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 -- 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 -- 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 -- 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. 
Hi. I'm going to ask you to raise your arms and wave back, just the way I am -- kind of a royal wave. 
You can mimic what you can see. 
You can program the hundreds of muscles in your arm. 
Soon, you'll be able to look inside your brain and program, control the hundreds of brain areas that you see there. 
I'm going to tell you about that technology. 
People have wanted to look inside the human mind, the human brain, for thousands of years. 
Well, coming out of the research labs just now, for our generation, is the possibility to do that. 
People envision this as being very difficult. 
You had to take a spaceship, shrink it down, inject it into the bloodstream. 
It was terribly dangerous. (Laughter) You could be attacked by white blood cells in the arteries. 
But now, we have a real technology to do this. 
We're going to fly into my colleague Peter's brain. 
We're going to do it non-invasively using MRI. 
We don't have to inject anything. We don't need radiation. 
We will be able to fly into the anatomy of Peter's brain -- literally, fly into his body -- but more importantly, we can look into his mind. 
When Peter moves his arm, that yellow spot you see there is the interface to the functioning of Peter's mind taking place. 
Now you've seen before that with electrodes you can control robotic arms, that brain imaging and scanners can show you the insides of brains. 
What's new is that that process has typically taken days or months of analysis. 
We've collapsed that through technology to milliseconds, and that allows us to let Peter to look at his brain in real time as he's inside the scanner. 
He can look at these 65,000 points of activation per second. 
If he can see this pattern in his own brain, he can learn how to control it. 
There have been three ways to try to impact the brain: the therapist's couch, pills and the knife. 
This is a fourth alternative that you are soon going to have. 
We all know that as we form thoughts, they form deep channels in our minds and in our brains. 
Chronic pain is an example. If you burn yourself, you pull your hand away. 
But if you're still in pain in six months' or six years' time, it's because these circuits are producing pain that's no longer helping you. 
If we can look at the activation in the brain that's producing the pain, we can form 3D models and watch in real time the brain process information, and then we can select the areas that produce the pain. 
So put your arms back up and flex your bicep. 
Now imagine that you will soon be able to look inside your brain and select brain areas to do that same thing. 
What you're seeing here is, we've selected the pathways in the brain of a chronic pain patient. 
This may shock you, but we're literally reading this person's brain in real time. 
They're watching their own brain activation, and they're controlling the pathway that produces their pain. 
They're learning to flex this system that releases their own endogenous opiates. 
As they do it, in the upper left is a display that's yoked to their brain activation of their own pain being controlled. 
When they control their brain, they can control their pain. 
This is an investigational technology, but, in clinical trials, we're seeing a 44 to 64 percent decrease in chronic pain patients. 
This is not "The Matrix." You can only do this to yourself. You take control. 
I've seen inside my brain. You will too, soon. 
When you do, what do you want to control? 
You will be able to look at all the aspects that make you yourself, all your experiences. 
These are some of the areas we're working on today that I don't have time to go into in detail. 
But I want to leave with you the big question. 
We are the first generation that's going to be able to enter into, using this technology, the human mind and brain. 
Where will we take it? 
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 -- 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 -- 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) By day, I'm a venture capitalist. On weekends, I love rockets. 
I love photography, I love rockets, and I'm going to talk to you about a hobby that can scale and show you some photos that I've taken over the years with kids like these; kids that hopefully will grow up to love rocketry and eventually become maybe another 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. 
Two stage rockets, rockets with video cameras on them, on-board 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 or not, and then fly them with on-board computers to verify their performance. 
But to launch the really big stuff, you go to the middle of nowhere: Black Rock Desert, where dangerous things happen. 
And the boys get bigger, and the rockets get bigger. (Laughter) And they use motors that literally are 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. 
We have a RocketMavericks.com website with my photos if you want to learn more about this, participate, be a spectator. 
Mavericks: we had to call it Rocket Mavericks. 
This one was great: it went to 100,000 feet, but didn't quite. Actually, it went 11 feet into the solid clay; and it became a bunker-buster, drilling down into the clay. 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 do what I often do, which is go way beyond the pads where none of the other spectators are. 
And if we can run the video, I'll show you what it took to get this DreamWorks shot. 
(Video) Voices: Woohoo! Yeah. Nice. 
Steve Jurvetson: This is rare. Here's where they realized the computer's failed. 
They're yelling deploy. Voices: Oh shit. 
SJ: This is when they realize everything on board's gone haywire. 
Voices: It's going ballistic. Oh shit. 
SJ: And I'll just be quiet. 
Voices: No. 
Up, up, up. 
SJ: And that's me over there, taking photos the whole way. 
Things often go wrong. 
Some people watch this event 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 -- yard sale in the sky -- and a burning metal hunk coming back. 
These things would drop down from above all through the weekend of rocket launch after rocket launch after rocket launch. 
It's a cadence you can't quite imagine. 
And in many ways, I try to capture the mishaps; it's the challenge in photography when these things all take place in a fraction of a second. 
Why do they do it? It's for things like this: Gene from Alabama drives out there with this rocket that he's built with X-ray sensors, video cameras, festooned with electronics, and he succeeds getting to 100,000 feet, leaving the atmosphere, seeing a thin blue line of space. 
It is this breathtaking image -- success, of course -- that motivates us and motivates kids to follow and understand rocket science: to understand the importance of physics and math and, in many ways, to sort of have that awe at exploration of the frontiers of the unknown. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Unless we do something to prevent it, over the next 40 years we’re facing an epidemic of neurologic diseases on a global scale. 
A cheery thought. 
On this map, every country that’s colored blue has more than 20 percent of its population over the age of 65. 
This is the world we live in. 
And this is the world your children will live in. 
For 12,000 years, the distribution of ages in the human population has looked like a pyramid, with the oldest on top. 
It’s already flattening out. 
By 2050, it’s going to be a column and will start to invert. 
This is why it’s happening. 
The average lifespan’s more than doubled since 1840, and it’s increasing currently at the rate of about five hours every day. 
And this is why that’s not entirely a good thing: because over the age of 65, your risk of getting Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease will increase exponentially. 
By 2050, there’ll be about 32 million people in the United States over the age of 80, and unless we do something about it, half of them will have Alzheimer’s disease and three million more will have Parkinson’s disease. 
Right now, those and other neurologic diseases -- for which we have no cure or prevention -- cost about a third of a trillion dollars a year. 
It will be well over a trillion dollars by 2050. 
Alzheimer’s disease starts when a protein that should be folded up properly misfolds into a kind of demented origami. 
So one approach we’re taking is to try to design drugs that function like molecular Scotch tape, to hold the protein into its proper shape. 
That would keep it from forming the tangles that seem to kill large sections of the brain when they do. 
Interestingly enough, other neurologic diseases which affect very different parts of the brain also show tangles of misfolded protein, which suggests that the approach might be a general one, and might be used to cure many neurologic diseases, not just Alzheimer’s disease. 
There’s also a fascinating connection to cancer here, because people with neurologic diseases have a very low incidence of most cancers. 
And this is a connection that most people aren’t pursuing right now, but which we’re fascinated by. 
Most of the important and all of the creative work in this area is being funded by private philanthropies. 
And there’s tremendous scope for additional private help here, because the government has dropped the ball on much of this, I’m afraid. 
In the meantime, while we’re waiting for all these things to happen, here’s what you can do for yourself. 
If you want to lower your risk of Parkinson’s disease, caffeine is protective to some extent; nobody knows why. 
Head injuries are bad for you. They lead to Parkinson’s disease. 
And the Avian Flu is also not a good idea. 
As far as protecting yourself against Alzheimer’s disease, well, it turns out that fish oil has the effect of reducing your risk for Alzheimer’s disease. 
You should also keep your blood pressure down, because chronic high blood pressure is the biggest single risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease. 
It’s also the biggest risk factor for glaucoma, which is just Alzheimer’s disease of the eye. 
And of course, when it comes to cognitive effects, "use it or lose it" applies, so you want to stay mentally stimulated. 
But hey, you’re listening to me. 
So you’ve got that covered. 
And one final thing. Wish people like me luck, okay? 
Because the clock is ticking for all of us. 
Thank you. 
Good morning. 
Let's look for a minute at the greatest icon of all, Leonardo da Vinci. 
We're all familiar with his fantastic work -- his drawings, his paintings, his inventions, his writings. 
But we do not know his face. 
Thousands of books have been written about him, but there's controversy, and it remains, about his looks. 
Even this well-known portrait is not accepted by many art historians. 
So, what do you think? 
Is this the face of Leonardo da Vinci or isn't it? 
Let's find out. 
Leonardo was a man that drew everything around him. 
He drew people, anatomy, plants, animals, landscapes, buildings, water, everything. 
But no faces? 
I find that hard to believe. 
His contemporaries made faces, like the ones you see here -- en face or three-quarters. 
So, surely a passionate drawer like Leonardo must have made self-portraits from time to time. 
So let's try to find them. 
I think that if we were to scan all of his work and look for self-portraits, we would find his face looking at us. 
So I looked at all of his drawings, more than 700, and looked for male portraits. 
There are about 120, you see them here. 
Which ones of these could be self-portraits? 
Well, for that they have to be done as we just saw, en face or three-quarters. 
So we can eliminate all the profiles. 
It also has to be sufficiently detailed. 
So we can also eliminate the ones that are very vague or very stylized. 
And we know from his contemporaries that Leonardo was a very handsome, even beautiful man. 
So we can also eliminate the ugly ones or the caricatures. 
(Laughter) And look what happens -- only three candidates remain that fit the bill. 
And here they are. 
Yes, indeed, the old man is there, as is this famous pen drawing of the Homo Vitruvianus. 
And lastly, the only portrait of a male that Leonardo painted, "The Musician." 
Before we go into these faces, I should explain why I have some right to talk about them. 
I've made more than 1,100 portraits myself for newspapers, over the course of 300 -- 30 years, sorry, 30 years only. 
(Laughter) But there are 1,100, and very few artists have drawn so many faces. 
So I know a little about drawing and analyzing faces. 
OK, now let's look at these three portraits. 
And hold onto your seats, because if we zoom in on those faces, remark how they have the same broad forehead, the horizontal eyebrows, the long nose, the curved lips and the small, well-developed chin. 
I couldn't believe my eyes when I first saw that. 
There is no reason why these portraits should look alike. 
All we did was look for portraits that had the characteristics of a self-portrait, and look, they are very similar. 
Now, are they made in the right order? 
The young man should be made first. 
And as you see here from the years that they were created, it is indeed the case. 
They are made in the right order. 
What was the age of Leonardo at the time? Does that fit? 
Yes, it does. He was 33, 38 and 63 when these were made. 
So we have three pictures, potentially of the same person of the same age as Leonardo at the time. 
But how do we know it's him, and not someone else? 
Well, we need a reference. 
And here's the only picture of Leonardo that's widely accepted. 
It's a statue made by Verrocchio, of David, for which Leonardo posed as a boy of 15. 
And if we now compare the face of the statue, with the face of the musician, you see the very same features again. 
The statue is the reference, and it connects the identity of Leonardo to those three faces. 
Ladies and gentlemen, this story has not yet been published. 
It's only proper that you here at TED hear and see it first. 
The icon of icons finally has a face. 
Here he is: Leonardo da Vinci. 
(Applause) The decorative use of wire in southern Africa dates back hundreds of years. 
But modernization actually brought communication and a whole new material, in the form of telephone wire. 
Rural to urban migration meant that newfound industrial materials started to replace hard-to-come-by natural grasses. 
So, here you can see the change from use -- starting to use contemporary materials. 
These pieces date back from the '40s to the late '50s. 
In the '90s, my interest and passion for transitional art forms led me to a new form, which came from a squatter camp outside Durban. 
And I got the opportunity to start working with this community at that point, and started developing, really, and mentoring them in terms of scale, in terms of the design. 
And the project soon grew from five to 50 weavers in about a year. 
Soon we had outgrown the scrap yards, what they could provide, so we coerced a wire manufacturer to help us, and not only to supply the materials on bobbins, but to produce to our color specifications. 
At the same time, I was thinking, well, there's lots of possibility here to produce contemporary products, away from the ethnic, a little bit more contemporary. 
So I developed a whole range around -- mass-produced range -- that obviously fitted into a much higher-end decor market that could be exported and also service our local market. 
We started experimenting, as you can see, in terms of shapes, forms. The scale became very important, and it's become our pet project. It's successful, it's been running for 12 years. And we supply the Conran shops, and Donna Karan, and so it's kind of great. 
This is our group, our main group of weavers. 
They come on a weekly basis to Durban. 
They all have bank accounts. 
They've all moved back to the rural area where they came from. 
It's a weekly turnaround of production. 
This is the community that I originally showed you the slide of. 
And that's also modernized today, and it's supporting work for 300 weavers. 
And the rest says it all. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) Those of you who know me know how passionate I am about opening the space frontier. 
So when I had the chance to give the world's expert in gravity the experience of zero gravity, it was incredible. 
And I want to tell you that story. 
I first met him through the Archon X PRIZE for Genomics. 
It's a competition we're holding, the second X PRIZE, for the first team to sequence 100 human genomes in 10 days. 
We have something called the Genome 100 -- 100 individuals we're sequencing as part of that. 
Craig Venter chairs that event. 
And I met Professor Hawking, and he said his dream was to travel into space. 
And I said, "I can't take you there, but I can take you into weightlessness into zero-g. 
And he said, on the spot, "Absolutely, yes." 
Well, the only way to experience zero-g on Earth is actually with parabolic flight, weightless flight. 
You take an airplane, you fly over the top, you're weightless for 25 seconds. 
Come back down, you weigh twice as much. 
You do it again and again. 
You can get eight, 10 minutes of weightlessness -- how NASA's trained their astronauts for so long. 
We set out to do this. 
It took us 11 years to become operational. 
And we announced that we were going to fly Stephen Hawking. 
We had one government agency and one company aircraft operator say, you're crazy, don't do that, you're going kill the guy. 
(Laughter) And he wanted to go. 
We worked hard to get all the permissions. 
And six months later, we sat down at Kennedy Space Center. 
We had a press conference, we announced our intent to do one zero-g parabola, give him 25 seconds of zero-g. 
And if it went really well, we might do three parabolas. 
Well, we asked him why he wanted to go up and do this. 
And what he said, for me, was very moving. 
He said, "Life on Earth is at an ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by disaster ... 
I think the human race doesn't have a future if it doesn't go into space. 
I therefore want to encourage public interest in space." 
We took him out to the Kennedy Space Center, up inside the NASA vehicle, into the back of the zero-g airplane. 
We had about 20 people who made donations -- we raised $150,000 in donations for children's charities -- who flew with us. 
A few TEDsters here. 
We set up a whole ER. 
We had four emergency room doctors and two nurses on board the airplane. 
We were monitoring his PO2 of his blood, his heart rate, his blood pressure. 
We had everything all set in case of an emergency; God knows, you don't want to hurt this world-renowned expert. 
We took off from the shuttle landing facility, where the shuttle takes off and lands. 
And my partner Byron Lichtenberg and I carefully suspended him into zero-g. 
Once he was there, [we] let him go to experience what weightlessness was truly like. 
And after that first parabola, you know, the doc said everything is great. He was smiling, and we said go. 
So we did a second parabola. 
(Laughter) (Applause) And a third. 
(Applause) We actually floated an apple in homage to Sir Isaac Newton because Professor Hawking holds the same chair at Cambridge that Isaac Newton did. 
And we did a fourth, and a fifth and a sixth. 
(Laughter) And a seventh and an eighth. 
And this man does not look like a 65-year-old wheelchair-bound man. 
(Laughter) He was so happy. 
We are living on a precious jewel, and it's during our lifetime that we're moving off this planet. 
Please join us in this epic adventure. 
Thank you so much. 
(Applause) It's amazing, when you meet a head of state and you say, "What is your most precious natural resource?" -- they will not say children at first. 
And then when you say children, they will pretty quickly agree with you. 
(Video): We're traveling today with the Minister of Defense of Colombia, head of the army and the head of the police, and we're dropping off 650 laptops today to children who have no television, no telephone and have been in a community cut off from the rest of the world for the past 40 years. 
The importance of delivering laptops to this region is connecting kids who have otherwise been unconnected because of the FARC, the guerrillas that started off 40 years ago as a political movement and then became a drug movement. 
There are one billion children in the world, and 50 percent of them don't have electricity at home or at school. 
And in some countries -- let me pick Afghanistan -- 75 percent of the little girls don't go to school. 
And I don't mean that they drop out of school in the third or fourth grade -- they don't go. 
So in the three years since I talked at TED and showed a prototype, it's gone from an idea to a real laptop. 
We have half a million laptops today in the hands of children. 
We have about a quarter of a million in transit to those and other children, and then there are another quarter of a million more that are being ordered at this moment. 
So, in rough numbers, there are a million laptops. 
That's smaller than I predicted -- I predicted three to 10 million -- but is still a very large number. 
In Colombia, we have about 3,000 laptops. 
It's the Minister of Defense with whom we're working, not the Minister of Education, because it is seen as a strategic defense issue in the sense of liberating these zones that had been completely closed off, in which the people who had been causing, if you will, 40 years' worth of bombings and kidnappings and assassinations lived. 
And suddenly, the kids have connected laptops. 
They've leapfrogged. 
The change is absolutely monumental, because it's not just opening it up, but it's opening it up to the rest of the world. 
So yes, they're building roads, yes, they're putting in telephone, yes, there will be television. 
But the kids six to 12 years old are surfing the Internet in Spanish and in local languages, so the children grow up with access to information, with a window into the rest of the world. 
Before, they were closed off. 
Interestingly enough, in other countries, it will be the Minister of Finance who sees it as an engine of economic growth. 
And that engine is going to see the results in 20 years. 
It's not going to happen, you know, in one year, but it's an important, deeply economic and cultural change that happens through children. 
Thirty-one countries in total are involved, and in the case of Uruguay, half the children already have them, and by the middle of 2009, every single child in Uruguay will have a laptop -- a little green laptop. 
Now what are some of the results? 
Some of the results that go across every single country include teachers saying they have never loved teaching so much, and reading comprehension measured by third parties -- not by us -- skyrockets. 
Probably the most important thing we see is children teaching parents. 
They own the laptops. They take them home. 
And so when I met with three children from the schools, who had traveled all day to come to Bogota, one of the three children brought her mother. 
And the reason she brought her mother is that this six-year-old child had been teaching her mother how to read and write. 
Her mother had not gone to primary school. 
And this is such an inversion, and such a wonderful example of children being the agents of change. 
So now, in closing, people say, now why laptops? 
Laptops are a luxury; it's like giving them iPods. No. 
The reason you want laptops is that the word is education, not laptop. 
This is an education project, not a laptop project. 
They need to learn learning. And then, just think -- they can have, let's say, 100 books. 
In a village, you have 100 laptops, each with a different set of 100 books, and so that village suddenly has 10,000 books. 
You and I didn't have 10,000 books when we went to primary school. 
Sometimes school is under a tree, or in many cases, the teacher has only a fifth-grade education, so you need a collaborative model of learning, not just building more schools and training more teachers, which you have to do anyway. 
So we're once again doing "Give One, Get One." 
Last year, we ran a "Give One, Get One" program, and it generated over 100,000 laptops that we were then able to give free. 
And by being a zero-dollar laptop, we can go to countries that can't afford it at all. 
And that's what we did. We went to Haiti, we went to Rwanda, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Mongolia. 
Places that are not markets, seeding it with the principles of saturation, connectivity, low ages, etc. 
And then we can actually roll out large numbers. 
So think of it this way: think of it as inoculating children against ignorance. 
And think of the laptop as a vaccine. 
You don't vaccinate a few children. 
You vaccinate all the children in an area. 
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 -- an autograph book, a soul-searching letter. 
If a fraction of this powerful TED audience could be inspired to buy a beautiful paper -- John, it'll be a recycled one -- 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 autograph books, and those of you authors in the audience know I hound you for them -- 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. 
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 -- very serious. This is a very -- (Laughter) -- 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 -- (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 -- 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 -- (Applause) -- for this gesture for humanity. 
And this is how they are promoting the product. This is -- 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) In his inaugural address, Barack Obama appealed to each of us to give our best as we try to extricate ourselves from this current financial crisis. 
But what did he appeal to? 
He did not, happily, follow in the footsteps of his predecessor, and tell us to just go shopping. 
Nor did he tell us, "Trust us. Trust your country. 
Invest, invest, invest." 
Instead, what he told us was to put aside childish things. 
And he appealed to virtue. 
Virtue is an old-fashioned word. 
It seems a little out of place in a cutting-edge environment like this one. 
And besides, some of you might be wondering, what the hell does it mean? 
Let me begin with an example. 
This is the job description of a hospital janitor that is scrolling up on the screen. 
And all of the items on it are unremarkable. 
They're the things you would expect: mop the floors, sweep them, empty the trash, restock the cabinets. 
It may be a little surprising how many things there are, but it's not surprising what they are. 
But the one thing I want you to notice about them is this: even though this is a very long list, there isn't a single thing on it that involves other human beings. 
Not one. 
The janitor's job could just as well be done in a mortuary as in a hospital. 
And yet, when some psychologists interviewed hospital janitors to get a sense of what they thought their jobs were like, they encountered Mike, who told them about how he stopped mopping the floor because Mr. Jones was out of his bed getting a little exercise, trying to build up his strength, walking slowly up and down the hall. 
And Charlene told them about how she ignored her supervisor's admonition and didn't vacuum the visitor's lounge because there were some family members who were there all day, every day who, at this moment, happened to be taking a nap. 
And then there was Luke, who washed the floor in a comatose young man's room twice because the man's father, who had been keeping a vigil for six months, didn't see Luke do it the first time, and his father was angry. 
And behavior like this from janitors, from technicians, from nurses and, if we're lucky now and then, from doctors, doesn't just make people feel a little better, it actually improves the quality of patient care and enables hospitals to run well. 
Now, not all janitors are like this, of course. 
But the ones who are think that these sorts of human interactions involving kindness, care and empathy are an essential part of the job. 
And yet their job description contains not one word about other human beings. 
These janitors have the moral will to do right by other people. 
And beyond this, they have the moral skill to figure out what "doing right" means. 
"Practical wisdom," Aristotle told us, "is the combination of moral will and moral skill." 
A wise person knows when and how to make the exception to every rule, as the janitors knew when to ignore the job duties in the service of other objectives. 
A wise person knows how to improvise, as Luke did when he re-washed the floor. 
Real-world problems are often ambiguous and ill-defined and the context is always changing. 
A wise person is like a jazz musician -- using the notes on the page, but dancing around them, inventing combinations that are appropriate for the situation and the people at hand. 
A wise person knows how to use these moral skills in the service of the right aims. 
To serve other people, not to manipulate other people. 
And finally, perhaps most important, a wise person is made, not born. 
Wisdom depends on experience, and not just any experience. 
You need the time to get to know the people that you're serving. 
You need permission to be allowed to improvise, try new things, occasionally to fail and to learn from your failures. 
And you need to be mentored by wise teachers. 
When you ask the janitors who behaved like the ones I described how hard it is to learn to do their job, they tell you that it takes lots of experience. 
And they don't mean it takes lots of experience to learn how to mop floors and empty trash cans. 
It takes lots of experience to learn how to care for people. 
At TED, brilliance is rampant. 
It's scary. 
The good news is you don't need to be brilliant to be wise. 
The bad news is that without wisdom, brilliance isn't enough. 
It's as likely to get you and other people into trouble as anything else. 
(Applause) Now, I hope that we all know this. 
There's a sense in which it's obvious, and yet, let me tell you a little story. 
It's a story about lemonade. 
A dad and his seven-year-old son were watching a Detroit Tigers game at the ballpark. 
His son asked him for some lemonade and Dad went to the concession stand to buy it. 
All they had was Mike's Hard Lemonade, which was five percent alcohol. 
Dad, being an academic, had no idea that Mike's Hard Lemonade contained alcohol. 
So he brought it back. 
And the kid was drinking it, and a security guard spotted it, and called the police, who called an ambulance that rushed to the ballpark, whisked the kid to the hospital. 
The emergency room ascertained that the kid had no alcohol in his blood. 
And they were ready to let the kid go. 
But not so fast. 
The Wayne County Child Welfare Protection Agency said no. 
And the child was sent to a foster home for three days. 
At that point, can the child go home? 
Well, a judge said yes, but only if the dad leaves the house and checks into a motel. 
After two weeks, I'm happy to report, the family was reunited. 
But the welfare workers and the ambulance people and the judge all said the same thing: "We hate to do it but we have to follow procedure." 
How do things like this happen? 
Scott Simon, who told this story on NPR, said, "Rules and procedures may be dumb, but they spare you from thinking." 
And, to be fair, rules are often imposed because previous officials have been lax and they let a child go back to an abusive household. 
Fair enough. 
When things go wrong, as of course they do, we reach for two tools to try to fix them. 
One tool we reach for is rules. 
Better ones, more of them. 
The second tool we reach for is incentives. 
Better ones, more of them. 
What else, after all, is there? 
We can certainly see this in response to the current financial crisis. 
Regulate, regulate, regulate. 
Fix the incentives, fix the incentives, fix the incentives ... 
The truth is that neither rules nor incentives are enough to do the job. 
How could you even write a rule that got the janitors to do what they did? 
And would you pay them a bonus for being empathic? 
It's preposterous on its face. 
And what happens is that as we turn increasingly to rules, rules and incentives may make things better in the short run, but they create a downward spiral that makes them worse in the long run. 
Moral skill is chipped away by an over-reliance on rules that deprives us of the opportunity to improvise and learn from our improvisations. 
And moral will is undermined by an incessant appeal to incentives that destroy our desire to do the right thing. 
And without intending it, by appealing to rules and incentives, we are engaging in a war on wisdom. 
Let me just give you a few examples, first of rules and the war on moral skill. 
The lemonade story is one. 
Second, no doubt more familiar to you, is the nature of modern American education: scripted, lock-step curricula. 
Here's an example from Chicago kindergarten. 
Reading and enjoying literature and words that begin with 'B.' "The Bath:" Assemble students on a rug and give students a warning about the dangers of hot water. 
Say 75 items in this script to teach a 25-page picture book. 
All over Chicago in every kindergarten class in the city, every teacher is saying the same words in the same way on the same day. 
We know why these scripts are there. 
We don't trust the judgment of teachers enough to let them loose on their own. 
Scripts like these are insurance policies against disaster. 
And they prevent disaster. 
But what they assure in its place is mediocrity. 
(Applause) Don't get me wrong. We need rules! 
Jazz musicians need some notes -- most of them need some notes on the page. 
We need more rules for the bankers, God knows. 
But too many rules prevent accomplished jazz musicians from improvising. 
And as a result, they lose their gifts, or worse, they stop playing altogether. 
Now, how about incentives? 
They seem cleverer. 
If you have one reason for doing something and I give you a second reason for doing the same thing, it seems only logical that two reasons are better than one and you're more likely to do it. 
Right? 
Well, not always. 
Sometimes two reasons to do the same thing seem to compete with one another instead of complimenting, and they make people less likely to do it. 
I'll just give you one example because time is racing. 
In Switzerland, back about 15 years ago, they were trying to decide where to site nuclear waste dumps. 
There was going to be a national referendum. 
Some psychologists went around and polled citizens who were very well informed. 
And they said, "Would you be willing to have a nuclear waste dump in your community?" 
Astonishingly, 50 percent of the citizens said yes. 
They knew it was dangerous. 
They thought it would reduce their property values. 
But it had to go somewhere and they had responsibilities as citizens. 
The psychologists asked other people a slightly different question. 
They said, "If we paid you six weeks' salary every year would you be willing to have a nuclear waste dump in your community?" 
Two reasons. It's my responsibility and I'm getting paid. 
Instead of 50 percent saying yes, 25 percent said yes. 
What happens is that the second this introduction of incentive gets us so that instead of asking, "What is my responsibility?" 
all we ask is, "What serves my interests?" 
When incentives don't work, when CEOs ignore the long-term health of their companies in pursuit of short-term gains that will lead to massive bonuses, the response is always the same. 
Get smarter incentives. 
The truth is that there are no incentives that you can devise that are ever going to be smart enough. 
Any incentive system can be subverted by bad will. 
We need incentives. People have to make a living. 
But excessive reliance on incentives demoralizes professional activity in two senses of that word. 
It causes people who engage in that activity to lose morale and it causes the activity itself to lose morality. 
Barack Obama said, before he was inaugurated, "We must ask not just 'Is it profitable?' but 'Is it right?'" And when professions are demoralized, everyone in them becomes dependent on -- addicted to -- incentives and they stop asking "Is it right?" 
We see this in medicine. 
("Although it's nothing serious, let's keep an eye on it to make sure it doesn't turn into a major lawsuit.") And we certainly see it in the world of business. 
("In order to remain competitive in today's marketplace, I'm afraid we're going to have to replace you with a sleezeball.") ("I sold my soul for about a tenth of what the damn things are going for now.") It is obvious that this is not the way people want to do their work. 
So what can we do? 
A few sources of hope: we ought to try to re-moralize work. 
One way not to do it: teach more ethics courses. 
(Applause) There is no better way to show people that you're not serious than to tie up everything you have to say about ethics into a little package with a bow and consign it to the margins as an ethics course. 
What to do instead? 
One: Celebrate moral exemplars. 
Acknowledge, when you go to law school, that a little voice is whispering in your ear about Atticus Finch. 
No 10-year-old goes to law school to do mergers and acquisitions. 
People are inspired by moral heroes. 
But we learn that with sophistication comes the understanding that you can't acknowledge that you have moral heroes. 
Well, acknowledge them. 
Be proud that you have them. 
Celebrate them. 
And demand that the people who teach you acknowledge them and celebrate them too. 
That's one thing we can do. 
I don't know how many of you remember this: another moral hero, 15 years ago, Aaron Feuerstein, who was the head of Malden Mills in Massachusetts -- they made Polartec -- The factory burned down. 
3,000 employees. He kept every one of them on the payroll. 
Why? Because it would have been a disaster for them and for the community if he had let them go. 
"Maybe on paper our company is worth less to Wall Street, but I can tell you it's worth more. We're doing fine." 
Just at this TED we heard talks from several moral heroes. 
Two were particularly inspiring to me. 
One was Ray Anderson, who turned -- (Applause) -- turned, you know, a part of the evil empire into a zero-footprint, or almost zero-footprint business. 
Why? Because it was the right thing to do. 
And a bonus he's discovering is he's actually going to make even more money. 
His employees are inspired by the effort. 
Why? Because there happy to be doing something that's the right thing to do. 
Yesterday we heard Willie Smits talk about re-foresting in Indonesia. 
(Applause) In many ways this is the perfect example. 
Because it took the will to do the right thing. 
God knows it took a huge amount of technical skill. 
I'm boggled at how much he and his associates needed to know in order to plot this out. 
But most important to make it work -- and he emphasized this -- is that it took knowing the people in the communities. 
Unless the people you're working with are behind you, this will fail. 
And there isn't a formula to tell you how to get the people behind you, because different people in different communities organize their lives in different ways. 
So there's a lot here at TED, and at other places, to celebrate. 
And you don't have to be a mega-hero. 
There are ordinary heroes. 
Ordinary heroes like the janitors who are worth celebrating too. 
As practitioners each and every one of us should strive to be ordinary, if not extraordinary heroes. 
As heads of organizations, we should strive to create environments that encourage and nurture both moral skill and moral will. 
Even the wisest and most well-meaning people will give up if they have to swim against the current in the organizations in which they work. 
If you run an organization, you should be sure that none of the jobs -- none of the jobs -- have job descriptions like the job descriptions of the janitors. 
Because the truth is that any work that you do that involves interaction with other people is moral work. 
And any moral work depends upon practical wisdom. 
And, perhaps most important, as teachers, we should strive to be the ordinary heroes, the moral exemplars, to the people we mentor. 
And there are a few things that we have to remember as teachers. 
One is that we are always teaching. 
Someone is always watching. 
The camera is always on. 
Bill Gates talked about the importance of education and, in particular, the model that KIPP was providing: "Knowledge is power." 
And he talked about a lot of the wonderful things that KIPP is doing to take inner-city kids and turn them in the direction of college. 
I want to focus on one particular thing KIPP is doing that Bill didn't mention. 
That is that they have come to the realization that the single most important thing kids need to learn is character. 
They need to learn to respect themselves. 
They need to learn to respect their schoolmates. 
They need to learn to respect their teachers. 
And, most important, they need to learn to respect learning. 
That's the principle objective. 
If you do that, the rest is just pretty much a coast downhill. 
And the teachers: the way you teach these things to the kids is by having the teachers and all the other staff embody it every minute of every day. 
Obama appealed to virtue. 
And I think he was right. 
And the virtue I think we need above all others is practical wisdom, because it's what allows other virtues -- honesty, kindness, courage and so on -- to be displayed at the right time and in the right way. 
He also appealed to hope. 
Right again. 
I think there is reason for hope. 
I think people want to be allowed to be virtuous. 
In many ways, it's what TED is all about. 
Wanting to do the right thing in the right way for the right reasons. 
This kind of wisdom is within the grasp of each and every one of us if only we start paying attention. 
Paying attention to what we do, to how we do it, and, perhaps most importantly, to the structure of the organizations within which we work, so as to make sure that it enables us and other people to develop wisdom rather than having it suppressed. 
Thank you very much. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Chris Anderson: You have to go and stand out here a sec. 
Barry Schwartz: Thank you very much. 
(Applause) I wrote this poem after hearing a pretty well known actress tell a very well known interviewer on television, "I'm really getting into the Internet lately. 
I just wish it were more organized." 
So ... 
(Laughter) If I controlled the Internet, you could auction your broken heart on eBay. 
Take the money; go to Amazon; buy a phonebook for a country you've never been to -- call folks at random until you find someone who flirts really well in a foreign language. 
(Laughter) If I were in charge of the Internet, you could Mapquest your lover's mood swings. 
Hang left at cranky, right at preoccupied, U-turn on silent treatment, all the way back to tongue kissing and good lovin'. 
You could navigate and understand every emotional intersection. 
Some days, I'm as shallow as a baking pan, but I still stretch miles in all directions. 
If I owned the Internet, Napster, Monster and Friendster.com would be one big website. 
That way you could listen to cool music while you pretend to look for a job and you're really just chattin' with your pals. 
(Laughter) Heck, if I ran the Web, you could email dead people. 
(Laughter) They would not email you back (Laughter) -- but you'd get an automated reply. 
(Laughter) Their name in your inbox (Laughter) -- it's all you wanted anyway. 
And a message saying, "Hey, it's me. I miss you. 
(Laughter) Listen, you'll see being dead is dandy. 
Now you go back to raising kids and waging peace and craving candy." 
If I designed the Internet, childhood.com would be a loop of a boy in an orchard, with a ski pole for a sword, trashcan lid for a shield, shouting, "I am the emperor of oranges. 
I am the emperor of oranges. I am the emperor of oranges." 
Now follow me, OK? 
(Laughter) Grandma.com would be a recipe for biscuits and spit-bath instructions. 
One, two, three. 
That links with hotdiggitydog.com. 
That is my grandfather. 
They take you to gruff-ex-cop-on-his-fourth-marriage.dad. 
He forms an attachment to kind-of-ditzy-but-still-sends-ginger-snaps-for-Christmas.mom, who downloads the boy in the orchard, the emperor of oranges, who grows up to be me -- the guy who usually goes too far. 
So if I were emperor of the Internet, I guess I'd still be mortal, huh? 
But at that point, I would probably already have the lowest possible mortgage and the most enlarged possible penis (Laughter) -- so I would outlaw spam on my first day in office. 
I wouldn't need it. 
I'd be like some kind of Internet genius, and me, I'd like to upgrade to deity and maybe just like that -- pop! -- I'd go wireless. 
(Laughter) Huh? Maybe Google would hire this. 
I could zip through your servers and firewalls like a virus until the World Wide Web is as wise, as wild and as organized as I think a modern-day miracle/oracle can get, but, ooh-eee, you want to bet just how whack and un-PC your Mac or PC is going to be when I'm rocking hot-shit-hot-shot-god.net? 
I guess it's just like life. 
It is not a question of if you can -- it's: do ya? 
We can interfere with the interface. 
We can make "You've got Hallelujah" the national anthem of cyberspace every lucky time we log on. 
You don't say a prayer. 
You don't write a psalm. 
You don't chant an "om." 
You send one blessed email to whomever you're thinking of at dah-da-la-dat-da-dah-da-la-dat.com. 
Thank you, TED. 
(Applause) 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 -- the number of children per woman -- and there you have the length of life in years. 
This is 1950 -- 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 -- 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 -- that is, survival -- 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 -- here we go, here we go, here we go -- 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 -- I can tell the world, "Stay where you are." 
And I take the United States -- we still want to see the background -- 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 -- present, contemporary India. 
And that means United States was richer, but lost more kids than India is doing today, proportionally. 
And look here -- 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 -- 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 -- we have 2001, or 2002 -- 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 -- 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 -- 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 -- 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 -- 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 -- 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 -- 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 -- 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 -- the high-income countries -- 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 -- what number they live on -- 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 -- 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 -- 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 -- 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 -- because the parents are dead from HIV and AIDS -- 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 -- 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 -- 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 -- red and white. 
(Laughter) But my neighbor only knows two types of countries -- 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 -- 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 -- at my age especially -- 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 -- solid steel -- this is the army bayonet from the Swedish Army, 1850, in the last year we had war. 
And it's all solid steel -- 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) This is the Large Hadron Collider. 
It's 27 kilometers in circumference. 
It's the biggest scientific experiment ever attempted. 
Over 10,000 physicists and engineers from 85 countries around the world have come together over several decades to build this machine. 
What we do is we accelerate protons -- so, hydrogen nuclei -- around 99.999999 percent the speed of light. 
Right? At that speed, they go around that 27 kilometers 11,000 times a second. 
And we collide them with another beam of protons going in the opposite direction. 
We collide them inside giant detectors. 
They're essentially digital cameras. 
And this is the one that I work on, ATLAS. 
You get some sense of the size -- you can just see these EU standard-size people underneath. 
(Laughter) You get some sense of the size: 44 meters wide, 22 meters in diameter, 7,000 tons. 
And we re-create the conditions that were present less than a billionth of a second after the universe began up to 600 million times a second inside that detector -- immense numbers. 
And if you see those metal bits there -- those are huge magnets that bend electrically charged particles, so it can measure how fast they're traveling. 
This is a picture about a year ago. 
Those magnets are in there. 
And, again, a EU standard-size, real person, so you get some sense of the scale. 
And it's in there that those mini-Big Bangs will be created, sometime in the summer this year. 
And actually, this morning, I got an email saying that we've just finished, today, building the last piece of ATLAS. 
So as of today, it's finished. I'd like to say that I planned that for TED, but I didn't. So it's been completed as of today. 
(Applause) Yeah, it's a wonderful achievement. 
So, you might be asking, "Why? 
Why create the conditions that were present less than a billionth of a second after the universe began?" 
Well, particle physicists are nothing if not ambitious. 
And the aim of particle physics is to understand what everything's made of, and how everything sticks together. 
And by everything I mean, of course, me and you, the Earth, the Sun, the 100 billion suns in our galaxy and the 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe. 
Absolutely everything. 
Now you might say, "Well, OK, but why not just look at it? 
You know? If you want to know what I'm made of, let's look at me." 
Well, we found that as you look back in time, the universe gets hotter and hotter, denser and denser, and simpler and simpler. 
Now, there's no real reason I'm aware of for that, but that seems to be the case. 
So, way back in the early times of the universe, we believe it was very simple and understandable. 
All this complexity, all the way to these wonderful things -- human brains -- are a property of an old and cold and complicated universe. 
Back at the start, in the first billionth of a second, we believe, or we've observed, it was very simple. 
It's almost like ... 
imagine a snowflake in your hand, and you look at it, and it's an incredibly complicated, beautiful object. But as you heat it up, it'll melt into a pool of water, and you would be able to see that, actually, it was just made of H20, water. 
So it's in that same sense that we look back in time to understand what the universe is made of. 
And, as of today, it's made of these things. 
Just 12 particles of matter, stuck together by four forces of nature. 
The quarks, these pink things, are the things that make up protons and neutrons that make up the atomic nuclei in your body. 
The electron -- the thing that goes around the atomic nucleus -- held around in orbit, by the way, by the electromagnetic force that's carried by this thing, the photon. 
The quarks are stuck together by other things called gluons. 
And these guys, here, they're the weak nuclear force, probably the least familiar. 
But, without it, the sun wouldn't shine. 
And when the sun shines, you get copious quantities of these things, called neutrinos, pouring out. 
Actually, if you just look at your thumbnail -- about a square centimeter -- there are something like 60 billion neutrinos per second from the sun, passing through every square centimeter of your body. 
But you don't feel them, because the weak force is correctly named -- very short range and very weak, so they just fly through you. 
And these particles have been discovered over the last century, pretty much. 
The first one, the electron, was discovered in 1897, and the last one, this thing called the tau neutrino, in the year 2000. Actually just -- I was going to say, just up the road in Chicago. I know it's a big country, America, isn't it? 
Just up the road. 
Relative to the universe, it's just up the road. 
(Laughter) So, this thing was discovered in the year 2000, so it's a relatively recent picture. 
One of the wonderful things, actually, I find, is that we've discovered any of them, when you realize how tiny they are. 
You know, they're a step in size from the entire observable universe. 
So, 100 billion galaxies, 13.7 billion light years away -- a step in size from that to Monterey, actually, is about the same as from Monterey to these things. 
Absolutely, exquisitely minute, and yet we've discovered pretty much the full set. 
So, one of my most illustrious forebears at Manchester University, Ernest Rutherford, discoverer of the atomic nucleus, once said, "All science is either physics or stamp collecting." 
Now, I don't think he meant to insult the rest of science, although he was from New Zealand, so it's possible. 
(Laughter) But what he meant was that what we've done, really, is stamp collect there. 
OK, we've discovered the particles, but unless you understand the underlying reason for that pattern -- you know, why it's built the way it is -- really you've done stamp collecting. You haven't done science. 
Fortunately, we have probably one of the greatest scientific achievements of the twentieth century that underpins that pattern. 
It's the Newton's laws, if you want, of particle physics. 
It's called the standard model -- beautifully simple mathematical equation. 
You could stick it on the front of a T-shirt, which is always the sign of elegance. 
This is it. 
(Laughter) I've been a little disingenuous, because I've expanded it out in all its gory detail. 
This equation, though, allows you to calculate everything -- other than gravity -- that happens in the universe. 
So, you want to know why the sky is blue, why atomic nuclei stick together -- in principle, you've got a big enough computer -- why DNA is the shape it is. 
In principle, you should be able to calculate it from that equation. 
But there's a problem. 
Can anyone see what it is? 
A bottle of champagne for anyone that tells me. 
I'll make it easier, actually, by blowing one of the lines up. 
Basically, each of these terms refers to some of the particles. 
So those Ws there refer to the Ws, and how they stick together. 
These carriers of the weak force, the Zs, the same. 
But there's an extra symbol in this equation: H. 
Right, H. 
H stands for Higgs particle. 
Higgs particles have not been discovered. 
But they're necessary: they're necessary to make that mathematics work. 
So all the exquisitely detailed calculations we can do with that wonderful equation wouldn't be possible without an extra bit. 
So it's a prediction: a prediction of a new particle. 
What does it do? 
Well, we had a long time to come up with good analogies. 
And back in the 1980s, when we wanted the money for the LHC from the U.K. government, Margaret Thatcher, at the time, said, "If you guys can explain, in language a politician can understand, what the hell it is that you're doing, you can have the money. 
I want to know what this Higgs particle does." 
And we came up with this analogy, and it seemed to work. 
Well, what the Higgs does is, it gives mass to the fundamental particles. 
And the picture is that the whole universe -- and that doesn't mean just space, it means me as well, and inside you -- the whole universe is full of something called a Higgs field. 
Higgs particles, if you will. 
The analogy is that these people in a room are the Higgs particles. 
Now when a particle moves through the universe, it can interact with these Higgs particles. 
But imagine someone who's not very popular moves through the room. 
Then everyone ignores them. They can just pass through the room very quickly, essentially at the speed of light. They're massless. 
And imagine someone incredibly important and popular and intelligent walks into the room. 
They're surrounded by people, and their passage through the room is impeded. 
It's almost like they get heavy. They get massive. 
And that's exactly the way the Higgs mechanism works. 
The picture is that the electrons and the quarks in your body and in the universe that we see around us are heavy, in a sense, and massive, because they're surrounded by Higgs particles. 
They're interacting with the Higgs field. 
If that picture's true, then we have to discover those Higgs particles at the LHC. 
If it's not true -- because it's quite a convoluted mechanism, although it's the simplest we've been able to think of -- then whatever does the job of the Higgs particles we know have to turn up at the LHC. 
So, that's one of the prime reasons we built this giant machine. 
I'm glad you recognize Margaret Thatcher. 
Actually, I thought about making it more culturally relevant, but -- (Laughter) anyway. 
So that's one thing. 
That's essentially a guarantee of what the LHC will find. 
There are many other things. You've heard many of the big problems in particle physics. 
One of them you heard about: dark matter, dark energy. 
There's another issue, which is that the forces in nature -- it's quite beautiful, actually -- seem, as you go back in time, they seem to change in strength. 
Well, they do change in strength. 
So, the electromagnetic force, the force that holds us together, gets stronger as you go to higher temperatures. 
The strong force, the strong nuclear force, which sticks nuclei together, gets weaker. And what you see is the standard model -- you can calculate how these change -- is the forces, the three forces, other than gravity, almost seem to come together at one point. 
It's almost as if there was one beautiful kind of super-force, back at the beginning of time. 
But they just miss. 
Now there's a theory called super-symmetry, which doubles the number of particles in the standard model, which, at first sight, doesn't sound like a simplification. 
But actually, with this theory, we find that the forces of nature do seem to unify together, back at the Big Bang -- absolutely beautiful prophecy. The model wasn't built to do that, but it seems to do it. 
Also, those super-symmetric particles are very strong candidates for the dark matter. 
So a very compelling theory that's really mainstream physics. 
And if I was to put money on it, I would put money on -- in a very unscientific way -- that that these things would also crop up at the LHC. 
Many other things that the LHC could discover. 
But in the last few minutes, I just want to give you a different perspective of what I think -- what particle physics really means to me -- particle physics and cosmology. 
And that's that I think it's given us a wonderful narrative -- almost a creation story, if you'd like -- about the universe, from modern science over the last few decades. 
And I'd say that it deserves, in the spirit of Wade Davis' talk, to be at least put up there with these wonderful creation stories of the peoples of the high Andes and the frozen north. 
This is a creation story, I think, equally as wonderful. 
The story goes like this: we know that the universe began 13.7 billion years ago, in an immensely hot, dense state, much smaller than a single atom. 
It began to expand about a million, billion, billion, billion billionth of a second -- I think I got that right -- after the Big Bang. 
Gravity separated away from the other forces. 
The universe then underwent an exponential expansion called inflation. 
In about the first billionth of a second or so, the Higgs field kicked in, and the quarks and the gluons and the electrons that make us up got mass. 
The universe continued to expand and cool. 
After about a few minutes, there was hydrogen and helium in the universe. That's all. 
The universe was about 75 percent hydrogen, 25 percent helium. It still is today. 
It continued to expand about 300 million years. 
Then light began to travel through the universe. 
It was big enough to be transparent to light, and that's what we see in the cosmic microwave background that George Smoot described as looking at the face of God. 
After about 400 million years, the first stars formed, and that hydrogen, that helium, then began to cook into the heavier elements. 
So the elements of life -- carbon, and oxygen and iron, all the elements that we need to make us up -- were cooked in those first generations of stars, which then ran out of fuel, exploded, threw those elements back into the universe. 
They then re-collapsed into another generation of stars and planets. 
And on some of those planets, the oxygen, which had been created in that first generation of stars, could fuse with hydrogen to form water, liquid water on the surface. 
On at least one, and maybe only one of those planets, primitive life evolved, which evolved over millions of years into things that walked upright and left footprints about three and a half million years ago in the mud flats of Tanzania, and eventually left a footprint on another world. 
And built this civilization, this wonderful picture, that turned the darkness into light, and you can see the civilization from space. 
As one of my great heroes, Carl Sagan, said, these are the things -- and actually, not only these, but I was looking around -- these are the things, like Saturn V rockets, and Sputnik, and DNA, and literature and science -- these are the things that hydrogen atoms do when given 13.7 billion years. 
Absolutely remarkable. 
And, the laws of physics. Right? 
So, the right laws of physics -- they're beautifully balanced. 
If the weak force had been a little bit different, then carbon and oxygen wouldn't be stable inside the hearts of stars, and there would be none of that in the universe. 
And I think that's a wonderful and significant story. 
50 years ago, I couldn't have told that story, because we didn't know it. 
It makes me really feel that that civilization -- which, as I say, if you believe the scientific creation story, has emerged purely as a result of the laws of physics, and a few hydrogen atoms -- then I think, to me anyway, it makes me feel incredibly valuable. 
So that's the LHC. 
The LHC is certainly, when it turns on in summer, going to write the next chapter of that book. 
And I'm certainly looking forward with immense excitement to it being turned on. 
Thanks. 
(Applause) How many of you have seen the Alfred Hitchcock film "The Birds"? 
Any of you get really freaked out by that? 
You might want to leave now. 
(Laughter) So, this is a vending machine for crows. 
And over the past few days, many of you have been asking me, "How did you come to this? How did you get started doing this?" 
And it started, as with many great ideas, or many ideas you can't get rid of anyway, at a cocktail party. 
About 10 years ago, I was at a cocktail party with a friend of mine, and we're sitting there, and he was complaining about the crows that he had seen that were all over his yard and making a big mess. 
And he was telling me that really, we ought to try and eradicate these things. 
We gotta kill them because they're making a mess. 
I said that was stupid, you know, maybe we should just train them to do something useful. 
And he said that was impossible. 
And I'm sure I'm in good company in finding that tremendously annoying -- when someone tells you it's impossible. 
So, I spent the next 10 years reading about crows in my spare time. 
(Laughter) And after 10 years of this, my wife eventually said, "Look, you know, you gotta do this thing you've been talking about, and build the vending machine." 
So I did. 
But part of the reason that I found this interesting is that I started noticing that we are very aware of all the species that are going extinct on the planet as a result of human habitation expansion, and no one seems to be paying attention to all the species that are actually living -- that are surviving. 
And I'm talking specifically about synanthropic species, which are species that have adapted specifically for human ecologies, species like rats and cockroaches and crows. 
And as I started looking at them, I was finding that they had hyper-adapted. 
They'd become extremely adept at living with us. 
And in return, we just tried to kill them all the time. 
And in doing so, we were breeding them for parasitism. 
We were giving them all sorts of reasons to adapt new ways. 
So, for example, rats are incredibly responsive breeders. 
And cockroaches, as anyone who's tried to get rid of them knows, have become really immune to the poisons that we're using. 
So, I thought, let's build something that's mutually beneficial. 
Well, then let's build something that we can both benefit from, and find some way to make a new relationship with these species. 
And so I built the vending machine. 
But the story of the vending machine is a little more interesting if you know more about crows. 
It turns out that crows aren't just surviving with human beings -- they're actually really thriving. 
They're found everywhere on the planet except for the Arctic and the southern tip of South America. 
And in all that area, they're only rarely found breeding more than five kilometers away from human beings. 
So we may not think about them, but they're always around. 
And not surprisingly, given the human population growth, more than half of the human population is living in cities now. 
And out of those, nine-tenths of the human growth population is occurring in cities. 
We're seeing a population boom with crows. 
So bird counts are indicating that we might be seeing up to exponential growth in their numbers. 
So that's no great surprise. 
But what was really interesting to me was to find out that the birds were adapting in a pretty unusual way. 
And I'll give you an example of that. 
So this is Betty. She's a New Caledonian crow. 
And these crows use sticks in the wild to get insects and whatnot out of pieces of wood. 
Here, she's trying to get a piece of meat out of a tube. 
But the researchers had a problem. 
They messed up and left just a stick of wire in there. 
And she hadn't had the opportunity to do this before. 
You see, it wasn't working very well. 
So she adapted. 
Now this is completely unprompted. She had never seen this done before. 
No one taught her to bend this into a hook, had shown her how it could happen. 
But she did it all on her own. 
So keep in mind that she's never seen this done. 
Right. 
(Laughter) Yeah. All right. 
(Applause) That's the part where the researchers freak out. 
(Laughter) So, it turns out we've been finding more and more that crows are really, really intelligent. 
Their brains are proportionate, in the same proportion as chimpanzee brains are. 
There are all kinds of anecdotes for different kinds of intelligence they have. 
For example, in Sweden, crows will wait for fishermen to drop lines through holes in the ice. 
And when the fishermen move off, the crows fly down, reel up the lines, and eat the fish or the bait. 
It's pretty annoying for the fishermen. 
On an entirely different tack, at University of Washington, they, a few years ago, were doing an experiment where they captured some crows on campus. 
Some students went out and netted some crows, brought them in, and were -- weighed them, and measured them and whatnot, and then let them back out again. 
And were entertained to discover that for the rest of the week, these crows, whenever these particular students walked around campus, these crows would caw at them, and run around and make their life kind of miserable. 
They were significantly less entertained when this went on for the next week. 
And the next month. And after summer break. 
Until they finally graduated and left campus, and -- glad to get away, I'm sure -- came back sometime later, and found the crows still remembered them. 
So -- the moral being, don't piss off crows. 
So now, students at the University of Washington that are studying these crows do so with a giant wig and a big mask. 
(Laughter) It's fairly interesting. 
So we know that these crows are really smart, but the more I dug into this, the more I found that they actually have an even more significant adaptation. 
Video: Crows have become highly skilled at making a living in these new urban environments. 
In this Japanese city, they have devised a way of eating a food that normally they can't manage: drop it among the traffic. 
The problem now is collecting the bits, without getting run over. 
Wait for the light to stop the traffic. 
Then, collect your cracked nut in safety. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Joshua Klein: Yeah, yeah. Pretty interesting. 
So what's significant about this isn't that crows are using cars to crack nuts. 
In fact, that's old hat for crows. 
This happened about 10 years ago in a place called Sendai City, at a driving school in the suburbs of Tokyo. 
And since that time, all of the crows in the neighborhood are picking up this behavior. 
And now, every crow within five kilometers is standing by a sidewalk, waiting to collect its lunch. 
So, they're learning from each other. And research bears this out. 
Parents seem to be teaching their young. 
They've learned from their peers. They've learned from their enemies. 
If I have a little extra time, I'll tell you about a case of crow infidelity that illustrates that nicely. 
The point being that they've developed cultural adaptation. 
And as we heard yesterday, that's the Pandora's box that's getting human beings in trouble, and we're starting to see it with them. 
They're able to very quickly and very flexibly adapt to new challenges and new resources in their environment, which is really useful if you live in a city. 
So we know that there's lots of crows. 
We found out they're really smart, and we found out that they can teach each other. 
And when all this became clear to me, I realized the only obvious thing to do is build a vending machine. 
So that's what we did. 
This is a vending machine for crows. 
And it uses Skinnerian training to shape their behavior over four stages. 
It's pretty simple. 
Basically, what happens is that we put this out in a field, or someplace where there's lots of crows, and we put coins and peanuts all around the base of the machine. 
And crows eventually come by, and eat the peanuts and get used to the machine being there. 
And eventually, they eat up all the peanuts. 
And then they see that there are peanuts here on the feeder tray, and they hop up and help themselves. 
And then they leave, and the machine spits up more coins and peanuts, and life is really dandy, if you're a crow. 
Then you can come back anytime and get yourself a peanut. 
So, when they get really used to that, we move on to the crows coming back. 
Now, they're used to the sound of the machine, and they keep coming back, and digging out these peanuts from amongst the pile of coins that's there. 
And when they get really happy about this, we go ahead and stymie them. 
And we move to the third stage, where we only give them a coin. 
Now, like most of us who have gotten used to a good thing, this really pisses them off. 
So, they do what they do in nature when they're looking for something -- they sweep things out of the way with their beak. 
And they do that here, and that knocks the coins down the slot, and when that happens, they get a peanut. 
And so this goes on for some time. 
The crows learn that all they have to do is show up, wait for the coin to come out, put the coin in the slot, and then they get their peanut. 
And when they're really good and comfortable with that, we move to the final stage, in which they show up and nothing happens. 
And this is where we see the difference between crows and other animals. 
Squirrels, for example, would show up, look for the peanut, go away. 
Come back, look for the peanut, go away. 
They do this maybe half a dozen times before they get bored, and then they go off and play in traffic. 
Crows, on the other hand, show up, and they try and figure it out. 
They know that this machine's been messing with them, through three different stages of behavior. 
(Laughter) They figure it's gotta have more to it. 
So, they poke at it and peck at it and whatnot. 
And eventually some crow gets a bright idea that, "Hey, there's lots of coins lying around from the first stage, lying around on the ground," hops down, picks it up, drops it in the slot. 
And then, we're off to the races. 
That crow enjoys a temporary monopoly on peanuts, until his friends figure out how to do it, and then there we go. 
So, what's significant about this to me isn't that we can train crows to pick up peanuts. 
Mind you, there's 216 million dollars' worth of change lost every year, but I'm not sure I can depend on that ROI from crows. 
Instead, I think we should look a little bit larger. 
I think that crows can be trained to do other things. 
For example, why not train them to pick up garbage after stadium events? 
Or find expensive components from discarded electronics? 
Or maybe do search and rescue? 
The main thing, the main point of all this for me is that we can find mutually beneficial systems for these species. 
We can find ways to interact with these other species that doesn't involve exterminating them, but involves finding an equilibrium with them that's a useful balance. 
Thanks very much. 
(Applause) I had a fire nine days ago. 
My archive: 175 films, my 16-millimeter negative, all my books, my dad's books, my photographs. 
I'd collected -- I was a collector, major, big-time. 
It's gone. 
I just looked at it, and I didn't know what to do. 
I mean, this was -- was I my things? 
I always live in the present -- I love the present. 
I cherish the future. 
And I was taught some strange thing as a kid, like, you've got to make something good out of something bad. 
You've got to make something good out of something bad. 
This was bad! Man, I was -- I cough. I was sick. 
That's my camera lens. The first one -- the one I shot my Bob Dylan film with 35 years ago. 
That's my feature film. "King, Murray" won Cannes Film Festival 1970 -- the only print I had. 
That's my papers. 
That was in minutes -- 20 minutes. 
Epiphany hit me. Something hit me. 
"You've got to make something good out of something bad," I started to say to my friends, neighbors, my sister. 
By the way, that's "Sputnik." I ran it last year. 
"Sputnik" was downtown, the negative. It wasn't touched. 
These are some pieces of things I used in my Sputnik feature film, which opens in New York in two weeks downtown. 
I called my sister. I called my neighbors. I said, "Come dig." 
That's me at my desk. 
That was a desk took 40-some years to build. 
You know -- all the stuff. 
That's my daughter, Jean. 
She came. She's a nurse in San Francisco. 
"Dig it up," I said. "Pieces. 
I want pieces. Bits and pieces." 
I came up with this idea: a life of bits and pieces, which I'm just starting to work on -- my next project. 
That's my sister. She took care of pictures, because I was a big collector of snapshot photography that I believed said a lot. 
And those are some of the pictures that -- something was good about the burnt pictures. 
I didn't know. I looked at that -- I said, "Wow, is that better than the --" That's my proposal on Jimmy Doolittle. I made that movie for television. 
It's the only copy I had. Pieces of it. 
Idea about women. 
So I started to say, "Hey, man, you are too much! 
You could cry about this." I really didn't. 
I just instead said, "I'm going to make something out of it, and maybe next year ... " And I appreciate this moment to come up on this stage with so many people who've already given me so much solace, and just say to TEDsters: I'm proud of me. That I take something bad, I turn it, and I'm going to make something good out of this, all these pieces. 
That's Arthur Leipzig's original photograph I loved. 
I was a big record collector -- the records didn't make it. Boy, I tell you, film burns. Film burns. 
I mean, this was 16-millimeter safety film. 
The negatives are gone. 
That's my father's letter to me, telling me to marry the woman I first married when I was 20. 
That's my daughter and me. 
She's still there. She's there this morning, actually. 
That's my house. 
My family's living in the Hilton Hotel in Scotts Valley. 
That's my wife, Heidi, who didn't take it as well as I did. 
My children, Davey and Henry. 
My son, Davey, in the hotel two nights ago. 
So, my message to you folks, from my three minutes, is that I appreciate the chance to share this with you. I will be back. I love being at TED. 
I came to live it, and I am living it. 
That's my view from my window outside of Santa Cruz, in Bonny Doon, just 35 miles from here. 
Thank you everybody. 
(Applause) When I was president of the American Psychological Association, they tried to media-train me, and an encounter I had with CNN summarizes what I'm going to be talking about today, which is the eleventh reason to be optimistic. 
The editor of Discover told us 10 of them, I'm going to give you the eleventh. 
So they came to me -- CNN -- and they said, "Professor Seligman, would you tell us about the state of psychology today? 
We'd like to interview you about that." And I said, "Great." 
And she said, "But this is CNN, so you only get a sound bite." 
So I said, "Well, how many words do I get?" 
And she said, "Well, one." 
(Laughter) And cameras rolled, and she said, "Professor Seligman, what is the state of psychology today?" 
"Good." 
(Laughter) "Cut. Cut. That won't do. 
We'd really better give you a longer sound bite." 
"Well, how many words do I get this time?" "I think, well, you get two. 
Doctor Seligman, what is the state of psychology today?" 
"Not good." 
(Laughter) "Look, Doctor Seligman, we can see you're really not comfortable in this medium. 
We'd better give you a real sound bite. 
This time you can have three words. 
Professor Seligman, what is the state of psychology today?" 
"Not good enough." And that's what I'm going to be talking about. 
I want to say why psychology was good, why it was not good and how it may become, in the next 10 years, good enough. 
And by parallel summary, I want to say the same thing about technology, about entertainment and design, because I think the issues are very similar. 
So, why was psychology good? 
Well, for more than 60 years, psychology worked within the disease model. 
Ten years ago, when I was on an airplane and I introduced myself to my seatmate, and told them what I did, they'd move away from me. 
And because, quite rightly, they were saying psychology is about finding what's wrong with you. Spot the loony. 
And now, when I tell people what I do, they move toward me. 
And what was good about psychology, about the 30 billion dollar investment NIMH made, about working in the disease model, about what you mean by psychology, is that, 60 years ago, none of the disorders were treatable -- it was entirely smoke and mirrors. 
And now, 14 of the disorders are treatable, two of them actually curable. 
And the other thing that happened is that a science developed, a science of mental illness. 
That we found out that we could take fuzzy concepts -- like depression, alcoholism -- and measure them with rigor. 
That we could create a classification of the mental illnesses. 
That we could understand the causality of the mental illnesses. 
We could look across time at the same people -- people, for example, who were genetically vulnerable to schizophrenia -- and ask what the contribution of mothering, of genetics are, and we could isolate third variables by doing experiments on the mental illnesses. 
And best of all, we were able, in the last 50 years, to invent drug treatments and psychological treatments. 
And then we were able to test them rigorously, in random assignment, placebo controlled designs, throw out the things that didn't work, keep the things that actively did. 
And the conclusion of that is that psychology and psychiatry, over the last 60 years, can actually claim that we can make miserable people less miserable. 
And I think that's terrific. I'm proud of it. 
But what was not good, the consequences of that were three things. 
The first was moral, that psychologists and psychiatrists became victimologists, pathologizers, that our view of human nature was that if you were in trouble, bricks fell on you. 
And we forgot that people made choices and decisions. 
We forgot responsibility. That was the first cost. 
The second cost was that we forgot about you people. 
We forgot about improving normal lives. 
We forgot about a mission to make relatively untroubled people happier, more fulfilled, more productive. And "genius," "high-talent," became a dirty word. 
No one works on that. 
And the third problem about the disease model is, in our rush to do something about people in trouble, in our rush to do something about repairing damage, it never occurred to us to develop interventions to make people happier, positive interventions. 
So that was not good. 
And so, that's what led people like Nancy Etcoff, Dan Gilbert, Mike Csikszentmihalyi and myself to work in something I call positive psychology, which has three aims. 
The first is that psychology should be just as concerned with human strength as it is with weakness. 
It should be just as concerned with building strength as with repairing damage. 
It should be interested in the best things in life. 
And it should be just as concerned with making the lives of normal people fulfilling, and with genius, with nurturing high talent. 
So in the last 10 years and the hope for the future, we've seen the beginnings of a science of positive psychology, a science of what makes life worth living. 
It turns out that we can measure different forms of happiness. 
And any of you, for free, can go to that website and take the entire panoply of tests of happiness. 
You can ask, how do you stack up for positive emotion, for meaning, for flow, against literally tens of thousands of other people? 
We created the opposite of the diagnostic manual of the insanities: a classification of the strengths and virtues that looks at the sex ratio, how they're defined, how to diagnose them, what builds them and what gets in their way. 
We found that we could discover the causation of the positive states, the relationship between left hemispheric activity and right hemispheric activity as a cause of happiness. 
I've spent my life working on extremely miserable people, and I've asked the question, how do extremely miserable people differ from the rest of you? 
And starting about six years ago, we asked about extremely happy people. 
And how do they differ from the rest of us? 
And it turns out there's one way. 
They're not more religious, they're not in better shape, they don't have more money, they're not better looking, they don't have more good events and fewer bad events. 
The one way in which they differ: they're extremely social. 
They don't sit in seminars on Saturday morning. 
(Laughter) They don't spend time alone. 
Each of them is in a romantic relationship and each has a rich repertoire of friends. 
But watch out here. This is merely correlational data, not causal, and it's about happiness in the first Hollywood sense I'm going to talk about: happiness of ebullience and giggling and good cheer. 
And I'm going to suggest to you that's not nearly enough, in just a moment. 
We found we could begin to look at interventions over the centuries, from the Buddha to Tony Robbins. 
About 120 interventions have been proposed that allegedly make people happy. 
And we find that we've been able to manualize many of them, and we actually carry out random assignment efficacy and effectiveness studies. 
That is, which ones actually make people lastingly happier? 
In a couple of minutes, I'll tell you about some of those results. 
But the upshot of this is that the mission I want psychology to have, in addition to its mission of curing the mentally ill, and in addition to its mission of making miserable people less miserable, is can psychology actually make people happier? 
And to ask that question -- happy is not a word I use very much -- we've had to break it down into what I think is askable about happy. 
And I believe there are three different -- and I call them different because different interventions build them, it's possible to have one rather than the other -- three different happy lives. 
The first happy life is the pleasant life. 
This is a life in which you have as much positive emotion as you possibly can, and the skills to amplify it. 
The second is a life of engagement -- a life in your work, your parenting, your love, your leisure, time stops for you. 
That's what Aristotle was talking about. 
And third, the meaningful life. 
So I want to say a little bit about each of those lives and what we know about them. 
The first life is the pleasant life and it's simply, as best we can find it, it's having as many of the pleasures as you can, as much positive emotion as you can, and learning the skills -- savoring, mindfulness -- that amplify them, that stretch them over time and space. 
But the pleasant life has three drawbacks, and it's why positive psychology is not happy-ology and why it doesn't end here. 
The first drawback is that it turns out the pleasant life, your experience of positive emotion, is heritable, about 50 percent heritable, and, in fact, not very modifiable. 
So the different tricks that Matthieu [Ricard] and I and others know about increasing the amount of positive emotion in your life are 15 to 20 percent tricks, getting more of it. 
Second is that positive emotion habituates. It habituates rapidly, indeed. 
It's all like French vanilla ice cream, the first taste is a 100 percent; by the time you're down to the sixth taste, it's gone. 
And, as I said, it's not particularly malleable. 
And this leads to the second life. 
And I have to tell you about my friend, Len, to talk about why positive psychology is more than positive emotion, more than building pleasure. 
In two of the three great arenas of life, by the time Len was 30, Len was enormously successful. The first arena was work. 
By the time he was 20, he was an options trader. 
By the time he was 25, he was a multimillionaire and the head of an options trading company. 
Second, in play -- he's a national champion bridge player. 
But in the third great arena of life, love, Len is an abysmal failure. 
And the reason he was, was that Len is a cold fish. 
(Laughter) Len is an introvert. 
American women said to Len, when he dated them, "You're no fun. You don't have positive emotion. Get lost." 
And Len was wealthy enough to be able to afford a Park Avenue psychoanalyst, who for five years tried to find the sexual trauma that had somehow locked positive emotion inside of him. 
But it turned out there wasn't any sexual trauma. 
It turned out that -- Len grew up in Long Island and he played football and watched football, and played bridge -- Len is in the bottom five percent of what we call positive affectivities. 
The question is, is Len unhappy? And I want to say not. 
Contrary to what psychology told us about the bottom 50 percent of the human race in positive affectivity, I think Len is one of the happiest people I know. 
He's not consigned to the hell of unhappiness and that's because Len, like most of you, is enormously capable of flow. 
When he walks onto the floor of the American Exchange at 9:30 in the morning, time stops for him. And it stops till the closing bell. 
When the first card is played, until 10 days later, the tournament is over, time stops for Len. 
And this is indeed what Mike Csikszentmihalyi has been talking about, about flow. And it's distinct from pleasure in a very important way. 
Pleasure has raw feels: you know it's happening. It's thought and feeling. 
But what Mike told you yesterday -- during flow, you can't feel anything. 
You're one with the music. Time stops. 
You have intense concentration. 
And this is indeed the characteristic of what we think of as the good life. 
And we think there's a recipe for it, and it's knowing what your highest strengths are. 
And again, there's a valid test of what your five highest strengths are. 
And then re-crafting your life to use them as much as you possibly can. 
Re-crafting your work, your love, your play, your friendship, your parenting. 
Just one example. One person I worked with was a bagger at Genuardi's. 
Hated the job. 
She's working her way through college. 
Her highest strength was social intelligence, so she re-crafted bagging to make the encounter with her the social highlight of every customer's day. 
Now obviously she failed. 
But what she did was to take her highest strengths, and re-craft work to use them as much as possible. 
What you get out of that is not smiley-ness. 
You don't look like Debbie Reynolds. 
You don't giggle a lot. What you get is more absorption. 
So, that's the second path. The first path, positive emotion. 
The second path is eudaimonian flow. 
And the third path is meaning. 
This is the most venerable of the happinesses, traditionally. 
And meaning, in this view, consists of -- very parallel to eudaimonia -- it consists of knowing what your highest strengths are, and using them to belong to and in the service of something larger than you are. 
I mentioned that for all three kinds of lives, the pleasant life, the good life, the meaningful life, people are now hard at work on the question, are there things that lastingly change those lives? 
And the answer seems to be yes. And I'll just give you some samples of it. 
It's being done in a rigorous manner. 
It's being done in the same way that we test drugs to see what really works. 
So we do random assignment, placebo controlled, long-term studies of different interventions. 
And just to sample the kind of interventions that we find have an effect, when we teach people about the pleasant life, how to have more pleasure in your life, one of your assignments is to take the mindfulness skills, the savoring skills, and you're assigned to design a beautiful day. 
Next Saturday, set a day aside, design yourself a beautiful day, and use savoring and mindfulness to enhance those pleasures. 
And we can show in that way that the pleasant life is enhanced. 
Gratitude visit. I want you all to do this with me now, if you would. 
Close your eyes. 
I'd like you to remember someone who did something enormously important that changed your life in a good direction, and who you never properly thanked. 
The person has to be alive. OK. 
Now, OK, you can open your eyes. 
I hope all of you have such a person. 
Your assignment, when you're learning the gratitude visit, is to write a 300-word testimonial to that person, call them on the phone in Phoenix, ask if you can visit, don't tell them why, show up at their door, you read the testimonial -- everyone weeps when this happens. 
And what happens is when we test people one week later, a month later, three months later, they're both happier and less depressed. 
Another example is a strength date, in which we get couples to identify their highest strengths on the strengths test, and then to design an evening in which they both use their strengths, and we find this is a strengthener of relationships. 
And fun versus philanthropy. 
But it's so heartening to be in a group like this, in which so many of you have turned your lives to philanthropy. 
Well, my undergraduates and the people I work with haven't discovered this, so we actually have people do something altruistic and do something fun, and to contrast it. 
And what you find is when you do something fun, it has a square wave walk set. 
When you do something philanthropic to help another person, it lasts and it lasts. 
So those are examples of positive interventions. 
So, the next to last thing I want to say is we're interested in how much life satisfaction people have. 
And this is really what you're about. And that's our target variable. 
And we ask the question as a function of the three different lives, how much life satisfaction do you get? 
So we ask -- and we've done this in 15 replications involving thousands of people -- to what extent does the pursuit of pleasure, the pursuit of positive emotion, the pleasant life, the pursuit of engagement, time stopping for you, and the pursuit of meaning contribute to life satisfaction? 
And our results surprised us, but they were backward of what we thought. 
It turns out the pursuit of pleasure has almost no contribution to life satisfaction. 
The pursuit of meaning is the strongest. 
The pursuit of engagement is also very strong. 
Where pleasure matters is if you have both engagement and you have meaning, then pleasure's the whipped cream and the cherry. 
Which is to say, the full life -- the sum is greater than the parts, if you've got all three. 
Conversely, if you have none of the three, the empty life, the sum is less than the parts. 
And what we're asking now is does the very same relationship, physical health, morbidity, how long you live and productivity, follow the same relationship? 
That is, in a corporation, is productivity a function of positive emotion, engagement and meaning? 
Is health a function of positive engagement, of pleasure, and of meaning in life? 
And there is reason to think the answer to both of those may well be yes. 
So, Chris said that the last speaker had a chance to try to integrate what he heard, and so this was amazing for me. I've never been in a gathering like this. 
I've never seen speakers stretch beyond themselves so much, which was one of the remarkable things. 
But I found that the problems of psychology seemed to be parallel to the problems of technology, entertainment and design in the following way. 
We all know that technology, entertainment and design have been and can be used for destructive purposes. 
We also know that technology, entertainment and design can be used to relieve misery. 
And by the way, the distinction between relieving misery and building happiness is extremely important. 
I thought, when I first became a therapist 30 years ago, that if I was good enough to make someone not depressed, not anxious, not angry, that I'd make them happy. 
And I never found that. I found the best you could ever do was to get to zero. 
But they were empty. 
And it turns out the skills of happiness, the skills of the pleasant life, the skills of engagement, the skills of meaning, are different from the skills of relieving misery. 
And so, the parallel thing holds with technology, entertainment and design, I believe. 
That is, it is possible for these three drivers of our world to increase happiness, to increase positive emotion, and that's typically how they've been used. 
But once you fractionate happiness the way I do -- not just positive emotion, that's not nearly enough -- there's flow in life, and there's meaning in life. 
As Laura Lee told us, design, and, I believe, entertainment and technology, can be used to increase meaning engagement in life as well. 
So in conclusion, the eleventh reason for optimism, in addition to the space elevator, is that I think with technology, entertainment and design, we can actually increase the amount of tonnage of human happiness on the planet. 
And if technology can, in the next decade or two, increase the pleasant life, the good life and the meaningful life, it will be good enough. 
If entertainment can be diverted to also increase positive emotion, meaning, eudaimonia, it will be good enough. 
And if design can increase positive emotion, eudaimonia, and flow and meaning, what we're all doing together will become good enough. Thank you. 
(Applause) 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 -- 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. 
These rocks have been hitting our earth for about three billion years, and are responsible for much of what’s gone on on our planet. 
This is an example of a real meteorite, and you can see all the melting of the iron from the speed and the heat when a meteorite hits the earth, and just how much of it survives and melts. 
From a meteorite from space, we’re over here with an original Sputnik. 
This is one of the seven surviving Sputniks that was not launched into space. 
This is not a copy. 
The space age began 50 years ago in October, and that’s exactly what Sputnik looked like. 
And it wouldn’t be fun to talk about the space age without seeing a flag that was carried to the moon and back, on Apollo 11. 
The astronauts each got to carry about ten silk flags in their personal kits. 
They would bring them back and mount them. 
So this has actually been carried to the moon and back. 
So that’s for fun. 
The dawn of books is, of course, important. 
And it wouldn’t be interesting to talk about the dawn of books without having a copy of a Guttenberg Bible. 
You can see how portable and handy it was to have your own Guttenberg in 1455. 
But what’s interesting about the Guttenberg Bible, and the dawn of this technology, is not the book. 
You see, the book was not driven by reading. 
In 1455, nobody could read. 
So why did the printing press succeed? 
This is an original page of a Guttenberg Bible. 
So you’re looking here at one of the first printed books using movable type in the history of man, 550 years ago. 
We are living at the age here at the end of the book, where electronic paper will undoubtedly replace it. 
But why is this so interesting? Here’s the quick story. 
It turns out that in the 1450s, the Catholic Church needed money, and so they actually hand-wrote these things called indulgences, which were forgiveness’s on pieces of paper. 
They traveled all around Europe and sold by the hundreds or by the thousands. 
They got you out of purgatory faster. 
And when the printing press was invented what they found was they could print indulgences, which was the equivalent of printing money. 
And so all of Western Europe started buying printing presses in 1455 -- to print out thousands, and then hundreds of thousands, and then ultimately millions of single, small pieces of paper that got you out of middle hell and into heaven. 
That is why the printing press succeeded, and that is why Martin Luther nailed his 90 theses to the door: because he was complaining that the Catholic Church had gone amok in printing out indulgences and selling them in every town and village and city in all of Western Europe. 
So the printing press, ladies and gentlemen, was driven entirely by the printing of forgivenesses and had nothing to do with reading. 
More tomorrow. I also have pictures coming of the library for those of you that have asked for pictures. 
We’re going to have some tomorrow. 
(Applause) Instead of showing an object from the stage I’m going to do something special for the first time. 
We are going to show, actually, what the library looks like, OK? 
So, I am married to the most wonderful woman in the world. 
You’re going to find out why in a minute, because when I went to see Eileen, this is what I said I wanted to build. 
This is the Library of Human Imagination. 
The room itself is three stories tall. 
In the glass panels are 5,000 years of human imagination that are computer controlled. 
The room is a theatre. It changes colors. 
And all throughout the library are different objects, different spaces. 
It’s designed like an Escher print. 
Here is some of the lower level of the library, where the exhibits constantly change. 
You can walk through. You can touch. 
You can see exactly how many of these types of items would fit in a room. 
There’s my very own Saturn V. 
Everybody should have one, OK? (Laughter) So you can see here in the lower level of the library the books and the objects. 
In the glass panels all along is sort of the history of imagination. 
There is a glass bridge that you walk across that’s suspended in space. 
So it’s a leap of imagination. 
How do we create? 
Part of the question that I have answered is, is we create by surrounding ourselves with stimuli: with human achievement, with history, with the things that drive us and make us human -- the passionate discovery, the bones of dinosaurs long gone, the maps of space that we’ve experienced, and ultimately the hallways that stimulate our mind and our imagination. 
So hopefully tomorrow I’ll show one or two more objects from the stage, but for today I just wanted to say thank you for all the people that came and talked to us about it. 
And Eileen and I are thrilled to open our home and share it with the TED community. 
(Applause) TED is all about patterns in the clouds. 
It’s all about connections. 
It’s all about seeing things that everybody else has seen before but thinking about them in ways that nobody has thought of them before. 
And that’s really what discovery and imagination is all about. 
For example, we can look at a DNA molecule model here. 
None of us really have ever seen one, but we know it exists because we’ve been taught to understand this molecule. 
But we can also look at an Enigma machine from the Nazis in World War II that was a coding and decoding machine. 
Now, you might say, what does this have to do with this? 
Well, this is the code for life, and this is a code for death. 
These two molecules code and decode. 
And yet, looking at them, you would see a machine and a molecule. 
But once you’ve seen them in a new way, you realize that both of these things really are connected. 
And they’re connected primarily because of this here. 
You see, this is a human brain model, OK? 
And it’s rare, because we never really get to see a brain. 
We get to see a skull. But there it is. 
All of imagination -- everything that we think, we feel, we sense -- comes through the human brain. 
And once we create new patterns in this brain, once we shape the brain in a new way, it never returns to its original shape. 
And I’ll give you a quick example. 
We think about the Internet; we think about information that goes across the Internet. 
And we never think about the hidden connection. 
But I brought along here a lump of coal -- right here, one lump of coal. 
And what does a lump of coal have to do with the Internet? 
You see, it takes the energy in one lump of coal to move one megabyte of information across the net. 
So every time you download a file, each megabyte is a lump of coal. 
What that means is, a 200-megabyte file looks like this, ladies and gentlemen. OK? 
So the next time you download a gigabyte, or two gigabytes, it’s not for free, OK? 
The connection is the energy it takes to run the web , and to make everything we think possible, possible. 
Thanks, Chris. 
(Applause) I have given the slide show that I gave here two years ago about 2,000 times. 
I'm giving a short slide show this morning that I'm giving for the very first time, so -- well it's -- I don't want or need to raise the bar, I'm actually trying to lower the bar. 
Because I've cobbled this together to try to meet the challenge of this session. 
And I was reminded by Karen Armstrong's fantastic presentation that religion really properly understood is not about belief, but about behavior. 
Perhaps we should say the same thing about optimism. 
How dare we be optimistic? 
Optimism is sometimes characterized as a belief, an intellectual posture. 
As Mahatma Gandhi famously said, "You must become the change you wish to see in the world." 
And the outcome about which we wish to be optimistic is not going to be created by the belief alone, except to the extent that the belief brings about new behavior. But the word "behavior" is also, I think, sometimes misunderstood in this context. 
I'm a big advocate of changing the lightbulbs and buying hybrids, and Tipper and I put 33 solar panels on our house, and dug the geothermal wells, and did all of that other stuff. 
But, as important as it is to change the lightbulbs, it is more important to change the laws. 
And when we change our behavior in our daily lives, we sometimes leave out the citizenship part and the democracy part. In order to be optimistic about this, we have to become incredibly active as citizens in our democracy. 
In order to solve the climate crisis, we have to solve the democracy crisis. 
And we have one. 
I have been trying to tell this story for a long time. 
I was reminded of that recently, by a woman who walked past the table I was sitting at, just staring at me as she walked past. She was in her 70s, looked like she had a kind face. I thought nothing of it until I saw from the corner of my eye she was walking from the opposite direction, also just staring at me. And so I said, "How do you do?" 
And she said, "You know, if you dyed your hair black, you would look just like Al Gore." (Laughter) Many years ago, when I was a young congressman, I spent an awful lot of time dealing with the challenge of nuclear arms control -- the nuclear arms race. 
And the military historians taught me, during that quest, that military conflicts are typically put into three categories: local battles, regional or theater wars, and the rare but all-important global, world war -- strategic conflicts. 
And each level of conflict requires a different allocation of resources, a different approach, a different organizational model. 
Environmental challenges fall into the same three categories, and most of what we think about are local environmental problems: air pollution, water pollution, hazardous waste dumps. But there are also regional environmental problems, like acid rain from the Midwest to the Northeast, and from Western Europe to the Arctic, and from the Midwest out the Mississippi into the dead zone of the Gulf of Mexico. 
And there are lots of those. But the climate crisis is the rare but all-important global, or strategic, conflict. 
Everything is affected. And we have to organize our response appropriately. We need a worldwide, global mobilization for renewable energy, conservation, efficiency and a global transition to a low-carbon economy. 
We have work to do. And we can mobilize resources and political will. But the political will has to be mobilized, in order to mobilize the resources. 
Let me show you these slides here. 
I thought I would start with the logo. What's missing here, of course, is the North Polar ice cap. 
Greenland remains. Twenty-eight years ago, this is what the polar ice cap -- the North Polar ice cap -- looked like at the end of the summer, at the fall equinox. 
This last fall, I went to the Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, and talked to the researchers here in Monterey at the Naval Postgraduate Laboratory. 
This is what's happened in the last 28 years. 
To put it in perspective, 2005 was the previous record. 
Here's what happened last fall that has really unnerved the researchers. 
The North Polar ice cap is the same size geographically -- doesn't look quite the same size -- but it is exactly the same size as the United States, minus an area roughly equal to the state of Arizona. 
The amount that disappeared in 2005 was equivalent to everything east of the Mississippi. 
The extra amount that disappeared last fall was equivalent to this much. It comes back in the winter, but not as permanent ice, as thin ice -- vulnerable. The amount remaining could be completely gone in summer in as little as five years. 
That puts a lot of pressure on Greenland. 
Already, around the Arctic Circle -- this is a famous village in Alaska. This is a town in Newfoundland. Antarctica. Latest studies from NASA. 
The amount of a moderate-to-severe snow melting of an area equivalent to the size of California. 
"They were the best of times, they were the worst of times": the most famous opening sentence in English literature. I want to share briefly a tale of two planets. Earth and Venus are exactly the same size. Earth's diameter is about 400 kilometers larger, but essentially the same size. 
They have exactly the same amount of carbon. 
But the difference is, on Earth, most of the carbon has been leeched over time out of the atmosphere, deposited in the ground as coal, oil, natural gas, etc. On Venus, most of it is in the atmosphere. The difference is that our temperature is 59 degrees on average. On Venus, it's 855. This is relevant to our current strategy of taking as much carbon out of the ground as quickly as possible, and putting it into the atmosphere. 
It's not because Venus is slightly closer to the Sun. 
It's three times hotter than Mercury, which is right next to the Sun. Now, briefly, here's an image you've seen, as one of the only old images, but I show it because I want to briefly give you CSI: Climate. 
The global scientific community says: man-made global warming pollution, put into the atmosphere, thickening this, is trapping more of the outgoing infrared. 
You all know that. At the last IPCC summary, the scientists wanted to say, "How certain are you?" They wanted to answer that "99 percent." 
The Chinese objected, and so the compromise was "more than 90 percent." 
Now, the skeptics say, "Oh, wait a minute, this could be variations in this energy coming in from the sun." If that were true, the stratosphere would be heated as well as the lower atmosphere, if it's more coming in. 
If it's more being trapped on the way out, then you would expect it to be warmer here and cooler here. Here is the lower atmosphere. 
Here's the stratosphere: cooler. 
CSI: Climate. 
Now, here's the good news. Sixty-eight percent of Americans now believe that human activity is responsible for global warming. Sixty-nine percent believe that the Earth is heating up in a significant way. There has been progress, but here is the key: when given a list of challenges to confront, global warming is still listed at near the bottom. 
What is missing is a sense of urgency. 
If you agree with the factual analysis, but you don't feel the sense of urgency, where does that leave you? 
Well, the Alliance for Climate Protection, which I head in conjunction with Current TV -- who did this pro bono -- did a worldwide contest to do commercials on how to communicate this. 
This is the winner. 
NBC -- I'll show all of the networks here -- the top journalists for NBC asked 956 questions in 2007 of the presidential candidates: two of them were about the climate crisis. ABC: 844 questions, two about the climate crisis. 
Fox: two. CNN: two. CBS: zero. 
From laughs to tears -- this is one of the older tobacco commercials. 
So here's what we're doing. 
This is gasoline consumption in all of these countries. And us. 
But it's not just the developed nations. 
The developing countries are now following us and accelerating their pace. And actually, their cumulative emissions this year are the equivalent to where we were in 1965. And they're catching up very dramatically. The total concentrations: by 2025, they will be essentially where we were in 1985. 
If the wealthy countries were completely missing from the picture, we would still have this crisis. 
But we have given to the developing countries the technologies and the ways of thinking that are creating the crisis. This is in Bolivia -- over thirty years. 
This is peak fishing in a few seconds. The '60s. 
'70s. '80s. '90s. We have to stop this. And the good news is that we can. 
We have the technologies. 
We have to have a unified view of how to go about this: the struggle against poverty in the world and the challenge of cutting wealthy country emissions, all has a single, very simple solution. 
People say, "What's the solution?" Here it is. 
Put a price on carbon. We need a CO2 tax, revenue neutral, to replace taxation on employment, which was invented by Bismarck -- and some things have changed since the 19th century. 
In the poor world, we have to integrate the responses to poverty with the solutions to the climate crisis. 
Plans to fight poverty in Uganda are mooted, if we do not solve the climate crisis. 
But responses can actually make a huge difference in the poor countries. This is a proposal that has been talked about a lot in Europe. 
This was from Nature magazine. These are concentrating solar, renewable energy plants, linked in a so-called "supergrid" to supply all of the electrical power to Europe, largely from developing countries -- high-voltage DC currents. 
This is not pie in the sky; this can be done. 
We need to do it for our own economy. 
The latest figures show that the old model is not working. There are a lot of great investments that you can make. If you are investing in tar sands or shale oil, then you have a portfolio that is crammed with sub-prime carbon assets. 
And it is based on an old model. 
Junkies find veins in their toes when the ones in their arms and their legs collapse. Developing tar sands and coal shale is the equivalent. Here are just a few of the investments that I personally think make sense. 
I have a stake in these, so I'll have a disclaimer there. 
But geothermal, concentrating solar, advanced photovoltaics, efficiency and conservation. 
You've seen this slide before, but there's a change. 
The only two countries that didn't ratify -- and now there's only one. Australia had an election. 
And there was a campaign in Australia that involved television and Internet and radio commercials to lift the sense of urgency for the people there. 
And we trained 250 people to give the slide show in every town and village and city in Australia. 
Lot of other things contributed to it, but the new Prime Minister announced that his very first priority would be to change Australia's position on Kyoto, and he has. Now, they came to an awareness partly because of the horrible drought that they have had. 
This is Lake Lanier. My friend Heidi Cullen said that if we gave droughts names the way we give hurricanes names, we'd call the one in the southeast now Katrina, and we would say it's headed toward Atlanta. 
We can't wait for the kind of drought Australia had to change our political culture. 
Here's more good news. The cities supporting Kyoto in the U.S. 
are up to 780 -- and I thought I saw one go by there, just to localize this -- which is good news. 
Now, to close, we heard a couple of days ago about the value of making individual heroism so commonplace that it becomes banal or routine. 
What we need is another hero generation. Those of us who are alive in the United States of America today especially, but also the rest of the world, have to somehow understand that history has presented us with a choice -- just as Jill [Bolte] Taylor was figuring out how to save her life while she was distracted by the amazing experience that she was going through. 
We now have a culture of distraction. 
But we have a planetary emergency. 
And we have to find a way to create, in the generation of those alive today, a sense of generational mission. 
I wish I could find the words to convey this. 
This was another hero generation that brought democracy to the planet. 
Another that ended slavery. And that gave women the right to vote. 
We can do this. Don't tell me that we don't have the capacity to do it. 
If we had just one week's worth of what we spend on the Iraq War, we could be well on the way to solving this challenge. 
We have the capacity to do it. 
One final point: I'm optimistic, because I believe we have the capacity, at moments of great challenge, to set aside the causes of distraction and rise to the challenge that history is presenting to us. 
Sometimes I hear people respond to the disturbing facts of the climate crisis by saying, "Oh, this is so terrible. 
What a burden we have." I would like to ask you to reframe that. How many generations in all of human history have had the opportunity to rise to a challenge that is worthy of our best efforts? 
A challenge that can pull from us more than we knew we could do? I think we ought to approach this challenge with a sense of profound joy and gratitude that we are the generation about which, a thousand years from now, philharmonic orchestras and poets and singers will celebrate by saying, they were the ones that found it within themselves to solve this crisis and lay the basis for a bright and optimistic human future. 
Let's do that. Thank you very much. 
Chris Anderson: For so many people at TED, there is deep pain that basically a design issue on a voting form -- one bad design issue meant that your voice wasn't being heard like that in the last eight years in a position where you could make these things come true. 
That hurts. 
Al Gore: You have no idea. (Laughter) CA: When you look at what the leading candidates in your own party are doing now -- I mean, there's -- are you excited by their plans on global warming? 
AG: The answer to the question is hard for me because, on the one hand, I think that we should feel really great about the fact that the Republican nominee -- certain nominee -- John McCain, and both of the finalists for the Democratic nomination -- all three have a very different and forward-leaning position on the climate crisis. All three have offered leadership, and all three are very different from the approach taken by the current administration. And I think that all three have also been responsible in putting forward plans and proposals. But the campaign dialogue that -- as illustrated by the questions -- 
that was put together by the League of Conservation Voters, by the way, the analysis of all the questions -- and, by the way, the debates have all been sponsored by something that goes by the Orwellian label, "Clean Coal." Has anybody noticed that? 
Every single debate has been sponsored by "Clean Coal." 
"Now, even lower emissions!" 
The richness and fullness of the dialogue in our democracy has not laid the basis for the kind of bold initiative that is really needed. 
So they're saying the right things and they may -- whichever of them is elected -- may do the right thing, but let me tell you: when I came back from Kyoto in 1997, with a feeling of great happiness that we'd gotten that breakthrough there, and then confronted the United States Senate, only one out of 100 senators was willing to vote to confirm, to ratify that treaty. Whatever the candidates say has to be laid alongside what the people say. 
This challenge is part of the fabric of our whole civilization. 
CO2 is the exhaling breath of our civilization, literally. 
And now we mechanized that process. Changing that pattern requires a scope, a scale, a speed of change that is beyond what we have done in the past. 
So that's why I began by saying, be optimistic in what you do, but be an active citizen. 
Demand -- change the light bulbs, but change the laws. Change the global treaties. 
We have to speak up. We have to solve this democracy -- this -- We have sclerosis in our democracy. And we have to change that. 
Use the Internet. Go on the Internet. 
Connect with people. Become very active as citizens. 
Have a moratorium -- we shouldn't have any new coal-fired generating plants that aren't able to capture and store CO2, which means we have to quickly build these renewable sources. 
Now, nobody is talking on that scale. But I do believe that between now and November, it is possible. 
This Alliance for Climate Protection is going to launch a nationwide campaign -- grassroots mobilization, television ads, Internet ads, radio, newspaper -- with partnerships with everybody from the Girl Scouts to the hunters and fishermen. 
We need help. We need help. 
CA: In terms of your own personal role going forward, Al, is there something more than that you would like to be doing? 
AG: I have prayed that I would be able to find the answer to that question. What can I do? 
Buckminster Fuller once wrote, "If the future of all human civilization depended on me, what would I do? 
How would I be?" It does depend on all of us, but again, not just with the light bulbs. 
We, most of us here, are Americans. We have a democracy. 
We can change things, but we have to actively change. 
What's needed really is a higher level of consciousness. 
And that's hard to -- that's hard to create -- but it is coming. 
There's an old African proverb that some of you know that says, "If you want to go quickly, go alone; if you want to go far, go together." We have to go far, quickly. 
So we have to have a change in consciousness. 
A change in commitment. A new sense of urgency. 
A new appreciation for the privilege that we have of undertaking this challenge. 
CA: Al Gore, thank you so much for coming to TED. 
AG: Thank you. Thank you very much. 
(Applause) (Music) (Applause) But anyway, this is about the evils of science, so I think it’s perfect. 
♫ My oh my, walking by, who’s the apple of my eye? ♫ ♫ Why, it's my very own Clonie. ♫ ♫ Oh, if I should stroll the hood, who knew I could look so good ♫ ♫ just talking on the phone to Clonie. ♫ ♫ We are pals, it's cool, 'cause we're not lonely, ♫ ♫ shallow gene pool is nothing to my only Clonie. ♫ ♫ Me and you, hustling through, holding on through thick and thin, ♫ ♫ just day by day, our DNA, so the Olson twins got nothing on us. ♫ ♫ We'll survive, side by side. Mother Nature, don’t you call her phony, she’s my Clonie. ♫ 
♫ Was wealthy, but not healthy, had no one to dwell with me, ♫ ♫ so look who I got born -- Clonie. ♫ ♫ Far from broke, bored, rich folk, we don't need no natural yolk -- ♫ ♫ our babies come full-formed, Clonie. ♫ ♫ We'll be huggable, get a publicist ♫ ♫ and show them, be the most lovable thing since fucking Eminem. ♫ ♫ Oh my friend, multiply, we’re a franchise, like Walt Disney or Hannibal Lecter. ♫ ♫ We can tell our cancer cells are more benign than old Phil Spector. ♫ 
♫ We’ll survive side by side, should have signed with Verve instead of Sony. ♫ ♫ You’re my Clonie. ♫ "Oh Clonie, how I love you." 
"Ha, I'm the only person I ever loved." 
♫ Gee, that's swell. I guess you're just my fatal attraction-ie. You’re my Clonie. ♫ Thank you. 
(Applause) Hello everyone. 
And so the two of us are here to give you an example of creation. 
And I'm going to be folding one of Robert Lang's models. 
And this is the piece of paper it will be made from, and you can see all of the folds that are needed for it. 
And Rufus is going to be doing some improvisation on his custom, five-string electric cello, and it's very exciting to listen to him. 
Are you ready to go? OK. 
Just to make it a little bit more exciting. 
All right. Take it away, Rufus. 
(Music) All right. There you go. 
(Laughter) (Applause) When I first arrived in beautiful Zimbabwe, it was difficult to understand that 35 percent of the population is HIV positive. 
It really wasn't until I was invited to the homes of people that I started to understand the human toll of the epidemic. 
For instance, this is Herbert with his grandmother. 
When I first met him, he was sitting on his grandmother's lap. 
He has been orphaned, as both of his parents died of AIDS, and his grandmother took care of him until he too died of AIDS. 
He liked to sit on her lap because he said that it was painful for him to lie in his own bed. 
When she got up to make tea, she placed him in my own lap and I had never felt a child that was that emaciated. 
Before I left, I actually asked him if I could get him something. 
I thought he would ask for a toy, or candy, and he asked me for slippers, because he said that his feet were cold. 
This is Joyce who's -- in this picture -- 21. 
Single mother, HIV positive. 
I photographed her before and after the birth of her beautiful baby girl, Issa. 
And I was last week walking on Lafayette Street in Manhattan and got a call from a woman who I didn't know, but she called to tell me that Joyce had passed away at the age of 23. 
Joyce's mother is now taking care of her daughter, like so many other Zimbabwean children who've been orphaned by the epidemic. 
So a few of the stories. 
With every picture, there are individuals who have full lives and stories that deserve to be told. 
All these pictures are from Zimbabwe. 
Chris Anderson: Kirsten, will you just take one minute, just to tell your own story of how you got to Africa? 
Kirsten Ashburn: Mmm, gosh. 
CA: Just -- KA: Actually, I was working at the time, doing production for a fashion photographer. 
And I was constantly reading the New York Times, and stunned by the statistics, the numbers. 
It was just frightening. 
So I quit my job and decided that that's the subject that I wanted to tackle. 
And I first actually went to Botswana, where I spent a month -- this is in December 2000 -- then went to Zimbabwe for a month and a half, and then went back again this March 2002 for another month and a half in Zimbabwe. 
CA: That's an amazing story, thank you. 
KB: Thanks for letting me show these. 
One way to change our genes is to make new ones, as Craig Venter has so elegantly shown. 
Another is to change our lifestyles. 
And what we're learning is how powerful and dynamic these changes can be, that you don't have to wait very long to see the benefits. 
When you eat healthier, manage stress, exercise and love more, your brain actually gets more blood flow and more oxygen. 
But more than that, your brain gets measurably bigger. 
Things that were thought impossible just a few years ago can actually be measured now. 
This was figured out by Robin Williams a few years before the rest of us. 
Now, there's some things that you can do to make your brain grow new brain cells. 
Some of my favorite things, like chocolate and tea, blueberries, alcohol in moderation, stress management and cannabinoids found in marijuana. 
I'm just the messenger. 
(Laughter) What were we just talking about? 
(Laughter) And other things that can make it worse, that can cause you to lose brain cells. 
The usual suspects, like saturated fat and sugar, nicotine, opiates, cocaine, too much alcohol and chronic stress. 
Your skin gets more blood flow when you change your lifestyle, so you age less quickly. Your skin doesn't wrinkle as much. 
Your heart gets more blood flow. 
We've shown that you can actually reverse heart disease. 
That these clogged arteries that you see on the upper left, after only a year become measurably less clogged. 
And the cardiac PET scan shown on the lower left, the blue means no blood flow. 
A year later -- orange and white is maximum blood flow. 
We've shown you may be able to stop and reverse the progression of early prostate cancer and, by extension, breast cancer, simply by making these changes. 
We've found that tumor growth in vitro was inhibited 70 percent in the group that made these changes, whereas only nine percent in the comparison group. 
These differences were highly significant. 
Even your sexual organs get more blood flow, so you increase sexual potency. 
One of the most effective anti-smoking ads was done by the Department of Health Services, showing that nicotine, which constricts your arteries, can cause a heart attack or a stroke, but it also causes impotence. 
Half of guys who smoke are impotent. 
How sexy is that? 
Now we're also about to publish a study -- the first study showing you can change gene expression in men with prostate cancer. 
This is what's called a heat map -- and the different colors -- and along the side, on the right, are different genes. 
And we found that over 500 genes were favorably changed -- in effect, turning on the good genes, the disease-preventing genes, turning off the disease-promoting genes. 
And so these findings I think are really very powerful, giving many people new hope and new choices. 
And companies like Navigenics and DNA Direct and 23andMe, that are giving you your genetic profiles, are giving some people a sense of, "Gosh, well, what can I do about it?" 
Well, our genes are not our fate, and if we make these changes -- they're a predisposition -- but if we make bigger changes than we might have made otherwise, we can actually change how our genes are expressed. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) I was here about four years ago, talking about the relationship of design and happiness. 
At the very end of it, I showed a list under that title. 
I learned very few things in addition since (Laughter) -- but made a whole number of them into projects since. 
These are inflatable monkeys in every city in Scotland: "Everybody always thinks they are right." 
They were combined in the media. 
"Drugs are fun in the beginning but become a drag later on." 
We're doing changing media. 
This is a projection that can see the viewer as the viewer walks by. 
You can't help but actually ripping that spider web apart. 
All of these things are pieces of graphic design. 
We do them for our clients. 
They are commissioned. 
I would never have the money to actually pay for the installment or pay for all the billboards or the production of these, so there's always a client attached to them. 
These are 65,000 coat hangers in a street that's lined with fashion stores. 
"Worrying solves nothing." 
"Money does not make me happy" appeared first as double-page spreads in a magazine. 
The printer lost the file, didn't tell us. 
When the magazine -- actually, when I got the subscription -- it was 12 following pages. 
It said, "Money does does make me happy." 
And a friend of mine in Austria felt so sorry for me that he talked the largest casino owner in Linz into letting us wrap his building. 
So this is the big pedestrian zone in Linz. 
It just says "Money," and if you look down the side street, it says, "does not make me happy." 
We had a show that just came down last week in New York. 
We steamed up the windows permanently, and every hour we had a different designer come in and write these things that they've learned into the steam in the window. 
Everybody participated -- Milton Glaser, Massimo Vignelli. 
Singapore was quite in discussion. 
This is a little spot that we filmed there that's to be displayed on the large JumboTrons in Singapore. 
And, of course, it's one that's dear to my heart, because all of these sentiments -- some banal, some a bit more profound -- all originally had come out of my diary. 
And I do go often into the diary and check if I wanted to change something about the situation. 
If it's -- see it for a long enough time, I actually do something about it. 
And the very last one is a billboard. 
This is our roof in New York, the roof of the studio. 
This is newsprint plus stencils that lie on the newsprint. 
We let that lie around in the sun. 
As you all know, newsprint yellows significantly in the sun. 
After a week, we took the stencils and the leaves off, shipped the newsprints to Lisbon to a very sunny spot, so on day one the billboard said, "Complaining is silly. Either act or forget." 
Three days later it faded, and a week later, no more complaining anywhere. 
(Laughter) Thank you so much. 
(Applause) Fifty years ago in the old Soviet Union, a team of engineers was secretly moving a large object through a desolate countryside. 
With it, they were hoping to capture the minds of people everywhere by being the first to conquer outer space. 
The rocket was huge. 
And packed in its nose was a silver ball with two radios inside. 
On October 4, 1957, they launched their rocket. 
One of the Russian scientists wrote at the time: "We are about to create a new planet that we will call Sputnik. 
In the olden days, explorers like Vasco da Gama and Columbus had the good fortune to open up the terrestrial globe. 
Now we have the good fortune to open up space. 
And it is for those in the future to envy us our joy." 
You're watching snippets from "Sputnik," my fifth documentary feature, which is just about completed. 
It tells the story of Sputnik, and the story of what happened to America as a result. 
For days after the launch, Sputnik was a wonderful curiosity. 
A man-made moon visible by ordinary citizens, it inspired awe and pride that humans had finally launched an object into space. 
But just three days later, on a day they called Red Monday, the media and the politicians told us, and we believed, that Sputnik was proof that our enemy had beaten us in science and technology, and that they could now attack us with hydrogen bombs, using their Sputnik rocket as an IBM missile. 
All hell broke loose. 
Sputnik quickly became one of the three great shocks to hit America -- historians say the equal of Pearl Harbor or 9/11. 
It provoked the missile gap. 
It exploded an arms race. 
It began the space race. 
Within a year, Congress funded huge weapons increases, and we went from 1,200 nuclear weapons to 20,000. 
And the reactions to Sputnik went far beyond weapons increases. 
For example, some here will remember this day, June 1958, the National Civil Defense Drill, where tens of millions of people in 78 cities went underground. 
Or the Gallup Poll that showed that seven in 10 Americans believed that a nuclear war would happen, and that at least 50 percent of our population was going to be killed. 
But Sputnik provoked wonderful changes as well. 
For example, some in this room went to school on scholarship because of Sputnik. 
Support for engineering, math and science -- education in general -- boomed. 
And Vint Cerf points out that Sputnik led directly to ARPA, and the Internet, and, of course, NASA. 
My feature documentary shows how a free society can be stampeded by those who know how to use media. 
But it also shows how we can turn what appears at first to be a bad situation, into something that was overall very good for America. 
"Sputnik" will soon be released. 
In closing, I would like to take a moment to thank one of my investors: longtime TEDster, Jay Walker. 
And I'd like to thank you all. 
(Applause). 
Thank you, Chris. 
Well, I'm involved in other things, besides physics. 
In fact, mostly now in other things. 
One thing is distant relationships among human languages. 
And the professional, historical linguists in the U.S. 
and in Western Europe mostly try to stay away from any long-distance relationships, big groupings, groupings that go back a long time, longer than the familiar families. 
They don't like that. They think it's crank. I don't think it's crank. 
And there are some brilliant linguists, mostly Russians, who are working on that, at Santa Fe Institute and in Moscow, and I would love to see where that leads. 
Does it really lead to a single ancestor some 20, 25,000 years ago? 
And what if we go back beyond that single ancestor, when there was presumably a competition among many languages? 
How far back does that go? How far back does modern language go? 
How many tens of thousands of years does it go back? 
Chris Anderson: Do you have a hunch or a hope for what the answer to that is? 
Murray Gell-Mann: Well, I would guess that modern language must be older than the cave paintings and cave engravings and cave sculptures and dance steps in the soft clay in the caves in Western Europe, in the Aurignacian Period some 35,000 years ago, or earlier. 
I can't believe they did all those things and didn't also have a modern language. 
So, I would guess that the actual origin goes back at least that far and maybe further. 
But that doesn't mean that all, or many, or most of today's attested languages couldn't descend perhaps from one that's much younger than that, like say 20,000 years, or something of that kind. It's what we call a bottleneck. 
CA: Well, Philip Anderson may have been right. 
You may just know more about everything than anyone. 
So, it's been an honor. Thank you Murray Gell-Mann. 
(Applause) 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 -- 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 -- "Using Energy," and I get information about doing the mill. 
And I tried, and I made it. 
(Applause) CA: So you copied -- you exactly copied the design in the book. 
WK: Ah, no. I just -- CA: What happened? 
WK: In fact, a design of the windmill that was in the book, it has got four -- ah -- 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 -- 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 -- 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 -- so who's that? 
WK: This is my parents, holding the radio. 
CA: So what did they make of -- that you were 14, 15 at the time -- what did they make of this? They were impressed? 
WK: Yeah. 
CA: And so what's your -- what are you going to do with this? 
WK: Um -- CA: What do you -- I mean -- do you want to build another one? 
WK: Yeah, I want to build another one -- 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)