tell me his city is so big, or the other mayors say, "We don't have financial resources," I would like to say from the experience I had: every city in the world can be improved in less than three years. There's no matter of scale. It's not a question of scale, it's not a question of financial resources. Every problem in a city has to have its own equation of co-responsibility and also a design. So to start, I want to introduce some characters from a book I made for teenagers. The best example of quality of life is the turtle because the turtle is an example of living and working together. And when you realize that the casque of the turtle looks like an urban tessitura, and can we imagine, if we cut the casque of the turtle, how sad she's going to be? And that's what we're doing in our cities: living here, working here, having leisure here. And most of the people are leaving the city and living outside of the city. So, the other character is Otto, the automobile. He is invited for a party β he never wants to leave. The chairs are on the tables and still drinking, and he drinks a lot. (Laughter) And he coughs a lot. Very egotistical: he carries only one or two people and he asks always for more infrastructure. Freeways. He's a very demanding person. And on the other hand, Accordion, the friendly bus, he carries 300 people β 275 in Sweden; 300 Brazilians. (Laughter) Speaking about the design: every city has its own design. Curitiba, my city: three million in the metropolitan area, 1,800,000 people in the city itself. Curitiba, Rio: it's like two birds kissing themselves. Oaxaca, San Francisco β it's very easy: Market Street, Van Ness and the waterfront. And every city has its own design. But to make it happen, sometimes you have to propose a scenario and to propose a design β an idea that everyone, or the large majority, will help you to make it happen. And that's the structure of the city of Curitiba. And it's an example of living and working together. And this is where we have more density; it's where we have more public transport. So, this system started in '74. We started with 25,000 passengers a day, now it's 2,200,000 passengers a day. And it took 25 years until another city ... which is Bogota, and they did a very good job. And now there's 83 cities all over the world that they are doing what they call the BRT of Curitiba. And one thing: it's important not for only your own city; every city, besides its normal problems, they have a very important role in being with the whole humanity. That means mostly two main issues β mobility and sustainability β are becoming very important for the cities. And this is an articulated bus, double-articulated. And we are very close to my house. You can come when you are in Curitiba and have a coffee there. And that's the evolution of the system. What in the design that made the difference is the boarding tubes: the boarding tube gives to the bus the same performance as a subway. That's why, I'm trying to say, it's like metro-nizing the bus. This is the design of the bus, and you can pay before entering the bus you're boarding. And for handicapped, they can use this as a normal system. What I'm trying to say is the major contribution on carbon emissions are from the cars β more than 50 percent β so when we depend only on cars, it's ... β that's why when we're talking about sustainability, it's not enough, green buildings. It's not enough, a new materials. It's not enough, new sources of energy. It's the concept of the city, the design of the city, that's also important, too. And also, how to teach the children. I'll speak on this later on. Our idea of mobility is trying to make the connections between all the systems. We started in '83, proposing for the city of Rio how to connect the subway with the bus. The subway was against, of course. And 23 years after, they called us to develop β we're developing this idea. And you can understand how different it's going to be, the image of Rio with the system β one-minute frequency. And it's not Shanghai, it's not being colored during the day, only at night it will look this way. And before you say it's a Norman Foster design, we designed this in '83. And this is the model, how it's going to work. So, it's the same system; the vehicle is different. And that's the model. What I'm trying to say is, I'm not trying to prove which system of transport is better. I'm trying to say we have to combine all the systems, and with one condition: never β if you have a subway, if you have surface systems, if you have any kind of system β never compete in the same space. And coming back to the car, I always used to say that the car is like your mother-in-law: you have to have good relationship with her, but she cannot command your life. So, when the only woman in your life is your mother-in-law, you have a problem. (Laughter) So, all the ideas about how to transform through design β old quarries and open universities and botanic garden β all of it's related to how we teach the children. And the children, we teach during six months how to separate their garbage. And after, the children teach their parents. And now we have 70 percent β since 20 years, it's the highest rate of separation of garbage in the world. Seven zero. (Applause) So teach the children. I would like to say, if we want to have a sustainable world we have to work with everything what's said, but don't forget the cities and the children. I'm working in a museum and also a multi-use city, because you cannot have empty places during 18 hours a day. You should have always a structure of living and working together. Try to understand the sectors in the city that could play different roles during the 24 hours. Another issue is, a city's like our family portrait. We don't rip our family portrait, even if we don't like the nose of our uncle, because this portrait is you. And these are the references that we have in any city. This is the main pedestrian mall; we did it in 72 hours. Yes, you have to be fast. And these are the references from our ethnic contribution. This is the Italian portal, the Ukrainian park, the Polish park, the Japanese square, the German park. All of a sudden, the Soviet Union, they split. And since we have people from Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, [unclear], we have to stop the program. (Laughter) Don't forget: creativity starts when you cut a zero from your budget. If you cut two zeros, it's much better. And this is the Wire Opera theater. We did it in two months. Parks β old quarries that they were transformed into parks. Quarries once made the nature, and sometimes we took this and we transformed. And every part can be transformed; every frog can be transformed in a prince. So, in a city, you have to work fast. Planning takes time. And I'm proposing urban acupuncture. That means me, with some focal ideas to help the normal process of planning. And this is an acupuncture note β or I.M. Pei's. Some small ones can make the city better. The smallest park in New York, the most beautiful: 32 meters. So, I want just to end saying that you can always propose new materials β new sustainable materials β but keep in mind that we have to work fast to the end, because we don't have the whole time to plan. And I think creativity, innovation is starting. And we cannot have all the answers. So when you start β and we cannot be so prepotent on having all the answers β it's important starting and having the contribution from people, and they could teach you if you're not in the right track. At the end, I would like if you can help me to sing the sustainable song. OK? Please, allow me just two minutes. You're going to make the music and the rhythm. β« Toonchi-too! Toonchi-too! Toonchi-too! β« β« Toonchi-too! Toonchi-too! Toonchi-too! β« β« It's possible! It's possible! You can do it! You can do it! β« β« Use less your car! Make this decision! β« β« Avoid carbon emission! It's possible! It's possible! β« β« You can do it! You can do it! β« β« Live closer to work! β« β« Work closer to home! Save energy in your home! β« β« It's possible! It's possible! You can do it! β« β« You can do it! Separate your garbage! β« β« Organic, schmorganic! Save more! Waste less! It's possible! β« β« You can do it! Please, do it now! β« Thank you. (Applause) |
An illustrated journey through Rome | {0: "David Macaulay gets under the skins of skyscrapers, mosques, pyramids, subways, and a host of other ancient and modern marvels. His lavish and micro-detailed renderings expose the world's secret engineering to dazzled readers of all ages."} | TED2002 | I draw to better understand things. Sometimes I make a lot of drawings and I still don't understand what it is I'm drawing. Those of you who are comfortable with digital stuff and even smug about that relationship might be amused to know that the guy who is best known for "The Way Things Work," while preparing for part of a panel for called Understanding, spent two days trying to get his laptop to communicate with his new CD burner. Who knew about extension managers? I've always managed my own extensions so it never even occurred to me to read the instructions, but I did finally figure it out. I had to figure it out, because along with the invitation came the frightening reminder that there would be no projector, so bringing those carousels would no longer be necessary but some alternate form of communication would. Now, I could talk about something that I'm known for, something that would be particularly appropriate for many of the more technically minded people here, or I could talk about something I really care about. I decided to go with the latter. I'm going to talk about Rome. Now, why would I care about Rome, particularly? Well, I went to Rhode Island School of Design in the second half of the '60s to study architecture. I was lucky enough to spend my last year, my fifth year, in Rome as a student. It changed my life. Not the least reason was the fact that I had spent those first four years living at home, driving into RISD everyday, driving back. I missed the '60s. I read about them; (Laughter) I understand they were pretty interesting. I missed them, but I did spend that extraordinary year in Rome, and it's a place that is never far from my mind. So, whenever given an opportunity, I try to do something in it or with it or for it. I also make drawings to help people understand things. Things that I want them to believe I understand. And that's what I do as an illustrator, that's my job. So, I'm going to show you some pictures of Rome. I've made a lot of drawings of Rome over the years. These are just drawings of Rome. I get back as often as possible β I need to. All different materials, all different styles, all different times, drawings from sketchbooks looking at the details of Rome. Part of the reason I'm showing you these is that it sort of helps illustrate this process I go through of trying to figure out what it is I feel about Rome and why I feel it. These are sketches of some of the little details. Rome is a city full of surprises. I mean, we're talking about unusual perspectives, we're talking about narrow little winding streets that suddenly open into vast, sun-drenched piazzas β never, though, piazzas that are not humanly scaled. Part of the reason for that is the fact that they grew up organically. That amazing juxtaposition of old and new, the bits of light that come down between the buildings that sort of create a map that's traveling above your head of usually blue β especially in the summer β compared to the map that you would normally expect to see of conventional streets. And I began to think about how I could communicate this in book form. How could I share my sense of Rome, my understanding of Rome? And I'm going to show you a bunch of dead ends, basically. The primary reason for all these dead ends is when if you're not quite sure where you're going, you're certainly not going to get there with any kind of efficiency. Here's a little map. And I thought of maps at the beginning; maybe I should just try and do a little atlas of my favorite streets and connections in Rome. And here's a line of text that actually evolves from the exhaust of a scooter zipping across the page. Here that same line of text wraps around a fountain in an illustration that can be turned upside down and read both ways. Maybe that line of text could be a story to help give some human aspect to this. Maybe I should get away from this map completely, and really be honest about wanting to show you my favorite bits and pieces of Rome and simply kick a soccer ball in the air β which happens in so many of the squares in the city β and let it bounce off of things. And I'll simply explain what each of those things is that the soccer ball hits. That seemed like a sort of a cheap shot. But even though I just started this presentation, this is not the first thing that I tried to do and I was getting sort of desperate. Eventually, I realized that I had really no content that I could count on, so I decided to move towards packaging. (Laughter) I mean, it seems to work for a lot of things. So I thought a little box set of four small books might do the trick. But one of the ideas that emerged from some of those sketches was the notion of traveling through Rome in different vehicles at different speeds in order to show the different aspects of Rome. Sort of an overview of Rome and the plan that you might see from a dirigible. Quick snapshots of things you might see from a speeding motor scooter, and very slow walking through Rome, you might be able to study in more detail some of the wonderful surfaces and whatnot that you come across. Anyways, I went back to the dirigible notion. Went to Alberto Santos-Dumont. Found one of his dirigibles that had enough dimensions so I could actually use it as a scale that I would then juxtapose with some of the things in Rome. This thing would be flying over or past or be parked in front of, but it would be like having a ruler β sort of travel through the pages without being a ruler. Not that you know how long number 11 actually is, but you would be able to compare number 11 against the Pantheon with number 11 against the Baths of Caracalla, and so on and so forth. If you were interested. This is Beatrix. She has a dog named Ajax, she has purchased a dirigible β a small dirigible β she's assembling the structure, Ajax is sniffing for holes in the balloon before they set off. She launches this thing above the Spanish Steps and sets off for an aerial tour of the city. Over the Spanish Steps we go. A nice way to show that river, that stream sort of pouring down the hill. Unfortunately, just across the road from it or quite close by is the Column of Marcus Aurelius, and the diameter of the dirigible makes an impression, as you can see, as she starts trying to read the story that spirals around the Column of Marcus Aurelius β gets a little too close, nudges it. This gives me a chance to suggest to you the structure of the Column of Marcus Aurelius, which is really no more than a pile of quarters high β thick quarters. Over the Piazza of Saint Ignacio, completely ruining the symmetry, but that aside a spectacular place to visit. A spectacular framework, inside of which you see, usually, extraordinary blue sky. Over the Pantheon and the 26-foot diameter Oculus. She parks her dirigible, lowers the anchor rope and climbs down for a closer look inside. The text here is right side and upside down so that you are forced to turn the book around, and you can see it from ground point of view and from her point of view β looking in the hole, getting a different kind of perspective, moving you around the space. Particularly appropriate in a building that can contain perfectly a sphere dimensions of the diameter being the same as the distance from the center of the floor to the center of the Oculus. Unfortunately for her, the anchor line gets tangled around the feet of some Boy Scouts who are visiting the Pantheon, and they are immediately yanked out and given an extraordinary but terrifying tour of some of the domes of Rome, which would, from their point of view, naturally be hanging upside down. They bail out as soon as they get to the top of Saint Ivo, that little spiral structure you see there. She continues on her way over Piazza Navona. Notices a lot of activity at the Tre Scalini restaurant, is reminded that it is lunchtime and she's hungry. They keep on motoring towards the Campo de' Fiori, which they soon reach. Ajax the dog is put in a basket and lowered with a list of food into the marketplace, which flourishes there until about one in the afternoon, and then is completely removed and doesn't appear again until six or seven the following morning. Anyway, the pooch gets back to the dirigible with the stuff. Unfortunately, when she goes to unwrap the prosciutto, Ajax makes a lunge for it. She's managed to save the prosciutto, but in the process she loses the tablecloth, which you can see flying away in the upper left-hand corner. They continue without their tablecloth, looking for a place to land this thing so that they can actually have lunch. They eventually discover a huge wall that's filled with small holes, ideal for docking a dirigible because you've got a place to tie up. Turns out to be the exterior wall β that part of it that remains β of the Coliseum, so they park themselves there and have a terrific lunch and have a spectacular view. At the end of lunch, they untie the anchor, they set off through the Baths of Caracalla and over the walls of the city and then an abandoned gatehouse and decide to take one more look at the Pyramid of Cestius, which has this lightning rod on top. Unfortunately, that's a problem: they get a little too close, and when you're in a dirigible you have to be very careful about spikes. So that sort of brings her little story to a conclusion. Marcello, on the other hand, is sort of a lazy guy, but he's not due at work until about noon. So, the alarm goes off and it's five to 12 or so. He gets up, leaps onto his scooter, races through the city past the church of Santa Maria della Pace, down the alleys, through the streets that tourists may be wandering through, disturbing the quiet backstreet life of Rome at every turn. That speed with which he is moving, I hope I have suggested in this little image, which, again, can be turned around and read from both sides because there's text on the bottom and text on the top, one of which is upside down in this image. So, he keeps on moving, approaching an unsuspecting waiter who is trying to deliver two plates of linguine in a delicate white wine clam sauce to diners who are sitting at a table just outside of a restaurant in the street. Waiter catches on, but it's too late. And Marcello keeps moving in his scooter. Everything he sees from this point on is slightly affected by the linguine, but keeps on moving because this guy's got a job to do. Removes some scaffolding. One of the reasons Rome remains the extraordinary place it is that because of scaffolding and the determination to maintain the fabric, it is a city that continues to grow and adapt to the needs of the particular time in which it finds itself, or we find it. Right through the Piazza della Rotonda, in front of the Pantheon β again wreaking havoc β and finally getting to work. Marcello, as it turns out, is the driver of the number 64 bus, and if you've been on the number 64 bus, you know that it's driven with the same kind of exuberance as Marcello demonstrated on his scooter. And finally Carletto. You see his apartment in the upper left-hand corner. He's looking at his table; he's planning to propose this evening to his girlfriend of 40 years, (Laughter) and he wants it to be perfect. He's got candles out, he's got flowers in the middle and he's trying to figure out where to put the plates and the glasses. But he's not happy; something's wrong. The phone rings anyway, he's called to the palazzo. He saunters β he saunters at a good clip, but as compared to all the traveling we've just seen, he's sauntering. Everybody knows Carletto, because he's in entertainment, actually; he's in television. He's actually in television repair, which is why people know him. So they all have his number. He arrives at the palazzo, arrives at the big front door. Enters the courtyard and talks to the custodian, who tells him that there's been a disaster in the palazzo; nobody's TVs are working and there's a big soccer game coming up, and the crowd is getting a little restless and a little nervous. He goes down to the basement and starts to check the wiring, and then gradually works his way up to the top of the building, apartment by apartment, checking every television, checking every connection, hoping to find out what this problem is. He works his way up, finally, the grand staircase and then a smaller staircase until he reaches the attic. He opens the window of the attic, of course, and there's a tablecloth wrapped around the building's television antenna. He removes it, the problems are solved, everybody in the palazzo is happy. And of course, he also solves his own problem. All he has to do now, with a perfect table, is wait for her to arrive. That was the first attempt, but it didn't seem substantial enough to convey whatever it was I wanted to convey about Rome. So I thought, well, I'll just do piazzas, and I'll get inside and underneath and I'll show these things growing and show why they're shaped the way they are and so on. And then I thought, that's too complicated. No, I'll just take my favorite bits and pieces and I'll put them inside the Pantheon but keep the scale, so you can see the top of Sant'Ivo and the Pyramid of Cestius and the Tempietto of Bramante all side by side in this amazing space. Now that's one drawing, so I thought maybe it's time for Piranesi to meet Escher. (Laughter) You see that I'm beginning to really lose control here and also hope. There's a very thin blue line of exhaust that sort of runs through this thing that would be kind of the trail that holds it all together. Then I thought, "Wait a minute, what am I doing?" A book is not only a neat way of collecting and storing information, it's a series of layers. I mean, you always peel one layer off another; we think of them as pages, doing it a certain way. But think of them as layers. I mean, Rome is a place of layers β horizontal layers, vertical layers β and I thought, well just peeling off a page would allow me to β if I got you thinking about it the right way β would allow me to sort of show you the depth of layers. The stucco on the walls of most of the buildings in Rome covers the scars; the scars of centuries of change as these structures have been adapted rather than being torn down. If I do a foldout page on the left-hand side and let you just unfold it, you see behind it what I mean by scar tissue. You can see that in 1635, it became essential to make smaller windows because the bad guys were coming or whatever. Adaptations all get buried under the stucco. I could peel out a page of this palazzo to show you what's going on inside of it. But more importantly, I could also show you what it looks like at the corner of one of those magnificent buildings with all the massive stone blocks, or the fake stone blocks done with brick and stucco, which is more often the case. So it becomes slightly three-dimensional. I could take you down one of those narrow little streets into one of those surprising piazzas by using a double gate fold β double foldout page β which, if you were like me reading a pop-up book as a child, you hopefully stick your head into. You wrap the pages around your head and are in that piazza for that brief period of time. And I've really not done anything much more complicated than make foldout pages. But then I thought, maybe I could be simpler here. Let's look at the Pantheon and the Piazza della Rotonda in front of it. Here's a book completely wide open. OK, if I don't open the book the whole way, if I just open it 90 degrees, we're looking down the front of the Pantheon, and we're looking sort of at the top, more or less down on the square. And if I turn the book the other way, we're looking across the square at the front of the Pantheon. No foldouts, no tricks β just a book that isn't open the whole way. That seemed promising. I thought, maybe I'll do it inside and I can even combine the foldouts with the only partially opened book. So we get inside the Pantheon and it grows and so on and so forth. And I thought, maybe I'm on the right track, but it sort of lost its human quality. So I went back to the notion of story, which is always a good thing to have if you're trying to get people to pay attention to a book and pick up information along the way. "Pigeon's Progress" struck me as a catchy title. If it was a homing pigeon, it would be called "Homer's Odyssey." But it was the journey of the ... (Laughter) I mean, if a title works, use it. But it would be a journey that went through Rome and showed all the things that I like about Rome. It's a pigeon sitting on top of a church. Goes off during the day and does normal pigeon stuff. Comes back, the whole place is covered with scaffolding and green netting and there's no way this pigeon can get home. So it's a homeless pigeon now and it's going to have to find another place to live, and that allows me to go through my catalog of favorite things, and we start with the tall ones and so on. Maybe it has to go back and live with family members; that's not always a good thing, but it does sort of bring pigeons together again. And I thought, that's sort of interesting, but maybe there's a person who should be involved in this in some way. So I kind of came up with this old guy who spends his life looking after sick pigeons. He'll go anywhere to get them β dangerous places and whatnot β and they become really friends with this guy, and learn to do tricks for him and entertain him at lunchtime and stuff like that. There's a real bond that develops between this old man and these pigeons. But unfortunately he gets sick. He gets really sick at the end of the story. He's taught them to spell his name, which is Aldo. They show up one day after three or four days of not seeing him β he lives in this little garret β and they spell his name and fly around. And he finally gets enough strength together to climb up the ladder onto the roof, and all the pigeons, a la Red Balloon, are there waiting for him and they carry him off over the walls of the city. And I forgot to mention this: whenever he lost a pigeon, he would take that pigeon out beyond the walls of the city. In the old Roman custom, the dead were never buried within the walls. And I thought that's a really cheery story. (Laughter). That's really going to go a long way. So anyway, I went through ... And again, if packaging doesn't work and if the stories aren't going anywhere, I just come up with titles and hope that a title will sort of kick me off in the right direction. And sometimes it does focus me enough and I'll even do a title page. So, these are all title pages that eventually led me to the solution I settled on, which is the story of a young woman who sends a message on a homing pigeon β she lives outside the walls of the city of Rome β to someone in the city. And the pigeon is flying down above the Appian Way here. You can see the tombs and pines and so on and so forth along the way. If you see the red line, you are seeing the trail of the pigeon; if you don't see the red line, you are the pigeon. And it becomes necessary and possible, at this point, to try to convey what that sense would be like of flying over the city without actually moving. Past the Pyramid of Cestius β these will seem very familiar to you, even if you haven't been to Rome recently β past the gatehouse. This is something that's a little bit unusual. This pigeon does something that most homing pigeons do not do: it takes the scenic route, (Laughter) which was a device that I felt was necessary to actually extend this book beyond about four pages. So, we circle around the Coliseum, past the Church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin and the Temple of Hercules towards the river. We almost collide with the cornice of the Palazzo Farnese β designed by Michelangelo, built of stone taken from the Coliseum β narrow escape. We swoop down over the Campo de' Fiori. This is one of those things I show to my students because it's a complete bastardization β a denial of any rules of perspective. The only rule of perspective that I think matters is if it looks believable, you've succeeded. But you try and figure out where the vanishing points meet here; a couple are on Mars and a couple of others in Cremona. But into the piazza in front of Santa Maria della Pace, where invariably a soccer game is going on, and we're hit by a soccer ball. Now this is a terrible illustration of being hit by a soccer ball. I have all the pieces: there's Santa Maria della Pace, there's a soccer ball, there's a little bit of a bird's wing β nothing's happening, so I had to rethink it. And if you do want to see Santa Maria della Pace, these books are really flexible, incredibly interactive β just turn it around and look at it the other way. Through the alley, we can see the impact is captured in the red line. And then bird manages to pull itself together past this medieval tower β one of the few remaining medieval towers β towards the church of Sant'Agnese and around the dome looking down into Piazza Navona β which we've already mentioned and seen and flown over a couple of times; there's the Bernini statue of the Four Rivers β and then past the wonderful Borromini Sant'Ivo, stopping just long enough on the 26-foot diameter Oculus of the Pantheon to catch our breath. And then we can swoop inside and around; and because we're flying, we don't really have to worry about gravity at this particular moment in time, so this drawing can be oriented in any way on the page. We get a little exuberant as we pass Gesu; it's not surprising to sort of mimic the architecture in this way. Past the wonderful wall filled with the juxtaposition that I was talking about; beautiful carvings set into the walls above the neon "Ristorante" sign, and so on. And eventually, we arrive at the courtyard of the palazzo, which is our destination. Straight up through the courtyard into a little window into the attic, where somebody is working at the drawing board. He removes the message from the leg of the bird; this is what it says. As we look at the drawing board, we see what he's working on is, in fact, a map of the journey that the pigeon has just taken, and the red line extends through all the sights. And if you want the information, so that we complete this cycle of understanding, all you have to do is read these paragraphs. Thank you very much. |
A plant's-eye view | {0: 'Michael Pollan is the author of "The Omnivoreβs Dilemma", in which he explains how our food not only affects our health but has far-reaching political, economic and environmental implications.'} | TED2007 | It's a simple idea about nature. I want to say a word for nature because we haven't talked that much about it the last couple days. I want to say a word for the soil and the bees and the plants and the animals, and tell you about a tool, a very simple tool that I have found. Although it's really nothing more than a literary conceit; it's not a technology. It's very powerful for, I think, changing our relationship to the natural world and to the other species on whom we depend. And that tool is very simply, as Chris suggested, looking at us and the world from the plants' or the animals' point of view. It's not my idea, other people have hit on it, but I've tried to take it to some new places. Let me tell you where I got it. Like a lot of my ideas, like a lot of the tools I use, I found it in the garden; I'm a very devoted gardener. And there was a day about seven years ago: I was planting potatoes, it was the first week of May β this is New England, when the apple trees are just vibrating with bloom; they're just white clouds above. I was here, planting my chunks, cutting up potatoes and planting it, and the bees were working on this tree; bumblebees, just making this thing vibrate. And one of the things I really like about gardening is that it doesn't take all your concentration, you really can't get hurt β it's not like woodworking β and you have plenty of kind of mental space for speculation. And the question I asked myself that afternoon in the garden, working alongside that bumblebee, was: what did I and that bumblebee have in common? How was our role in this garden similar and different? And I realized we actually had quite a bit in common: both of us were disseminating the genes of one species and not another, and both of us β probably, if I can imagine the bee's point of view β thought we were calling the shots. I had decided what kind of potato I wanted to plant β I had picked my Yukon Gold or Yellow Finn, or whatever it was β and I had summoned those genes from a seed catalog across the country, brought it, and I was planting it. And that bee, no doubt, assumed that it had decided, "I'm going for that apple tree, I'm going for that blossom, I'm going to get the nectar and I'm going to leave." We have a grammar that suggests that's who we are; that we are sovereign subjects in nature, the bee as well as me. I plant the potatoes, I weed the garden, I domesticate the species. But that day, it occurred to me: what if that grammar is nothing more than a self-serving conceit? Because, of course, the bee thinks he's in charge or she's in charge, but we know better. We know that what's going on between the bee and that flower is that bee has been cleverly manipulated by that flower. And when I say manipulated, I'm talking about in a Darwinian sense, right? I mean it has evolved a very specific set of traits β color, scent, flavor, pattern β that has lured that bee in. And the bee has been cleverly fooled into taking the nectar, and also picking up some powder on its leg, and going off to the next blossom. The bee is not calling the shots. And I realized then, I wasn't either. I had been seduced by that potato and not another into planting its β into spreading its genes, giving it a little bit more habitat. And that's when I got the idea, which was, "Well, what would happen if we kind of looked at us from this point of view of these other species who are working on us?" And agriculture suddenly appeared to me not as an invention, not as a human technology, but as a co-evolutionary development in which a group of very clever species, mostly edible grasses, had exploited us, figured out how to get us to basically deforest the world. The competition of grasses, right? And suddenly everything looked different. And suddenly mowing the lawn that day was a completely different experience. I had thought always β and in fact, had written this in my first book; this was a book about gardening β that lawns were nature under culture's boot, that they were totalitarian landscapes, and that when we mowed them we were cruelly suppressing the species and never letting it set seed or die or have sex. And that's what the lawn was. But then I realized, "No, this is exactly what the grasses want us to do. I'm a dupe. I'm a dupe of the lawns, whose goal in life is to outcompete the trees, who they compete with for sunlight." And so by getting us to mow the lawn, we keep the trees from coming back, which in New England happens very, very quickly. So I started looking at things this way and wrote a whole book about it called "The Botany of Desire." And I realized that in the same way you can look at a flower and deduce all sorts of interesting things about the taste and the desires of bees β that they like sweetness, that they like this color and not that color, that they like symmetry β what could we find out about ourselves by doing the same thing? That a certain kind of potato, a certain kind of drug, a sativa-indica Cannabis cross has something to say about us. And that, wouldn't this be kind of an interesting way to look at the world? Now, the test of any idea β I said it was a literary conceit β is what does it get us? And when you're talking about nature, which is really my subject as a writer, how does it meet the Aldo Leopold test? Which is, does it make us better citizens of the biotic community? Get us to do things that leads to the support and perpetuation of the biota, rather than its destruction? And I would submit that this idea does this. So, let me go through what you gain when you look at the world this way, besides some entertaining insights about human desire. As an intellectual matter, looking at the world from other species' points of view helps us deal with this weird anomaly, which is β and this is in the realm of intellectual history β which is that we have this Darwinian revolution 150 years ago ... Ugh. Mini-Me. (Laughter) We have this intellectual, this Darwinian revolution in which, thanks to Darwin, we figured out we are just one species among many; evolution is working on us the same way it's working on all the others; we are acted upon as well as acting; we are really in the fiber, the fabric of life. But the weird thing is, we have not absorbed this lesson 150 years later; none of us really believes this. We are still Cartesians β the children of Descartes β who believe that subjectivity, consciousness, sets us apart; that the world is divided into subjects and objects; that there is nature on one side, culture on another. As soon as you start seeing things from the plant's point of view or the animal's point of view, you realize that the real literary conceit is that β is the idea that nature is opposed to culture, the idea that consciousness is everything β and that's another very important thing it does. Looking at the world from other species' points of view is a cure for the disease of human self-importance. You suddenly realize that consciousness β which we value and we consider the crowning achievement of nature, human consciousness β is really just another set of tools for getting along in the world. And it's kind of natural that we would think it was the best tool. But, you know, there's a comedian who said, "Well, who's telling me that consciousness is so good and so important? Well, consciousness." So when you look at the plants, you realize that there are other tools and they're just as interesting. I'll give you two examples, also from the garden: lima beans. You know what a lima bean does when it's attacked by spider mites? It releases this volatile chemical that goes out into the world and summons another species of mite that comes in and attacks the spider mite, defending the lima bean. So what plants have β while we have consciousness, tool making, language, they have biochemistry. And they have perfected that to a degree far beyond what we can imagine. Their complexity, their sophistication, is something to really marvel at, and I think it's really the scandal of the Human Genome Project. You know, we went into it thinking, 40,000 or 50,000 human genes and we came out with only 23,000. Just to give you grounds for comparison, rice: 35,000 genes. So who's the more sophisticated species? Well, we're all equally sophisticated. We've been evolving just as long, just along different paths. So, cure for self-importance, way to sort of make us feel the Darwinian idea. And that's really what I do as a writer, as a storyteller, is try to make people feel what we know and tell stories that actually help us think ecologically. Now, the other use of this is practical. And I'm going to take you to a farm right now, because I used this idea to develop my understanding of the food system and what I learned, in fact, is that we are all, now, being manipulated by corn. And the talk you heard about ethanol earlier today, to me, is the final triumph of corn over good sense. (Laughter) (Applause) It is part of corn's scheme for world domination. (Laughter) And you will see, the amount of corn planted this year will be up dramatically from last year and there will be that much more habitat because we've decided ethanol is going to help us. So it helped me understand industrial agriculture, which of course is a Cartesian system. It's based on this idea that we bend other species to our will and that we are in charge, and that we create these factories and we have these technological inputs and we get the food out of it or the fuel or whatever we want. Let me take you to a very different kind of farm. This is a farm in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. I went looking for a farm where these ideas about looking at things from the species' point of view are actually implemented, and I found it in a man. The farmer's name is Joel Salatin. And I spent a week as an apprentice on his farm, and I took away from this some of the most hopeful news about our relationship to nature that I've ever come across in 25 years of writing about nature. And that is this: the farm is called Polyface, which means ... the idea is he's got six different species of animals, as well as some plants, growing in this very elaborate symbiotic arrangement. It's permaculture, those of you who know a little bit about this, such that the cows and the pigs and the sheep and the turkeys and the ... what else does he have? All the six different species β rabbits, actually β are all performing ecological services for one another, such that the manure of one is the lunch for the other and they take care of pests for one another. It's a very elaborate and beautiful dance, but I'm going to just give you a close-up on one piece of it, and that is the relationship between his cattle and his chickens, his laying hens. And I'll show you, if you take this approach, what you get, OK? And this is a lot more than growing food, as you'll see; this is a different way to think about nature and a way to get away from the zero-sum notion, the Cartesian idea that either nature's winning or we're winning, and that for us to get what we want, nature is diminished. So, one day, cattle in a pen. The only technology involved here is this cheap electric fencing: relatively new, hooked to a car battery; even I could carry a quarter-acre paddock, set it up in 15 minutes. Cows graze one day. They move, OK? They graze everything down, intensive grazing. He waits three days, and then we towed in something called the Eggmobile. The Eggmobile is a very rickety contraption β it looks like a prairie schooner made out of boards β but it houses 350 chickens. He tows this into the paddock three days later and opens the gangplank, turns them down, and 350 hens come streaming down the gangplank β clucking, gossiping as chickens will β and they make a beeline for the cow patties. And what they're doing is very interesting: they're digging through the cow patties for the maggots, the grubs, the larvae of flies. And the reason he's waited three days is because he knows that on the fourth day or the fifth day, those larvae will hatch and he'll have a huge fly problem. But he waits that long to grow them as big and juicy and tasty as he can because they are the chickens' favorite form of protein. So the chickens do their kind of little breakdance and they're pushing around the manure to get at the grubs, and in the process they're spreading the manure out. Very useful second ecosystem service. And third, while they're in this paddock they are, of course, defecating madly and their very nitrogenous manure is fertilizing this field. They then move out to the next one, and in the course of just a few weeks, the grass just enters this blaze of growth. And within four or five weeks, he can do it again. He can graze again, he can cut, he can bring in another species, like the lambs, or he can make hay for the winter. Now, I want you to just look really close up onto what's happened there. So, it's a very productive system. And what I need to tell you is that on 100 acres he gets 40,000 pounds of beef; 30,000 pounds of pork; 25,000 dozen eggs; 20,000 broilers; 1,000 turkeys; 1,000 rabbits β an immense amount of food. You know, you hear, "Can organic feed the world?" Well, look how much food you can produce on 100 acres if you do this kind of ... again, give each species what it wants, let it realize its desires, its physiological distinctiveness. Put that in play. But look at it from the point of view of the grass, now. What happens to the grass when you do this? When a ruminant grazes grass, the grass is cut from this height to this height, and it immediately does something very interesting. Any one of you who gardens knows that there is something called the root-shoot ratio, and plants need to keep the root mass in some rough balance with the leaf mass to be happy. So when they lose a lot of leaf mass, they shed roots; they kind of cauterize them and the roots die. And the species in the soil go to work basically chewing through those roots, decomposing them β the earthworms, the fungi, the bacteria β and the result is new soil. This is how soil is created. It's created from the bottom up. This is how the prairies were built, the relationship between bison and grasses. And what I realized when I understood this β and if you ask Joel Salatin what he is, he'll tell you he's not a chicken farmer, he's not a sheep farmer, he's not a cattle rancher; he's a grass farmer, because grass is really the keystone species of such a system β is that, if you think about it, this completely contradicts the tragic idea of nature we hold in our heads, which is that for us to get what we want, nature is diminished. More for us, less for nature. Here, all this food comes off this farm, and at the end of the season there is actually more soil, more fertility and more biodiversity. It's a remarkably hopeful thing to do. There are a lot of farmers doing this today. This is well beyond organic agriculture, which is still a Cartesian system, more or less. And what it tells you is that if you begin to take account of other species, take account of the soil, that even with nothing more than this perspectival idea β because there is no technology involved here except for those fences, which are so cheap they could be all over Africa in no time β that we can take the food we need from the Earth and actually heal the Earth in the process. This is a way to reanimate the world, and that's what's so exciting about this perspective. When we really begin to feel Darwin's insights in our bones, the things we can do with nothing more than these ideas are something to be very hopeful about. Thank you very much. |
The new power of collaboration | {0: 'Writer, artist and designer, theorist and community builder, Howard Rheingold is one of the driving minds behind our net-enabled, open, collaborative life.'} | TED2005 | I'm here to enlist you in helping reshape the story about how humans and other critters get things done. Here is the old story β we've already heard a little bit about it: biology is war in which only the fiercest survive; businesses and nations succeed only by defeating, destroying and dominating competition; politics is about your side winning at all costs. But I think we can see the very beginnings of a new story beginning to emerge. It's a narrative spread across a number of different disciplines, in which cooperation, collective action and complex interdependencies play a more important role. And the central, but not all-important, role of competition and survival of the fittest shrinks just a little bit to make room. I started thinking about the relationship between communication, media and collective action when I wrote "Smart Mobs," and I found that when I finished the book, I kept thinking about it. In fact, if you look back, human communication media and the ways in which we organize socially have been co-evolving for quite a long time. Humans have lived for much, much longer than the approximately 10,000 years of settled agricultural civilization in small family groups. Nomadic hunters bring down rabbits, gathering food. The form of wealth in those days was enough food to stay alive. But at some point, they banded together to hunt bigger game. And we don't know exactly how they did this, although they must have solved some collective action problems; it only makes sense that you can't hunt mastodons while you're fighting with the other groups. And again, we have no way of knowing, but it's clear that a new form of wealth must have emerged. More protein than a hunter's family could eat before it rotted. So that raised a social question that I believe must have driven new social forms. Did the people who ate that mastodon meat owe something to the hunters and their families? And if so, how did they make arrangements? Again, we can't know, but we can be pretty sure that some form of symbolic communication must have been involved. Of course, with agriculture came the first big civilizations, the first cities built of mud and brick, the first empires. And it was the administers of these empires who began hiring people to keep track of the wheat and sheep and wine that was owed and the taxes that was owed on them by making marks; marks on clay in that time. Not too much longer after that, the alphabet was invented. And this powerful tool was really reserved, for thousands of years, for the elite administrators (Laughter) who kept track of accounts for the empires. And then another communication technology enabled new media: the printing press came along, and within decades, millions of people became literate. And from literate populations, new forms of collective action emerged in the spheres of knowledge, religion and politics. We saw scientific revolutions, the Protestant Reformation, constitutional democracies possible where they had not been possible before. Not created by the printing press, but enabled by the collective action that emerges from literacy. And again, new forms of wealth emerged. Now, commerce is ancient. Markets are as old as the crossroads. But capitalism, as we know it, is only a few hundred years old, enabled by cooperative arrangements and technologies, such as the joint-stock ownership company, shared liability insurance, double-entry bookkeeping. Now of course, the enabling technologies are based on the Internet, and in the many-to-many era, every desktop is now a printing press, a broadcasting station, a community or a marketplace. Evolution is speeding up. More recently, that power is untethering and leaping off the desktops, and very, very quickly, we're going to see a significant proportion, if not the majority of the human race, walking around holding, carrying or wearing supercomputers linked at speeds greater than what we consider to be broadband today. Now, when I started looking into collective action, the considerable literature on it is based on what sociologists call "social dilemmas." And there are a couple of mythic narratives of social dilemmas. I'm going to talk briefly about two of them: the prisoner's dilemma and the tragedy of the commons. Now, when I talked about this with Kevin Kelly, he assured me that everybody in this audience pretty much knows the details of the prisoner's dilemma, so I'm just going to go over that very, very quickly. If you have more questions about it, ask Kevin Kelly later. (Laughter) The prisoner's dilemma is actually a story that's overlaid on a mathematical matrix that came out of the game theory in the early years of thinking about nuclear war: two players who couldn't trust each other. Let me just say that every unsecured transaction is a good example of a prisoner's dilemma. Person with the goods, person with the money, because they can't trust each other, are not going to exchange. Neither one wants to be the first one or they're going to get the sucker's payoff, but both lose, of course, because they don't get what they want. If they could only agree, if they could only turn a prisoner's dilemma into a different payoff matrix called an assurance game, they could proceed. Twenty years ago, Robert Axelrod used the prisoner's dilemma as a probe of the biological question: if we are here because our ancestors were such fierce competitors, how does cooperation exist at all? He started a computer tournament for people to submit prisoner's dilemma strategies and discovered, much to his surprise, that a very, very simple strategy won β it won the first tournament, and even after everyone knew it won, it won the second tournament β that's known as tit for tat. Another economic game that may not be as well known as the prisoner's dilemma is the ultimatum game, and it's also a very interesting probe of our assumptions about the way people make economic transactions. Here's how the game is played: there are two players; they've never played the game before, they will not play the game again, they don't know each other, and they are, in fact, in separate rooms. First player is offered a hundred dollars and is asked to propose a split: 50/50, 90/10, whatever that player wants to propose. The second player either accepts the split β both players are paid and the game is over β or rejects the split β neither player is paid and the game is over. Now, the fundamental basis of neoclassical economics would tell you it's irrational to reject a dollar because someone you don't know in another room is going to get 99. Yet in thousands of trials with American and European and Japanese students, a significant percentage would reject any offer that's not close to 50/50. And although they were screened and didn't know about the game and had never played the game before, proposers seemed to innately know this because the average proposal was surprisingly close to 50/50. Now, the interesting part comes in more recently when anthropologists began taking this game to other cultures and discovered, to their surprise, that slash-and-burn agriculturalists in the Amazon or nomadic pastoralists in Central Asia or a dozen different cultures β each had radically different ideas of what is fair. Which suggests that instead of there being an innate sense of fairness, that somehow the basis of our economic transactions can be influenced by our social institutions, whether we know that or not. The other major narrative of social dilemmas is the tragedy of the commons. Garrett Hardin used it to talk about overpopulation in the late 1960s. He used the example of a common grazing area in which each person by simply maximizing their own flock led to overgrazing and the depletion of the resource. He had the rather gloomy conclusion that humans will inevitably despoil any common pool resource in which people cannot be restrained from using it. Now, Elinor Ostrom, a political scientist, in 1990 asked the interesting question that any good scientist should ask, which is: is it really true that humans will always despoil commons? So she went out and looked at what data she could find. She looked at thousands of cases of humans sharing watersheds, forestry resources, fisheries, and discovered that yes, in case after case, humans destroyed the commons that they depended on. But she also found many instances in which people escaped the prisoner's dilemma; in fact, the tragedy of the commons is a multiplayer prisoner's dilemma. And she said that people are only prisoners if they consider themselves to be. They escape by creating institutions for collective action. And she discovered, I think most interestingly, that among those institutions that worked, there were a number of common design principles, and those principles seem to be missing from those institutions that don't work. I'm moving very quickly over a number of disciplines. In biology, the notions of symbiosis, group selection, evolutionary psychology are contested, to be sure. But there is really no longer any major debate over the fact that cooperative arrangements have moved from a peripheral role to a central role in biology, from the level of the cell to the level of the ecology. And again, our notions of individuals as economic beings have been overturned. Rational self-interest is not always the dominating factor. In fact, people will act to punish cheaters, even at a cost to themselves. And most recently, neurophysiological measures have shown that people who punish cheaters in economic games show activity in the reward centers of their brain. Which led one scientist to declare that altruistic punishment may be the glue that holds societies together. Now, I've been talking about how new forms of communication and new media in the past have helped create new economic forms. Commerce is ancient. Markets are very old. Capitalism is fairly recent; socialism emerged as a reaction to that. And yet we see very little talk about how the next form may be emerging. Jim Surowiecki briefly mentioned Yochai Benkler's paper about open source, pointing to a new form of production: peer-to-peer production. I simply want you to keep in mind that if in the past, new forms of cooperation enabled by new technologies create new forms of wealth, we may be moving into yet another economic form that is significantly different from previous ones. Very briefly, let's look at some businesses. IBM, as you know, HP, Sun β some of the most fierce competitors in the IT world are open sourcing their software, are providing portfolios of patents for the commons. Eli Lilly β in, again, the fiercely competitive pharmaceutical world β has created a market for solutions for pharmaceutical problems. Toyota, instead of treating its suppliers as a marketplace, treats them as a network and trains them to produce better, even though they are also training them to produce better for their competitors. Now none of these companies are doing this out of altruism; they're doing it because they're learning that a certain kind of sharing is in their self-interest. Open source production has shown us that world-class software, like Linux and Mozilla, can be created with neither the bureaucratic structure of the firm nor the incentives of the marketplace as we've known them. Google enriches itself by enriching thousands of bloggers through AdSense. Amazon has opened its Application Programming Interface to 60,000 developers, countless Amazon shops. They're enriching others, not out of altruism but as a way of enriching themselves. eBay solved the prisoner's dilemma and created a market where none would have existed by creating a feedback mechanism that turns a prisoner's dilemma game into an assurance game. Instead of, "Neither of us can trust each other, so we have to make suboptimal moves," it's, "You prove to me that you are trustworthy and I will cooperate." Wikipedia has used thousands of volunteers to create a free encyclopedia with a million and a half articles in 200 languages in just a couple of years. We've seen that ThinkCycle has enabled NGOs in developing countries to put up problems to be solved by design students around the world, including something that's being used for tsunami relief right now: it's a mechanism for rehydrating cholera victims that's so simple to use it, illiterates can be trained to use it. BitTorrent turns every downloader into an uploader, making the system more efficient the more it is used. Millions of people have contributed their desktop computers when they're not using them to link together through the Internet into supercomputing collectives that help solve the protein folding problem for medical researchers β that's Folding@home at Stanford β to crack codes, to search for life in outer space. I don't think we know enough yet. I don't think we've even begun to discover what the basic principles are, but I think we can begin to think about them. And I don't have enough time to talk about all of them, but think about self-interest. This is all about self-interest that adds up to more. In El Salvador, both sides that withdrew from their civil war took moves that had been proven to mirror a prisoner's dilemma strategy. In the U.S., in the Philippines, in Kenya, around the world, citizens have self-organized political protests and get out the vote campaigns using mobile devices and SMS. Is an Apollo Project of cooperation possible? A transdisciplinary study of cooperation? I believe that the payoff would be very big. I think we need to begin developing maps of this territory so that we can talk about it across disciplines. And I am not saying that understanding cooperation is going to cause us to be better people β and sometimes people cooperate to do bad things β but I will remind you that a few hundred years ago, people saw their loved ones die from diseases they thought were caused by sin or foreigners or evil spirits. Descartes said we need an entire new way of thinking. When the scientific method provided that new way of thinking and biology showed that microorganisms caused disease, suffering was alleviated. What forms of suffering could be alleviated, what forms of wealth could be created if we knew a little bit more about cooperation? I don't think that this transdisciplinary discourse is automatically going to happen; it's going to require effort. So I enlist you to help me get the cooperation project started. Thank you. (Applause) |
The untouchable music of the theremin | {0: "Pamelia Kurstin excavates a dusty artifact from the prehistoric strata of electronic music -- and demonstrates how to squeeze soul from an instrument you can't even touch."} | TED2002 | (Music) (Applause) Thank you. Ooh, I'm like, "Phew, phew, calm down. Get back into my body now." (Laughter) Usually when I play out, the first thing that happens is people scream out, "What's she doing?!" I'll play at these rock shows, be on stage standing completely still, and they're like, "What's she doing?! What's she doing?!" And then I'll kind of be like β (Vvvwow!) β and then they're like, "Whoa!" (Laughter) I'm sure you're trying to figure out, "Well, how does this thing work?" Well, what I'm doing is controlling the pitch with my left hand. See, the closer I get to this antenna, the higher the note gets β (Portamento) β and you can get it really low. And with this hand I'm controlling the volume, so the further away my right hand gets, the louder it gets. (Tones) So basically, with both of your hands you're controlling pitch and volume and kind of trying to create the illusion that you're doing separate notes, when really it's continuously going ... (Flourish ... Beep) (Laughter) Sometimes I startle myself: I'll forget that I have it on, and I'll lean over to pick up something, and then it goes like β (Blip) β "Oh!" And it's like a funny sound effect that follows you around if you don't turn the thing off. (Laughter) Maybe we'll go into the next tune, because I totally lost where this is going. We're going to do a song by David Mash called "Listen: the Words Are Gone," and maybe I'll have words come back into me afterwards if I can relax. (Music) (Applause) So, I'm trying to think of some of the questions that are commonly asked; there are so many. And ... Well, I guess I could tell you a little of the history of the theremin. It was invented around the 1920s, and the inventor, LΓ©on Theremin β he also was a musician besides an inventor β he came up with the idea for making the theremin, I think, when he was working on some shortwave radios. And there'd be that sound in the signal β it's like (Screeching) β and he thought, "Oh, what if I could control that sound and turn it into an instrument, because there are pitches in it." And so somehow through developing that, he eventually came to make the theremin the way it is now. And a lot of times, even kids nowadays, they'll make reference to a theremin by going, "Whoo-hoo-hoo-hoo," because in the '50s it was used in the sci-fi horror movies, that sound that's like ... (Woo-hoo-hoo-hoo) (Laughter) It's kind of a funny, goofy sound to do. And sometimes if I have too much coffee, then my vibrato gets out of hand. You're really sensitive to your body and its functions when you're behind this thing. You have to stay so still if you want to have the most control. It reminds me of the balancing act earlier on β what Michael was doing β because you're fighting so hard to keep the balance with what you're playing with and stay in tune, and at the same time you don't want to focus so much on being in tune all the time; you want to be feeling the music. And then also, you're trying to stay very, very, very still because little movements with other parts of your body will affect the pitch, or sometimes if you're holding a low note β (Tone rising out of key) β and breathing will make it ... (Laughter) If I pass out on the next song ... (Laughter) I think of it almost like like a yoga instrument because it makes you so aware of every little crazy thing your body is doing, or just aware of what you don't want it to be doing while you're playing; you don't want to have any sudden movements. And if I go to a club and play a gig, people are like, "Here, have some drinks on us!" And it's like, "Well, I'm about to go on soon; I don't want to be like β (Teetering tones) β you know?" It really does reflect the mood that you're in also, if you're ... it's similar to being a vocalist, except instead of it coming out of your throat, you're controlling it just in the air and you don't really have a point of reference; you're always relying on your ears and adjusting constantly. You just have to always adjust to what's happening and realize you'll have bummer notes come here and there and listen to it, adjust it, and just move on, or else you'll get too tied up and go crazy. Like me. I think we will play another tune now. I'm going to do "Lush Life." It's one of my favorite tunes to play. (Music) (Applause) |
The story of Project Orion | {0: 'In telling stories of technologies and the individuals who created them, George Dyson takes a clear-eyed view of our scientific past -- while illuminating what lies ahead.'} | TED2002 | I'm a historian. Steve told us about the future of little technology; I'm going to show you some of the past of big technology. This was a project to build a 4,000-ton nuclear bomb-propelled spaceship and go to Saturn and Jupiter. This took place in my childhood, 1957-65. It was deeply classified. I'm going to show you some stuff that not only has not been declassified, but has now been reclassified. (Laughter) If all goes well, next year I'll be back, and I'll have a lot more to show you, and if all doesn't go well, I'll be in jail, like Wen Ho Lee. (Laughter) So, this ship was basically the size of the Marriott Hotel, a little taller and a little bigger. And one of the people who worked on it at the beginning was my father, Freeman, there in the middle. That's me and my sister, Esther, who's a frequent TEDster. I didn't like nuclear bomb-propelled spaceships. I mean, I thought it was a great idea, but I started building kayaks. So we had a few kayaks. Just so you know that I am not Dr. Strangelove. But all the time I was out there doing these strange kayak voyages in odd, beautiful parts of this planet, I always thought in the back of my mind about Project Orion, and how my father and his friends were going to build these big ships. They were actually going to go β Ted Taylor, who led the project, was going to take his children. My father was not going to take his children, that was one of the reasons we sort of had a falling out for a few years. (Laughter) The project began in '57 at General Atomics there, that's right on the coast at La Jolla. Look at that central building right in the middle of the picture. That's the 130-foot diameter library. That is exactly the size of the base of the spaceship. So put that library at the bottom of that ship β that's how big the thing was going to be. It would take two or three thousand bombs. The people who worked on it were a lot of the Los Alamos people who had done the hydrogen bomb work. It was the first project funded by ARPA. That's the contract where ARPA gave the first million dollars to get this thing started. "Spaceship project officially begun. Job waiting for you. Dyson." That's July '58. Two days later, the space traveler's manifesto explaining why β just like we heard yesterday β why we need to go into space: "... trips to satellites of the outer planets. August 20, 1958." These are the statistics of what would be the good places to go and stop. Some of the sizes of the ships, ranging all the way up to ship mass of 8 million tons. So that was the outer extreme. Here was version two: 2,000 bombs. These are five-kiloton yield bombs, about the size of small Volkswagens; it would take 800 to get into orbit. Here we see a 10,000-ton ship will deliver 1,300 tons to Saturn and back β essentially, a five-year trip. Possible departure dates: October 1960 to February 1967. These are trajectories going to Mars. All this was done by hand, with slide rules. The little Orion ship, and what it would take to do what Orion does with chemicals: you have a ship the size of the Empire State Building. NASA had no interest; they tried to kill the project. The people who supported it were the Air Force, which meant that it was all secret. And that's why when you get something declassified, that's what it looks like. Military weapon versions that carried hydrogen bombs that could destroy half the planet. There's another version there that sends retaliatory strikes at the Soviet Union. This is the really secret stuff: how to get directed energy explosions. So you're sending the energy of a nuclear explosion β not like just a stick of dynamite, but you're directing it at the ship. And this is still a very active subject. It's quite dangerous, but I believe it's better to have dangerous things in the open than think you're going to keep them secret. This is what happened at 600 microseconds. The Air Force started to build smaller models and actually started doing this. The guys in La Jolla said, "We've got to get started now." They built a high-explosive propelled model. These are stills from film footage that was saved by someone who was supposed to destroy it but didn't, and kept it in their basement for the last 40 years. So, these are three-pound charges of C4; that's about 10 times what the guy had in his shoes. (Laughter) This is Ed Day putting β So each of these coffee cans has three pounds of C4 in it. They're building a system that ejects these at quarter-second intervals. That's my dad in the sport coat there, holding the briefcase. So, they had a lot of fun doing this. But no children were allowed; my dad could tell me he was building a spaceship and going to go to Saturn, but he could not say anything more about it. So all my life I have wanted to find this stuff out, and spent the last four years tracking these old guys down. These are stills from the video. Jeff Bezos kindly, yesterday, said he'll put this video up on the Amazon site β some little clip of it. (Applause) So, thanks to him. They got quite serious about the engineering of this. The size of that mass, for us, is really large technology in a way we're never going to go back to. If you saw the 1959 β this is what it would feel like in the passenger compartment; that's acceleration profile. (Laughter) And pulse-system yield: we're looking at 20-kiloton yield for an effective thrust of 10 million newtons. Well, here we have a little problem, the radiation doses at the crew station: 700 rads per shot. (Laughter) Fission yields during development: they were hoping to get clean bombs; they didn't. Eyeburn: this is what happens to the people in Miami who are looking up. (Laughter) Personnel compartment noise: that's not too bad; it's very low frequencies, it's basically like these sub-woofers. And now we have ground-hazard assessments when you have a blow-up on the pad. Finally, at the very end in 1964, NASA steps in and says, "OK, we'll support a feasibility study for a small version that could be launched with Saturn Vs in sections and pieced together." So this is what NASA did, getting an eight-man version that would go to Mars. They liked it because the guys could kind of live there and be like, "It's like living in a submarine." This is crew compartment. It switches, so what's upside down is right side up when you go to artificial gravity mode. The scientists were still going to go along; they would take seven astronauts and seven scientists. This is a 20-man version for going to Jupiter: bunks, storm cellars, exercise room. You know, it was going to be a nice, long trip. The Air Force version: here we have a military version. This is the kind of stuff that's not been declassified, just that people managed to sneak home and after, you know, on their deathbed, basically, gave me that. The sort of artist conceptions. These are basically PowerPoint presentations given to the Air Force 40 years ago. Look at the little guys there outside the vehicle. And one part of NASA was interested in it, but the headquarters in NASA, they killed the project. So finally, at the end, we can see the thing followed its sort of design path right up to 1965, and then all those paths came to a halt. Results: none. This project is hereby terminated. So that's the end. All I can say in closing is: we heard yesterday that one of the 10 bad things that could happen to us is an asteroid with our name on it. And one of the bad things that could happen to NASA is if that asteroid shows up with our name on it nine months out, and everybody says, "Well, what are we going to do?" And Orion is really one of the only, if not the only, off-the-shelf technologies that could do something. (Laughter) So I'm going to tell you the good news and the bad news. The good news is that NASA has a small, secret contingency-plan division that is looking at this, trying to keep knowledge of Orion preserved in the event of such a misfortune. Maybe keep a few little bombs of plutonium on the side. That's the good news. The bad news is, when I got in contact with these people to try and get some documents from them, they went crazy because I had all this stuff that they don't have, and NASA purchased 1,759 pages of this stuff from me. So that's the state we're at; it's not very good. (Laughter) (Applause) |
Building uniqueness | {0: "Moshe Safdie's buildings -- from grand libraries to intimate apartment complexes -- explore the qualities of light and the nature of private and public space."} | TED2002 | So, what I'd like to talk about is something that was very dear to Kahn's heart, which is: how do we discover what is really particular about a project? How do you discover the uniqueness of a project as unique as a person? Because it seems to me that finding this uniqueness has to do with dealing with the whole force of globalization; that the particular is central to finding the uniqueness of place and the uniqueness of a program in a building. And so I'll take you to Wichita, Kansas, where I was asked some years ago to do a science museum on a site, right downtown by the river. And I thought the secret of the site was to make the building of the river, part of the river. Unfortunately, though, the site was separated from the river by McLean Boulevard so I suggested, "Let's reroute McLean," and that gave birth instantly to Friends of McLean Boulevard. (Laughter) And it took six months to reroute it. The first image I showed the building committee was this astronomic observatory of Jantar Mantar in Jaipur because I talked about what makes a building a building of science. And it seemed to me that this structure β complex, rich and yet totally rational: it's an instrument β had something to do with science, and somehow a building for science should be different and unique and speak of that. And so my first sketch after I left was to say, "Let's cut the channel and make an island and make an island building." And I got all excited and came back, and they sort of looked at me in dismay and said, "An island? This used to be an island β Ackerman Island β and we filled in the channel during the Depression to create jobs." (Laughter) And so the process began and they said, "You can't put it all on an island; some of it has to be on the mainland because we don't want to turn our back to the community." And there emerged a design: the galleries sort of forming an island and you could walk through them or on the roof. And there were all kinds of exciting features: you could come in through the landside buildings, walk through the galleries into playgrounds in the landscape. If you were cheap you could walk on top of a bridge to the roof, peek in the exhibits and then get totally seduced, come back and pay the five dollars admission. (Laughter) And the client was happy β well, sort of happy because we were four million dollars over the budget, but essentially happy. But I was still troubled, and I was troubled because I felt this was capricious. It was complex, but there was something capricious about its complexity. It was, what I would say, compositional complexity, and I felt that if I had to fulfill what I talked about β a building for science β there had to be some kind of a generating idea, some kind of a generating geometry. And this gave birth to the idea of having toroidal generating geometry, one with its center deep in the earth for the landside building and a toroid with its center in the sky for the island building. A toroid, for those who don't know, is the surface of a doughnut or, for some of us, a bagel. And out of this idea started spinning off many, many kinds of variations of different plans and possibilities, and then the plan itself evolved in relationship to the exhibits, and you see the intersection of the plan with the toroidal geometry. And finally the building β this is the model. And when there were complaints about budget, I said, "Well, it's worth doing the island because you get twice for your money: reflections." And here's the building as it opened, with a channel overlooking downtown, and as seen from downtown. And the bike route's going right through the building, so those traveling the river would see the exhibits and be drawn to the building. The toroidal geometry made for a very efficient building: every beam in this building is the same radius, all laminated wood. Every wall, every concrete wall is resisting the stresses and supporting the building. Every piece of the building works. These are the galleries with the light coming in through the skylights, and at night, and on opening day. Going back to 1976. (Applause) In 1976, I was asked to design a children's memorial museum in a Holocaust museum in Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, which you see here the campus. I was asked to do a building, and I was given all the artifacts of clothing and drawings. And I felt very troubled. I worked on it for months and I couldn't deal with it because I felt people were coming out of the historic museum, they are totally saturated with information and to see yet another museum with information, it would make them just unable to digest. And so I made a counter-proposal: I said, "No building." There was a cave on the site; we tunnel into the hill, descend through the rock into an underground chamber. There's an anteroom with photographs of children who perished and then you come into a large space. There is a single candle flickering in the center; by an arrangement of reflective glasses, it reflects into infinity in all directions. You walk through the space, a voice reads the names, ages and place of birth of the children. This voice does not repeat for six months. And then you descend to light and to the north and to life. Well, they said, "People won't understand, they'll think it's a discotheque. You can't do that." And they shelved the project. And it sat there for 10 years, and then one day Abe Spiegel from Los Angeles, who had lost his three-year-old son at Auschwitz, came, saw the model, wrote the check and it got built 10 years later. So, many years after that in 1998, I was on one of my monthly trips to Jerusalem and I got a call from the foreign ministry saying, "We've got the Chief Minister of the Punjab here. He is on a state visit. We took him on a visit to Yad Vashem, we took him to the children's memorial; he was extremely moved. He's demanding to meet the architect. Could you come down and meet him in Tel Aviv?" And I went down and Chief Minister Badal said to me, "We Sikhs have suffered a great deal, as you have Jews. I was very moved by what I saw today. We are going to build our national museum to tell the story of our people; we're about to embark on that. I'd like you to come and design it." And so, you know, it's one of those things that you don't take too seriously. But two weeks later, I was in this little town, Anandpur Sahib, outside Chandigarh, the capital of the Punjab, and the temple and also next to it the fortress that the last guru of the Sikhs, Guru Gobind, died in as he wrote the Khalsa, which is their holy scripture. And I got to work and they took me somewhere down there, nine kilometers away from the town and the temple, and said, "That's where we have chosen the location." And I said, "This just doesn't make any sense. The pilgrims come here by the hundreds of thousands β they're not going to get in trucks and buses and go down there. Let's get back to the town and walk to the site." And I recommended they do it right there, on that hill and this hill, and bridge all the way into the town. And, as things are a little easier in India, the site was purchased within a week and we were working. (Laughter) And my proposal was to split the museum into two β the permanent exhibits at one end, the auditorium, library, and changing exhibitions on the other β to flood the valley into a series of water gardens and to link it all to the fort and to the downtown. And the structures rise from the sand cliffs β they're built in concrete and sandstones; the roofs are stainless steel β they are facing south and reflecting light towards the temple itself, pedestrians crisscross from one side to the other. And as you come from the north, it is all masonry growing out of the sand cliffs as you come from the Himalayas and evoking the tradition of the fortress. And then I went away for four months and there was going to be groundbreaking. And I came back and, lo and behold, the little model I'd left behind had been built ten times bigger for public display on site and ... the bridge was built! (Laughter) Within the working drawings! And half a million people gathered for the celebrations; you can see them on the site itself as the foundations are beginning. I was renamed Safdie Singh. And there it is under construction; there are 1,800 workers at work and it will be finished in two years. Back to Yad Vashem three years ago. After all this episode began, Yad Vashem decided to rebuild completely the historic museum because now Washington was built β the Holocaust Museum in Washington β and that museum is so much more comprehensive in terms of information. And Yad Vashem needs to deal with three million visitors a year at this point. They said, "Let's rebuild the museum." But of course, the Sikhs might give you a job on a platter β the Jews make it hard: international competition, phase one, phase two, phase three. (Laughter) And again, I felt kind of uncomfortable with the notion that a building the size of the Washington building β 50,000 square feet β will sit on that fragile hill and that we will go into galleries β rooms with doors and sort of familiar rooms β to tell the story of the Holocaust. And I proposed that we cut through the mountain. That was my first sketch. Just cut the whole museum through the mountain β enter from one side of the mountain, come out on the other side of the mountain β and then bring light through the mountain into the chambers. And here you see the model: a reception building and some underground parking. You cross a bridge, you enter this triangular room, 60 feet high, which cuts right into the hill and extends right through as you go towards the north. And all of it, then, all the galleries are underground, and you see the openings for the light. And at night, just one line of light cuts through the mountain, which is a skylight on top of that triangle. And all the galleries, as you move through them and so on, are below grade. And there are chambers carved in the rock β concrete walls, stone, the natural rock when possible β with the light shafts. This is actually a Spanish quarry, which sort of inspired the kind of spaces that these galleries could be. And then, coming towards the north, it opens up: it bursts out of the mountain into, again, a view of light and of the city and of the Jerusalem hills. I'd like to conclude with a project I've been working on for two months. It's the headquarters for the Institute of Peace in Washington, the U.S. Institute of Peace. The site chosen is across from the Lincoln Memorial; you see it there directly on the Mall. It's the last building on the Mall, on access of the Roosevelt Bridge that comes in from Virginia. That too was a competition, and it is something I'm just beginning to work on. But one recognized the kind of uniqueness of the site. If it were to be anywhere in Washington, it would be an office building, a conference center, a place for negotiating peace and so on β all of which the building is β but by virtue of the choice of putting it on the Mall and by the Lincoln Memorial, this becomes the structure that is the symbol of peace on the Mall. And that was a lot of heat to deal with. The first sketch recognizes that the building is many spaces β spaces where research goes on, conference centers, a public building because it will be a museum devoted to peacemaking β and these are the drawings that we submitted for the competition, the plans showing the spaces which radiate outwards from the entry. You see the structure as, in the sequence of structures on the Mall, very transparent and inviting and looking in. And then as you enter it again, looking in all directions towards the city. And what I felt about that building is that it really was a building that had to do with a lightness of being β to quote Kundera β that it had to do with whiteness, it had to do with a certain dynamic quality and it had to do with optimism. And this is where it is; it's sort of evolving. Studies for the structure of the roof, which demands maybe new materials: how to make it white, how to make it translucent, how to make it glowing, how to make it not capricious. And here studying, in three dimensions, how to give some kind, again, of order, a structure; not something you feel you could just change because you stop the design of that particular process. And so it goes. I'd like to conclude by saying something ... (Applause) I'd like to conclude by relating all of what I've said to the term "beauty." And I know it is not a fashionable term these days, and certainly not fashionable in the discourse of architectural schools, but it seems to me that all this, in one way or the other, is a search for beauty. Beauty in the most profound sense of fit. I have a quote that I like by a morphologist, 1917, Theodore Cook, who said, "Beauty connotes humanity. We call a natural object beautiful because we see that its form expresses fitness, the perfect fulfillment of function." Well, I would have said the perfect fulfillment of purpose. Nevertheless, beauty as the kind of fit; something that tells us that all the forces that have to do with our natural environment have been fulfilled β and our human environment β for that. Twenty years ago, in a conference Richard and I were at together, I wrote a poem, which seems to me to still hold for me today. "He who seeks truth shall find beauty. He who seeks beauty shall find vanity. He who seeks order shall find gratification. He who seeks gratification shall be disappointed. He who considers himself the servant of his fellow beings shall find the joy of self-expression. He who seeks self-expression shall fall into the pit of arrogance. Arrogance is incompatible with nature. Through nature, the nature of the universe and the nature of man, we shall seek truth. If we seek truth, we shall find beauty." Thank you very much. (Applause) |
The Jill and Julia Show | {0: "Jill Sobule isn't just another singer-songwriter with catchy tunes and smart lyrics, she's one of the more insightful satirists of our age. Each of her fanciful songs captures an issue or irony, an emotion or epiphany that helps us understand what it's like to live now.", 1: 'Julia Sweeney creates comedic works that tackle deep issues like cancer, family and faith.'} | TED2007 | β« Jill Sobule: At a conference in Monterey by the big, big jellyfish tank, β« β« I first saw you and I got so shy. β« β« You see, I was a little paranoid 'cause I might have been high. β« β« And I hadn't done that in ages and I won't do that again. β« β« But that's another story. β« β« Loved you forever and I've been a big fan, β« β« the one-woman shows, I even rented "Pat." β« β« I got enough nerve to come up to you, β« β« but little did I know one year later we'd be doing this show. β« β« I sing. Julia Sweeney: I tell stories. Together: The Jill and Julia Show. β« β« Sobule: Sometimes it works. Sweeney: Sometimes it doesn't. β« β« Together: The Jill and Julia Show. β« β« Sweeney: At a conference in Monterey next to the big, big jellyfish tank, β« β« I first saw you and I wasn't so shy. β« I made a beeline for you and told you what a huge fan I was ever since I was writing that pilot for Fox, and Wendy and I wanted you to do the theme song. And then the pilot didn't go and I was so sad, but I kept remaining a fan of yours. And then when I went through that big, horrible breakup with Carl and I couldn't get off the couch, I listened to your song, β« "Now That I Don't Have You," β« over and over and over and over again. And I can't believe you're here and that I'm meeting you here at TED. And also, I can't believe that we're eating sushi in front of the fish tank, which, personally, I think is really inappropriate. (Laughter) (Applause) And little did I know that one year later ... β« we'd be doing this show. β« β« Sobule: I sing. Sweeney: I tell stories. Together: The Jill and Julia Show. β« Sobule: Hey, they asked us back! Sweeney: Can you stand it?! β« Together: The Jill and Julia, the Jill and Julia, the Jill and Julia Show. β« β« Sobule: Why are all our heroes so imperfect? β« β« Why do they always bring me down? β« β« Why are all our heroes so imperfect? β« β« Statue in the park has lost his crown. β« β« William Faulkner, drunk and depressed. β« Sweeney: Mmm. β« Dorothy Parker, mean, drunk and depressed. β« Sweeney: I know. β« And that guy, "Seven Years in Tibet," turned out to be a Nazi. β« Sweeney: Yeah. β« Founding fathers all had slaves. β« Sweeney: I know. β« The explorers slaughtered the braves. β« Sweeney: Horribly. β« Sobule: The Old Testament God can be so petty. β« Sweeney: Don't get me started on that. (Laughter) β« Sobule: Paul McCartney, jealous of John, even more so now that he's gone. β« β« Dylan was so mean to Donovan in that movie. β« β« Pablo Picasso, cruel to his wives. β« Sweeney: Horrible. β« Sobule: My favorite poets took their own lives. β« β« Orson Welles peaked at twenty-five, below before our eyes. β« β« And he sold bad wine. β« β« Together: Why are all our heroes so imperfect? Yeah β« β« Why do they always bring me down? β« β« Sobule: Heard Babe Ruth was full of malice. β« Sweeney: Oh. β« Lewis Carroll I'm sure did Alice. β« Sweeney: What?! β« Plato in the cave with those very young boys. β« Sweeney: Ooh... β« Sobule: Hillary supported the war. β« β« Sweeney: Even Thomas Friedman supported the war. β« (Laughter) β« Sobule: Colin Powell turned out to be ... Together: ... such a pussy. β« (Laughter) (Applause) β« Sobule: William Faulkner, drunk and depressed, β« β« Tennessee Williams, drunk and depressed. β« Sweeney: Yeah. β« Sobule: Take it, Julia. β« Sweeney: Okay. Oprah was never necessarily a big hero of mine. I mean, I watch Oprah mostly when I'm home in Spokane visiting my mother. And to my mother, Oprah is a greater moral authority than the Pope, which is actually saying something because she's a devout Catholic. Anyway, I like Oprah β I like her girlfriendy-ness, I like her weight issues, I like how she's transformed talk television, I like how she's brought reading back to America β but there was something that happened the last two weeks that was ... I call it the Soon-Yi moment: it is the moment when I cannot continue supporting someone. And that was that she did two entire shows promoting that movie "The Secret." Do you guys know about that movie "The Secret"? It makes "What the Bleep Do We Know" seem like a doctoral dissertation from Harvard on quantum mechanics β that's how bad it is. It makes "The DaVinci Code" seem like "War and Peace." That movie is so horrible. It promotes such awful pseudoscience. And the basic idea is that there's this law of attraction, and your thoughts have this vibrating energy that goes out into the universe and then you attract good things to happen to you. On a scientific basis, it's more than just "Power of Positive Thinking" β it has a horrible, horrible dark side. Like if you get ill, it's because you've just been thinking negative thoughts. Yeah, stuff like that was in the movie and she's promoting it. And all I'm saying is that I really wish that Murray Gell-Mann would go on Oprah and just explain to her that the law of attraction is, in fact, not a law. So that's what I have to say. (Laughter) (Applause) β« Sobule: I sing. Sweeney: I tell stories. Together: The Jill and Julia Show. β« β« Sobule: Sometimes it works. Sweeney: Sometimes it doesn't. β« β« Together: The Jill and Julia, the Jill and Julia, the Jill and Julia Show. β« (Applause) |
Juggle and jest | {0: 'Unapologetic vaudevillians Barry Friedman and Dan Holzman -- the Raspyni Brothers -- have been international juggling champions, Guinness record holders, recurring guests on "The Tonight Show" and, recently, preeminent entertainers on the corporate seminar circuit.'} | TED2002 | Dan Holzman: Please throw out the beanbag chairs. Here we go. Barry Friedman: There are all kinds of high-tech chairs here today, but this is really, I think, when it reached its peak as far as ergonomics, comfort, design, flexibility ... DH: Now obviously, this is not something we do on our regular show; it's something we just kind of learned for this, so we're going to try. But can we have some inspirational music for the beanbag chairs? BF: Nice show, Daniel, nice show. You are the man! Nice show. Man, that was good! DH: Thank you. BF: You know, sometimes when people do those, they go all the way down. You actually just did that. (Laughter) That's the kind of extra effort that's gotten us where we are today ... DH: All right, let's show them something special. BF: ... without a MacArthur grant. Yeah, look at this. You know, all kinds of different ... TED is about invention, let's be honest. Right? DH: Yeah, it is. BF: Last night, Michael Moschen showed some juggling props he has invented and working on. Right now, Dan's going to show something he actually invented. DH: A type of juggling I actually invented, right after I saw another juggler do it. BF: Shut up. (Laughter) DH: And this is a small excerpt from a longer piece. (Laughter) (Applause) Folks, this is shaker cup juggling. It's not a showstopper but it certainly slows it down. BF: Oh yeah, it does. (Drum roll) BF: Oh, Daniel. (Applause) DH: One more? (Drum roll) Perfect. (Drum roll) Perfect. (Drum roll) BF: OK. DH: Oh! All right. (Applause) I'm now pushing my luck: I'm skipping right to six cups. In order to do six cups, I must have perfect control over three with my right hand. (Drum roll) BF: Also three with his left. DH: Perfect. (Laughter) And now, all six cups. Should I do it on the first try or should I miss once on purpose? (Laughter) BF: First try? Once on purpose? (Audience: Once on purpose!) DH: How about if I try first and then decide? BF: Good idea. (Laughter) Let's leave that. We'll leave that door open. (Laughter) (Applause) DH: He's looking at me. BF: That's all right, he does that. All right. DH: Oh! It's time for Richard's help. (Laughter) Oh, good. All right. BF: You know, over the years, every year at the conference, it's kind of become a tradition for us to do something dangerous with Richard. And we've always done something with the bullwhips in our act. It's funny, for years I did it with Daniel holding balloons. And then we thought, "How stupid." DH: Excuse me, could we work on the design of the microphone? BF: I think that's the next session. DH: Next session? BF: Yeah. And so we've actually found a way to incorporate Richard in this. He actually assumes more of the danger in this. DH: Please stand up, Richard. (Whip cracks) Oh, sorry. (Laughter) DH: Now Richard, please ... (Whip cracks) BF: OK, sorry. DH: Jesus Christ. Richard, please stand in front of me. Richard Wurman: Can I say something? BF: Sure. RW: In all past years I've rehearsed with them, the things that have happened to me β I have no idea what's going to happen and that's the truth. DH: All right, please stand here in front ... God, I hate that. Put your hands out like this, please. (Laughter) BF: No, come stay up with him. Dan used to actually hold them but now he's got you for protection. It's kind of neat. OK. (Laughter) DH: Wow, you've been working out. BF: No, shut up! (Laughter) Having a little bit of Richard time. That's nice, that's good. OK, here we go. Have him hold your wrist so I can ... DH: Please hold my wrist, will you. BF: Yeah, hold this a minute. There you go. (Laughter) OK. OK, hold on. RW: Hmmm. (Laughter) DH: First one. BF: All those mid-year phone calls are coming back to me now, Richard. (Laughter) DH: So Richard, what were we on the list? Like 1,020? (Laughter) What happened there? BF: I think we were just outside. DH: I don't get it. (Applause) (Laughter) DH: Sorry. BF: Having some bad flashbacks. RW: Do you want me to hold you or not? DH: Don't hold me that hard. BF: Here we go, I'm taking it. (Balloon pops) (Applause) DH: One more, one more. BF: We've got one more we're going to do. RW: Do I get to hold them? BF: You don't want to hold these, trust me. DH: Could you spread your legs a little bit? (Laughter) BF: Gloria, you want to do it? It's very cool. (Laughter) (Applause) (Laughter) One more try. Man, I don't want to get too close. (Laughter) Could you just push that? (Applause) DH: Wow! Boy! BF: That's cool. I always wanted to try that. (Laughter) DH: Let's jump this way, though. Now, we risked Richard's life, it's only fair we risk our own lives. So to do that, I will juggle these three razor-sharp sickles. And if that wasn't enough, and judging by your response, it's not ... (Laughter) DH: Wow! BF: Hoping for a little more build. DH: True. Barry ... BF: I'm going to run up behind him. DH: Leap over my shoulder. BF: Up and over his shoulders. DH: Grab the blades in mid-air, land right there in a pool of blood ... (Laughter) Still juggling. (Laughter) Impossible, you say? BF: Incredible, you say? DH: Why bother, you say? BF: Here we go. DH: Just do it juggler boys, you say? BF: This guy, this guy invented air. DH: I think so, that's right. Even the pencil. BF: He invented the pencil. DH: All right, we'll do this trick, but please remember it took us over 10 years to perfect. BF: Ten years to perfect, which you're about to see. DH: It's not that difficult, we just don't like to practice that much. BF: No, it's a hassle. Traveling too much. Actually, we will take a second to prove β this could be fake β that the blades are indeed razor-sharp. DH: Will someone please throw a small farm animal up onto the stage? (Laughter) Or a virgin for a sacrifice? BF: Anything? DH: Where's Gloria? (Laughter) BF: No, she's got ... farm animal. DH: Do you have a small farm animal? Just trying to play the odds. All right, here we go. BF: Over the top, over the top. DH: How you feeling, Barry? You feeling all right? BF: Yeah, it's all right. DH: Do you feel everything's OK? The atmosphere, the ... BF: Yeah, a little sketchy. DH: Everything up here's OK? BF: Yeah. DH: Then here we go. BF: This one's a little ... Who's doing the lights? Could you point that a little more directly into my eyeballs? Is that possible? (Laughter) I can still see a little. DH: And turn up the intensity; we're still pink in the middle. We went too far. (Laughter) BF: Yeah, it's too far. It's too much of a visual. The design of the body is a whole different thing. DH: Ready, Barry? BF: Over the top. DH: May we have our jumping music please? (Silence) May we have it a bit louder? (Laughter) BF: They're a good crew! Whoa! DH: Whoa, sorry. All right. BF: We're going on. DH: All right, we'll try again. BF: All right? Oh my gosh. Oh. DH: All right, here we go. Sorry about that. BF: I thought I had the hard part. OK. DH: Whenever you're ready. BF: There we go! (Applause) All right, get up! Come on and dance! DH: Dance, come on. BF: Come on and dance! Somebody dance! Come on! (Applause) Wow, wow, OK, stop. Weird, no one dances. We're two guys doing this. (Laughter) I think that's uncomfortable for everyone. DH: The French judge ... BF: One more quick thing. DH: The French judge gives it a 5.2. (Laughter) BF: Well, you know ... DH: There you go ... BF: Oh, yeah. Another one coming in. DH: Tell them about our bio and stuff. BF: Yeah. In our bio, some of you may have read that we've won two world juggling championships. And believe it or not, you don't win juggling champions for doing things with bullwhips or shaker cups. We're going to show you right now an excerpt from a routine that we used to wipe out the other juggling team competition. DH: That's right. BF: Good. DH: I know what you're thinking: other juggling teams must really suck. (Laughter) BF: Juggling's got a bad rap. DH: But wait, Barry, there's still one more club lying there by my foot. And look, it has a twin! BF: Shut up. (Laughter) DH: There's still one more by my foot. What do you want me to do with it? BF: Richard you tell him, it's your last year. (Laughter) DH: That's a pretty good setup, Richard. BF: Yeah, it's a good setup. That's a big setup. DH: You can't get any better than that. All right. What I will do: I will use my panther-like reflexes. BF: Nice. DH: I got that β to reach down and grab that club in my grip of steel. BF: Nice. DH: I touched it, Barry. That should be enough. BF: It's progress, that's the thing. (Laughter) DH: How about that? I'll do it again. Oh wait, it's on your side, Barry. And it's awfully windy over there. BF: It is, it's weird. You wouldn't think it would affect half the stage, but it is. It's weird. Watch this: what I'm going to do is slide the seventh one onto my foot. DH: Wow! What a great trick, Barry! Oh, look how it lies there. Oh, Barry, is there nothing you can't do? (Laughter) You are my hero. You're my Jim Shea, Jr. Too much Olympics. BF: From my foot, I'll attempt to kick the seventh club. Here we go. DH: Where, Barry? Where? Tell us, Barry. [Unclear] eagerly awaits your next syllable. What will it be? What gem of knowledge? What pearl of wisdom? Do you want to buy a vowel, Barry? Is that your final answer? BF: All right! You have to turn off the TV from time to time. DH: I do, I do. BF: From my foot, the kick up in the seven. DH: We will juggle seven. BF: From six to seven. DH: That's a world's record. BF: Really? DH: For us. BF: Yes. DH: Whenever you're ready there, big guy. Put your tongue away, Barry. BF: Oh, oh, whoa. (Applause) DH: Please, please stay seated. Stay seated. Thank you. Because now, to make this twice as difficult, we'll juggle the seven clubs back ... BF: Seven-club juggling. DH: ... to back. BF: Thank you, that's it. BF: Thank you guys! DH: Thank you very much! |
A parable for Kenya | {0: 'A teacher, writer and member of the Kenyan parliament, Joseph Lekuton has an inspiring vision for Kenya.'} | TEDGlobal 2007 | My name is Joseph, a Member of Parliament in Kenya. Picture a Maasai village, and one evening, government soldiers come, surround the village and ask each elder to bring one boy to school. That's how I went to school β pretty much a government guy pointing a gun and told my father, "You have to make a choice." I walked very comfortably to this missionary school, that was run by an American missionary. The first thing the American missionary gave me was a candy. I had never in my life ever tasted candy. So I said to myself, with all these hundred other boys, this is where I belong. (Laughter) I stayed. When everybody else was dropping out. My family moved; we're nomads. It was a boarding school, I was seven β Every time it closed you had to travel to find them. 40-50 miles, it doesn't matter. You slept in the bush, but you kept going. And I stayed. I don't know why, but I did. All of a sudden I passed the national examination, found myself in a very beautiful high school in Kenya. And I finished high school. And just walking, I found a man who gave me a full scholarship to the United States. My mother still lived in a cow-dung hut, none of my brothers were going to school, and this man told me, "Here, go." I got a scholarship to St. Lawrence University, Upstate New York; finished that. And after that I went to Harvard Graduate School; finished that. Then I worked in DC a little bit: I wrote a book for National Geographic and taught U.S. history. And every time, I kept going back home, listening to their problems β sick people, people with no water, all this stuff β every time I go back to America, I kept thinking about them. Then one day, an elder gave me a story that went like this: long time ago, there was a big war between tribes. This specific tribe was really afraid of this other Luhya tribe. Every time, they sent scouts to make sure no one attacked them. So one day, the scouts came running and told the villagers, "The enemies are coming. Only half an hour away, they'll be here." So people scrambled, took their things and ready to go, move out. But there were two men: one man was blind, one man had no legs β he was born like that. The leader of the chiefs said, "No, sorry. We can't take you. You'll slow us down. We have to flee our women and children, we have to run." And they were left behind, waiting to die. But these two people worked something out. The blind man said, "Look, I'm a very strong man but I can't see." The man with no legs says, "I can see as far as the end of the world, but I can't save myself from a cat, or whatever animals." The blind man went down on his knees like this, and told the man with no legs to go over his back, and stood up. The man on top can see, the blind man can walk. These guys took off, followed the footsteps of the villagers until they found and passed them. So, this was told to me in a setup of elders. And it's a really poor area. I represent Northern Kenya: the most nomadic, remote areas you can even find. And that man told me, "So, here you are. You've got a good education from America, you have a good life in America; what are you going to do for us? We want you to be our eyes, we'll give you the legs. We'll walk you, you lead us." The opportunity came. I was always thinking about that: "What can I do to help my people? Every time you go to an area where for 43 years of independence, we still don't have basic health facilities. A man has to be transported in a wheelbarrow 30 km for a hospital. No clean drinking water. So I said, "I'm going to dedicate myself. I'm leaving America. I'm going to run for office." Last June, I moved from America, ran in July election and won. And I came for them, and that's my goal. Right now I have in place, for the last nine months, a plan that in five years, every nomad will have clean drinking water. We're building dispensaries across that constituency. I'm asking my friends from America to help with bringing nurses or doctors to help us out. I'm trying to improve infrastructure. I'm using the knowledge I received from the United States and from my community to move them forward. I'm trying to develop homegrown solutions to our issues because people from outside can come and help us, but if we don't help ourselves, there's nothing to do. My plan right now as I continue with introducing students to different fields β some become doctors, some lawyers β we want to produce a comprehensive group of people, students who can come back and help us see a community grow that is in the middle of a huge economic recession. As I continue to be a Member of Parliament and as I continue listening to all of you talking about botany, health, democracy, new inventions, I'm hoping that one day in my own little community β which is 26,000 square km, maybe five times Rhode Island β with no roads, we'll be able to become a model to help others develop. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
Model rocketry | {0: "Venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson (he brought you Hotmail) is one of the most influential funders and thinkers in Silicon Valley. He's also an enthusiastic hobbyist, blogger and Flickr-er."} | TED2007 | By day, I'm a venture capitalist. On weekends, I love rockets. I love photography, I love rockets. I'm going to talk about a hobby that can scale and show you photos I've taken over the years with kids like these, that hopefully will grow up to love rocketry and eventually become a Richard Branson or Diamandis. My son designed a rocket that became stable, a golf ball rocket. I thought it was quite an interesting experiment in the principles of rocket science. And it flies straight as an arrow. Baking soda and vinegar. Night shots are beautiful, piercing the Big Dipper and the Milky Way. 2-stage rockets with video cameras on them, onboard computers logging their flights, rocket gliders that fly back to Earth. I use RockSim to simulate flights before they go to see if they'll break supersonic, then fly them with onboard computers to verify performance. To launch the big stuff, you go to the middle of nowhere: Black Rock Desert, where dangerous things happen. The boys and the rockets get bigger. They use motors used on cruise-missile boosters. They rumble the belly and leave even photographers in awe, watching the spectacle. These rockets use experimental motors like nitrous oxide. They use solid propellant most frequently. It's a strange kind of love. RocketMavericks.com with my photos, if you want to learn about this, participate, be a spectator. We had to call it Rocket Mavericks. This one was great, went to 100,000 feet β but didn't quite. Actually, it went 11 feet into solid clay and became a bunker-buster. It had to be dug out. Rockets often spiral out of control if you put too much propellant in them. Here was a drag race. At night you can see what happened in a second; in daytime, we call them land sharks. Sometimes they just explode before your eyes or come down supersonic. (Laughter) To take this shot, I did what I often do, which is go way beyond the pads, where none of the spectators are. And if we can run the video, I'll show you what it took to get this DreamWorks shot. (Video) Voices: Woo-hoo! Yeah. Nice. Steve Jurvetson: They realize the computer failed, they're yelling "Deploy!" (Video) Man: Oh, shit. SJ: This is when they realize everything's gone haywire. (Video) Man: It's going ballistic. SJ: I'll just be quiet. (Video) Woman: No! Come on, come on, come on. SJ: And that's me over there, taking photos the whole way. Things often go wrong. Some people watch this because of a NASCAR-like fascination with things bumping and grinding. Burning the parachute as it fell. That was last weekend. This guy went up, went supersonic, ripped the fin can off. The art sale in the sky. A burning metal hunk coming back. These things dropped down from above all through the weekend of rocket launch after rocket launch. It's a cadence you can't quite imagine. I try to capture the mishaps; it's a challenge in photography when these things take place in a fraction of a second. Why do it? For things like this: Gene from Alabama drives out there with this rocket he's built with X-ray sensors, video cameras, festooned with electronics. He succeeds getting to 100,000 feet, leaving the atmosphere, seeing a thin blue line of space. It is this breathtaking image β success, of course β that motivates us and motivates kids to follow and understand rocket science, understand the importance of physics and math and, in many ways, to have that awe at exploration of the frontiers of the unknown. Thank you. (Applause) |
A preview of the WorldWide Telescope | {0: 'Curtis Wong is manager of Next Media Research for Microsoft, whose focus "spans the linear and interactive media spectrum from television, broadband and gaming to emerging media forms." He\'s a leader on the WorldWide Telescope project.', 1: 'A researcher at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics, Roy Gould gives the first public demo of the World Wide Telescope, a powerful new web-based tool for exploring the universe, developed by TEDster Curtis Wong and his team at Microsoft.'} | TED2008 | Roy Gould: Less than a year from now, the world is going to celebrate the International Year of Astronomy, which marks the 400th anniversary of Galileo's first glimpse of the night sky through a telescope. In a few months, the world is also going to celebrate the launch of a new invention from Microsoft Research, which I think is going to have as profound an impact on the way we view the universe as Galileo did four centuries ago. It's called the WorldWide Telescope, and I want to thank TED and Microsoft for allowing me to bring it to your attention. And I want to urge you, when you get a chance, to give it a closer look at the TED Lab downstairs. The WorldWide Telescope takes the best images from the world's greatest telescopes on Earth and in space, and has woven them seamlessly to produce a holistic view of the universe. It's going to change the way we do astronomy, it's going to change the way we teach astronomy and I think most importantly it's going to change the way we see ourselves in the universe. If we were having this TED meeting in our grandparents' day, that might not be so big a claim. In 1920, for example, you weren't allowed to drink; if you were a woman, you weren't allowed to vote; and if you looked up at the stars and the Milky Way on a summer night, what you saw was thought to be the entire universe. In fact, the head of Harvard's observatory back then gave a great debate in which he argued that the Milky Way Galaxy was the entire universe. Harvard was wrong, big time. (Laughter) Of course, we know today that galaxies extend far beyond our own galaxy. We can see all the way out to the edge of the observable universe, all the way back in time, almost to the moment of the Big Bang itself. We can see across the entire spectrum of light, revealing worlds that had previously been invisible. We see these magnificent star nurseries, where nature has somehow arranged for just the right numbers and just the right sizes of stars to be born for life to arise. We see alien worlds, we see alien solar systems β 300 now, and still counting β and they're not like us. We see black holes at the heart of our galaxy, in the Milky Way, and elsewhere in the universe, where time itself seems to stand still. But until now, our view of the universe has been disconnected and fragmented, and I think that many of the marvelous stories that nature has to tell us have fallen through the cracks. And that's changing. I want to just briefly mention three reasons why my colleagues and I, in astronomy and in education, are so excited about the WorldWide Telescope and why we think it's truly transformative. First, it enables you to experience the universe: the WorldWide Telescope, for me, is a kind of magic carpet that lets you navigate through the universe where you want to go. Second: you can tour the universe with astronomers as your guides. And I'm not talking here about just experts who are telling you what you're seeing, but really people who are passionate about the various nooks and crannies of the universe, who can share their enthusiasm and can make the universe a welcoming place. And third, you can create your own tours β you can share them with friends, you can create them with friends β and that's the part that I think I'm most excited about because I think that at heart, we are all storytellers. And in telling stories, each of us is going to understand the universe in our own way. We're going to have a personal universe. I think we're going to see a community of storytellers evolve and emerge. Before I introduce the person responsible for the WorldWide Telescope, I just want to leave you with this brief thought: when I ask people, "How does the night sky make you feel?" they often say, "Oh, tiny. I feel tiny and insignificant." Well, our gaze fills the universe. And thanks to the creators of the WorldWide Telescope, we can now start to have a dialogue with the universe. I think the WorldWide Telescope will convince you that we may be tiny, but we are truly, wonderfully significant. Thank you. (Applause) I can't tell you what a privilege it is to introduce Curtis Wong from Microsoft. (Applause) Curtis Wong: Thank you, Roy. So, what you're seeing here is a wonderful presentation, but it's one of the tours. And actually this tour is one that was created earlier. And the tours are all totally interactive, so that if I were to go somewhere ... you may be watching a tour and you can pause anywhere along the way, pull up other information β there are lots of Web and information sources about places you might want to go β you can zoom in, you can pull back out. The whole resources are there available for you. So, Microsoft β this is a project that β WorldWide Telescope is dedicated to Jim Gray, who's our colleague, and a lot of his work that he did is really what makes this project possible. It's a labor of love for us and our small team, and we really hope it will inspire kids to explore and learn about the universe. So basically, kids of all ages, like us. And so WorldWide Telescope will be available this spring. It'll be a free download β thank you, Craig Mundie β and it'll be available at the website WorldWideTelescope.org, which is something new. And so, what you've seen today is less than a fraction of one percent of what is in here, and in the TED Lab, we have a tour that was created by a six-year-old named Benjamin that will knock your socks off. (Laughter) So we'll see you there. Thank you. (Applause) |
A powerful idea about ideas | {0: 'One of the true luminaries of personal computing, Alan Kay conceived of laptops and graphical interfaces years before they were realized. At XeroxPARC, Apple, HP and Disney, he has developed tools for improving the mind.'} | TED2007 | A great way to start, I think, with my view of simplicity is to take a look at TED. Here you are, understanding why we're here, what's going on with no difficulty at all. The best A.I. in the planet would find it complex and confusing, and my little dog Watson would find it simple and understandable but would miss the point. (Laughter) He would have a great time. And of course, if you're a speaker here, like Hans Rosling, a speaker finds this complex, tricky. But in Hans Rosling's case, he had a secret weapon yesterday, literally, in his sword swallowing act. And I must say, I thought of quite a few objects that I might try to swallow today and finally gave up on, but he just did it and that was a wonderful thing. So Puck meant not only are we fools in the pejorative sense, but that we're easily fooled. In fact, what Shakespeare was pointing out is we go to the theater in order to be fooled, so we're actually looking forward to it. We go to magic shows in order to be fooled. And this makes many things fun, but it makes it difficult to actually get any kind of picture on the world we live in or on ourselves. And our friend, Betty Edwards, the "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" lady, shows these two tables to her drawing class and says, "The problem you have with learning to draw is not that you can't move your hand, but that the way your brain perceives images is faulty. It's trying to perceive images into objects rather than seeing what's there." And to prove it, she says, "The exact size and shape of these tabletops is the same, and I'm going to prove it to you." She does this with cardboard, but since I have an expensive computer here I'll just rotate this little guy around and ... Now having seen that β and I've seen it hundreds of times, because I use this in every talk I give β I still can't see that they're the same size and shape, and I doubt that you can either. So what do artists do? Well, what artists do is to measure. They measure very, very carefully. And if you measure very, very carefully with a stiff arm and a straight edge, you'll see that those two shapes are exactly the same size. And the Talmud saw this a long time ago, saying, "We see things not as they are, but as we are." I certainly would like to know what happened to the person who had that insight back then, if they actually followed it to its ultimate conclusion. So if the world is not as it seems and we see things as we are, then what we call reality is a kind of hallucination happening inside here. It's a waking dream, and understanding that that is what we actually exist in is one of the biggest epistemological barriers in human history. And what that means: "simple and understandable" might not be actually simple or understandable, and things we think are "complex" might be made simple and understandable. Somehow we have to understand ourselves to get around our flaws. We can think of ourselves as kind of a noisy channel. The way I think of it is, we can't learn to see until we admit we're blind. Once you start down at this very humble level, then you can start finding ways to see things. And what's happened, over the last 400 years in particular, is that human beings have invented "brainlets" β little additional parts for our brain β made out of powerful ideas that help us see the world in different ways. And these are in the form of sensory apparatus β telescopes, microscopes β reasoning apparatus β various ways of thinking β and, most importantly, in the ability to change perspective on things. I'll talk about that a little bit. It's this change in perspective on what it is we think we're perceiving that has helped us make more progress in the last 400 years than we have in the rest of human history. And yet, it is not taught in any K through 12 curriculum in America that I'm aware of. So one of the things that goes from simple to complex is when we do more. We like more. If we do more in a kind of a stupid way, the simplicity gets complex and, in fact, we can keep on doing it for a very long time. But Murray Gell-Mann yesterday talked about emergent properties; another name for them could be "architecture" as a metaphor for taking the same old material and thinking about non-obvious, non-simple ways of combining it. And in fact, what Murray was talking about yesterday in the fractal beauty of nature β of having the descriptions at various levels be rather similar β all goes down to the idea that the elementary particles are both sticky and standoffish, and they're in violent motion. Those three things give rise to all the different levels of what seem to be complexity in our world. But how simple? So, when I saw Roslings' Gapminder stuff a few years ago, I just thought it was the greatest thing I'd seen in conveying complex ideas simply. But then I had a thought of, "Boy, maybe it's too simple." And I put some effort in to try and check to see how well these simple portrayals of trends over time actually matched up with some ideas and investigations from the side, and I found that they matched up very well. So the Roslings have been able to do simplicity without removing what's important about the data. Whereas the film yesterday that we saw of the simulation of the inside of a cell, as a former molecular biologist, I didn't like that at all. Not because it wasn't beautiful or anything, but because it misses the thing that most students fail to understand about molecular biology, and that is: why is there any probability at all of two complex shapes finding each other just the right way so they combine together and be catalyzed? And what we saw yesterday was every reaction was fortuitous; they just swooped in the air and bound, and something happened. But in fact, those molecules are spinning at the rate of about a million revolutions per second; they're agitating back and forth their size every two nanoseconds; they're completely crowded together, they're jammed, they're bashing up against each other. And if you don't understand that in your mental model of this stuff, what happens inside of a cell seems completely mysterious and fortuitous, and I think that's exactly the wrong image for when you're trying to teach science. So, another thing that we do is to confuse adult sophistication with the actual understanding of some principle. So a kid who's 14 in high school gets this version of the Pythagorean theorem, which is a truly subtle and interesting proof, but in fact it's not a good way to start learning about mathematics. So a more direct one, one that gives you more of the feeling of math, is something closer to Pythagoras' own proof, which goes like this: so here we have this triangle, and if we surround that C square with three more triangles and we copy that, notice that we can move those triangles down like this. And that leaves two open areas that are kind of suspicious ... and bingo. That is all you have to do. And this kind of proof is the kind of proof that you need to learn when you're learning mathematics in order to get an idea of what it means before you look into the, literally, 1,200 or 1,500 proofs of Pythagoras' theorem that have been discovered. Now let's go to young children. This is a very unusual teacher who was a kindergarten and first-grade teacher, but was a natural mathematician. So she was like that jazz musician friend you have who never studied music but is a terrific musician; she just had a feeling for math. And here are her six-year-olds, and she's got them making shapes out of a shape. So they pick a shape they like β like a diamond, or a square, or a triangle, or a trapezoid β and then they try and make the next larger shape of that same shape, and the next larger shape. You can see the trapezoids are a little challenging there. And what this teacher did on every project was to have the children act like first it was a creative arts project, and then something like science. So they had created these artifacts. Now she had them look at them and do this ... laborious, which I thought for a long time, until she explained to me was to slow them down so they'll think. So they're cutting out the little pieces of cardboard here and pasting them up. But the whole point of this thing is for them to look at this chart and fill it out. "What have you noticed about what you did?" And so six-year-old Lauren there noticed that the first one took one, and the second one took three more and the total was four on that one, the third one took five more and the total was nine on that one, and then the next one. She saw right away that the additional tiles that you had to add around the edges was always going to grow by two, so she was very confident about how she made those numbers there. And she could see that these were the square numbers up until about six, where she wasn't sure what six times six was and what seven times seven was, but then she was confident again. So that's what Lauren did. And then the teacher, Gillian Ishijima, had the kids bring all of their projects up to the front of the room and put them on the floor, and everybody went batshit: "Holy shit! They're the same!" No matter what the shapes were, the growth law is the same. And the mathematicians and scientists in the crowd will recognize these two progressions as a first-order discrete differential equation and a second-order discrete differential equation, derived by six-year-olds. Well, that's pretty amazing. That isn't what we usually try to teach six-year-olds. So, let's take a look now at how we might use the computer for some of this. And so the first idea here is just to show you the kind of things that children do. I'm using the software that we're putting on the $100 laptop. So I'd like to draw a little car here β I'll just do this very quickly β and put a big tire on him. And I get a little object here and I can look inside this object, I'll call it a car. And here's a little behavior: car forward. Each time I click it, car turn. If I want to make a little script to do this over and over again, I just drag these guys out and set them going. And I can try steering the car here by ... See the car turn by five here? So what if I click this down to zero? It goes straight. That's a big revelation for nine-year-olds. Make it go in the other direction. But of course, that's a little bit like kissing your sister as far as driving a car, so the kids want to do a steering wheel; so they draw a steering wheel. And we'll call this a wheel. See this wheel's heading here? If I turn this wheel, you can see that number over there going minus and positive. That's kind of an invitation to pick up this name of those numbers coming out there and to just drop it into the script here, and now I can steer the car with the steering wheel. And it's interesting. You know how much trouble the children have with variables, but by learning it this way, in a situated fashion, they never forget from this single trial what a variable is and how to use it. And we can reflect here the way Gillian Ishijima did. So if you look at the little script here, the speed is always going to be 30. We're going to move the car according to that over and over again. And I'm dropping a little dot for each one of these things; they're evenly spaced because they're 30 apart. And what if I do this progression that the six-year-olds did of saying, "OK, I'm going to increase the speed by two each time, and then I'm going to increase the distance by the speed each time? What do I get there?" We get a visual pattern of what these nine-year-olds called acceleration. So how do the children do science? (Video) Teacher: [Choose] objects that you think will fall to the Earth at the same time. Student 1: Ooh, this is nice. Teacher: Do not pay any attention to what anybody else is doing. Who's got the apple? Alan Kay: They've got little stopwatches. Student 2: What did you get? What did you get? AK: Stopwatches aren't accurate enough. Student 3: 0.99 seconds. Teacher: So put "sponge ball" ... Student 4l: [I decided to] do the shot put and the sponge ball because they're two totally different weights, and if you drop them at the same time, maybe they'll drop at the same speed. Teacher: Drop. Class: Whoa! AK: So obviously, Aristotle never asked a child about this particular point because, of course, he didn't bother doing the experiment, and neither did St. Thomas Aquinas. And it was not until Galileo actually did it that an adult thought like a child, only 400 years ago. We get one child like that about every classroom of 30 kids who will actually cut straight to the chase. Now, what if we want to look at this more closely? We can take a movie of what's going on, but even if we single stepped this movie, it's tricky to see what's going on. And so what we can do is we can lay out the frames side by side or stack them up. So when the children see this, they say, "Ah! Acceleration," remembering back four months when they did their cars sideways, and they start measuring to find out what kind of acceleration it is. So what I'm doing is measuring from the bottom of one image to the bottom of the next image, about a fifth of a second later, like that. And they're getting faster and faster each time, and if I stack these guys up, then we see the differences; the increase in the speed is constant. And they say, "Oh, yeah. Constant acceleration. We've done that already." And how shall we look and verify that we actually have it? So you can't tell much from just making the ball drop there, but if we drop the ball and run the movie at the same time, we can see that we have come up with an accurate physical model. Galileo, by the way, did this very cleverly by running a ball backwards down the strings of his lute. I pulled out those apples to remind myself to tell you that this is actually probably a Newton and the apple type story, but it's a great story. And I thought I would do just one thing on the $100 laptop here just to prove that this stuff works here. So once you have gravity, here's this β increase the speed by something, increase the ship's speed. If I start the little game here that the kids have done, it'll crash the space ship. But if I oppose gravity, here we go ... Oops! (Laughter) One more. Yeah, there we go. Yeah, OK? I guess the best way to end this is with two quotes: Marshall McLuhan said, "Children are the messages that we send to the future," but in fact, if you think of it, children are the future we send to the future. Forget about messages; children are the future, and children in the first and second world and, most especially, in the third world need mentors. And this summer, we're going to build five million of these $100 laptops, and maybe 50 million next year. But we couldn't create 1,000 new teachers this summer to save our life. That means that we, once again, have a thing where we can put technology out, but the mentoring that is required to go from a simple new iChat instant messaging system to something with depth is missing. I believe this has to be done with a new kind of user interface, and this new kind of user interface could be done with an expenditure of about 100 million dollars. It sounds like a lot, but it is literally 18 minutes of what we're spending in Iraq β we're spending 8 billion dollars a month; 18 minutes is 100 million dollars β so this is actually cheap. And Einstein said, "Things should be as simple as possible, but not simpler." Thank you. |
On the verge of creating synthetic life | {0: "In 2001, Craig Venter made headlines for sequencing the human genome. In 2003, he started mapping the ocean's biodiversity. And now he's created the first synthetic lifeforms -- microorganisms that can produce alternative fuels."} | TED2008 | You know, I've talked about some of these projects before β about the human genome and what that might mean, and discovering new sets of genes. We're actually starting at a new point: we've been digitizing biology, and now we're trying to go from that digital code into a new phase of biology with designing and synthesizing life. So, we've always been trying to ask big questions. "What is life?" is something that I think many biologists have been trying to understand at various levels. We've tried various approaches, paring it down to minimal components. We've been digitizing it now for almost 20 years; when we sequenced the human genome, it was going from the analog world of biology into the digital world of the computer. Now we're trying to ask, "Can we regenerate life or can we create new life out of this digital universe?" This is the map of a small organism, Mycoplasma genitalium, that has the smallest genome for a species that can self-replicate in the laboratory, and we've been trying to just see if we can come up with an even smaller genome. We're able to knock out on the order of 100 genes out of the 500 or so that are here. When we look at its metabolic map, it's relatively simple compared to ours β trust me, this is simple β but when we look at all the genes that we can knock out one at a time, it's very unlikely that this would yield a living cell. So we decided the only way forward was to actually synthesize this chromosome so we could vary the components to ask some of these most fundamental questions. And so we started down the road of: can we synthesize a chromosome? Can chemistry permit making these really large molecules where we've never been before? And if we do, can we boot up a chromosome? A chromosome, by the way, is just a piece of inert chemical material. So, our pace of digitizing life has been increasing at an exponential pace. Our ability to write the genetic code has been moving pretty slowly but has been increasing, and our latest point would put it on, now, an exponential curve. We started this over 15 years ago. It took several stages, in fact, starting with a bioethical review before we did the first experiments. But it turns out synthesizing DNA is very difficult. There are tens of thousands of machines around the world that make small pieces of DNA β 30 to 50 letters in length β and it's a degenerate process, so the longer you make the piece, the more errors there are. So we had to create a new method for putting these little pieces together and correct all the errors. And this was our first attempt, starting with the digital information of the genome of phi X174. It's a small virus that kills bacteria. We designed the pieces, went through our error correction and had a DNA molecule of about 5,000 letters. The exciting phase came when we took this piece of inert chemical and put it in the bacteria, and the bacteria started to read this genetic code, made the viral particles. The viral particles then were released from the cells and came back and killed the E. coli. I was talking to the oil industry recently and I said they clearly understood that model. (Laughter) They laughed more than you guys are. (Laughter) And so, we think this is a situation where the software can actually build its own hardware in a biological system. But we wanted to go much larger: we wanted to build the entire bacterial chromosome β it's over 580,000 letters of genetic code β so we thought we'd build them in cassettes the size of the viruses so we could actually vary the cassettes to understand what the actual components of a living cell are. Design is critical, and if you're starting with digital information in the computer, that digital information has to be really accurate. When we first sequenced this genome in 1995, the standard of accuracy was one error per 10,000 base pairs. We actually found, on resequencing it, 30 errors; had we used that original sequence, it never would have been able to be booted up. Part of the design is designing pieces that are 50 letters long that have to overlap with all the other 50-letter pieces to build smaller subunits we have to design so they can go together. We design unique elements into this. You may have read that we put watermarks in. Think of this: we have a four-letter genetic code β A, C, G and T. Triplets of those letters code for roughly 20 amino acids, such that there's a single letter designation for each of the amino acids. So we can use the genetic code to write out words, sentences, thoughts. Initially, all we did was autograph it. Some people were disappointed there was not poetry. We designed these pieces so we can just chew back with enzymes; there are enzymes that repair them and put them together. And we started making pieces, starting with pieces that were 5,000 to 7,000 letters, put those together to make 24,000-letter pieces, then put sets of those going up to 72,000. At each stage, we grew up these pieces in abundance so we could sequence them because we're trying to create a process that's extremely robust that you can see in a minute. We're trying to get to the point of automation. So, this looks like a basketball playoff. When we get into these really large pieces over 100,000 base pairs, they won't any longer grow readily in E. coli β it exhausts all the modern tools of molecular biology β and so we turned to other mechanisms. We knew there's a mechanism called homologous recombination that biology uses to repair DNA that can put pieces together. Here's an example of it: there's an organism called Deinococcus radiodurans that can take three millions rads of radiation. You can see in the top panel, its chromosome just gets blown apart. Twelve to 24 hours later, it put it back together exactly as it was before. We have thousands of organisms that can do this. These organisms can be totally desiccated; they can live in a vacuum. I am absolutely certain that life can exist in outer space, move around, find a new aqueous environment. In fact, NASA has shown a lot of this is out there. Here's an actual micrograph of the molecule we built using these processes, actually just using yeast mechanisms with the right design of the pieces we put them in; yeast puts them together automatically. This is not an electron micrograph; this is just a regular photomicrograph. It's such a large molecule we can see it with a light microscope. These are pictures over about a six-second period. So, this is the publication we had just a short while ago. This is over 580,000 letters of genetic code; it's the largest molecule ever made by humans of a defined structure. It's over 300 million molecular weight. If we printed it out at a 10 font with no spacing, it takes 142 pages just to print this genetic code. Well, how do we boot up a chromosome? How do we activate this? Obviously, with a virus it's pretty simple; it's much more complicated dealing with bacteria. It's also simpler when you go into eukaryotes like ourselves: you can just pop out the nucleus and pop in another one, and that's what you've all heard about with cloning. With bacteria and Archaea, the chromosome is integrated into the cell, but we recently showed that we can do a complete transplant of a chromosome from one cell to another and activate it. We purified a chromosome from one microbial species β roughly, these two are as distant as human and mice β we added a few extra genes so we could select for this chromosome, we digested it with enzymes to kill all the proteins, and it was pretty stunning when we put this in the cell β and you'll appreciate our very sophisticated graphics here. The new chromosome went into the cell. In fact, we thought this might be as far as it went, but we tried to design the process a little bit further. This is a major mechanism of evolution right here. We find all kinds of species that have taken up a second chromosome or a third one from somewhere, adding thousands of new traits in a second to that species. So, people who think of evolution as just one gene changing at a time have missed much of biology. There are enzymes called restriction enzymes that actually digest DNA. The chromosome that was in the cell doesn't have one; the chromosome we put in does. It got expressed and it recognized the other chromosome as foreign material, chewed it up, and so we ended up just with a cell with the new chromosome. It turned blue because of the genes we put in it. And with a very short period of time, all the characteristics of one species were lost and it converted totally into the new species based on the new software that we put in the cell. All the proteins changed, the membranes changed; when we read the genetic code, it's exactly what we had transferred in. So, this may sound like genomic alchemy, but we can, by moving the software of DNA around, change things quite dramatically. Now I've argued, this is not genesis; this is building on three and a half billion years of evolution. And I've argued that we're about to perhaps create a new version of the Cambrian explosion, where there's massive new speciation based on this digital design. Why do this? I think this is pretty obvious in terms of some of the needs. We're about to go from six and a half to nine billion people over the next 40 years. To put it in context for myself: I was born in 1946. There are now three people on the planet for every one of us that existed in 1946; within 40 years, there'll be four. We have trouble feeding, providing fresh, clean water, medicines, fuel for the six and a half billion. It's going to be a stretch to do it for nine. We use over five billion tons of coal, 30 billion-plus barrels of oil β that's a hundred million barrels a day. When we try to think of biological processes or any process to replace that, it's going to be a huge challenge. Then of course, there's all that CO2 from this material that ends up in the atmosphere. We now, from our discovery around the world, have a database with about 20 million genes, and I like to think of these as the design components of the future. The electronics industry only had a dozen or so components, and look at the diversity that came out of that. We're limited here primarily by a biological reality and our imagination. We now have techniques, because of these rapid methods of synthesis, to do what we're calling combinatorial genomics. We have the ability now to build a large robot that can make a million chromosomes a day. When you think of processing these 20 million different genes or trying to optimize processes to produce octane or to produce pharmaceuticals, new vaccines, we can just with a small team, do more molecular biology than the last 20 years of all science. And it's just standard selection: we can select for viability, chemical or fuel production, vaccine production, etc. This is a screen snapshot of some true design software that we're working on to actually be able to sit down and design species in the computer. You know, we don't know necessarily what it'll look like: we know exactly what their genetic code looks like. We're focusing on now fourth-generation fuels. You've seen recently, corn to ethanol is just a bad experiment. We have second- and third-generation fuels that will be coming out relatively soon that are sugar, to much higher-value fuels like octane or different types of butanol. But the only way we think that biology can have a major impact without further increasing the cost of food and limiting its availability is if we start with CO2 as its feedstock, and so we're working with designing cells to go down this road. And we think we'll have the first fourth-generation fuels in about 18 months. Sunlight and CO2 is one method ... (Applause) but in our discovery around the world, we have all kinds of other methods. This is an organism we described in 1996. It lives in the deep ocean, about a mile and a half deep, almost at boiling-water temperatures. It takes CO2 to methane using molecular hydrogen as its energy source. We're looking to see if we can take captured CO2, which can easily be piped to sites, convert that CO2 back into fuel to drive this process. So, in a short period of time, we think that we might be able to increase what the basic question is of "What is life?" We truly, you know, have modest goals of replacing the whole petrol-chemical industry β (Laughter) (Applause) Yeah. If you can't do that at TED, where can you? β (Laughter) become a major source of energy ... But also, we're now working on using these same tools to come up with instant sets of vaccines. You've seen this year with flu; we're always a year behind and a dollar short when it comes to the right vaccine. I think that can be changed by building combinatorial vaccines in advance. Here's what the future may begin to look like with changing, now, the evolutionary tree, speeding up evolution with synthetic bacteria, Archaea and, eventually, eukaryotes. We're a ways away from improving people: our goal is just to make sure that we have a chance to survive long enough to maybe do that. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
5 predictions, from 1984 | {0: "The founder of the MIT Media Lab, Nicholas Negroponte pushed the edge of the information revolution as an inventor, thinker and angel investor. He's the driving force behind One Laptop per Child, building computers for children in the developing world. "} | TED1984 | In this rather long sort of marathon presentation, I've tried to break it up into three parts: the first being a whole lot of examples on how it can be a little bit more pleasurable to deal with a computer and really address the qualities of the human interface. And these will be some simple design qualities and they will also be some qualities of, if you will, the intelligence of interaction. Then the second part will really just be examples of new technologies β new media falling very much into that mold. Again, I will go through them as fast as possible. And then the last one will be some examples I've been able to collect, which I think illustrate this at least as best I can, in the world of entertainment. People have this belief β and I share most of it β that we will be using the TV screens or their equivalents for electronic books of the future. But then you think, "My God! What a terrible image you get when you look at still pictures on TV." Well, it doesn't have to be terrible. And that is a slide taken from a TV set and it was pre-processed to be very sympathetic to the TV medium, and it absolutely looks beautiful. Well, what's happened? How did people get into this mess? Where you are now, all of a sudden, sitting in front of personal computers and video text β teletext systems, and somewhat horrified by what you see on the screen? Well, you have to remember that TV was designed to be looked at eight times the distance of the diagonal. So you get a 13-inch, 19-inch, whatever, TV, and then you should multiply that by eight and that's the distance you should sit away from the TV set. Now we've put people 18 inches in front of a TV, and all the artifacts that none of the original designers expected to be seen, all of a sudden, are staring you in the face: the shadow mask, the scan lines, all of that. And they can be treated very easily; there are actually ways of getting rid of them, there are actually ways of just making absolutely beautiful pictures. I'm talking here a little bit about display technologies. Let me talk about how you might input information. And my favorite example is always fingers. I'm very interested in touch-sensitive displays. High-tech, high-touch. Isn't that what some of you said? It's certainly a very important medium for input, and a lot of people think that fingers are a very low-resolution sort of stylus for inputting to a display. In fact, they're not: it's really a very, very high-resolution input medium β you have to just do it twice, you have to touch the screen and then rotate your finger slightly β and you can move a cursor with great accuracy. And so when you see on the market these systems that have just a few light emitting diodes on the side and are very low resolution, it's nice that they exist because it still is better than nothing. But it, in some sense, misses the point: namely, that fingers are a very, very high-resolution input medium. Now, what are some of the other advantages? Well, the one advantage is that you don't have to pick them up, and people don't realize how important that is β not having to pick up your fingers to use them. (Laughter) When you think for a second of the mouse on Macintosh β and I will not criticize the mouse too much β when you're typing β what you have β you want to now put something β first of all, you've got to find the mouse. You have to probably stop. Maybe not come to a grinding halt, but you've got to sort of find that mouse. Then you find the mouse, and you're going to have to wiggle it a little bit to see where the cursor is on the screen. And then when you finally see where it is, then you've got to move it to get the cursor over there, and then β "Bang" β you've got to hit a button or do whatever. That's four separate steps versus typing and then touching and typing and just doing it all in one motion β or one-and-a-half, depending on how you want to count. Again, what I'm trying to do is just illustrate the kinds of problems that I think face the designers of new computer systems and entertainment systems and educational systems from the perspective of the quality of that interface. And another advantage, of course, of using fingers is you have 10 of them. And we have never known how to do this technically, so this slide is a fake slide. We never succeeded in using ten fingers, but there are certain things you can do, obviously, with more than one-finger input, which is rather fascinating. What we did stumble across was something ... Again, which is typical of the computer field, is when you have a bug that you can't get rid of you turn it into a feature. And maybe ... (Laughter) maybe a mouse is a new kind of bug. But the bug in our case was in touch-sensitive displays: we wanted to be able to draw β you know, rub your finger across the screen to input continuous points β and there was just too much friction created between your finger and the glass β if glass was the substrate, which it usually is. So we found that that actually was a feature in the sense you could build a pressure-sensitive display. And when you touch it with your finger, you can actually, then, introduce all the forces on the face of that screen, and that actually has a certain amount of value. Let me see if I can load another disc and show you, quickly, an example. Now, imagine a screen, which is not only touch-sensitive now, it's pressure-sensitive. And it's pressure-sensitive to the forces both in the plane of the screen β X, Y, and Z at least in one direction; we couldn't figure out how to come in the other direction. But let me get rid of the slide, and let's see if this comes on. OK. So there is the pressure-sensitive display in operation. The person's just, if you will, pushing on the screen to make a curve. But this is the interesting part. I want to stop it for a second because the movie is very badly made. And the particular display was built about six years ago, and when we moved from one room to another room, a rather large person sat on it and it got destroyed. So all we have is this record. (Laughter) But imagine that screen having lots of objects on it and the person has touched an object β one of N β like he did there, and then pushed on it. Now, imagine a program where some of those objects are physically heavy and some are light: one is an anvil on a fuzzy rug and the other one is a ping-pong ball on a sheet of glass. And when you touch it, you have to really push very hard to move that anvil across the screen, and yet you touch the ping-pong ball very lightly and it just scoots across the screen. And what you can do β oops, I didn't mean to do that β what you can do is actually feed back to the user the feeling of the physical properties. So again, they don't have to be weight; they could be a general trying to move troops, and he's got to move an aircraft carrier versus a little boat. In fact, they funded it for that very reason. (Laughter) The whole notion, then, is one that at the interface there are physical properties in that transducer β in this case it's pressure and touches β that allow you to present things to the user that you could never present before. So it's not simply looking at the quality or, if you will, the luxury of that interface, but it's actually looking at the idea of presenting things that previously couldn't be presented before. I want to move on to another example, which is one of a different sort, where we're trying to use computer and video disc technology now to come up with a new kind of book. Here, the idea is that you're going to take this book, if you will, and it's going to come alive. You're going to sort of breathe life into it. We are so used to doing monologues. Filmmakers, for example, are the experts in monologue making: you make a film and it has a well-formed beginning, middle and end, and in some sense the art of it is that. And you then say, "There's an opportunity for making conversational movies." Well, what does that mean? And it sort of nibbles at the core of the whole profession and all the assumptions of that medium. So, book writing is the same thing. What I'll show you very quickly is a new kind of book where it is mixed now with ... all sorts of things live in there, but you have to keep a few things in mind. One is that this book knows about itself. Each frame of the movie has information about itself. So it knows, or at least there is computer-readable information in the medium itself. It's just not a static movie frame. That's one thing. The other is that you have to realize that it is a random access medium, and you can, in fact, branch and expand and elaborate and shrink. And here β again, my favorite example β is the cookbook, the "Larousse Gastronomique." And I think I use the example all too often, but it's a great one because there is a classic ending in that little encyclopedia-style cookbook that tells you how to do something like penguin, and you get to the end of the recipe and it says, "Cook until done." Now, that would be, if you will, the top green track, which doesn't mean too much. But you might have to elaborate for me or for somebody who isn't an expert, and say, "Cook at 380 degrees for 45 minutes." And then for a real beginner, you would go down even further and elaborate more β say, "Open the oven, preheat, wait for the light to go out, open the door, don't leave it open too long, put the penguin in and shut the door ..." (Laughter) whatever. And that's a much more elaborate one than you dribble back. That's one kind of use of random access. And the other is where you want to explain the same thing in different ways. If you're in a classroom situation and somebody asks a question, the last thing you do is repeat what you just said. You try and think of a different way of saying the same thing, or if you know the particular student and that student's cognitive style, then you might say it in a way that you think would have a good impedance match with that student. There are all sorts of techniques you will use β and again, this is a different kind of branching. So, what I will show you is ... it's a rather boring book, but I'm afraid sometimes you have to do boring books because your sponsors aren't necessarily interested in fiction and entertainment. And this is a book on how to repair a transmission. Now, I don't even know what vintage the transmission is, but let me just show you very quickly some of it, and we'll move on. (Video) Narrator: And continue to get descriptions for each of these chapters. Nicholas Negroponte: Now, this is his table of contents. Just a picture of the transmission, and as you rub your finger across the transmission it highlights the various parts. Narrator: When I find a chapter that I want to see, I just touch the text and the system will format pages for me to read. The words or phrases that are lit up in red are glossary words, so I can get a different definition by just touching the word, and the definition appears, superimposed over the illustration. NN: This is about the oil pan, or the oil filter and all that. This is relatively important because it sets the page ... Narrator: This is another example of a page with glossary words highlighted in red. I can get a definition of these words just by touching them, and the definition will appear in the illustration corner. I can get back to the illustration, but in this case it's not a single frame, but it's actually a movie of someone coming into the frame and doing the repair that's described in the text. The two-headed slider is a speed control that allows me to watch the movie at various speeds, in forward or reverse. And the movie is displayed as a full frame movie. I can go back to the beginning ... and play the movie at full speed. Here's another step-by-step procedure, only in this case β NN: Okay, this movie is ... Everybody's heard of sound-sync movies β this is text-sync movies, so as the movie plays, the text gets highlighted. We highlight the text as we go through the movie. Repairman: ... Not too far out. Front poles, preferably. Don't loosen them too far. If you loosen them too far, you'll have a big mess. NN: I suspect that some of you might not even understand that language. (Laughter) OK. I'm at the third and last part of this, which I said I would make an attempt to at least give you some examples that may be more directly related to the world of entertainment. And of course, good education has got to be good entertainment, so my first example will be drawn from a very recent experiment that we've been doing β in this case, in Senegal β where we have tried to use personal computers as a pedagogical medium. But not as teaching machines at all; the whole notion is to use this as an instrument where there is a complete reversal of roles β the child is, if you will, the teacher and the machine is the student β and the art of computer programming is a vehicle that sort of approximates thinking about thinking. But teaching kids programming per se is utterly irrelevant. And there are just a few slides I want to go through, but there's a story I'd like to tell. And that was when, before we did this in any developing countries β we're doing it, in fact, in three developing countries right now: Pakistan, Colombia and Senegal β we did it in some pretty rough areas of New York City. And one child, whose name I've forgotten, was about seven or eight years old, absolutely considered mentally handicapped β couldn't read, didn't even make it in the lowest section of the school's classes β and was pretty much not in school, though physically there. But did hang around the, quote, "computer room," where there were quite a few computers, and learned this particular language called Logo β and learned it with great ease and found it a lot of fun, it was very interesting. And one day, by chance, some visitors from the NIE came by in their double-breasted suits looking at this setup, and none of the children who were normally there, except for this one child, were there. He was, and he said, "Let me show you how this works," and they got an absolutely ingenuous, wonderful description of Logo. And the child was just zipping right through it, showing them all sorts of things until they asked him how to do something which he couldn't explain and so he flipped through the manual, found the explanation and typed the command and got it to do what they asked. They were delighted, and by the time it was time to go see the principal, whom they'd actually come to see β not the computer room β they went upstairs and they said, "This is absolutely remarkable! That child was very articulate and showed us and even dealt with the things he couldn't do automatically with that manual. It was just absolutely fantastic." The principal said, "There's a dreadful mistake, because that child can't read. And you obviously have been hoodwinked or you've talked about somebody else." And they all got up and they all went downstairs and the child was still there. And they did something very intelligent: they asked the child, "Can you read?" And the child said, "No, I can't." And then they said, "But wait a minute. You just looked through that manual and you found ... " and he said, "Oh, but that's not reading." And so they said, "Well, what's reading then?" He says, "Well, reading is this junk they give me in little books to read. It's absolutely irrelevant, (Laughter) and I get nothing for it. But here, with a little bit of effort I get a lot of return." And it really meant something to the child. The child read beautifully, it turned out, and was really very competent. So it actually meant something. And that story has many other anecdotes that are similar, but wow. The key to the future of computers in education is right there, and it is: when does it mean something to a child? There is a myth, and it truly is a myth: we believe β and I'm sure a lot of you believe in this room β that it is harder to read and write than it is to learn how to speak. And it's not, but we think speech β "My God, little children pick it up somehow, and by the age of two they're doing a mediocre job, and by three and four they're speaking reasonably well. And yet you've got to go to school to learn how to read, and you have to sit in a classroom and somebody has to teach you. Hence, it must be harder." Well, it's not harder. What the truth is is that speaking has great value to a child; the child can get a great deal by talking to you. Reading and writing is utterly useless. There is no reason for a child to read and write except blind faith, and that it's going to help you. (Laughter) So what happens is you go to school and people say, "Just believe me, you're going to like it. You're going to like reading," and just read and read. On the other hand, you give a kid β a three-year-old kid β a computer and they type a little command and β Poof! β something happens. And all of a sudden ... You may not call that reading and writing, but a certain bit of typing and reading stuff on the screen has a huge payoff, and it's a lot of fun. And in fact, it's a powerful educational instrument. Well, in Senegal we found that this was the traditional classroom: 120 kids β three per desk β one teacher, a little bit of chalk. This student was one of our first students, and it's the girl on the left leaning with her chalkboard, and she came ... within two days β I want to show you the program she wrote, and remember her hairstyle. And that is the program she made. That's what meant something to her, is doing the hair pattern, and actually did it within two days β an hour each day β and found it was, to her, absolutely the most meaningful piece ... But rooted in that, little did she know how much knowledge she was acquiring about geometry and just math and logic and all the rest. And again, I could talk for three hours about this subject. I will come to my last example and then quit. And my last example β as some of my former colleagues, whom I see in the room, can imagine what it will be. Yes, it is. It's our work β that was a while ago, and it still is my favorite project β of teleconferencing. And the reason it remains a favorite project is that we were asked to do a teleconferencing system where you had the following situation: you had five people at five different sites β they were known people β and you had to have these people in teleconference, such that each one was utterly convinced that the other four were physically present. Now, that is sufficiently zany that we would, obviously, jump to the bait, and we did. And the fact that we knew the people β we had to take a page out of the history of Walt Disney β we actually went so far as to build CRTs in the shapes of the people's faces. So if I wanted to call my friend Peter Sprague on the phone, my secretary would get his head out and bring it and set it on the desk, (Laughter) and that would be the TV used for the occasion. And it's uncanny: there's no way I can explain to you the amount of eye contact you get with that physical face projected on a 3D CRT of that sort. The next thing that we had to do is to persuade them that there needed to be spatial correspondence, which is straightforward, but again, it's something that didn't fall naturally out of a telecommunications or computing style of thinking; it was a very, if you will, architectural or spatial concept. And that was to recognize that when you sit around the table, the actual location of the people becomes rather important. And when somebody gets up, in fact, to go answer a phone or use a bathroom or something, the empty seat becomes, if you will, that person. And you point frequently to the empty seat and you say, "He or she wouldn't agree," and the empty chair is that person and the spatiality is crucial. So we said, "Well, these will be on round tables and the order around the table had to be the same, so that at my site, I would be, if you will, real and then at each other's site you'd have these plastic heads. And the plastic heads, sometimes you want to project them. And there are a number of schemes, which I don't want to dwell on, but this is the one that we finally used where we projected onto rear screen material that was molded in the face β literally in the face of the person. And I'll show you one more slide, where this is actually made from something called a solid photograph and is the screen. Now, we track, on the person's head, the head motions β so we transmit with a video the head positions β and so this head moves in about two axes. So if I, all of a sudden, turn to the person to my left and start talking to that person, then at the person to my right's site, he'll see these two plastic heads talking to each other. And then if that person interrupts, then those two heads may turn. And it really is reconstructing, quite accurately, teleconferencing. |
My stroke of insight | {0: 'Brain researcher Jill Bolte Taylor studied her own stroke as it happened -- and has become a powerful voice for brain recovery.'} | TED2008 | I grew up to study the brain because I have a brother who has been diagnosed with a brain disorder, schizophrenia. And as a sister and later, as a scientist, I wanted to understand, why is it that I can take my dreams, I can connect them to my reality, and I can make my dreams come true? What is it about my brother's brain and his schizophrenia that he cannot connect his dreams to a common and shared reality, so they instead become delusion? So I dedicated my career to research into the severe mental illnesses. And I moved from my home state of Indiana to Boston, where I was working in the lab of Dr. Francine Benes, in the Harvard Department of Psychiatry. And in the lab, we were asking the question, "What are the biological differences between the brains of individuals who would be diagnosed as normal control, as compared with the brains of individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia, schizoaffective or bipolar disorder?" So we were essentially mapping the microcircuitry of the brain: which cells are communicating with which cells, with which chemicals, and then in what quantities of those chemicals? So there was a lot of meaning in my life because I was performing this type of research during the day, but then in the evenings and on the weekends, I traveled as an advocate for NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness. But on the morning of December 10, 1996, I woke up to discover that I had a brain disorder of my own. A blood vessel exploded in the left half of my brain. And in the course of four hours, I watched my brain completely deteriorate in its ability to process all information. On the morning of the hemorrhage, I could not walk, talk, read, write or recall any of my life. I essentially became an infant in a woman's body. If you've ever seen a human brain, it's obvious that the two hemispheres are completely separate from one another. And I have brought for you a real human brain. (Groaning, laughter) So this is a real human brain. This is the front of the brain, the back of brain with the spinal cord hanging down, and this is how it would be positioned inside of my head. And when you look at the brain, it's obvious that the two cerebral cortices are completely separate from one another. For those of you who understand computers, our right hemisphere functions like a parallel processor, while our left hemisphere functions like a serial processor. The two hemispheres do communicate with one another through the corpus callosum, which is made up of some 300 million axonal fibers. But other than that, the two hemispheres are completely separate. Because they process information differently, each of our hemispheres think about different things, they care about different things, and, dare I say, they have very different personalities. Excuse me. Thank you. It's been a joy. Assistant: It has been. (Laughter) Our right human hemisphere is all about this present moment. It's all about "right here, right now." Our right hemisphere, it thinks in pictures and it learns kinesthetically through the movement of our bodies. Information, in the form of energy, streams in simultaneously through all of our sensory systems and then it explodes into this enormous collage of what this present moment looks like, what this present moment smells like and tastes like, what it feels like and what it sounds like. I am an energy-being connected to the energy all around me through the consciousness of my right hemisphere. We are energy-beings connected to one another through the consciousness of our right hemispheres as one human family. And right here, right now, we are brothers and sisters on this planet, here to make the world a better place. And in this moment we are perfect, we are whole and we are beautiful. My left hemisphere, our left hemisphere, is a very different place. Our left hemisphere thinks linearly and methodically. Our left hemisphere is all about the past and it's all about the future. Our left hemisphere is designed to take that enormous collage of the present moment and start picking out details, and more details about those details. It then categorizes and organizes all that information, associates it with everything in the past we've ever learned, and projects into the future all of our possibilities. And our left hemisphere thinks in language. It's that ongoing brain chatter that connects me and my internal world to my external world. It's that little voice that says to me, "Hey, you've got to remember to pick up bananas on your way home. I need them in the morning." It's that calculating intelligence that reminds me when I have to do my laundry. But perhaps most important, it's that little voice that says to me, "I am. I am." And as soon as my left hemisphere says to me "I am," I become separate. I become a single solid individual, separate from the energy flow around me and separate from you. And this was the portion of my brain that I lost on the morning of my stroke. On the morning of the stroke, I woke up to a pounding pain behind my left eye. And it was the kind of caustic pain that you get when you bite into ice cream. And it just gripped me β and then it released me. And then it just gripped me β and then it released me. And it was very unusual for me to ever experience any kind of pain, so I thought, "OK, I'll just start my normal routine." So I got up and I jumped onto my cardio glider, which is a full-body, full-exercise machine. And I'm jamming away on this thing, and I'm realizing that my hands look like primitive claws grasping onto the bar. And I thought, "That's very peculiar." And I looked down at my body and I thought, "Whoa, I'm a weird-looking thing." And it was as though my consciousness had shifted away from my normal perception of reality, where I'm the person on the machine having the experience, to some esoteric space where I'm witnessing myself having this experience. And it was all very peculiar, and my headache was just getting worse. So I get off the machine, and I'm walking across my living room floor, and I realize that everything inside of my body has slowed way down. And every step is very rigid and very deliberate. There's no fluidity to my pace, and there's this constriction in my area of perception, so I'm just focused on internal systems. And I'm standing in my bathroom getting ready to step into the shower, and I could actually hear the dialogue inside of my body. I heard a little voice saying, "OK. You muscles, you've got to contract. You muscles, you relax." And then I lost my balance, and I'm propped up against the wall. And I look down at my arm and I realize that I can no longer define the boundaries of my body. I can't define where I begin and where I end, because the atoms and the molecules of my arm blended with the atoms and molecules of the wall. And all I could detect was this energy β energy. And I'm asking myself, "What is wrong with me? What is going on?" And in that moment, my left hemisphere brain chatter went totally silent. Just like someone took a remote control and pushed the mute button. Total silence. And at first I was shocked to find myself inside of a silent mind. But then I was immediately captivated by the magnificence of the energy around me. And because I could no longer identify the boundaries of my body, I felt enormous and expansive. I felt at one with all the energy that was, and it was beautiful there. Then all of a sudden my left hemisphere comes back online and it says to me, "Hey! We've got a problem! We've got to get some help." And I'm going, "Ahh! I've got a problem!" (Laughter) So it's like, "OK, I've got a problem." But then I immediately drifted right back out into the consciousness β and I affectionately refer to this space as La La Land. But it was beautiful there. Imagine what it would be like to be totally disconnected from your brain chatter that connects you to the external world. So here I am in this space, and my job, and any stress related to my job β it was gone. And I felt lighter in my body. And imagine all of the relationships in the external world and any stressors related to any of those β they were gone. And I felt this sense of peacefulness. And imagine what it would feel like to lose 37 years of emotional baggage! (Laughter) Oh! I felt euphoria β euphoria. It was beautiful. And again, my left hemisphere comes online and it says, "Hey! You've got to pay attention. We've got to get help." And I'm thinking, "I've got to get help. I've got to focus." So I get out of the shower and I mechanically dress and I'm walking around my apartment, and I'm thinking, "I've got to get to work. Can I drive?" And in that moment, my right arm went totally paralyzed by my side. Then I realized, "Oh my gosh! I'm having a stroke!" And the next thing my brain says to me is, Wow! This is so cool! (Laughter) This is so cool! How many brain scientists have the opportunity to study their own brain from the inside out?" (Laughter) And then it crosses my mind, "But I'm a very busy woman!" (Laughter) "I don't have time for a stroke!" So I'm like, "OK, I can't stop the stroke from happening, so I'll do this for a week or two, and then I'll get back to my routine. OK. So I've got to call help. I've got to call work." I couldn't remember the number at work, so I remembered, in my office I had a business card with my number. So I go into my business room, I pull out a three-inch stack of business cards. And I'm looking at the card on top and even though I could see clearly in my mind's eye what my business card looked like, I couldn't tell if this was my card or not, because all I could see were pixels. And the pixels of the words blended with the pixels of the background and the pixels of the symbols, and I just couldn't tell. And then I would wait for what I call a wave of clarity. And in that moment, I would be able to reattach to normal reality and I could tell that's not the card... that's not the card. It took me 45 minutes to get one inch down inside of that stack of cards. In the meantime, for 45 minutes, the hemorrhage is getting bigger in my left hemisphere. I do not understand numbers, I do not understand the telephone, but it's the only plan I have. So I take the phone pad and I put it right here. I take the business card, I put it right here, and I'm matching the shape of the squiggles on the card to the shape of the squiggles on the phone pad. But then I would drift back out into La La Land, and not remember when I came back if I'd already dialed those numbers. So I had to wield my paralyzed arm like a stump and cover the numbers as I went along and pushed them, so that as I would come back to normal reality, I'd be able to tell, "Yes, I've already dialed that number." Eventually, the whole number gets dialed and I'm listening to the phone, and my colleague picks up the phone and he says to me, "Woo woo woo woo." (Laughter) (Laughter) And I think to myself, "Oh my gosh, he sounds like a Golden Retriever!" (Laughter) And so I say to him β clear in my mind, I say to him: "This is Jill! I need help!" And what comes out of my voice is, "Woo woo woo woo woo." I'm thinking, "Oh my gosh, I sound like a Golden Retriever." So I couldn't know β I didn't know that I couldn't speak or understand language until I tried. So he recognizes that I need help and he gets me help. And a little while later, I am riding in an ambulance from one hospital across Boston to [Massachusetts] General Hospital. And I curl up into a little fetal ball. And just like a balloon with the last bit of air, just right out of the balloon, I just felt my energy lift and just I felt my spirit surrender. And in that moment, I knew that I was no longer the choreographer of my life. And either the doctors rescue my body and give me a second chance at life, or this was perhaps my moment of transition. When I woke later that afternoon, I was shocked to discover that I was still alive. When I felt my spirit surrender, I said goodbye to my life. And my mind was now suspended between two very opposite planes of reality. Stimulation coming in through my sensory systems felt like pure pain. Light burned my brain like wildfire, and sounds were so loud and chaotic that I could not pick a voice out from the background noise, and I just wanted to escape. Because I could not identify the position of my body in space, I felt enormous and expansive, like a genie just liberated from her bottle. And my spirit soared free, like a great whale gliding through the sea of silent euphoria. Nirvana. I found Nirvana. And I remember thinking, there's no way I would ever be able to squeeze the enormousness of myself back inside this tiny little body. But then I realized, "But I'm still alive! I'm still alive, and I have found Nirvana. And if I have found Nirvana and I'm still alive, then everyone who is alive can find Nirvana." And I pictured a world filled with beautiful, peaceful, compassionate, loving people who knew that they could come to this space at any time. And that they could purposely choose to step to the right of their left hemispheres β and find this peace. And then I realized what a tremendous gift this experience could be, what a stroke of insight this could be to how we live our lives. And it motivated me to recover. Two and a half weeks after the hemorrhage, the surgeons went in, and they removed a blood clot the size of a golf ball that was pushing on my language centers. Here I am with my mama, who is a true angel in my life. It took me eight years to completely recover. So who are we? We are the life-force power of the universe, with manual dexterity and two cognitive minds. And we have the power to choose, moment by moment, who and how we want to be in the world. Right here, right now, I can step into the consciousness of my right hemisphere, where we are. I am the life-force power of the universe. I am the life-force power of the 50 trillion beautiful molecular geniuses that make up my form, at one with all that is. Or, I can choose to step into the consciousness of my left hemisphere, where I become a single individual, a solid. Separate from the flow, separate from you. I am Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: intellectual, neuroanatomist. These are the "we" inside of me. Which would you choose? Which do you choose? And when? I believe that the more time we spend choosing to run the deep inner-peace circuitry of our right hemispheres, the more peace we will project into the world, and the more peaceful our planet will be. And I thought that was an idea worth spreading. Thank you. (Applause) |
My days as a young rebel | {0: "A living legend, Frank Gehry has forged his own language of architecture, creating astonishing buildings all over the world, such as the Guggenheim in Bilbao, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in LA, and Manhattan's new IAC building."} | TED1990 | I'm going to go right into the slides. And all I'm going to try and prove to you with these slides is that I do just very straight stuff. And my ideas are β in my head, anyway β they're very logical and relate to what's going on and problem solving for clients. I either convince clients at the end that I solve their problems, or I really do solve their problems, because usually they seem to like it. Let me go right into the slides. Can you turn off the light? Down. I like to be in the dark. I don't want you to see what I'm doing up here. (Laughter) Anyway, I did this house in Santa Monica, and it got a lot of notoriety. In fact, it appeared in a porno comic book, which is the slide on the right. (Laughter) This is in Venice. I just show it because I want you to know I'm concerned about context. On the left-hand side, I had the context of those little houses, and I tried to build a building that fit into that context. When people take pictures of these buildings out of that context they look really weird, and my premise is that they make a lot more sense when they're photographed or seen in that space. And then, once I deal with the context, I then try to make a place that's comfortable and private and fairly serene, as I hope you'll find that slide on the right. And then I did a law school for Loyola in downtown L.A. I was concerned about making a place for the study of law. And we continue to work with this client. The building on the right at the top is now under construction. The garage on the right β the gray structure β will be torn down, finally, and several small classrooms will be placed along this avenue that we've created, this campus. And it all related to the clients and the students from the very first meeting saying they felt denied a place. They wanted a sense of place. And so the whole idea here was to create that kind of space in downtown, in a neighborhood that was difficult to fit into. And it was my theory, or my point of view, that one didn't upstage the neighborhood β one made accommodations. I tried to be inclusive, to include the buildings in the neighborhood, whether they were buildings I liked or not. In the '60s I started working with paper furniture and made a bunch of stuff that was very successful in Bloomingdale's. We even made flooring, walls and everything, out of cardboard. And the success of it threw me for a loop. I couldn't deal with the success of furniture β I wasn't secure enough as an architect β and so I closed it all up and made furniture that nobody would like. (Laughter) So, nobody would like this. And it was in this, preliminary to these pieces of furniture, that Ricky and I worked on furniture by the slice. And after we failed, I just kept failing. (Laughter) The piece on the left β and that ultimately led to the piece on the right β happened when the kid that was working on this took one of those long strings of stuff and folded it up to put it in the wastebasket. And I put a piece of tape around it, as you see there, and realized you could sit on it, and it had a lot of resilience and strength and so on. So, it was an accidental discovery. I got into fish. (Laughter) I mean, the story I tell is that I got mad at postmodernism β at po-mo β and said that fish were 500 million years earlier than man, and if you're going to go back, we might as well go back to the beginning. And so I started making these funny things. And they started to have a life of their own and got bigger β as the one glass at the Walker. And then, I sliced off the head and the tail and everything and tried to translate what I was learning about the form of the fish and the movement. And a lot of my architectural ideas that came from it β accidental, again β it was an intuitive kind of thing, and I just kept going with it, and made this proposal for a building, which was only a proposal. I did this building in Japan. I was taken out to dinner after the contract for this little restaurant was signed. And I love sake and Kobe and all that stuff. And after I got β I was really drunk β I was asked to do some sketches on napkins. (Laughter) And I made some sketches on napkins β little boxes and Morandi-like things that I used to do. And the client said, "Why no fish?" And so I made a drawing with a fish, and I left Japan. Three weeks later, I received a complete set of drawings saying we'd won the competition. (Laughter) Now, it's hard to do. It's hard to translate a fish form, because they're so beautiful β perfect β into a building or object like this. And Oldenburg, who I work with a little once in a while, told me I couldn't do it, and so that made it even more exciting. But he was right β I couldn't do the tail. I started to get the head OK, but the tail I couldn't do. It was pretty hard. The thing on the right is a snake form, a ziggurat. And I put them together, and you walk between them. It was a dialog with the context again. Now, if you saw a picture of this as it was published in Architectural Record β they didn't show the context, so you would think, "God, what a pushy guy this is." But a friend of mine spent four hours wandering around here looking for this restaurant. Couldn't find it. So ... (Laughter) As for craft and technology and all those things that you've all been talking about, I was thrown for a complete loop. This was built in six months. The way we sent drawings to Japan: we used the magic computer in Michigan that does carved models, and we used to make foam models, which that thing scanned. We made the drawings of the fish and the scales. And when I got there, everything was perfect β except the tail. So, I decided to cut off the head and the tail. And I made the object on the left for my show at the Walker. And it's one of the nicest pieces I've ever made, I think. And then Jay Chiat, a friend and client, asked me to do his headquarters building in L.A. For reasons we don't want to talk about, it got delayed. Toxic waste, I guess, is the key clue to that one. And so we built a temporary building β I'm getting good at temporary β and we put a conference room in that's a fish. And, finally, Jay dragged me to my hometown, Toronto, Canada. And there is a story β it's a real story β about my grandmother buying a carp on Thursday, bringing it home, putting it in the bathtub when I was a kid. I played with it in the evening. When I went to sleep, the next day it wasn't there. And the next night, we had gefilte fish. (Laughter) And so I set up this interior for Jay's offices and I made a pedestal for a sculpture. And he didn't buy a sculpture, so I made one. I went around Toronto and found a bathtub like my grandmother's, and I put the fish in. It was a joke. (Laughter) I play with funny people like [Claes] Oldenburg. We've been friends for a long time. And we've started to work on things. A few years ago, we did a performance piece in Venice, Italy, called "Il Corso del Coltello" β the Swiss Army knife. And most of the imagery is β (Laughter) Claes', but those two little boys are my sons, and they were Claes' assistants in the play. He was the Swiss Army knife. He was a souvenir salesman who always wanted to be a painter, and I was Frankie P. Toronto. P for Palladio. Dressed up like the AT&T building by Claes β (Laughter) with a fish hat. The highlight of the performance was at the end. This beautiful object, the Swiss Army knife, which I get credit for participating in. And I can tell you β it's totally an Oldenburg. I had nothing to do with it. The only thing I did was, I made it possible for them to turn those blades so you could sail this thing in the canal, because I love sailing. (Laughter) We made it into a sailing craft. I've been known to mess with things like chain link fencing. I do it because it's a curious thing in the culture, when things are made in such great quantities, absorbed in such great quantities, and there's so much denial about them. People hate it. And I'm fascinated with that, which, like the paper furniture β it's one of those materials. And I'm always drawn to that. And so I did a lot of dirty things with chain link, which nobody will forgive me for. But Claes made homage to it in the Loyola Law School. And that chain link is really expensive. It's in perspective and everything. And then we did a camp together for children with cancer. And you can see, we started making a building together. Of course, the milk can is his. But we were trying to collide our ideas, to put objects next to each other. Like a Morandi β like the little bottles β composing them like a still life. And it seemed to work as a way to put he and I together. Then Jay Chiat asked me to do this building on this funny lot in Venice, and I started with this three-piece thing, and you entered in the middle. And Jay asked me what I was going to do with the piece in the middle. And he pushed that. And one day I had a β oh, well, the other way. I had the binoculars from Claes, and I put them there, and I could never get rid of them after that. Oldenburg made the binoculars incredible when he sent me the first model of the real proposal. It made my building look sick. And it was this interaction between that kind of, up-the-ante stuff that became pretty interesting. It led to the building on the left. And I still think the Time magazine picture will be of the binoculars, you know, leaving out the β what the hell. I use a lot of metal in my work, and I have a hard time connecting with the craft. The whole thing about my house, the whole use of rough carpentry and everything, was the frustration with the crafts available. I said, "If I can't get the craft that I want, I'll use the craft I can get." There were plenty of models for that, in Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, and many artists who were making beautiful art and sculpture with junk materials. I went into the metal because it was a way of building a building that was a sculpture. And it was all of one material, and the metal could go on the roof as well as the walls. The metalworkers, for the most part, do ducts behind the ceilings and stuff. I was given an opportunity to design an exhibit for the metalworkers' unions of America and Canada in Washington, and I did it on the condition that they become my partners in the future and help me with all future metal buildings, etc. etc. And it's working very well to have these people, these craftsmen, interested in it. I just tell the stories. It's a way of connecting, at least, with some of those people that are so important to the realization of architecture. The metal continued into a building β Herman Miller, in Sacramento. And it's just a complex of factory buildings. And Herman Miller has this philosophy of having a place β a people place. I mean, it's kind of a trite thing to say, but it is real that they wanted to have a central place where the cafeteria would be, where the people would come and where the people working would interact. So it's out in the middle of nowhere, and you approach it. It's copper and galvanize. I used the galvanize and copper in a very light gauge, so it would buckle. I spent a lot of time undoing Richard Meier's aesthetic. Everybody's trying to get the panels perfect, and I always try to get them sloppy and fuzzy. And they end up looking like stone. This is the central area. There's a ramp. And that little dome in there is a building by Stanley Tigerman. Stanley was instrumental in my getting this job. And when I was awarded the contract I, at the very beginning, asked the client if they would let Stanley do a cameo piece with me. Because these were ideas that we were talking about, building things next to each other, making β it's all about [a] metaphor for a city, maybe. And so Stanley did the little dome thing. And we did it over the phone and by fax. He would send me a fax and show me something. He'd made a building with a dome and he had a little tower. I told him, "No, no, that's too ongepotchket. I don't want the tower." So he came back with a simpler building, but he put some funny details on it, and he moved it closer to my building. And so I decided to put him in a depression. I put him in a hole and made a kind of a hole that he sits in. And so then he put two bridges β this all happened on the fax, going back and forth over a couple of weeks' period. And he put these two bridges with pink guardrails on it. And so then I put this big billboard behind it. And I call it, "David and Goliath." And that's my cafeteria. In Boston, we had that old building on the left. It was a very prominent building off the freeway, and we added a floor and cleaned it up and fixed it up and used the kind of β I thought β the language of the neighborhood, which had these cornices, projecting cornices. Mine got a little exuberant, but I used lead copper, which is a beautiful material, and it turns green in 100 years. Instead of, like, copper in 10 or 15. We redid the side of the building and re-proportioned the windows so it sort of fit into the space. And it surprised both Boston and myself that we got it approved, because they have very strict kind of design guideline, and they wouldn't normally think I would fit them. The detailing was very careful with the lead copper and making panels and fitting it tightly into the fabric of the existing building. In Barcelona, on Las Ramblas for some film festival, I did the Hollywood sign going and coming, made a building out of it, and they built it. I flew in one night and took this picture. But they made it a third smaller than my model without telling me. And then more metal and some chain link in Santa Monica β a little shopping center. And this is a laser laboratory at the University of Iowa, in which the fish comes back as an abstraction in the back. It's the support labs, which, by some coincidence, required no windows. And the shape fit perfectly. I just joined the points. In the curved part there's all the mechanical equipment. That solid wall behind it is a pipe chase β a pipe canyon β and so it was an opportunity that I seized, because I didn't have to have any protruding ducts or vents or things in this form. It gave me an opportunity to make a sculpture out of it. This is a small house somewhere. They've been building it so long I don't remember where it is. It's in the West Valley. And we started with the stream and built the house along the stream β dammed it up to make a lake. These are the models. The reality, with the lake β the workmanship is pretty bad. And it reminded me why I play defensively in things like my house. When you have to do something really cheaply, it's hard to get perfect corners and stuff. That big metal thing is a passage, and in it is β you go downstairs into the living room and then down into the bedroom, which is on the right. It's kind of like a whole built town. I was asked to do a hospital for schizophrenic adolescents at Yale. I thought it was fitting for me to be doing that. This is a house next to a Philip Johnson house in Minnesota. The owners had a dilemma β they asked Philip to do it. He was too busy. He didn't recommend me, by the way. (Laughter) We ended up having to make it a sculpture, because the dilemma was, how do you build a building that doesn't look like the language? Is it going to look like this beautiful estate is sub-divided? Etc. etc. You've got the idea. And so we finally ended up making it. These people are art collectors. And we finally made it so it appears very sculptural from the main house and all the windows are on the other side. And the building is very sculptural as you walk around it. It's made of metal and the brown stuff is Fin-Ply β it's that formed lumber from Finland. We used it at Loyola on the chapel, and it didn't work. I keep trying to make it work. In this case we learned how to detail it. In Cleveland, there's Burnham Mall, on the left. It's never been finished. Going out to the lake, you can see all those new buildings we built. And we had the opportunity to build a building on this site. There's a railroad track. This is the city hall over here somewhere, and the courthouse. And the centerline of the mall goes out. Burnham had designed a railroad station that was never built, and so we followed. Sohio is on the axis here, and we followed the axis, and they're two kind of goalposts. And this is our building, which is a corporate headquarters for an insurance company. We collaborated with Oldenburg and put the newspaper on top, folded. The health club is fastened to the garage with a C-clamp, for Cleveland. (Laughter) You drive down. So it's about a 10-story C-clamp. And all this stuff at the bottom is a museum, and an idea for a very fancy automobile entry. This owner has a pet peeve about bad automobile entries. And this would be a hotel. So, the centerline of this thing β we'd preserve it, and it would start to work with the scale of the new buildings by Pelli and Kohn Pederson Fox, etc., that are underway. It's hard to do high-rise. I feel much more comfortable down here. This is a piece of property in Brentwood. And a long time ago, about '82 or something, after my house β I designed a house for myself that would be a village of several pavilions around a courtyard β and the owner of this lot worked for me and built that actual model on the left. And she came back, I guess wealthier or something β something happened β and asked me to design a house for her on this site. And following that basic idea of the village, we changed it as we got into it. I locked the house into the site by cutting the back end β here you see on the photographs of the site β slicing into it and putting all the bathrooms and dressing rooms like a retaining wall, creating a lower level zone for the master bedroom, which I designed like a kind of a barge, looking like a boat. And that's it, built. The dome was a request from the client. She wanted a dome somewhere in the house. She didn't care where. When you sleep in this bedroom, I hope β I mean, I haven't slept in it yet. I've offered to marry her so I could sleep there, but she said I didn't have to do that. But when you're in that room, you feel like you're on a kind of barge on some kind of lake. And it's very private. The landscape is being built around to create a private garden. And then up above there's a garden on this side of the living room, and one on the other side. These aren't focused very well. I don't know how to do it from here. Focus the one on the right. It's up there. Left β it's my right. Anyway, you enter into a garden with a beautiful grove of trees. That's the living room. Servants' quarters. A guest bedroom, which has this dome with marble on it. And then you enter into the living room and then so on. This is the bedroom. You come down from this level along the stairway, and you enter the bedroom here, going into the lake. And the bed is back in this space, with windows looking out onto the lake. These Stonehenge things were designed to give foreground and to create a greater depth in this shallow lot. The material is lead copper, like in the building in Boston. And so it was an intent to make this small piece of land β it's 100 by 250 β into a kind of an estate by separating these areas and making the living room and dining room into this pavilion with a high space in it. And this happened by accident that I got this right on axis with the dining room table. It looks like I got a Baldessari painting for free. But the idea is, the windows are all placed so you see pieces of the house outside. Eventually this will be screened β these trees will come up β and it will be very private. And you feel like you're in your own kind of village. This is for Michael Eisner β Disney. We're doing some work for him. And this is in Anaheim, California, and it's a freeway building. You go under this bridge at about 65 miles an hour, and there's another bridge here. And you're through this room in a split second, and the building will sort of reflect that. On the backside, it's much more humane β entrance, dining hall, etc. And then this thing here β I'm hoping as you drive by you'll hear the picket fence effect of the sound hitting it. Kind of a fun thing to do. I'm doing a building in Switzerland, Basel, which is an office building for a furniture company. And we struggled with the image. These are the early studies, but they have to sell furniture to normal people, so if I did the building and it was too fancy, then people might say, "Well, the furniture looks OK in his thing, but no, it ain't going to look good in my normal building." So we've made a kind of pragmatic slab in the second phase here, and we've taken the conference facilities and made a villa out of them so that the communal space is very sculptural and separate. And you're looking at it from the offices and you create a kind of interaction between these pieces. This is in Paris, along the Seine. Palais des Sports, the Gare de Lyon over here. The Minister of Finance β the guy that moved from the Louvre β goes in here. There's a new library across the river. And back in here, in this already treed park, we're doing a very dense building called the American Center, which has a theater, apartments, dance school, an art museum, restaurants and all kinds of β it's a very dense program β bookstores, etc. In a very tight, small β this is the ground level. And the French have this extraordinary way of screwing things up by taking a beautiful site and cutting the corner off. They call it the plan coupe. And I struggled with that thing β how to get around the corner. These are the models for it. I showed you the other model, the one β this is the way I organized myself so I could make the drawing β so I understood the problem. I was trying to get around this plan coupe β how do you do it? Apartments, etc. And these are the kind of study models we did. And the one on the left is pretty awful. You can see why I was ready to commit suicide when this one was built. But out of it came finally this resolution, where the elevator piece worked frontally to this, parallel to this street, and also parallel to here. And then this kind of twist, with this balcony and the skirt, kind of like a ballerina lifting her skirt to let you into the foyer. The restaurants here β the apartments and the theater, etc. So it would all be built in stone, in French limestone, except for this metal piece. And it faces into a park. And the idea was to make this express the energy of this. On the side facing the street it's much more normal, except I slipped a few mansards down, so that coming on the point, these housing units made a gesture to the corner. And this will be some kind of high-tech billboard. If any of you guys have any ideas for it, please contact me. I don't know what to do. Jay Chiat is a glutton for punishment, and he hired me to do a house for him in the Hamptons. And it's got a fish. And I keep thinking, "This is going to be the last fish." It's like a drug addict. I say, "I'm not going to do it anymore β I don't want to do it anymore β I'm not going to do it." And then I do it. (Laughter) There it is. But it's the living room. And this piece here is β I don't know what it is. I just added it so that we'd have enough money in the budget so we could take something out. (Applause) This is Euro Disney, and I've worked with all of the guys that presented to you earlier. We've had a lot of fun working together. I think I'm from Mars for them, and they are for me, but somehow we all manage to work together, and I think, productively. So far. This is a shopping thing. You come into the Magic Kingdom and the hotel that Tony Baxter's group is doing out here. And then this is a kind of a shopping mall, with a rodeo and restaurants. And another restaurant. What I did β because of the Paris skies being quite dull, I made a light grid that's perpendicular to the train station, to the route of the train. It looks like it's kind of been there, and then crashed all these simpler forms into it. The light grid will have a light, be lit up at night and give a kind of light ceiling. In Switzerland β Germany, actually β on the Rhine across from Basel, we did a furniture factory and a furniture museum. And I tried to β there's a Nick Grimshaw building over here, there's an Oldenburg sculpture over here β I tried to make a relationship urbanistically. And I don't gave good slides to show β it's just been completed β but this piece here is this building, and these pieces here and here. And as you pass by it's always part β you see it as all of these pieces accrue and become part of an overall neighborhood. It's plaster and just zinc. And you wonder, if this is a museum, what it's going to be like inside? If it's going to be so busy and crazy that you wouldn't show anything, and just wait. I'm so cunning and clever β I made it quiet and wonderful. But on the outside it does scream out at you a bit. It's actually basically three square rooms with a couple of skylights and stuff. And from the building in the back, you see it as an iceberg floating by in the hills. I know I'm over time. See, that skylight goes down and becomes that one. So it's pretty quiet inside. This is the Disney Hall β the concert hall. It's a complicated project. It has a chamber hall. It's related to an existing Chandler Pavilion that was built with a lot of love and tears and caring. And it's not a great building, but I approached it optimistically, that we would make a compositional relationship between us that would strengthen both of us. And the plan of this β it's a concert hall. This is the foyer, which is kind of a garden structure. There's commercial at the ground floor. These are offices, which, really, in the competition, we didn't have to design. But finally, there's a hotel there. These were the kind of relationships made to the Chandler, composing these elevations together and relating them to the buildings that existed β to MOCA, etc. The acoustician in the competition gave us criteria, which led to this compartmentalized scheme, which we found out after the competition would not work at all. But everybody liked these forms and liked the space, and so that's one of the problems of a competition. You have to then try and get that back in some way. And we studied many models. This was our original model. These were the three buildings that were the ideal β the Concertgebouw, Boston and Berlin. Everybody liked the surround. Actually, this is the smallest hall in size, and it has more seats than any of these because it has double balconies. Our client doesn't want balconies, so β and when we met our new acoustician, he told us this was the right shape or this was the right shape. And we tried many shapes, trying to get the energy of the original design within an acoustical, acceptable format. We finally settled on a shape that was the proportion of the Concertgebouw with the sloping outside walls, which the acoustician said were crucial to this and later decided they weren't, but now we have them. (Laughter) And our idea is to make the seating carriage very sculptural and out of wood and like a big boat sitting in this plaster room. That's the idea. And the corners would have skylights and these columns would be structural. And the nice thing about introducing columns is they give you a kind of sense of proscenium from wherever you sit, and create intimacy. Now, this is not a final design β these are just on the way to being β and so I wouldn't take it literally, except the feeling of the space. We studied the acoustics with laser stuff, and they bounce them off this and see where it all works. But you get the sense of the hall in section. Most halls come straight down into a proscenium. In this case we're opening it back up and getting skylights in the four corners. And so it will be quite a different shape. (Laughter) The original building, because it was frog-like, fit nicely on the site and cranked itself well. When you get into a box, it's harder to do it β and here we are, struggling with how to put the hotel in. And this is a teapot I designed for Alessi. I just stuck it on there. But this is how I do work. I do take pieces and bits and look at it and struggle with it and cut it away. And of course it's not going to look like that, but it is the crazy way I tend to work. And then finally, in L.A. I was asked to do a sculpture at the foot of Interstate Bank Tower, the highest building in L.A. Larry Halprin is doing the stairs. And I was asked to do a fish, and so I did a snake. (Laughter) It's a public space, and I made it kind of a garden structure, and you can go in it. It's a kiva, and Larry's putting some water in there, and it works much better than a fish. In Barcelona I was asked to do a fish, and we're working on that, at the foot of a Ritz-Carlton Tower being done by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. And the Ritz-Carlton Tower is being designed with exposed steel, non-fire proof, much like those old gas tanks. And so we took the language of this exposed steel and used it, perverted it, into the form of the fish, and created a kind of a 19th-century contraption that looks like, that will sit β this is the beach and the harbor out in front, and this is really a shopping center with department stores. And we split these bridges. Originally, this was all solid with a hole in it. We cut them loose and made several bridges and created a kind of a foreground for this hotel. We showed this to the hotel people the other day, and they were terrified and said that nobody would come to the Ritz-Carlton anymore, because of this fish. (Laughter) And finally, I just threw these in β Lou Danziger. I didn't expect Lou Danziger to be here, but this is a building I did for him in 1964, I think. A little studio β and it's sadly for sale. Time goes on. And this is my son working with me on a small fast-food thing. He designed the robot as the cashier, and the head moves, and I did the rest of it. And the food wasn't as good as the stuff, and so it failed. It should have been the other way around β the food should have been good first. It didn't work. Thank you very much. |
My wish: Once Upon a School | {0: 'Writing is only his day job: Dave Eggers moonlights as a publisher, philanthropist and advocate for students and teachers.'} | TED2008 | Thank you so much everyone from TED, and Chris and Amy in particular. I cannot believe I'm here. I have not slept in weeks. Neil and I were sitting there comparing how little we've slept in anticipation for this. I've never been so nervous β and I do this when I'm nervous, I just realized. (Laughter) So, I'm going to talk about sort of what we did at this organization called 826 Valencia, and then I'm going to talk about how we all might join in and do similar things. Back in about 2000, I was living in Brooklyn, I was trying to finish my first book, I was wandering around dazed every day because I wrote from 12 a.m. to 5 a.m. So I would walk around in a daze during the day. I had no mental acuity to speak of during the day, but I had flexible hours. In the Brooklyn neighborhood that I lived in, Park Slope, there are a lot of writers β it's like a very high per capita ratio of writers to normal people. Meanwhile, I had grown up around a lot of teachers. My mom was a teacher, my sister became a teacher and after college so many of my friends went into teaching. And so I was always hearing them talk about their lives and how inspiring they were, and they were really sort of the most hard-working and constantly inspiring people I knew. But I knew so many of the things they were up against, so many of the struggles they were dealing with. And one of them was that so many of my friends that were teaching in city schools were having trouble with their students keeping up at grade level, in their reading and writing in particular. Now, so many of these students had come from households where English isn't spoken in the home, where a lot of them have different special needs, learning disabilities. And of course they're working in schools which sometimes and very often are under-funded. And so they would talk to me about this and say, "You know, what we really need is just more people, more bodies, more one-on-one attention, more hours, more expertise from people that have skills in English and can work with these students one-on-one." Now, I would say, "Well, why don't you just work with them one-on-one?" And they would say, "Well, we have five classes of 30 to 40 students each. This can lead up to 150, 180, 200 students a day. How can we possibly give each student even one hour a week of one-on-one attention?" You'd have to greatly multiply the workweek and clone the teachers. And so we started talking about this. And at the same time, I thought about this massive group of people I knew: writers, editors, journalists, graduate students, assistant professors, you name it. All these people that had sort of flexible daily hours and an interest in the English word β I hope to have an interest in the English language, but I'm not speaking it well right now. (Laughter) I'm trying. That clock has got me. But everyone that I knew had an interest in the primacy of the written word in terms of nurturing a democracy, nurturing an enlightened life. And so they had, you know, their time and their interest, but at the same time there wasn't a conduit that I knew of in my community to bring these two communities together. So when I moved back to San Francisco, we rented this building. And the idea was to put McSweeney's β McSweeney's Quarterly, that we published twice or three times a year, and a few other magazines β we were going to move it into an office for the first time. It used to be in my kitchen in Brooklyn. We were going to move it into an office, and we were going to actually share space with a tutoring center. So we thought, "We'll have all these writers and editors and everybody β sort of a writing community β coming into the office every day anyway, why don't we just open up the front of the building for students to come in there after school, get extra help on their written homework, so you have basically no border between these two communities?" So the idea was that we would be working on whatever we're working on, at 2:30 p.m. the students flow in and you put down what you're doing, or you trade, or you work a little bit later or whatever it is. You give those hours in the afternoon to the students in the neighborhood. So, we had this place, we rented it, the landlord was all for it. We did this mural, that's a Chris Ware mural, that basically explains the entire history of the printed word, in mural form β it takes a long time to digest and you have to stand in the middle of the road. So we rented this space. And everything was great except the landlord said, "Well, the space is zoned for retail; you have to come up with something. You've gotta sell something. You can't just have a tutoring center." So we thought, "Ha ha! Really!" And we couldn't think of anything necessarily to sell, but we did all the necessary research. It used to be a weight room, so there were rubber floors below, acoustic tile ceilings and fluorescent lights. We took all that down, and we found beautiful wooden floors, whitewashed beams and it had the look β while we were renovating this place, somebody said, "You know, it really kind of looks like the hull of a ship." And we looked around and somebody else said, "Well, you should sell supplies to the working buccaneer." (Laughter) And so this is what we did. So it made everybody laugh, and we said, "There's a point to that. Let's sell pirate supplies." This is the pirate supply store. You see, this is sort of a sketch I did on a napkin. A great carpenter built all this stuff and you see, we made it look sort of pirate supply-like. Here you see planks sold by the foot and we have supplies to combat scurvy. We have the peg legs there, that are all handmade and fitted to you. Up at the top, you see the eyepatch display, which is the black column there for everyday use for your eyepatch, and then you have the pastel and other colors for stepping out at night β special occasions, bar mitzvahs and whatever. So we opened this place. And this is a vat that we fill with treasures that students dig in. This is replacement eyes in case you lose one. These are some signs that we have all over the place: "Practical Joking with Pirates." While you're reading the sign, we pull a rope behind the counter and eight mop heads drop on your head. That was just my one thing β I said we had to have something that drops on people's heads. It became mop heads. And this is the fish theater, which is just a saltwater tank with three seats, and then right behind it we set up this space, which was the tutoring center. So right there is the tutoring center, and then behind the curtain were the McSweeney's offices, where all of us would be working on the magazine and book editing and things like that. The kids would come in β or we thought they would come in. I should back up. We set the place up, we opened up, we spent months and months renovating this place. We had tables, chairs, computers, everything. I went to a dot-com auction at a Holiday Inn in Palo Alto and I bought 11 G4s with a stroke of a paddle. Anyway, we bought 'em, we set everything up and then we waited. It was started with about 12 of my friends, people that I had known for years that were writers in the neighborhood. And we sat. And at 2:30 p.m. we put a sandwich board out on the front sidewalk and it just said, "Free Tutoring for Your English-Related and Writing-Related Needs β Just Come In, It's All Free." And we thought, "Oh, they're going to storm the gates, they're gonna love it." And they didn't. And so we waited, we sat at the tables, we waited and waited. And everybody was becoming very discouraged because it was weeks and weeks that we waited, really, where nobody came in. And then somebody alerted us to the fact that maybe there was a trust gap, because we were operating behind a pirate supply store. (Laughter) We never put it together, you know? And so then, around that time, I persuaded a woman named Nineveh Caligari, a longtime San Francisco educator β she was teaching in Mexico City, she had all the experience necessary, knew everything about education, was connected with all the teachers and community members in the neighborhood β I convinced her to move up from Mexico City where she was teaching. She took over as executive director. Immediately, she made the inroads with the teachers and the parents and the students and everything, and so suddenly it was actually full every day. And what we were trying to offer every day was one-on-one attention. The goal was to have a one-to-one ratio with every one of these students. You know, it's been proven that 35 to 40 hours a year with one-on-one attention, a student can get one grade level higher. And so most of these students, English is not spoken in the home. They come there, many times their parents β you can't see it, but there's a church pew that I bought in a Berkeley auction right there β the parents will sometimes watch while their kids are being tutored. So that was the basis of it, was one-on-one attention. And we found ourselves full every day with kids. If you're on Valencia Street within those few blocks at around 2 p.m., 2:30 p.m., you will get run over, often, by the kids and their big backpacks, or whatever, actually running to this space, which is very strange, because it's school, in a way. But there was something psychological happening there that was just a little bit different. And the other thing was, there was no stigma. Kids weren't going into the "Center-for-Kids-That-Need-More-Help," or something like that. It was 826 Valencia. First of all, it was a pirate supply store, which is insane. And then secondly, there's a publishing company in the back. And so our interns were actually working at the same tables very often, and shoulder-to-shoulder, computer-next-to-computer with the students. And so it became a tutoring center β publishing center, is what we called it β and a writing center. They go in, and they might be working with a high school student actually working on a novel β because we had very gifted kids, too. So there's no stigma. They're all working next to each other. It's all a creative endeavor. They're seeing adults. They're modeling their behavior. These adults, they're working in their field. They can lean over, ask a question of one of these adults and it all sort of feeds on each other. There's a lot of cross-pollination. The only problem, especially for the adults working at McSweeney's who hadn't necessarily bought into all of this when they signed up, was that there was just the one bathroom. (Laughter) With like 60 kids a day, this is a problem. But you know, there's something about the kids finishing their homework in a given day, working one-on-one, getting all this attention β they go home, they're finished. They don't stall. They don't do their homework in front of the TV. They're allowed to go home at 5:30 p.m., enjoy their family, enjoy other hobbies, get outside, play. And that makes a happy family. A bunch of happy families in a neighborhood is a happy community. A bunch of happy communities tied together is a happy city and a happy world. So the key to it all is homework! (Laughter) (Applause) There you have it, you know β one-on-one attention. So we started off with about 12 volunteers, and then we had about 50, and then a couple hundred. And we now have 1,400 volunteers on our roster. And we make it incredibly easy to volunteer. The key thing is, even if you only have a couple of hours a month, those two hours shoulder-to-shoulder, next to one student, concentrated attention, shining this beam of light on their work, on their thoughts and their self-expression, is going to be absolutely transformative, because so many of the students have not had that ever before. So we said, "Even if you have two hours one Sunday every six months, it doesn't matter. That's going to be enough." So that's partly why the tutor corps grew so fast. Then we said, "Well, what are we going to do with the space during the day, because it has to be used before 2:30 p.m.?" So we started bringing in classes during the day. So every day, there's a field trip where they together create a book β you can see it being typed up above. This is one of the classes getting way too excited about writing. You just point a camera at a class, and it always looks like this. So this is one of the books that they do. Notice the title of the book, "The Book That Was Never Checked Out: Titanic." And the first line of that book is, "Once there was a book named Cindy that was about the Titanic." So, meanwhile, there's an adult in the back typing this up, taking it completely seriously, which blows their mind. So then we still had more tutors to use. This is a shot of just some of the tutors during one of the events. The teachers that we work with β and everything is different to teachers β they tell us what to do. We went in there thinking, "We're ultimately, completely malleable. You're going to tell us. The neighborhood's going to tell us, the parents are going to tell us. The teachers are going to tell us how we're most useful." So then they said, "Why don't you come into the schools? Because what about the students that wouldn't come to you, necessarily, who don't have really active parents that are bringing them in, or aren't close enough?" So then we started saying, "Well, we've got 1,400 people on our tutor roster. Let's just put out the word." A teacher will say, "I need 12 tutors for the next five Sundays. We're working on our college essays. Send them in." So we put that out on the wire: 1,400 tutors. Whoever can make it signs up. They go in about a half an hour before the class. The teacher tells them what to do, how to do it, what their training is, what their project is so far. They work under the teacher's guide, and it's all in one big room. And that's actually the brunt of what we do is, people going straight from their workplace, straight from home, straight into the classroom and working directly with the students. So then we're able to work with thousands and thousands of more students. Then another school said, "Well, what if we just give you a classroom and you can staff it all day?" So this is the Everett Middle School Writers' Room, where we decorated it in buccaneer style. It's right off the library. And there we serve all 529 kids in this middle school. This is their newspaper, the "Straight-Up News," that has an ongoing column from Mayor Gavin Newsom in both languages β English and Spanish. So then one day Isabel Allende wrote to us and said, "Hey, why don't you assign a book with high school students? I want them to write about how to achieve peace in a violent world." And so we went into Thurgood Marshall High School, which is a school that we had worked with on some other things, and we gave that assignment to the students. And we said, "Isabel Allende is going to read all your essays at the end. She's going to publish them in a book. She's going to sponsor the printing of this book in paperback form. It's going to be available in all the bookstores in the Bay Area and throughout the world, on Amazon and you name it." So these kids worked harder than they've ever worked on anything in their lives, because there was that outside audience, there was Isabel Allende on the other end. I think we had about 170 tutors that worked on this book with them and so this worked out incredibly well. We had a big party at the end. This is a book that you can find anywhere. So that led to a series of these. You can see Amy Tan sponsored the next one, "I Might Get Somewhere." And this became an ongoing thing. More and more books. Now we're sort of addicted to the book thing. The kids will work harder than they've ever worked in their life if they know it's going to be permanent, know it's going to be on a shelf, know that nobody can diminish what they've thought and said, that we've honored their words, honored their thoughts with hundreds of hours of five drafts, six drafts β all this attention that we give to their thoughts. And once they achieve that level, once they've written at that level, they can never go back. It's absolutely transformative. And so then they're all sold in the store. This is near the planks. We sell all the student books. Where else would you put them, right? So we sell 'em, and then something weird had been happening with the stores. The store, actually β even though we started out as just a gag β the store actually made money. So it was paying the rent. And maybe this is just a San Francisco thing β I don't know, I don't want to judge. But people would come in β and this was before the pirate movies and everything! It was making a lot of money. Not a lot of money, but it was paying the rent, paying a full-time staff member there. There's the ocean maps you can see on the left. And it became a gateway to the community. People would come in and say, "What the β? What is this?" I don't want to swear on the web. (Laughter) Is that a rule? I don't know. They would say, "What is this?" And people would come in and learn more about it. And then right beyond β there's usually a little chain there β right beyond, they would see the kids being tutored. This is a field trip going on. And so they would be shopping, and they might be more likely to buy some lard, or millet for their parrot, or, you know, a hook, or hook protector for nighttime, all of these things we sell. So the store actually did really well. But it brought in so many people β teachers, donors, volunteers, everybody β because it was street level. It was open to the public. It wasn't a non-profit buried, you know, on the 30th floor of some building downtown. It was right in the neighborhood that it was serving, and it was open all the time to the public. So, it became this sort of weird, happy accident. So all the people I used to know in Brooklyn, they said, "Well, why don't we have a place like that here?" And a lot of them had been former educators or would-be educators, so they combined with a lot of local designers, local writers, and they just took the idea independently and they did their own thing. They didn't want to sell pirate supplies. They didn't think that that was going to work there. So, knowing the crime-fighting community in New York, they opened the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Company. This is Sam Potts' great design that did this. And this was to make it look sort of like one of those keysmith's shops that has to have every service they've ever offered, you know, all over there. So they opened this place. Inside, it's like a Costco for superheroes β all the supplies in kind of basic form. These are all handmade. These are all sort of repurposed other products, or whatever. All the packaging is done by Sam Potts. So then you have the villain containment unit, where kids put their parents. You have the office. This is a little vault β you have to put your product in there, it goes up an electric lift and then the guy behind the counter tells you that you have to recite the vow of heroism, which you do, if you want to buy anything. And it limits, really, their sales. Personally, I think it's a problem. Because they have to do it hand on heart and everything. These are some of the products. These are all handmade. This is a secret identity kit. If you want to take on the identity of Sharon Boone, one American female marketing executive from Hoboken, New Jersey. It's a full dossier on everything you would need to know about Sharon Boone. So, this is the capery where you get fitted for your cape, and then you walk up these three steel-graded steps and then we turn on three hydraulic fans from every side and then you can see the cape in action. There's nothing worse than, you know, getting up there and the cape is bunching up or something like that. So then, the secret door β this is one of the shelves you don't see when you walk in, but it slowly opens. You can see it there in the middle next to all the grappling hooks. It opens and then this is the tutoring center in the back. (Applause) So you can see the full effect! But this is β I just want to emphasize β locally funded, locally built. All the designers, all of the builders, everybody was local, all the time was pro-bono. I just came and visited and said, "Yes, you guys are doing great," or whatever. That was it. You can see the time in all five boroughs of New York in the back. (Laughter) (Applause) So this is the space during tutoring hours. It's very busy. Same principles: one-on-one attention, complete devotion to the students' work and a boundless optimism and sort of a possibility of creativity and ideas. And this switch is flicked in their heads when they walk through those 18 feet of this bizarre store, right? So it's school, but it's not school. It's clearly not school, even though they're working shoulder-to-shoulder on tables, pencils and papers, whatever. This is one of the students, Khaled Hamdan. You can read this quote. Addicted to video games and TV. Couldn't concentrate at home. Came in. Got this concentrated attention. And he couldn't escape it. So, soon enough, he was writing. He would finish his homework early β got really addicted to finishing his homework early. It's an addictive thing to sort of be done with it, and to have it checked, and to know he's going to achieve the next thing and be prepared for school the next day. So he got hooked on that, and then he started doing other things. He's now been published in five books. He co-wrote a mockumentary about failed superheroes called "Super-Has-Beens." He wrote a series on "Penguin Balboa," which is a fighting β a boxing β penguin. And then he read aloud just a few weeks ago to 500 people at Symphony Space, at a benefit for 826 New York. So he's there every day. He's evangelical about it. He brings his cousins in now. There's four family members that come in every day. So, I'll go through really quickly. This is L.A., The Echo Park Time Travel Mart: "Whenever You Are, We're Already Then." (Laughter) This is sort of a 7-Eleven for time travelers. So you see everything: it's exactly as a 7-Eleven would be. Leeches. Mammoth chunks. They even have their own Slurpee machine: "Out of Order. Come Back Yesterday." (Laughter) (Applause) Anyway. So I'm going to jump ahead. These are spaces that are only affiliated with us, doing this same thing: Word St. in Pittsfield, Massachusetts; Ink Spot in Cincinnati; Youth Speaks, San Francisco, California, which inspired us; Studio St. Louis in St. Louis; Austin Bat Cave in Austin; Fighting Words in Dublin, Ireland, started by Roddy Doyle, this will be open in April. Now I'm going to the TED Wish β is that okay? All right, I've got a minute. So, the TED Wish: I wish that you β you personally and every creative individual and organization you know β will find a way to directly engage with a public school in your area and that you'll then tell the story of how you got involved, so that within a year we have a thousand examples β a thousand! β of transformative partnerships. Profound leaps forward! And these can be things that maybe you're already doing. I know that so many people in this room are already doing really interesting things. I know that for a fact. So, tell us these stories and inspire others on the website. We created a website. I'm going to switch to "we," and not "I," hope: We hope that the attendees of this conference will usher in a new era of participation in our public schools. We hope that you will take the lead in partnering your innovative spirit and expertise with that of innovative educators in your community. Always let the teachers lead the way. They will tell you how to be useful. I hope that you'll step in and help out. There are a million ways. You can walk up to your local school and consult with the teachers. They'll always tell you how to help. So, this is with Hot Studio in San Francisco, they did this phenomenal job. This website is already up, it's already got a bunch of stories, a lot of ideas. It's called "Once Upon a School," which is a great title, I think. This site will document every story, every project that comes out of this conference and around the world. So you go to the website, you see a bunch of ideas you can be inspired by and then you add your own projects once you get started. Hot Studio did a great job in a very tight deadline. So, visit the site. If you have any questions, you can ask this guy, who's our director of national programs. He'll be on the phone. You email him, he'll answer any question you possibly want. And he'll get you inspired and get you going and guide you through the process so that you can affect change. And it can be fun! That's the point of this talk β it needn't be sterile. It needn't be bureaucratically untenable. You can do and use the skills that you have. The schools need you. The teachers need you. Students and parents need you. They need your actual person: your physical personhood and your open minds and open ears and boundless compassion, sitting next to them, listening and nodding and asking questions for hours at a time. Some of these kids just don't plain know how good they are: how smart and how much they have to say. You can tell them. You can shine that light on them, one human interaction at a time. So we hope you'll join us. Thank you so much. |