-lrb- applause -rrb- david gallo : this is bill lange . i 'm dave gallo .
and we 're going to tell you some stories from the sea here in video .
we 've got some of the most incredible video of titanic that 's ever been seen , and we 're not going to show you any of it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the truth of the matter is that the titanic - even though it 's breaking all sorts of box office records - it 's not the most exciting story from the sea .
and the problem , i think , is that we take the ocean for granted .
when you think about it , the oceans are 75 percent of the planet .
most of the planet is ocean water .
the average depth is about two miles .
part of the problem , i think , is we stand at the beach , or we see images like this of the ocean , and you look out at this great big blue expanse , and it 's shimmering and it 's moving and there 's waves and there 's surf and there 's tides , but you have no idea for what lies in there .
and in the oceans , there are the longest mountain ranges on the planet .
most of the animals are in the oceans .
most of the earthquakes and volcanoes are in the sea , at the bottom of the sea .
the biodiversity and the biodensity in the ocean is higher , in places , than it is in the rainforests .
it 's mostly unexplored , and yet there are beautiful sights like this that captivate us and make us become familiar with it .
but when you 're standing at the beach , i want you to think that you 're standing at the edge of a very unfamiliar world .
we have to have a very special technology to get into that unfamiliar world .
we use the submarine alvin and we use cameras , and the cameras are something that bill lange has developed with the help of sony .
marcel proust said , " the true voyage of discovery is not so much in seeking new landscapes as in having new eyes . "
people that have partnered with us have given us new eyes , not only on what exists - the new landscapes at the bottom of the sea - but also how we think about life on the planet itself .
here 's a jelly .
it 's one of my favorites , because it 's got all sorts of working parts .
this turns out to be the longest creature in the oceans .
it gets up to about 150 feet long .
but see all those different working things ?
i love that kind of stuff .
it 's got these fishing lures on the bottom . they 're going up and down .
it 's got tentacles dangling , swirling around like that .
it 's a colonial animal .
these are all individual animals banding together to make this one creature .
and it 's got these jet thrusters up in front that it 'll use in a moment , and a little light .
if you take all the big fish and schooling fish and all that , put them on one side of the scale , put all the jelly-type of animals on the other side , those guys win hands down .
most of the biomass in the ocean is made out of creatures like this .
here 's the x-wing death jelly .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the bioluminescence - they use the lights for attracting mates and attracting prey and communicating .
we could n't begin to show you our archival stuff from the jellies .
they come in all different sizes and shapes .
bill lange : we tend to forget about the fact that the ocean is miles deep on average , and that we 're real familiar with the animals that are in the first 200 or 300 feet , but we 're not familiar with what exists from there all the way down to the bottom .
and these are the types of animals that live in that three-dimensional space , that micro-gravity environment that we really have n't explored .
you hear about giant squid and things like that , but some of these animals get up to be approximately 140 , 160 feet long .
they 're very little understood .
dg : this is one of them , another one of our favorites , because it 's a little octopod .
you can actually see through his head .
and here he is , flapping with his ears and very gracefully going up .
we see those at all depths and even at the greatest depths .
they go from a couple of inches to a couple of feet .
they come right up to the submarine - they 'll put their eyes right up to the window and peek inside the sub .
this is really a world within a world , and we 're going to show you two .
in this case , we 're passing down through the mid-ocean and we see creatures like this .
this is kind of like an undersea rooster .
this guy , that looks incredibly formal , in a way .
and then one of my favorites . what a face !
this is basically scientific data that you 're looking at .
it 's footage that we 've collected for scientific purposes .
and that 's one of the things that bill 's been doing , is providing scientists with this first view of animals like this , in the world where they belong .
they do n't catch them in a net .
they 're actually looking at them down in that world .
we 're going to take a joystick , sit in front of our computer , on the earth , and press the joystick forward , and fly around the planet .
we 're going to look at the mid-ocean ridge , a 40,000-mile long mountain range .
the average depth at the top of it is about a mile and a half .
and we 're over the atlantic - that 's the ridge right there - but we 're going to go across the caribbean , central america , and end up against the pacific , nine degrees north .
we make maps of these mountain ranges with sound , with sonar , and this is one of those mountain ranges .
we 're coming around a cliff here on the right .
the height of these mountains on either side of this valley is greater than the alps in most cases .
and there 's tens of thousands of those mountains out there that have n't been mapped yet .
this is a volcanic ridge .
we 're getting down further and further in scale .
and eventually , we can come up with something like this .
this is an icon of our robot , jason , it 's called .
and you can sit in a room like this , with a joystick and a headset , and drive a robot like that around the bottom of the ocean in real time .
one of the things we 're trying to do at woods hole with our partners is to bring this virtual world - this world , this unexplored region - back to the laboratory .
because we see it in bits and pieces right now .
we see it either as sound , or we see it as video , or we see it as photographs , or we see it as chemical sensors , but we never have yet put it all together into one interesting picture .
here 's where bill 's cameras really do shine .
this is what 's called a hydrothermal vent .
and what you 're seeing here is a cloud of densely packed , hydrogen-sulfide-rich water coming out of a volcanic axis on the sea floor .
gets up to 600 , 700 degrees f , somewhere in that range .
so that 's all water under the sea - a mile and a half , two miles , three miles down .
and we knew it was volcanic back in the ' 60s , ' 70s .
and then we had some hint that these things existed all along the axis of it , because if you 've got volcanism , water 's going to get down from the sea into cracks in the sea floor , come in contact with magma , and come shooting out hot .
we were n't really aware that it would be so rich with sulfides , hydrogen sulfides .
we did n't have any idea about these things , which we call chimneys .
this is one of these hydrothermal vents .
six hundred degree f water coming out of the earth .
on either side of us are mountain ranges that are higher than the alps , so the setting here is very dramatic .
bl : the white material is a type of bacteria that thrives at 180 degrees c.
dg : i think that 's one of the greatest stories right now that we 're seeing from the bottom of the sea , is that the first thing we see coming out of the sea floor after a volcanic eruption is bacteria .
and we started to wonder for a long time , how did it all get down there ?
what we find out now is that it 's probably coming from inside the earth .
not only is it coming out of the earth - so , biogenesis made from volcanic activity - but that bacteria supports these colonies of life .
the pressure here is 4,000 pounds per square inch .
a mile and a half from the surface to two miles to three miles - no sun has ever gotten down here .
all the energy to support these life forms is coming from inside the earth - so , chemosynthesis .
and you can see how dense the population is .
these are called tube worms .
bl : these worms have no digestive system . they have no mouth .
but they have two types of gill structures .
one for extracting oxygen out of the deep-sea water , another one which houses this chemosynthetic bacteria , which takes the hydrothermal fluid - that hot water that you saw coming out of the bottom - and converts that into simple sugars that the tube worm can digest .
dg : you can see , here 's a crab that lives down there .
he 's managed to grab a tip of these worms .
now , they normally retract as soon as a crab touches them .
oh ! good going .
so , as soon as a crab touches them , they retract down into their shells , just like your fingernails .
there 's a whole story being played out here that we 're just now beginning to have some idea of because of this new camera technology .
bl : these worms live in a real temperature extreme .
their foot is at about 200 degrees c and their head is out at three degrees c , so it 's like having your hand in boiling water and your foot in freezing water .
that 's how they like to live .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- dg : this is a female of this kind of worm .
and here 's a male .
you watch . it does n't take long before two guys here - this one and one that will show up over here - start to fight .
everything you see is played out in the pitch black of the deep sea .
there are never any lights there , except the lights that we bring .
here they go .
on one of the last dive series , we counted 200 species in these areas - 198 were new , new species .
bl : one of the big problems is that for the biologists working at these sites , it 's rather difficult to collect these animals .
and they disintegrate on the way up , so the imagery is critical for the science .
dg : two octopods at about two miles depth .
this pressure thing really amazes me - that these animals can exist there at a depth with pressure enough to crush the titanic like an empty pepsi can .
what we saw up till now was from the pacific .
this is from the atlantic . even greater depth .
you can see this shrimp is harassing this poor little guy here , and he 'll bat it away with his claw . whack !
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and the same thing 's going on over here .
what they 're getting at is that - on the back of this crab - the foodstuff here is this very strange bacteria that lives on the backs of all these animals .
and what these shrimp are trying to do is actually harvest the bacteria from the backs of these animals .
and the crabs do n't like it at all .
these long filaments that you see on the back of the crab are actually created by the product of that bacteria .
so , the bacteria grows hair on the crab .
on the back , you see this again .
the red dot is the laser light of the submarine alvin to give us an idea about how far away we are from the vents .
those are all shrimp .
you see the hot water over here , here and here , coming out .
they 're clinging to a rock face and actually scraping bacteria off that rock face .
here 's a tiny , little vent that 's come out of the side of that pillar .
those pillars get up to several stories .
so here , you 've got this valley with this incredible alien landscape of pillars and hot springs and volcanic eruptions and earthquakes , inhabited by these very strange animals that live only on chemical energy coming out of the ground .
they do n't need the sun at all .
bl : you see this white v-shaped mark on the back of the shrimp ?
it 's actually a light-sensing organ .
it 's how they find the hydrothermal vents .
the vents are emitting a black body radiation - an ir signature - and so they 're able to find these vents at considerable distances .
dg : all this stuff is happening along that 40,000-mile long mountain range that we 're calling the ribbon of life , because just even today , as we speak , there 's life being generated there from volcanic activity .
this is the first time we 've ever tried this any place .
we 're going to try to show you high definition from the pacific .
we 're moving up one of these pillars .
this one 's several stories tall .
in it , you 'll see that it 's a habitat for a lot of different animals .
there 's a funny kind of hot plate here , with vent water coming out of it .
so all of these are individual homes for worms .
now here 's a closer view of that community .
here 's crabs here , worms here .
there are smaller animals crawling around .
here 's pagoda structures .
i think this is the neatest-looking thing .
i just ca n't get over this - that you 've got these little chimneys sitting here smoking away .
this stuff is toxic as hell , by the way .
you could never get a permit to dump this in the ocean , and it 's coming out all from it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's unbelievable . it 's basically sulfuric acid , and it 's being just dumped out , at incredible rates .
and animals are thriving - and we probably came from here .
that 's probably where we evolved from .
bl : this bacteria that we 've been talking about turns out to be the most simplest form of life found .
there are a number of groups that are proposing that life evolved at these vent sites .
although the vent sites are short-lived - an individual site may last only 10 years or so - as an ecosystem they 've been stable for millions - well , billions - of years .
dg : it works too well . you see there 're some fish inside here as well .
there 's a fish sitting here .
here 's a crab with his claw right at the end of that tube worm , waiting for that worm to stick his head out .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- bl : the biologists right now can not explain why these animals are so active .
the worms are growing inches per week !
dg : i already said that this site , from a human perspective , is toxic as hell .
not only that , but on top - the lifeblood - that plumbing system turns off every year or so .
their plumbing system turns off , so the sites have to move .
and then there 's earthquakes , and then volcanic eruptions , on the order of one every five years , that completely wipes the area out .
despite that , these animals grow back in about a year 's time .
you 're talking about biodensities and biodiversity , again , higher than the rainforest that just springs back to life .
is it sensitive ? yes .
is it fragile ? no , it 's not really very fragile .
i 'll end up with saying one thing .
there 's a story in the sea , in the waters of the sea , in the sediments and the rocks of the sea floor .
it 's an incredible story .
what we see when we look back in time , in those sediments and rocks , is a record of earth history .
everything on this planet - everything - works by cycles and rhythms .
the continents move apart . they come back together .
oceans come and go . mountains come and go . glaciers come and go .
el nino comes and goes . it 's not a disaster , it 's rhythmic .
what we 're learning now , it 's almost like a symphony .
it 's just like music - it really is just like music .
and what we 're learning now is that you ca n't listen to a five-billion-year long symphony , get to today and say , " stop ! we want tomorrow 's note to be the same as it was today . "
it 's absurd . it 's just absurd .
so , what we 've got to learn now is to find out where this planet 's going at all these different scales and work with it .
learn to manage it .
the concept of preservation is futile .
conservation 's tougher , but we can probably get there .
thank you very much .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm here today to start a revolution .
now before you get up in arms , or you break into song , or you pick a favorite color , i want to define what i mean by revolution .
by revolution , i mean a drastic and far-reaching change in the way we think and behave - the way we think and the way we behave .
now why , steve , why do we need a revolution ?
we need a revolution because things are n't working ; they 're just not working .
and that makes me really sad because i 'm sick and tired of things not working .
you know , i 'm sick and tired of us not living up to our potential .
i 'm sick and tired of us being last .
and we are last place in so many things - for example , social factors .
we 're last place in europe in innovation .
there we are right at the end , right at the bottom , last place as a culture that does n't value innovation .
we 're last place in health care , and that 's important for a sense of well-being .
and there we are , not just last in the e.u. , we 're last in europe , at the very bottom .
and worst of all , it just came out three weeks ago , many of you have seen it , the economist .
we 're the saddest place on earth , relative to gdp per capita - the saddest place on earth .
that 's social . let 's look at education .
where do we rank three weeks ago in another report by the oecd ?
last in reading , math and science . last .
business : the lowest perception in the e.u.
that entrepreneurs provide benefits to society .
why as a result , what happens ?
the lowest percentage of entrepreneurs starting businesses .
and this is despite the fact that everybody knows that small business is the engine of economies .
we hire the most people ; we create the most taxes .
so if our engine 's broken , guess what ?
last in europe gdp per capita .
last .
so it 's no surprise , guys , that 62 percent of bulgarians are not optimistic about the future .
we 're unhappy , we have bad education , and we have the worst businesses .
and these are facts , guys .
this is n't story tale ; it 's not make-believe .
it 's not .
it 's not a conspiracy i have got against bulgaria . these are facts .
so i think it should be really , really clear that our system is broken .
the way we think , the way we behave , our operating system of behaving is broken .
we need a drastic change in the way we think and behave to transform bulgaria for the better , for ourselves , for our friends , for our family and for our future .
how did this happen ?
let 's be positive now . we 're going to get positive . how did this happen ?
i think we 're last because - and this is going to be drastic to some of you - because we are handicapping ourselves .
we 're holding ourselves back because we do n't value play .
i said " play , " all right .
in case some of you forgot what play is , this is what play looks like .
babies play , kids play , adults play .
we do n't value play .
in fact , we devalue play .
and we devalue it in three areas .
let 's go back to the same three areas .
social : 45 years of what ?
of communism - of valuing the society and the state over the individual and squashing , inadvertently , creativity , individual self-expression and innovation .
and instead , what do we value ?
because it 's shown the way we apply , generate and use knowledge is affected by our social and institutional context , which told us what in communism ?
to be serious .
to be really , really serious .
it did .
-lrb- applause -rrb- be serious .
i ca n't tell you how many times i 've been scolded in the park for letting my kids play on the ground .
heaven forbid they play in the dirt , the kal , or even worse , lokvi , water - that will kill them .
i have been told by babas and dyados that we should n't let our kids play so much because life is serious and we need to train them for the seriousness of life .
we have a serious meme running through .
it 's a social gene running through us .
it 's a serious gene .
it 's 45 years of it that 's created what i call the " baba factor . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- and here 's how it works .
step one : woman says , " i want to have a baby . iskam baby . "
step two : we get the baby . woohoo !
but then what happens in step three ?
i want to go back to work because i need to further my career or i just want to go have coffees .
i 'm going to give bebko to baba .
but we need to remember that baba 's been infected by the serious meme for 45 years .
so what happens ?
she passes that virus on to baby , and it takes a really , really , really long time - as the redwood trees - for that serious meme to get out of our operating system .
what happens then ?
it goes into education where we have an antiquated education system that has little changed for 100 years , that values rote learning , memorization and standardization , and devalues self-expression , self-exploration , questioning , creativity and play .
it 's a crap system .
true story : i went looking for a school for my kid .
we went to this prestigious little school and they say they 're going to study math 10 times a week and science eight times a week and reading five times a day and all this stuff .
and we said , " well what about play and recess ? "
and they said , " ha . there wo n't be a single moment in the schedule . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and we said , " he 's five . "
what a crime . what a crime .
and it 's a crime that our education system is so serious because education is serious that we 're creating mindless , robotic workers to put bolts in pre-drilled holes .
but i 'm sorry , the problems of today are not the problems of the industrial revolution .
we need adaptability , the ability to learn how to be creative and innovative .
we do n't need mechanized workers .
but no , now our meme goes into work where we do n't value play .
we create robotic workers that we treat like assets , to lever and just throw away .
what are qualities of a bulgarian work ?
autocratic - do what i say because i 'm the chef .
i 'm the boss and i know better than you .
untrusting - you 're obviously a criminal , so i 'm going to install cameras .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- controlling - you 're obviously an idiot , so i 'm going to make a zillion little processes for you to follow so you do n't step out of the box .
so they 're restrictive - do n't use your mobile phone , do n't use your laptop , do n't search the internet , do n't be on i.m.
that 's somehow unprofessional and bad .
and at the end of the day , it 's unfulfilling because you 're controlled , you 're restricted , you 're not valued and you 're not having any fun .
in social , in education and in our business , do n't value play .
and that 's why we 're last , because we do n't value play .
and you can say , " that 's ridiculous , steve . what a dumb idea .
it ca n't be because of play .
just play , that 's a stupid thing . "
we have the serious meme in us .
well i 'm going to say no .
and i will prove it to you in the next part of the speech - that play is the catalyst , it is the revolution , that we can use to transform bulgaria for the better .
play : our brains are hardwired for play .
evolution has selected , over millions and billions of years , for play in animals and in humans .
and you know what ?
evolution does a really , really good job of deselecting traits that are n't advantageous to us and selecting traits for competitive advantage .
nature is n't stupid , and it selected for play .
throughout the animal kingdom , for example : ants . ants play .
maybe you did n't know that .
but when they 're playing , they 're learning the social order and dynamics of things .
rats play , but what you might not have known is that rats that play more have bigger brains and they learn tasks better , skills .
kittens play . we all know kittens play .
but what you may not know is that kittens deprived of play are unable to interact socially .
they can still hunt , but they ca n't be social .
bears play .
but what you may not know is that bears that play more survive longer .
it 's not the bears that learn how to fish better .
it 's the ones that play more .
and a final really interesting study - it 's been shown , a correlation between play and brain size .
the more you play , the bigger the brains there are .
dolphins , pretty big brains , play a lot .
but who do you think with the biggest brains are the biggest players ?
yours truly : humans .
kids play , we play - of every nationality , of every race , of every color , of every religion .
it 's a universal thing - we play .
and it 's not just kids , it 's adults too .
really cool term : neoteny - the retention of play and juvenile traits in adults .
and who are the biggest neotenists ?
humans . we play sports .
we do it for fun , or as olympians , or as professionals .
we play musical instruments .
we dance , we kiss , we sing , we just goof around .
we 're designed by nature to play from birth to old age .
we 're designed to do that continuously - to play and play a lot and not stop playing .
it is a huge benefit .
just like there 's benefits to animals , there 's benefits to humans .
for example , it 's been shown to stimulate neural growth in the amygdala , in the area where it controls emotions .
it 's been shown to promote pre-frontal cortex development where a lot of cognition is happening .
as a result , what happens ?
we develop more emotional maturity if we play more .
we develop better decision-making ability if we play more .
these guys are facts .
it 's not fiction , it 's not story tales , it 's not make-believe ; it 's cold , hard science .
these are the benefits to play .
it is a genetic birthright that we have , like walking or speaking or seeing .
and if we handicap ourselves with play , we handicap ourselves as if we would with any other birthright that we have .
we hold ourselves back .
little exercise just for a second : close your eyes and try to imagine a world without play .
imagine a world without theater , without the arts , without song , without dancing , without soccer , without football , without laughter .
what does this world look like ?
it 's pretty bleak .
it 's pretty glum .
now imagine your workplace .
is it fun ? is it playful ?
or maybe the workplace of your friends - here we 're forward thinking .
is it fun ? is it playful ?
or is it crap ? is it autocratic , controlling , restrictive and untrusting and unfulfilling ?
we have this concept that the opposite of play is work .
we even feel guilty if we 're seen playing at work .
" oh , my colleagues see me laughing . i must not have enough work , " or , " oh , i 've got to hide because my boss might see me .
he 's going to think i 'm not working hard . "
but i have news for you : our thinking is backwards .
the opposite of play is not work .
the opposite of play is depression . it 's depression .
in fact , play improves our work .
just like there 's benefits for humans and animals , there 's benefits for play at work .
for example , it stimulates creativity .
it increases our openness to change .
it improves our ability to learn .
it provides a sense of purpose and mastery - two key motivational things that increase productivity , through play .
so before you start thinking of play as just not serious , play does n't mean frivolous .
you know , the professional athlete that loves skiing , he 's serious about it , but he loves it .
he 's having fun , he 's in the groove , he 's in the flow .
a doctor might be serious , but laughter 's still a great medicine .
our thinking is backwards .
we should n't be feeling guilty .
we should be celebrating play .
quick example from the corporate world .
fedex , easy motto : people , service , profit .
if you treat your people like people , if you treat them great , they 're happier , they 're fulfilled , they have a sense of mastery and purpose .
what happens ? they give better service - not worse , but better .
and when customers call for service and they 're dealing with happy people that can make decisions and are fulfilled , how do the customers feel ? they feel great .
and what do great customers do , great-feeling customers ?
they buy more of your service and they tell more of their friends , which leads to more profit .
people , service , profit .
play increases productivity , not decreases .
and you 're going to say , " gee , that can work for fedex out there in the united states , but it ca n't work in bulgaria .
no way . we 're different . "
it does work in bulgaria , you guys . two reasons .
one , play is universal .
there 's nothing weird about bulgarians that we ca n't play , besides the serious meme that we have to kick out .
two , i 've tried it . i 've tried at sciant .
when i got there , we had zero happy customers .
not one customer would refer us .
i asked them all .
we had marginal profit - i did .
we had marginal profits , and we had unhappy stakeholders .
through some basic change , change like improving transparency , change like promoting self-direction and collaboration , encouraging collaboration , not autocracy , the things like having a results-focus .
i do n't care when you get in in the morning . i do n't care when you leave .
i care that your customer and your team is happy and you 're organized with that .
why do i care if you get in at nine o 'clock ?
basically promoting fun .
through promoting fun and a great environment , we were able to transform sciant and , in just three short years - sounds like a long time , but change is slow - every customer , from zero to every customer referring us , above average profits for the industry and happy stakeholders .
and you can say , " well how do you know they 're happy ? "
well we did win , every year that we entered , one of the rankings for best employer for small business .
independent analysis from anonymous employees on their surveys .
it does , and it can , work in bulgaria .
there 's nothing holding us back , except our own mentality about play .
so some steps that we can take - to finish up - how to make this revolution through play .
first of all , you have to believe me .
if you do n't believe me , well just go home and think about it some more or something .
second of all , if you do n't have the feeling of play in you , you need to rediscover play .
whatever it was that as a kid you used to enjoy , that you enjoyed only six months ago , but now that you 've got that promotion you ca n't enjoy , because you feel like you have to be serious , rediscover it .
i do n't care if it 's mountain biking or reading a book or playing a game .
rediscover that because you 're the leaders , the innovation leaders , the thought leaders .
you 're the ones that have to go back to the office or talk to your friends and ignite the fire of change in the play revolution .
you guys have to , and if you 're not feeling it , your colleagues , your employees , are n't going to feel it .
you 've got to go back and say , " hey , i 'm going to trust you . "
weird concept : i hired you ; i should trust you .
i 'm going to let you make decisions . i 'm going to empower you , and i 'm going to delegate to the lowest level , rather than the top .
i 'm going to encourage constructive criticism .
i 'm going to let you challenge authority .
because it 's by challenging the way things are always done is that we are able to break out of the rut that we 're in and create innovative solutions to problems of today .
we 're not always right as leaders .
we 're going to eradicate fear .
fear is the enemy of play .
and we 're going to do things like eliminate restrictions .
you know what , let them use their mobile phone for personal calls - heaven forbid .
let them be on the internet .
let them be on instant messengers .
let them take long lunches .
lunch is like the recess for work .
it 's when you go out in the world and you recharge your brain , you meet your friends , you have a beer , you have some food , you talk , you get some synergy of ideas that maybe you would n't have had before .
let them do it . give them some freedom , and in general , let them play . let them have fun at the workplace .
we spend so much of our lives at the workplace , and it 's supposed to be , what , a miserable grind , so that 20 years from now , we wake up and say , " is this it ?
is that all there was ? "
unacceptable . nepriemliv .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so in summary , we need a drastic change in the way we think and behave , but we do n't need a workers ' revolution .
we do n't need a workers ' revolution .
what we need is a players ' uprising .
what we need is a players ' uprising .
what we need is a players ' uprising .
seriously , we need to band together .
today is the start of the uprising .
but what you need to do is fan the flames of the revolution .
you need to go and share your ideas and your success stories of what worked about reinvigorating our lives , our schools , and our work with play ; about how play promotes a sense of promise and self-fulfillment ; of how play promotes innovation and productivity , and , ultimately , how play creates meaning .
because we ca n't do it alone . we have to do it together , and together , if we do this and share these ideas on play , we can transform bulgaria for the better .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- radical openness is still a distant future in the field of school education .
we have such a hard time figuring out that learning is not a place but an activity .
but i want to tell you the story of pisa , oecd 's test to measure the knowledge and skills of 15-year-olds around the world , and it 's really a story of how international comparisons have globalized the field of education that we usually treat look at how the world looked in the 1960s , in terms of the proportion of people who had completed high school .
you can see the united states ahead of everyone else , and much of the economic success of the united states draws on its long-standing advantage as the first mover in education .
but in the 1970s , some countries caught up .
in the 1980s , the global expansion of the talent pool continued .
and the world did n't stop in the 1990s .
so in the ' 60s , the u.s. was first .
in the ' 90s , it was 13th , and not because standards had fallen , but because they had risen so much faster elsewhere .
korea shows you what 's possible in education .
two generations ago , korea had the standard of living of afghanistan today , and was one of the lowest education performers .
today , every young korean finishes high school .
so this tells us that , in a global economy , it is no longer national improvement that 's the benchmark for success , but the best performing education systems internationally .
the trouble is that measuring how much time people spend in school or what degree they have got is not always a good way of seeing what they can actually do .
look at the toxic mix of unemployed graduates on our streets , while employers say they can not find the people with the skills they need .
and that tells you that better degrees do n't automatically translate into better skills and better jobs and better lives .
so with pisa , we try to change this by measuring the knowledge and skills of people directly .
and we took a very special angle to this .
we were less interested in whether students can simply reproduce what they have learned in school , but we wanted to test whether they can extrapolate from what they know and apply their knowledge in novel situations .
now , some people have criticized us for this .
they say , you know , such a way of measuring outcomes is terribly unfair to people , because we test students with problems they have n't seen before .
but if you take that logic , you know , you should consider life unfair , because the test of truth in life is not whether we can remember what we learned in school , but whether we are prepared for change , whether we are prepared for jobs that have n't been created , to use technologies that have n't been invented , to solve problems we just ca n't anticipate today .
and once hotly contested , our way of measuring outcomes has actually quickly become the standard .
in our latest assessment in 2009 , we measured 74 school systems that together cover 87 percent of the economy .
this chart shows you the performance of countries .
in red , sort of below oecd average .
yellow is so-so , and in green are the countries doing really well .
you can see shanghai , korea , singapore in asia ; finland in europe ; canada in north america doing really well .
three and a half school years between 15-year-olds in shanghai and 15-year-olds in chile , and the gap grows to seven school years when you include the countries with really poor performance .
there 's a world of difference in the way in which young people are prepared for today 's economy .
but i want to introduce a second important dimension into this picture .
educators like to talk about equity .
with pisa , we wanted to measure how they actually deliver equity , in terms of ensuring that people from different social backgrounds have equal chances .
and we see that in some countries , the impact of social background on learning outcomes is very , very strong .
opportunities are unequally distributed .
a lot of potential of young children is wasted .
we see in other countries that it matters much less into which social context you 're born .
we all want to be there , in the upper right quadrant , where performance is strong and learning opportunities are equally distributed .
nobody , and no country , can afford to be there , where performance is poor and there are large social disparities .
and then we can debate , you know , is it better to be there , where performance is strong at the price of large disparities ?
or do we want to focus on equity and accept mediocrity ?
but actually , if you look at how countries come out on this picture , you see there are a lot of countries that actually are combining excellence with equity .
in fact , one of the most important lessons from this comparison is that you do n't have to compromise equity to achieve excellence .
these countries have moved on from providing excellence for just some to providing excellence for all , a very important lesson .
and that also challenges the paradigms of many school systems that believe they are mainly there to sort people .
and ever since those results came out , policymakers , educators , researchers from around the world what 's behind the success of those systems .
but let 's step back for a moment and focus on the countries that actually started pisa , and i 'm giving them a colored bubble now .
and i 'm making the size of the bubble proportional to the amount of money that countries spent on students .
if money would tell you everything about the quality of learning outcomes , you would find all the large bubbles at the top , no ?
but that 's not what you see .
spending per student only explains about , well , less than 20 percent of the performance variation among countries , and luxembourg , for example , the most expensive system , does n't do particularly well .
what you see is that two countries with similar spending achieve very different results .
you also see - and i think that 's one of the most encouraging findings - that we no longer live in a world that is neatly divided between rich and well-educated countries , and poor and badly-educated ones , a very , very important lesson .
let 's look at this in greater detail .
the red dot shows you spending per student relative to a country 's wealth .
one way you can spend money is by paying teachers well , and you can see korea investing a lot in attracting the best people into the teaching profession .
and korea also invests into long school days , which drives up costs further .
last but not least , koreans want their teachers not only to teach but also to develop .
they invest in professional development and collaboration and many other things .
all that costs money .
how can korea afford all of this ?
the answer is , students in korea learn in large classes .
this is the blue bar which is driving costs down .
you go to the next country on the list , luxembourg , and you can see the red dot is exactly where it is for korea , so luxembourg spends the same per student as korea does .
but , you know , parents and teachers and policymakers in luxembourg all like small classes .
you know , it 's very pleasant to walk into a small class .
so they have invested all their money into there , and the blue bar , class size , is driving costs up .
but even luxembourg can spend its money only once , and the price for this is that teachers are not paid particularly well .
students do n't have long hours of learning .
and basically , teachers have little time to do anything else than teaching .
so you can see two countries spent their money very differently , and actually how they spent their money matters a lot more than how much they invest in education .
let 's go back to the year 2000 .
remember , that was the year before the ipod was invented .
this is how the world looked then in terms of pisa performance .
the first thing you can see is that the bubbles were a lot smaller , no ?
we spent a lot less on education , about 35 percent less on education .
so you ask yourself , if education has become so much more expensive , has it become so much better ?
and the bitter truth really is that , you know , not in many countries .
but there are some countries which have seen impressive improvements .
germany , my own country , in the year 2000 , featured in the lower quadrant , below average performance , large social disparities .
and remember , germany , we used to be one of those countries that comes out very well when you just count people who have degrees .
very disappointing results .
people were stunned by the results .
and for the very first time , the public debate in germany was dominated for months by education , not tax , not other kinds of issues , but education was the center of the public debate .
and then policymakers began to respond to this .
the federal government dramatically raised its investment in education .
a lot was done to increase the life chances of students with an immigrant background or from social disadvantage .
and what 's really interesting is that this was n't just about optimizing existing policies , but data transformed some of the beliefs and paradigms underlying german education .
for example , traditionally , the education of the very young children where women were seen as neglecting their family responsibilities when they sent their children to kindergarten .
pisa has transformed that debate , and pushed early childhood education right at the center of public policy in germany .
or traditionally , the german education divides children at the age of 10 , very young children , between those deemed to pursue careers of knowledge workers and those who would end up working for the knowledge workers , and that mainly along socioeconomic lines , and that paradigm is being challenged now too .
a lot of change .
and the good news is , nine years later , you can see improvements in quality and equity .
people have taken up the challenge , done something about it .
or take korea , at the other end of the spectrum .
in the year 2000 , korea did already very well , but the koreans were concerned that only a small share of their students achieved the really high levels of excellence .
they took up the challenge , and korea was able to double the proportion of students achieving excellence in one decade in the field of reading .
well , if you only focus on your brightest students , you know what happens is disparities grow , and you can see this bubble moving slightly to the other direction , but still , an impressive improvement .
a major overhaul of poland 's education helped to dramatically reduce between variability among schools , turn around many of the lowest-performing schools , and raise performance by over half a school year .
and you can see other countries as well .
portugal was able to consolidate its fragmented school system , raise quality and improve equity , and so did hungary .
so what you can actually see , there 's been a lot of change .
and even those people who complain and say that the relative standing of countries on something like pisa is just an artifact of culture , of economic factors , of social issues , of homogeneity of societies , and so on , these people must now concede that education improvement is possible .
you know , poland has n't changed its culture .
it did n't change its economy . it did n't change the compositions of its population .
it did n't fire its teachers . it changed its education policies and practice . very impressive .
and all that raises , of course , the question : what can we learn from those countries in the green quadrant who have achieved high levels of equity , high levels of performance , and raised outcomes ?
and , of course , the question is , can what works in one context provide a model elsewhere ?
of course , you ca n't copy and paste education systems wholesale , but these comparisons have identified a range of factors that high-performing systems share .
everybody agrees that education is important .
everybody says that .
but the test of truth is , how do you weigh that priority against other priorities ?
how do countries pay their teachers relative to other highly skilled workers ?
would you want your child to become a teacher rather than a lawyer ?
how do the media talk about schools and teachers ?
those are the critical questions , and what we have learned from pisa is that , in high-performing education systems , the leaders have convinced their citizens to make choices that value education , their future , more than consumption today .
and you know what 's interesting ? you wo n't believe it , but there are countries in which the most attractive place to be is not the shopping center but the school .
those things really exist .
but placing a high value on education is just part of the picture .
the other part is the belief that all children are capable of success .
you have some countries where students are segregated early in their ages .
you know , students are divided up , reflecting the belief that only some children can achieve world-class standards .
but usually that is linked to very strong social disparities .
if you go to japan in asia , or finland in europe , parents and teachers in those countries expect every student to succeed , and you can see that actually mirrored in student behavior .
when we asked students what counts for success in mathematics , students in north america would typically tell us , you know , it 's all about talent .
if i 'm not born as a genius in math , i 'd better study something else .
nine out of 10 japanese students say that it depends on my own investment , on my own effort , and that tells you a lot about the system that is around them .
in the past , different students were taught in similar ways .
high performers on pisa embrace diversity with differentiated pedagogical practices .
they realize that ordinary students have extraordinary talents , and they personalize learning opportunities .
high-performing systems also share clear and ambitious standards across the entire spectrum .
every student knows what matters .
every student knows what 's required to be successful .
and nowhere does the quality of an education system exceed the quality of its teachers .
high-performing systems are very careful in how they recruit and select their teachers and how they train them .
they watch how they improve the performances of teachers in difficulties who are struggling , and how they structure teacher pay .
they provide an environment also in which teachers work together to frame good practice .
and they provide intelligent pathways for teachers to grow in their careers .
in bureaucratic school systems , teachers are often left alone in classrooms with a lot of prescription on what they should be teaching .
high-performing systems are very clear what good performance is .
they set very ambitious standards , but then they enable their teachers to figure out , what do i need to teach to my students today ?
the past was about delivered wisdom in education .
now the challenge is to enable user-generated wisdom .
high performers have moved on from professional or from administrative forms of accountability and control - to professional forms of work organization .
they enable their teachers to make innovations in pedagogy .
they provide them with the kind of development they need to develop stronger pedagogical practices .
the goal of the past was standardization and compliance .
high-performing systems have made teachers and school principals inventive .
in the past , the policy focus was on outcomes , on provision .
the high-performing systems have helped teachers and school principals to look outwards to the next teacher , the next school around their lives .
and the most impressive outcomes of world-class systems is that they achieve high performance across the entire system .
you 've seen finland doing so well on pisa , but what makes finland so impressive is that only five percent of the performance variation amongst students lies between schools .
every school succeeds .
this is where success is systemic .
and how do they do that ?
they invest resources where they can make the most difference .
they attract the strongest principals into the toughest schools , and the most talented teachers into the most challenging classroom .
last but not least , those countries align policies across all areas of public policy .
they make them coherent over sustained periods of time , and they ensure that what they do is consistently implemented .
now , knowing what successful systems are doing does n't yet tell us how to improve .
that 's also clear , and that 's where some of the limits of international comparisons of pisa are .
that 's where other forms of research need to kick in , and that 's also why pisa does n't venture into telling countries what they should be doing .
but its strength lies in telling them what everybody else has been doing .
and the example of pisa shows that data can be more powerful than administrative control of financial subsidy through which we usually run education systems .
you know , some people argue that changing educational administration is like moving graveyards .
you just ca n't rely on the people out there to help you with this . -lrb- laughter -rrb- but pisa has shown what 's possible in education .
it has helped countries to see that improvement is possible .
it has taken away excuses from those who are complacent .
and it has helped countries to set meaningful targets in terms of measurable goals achieved by the world 's leaders .
if we can help every child , every teacher , every school , every principal , every parent see what improvement is possible , that only the sky is the limit to education improvement , we have laid the foundations for better policies and better lives .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'd like to talk to you today about the scale of the scientific effort that goes into making the headlines you see in the paper .
headlines that look like this when they have to do with climate change , and headlines that look like this when they have to do with air quality or smog .
they are both two branches of the same field of atmospheric science .
recently the headlines looked like this when the intergovernmental panel on climate change , or ipcc , put out their report on the state of understanding of the atmospheric system .
that report was written by 620 scientists from 40 countries .
they wrote almost a thousand pages on the topic .
and all of those pages were reviewed by another 400-plus scientists and reviewers , from 113 countries .
it 's a big community . it 's such a big community , in fact , that our annual gathering is the largest scientific meeting in the world .
over 15,000 scientists go to san francisco every year for that .
and every one of those scientists is in a research group , and every research group studies a wide variety of topics .
for us at cambridge , it 's as varied as the el niño oscillation , which affects weather and climate , to the assimilation of satellite data , to emissions from crops that produce biofuels , which is what i happen to study .
and in each one of these research areas , of which there are even more , there are phd students , like me , and we study incredibly narrow topics , things as narrow as a few processes or a few molecules .
and one of the molecules i study is called isoprene , which is here . it 's a small organic molecule . you 've probably never heard of it .
the weight of a paper clip is approximately equal to 900 zeta-illion - 10 to the 21st - molecules of isoprene .
but despite its very small weight , enough of it is emitted into the atmosphere every year to equal the weight of all the people on the planet .
it 's a huge amount of stuff . it 's equal to the weight of methane .
and because it 's so much stuff , it 's really important for the atmospheric system .
because it 's important to the atmospheric system , we go to all lengths to study this thing .
we blow it up and look at the pieces .
this is the euphore smog chamber in spain .
atmospheric explosions , or full combustion , takes about 15,000 times longer than what happens in your car .
but still , we look at the pieces .
we run enormous models on supercomputers ; this is what i happen to do .
our models have hundreds of thousands of grid boxes calculating hundreds of variables each , on minute timescales .
and it takes weeks to perform our integrations .
and we perform dozens of integrations in order to understand what 's happening .
we also fly all over the world looking for this thing .
i recently joined a field campaign in malaysia . there are others .
we found a global atmospheric watchtower there , in the middle of the rainforest , and hung hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of scientific equipment off this tower , to look for isoprene , and of course , other things while we were there .
this is the tower in the middle of the rainforest , from above .
and this is the tower from below .
and on part of that field campaign we even brought an aircraft with us .
and this plane , the model , ba146 , which was run by faam , normally flies 120 to 130 people .
so maybe you took a similar aircraft to get here today .
but we did n't just fly it . we were flying at 100 meters above the top of the canopy to measure this molecule - incredibly dangerous stuff .
we have to fly at a special incline in order to make the measurements .
we hire military and test pilots to do the maneuvering .
we have to get special flight clearance .
and as you come around the banks in these valleys , the forces can get up to two gs .
and the scientists have to be completely harnessed in in order to make measurements while they 're on board .
so , as you can imagine , the inside of this aircraft does n't look like any plane you would take on vacation .
it 's a flying laboratory that we took to make measurements in the region of this molecule .
we do all of this to understand the chemistry of one molecule .
and when one student like me has some sort of inclination or understanding about that molecule , they write one scientific paper on the subject .
and out of that field campaign we 'll probably get a few dozen papers on a few dozen processes or molecules .
and as a body of knowledge builds up , it will form one subsection , or one sub-subsection of an assessment like the ipcc , although we have others .
and each one of the 11 chapters of the ipcc has six to ten subsections .
so you can imagine the scale of the effort .
in each one of those assessments that we write , we always tag on a summary , and the summary is written for a non-scientific audience .
and we hand that summary to journalists and policy makers , in order to make headlines like these .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- today i have just one request .
please do n't tell me i 'm normal .
now i 'd like to introduce you to my brothers .
remi is 22 , tall and very handsome .
he 's speechless , but he communicates joy in a way that some of the best orators can not .
remi knows what love is .
he shares it unconditionally and he shares it regardless .
he 's not greedy . he does n't see skin color .
he does n't care about religious differences , and get this : he has never told a lie .
when he sings songs from our childhood , attempting words that not even i could remember , he reminds me of one thing : how little we know about the mind , and how wonderful the unknown must be .
samuel is 16 . he 's tall . he 's very handsome .
he has the most impeccable memory .
he has a selective one , though .
he does n't remember if he stole my chocolate bar , but he remembers the year of release for every song on my ipod , conversations we had when he was four , weeing on my arm on the first ever episode of teletubbies , and lady gaga 's birthday .
do n't they sound incredible ?
but most people do n't agree .
and in fact , because their minds do n't fit into society 's version of normal , they 're often bypassed and misunderstood .
but what lifted my heart and strengthened my soul was that even though this was the case , although they were not seen as ordinary , this could only mean one thing : that they were extraordinary - autistic and extraordinary .
now , for you who may be less familiar with the term " autism , " it 's a complex brain disorder that affects social communication , learning and sometimes physical skills .
it manifests in each individual differently , hence why remi is so different from sam .
and across the world , every 20 minutes , one new person is diagnosed with autism , and although it 's one of the fastest-growing developmental disorders in the world , there is no known cause or cure .
and i can not remember the first moment i encountered autism , but i can not recall a day without it .
i was just three years old when my brother came along , and i was so excited that i had a new being in my life .
and after a few months went by , i realized that he was different .
he screamed a lot .
he did n't want to play like the other babies did , and in fact , he did n't seem very interested in me whatsoever .
remi lived and reigned in his own world , with his own rules , and he found pleasure in the smallest things , like lining up cars around the room and staring at the washing machine and eating anything that came in between .
and as he grew older , he grew more different , and the differences became more obvious .
yet beyond the tantrums and the frustration and the never-ending hyperactivity was something really unique : a pure and innocent nature , a boy who saw the world without prejudice , a human who had never lied .
extraordinary .
now , i can not deny that there have been some challenging moments in my family , moments where i 've wished that they were just like me .
but i cast my mind back to the things that they 've taught me about individuality and communication and love , and i realize that these are things that i would n't want to change with normality .
normality overlooks the beauty that differences give us , and the fact that we are different does n't mean that one of us is wrong .
it just means that there 's a different kind of right .
and if i could communicate just one thing to remi and to sam and to you , it would be that you do n't have to be normal .
you can be extraordinary .
because autistic or not , the differences that we have - we 've got a gift ! everyone 's got a gift inside of us , and in all honesty , the pursuit of normality is the ultimate sacrifice of potential .
the chance for greatness , for progress and for change dies the moment we try to be like someone else .
please - do n't tell me i 'm normal .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- evidence suggests that humans in all ages and from all cultures create their identity in some kind of narrative form .
from mother to daughter , preacher to congregant , teacher to pupil , storyteller to audience .
whether in cave paintings or the latest uses of the internet , human beings have always told their histories and truths through parable and fable .
we are inveterate storytellers .
but where , in our increasingly secular and fragmented world , do we offer communality of experience , unmediated by our own furious consumerism ?
and what narrative , what history , what identity , what moral code are we imparting to our young ?
cinema is arguably the 20th century 's most influential art form .
its artists told stories across national boundaries , in as many languages , genres and philosophies as one can imagine .
indeed , it is hard to find a subject that film has yet to tackle .
during the last decade we 've seen a vast integration of global media , now dominated by a culture of the hollywood blockbuster .
we are increasingly offered a diet in which sensation , not story , is king .
what was common to us all 40 years ago - the telling of stories between generations - is now rarified .
as a filmmaker , it worried me .
as a human being , it puts the fear of god in me .
what future could the young build with so little grasp of where they 've come from and so few narratives of what 's possible ?
the irony is palpable ; technical access has never been greater , cultural access never weaker .
and so in 2006 we set up filmclub , an organization that ran weekly film screenings in schools followed by discussions .
if we could raid the annals of 100 years of film , maybe we could build a narrative that would deliver meaning to the fragmented and restless world of the young .
given the access to technology , even a school in a tiny rural hamlet could project a dvd onto a white board .
in the first nine months we ran 25 clubs across the u.k. , with kids in age groups between five and 18 watching a film uninterrupted for 90 minutes .
the films were curated and contextualized .
but the choice was theirs , and our audience quickly grew to choose the richest and most varied diet that we could provide .
the outcome , immediate .
it was an education of the most profound and transformative kind .
in groups as large as 150 and as small as three , these young people discovered new places , new thoughts , new perspectives .
by the time the pilot had finished , we had the names of a thousand schools that wished to join .
the film that changed my life is a 1951 film by vittorio de sica , " miracle in milan . "
it 's a remarkable comment on slums , poverty and aspiration .
i had seen the film on the occasion of my father 's 50th birthday .
technology then meant we had to hire a viewing cinema , find and pay for the print and the projectionist .
but for my father , the emotional and artistic importance of de sica 's vision was so great that he chose to celebrate his half-century with his three teenage children and 30 of their friends , " in order , " he said , " to pass the baton of concern and hope on to the next generation . "
in the last shot of " miracle in milan , " slum-dwellers float skyward on flying brooms .
sixty years after the film was made and 30 years after i first saw it , i see young faces tilt up in awe , their incredulity matching mine .
and the speed with which they associate it with " slumdog millionaire " or the favelas in rio speaks to the enduring nature .
in a filmclub season about democracy and government , we screened " mr. smith goes to washington . "
made in 1939 , the film is older than most of our members ' grandparents .
frank capra 's classic values independence and propriety .
it shows how to do right , how to be heroically awkward .
it is also an expression of faith in the political machine as a force of honor .
shortly after " mr. smith " became a filmclub classic , there was a week of all-night filibustering in the house of lords .
and it was with great delight that we found young people up and down the country explaining with authority what filibustering was and why the lords might defy their bedtime on a point of principle .
after all , jimmy stewart filibustered for two entire reels .
in choosing " hotel rwanda , " they explored genocide of the most brutal kind .
it provoked tears as well as incisive questions about unarmed peace-keeping forces and the double-dealing of a western society that picks its moral fights with commodities in mind .
and when " schindler 's list " demanded that they never forget , one child , full of the pain of consciousness , remarked , " we already forgot , otherwise how did ' hotel rwanda ' happen ? "
as they watch more films their lives got palpably richer .
" pickpocket " started a debate about criminality disenfranchisement .
" to sir , with love " ignited its teen audience .
they celebrated a change in attitude towards non-white britons , but railed against our restless school system that does not value collective identity , unlike that offered by sidney poitier 's careful tutelage .
by now , these thoughtful , opinionated , curious young people thought nothing of tackling films of all forms - black and white , subtitled , documentary , non-narrative , fantasy - and thought nothing of writing detailed reviews that competed to favor one film over another in passionate and increasingly sophisticated prose .
six thousand reviews each school week vying for the honor of being review of the week .
from 25 clubs , we became hundreds , then thousands , until we were nearly a quarter of a million kids in 7,000 clubs right across the country .
and although the numbers were , and continue to be , extraordinary , what became more extraordinary was how the experience of critical and curious questioning translated into life .
some of our kids started talking with their parents , others with their teachers , or with their friends .
and those without friends started making them .
the films provided communality across all manner of divide .
and the stories they held provided a shared experience .
" persepolis " brought a daughter closer to her iranian mother , and " jaws " became the way in which one young boy was able to articulate the fear he 'd experienced in flight from violence that killed first his father then his mother , the latter thrown overboard on a boat journey .
who was right , who wrong ?
what would they do under the same conditions ?
was the tale told well ?
was there a hidden message ?
how has the world changed ? how could it be different ?
a tsunami of questions flew out of the mouths of children who the world did n't think were interested .
and they themselves had not known they cared .
and as they wrote and debated , rather than seeing the films as artifacts , they began to see themselves .
i have an aunt who is a wonderful storyteller .
in a moment she can invoke images of running barefoot on table mountain and playing cops and robbers .
quite recently she told me that in 1948 , two of her sisters and my father traveled on a boat to israel without my grandparents .
when the sailors mutinied at sea in a demand for humane conditions , it was these teenagers that fed the crew .
i was past 40 when my father died .
he never mentioned that journey .
my mother 's mother left europe in a hurry without her husband , but with her three-year-old daughter and diamonds sewn into the hem of her skirt .
after two years in hiding , my grandfather appeared in london .
he was never right again .
and his story was hushed as he assimilated .
my story started in england with a clean slate and the silence of immigrant parents .
i had " anne frank , " " the great escape , " " shoah , " " triumph of the will . "
it was leni riefenstahl in her elegant nazi propaganda who gave context to what the family had to endure .
these films held what was too hurtful to say out loud , and they became more useful to me than the whispers of survivors and the occasional glimpse of a tattoo on a maiden aunt 's wrist .
purists may feel that fiction dissipates the quest of real human understanding , that film is too crude to tell a complex and detailed history , or that filmmakers always serve drama over truth .
but within the reels lie purpose and meaning .
as one 12-year-old said after watching " wizard of oz , " " every person should watch this , because unless you do you may not know that you too have a heart . "
we honor reading , why not honor watching with the same passion ?
consider " citizen kane " as valuable as jane austen .
agree that " boyz n the hood , " like tennyson , offers an emotional landscape and a heightened understanding that work together .
each a piece of memorable art , each a brick in the wall of who we are .
and it 's okay if we remember tom hanks better than astronaut jim lovell or have ben kingsley 's face superimposed onto that of gandhi 's .
and though not real , eve harrington , howard beale , mildred pierce are an opportunity to discover what it is to be human , and no less helpful to understanding our life and times as shakespeare is in illuminating the world of elizabethan england .
we guessed that film , whose stories are a meeting place of drama , music , literature and human experience , would engage and inspire the young people participating in filmclub .
what we could not have foreseen was the measurable improvements in behavior , confidence and academic achievement .
once-reluctant students now race to school , talk to their teachers , fight , not on the playground , but to choose next week 's film - young people who have found self-definition , ambition and an appetite for education and social engagement from the stories they have witnessed .
our members defy the binary description of how we so often describe our young .
they are neither feral nor myopically self-absorbed .
they are , like other young people , negotiating a world with infinite choice , but little culture of how to find meaningful experience .
we appeared surprised at the behaviors of those who define themselves by the size of the tick on their shoes , yet acquisition has been the narrative we have offered .
if we want different values we have to tell a different story , a story that understands that an individual narrative is an essential component of a person 's identity , that a collective narrative is an essential component of a cultural identity , and without it it is impossible to imagine yourself as part of a group .
because when these people get home after a screening of " rear window " and raise their gaze to the building next door , they have the tools to wonder who , apart from them , is out there and what is their story .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- it 's a great time to be a molecular biologist . -lrb- laughter -rrb- reading and writing dna code is getting easier and cheaper .
by the end of this year , we 'll be able to sequence the three million bits of information in your genome in less than a day and for less than 1,000 euros .
biotech is probably the most powerful and the fastest-growing technology sector .
it has the power , potentially , to replace our fossil fuels , to revolutionize medicine , and to touch every aspect of our daily lives .
so who gets to do it ?
i think we 'd all be pretty comfortable with this guy doing it .
but what about that guy ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- in 2009 , i first heard about diybio .
it 's a movement that - it advocates making biotechnology accessible to everyone , not just scientists and people in government labs .
the idea is that if you open up the science and you allow diverse groups to participate , it could really stimulate innovation .
putting technology in the hands of the end user is usually a good idea because they 've got the best idea of what their needs are .
and here 's this really sophisticated technology coming down the road , all these associated social , moral , ethical questions , and we scientists are just lousy at explaining to the public just exactly what it is we 're doing in those labs .
so would n't it be nice if there was a place in your local neighborhood where you could go and learn about this stuff , do it hands-on ?
i thought so .
so , three years ago , i got together with some friends of mine who had similar aspirations it 's a nonprofit , a community biotech lab in brooklyn , new york , and the idea was people could come , they could take classes and putter around in the lab in a very open , friendly atmosphere .
none of my previous experience prepared me for what came next . can you guess ?
the press started calling us .
and the more we talked about how great it was to increase science literacy , the more they wanted to talk about us creating the next frankenstein , and as a result , for the next six months , when you googled my name , instead of getting my scientific papers , you got this .
-lsb- " am i a biohazard ? " -rsb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- it was pretty depressing .
the only thing that got us through that period was that we knew that all over the world , there were other people that were trying to do the same thing that we were .
they were opening biohacker spaces , and some of them were facing much greater challenges than we did , more regulations , less resources .
but now , three years later , here 's where we stand .
it 's a vibrant , global community of hackerspaces , and this is just the beginning .
these are some of the biggest ones , and there are others opening every day .
there 's one probably going to open up in moscow , one in south korea , and the cool thing is they each have their own individual flavor that grew out of the community they came out of .
let me take you on a little tour .
biohackers work alone .
we work in groups , in big cities - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - and in small villages .
we reverse engineer lab equipment .
we genetically engineer bacteria .
we hack hardware , software , wetware , and , of course , the code of life .
we like to build things .
then we like to take things apart .
we make things grow .
we make things glow .
and we make cells dance .
the spirit of these labs , it 's open , it 's positive , but , you know , sometimes when people think of us , the first thing that comes to mind is bio-safety , bio-security , all the dark side stuff .
i 'm not going to minimize those concerns .
any powerful technology is inherently dual use , and , you know , you get something like synthetic biology , nanobiotechnology , it really compels you , you have to look at both the amateur groups but also the professional groups , because they have better infrastructure , they have better facilities , and they have access to pathogens .
so the united nations did just that , and they recently issued a report on this whole area , and what they concluded was the power of this technology for positive was much greater than the risk for negative , and they even looked specifically at the diybio community , and they noted , not surprisingly , that the press had a tendency to consistently overestimate our capabilities and underestimate our ethics .
as a matter of fact , diy people from all over the world , america , europe , got together last year , and we hammered out a common code of ethics .
that 's a lot more than conventional science has done .
now , we follow state and local regulations .
we dispose of our waste properly , we follow safety procedures , we do n't work with pathogens .
you know , if you 're working with a pathogen , you 're not part of the biohacker community , you 're part of the bioterrorist community , i 'm sorry .
and sometimes people ask me , " well , what about an accident ? "
well , working with the safe organisms that we normally work with , the chance of an accident happening with somebody accidentally creating , like , some sort of superbug , that 's literally about as probable as a snowstorm in the middle of the sahara desert .
now , it could happen , but i 'm not going to plan my life around it .
i 've actually chosen to take a different kind of risk .
i signed up for something called the personal genome project .
it 's a study at harvard where , at the end of the study , they 're going to take my entire genomic sequence , all of my medical information , and my identity , and they 're going to post it online for everyone to see .
there were a lot of risks involved that they talked about during the informed consent portion .
the one i liked the best is , someone could download my sequence , go back to the lab , synthesize some fake ellen dna , and plant it at a crime scene . -lrb- laughter -rrb- but like diybio , the positive outcomes and the potential for good for a study like that far outweighs the risk .
now , you might be asking yourself , " well , you know , what would i do in a biolab ? "
well , it was n't that long ago we were asking , " well , what would anyone do with a personal computer ? "
so this stuff is just beginning .
we 're only seeing just the tip of the dna iceberg .
let me show you what you could do right now .
a biohacker in germany , a journalist , wanted to know whose dog was leaving little presents on his street ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- yep , you guessed it . he threw tennis balls to all the neighborhood dogs , analyzed the saliva , identified the dog , and confronted the dog owner .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- i discovered an invasive species in my own backyard .
looked like a ladybug , right ?
it actually is a japanese beetle .
and the same kind of technology - it 's called dna barcoding , it 's really cool - you can use it to check if your caviar is really beluga , if that sushi is really tuna , or if that goat cheese that you paid so much for is really goat 's .
in a biohacker space , you can analyze your genome for mutations .
you can analyze your breakfast cereal for gmo 's , and you can explore your ancestry .
you can send weather balloons up into the stratosphere , collect microbes , see what 's up there .
you can make a biocensor out of yeast to detect pollutants in water .
you can make some sort of a biofuel cell .
you can do a lot of things .
you can also do an art science project . some of these are really spectacular , and they look at social , ecological problems from a completely different perspective .
it 's really cool .
some people ask me , well , why am i involved ?
i could have a perfectly good career in mainstream science .
the thing is , there 's something in these labs that they have to offer society that you ca n't find anywhere else .
there 's something sacred about a space where you can work on a project , and you do n't have to justify to anyone that it 's going to make a lot of money , that it 's going to save mankind , or even that it 's feasible .
it just has to follow safety guidelines .
if you had spaces like this all over the world , it could really change the perception of who 's allowed to do biotech .
it 's spaces like these that spawned personal computing .
why not personal biotech ?
if everyone in this room got involved , who knows what we could do ?
this is such a new area , and as we say back in brooklyn , you ai n't seen nothin ' yet . -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- whistling -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you very much .
that was whistling .
i 'm trying to do this in english .
what is a chubby , curly-haired guy from holland - why is he whistling ?
well actually , i 've -lsb- been -rsb- whistling since the age of four , about four .
my dad was always whistling around the house , and i just thought that 's part of communication in my family .
so i whistled along with him .
and actually , till i was 34 , i always annoyed and irritated people with whistling , because , to be honest , my whistling is a kind of deviant behavior .
i whistled alone . i whistled in the classroom .
i whistled on -lsb- my -rsb- bike . i whistled everywhere .
and i also whistled at a christmas eve party with my family-in-law .
and they had some , in my opinion , terrible christmas music .
and when i hear music that i do n't like , i try to make it better .
so " rudolph the red-nosed reindeer " - you know it ?
-lrb- whistling -rrb- but it can also sound like this .
-lrb- whistling -rrb- but during a christmas party - at dinner actually - it 's very annoying .
so my sister-in-law asked me a few times , " please stop whistling . "
and i just could n't .
and at one point - and i had some wine , i have to admit that - at one point i said , " if there was a contest , i would join . "
and two weeks later i received a text message : " you 're going to america . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , okay , i 'm going to america .
i would love to , but why ?
so i immediately called her up , of course .
she googled , and she found this world whistling championship in america , of course .
she did n't expect me to go there .
and i would have lost my face .
i do n't know if that 's correct english .
but the dutch people here will understand what i mean .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i lost my face .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and she thought , " he will never go there . "
but actually i did .
so i went to louisburg , north carolina , southeast united states , and i entered the world of whistling .
and i also entered the world championship , and i won there in 2004 .
-lrb- applause -rrb- that was great fun , of course .
and to defend my title - like judokas do and sportsmen - i thought , well let 's go back in 2005 , and i won again .
then i could n't participate for a few years .
and in 2008 i entered again in japan , tokyo , and i won again .
so what happened now is i 'm standing here in rotterdam , in the beautiful city , on a big stage , and i 'm talking about whistling .
and actually i earn my money whistling at the moment .
so i quit my day job as a nurse .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and i try to live my dream - well , actually , it was never my dream , but it sounds so good .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- okay , i 'm not the only one whistling here .
you say , " huh , what do you mean ? "
well actually , you are going to whistle along .
and then always the same thing happens : people are watching each other and think , " oh , my god .
why ? can i go away ? "
no , you ca n't .
actually it 's very simple .
the track that i will whistle is called " fête de la belle . "
it 's about 80 minutes long .
no , no , no . it 's four minutes long .
and i want to first rehearse with you your whistling .
so i whistle the tone .
-lrb- whistling -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- sorry . i forgot one thing .
you whistle the same tone as me .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i heard a wide variety of tones .
-lrb- whistling -rrb- this is very promising .
this is very promising .
i 'll ask the technicians to start the music .
and if it 's started , i just point where you whistle along , and we will see what happens .
oh , hah .
i 'm so sorry , technicians .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'm so used to that .
i start it myself .
okay , here it is .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- whistling -rrb- okay .
-lrb- whistling -rrb- it 's easy , is n't it ?
-lrb- whistling -rrb- now comes the solo . i propose i do that myself .
-lrb- whistling -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- max westerman : geert chatrou , the world champion -lsb- of -rsb- whistling .
geert chatrou : thank you . thank you .
i 'm here to show you how something you ca n't see can be so much fun to look at .
you 're about to experience a new , available and exciting technology that 's going to make us rethink how we waterproof our lives .
what i have here is a cinder block that we 've coated half with a nanotechnology spray that can be applied to almost any material .
it 's called ultra-ever dry , and when you apply it to any material , it turns into a superhydrophobic shield .
so this is a cinder block , uncoated , and you can see that it 's porous , it absorbs water .
not anymore .
porous , nonporous .
so what 's superhydrophobic ?
superhydrophobic is how we measure a drop of water on a surface .
the rounder it is , the more hydrophobic it is , and if it 's really round , it 's superhydrophobic .
a freshly waxed car , the water molecules slump to about 90 degrees .
a windshield coating is going to give you about 110 degrees .
but what you 're seeing here is 160 to 175 degrees , and anything over 150 is superhydrophobic .
so as part of the demonstration , what i have is a pair of gloves , and we 've coated one of the gloves with the nanotechnology coating , and let 's see if you can tell which one , and i 'll give you a hint .
did you guess the one that was dry ?
when you have nanotechnology and nanoscience , what 's occurred is that we 're able to now look at atoms and molecules and actually control them for great benefits .
and we 're talking really small here .
the way you measure nanotechnology is in nanometers , and one nanometer is a billionth of a meter , and to put some scale to that , if you had a nanoparticle that was one nanometer thick , and you put it side by side , and you had 50,000 of them , you 'd be the width of a human hair .
so very small , but very useful .
and it 's not just water that this works with .
it 's a lot of water-based materials like concrete , water-based paint , mud , and also some refined oils as well .
you can see the difference .
moving onto the next demonstration , we 've taken a pane of glass and we 've coated the outside of it , we 've framed it with the nanotechnology coating , and we 're going to pour this green-tinted water inside the middle , and you 're going to see , it 's going to spread out on glass like you 'd normally think it would , except when it hits the coating , it stops , and i ca n't even coax it to leave .
it 's that afraid of the water .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so what 's going on here ? what 's happening ?
well , the surface of the spray coating is actually filled with nanoparticles that form a very rough and craggly surface .
you 'd think it 'd be smooth , but it 's actually not .
and it has billions of interstitial spaces , and those spaces , along with the nanoparticles , reach up and grab the air molecules , and cover the surface with air .
it 's an umbrella of air all across it , and that layer of air is what the water hits , the mud hits , the concrete hits , and it glides right off .
so if i put this inside this water here , you can see a silver reflective coating around it , and that silver reflective coating is the layer of air that 's protecting the water from touching the paddle , and it 's dry .
so what are the applications ?
i mean , many of you right now are probably going through your head .
everyone that sees this gets excited , and says , " oh , i could use it for this and this and this . "
the applications in a general sense could be anything that 's anti-wetting .
we 've certainly seen that today .
it could be anything that 's anti-icing , because if you do n't have water , you do n't have ice .
it could be anti-corrosion .
no water , no corrosion .
it could be anti-bacterial .
without water , the bacteria wo n't survive .
and it could be things that need to be self-cleaning as well .
so imagine how something like this could help revolutionize your field of work .
and i 'm going to leave you with one last demonstration , but before i do that , i would like to say thank you , and think small .
-lrb- applause -rrb- it 's going to happen . wait for it . wait for it .
chris anderson : you guys did n't hear about us cutting out the design from ted ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lsb- two minutes later ... -rsb- he ran into all sorts of problems in terms of managing the medical research part .
it 's happening !
-lrb- applause -rrb- i want to talk to you today a little bit about predictable irrationality .
and my interest in irrational behavior started many years ago in the hospital .
i was burned very badly .
and if you spend a lot of time in hospital , you 'll see a lot of types of irrationalities .
and the one that particularly bothered me in the burn department was the process by which the nurses took the bandage off me .
now , you must have all taken a band-aid off at some point , and you must have wondered what 's the right approach .
do you rip it off quickly - short duration but high intensity - or do you take your band-aid off slowly - you take a long time , but each second is not as painful - which one of those is the right approach ?
the nurses in my department thought that the right approach was the ripping one , so they would grab hold and they would rip , and they would grab hold and they would rip .
and because i had 70 percent of my body burned , it would take about an hour .
and as you can imagine , i hated that moment of ripping with incredible intensity .
and i would try to reason with them and say , " why do n't we try something else ?
why do n't we take it a little longer - maybe two hours instead of an hour - and have less of this intensity ? "
and the nurses told me two things .
they told me that they had the right model of the patient - that they knew what was the right thing to do to minimize my pain - and they also told me that the word patient does n't mean to make suggestions or to interfere or ...
this is not just in hebrew , by the way .
it 's in every language i 've had experience with so far .
and , you know , there 's not much - there was n't much i could do , and they kept on doing what they were doing .
and about three years later , when i left the hospital , i started studying at the university .
and one of the most interesting lessons i learned was that there is an experimental method that if you have a question you can create a replica of this question in some abstract way , and you can try to examine this question , maybe learn something about the world .
so that 's what i did .
i was still interested in this question of how do you take bandages off burn patients .
so originally i did n't have much money , so i went to a hardware store and i bought a carpenter 's vice .
and i would bring people to the lab and i would put their finger in it , and i would crunch it a little bit .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i would crunch it for long periods and short periods , and pain that went up and pain that went down , and with breaks and without breaks - all kinds of versions of pain .
and when i finished hurting people a little bit , i would ask them , so , how painful was this ? or , how painful was this ?
or , if you had to choose between the last two , which one would you choose ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i kept on doing this for a while .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and then , like all good academic projects , i got more funding .
i moved to sounds , electrical shocks - i even had a pain suit that i could get people to feel much more pain .
but at the end of this process , what i learned was that the nurses were wrong .
here were wonderful people with good intentions and plenty of experience , and nevertheless they were getting things wrong predictably all the time .
it turns out that because we do n't encode duration in the way that we encode intensity , i would have had less pain if the duration would have been longer and the intensity was lower .
it turns out it would have been better to start with my face , which was much more painful , and move toward my legs , giving me a trend of improvement over time - that would have been also less painful .
and it also turns out that it would have been good to give me breaks in the middle to kind of recuperate from the pain .
all of these would have been great things to do , and my nurses had no idea .
and from that point on i started thinking , are the nurses the only people in the world who get things wrong in this particular decision , or is it a more general case ?
and it turns out it 's a more general case - there 's a lot of mistakes we do .
and i want to give you one example of one of these irrationalities , and i want to talk to you about cheating .
and the reason i picked cheating is because it 's interesting , but also it tells us something , i think , about the stock market situation we 're in .
so , my interest in cheating started when enron came on the scene , exploded all of a sudden , and i started thinking about what is happening here .
is it the case that there was kind of a few apples who are capable of doing these things , or are we talking a more endemic situation , that many people are actually capable of behaving this way ?
so , like we usually do , i decided to do a simple experiment .
and here 's how it went .
if you were in the experiment , i would pass you a sheet of paper with 20 simple math problems that everybody could solve , but i would n't give you enough time .
when the five minutes were over , i would say , " pass me the sheets of paper , and i 'll pay you a dollar per question . "
people did this . i would pay people four dollars for their task - on average people would solve four problems .
other people i would tempt to cheat .
i would pass their sheet of paper .
when the five minutes were over , i would say , " please shred the piece of paper .
put the little pieces in your pocket or in your backpack , and tell me how many questions you got correctly . "
people now solved seven questions on average .
now , it was n't as if there was a few bad apples - a few people cheated a lot .
instead , what we saw is a lot of people who cheat a little bit .
now , in economic theory , cheating is a very simple cost-benefit analysis .
you say , what 's the probability of being caught ?
how much do i stand to gain from cheating ?
and how much punishment would i get if i get caught ?
and you weigh these options out - you do the simple cost-benefit analysis , and you decide whether it 's worthwhile to commit the crime or not .
so , we try to test this .
for some people , we varied how much money they could get away with - how much money they could steal .
we paid them 10 cents per correct question , 50 cents , a dollar , five dollars , 10 dollars per correct question .
you would expect that as the amount of money on the table increases , people would cheat more , but in fact it was n't the case .
we got a lot of people cheating by stealing by a little bit .
what about the probability of being caught ?
some people shredded half the sheet of paper , so there was some evidence left .
some people shredded the whole sheet of paper .
some people shredded everything , went out of the room , and paid themselves from the bowl of money that had over 100 dollars .
you would expect that as the probability of being caught goes down , people would cheat more , but again , this was not the case .
again , a lot of people cheated by just by a little bit , and they were insensitive to these economic incentives .
so we said , " if people are not sensitive to the economic rational theory explanations , to these forces , what could be going on ? "
and we thought maybe what is happening is that there are two forces .
at one hand , we all want to look at ourselves in the mirror and feel good about ourselves , so we do n't want to cheat .
on the other hand , we can cheat a little bit , and still feel good about ourselves .
so , maybe what is happening is that there 's a level of cheating we ca n't go over , but we can still benefit from cheating at a low degree , as long as it does n't change our impressions about ourselves .
we call this like a personal fudge factor .
now , how would you test a personal fudge factor ?
initially we said , what can we do to shrink the fudge factor ?
so , we got people to the lab , and we said , " we have two tasks for you today . "
first , we asked half the people to recall either 10 books they read in high school , or to recall the ten commandments , and then we tempted them with cheating .
turns out the people who tried to recall the ten commandments - and in our sample nobody could recall all of the ten commandments - but those people who tried to recall the ten commandments , given the opportunity to cheat , did not cheat at all .
it was n't that the more religious people - the people who remembered more of the commandments - cheated less , and the less religious people - the people who could n't remember almost any commandments - cheated more .
the moment people thought about trying to recall the ten commandments , they stopped cheating .
in fact , even when we gave self-declared atheists the task of swearing on the bible and we give them a chance to cheat , they do n't cheat at all .
now , ten commandments is something that is hard to bring into the education system , so we said , " why do n't we get people to sign the honor code ? "
so , we got people to sign , " i understand that this short survey falls under the mit honor code . "
then they shredded it . no cheating whatsoever .
and this is particularly interesting , because mit does n't have an honor code .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , all this was about decreasing the fudge factor .
what about increasing the fudge factor ?
the first experiment - i walked around mit and i distributed six-packs of cokes in the refrigerators - these were common refrigerators for the undergrads .
and i came back to measure what we technically call the half-lifetime of coke - how long does it last in the refrigerators ?
as you can expect it does n't last very long ; people take it .
in contrast , i took a plate with six one-dollar bills , and i left those plates in the same refrigerators .
no bill ever disappeared .
now , this is not a good social science experiment , so to do it better i did the same experiment as i described to you before .
a third of the people we passed the sheet , they gave it back to us .
a third of the people we passed it to , they shredded it , they came to us and said , " mr. experimenter , i solved x problems . give me x dollars . "
a third of the people , when they finished shredding the piece of paper , they came to us and said , " mr experimenter , i solved x problems . give me x tokens . "
we did not pay them with dollars ; we paid them with something else .
and then they took the something else , they walked 12 feet to the side , and exchanged it for dollars .
think about the following intuition .
how bad would you feel about taking a pencil from work home , compared to how bad would you feel about taking 10 cents from a petty cash box ?
these things feel very differently .
would being a step removed from cash for a few seconds by being paid by token make a difference ?
our subjects doubled their cheating .
i 'll tell you what i think about this and the stock market in a minute .
but this did not solve the big problem i had with enron yet , because in enron , there 's also a social element .
people see each other behaving .
in fact , every day when we open the news we see examples of people cheating .
what does this cause us ?
so , we did another experiment .
we got a big group of students to be in the experiment , and we prepaid them .
so everybody got an envelope with all the money for the experiment , and we told them that at the end , we asked them to pay us back the money they did n't make . ok ?
the same thing happens .
when we give people the opportunity to cheat , they cheat .
they cheat just by a little bit , all the same .
but in this experiment we also hired an acting student .
this acting student stood up after 30 seconds , and said , " i solved everything . what do i do now ? "
and the experimenter said , " if you 've finished everything , go home .
that 's it . the task is finished . "
so , now we had a student - an acting student - that was a part of the group .
nobody knew it was an actor .
and they clearly cheated in a very , very serious way .
what would happen to the other people in the group ?
will they cheat more , or will they cheat less ?
here is what happens .
it turns out it depends on what kind of sweatshirt they 're wearing .
here is the thing .
we ran this at carnegie mellon and pittsburgh .
and at pittsburgh there are two big universities , carnegie mellon and university of pittsburgh .
all of the subjects sitting in the experiment were carnegie mellon students .
when the actor who was getting up was a carnegie mellon student - he was actually a carnegie mellon student - but he was a part of their group , cheating went up .
but when he actually had a university of pittsburgh sweatshirt , cheating went down .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , this is important , because remember , when the moment the student stood up , it made it clear to everybody that they could get away with cheating , because the experimenter said , " you 've finished everything . go home , " and they went with the money .
so it was n't so much about the probability of being caught again .
it was about the norms for cheating .
if somebody from our in-group cheats and we see them cheating , we feel it 's more appropriate , as a group , to behave this way .
but if it 's somebody from another group , these terrible people - i mean , not terrible in this - but somebody we do n't want to associate ourselves with , from another university , another group , all of a sudden people 's awareness of honesty goes up - a little bit like the ten commandments experiment - and people cheat even less .
so , what have we learned from this about cheating ?
we 've learned that a lot of people can cheat .
they cheat just by a little bit .
when we remind people about their morality , they cheat less .
when we get bigger distance from cheating , from the object of money , for example , people cheat more .
and when we see cheating around us , particularly if it 's a part of our in-group , cheating goes up .
now , if we think about this in terms of the stock market , think about what happens .
what happens in a situation when you create something where you pay people a lot of money to see reality in a slightly distorted way ?
would they not be able to see it this way ?
of course they would .
what happens when you do other things , like you remove things from money ?
you call them stock , or stock options , derivatives , mortgage-backed securities .
could it be that with those more distant things , it 's not a token for one second , it 's something that is many steps removed from money for a much longer time - could it be that people will cheat even more ?
and what happens to the social environment when people see other people behave around them ?
i think all of those forces worked in a very bad way in the stock market .
more generally , i want to tell you something about behavioral economics .
we have many intuitions in our life , and the point is that many of these intuitions are wrong .
the question is , are we going to test those intuitions ?
we can think about how we 're going to test this intuition in our private life , in our business life , and most particularly when it goes to policy , when we think about things like no child left behind , when you create new stock markets , when you create other policies - taxation , health care and so on .
and the difficulty of testing our intuition was the big lesson i learned when i went back to the nurses to talk to them .
so i went back to talk to them and tell them what i found out about removing bandages .
and i learned two interesting things .
one was that my favorite nurse , ettie , told me that i did not take her pain into consideration .
she said , " of course , you know , it was very painful for you .
but think about me as a nurse , taking , removing the bandages of somebody i liked , and had to do it repeatedly over a long period of time .
creating so much torture was not something that was good for me , too . "
and she said maybe part of the reason was it was difficult for her .
but it was actually more interesting than that , because she said , " i did not think that your intuition was right .
i felt my intuition was correct . "
so , if you think about all of your intuitions , it 's very hard to believe that your intuition is wrong .
and she said , " given the fact that i thought my intuition was right ... " - she thought her intuition was right - it was very difficult for her to accept doing a difficult experiment to try and check whether she was wrong .
but in fact , this is the situation we 're all in all the time .
we have very strong intuitions about all kinds of things - our own ability , how the economy works , how we should pay school teachers .
but unless we start testing those intuitions , we 're not going to do better .
and just think about how better my life would have been if these nurses would have been willing to check their intuition , and how everything would have been better if we just start doing more systematic experimentation of our intuitions .
thank you very much .
today i am going to teach you how to play my favorite game : massively multiplayer thumb-wrestling .
it 's the only game in the world that i know of that allows you , the player , the opportunity to experience 10 positive emotions in 60 seconds or less .
this is true , so if you play this game with me today for just one single minute , you will get to feel joy , relief , love , surprise , pride , curiosity , excitement , awe and wonder , contentment , and creativity , all in the span of one minute .
so this sounds pretty good , right ? now you 're willing to play .
in order to teach you this game , i 'm going to need some volunteers to come up onstage really quickly , and we 're going to do a little hands-on demo .
while they 're coming up , i should let you know , this game was invented 10 years ago by an artists ' collective in austria named monochrom .
so thank you , monochrom .
okay , so most people are familiar with traditional , two-person thumb-wrestling .
sunni , let 's just remind them .
one , two , three , four , i declare a thumb war , and we wrestle , and of course sunni beats me because she 's the best .
now the first thing about massively multiplayer thumb-wrestling , we 're the gamer generation .
there are a billion gamers on the planet now , so we need more of a challenge .
so the first thing we need is more thumbs .
so eric , come on over .
so we could get three thumbs together , and peter could join us .
we could even have four thumbs together , and the way you win is you 're the first person to pin someone else 's thumb .
this is really important . you ca n't , like , wait while they fight it out and then swoop in at the last minute .
that is not how you win .
ah , who did that ? eric you did that .
so eric would have won . he was the first person to pin my thumb .
okay , so that 's the first rule , and we can see that three or four is kind of the typical number of thumbs in a node , but if you feel ambitious , you do n't have to hold back .
we can really go for it .
so you can see up here .
now the only other rule you need to remember is , gamer generation , we like a challenge .
i happen to notice you all have some thumbs you 're not using .
so i think we should kind of get some more involved .
and if we had just four people , we would do it just like this , and we would try and wrestle both thumbs at the same time .
perfect .
now , if we had more people in the room , instead of just wrestling in a closed node , we might reach out and try and grab some other people .
and in fact , that 's what we 're going to do right now .
we 're going to try and get all , something like , i do n't know , 1,500 thumbs in this room connected in a single node .
and we have to connect both levels , so if you 're up there , you 're going to be reaching down and reaching up .
now - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - before we get started - this is great . you 're excited to play . - before we get started , can i have the slides back up here really quick , because if you get good at this game , i want you to know there are some advanced levels .
so this is the kind of simple level , right ?
but there are advanced configurations .
this is called the death star configuration .
any star wars fans ?
and this one 's called the möbius strip .
any science geeks , you get that one .
this is the hardest level . this is the extreme .
so we 'll stick with the normal one for now , and i 'm going to give you 30 seconds , every thumb into the node , connect the upper and the lower levels , you guys go on down there .
thirty seconds . into the network . make the node .
stand up ! it 's easier if you stand up .
everybody , up up up up up !
stand up , my friends .
all right .
do n't start wrestling yet .
if you have a free thumb , wave it around , make sure it gets connected .
okay . we need to do a last-minute thumb check .
if you have a free thumb , wave it around to make sure .
grab that thumb !
reach behind you . there you go .
any other thumbs ?
okay , on the count of three , you 're going to go .
try to keep track . grab , grab , grab it .
okay ? one , two , three , go !
-lrb- laughter -rrb- did you win ? you got it ? you got it ? excellent !
-lrb- applause -rrb- well done . thank you . thank you very much .
all right .
while you are basking in the glow of having won your first massively multiplayer thumb-wrestling game , let 's do a quick recap on the positive emotions .
so curiosity .
i said " massively multiplayer thumb-wrestling . "
you were like , " what the hell is she talking about ? "
so i provoked a little curiosity .
creativity : it took creativity to solve the problem of getting all the thumbs into the node .
i 'm reaching around and i 'm reaching up .
so you used creativity . that was great .
how about surprise ? the actual feeling of trying to wrestle two thumbs at once is pretty surprising .
you heard that sound go up in the room .
we had excitement . as you started to wrestle , maybe you 're starting to win or this person 's , like , really into it , so you kind of get the excitement going .
we have relief . you got to stand up .
you 've been sitting for awhile , so the physical relief , getting to shake it out .
we had joy . you were laughing , smiling . look at your faces . this room is full of joy .
we had some contentment .
i did n't see anybody sending text messages or checking their email while we were playing , so you were totally content to be playing .
the most important three emotions , awe and wonder , we had everybody connected physically for a minute .
when was the last time you were at ted and you got to connect physically with every single person in the room ?
and it 's truly awesome and wondrous .
and speaking of physical connection , you guys know i love the hormone oxytocin , you release oxytocin , you feel bonded to everyone in the room .
you guys know that the best way to release oxytocin quickly is to hold someone else 's hand for at least six seconds .
you guys were all holding hands for way more than six seconds , so we are all now biochemically primed to love each other . that is great .
and the last emotion of pride .
how many people are like me . just admit it .
you lost both your thumbs .
it just did n't work out for you .
that 's okay , because you learned a new skill today .
you learned , from scratch , a game you never knew before .
now you know how to play it . you can teach other people .
so congratulations .
how many of you won just won thumb ?
all right . i have very good news for you .
according to the official rules of massively multiplayer thumb-wrestling , this makes you a grandmaster of the game .
because there are n't that many people who know how to play , we have to kind of accelerate the program more than a game like chess .
so congratulations , grandmasters .
win one thumb once , you will become a grandmaster .
did anybody win both their thumbs ?
yes . awesome . okay .
get ready to update your twitter or facebook status .
you guys , according to the rules , are legendary grandmasters , so congratulations .
i will just leave you with this tip , if you want to play again .
the best way to become a legendary grandmaster , you 've got your two nodes going on .
pick off the one that looks easiest .
they 're not paying attention . they look kind of weak .
focus on that one and do something crazy with this arm .
as soon as you win , suddenly stop .
everybody is thrown off . you go in for the kill .
that 's how you become a legendary grandmaster of massively multiplayer thumb-wrestling .
thank you for letting me teach you my favorite game .
wooo ! -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- the first idea i 'd like to suggest is that we all love music a great deal . it means a lot to us .
but music is even more powerful if you do n't just listen to it , but you make it yourself .
so , that 's my first idea . and we all know about the mozart effect - the idea that 's been around for the last five to 10 years - that just by listening to music or by playing music to your baby -lsb- in utero -rsb- , that it 'll raise our iq points 10 , 20 , 30 percent .
great idea , but it does n't work at all .
so , you ca n't just listen to music , you have to make it somehow .
and i 'd add to that , that it 's not just making it , but everybody , each of us , everybody in the world has the power to create and be part of music in a very dynamic way , and that 's one of the main parts of my work .
so , with the mit media lab , for quite a while now , we 've been engaged in a field called active music .
what are all the possible ways that we can think of to get everybody in the middle of a musical experience , not just listening , but making music ?
and we started by making instruments for some of the world 's greatest performers - we call these hyperinstruments - for yo-yo ma , peter gabriel , prince , orchestras , rock bands . instruments where they 're all kinds of sensors built right into the instrument , so the instrument knows how it 's being played .
and just by changing the interpretation and the feeling , i can turn my cello into a voice , or into a whole orchestra , or into something that nobody has ever heard before .
when we started making these , i started thinking , why ca n't we make wonderful instruments like that for everybody , people who are n't fantastic yo-yo mas or princes ?
so , we 've made a whole series of instruments .
one of the largest collections is called the brain opera .
it 's a whole orchestra of about 100 instruments , all designed for anybody to play using natural skill .
so , you can play a video game , drive through a piece of music , use your body gesture to control huge masses of sound , touch a special surface to make melodies , use your voice to make a whole aura .
and when we make the brain opera , we invite the public to come in , to try these instruments and then collaborate with us to help make each performance of the brain opera .
we toured that for a long time . it is now permanently in vienna , where we built a museum around it .
and that led to something which you probably do know .
guitar hero came out of our lab , and my two teenage daughters and most of the students at the mit media lab are proof that if you make the right kind of interface , people are really interested in being in the middle of a piece of music , and playing it over and over and over again .
so , the model works , but it 's only the tip of the iceberg , because my second idea is that it 's not enough just to want to make music in something like guitar hero .
and music is very fun , but it 's also transformative .
it 's very , very important .
music can change your life , more than almost anything .
it can change the way you communicate with others , it can change your body , it can change your mind . so , we 're trying to go to the next step of how you build on top of something like guitar hero .
we are very involved in education . we have a long-term project called toy symphony , where we make all kinds of instruments that are also addictive , but for little kids , so the kids will fall in love with making music , want to spend their time doing it , and then will demand to know how it works , how to make more , how to create . so , we make squeezy instruments , like these music shapers that measure the electricity in your fingers , beatbugs that let you tap in rhythms - they gather your rhythm , and like hot potato , you send your rhythm to your friends ,
who then have to imitate or respond to what your doing - and a software package called hyperscore , which lets anybody use lines and color to make quite sophisticated music . extremely easy to use , but once you use it , you can go quite deep - music in any style . and then , by pressing a button , it turns into music notation so that live musicians can play your pieces .
we 've had good enough , really , very powerful effects with kids around the world , and now people of all ages , using hyperscore .
so , we 've gotten more and more interested in using these kinds of creative activities in a much broader context , for all kinds of people who do n't usually have the opportunity to make music .
so , one of the growing fields that we 're working on at the media lab right now is music , mind and health .
a lot of you have probably seen oliver sacks ' wonderful new book called " musicophilia . " it 's on sale in the bookstore . it 's a great book .
if you have n't seen it , it 's worth reading . he 's a pianist himself , and he details his whole career of looking at and observing incredibly powerful effects that music has had on peoples ' lives in unusual situations .
so we know , for instance , that music is almost always the last thing that people with advanced alzheimer 's can still respond to .
maybe many of you have noticed this with loved ones , you can find somebody who ca n't recognize their face in the mirror , or ca n't tell anyone in their family , but you can still find a shard of music that that person will jump out of the chair and start singing . and with that you can bring back parts of people 's memories and personalities .
music is the best way to restore speech to people who have lost it through strokes , movement to people with parkinson 's disease .
it 's very powerful for depression , schizophrenia , many , many things .
so , we 're working on understanding those underlying principles and then building activities which will let music really improve people 's health .
and we do this in many ways . we work with many different hospitals .
one of them is right near boston , called tewksbury hospital .
it 's a long-term state hospital , where several years ago we started working with hyperscore and patients with physical and mental disabilities .
this has become a central part of the treatment at tewksbury hospital , so everybody there clamors to work on musical activities .
it 's the activity that seems to accelerate people 's treatment the most and it also brings the entire hospital together as a kind of musical community .
i wanted to show you a quick video of some of this work before i go on .
video : they 're manipulating each other 's rhythms .
it 's a real experience , not only to learn how to play and listen to rhythms , but to train your musical memory and playing music in a group .
to get their hands on music , to shape it themselves , change it , to experiment with it , to make their own music .
so hyperscore lets you start from scratch very quickly .
everybody can experience music in a profound way , we just have to make different tools .
the third idea i want to share with you is that music , paradoxically , i think even more than words , is one of the very best ways we have of showing who we really are . i love giving talks , although strangely i feel more nervous giving talks than playing music .
if i were here playing cello , or playing on a synth , or sharing my music with you , i 'd be able to show things about myself that i ca n't tell you in words , more personal things , perhaps deeper things .
i think that 's true for many of us , and i want to give you two examples of how music is one of the most powerful interfaces we have , from ourselves to the outside world .
the first is a really crazy project that we 're building right now , called death and the powers . and it 's a big opera , one of the larger opera projects going on in the world right now .
and it 's about a man , rich , successful , powerful , who wants to live forever .
so , he figures out a way to download himself into his environment , actually into a series of books .
so this guy wants to live forever , he downloads himself into his environment .
the main singer disappears at the beginning of the opera and the entire stage becomes the main character . it becomes his legacy .
and the opera is about what we can share , what we can pass on to others , to the people we love , and what we ca n't .
every object in the opera comes alive and is a gigantic music instrument , like this chandelier . it takes up the whole stage . it looks like a chandelier , but it 's actually a robotic music instrument .
so , as you can see in this prototype , gigantic piano strings , each string is controlled with a little robotic element - either little bows that stroke the strings , propellers that tickle the strings , acoustic signals that vibrate the strings . we also have an army of robots on stage .
these robots are the kind of the intermediary between the main character , simon powers , and his family . there are a whole series of them , kind of like a greek chorus .
they observe the action . we 've designed these square robots that we 're testing right now at mit called operabots . these operabots follow my music .
they follow the characters . they 're smart enough , we hope , not to bump into each other . they go off on their own .
and then they can also , when you snap , line up exactly the way you 'd like to .
even though they 're cubes , they actually have a lot of personality .
the largest set piece in the opera is called the system . it 's a series of books .
every single book is robotic , so they all move , they all make sound , and when you put them all together , they turn into these walls , which have the gesture and the personality of simon powers . so he 's disappeared , but the whole physical environment becomes this person .
this is how he 's chosen to represent himself .
the books also have high-packed leds on the spines . so it 's all display .
and here 's the great baritone james maddalena as he enters the system .
this is a sneak preview .
this premieres in monaco - it 's in september 2009 . if by any chance you ca n't make it , another idea with this project - here 's this guy building his legacy through this very unusual form , through music and through the environment .
but we 're also making this available both online and in public spaces , as a way of each of us to use music and images from our lives to make our own legacy or to make a legacy of someone we love .
so instead of being grand opera , this opera will turn into what we 're thinking of as personal opera .
and , if you 're going to make a personal opera , what about a personal instrument ?
everything i 've shown you so far - whether it 's a hyper-cello for yo-yo ma or squeezy toy for a child - the instruments stayed the same and are valuable for a certain class of person : a virtuoso , a child .
but what if i could make an instrument that could be adapted to the way i personally behave , to the way my hands work , to what i do very skillfully , perhaps , to what i do n't do so skillfully ?
i think that this is the future of interface , it 's the future of music , the future of instruments .
and i 'd like now to invite two very special people on the stage , so that i can give you an example of what personal instruments might be like .
so , can you give a hand to adam boulanger , ph.d. student from the mit media lab , and dan ellsey . dan , thanks to ted and to bombardier flexjet , dan is here with us today all the way from tewksbury . he 's a resident at tewksbury hospital .
this is by far the farthest he 's strayed from tewksbury hospital , i can tell you that , because he 's motivated to meet with you today and show you his own music .
so , first of all , dan , do you want to say hi to everyone and tell everyone who you are ?
dan ellsey : hello . my name is dan ellsey . i am 34 years old and i have cerebral palsy .
i have always loved music and i am excited to be able to conduct my own music with this new software .
tod machover : and we 're really excited to have you here , really dan . -lrb- applause -rrb- so we met dan about three years ago , three and a half years ago , when we started working at tewksbury . everybody we met there was fantastic , did fantastic music . dan had never made music before , and it turned out he was really fantastic at it . he 's a born composer .
he 's very shy , too .
so , turned out he 's a fantastic composer , and over the last few years has been a constant collaborator of ours . he has made many , many pieces .
he makes his own cds . actually , he is quite well known in the boston area - mentors people at the hospital and children , locally , in how to make their own music .
and i 'll let adam tell you . so , adam is a ph.d. student at mit , an expert in music technology and medicine . and adam and dan have become close collaborators .
what adam 's been working on for this last period is not only how to have dan be able easily to make his own pieces , but how he can perform his piece using this kind of personal instrument .
so , you want to say a little bit about how you guys work ?
adam boulanger : yes . so , tod and i entered into a discussion following the tewksbury work and it was really about how dan is an expressive person , and he 's an intelligent and creative person . and it 's in his face , it 's in his breathing , it 's in his eyes . how come he ca n't perform one of his pieces of music ? that 's our responsibility , and it does n't make sense .
so we started developing a technology that will allow him with nuance , with precision , with control , and despite his physical disability , to be able to do that , to be able to perform his piece of music .
so , the process and the technology - basically , first we needed an engineering solution . so , you know , we have a firewire camera , it looked at an infrared pointer .
we went with the type of gesture metaphor that dan was already used to with his speaking controller .
and this was actually the least interesting part of the work , you know , the design process . we needed an input ; we needed continuous tracking ; in the software , we look at the types of shapes he 's making .
but , then was the really interesting aspect of the work , following the engineering part , where , basically , we 're coding over dan 's shoulder at the hospital extensively to figure out , you know , how does dan move ?
what 's useful to him as an expressive motion ?
you know , what 's his metaphor for performance ?
what types of things does he find important to control and convey in a piece of music ?
so all the parameter fitting , and really the technology was stretched at that point to fit just dan .
and , you know , i think this is a perspective shift . it 's not that our technologies - they provide access , they allow us to create pieces of creative work .
but what about expression ? what about that moment when an artist delivers that piece of work ? you know , do our technologies allow us to express ?
do they provide structure for us to do that ? and , you know , that 's a personal relationship to expression that is lacking in the technological sphere . so , you know , with dan , we needed a new design process , a new engineering process to sort of discover his movement and his path to expression that allow him to perform .
and so that 's what we 'll do today .
tm : so let 's do it . so dan do you want to tell everyone about what you 're going to play now ?
de : this is " my eagle song . "
tm : so dan is going to play a piece of his , called " my eagle song . "
in fact , this is the score for dan 's piece , completely composed by dan in hyperscore .
so he can use his infrared tracker to go directly into hyperscore .
he 's incredibly fast at it , too , faster than i am , in fact .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- tm : he 's really modest , too .
so he can go in hyperscore . you start out by making melodies and rhythms .
he can place those exactly where he wants .
each one gets a color . he goes back into the composition window , draws the lines , places everything the way he wants to . looking at the hyperscore , you can see it also , you can see where the sections are , something might continue for a while , change , get really crazy and then end up with a big bang at the end .
so that 's the way he made his piece , and as adam says , we then figured out the best way to have him perform his piece .
it 's going to be looked at by this camera , analyze his movements , it 's going to let dan bring out all the different aspects of his music that he wants to .
and you 're also going to notice a visual on the screen .
we asked one of our students to look at what the camera is measuring .
but instead of making it very literal , showing you exactly the camera tracing , we turned it into a graphic that shows you the basic movement , and shows the way it 's being analyzed .
i think it gives an understanding of how we 're picking out movement from what dan 's doing , but i think it will also show you , if you look at that movement , that when dan makes music , his motions are very purposeful , very precise , very disciplined and they 're also very beautiful .
so , in hearing this piece , as i mentioned before , the most important thing is the music 's great , and it 'll show you who dan is .
so , are we ready adam ?
ab : yeah .
tm : ok , now dan will play his piece " my eagle song " for you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- tm : bravo .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this is the venue where , as a young man , some of the music that i wrote was first performed .
it was , remarkably , a pretty good sounding room .
with all the uneven walls and all the crap everywhere , it actually sounded pretty good .
this is a song that was recorded there .
-lrb- music -rrb- this is not talking heads , in the picture anyway .
-lrb- music : " a clean break -lrb- let 's work -rrb- " by talking heads -rrb- so the nature of the room meant that words could be understood .
the lyrics of the songs could be pretty much understood .
the sound system was kind of decent .
and there was n't a lot of reverberation in the room .
so the rhythms could be pretty intact too , pretty concise .
other places around the country had similar rooms .
this is tootsie 's orchid lounge in nashville .
the music was in some ways different , but in structure and form , very much the same .
the clientele behavior was very much the same too .
and so the bands at tootsie 's or at cbgb 's had to play loud enough - the volume had to be loud enough to overcome people falling down , shouting out and doing whatever else they were doing .
since then , i 've played other places that are much nicer .
i 've played the disney hall here and carnegie hall and places like that .
and it 's been very exciting .
but i also noticed that sometimes the music that i had written , or was writing at the time , did n't sound all that great in some of those halls .
we managed , but sometimes those halls did n't seem exactly suited to the music i was making or had made .
so i asked myself : do i write stuff for specific rooms ?
do i have a place , a venue , in mind when i write ?
is that a kind of model for creativity ?
do we all make things with a venue , a context , in mind ?
okay , africa .
-lrb- music : " wenlenga " / various artists -rrb- most of the popular music that we know now has a big part of its roots in west africa .
and the music there , i would say , the instruments , the intricate rhythms , the way it 's played , the setting , the context , it 's all perfect . it all works perfect .
the music works perfectly in that setting .
there 's no big room to create reverberation and confuse the rhythms .
the instruments are loud enough that they can be heard without amplification , etc . , etc .
it 's no accident .
it 's perfect for that particular context .
and it would be a mess in a context like this . this is a gothic cathedral .
-lrb- music : " spem in alium " by thomas tallis -rrb- in a gothic cathedral , this kind of music is perfect .
it does n't change key , the notes are long , there 's almost no rhythm whatsoever , and the room flatters the music .
it actually improves it .
this is the room that bach wrote some of his music for . this is the organ .
it 's not as big as a gothic cathedral , so he can write things that are a little bit more intricate .
he can , very innovatively , actually change keys without risking huge dissonances .
-lrb- music : " fantasia on jesu , mein freunde " by johann s. bach -rrb- this is a little bit later .
this is the kind of rooms that mozart wrote in .
i think we 're in like 1770 , somewhere around there .
they 're smaller , even less reverberant , so he can write really frilly music that 's very intricate - and it works .
-lrb- music : " sonata in f , " kv 13 , by wolfgang a. mozart -rrb- it fits the room perfectly .
this is la scala .
it 's around the same time , i think it was built around 1776 .
people in the audience in these opera houses , when they were built , they used to yell out to one another .
they used to eat , drink and yell out to people on the stage , just like they do at cbgb 's and places like that .
if they liked an aria , they would holler and suggest that it be done again as an encore , not at the end of the show , but immediately .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and well , that was an opera experience .
this is the opera house that wagner built for himself .
and the size of the room is not that big .
it 's smaller than this .
but wagner made an innovation .
he wanted a bigger band .
he wanted a little more bombast , so he increased the size of the orchestra pit so he could get more low-end instruments in there .
-lrb- music : " lohengrin / prelude to act iii " by richard wagner -rrb- okay .
this is carnegie hall .
obviously , this kind of thing became popular .
the halls got bigger . carnegie hall 's fair-sized .
it 's larger than some of the other symphony halls .
and they 're a lot more reverberant than la scala .
around the same , according to alex ross who writes for the new yorker , this kind of rule came into effect that audiences had to be quiet - no more eating , drinking and yelling at the stage , or gossiping with one another during the show .
they had to be very quiet .
so those two things combined meant that a different kind of music worked best in these kind of halls .
it meant that there could be extreme dynamics , which there were n't in some of these other kinds of music .
quiet parts could be heard that would have been drowned out by all the gossiping and shouting .
but because of the reverberation in those rooms like carnegie hall , the music had to be maybe a little less rhythmic and a little more textural .
-lrb- music : " symphony no. 8 in e flat major " by gustav mahler -rrb- this is mahler .
it looks like bob dylan , but it 's mahler .
that was bob 's last record , yeah .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- popular music , coming along at the same time .
this is a jazz band .
according to scott joplin , the bands were playing on riverboats and clubs .
again , it 's noisy . they 're playing for dancers .
there 's certain sections of the song - the songs had different sections that the dancers really liked .
and they 'd say , " play that part again . "
well , there 's only so many times you can play the same section of a song over and over again for the dancers .
so the bands started to improvise new melodies .
and a new form of music was born .
-lrb- music : " royal garden blues " by w.c. handy / ethel waters -rrb- these are played mainly in small rooms .
people are dancing , shouting and drinking .
so the music has to be loud enough to be heard above that .
same thing goes true for - that 's the beginning of the century - for the whole of 20th-century popular music , whether it 's rock or latin music or whatever .
-lsb- live music -rsb- does n't really change that much .
it changes about a third of the way into the 20th century , when this became one of the primary venues for music .
and this was one way that the music got there .
microphones enabled singers , in particular , and musicians and composers , to completely change the kind of music that they were writing .
so far , a lot of the stuff that was on the radio was live music , but singers , like frank sinatra , could use the mic and do things that they could never do without a microphone .
other singers after him went even further .
-lrb- music : " my funny valentine " by chet baker -rrb- this is chet baker .
and this kind of thing would have been impossible without a microphone .
it would have been impossible without recorded music as well .
and he 's singing right into your ear .
he 's whispering into your ears .
the effect is just electric .
it 's like the guy is sitting next to you , whispering who knows what into your ear .
so at this point , music diverged .
there 's live music , and there 's recorded music .
and they no longer have to be exactly the same .
now there 's venues like this , a discotheque , and there 's jukeboxes in bars , where you do n't even need to have a band .
there does n't need to be any live performing musicians whatsoever , and the sound systems are good .
people began to make music specifically for discos and for those sound systems .
and , as with jazz , the dancers liked certain sections more than they did others .
so the early hip-hop guys would loop certain sections .
-lrb- music : " rapper 's delight " by the sugarhill gang -rrb- the mc would improvise lyrics in the same way that the jazz players would improvise melodies .
and another new form of music was born .
live performance , when it was incredibly successful , ended up in what is probably , acoustically , the worst sounding venues on the planet : sports stadiums , basketball arenas and hockey arenas .
musicians who ended up there did the best they could .
they wrote what is now called arena rock , which is medium-speed ballads .
-lrb- music : " i still have n't found what i 'm looking for " by u2 -rrb- they did the best they could given that this is what they 're writing for .
the tempos are medium . it sounds big .
it 's more a social situation than a musical situation .
and in some ways , the music that they 're writing for this place works perfectly .
so there 's more new venues .
one of the new ones is the automobile .
i grew up with a radio in a car .
but now that 's evolved into something else .
the car is a whole venue .
-lrb- music : " who u wit " by lil ' jon & the east side boyz -rrb- the music that , i would say , is written for automobile sound systems works perfectly on it .
it might not be what you want to listen to at home , but it works great in the car - has a huge frequency spectrum , you know , big bass and high-end and the voice kind of stuck in the middle .
automobile music , you can share with your friends .
there 's one other kind of new venue , the private mp3 player .
presumably , this is just for christian music .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and in some ways it 's like carnegie hall , or when the audience had to hush up , because you can now hear every single detail .
in other ways , it 's more like the west african music because if the music in an mp3 player gets too quiet , you turn it up , and the next minute , your ears are blasted out by a louder passage .
so that does n't really work .
i think pop music , mainly , it 's written today , to some extent , is written for these kind of players , for this kind of personal experience where you can hear extreme detail , but the dynamic does n't change that much .
so i asked myself : okay , is this a model for creation , this adaptation that we do ?
and does it happen anywhere else ?
well , according to david attenborough and some other people , birds do it too - that the birds in the canopy , where the foliage is dense , their calls tend to be high-pitched , short and repetitive .
and the birds on the floor tend to have lower pitched calls , so that they do n't get distorted when they bounce off the forest floor .
and birds like this savannah sparrow , they tend to have a buzzing -lrb- sound clip : savannah sparrow song -rrb- type call .
and it turns out that a sound like this is the most energy efficient and practical way to transmit their call across the fields and savannahs .
other birds , like this tanager , have adapted within the same species .
the tananger on the east coast of the united states , where the forests are a little denser , has one kind of call , and the tananger on the other side , on the west -lrb- sound clip : scarlet tanager song -rrb- has a different kind of call .
-lrb- sound clip : scarlet tanager song -rrb- so birds do it too .
and i thought : well , if this is a model for creation , if we make music , primarily the form at least , to fit these contexts , and if we make art to fit gallery walls or museum walls , and if we write software to fit existing operating systems , is that how it works ?
yeah . i think it 's evolutionary .
it 's adaptive .
but the pleasure and the passion and the joy is still there .
this is a reverse view of things from the kind of traditional romantic view .
the romantic view is that first comes the passion and then the outpouring of emotion , and then somehow it gets shaped into something .
and i 'm saying , well , the passion 's still there , but the vessel that it 's going to be injected into and poured into , that is instinctively and intuitively created first .
we already know where that passion is going .
but this conflict of views is kind of interesting .
the writer , thomas frank , says that this might be a kind of explanation why some voters vote against their best interests , that voters , like a lot of us , assume , that if they hear something that sounds like it 's sincere , that it 's coming from the gut , that it 's passionate , that it 's more authentic .
and they 'll vote for that .
so that , if somebody can fake sincerity , if they can fake passion , they stand a better chance of being selected in that way , which seems a little dangerous .
i 'm saying the two , the passion , the joy , are not mutually exclusive .
maybe what the world needs now is for us to realize that we are like the birds .
we adapt .
we sing .
and like the birds , the joy is still there , even though we have changed what we do to fit the context .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- on march 14 , this year , i posted this poster on facebook .
this is an image of me and my daughter holding the israeli flag .
i will try to explain to you about the context of why and when i posted .
a few days ago , i was sitting waiting on the line at the grocery store , and the owner and one of the clients were talking to each other , and the owner was explaining to the client that we 're going to get 10,000 missiles on israel .
and the client was saying , no , it 's 10,000 a day .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- " 10,000 missiles " -rrb- this is the context . this is where we are now in israel .
we have this war with iran coming for 10 years now , and we have people , you know , afraid .
it 's like every year it 's the last minute that we can do something about the war with iran .
it 's like , if we do n't act now , it 's too late forever , for 10 years now .
so at some point it became , you know , to me , i 'm a graphic designer , so i made posters about it and i posted the one i just showed you before .
most of the time , i make posters , i post them on facebook , my friends like it , do n't like it , most of the time do n't like it , do n't share it , do n't nothing , and it 's another day .
so i went to sleep , and that was it for me .
and later on in the night , i woke up because i 'm always waking up in the night , and i went by the computer and i see all these red dots , you know , on facebook , which i 've never seen before .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i was like , " what 's going on ? "
so i come to the computer and i start looking on , and suddenly i see many people talking to me , most of them i do n't know , and a few of them from iran , which is - what ?
because you have to understand , in israel we do n't talk with people from iran .
we do n't know people from iran .
it 's like , on facebook , you have friends only from - it 's like your neighbors are your friends on facebook .
and now people from iran are talking to me .
so i start answering this girl , and she 's telling me she saw the poster and she asked her family to come , because they do n't have a computer , she asked her family to come to see the poster , and they 're all sitting in the living room crying .
so i 'm like , whoa .
i ask my wife to come , and i tell her , you have to see that .
people are crying , and she came , she read the text , and she started to cry .
and everybody 's crying now . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so i do n't know what to do , so my first reflex , as a graphic designer , is , you know , to show everybody what i 'd just seen , and people started to see them and to share them , and that 's how it started .
the day after , when really it became a lot of talking , i said to myself , and my wife said to me , i also want a poster , so this is her . -lrb- laughter -rrb- because it 's working , put me in a poster now .
but more seriously , i was like , okay , these ones work , but it 's not just about me , it 's about people from israel who want to say something .
so i 'm going to shoot all the people i know , if they want , and i 'm going to put them in a poster and i 'm going to share them .
so i went to my neighbors and friends and students and i just asked them , give me a picture , i will make you a poster .
and that 's how it started . and that 's how , really , it 's unleashed , because suddenly people from facebook , friends and others , just understand that they can be part of it .
it 's not just one dude making one poster , it 's - we can be part of it , so they start sending me pictures and ask me , " make me a poster . post it .
tell the iranians we from israel love you too . "
it became , you know , at some point it was really , really intense .
i mean , so many pictures , so i asked friends to come , graphic designers most of them , to make posters with me , because i did n't have the time .
it was a huge amount of pictures .
so for a few days , that 's how my living room was .
and we received israeli posters , israeli images , but also lots of comments , lots of messages from iran .
and we took these messages and we made posters out of it , because i know people : they do n't read , they see images .
if it 's an image , they may read it .
so here are a few of them .
-lrb- " you are my first israelian friend . i wish we both get rid of our idiot politicians , anyway nice to see you ! " -rrb- -lrb- " i love that blue . i love that star . i love that flag . " -rrb- this one is really moving for me because it 's the story of a girl who has been raised in iran to walk on an israeli flag to enter her school every morning , and now that she sees the posters that we 're sending , she starts - she said that she changed her mind , and now she loves that blue , she loves that star , and she loves that flag , talking about the israeli flag ,
and she wished that we 'd meet and come to visit one another , and just a few days after i posted the first poster .
the day after , iranians started to respond with their own posters .
they have graphic designers . what ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- crazy , crazy .
so you can see they are still shy , they do n't want to show their faces , but they want to spread the message .
they want to respond . they want to say the same thing .
so . and now it 's communication .
it 's a two-way story . it 's israelis and iranians sending the same message , one to each other .
-lrb- " my israeli friends . i do n't hate you . i do n't want war . " -rrb- this never happened before , and this is two people supposed to be enemies , we 're on the verge of a war , and suddenly people on facebook are starting to say , " i like this guy . i love those guys . "
and it became really big at some point .
and then it became news .
because when you 're seeing the middle east , you see only the bad news .
and suddenly , there is something that was happening that was good news . so the guys on the news , they say , " okay , let 's talk about this . "
and they just came , and it was so much , i remember one day , michal , she was talking with the journalist , and she was asking him , " who 's gonna see the show ? " and he said , " everybody . "
so she said , " everybody in palestine , in where ? israel ?
who is everybody ? " " everybody . "
they said , " syria ? " " syria . "
" lebanon ? " " lebanon . "
at some point , he just said , " 40 million people are going to see you today .
it 's everybody . " the chinese .
and we were just at the beginning of the story .
something crazy also happened .
every time a country started talking about it , like germany , america , wherever , a page on facebook popped up with the same logo with the same stories , so at the beginning we had " iran-loves-israel , " which is an iranian sitting in tehran , saying , " okay , israel loves iran ?
i give you iran-loves-israel . "
you have palestine-loves-israel .
you have lebanon that just - a few days ago .
and this whole list of pages on facebook dedicated to the same message , to people sending their love , one to each other .
the moment i really understood that something was happening , a friend of mine told me , " google the word ' israel . " ' and those were the first images on those days that popped up from google when you were typing , " israel " or " iran . "
we really changed how people see the middle east .
because you 're not in the middle east .
you 're somewhere over there , and then you want to see the middle east , so you go on google and you say , " israel , " and they give you the bad stuff .
and for a few days you got those images .
today the israel-loves-iran page is this number , 80,831 , and two million people last week went on the page and shared , liked , i do n't know , commented on one of the photos .
so for five months now , that 's what we are doing , me , michal , a few of my friends , are just making images .
we 're showing a new reality by just making images because that 's how the world perceives us .
they see images of us , and they see bad images .
so we 're working on making good images . end of story .
look at this one . this is the iran-loves-israel page .
this is not the israel-loves-iran . this is not my page .
this is a guy in tehran on the day of remembrance of the israeli fallen soldier putting an image of an israeli soldier on his page .
this is the enemy .
what ?
-lrb- " our heartfelt condolences to the families who lost their dearests in terror attack in bulgaria " -rrb- and it 's going both ways .
it 's like , we are showing respect , one to each other .
and we 're understanding . and you show compassion .
and you become friends .
and at some point , you become friends on facebook , and you become friends in life .
you can go and travel and meet people .
and i was in munich a few weeks ago .
i went there to open an exposition about iran and i met there with people from the page that told me , " okay , you 're going to be in europe , i 'm coming . i 'm coming from france , from holland , from germany , " of course , and from israel people came , and we just met there for the first time in real life .
i met with people that are supposed to be my enemies for the first time . and we just shake hands , and have a coffee and a nice discussion , and we talk about food and basketball .
and that was the end of it .
remember that image from the beginning ?
at some point we met in real life , and we became friends .
and it goes the other way around .
some girl that we met on facebook never been in israel , born and raised in iran , lives in germany , afraid of israelis because of what she knows about us , decides after a few months of talking on the internet with some israelis to come to israel , and she gets on the plane and arrives at ben gurion and says , " okay , not that big a deal . "
so a few weeks ago , the stress is getting higher , so we start this new campaign called " not ready to die in your war . "
i mean , it 's plus / minus the same message , but we wanted really to add some aggressivity to it .
and again , something amazing happened , something that we did n't have on the first wave of the campaign .
now people from iran , the same ones who were shy at the first campaign and just sent , you know , their foot and half their faces , now they 're sending their faces , and they 're saying , " okay , no problem , we 're into it . we are with you . "
just read where those guys are from .
and for every guy from israel , you 've got someone from iran .
just people sending their pictures .
crazy , yes ?
so - -lrb- applause -rrb- so you may ask yourself , who is this dude ?
my name is ronny edry , and i 'm 41 , i 'm an israeli , i 'm a father of two , i 'm a husband , and i 'm a graphic designer . i 'm teaching graphic design .
and i 'm not that naive , because a lot of the time i 've been asked , many times i 've been asked , " yeah , but , this is really naive , sending flowers over , i mean - " i was in the army . i was in the paratroopers for three years , and i know how it looks from the ground .
i know how it can look really bad .
so to me , this is the courageous thing to do , to try to reach the other side before it 's too late , because when it 's going to be too late , it 's going to be too late .
and sometimes war is inevitable , sometimes , but maybe -lsb- with -rsb- effort , we can avoid it .
maybe as people , because especially in israel , and maybe that little thing can change something .
and really , we can be our own ambassadors .
we can just send a message and hope for the best .
so i want to ask michal , my wife , to come with me on the stage just to make with you one image , because it 's all about images .
and maybe that image will help us change something .
just raise that . exactly .
and i 'm just going to take a picture of it , and i 'm just going to post it on facebook with kind of " israelis for peace " or something .
oh my god .
do n't cry .
thank you guys .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm jessi , and this is my suitcase .
but before i show you what i 've got inside , i 'm going to make a very public confession , and that is , i 'm outfit-obsessed .
i love finding , wearing , and more recently , photographing and blogging a different , colorful , crazy outfit for every single occasion .
but i do n't buy anything new .
i get all my clothes secondhand from flea markets and thrift stores .
aww , thank you .
secondhand shopping allows me to reduce the impact my wardrobe has on the environment and on my wallet .
i get to meet all kinds of great people ; my dollars usually go to a good cause ; i look pretty unique ; and it makes shopping like my own personal treasure hunt .
i mean , what am i going to find today ?
is it going to be my size ?
will i like the color ?
will it be under $ 20 ?
if all the answers are yes , i feel as though i 've won .
i want to get back to my suitcase and tell you what i packed for this exciting week here at ted .
i mean , what does somebody with all these outfits bring with her ?
so i 'm going to show you exactly what i brought .
i brought seven pairs of underpants and that 's it .
exactly one week 's worth of undies is all i put in my suitcase .
i was betting that i 'd be able to find everything else i could possible want to wear once i got here to palm springs .
and since you do n't know me as the woman walking around ted in her underwear - -lrb- laughter -rrb- that means i found a few things .
and i 'd really love to show you my week 's worth of outfits right now .
does that sound good ?
-lrb- applause -rrb- so as i do this , i 'm also going to tell you a few of the life lessons that , believe it or not , i have picked up in these adventures wearing nothing new .
so let 's start with sunday .
i call this " shiny tiger . "
you do not have to spend a lot of money to look great .
you can almost always look phenomenal for under $ 50 .
this whole outfit , including the jacket , cost me $ 55 , and it was the most expensive thing that i wore the entire week .
monday : color is powerful .
it is almost physiologically impossible to be in a bad mood when you 're wearing bright red pants .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- if you are happy , you are going to attract other happy people to you .
tuesday : fitting in is way overrated .
i 've spent a whole lot of my life trying to be myself and at the same time fit in .
just be who you are .
if you are surrounding yourself with the right people , they will not only get it , they will appreciate it .
wednesday : embrace your inner child .
sometimes people tell me that i look like i 'm playing dress-up , or that i remind them of their seven-year-old .
i like to smile and say , " thank you . "
thursday : confidence is key .
if you think you look good in something , you almost certainly do .
and if you do n't think you look good in something , you 're also probably right .
i grew up with a mom who taught me this day-in and day-out .
but it was n't until i turned 30 that i really got what this meant .
and i 'm going to break it down for you for just a second .
if you believe you 're a beautiful person inside and out , there is no look that you ca n't pull off .
so there is no excuse for any of us here in this audience .
we should be able to rock anything we want to rock .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- friday : a universal truth - five words for you : gold sequins go with everything .
and finally , saturday : developing your own unique personal style is a really great way to tell the world something about you without having to say a word .
it 's been proven to me time and time again as people have walked up to me this week simply because of what i 'm wearing , and we 've had great conversations .
so obviously this is not all going to fit back in my tiny suitcase .
so before i go home to brooklyn , i 'm going to donate everything back .
because the lesson i 'm trying to learn myself this week is that it 's okay to let go .
i do n't need to get emotionally attached to these things because around the corner , there is always going to be another crazy , colorful , shiny outfit just waiting for me , if i put a little love in my heart and look .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this is about a place in london called kiteflyer 's hill where i used to go and spend hours going " when is he coming back ? when is he coming back ? "
so this is another one dedicated to that guy ...
who i 've got over .
but this is " kiteflyer 's hill . "
it 's a beautiful song written by a guy called martin evan , actually , for me .
boo hewerdine , thomas dolby , thank you very much for inviting me . it 's been a blessing singing for you .
thank you very much .
♫ do you remember when we used to go ♫ ♫ up to kiteflyer 's hill ? ♫ ♫ those summer nights , so still ♫ ♫ with all of the city beneath us ♫ ♫ and all of our lives ahead ♫ ♫ before cruel and foolish words ♫ ♫ were cruelly and foolishly said ♫ ♫ some nights i think of you ♫ ♫ and then i go up ♫ ♫ on kiteflyer 's hill ♫ ♫ wrapped up against the winter chill ♫ ♫ and somewhere in the city beneath me ♫ ♫ you lie asleep in your bed ♫
♫ and i wonder if ever just briefly ♫ ♫ do i creep in your dreams now and then ♫ ♫ where are you now ? ♫ ♫ my wild summer love ♫ ♫ where are you now ? ♫ ♫ have the years been kind ? ♫ ♫ and do you think of me sometimes ♫ ♫ up on kiteflyer 's hill ? ♫ ♫ oh , i pray you one day will ♫ ♫ we wo n't say a word ♫ ♫ we wo n't need them ♫ ♫ sometimes silence is best ♫ ♫ we 'll just stand in the still of the evening ♫
♫ and whisper farewell to loneliness ♫ ♫ where are you now ? ♫ ♫ my wild summer love ♫ ♫ where are you now ? ♫ ♫ do you think of me sometimes ? ♫ ♫ and do you ever make that climb ? ♫ ♫ where are you now ? ♫ ♫ my wild summer love ♫ ♫ where are you now ? ♫ ♫ have the years been kind ? ♫ ♫ and do you ever make that climb ♫ ♫ up on kiteflyer 's hill ? kiteflyer 's ... ♫ ♫ -lsb- french -rsb- ♫ ♫ where are you ? where are you now ? ♫ ♫ where are you now ? ♫
♫ kiteflyer 's ... ♫ -lrb- applause -rrb- gracias . thank you very much .
i was asked by wilsonart international , a plastic laminate company , which is the largest plastic laminate company in the world - they asked me to design a trade show booth for exhibition at the international contemporary furniture fair in new york , in 2000 .
so looking at their three main markets for their product which were basically transportation design , interiors and furniture , we came up with the solution of taking an old airstream trailer and gutting it , and trying to portray laminate , and a trailer , in kind of a fresh , new contemporary look .
when this trailer showed up at my shop in berkeley , i 'd actually never stepped foot in an airstream trailer , or any other trailer .
so i can be somebody that can look at this in a totally fresh perspective and see if i can optimize it in its most idealistic fashion .
i decided i had to do some research and really figure out what had gone wrong somewhere along the history of airstream .
what i discovered in these interiors is that there was a disconnect between the exterior shell and the interior architecture of the pieces .
in that the shell was originally conceived as a lightweight , modern , futuristic , high-tech pod for hurtling down the freeway , and the interiors were completely out of sync with that .
in fact it appeared like they referenced a mountain cabin .
that seemed really like a crisis to me , that they had never been able to develop a vocabulary about escape , and about travel , and modernity in this trailer that was consistent with the shell .
we really needed to do some archeology in the trailer itself to figure out what 's authentic in an airstream trailer , and what feels like it has true purpose and utility .
we stripped out all the vinyl and zolatone paint that was covering up this just fantastic aluminum shell .
we took off all the visible hardware and trim that was kind of doing the country cabin thing .
i literally drew on the walls of the trailer , mocked it up in cardboard , we 'd come in and cut , decide things were wrong , pull it out , put it back in .
the main goal was to smooth out the interior , and begin to speak about motion , and mobility , and independence .
the biggest difficulty on one of these trailers is that when you 're designing there 's actually no logical place to stop and start materials because of the continuous form of the trailer .
there 's no such things as two walls and a ceiling coming together , where you can change materials and shapes .
so that became a challenge .
compounding that , the material of choice , laminate , that i was trying to highlight , only bends in two dimensions .
it 's a compound curve interior .
what i had to devise was a way of fooling the eye into believing that all these panels are curved with the shell .
what i came up with was a series of second skins that basically float over the aluminum shell .
and what i was trying to do there was direct your eye in the space , so that you would perceive the geometry in a different way , and that the casework would n't break up the space .
they also gave us a way to run power and rewire the trailer without tearing out the skin , so they function as an electrical chase .
that 's the trailer , pretty much finished .
that trailer led to another commission , to participate in whats called tokyo designers block .
its a week of furniture design events in tokyo , in october .
teruo kurosaki , who owns a furniture company called idee , he asked me to ship him two trailers to tokyo .
he said one he would like to make a real trailer , functioning , and we would sell that one .
trailer number two , you have a blank slate , you can to anything you want .
we came up with a fantasy scenario of a dj traveling around the states , that would collect records and go on tours .
this trailer housed two turntables , mixer , wet bar , fridge , integrated sound system .
it 's got a huge couch , fits quite a few people , and basically we 'd had a great time with this .
and so in this trailer i took it upon myself to think about travel , and escape , in an idiosyncratic sense .
a lot of these ideas migrated into the production trailers for airstream .
this brings us up to the time that i started consulting to airstream .
they came to me and said , " well , what can we do to freshen this thing up ?
and do you think kids , you know , skateboarders , surfers , rock climbers , would use these things ? "
and i said , " well , not in that interior . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- anyway , i went out to airstream about six times during the process of building this prototype , and it 's called the bambi prototype .
i thought , " finally , oh yeah great , big company , i 'm gonna work with somebody with money for tooling and molding . "
and i walked in their prototype facility , and it 's exactly like my shop , only bigger - same tools , same things .
so the problem became - and they set this dilemma to me - that you have to design the interior using only our existing technology , and there 's no money for tooling or molding .
the trailers themselves are actually hand-built .
all the casework is hand-scribed in , uniquely , so you ca n't just cut 100 parts for 100 trailers , you have to cut them big , and every single one is hand-fit .
they did n't want to go to a componentized system .
and there it is , that 's the bambi 16 .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm a pediatrician and an anesthesiologist , so i put children to sleep for a living .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i 'm an academic , so i put audiences to sleep for free .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but what i actually mostly do is i manage the pain management service at the packard children 's hospital up at stanford in palo alto .
and it 's from the experience from about 20 or 25 years of doing that that i want to bring to you the message this morning , that pain is a disease .
now most of the time , you think of pain as a symptom of a disease , and that 's true most of the time .
it 's the symptom of a tumor or an infection or an inflammation or an operation .
but about 10 percent of the time , after the patient has recovered from one of those events , pain persists .
it persists for months and oftentimes for years , and when that happens , it is its own disease .
and before i tell you about how it is that we think that happens and what we can do about it , i want to show you how it feels for my patients .
so imagine , if you will , that i 'm stroking your arm with this feather , as i 'm stroking my arm right now .
now , i want you to imagine that i 'm stroking it with this .
please keep your seat .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- a very different feeling .
now what does it have to do with chronic pain ?
imagine , if you will , these two ideas together .
imagine what your life would be like if i were to stroke it with this feather , but your brain was telling you that this is what you are feeling - and that is the experience of my patients with chronic pain .
in fact , imagine something even worse .
imagine i were to stroke your child 's arm with this feather , and their brain -lsb- was -rsb- telling them that they were feeling this hot torch .
that was the experience of my patient , chandler , whom you see in the photograph .
as you can see , she 's a beautiful , young woman .
she was 16 years old last year when i met her , and she aspired to be a professional dancer .
and during the course of one of her dance rehearsals , she fell on her outstretched arm and sprained her wrist .
now you would probably imagine , as she did , that a wrist sprain is a trivial event in a person 's life .
wrap it in an ace bandage , take some ibuprofen for a week or two , and that 's the end of the story .
but in chandler 's case , that was the beginning of the story .
this is what her arm looked like when she came to my clinic about three months after her sprain .
you can see that the arm is discolored , purplish in color .
it was cadaverically cold to the touch .
the muscles were frozen , paralyzed - dystonic is how we refer to that .
the pain had spread from her wrist to her hands , to her fingertips , from her wrist up to her elbow , almost all the way to her shoulder .
but the worst part was , not the spontaneous pain that was there 24 hours a day .
the worst part was that she had allodynia , the medical term for the phenomenon that i just illustrated with the feather and with the torch .
the lightest touch of her arm - the touch of a hand , the touch even of a sleeve , of a garment , as she put it on - caused excruciating , burning pain .
how can the nervous system get this so wrong ?
how can the nervous system misinterpret an innocent sensation like the touch of a hand and turn it into the malevolent sensation of the touch of the flame ?
well you probably imagine that the nervous system in the body is hardwired like your house .
in your house , wires run in the wall , from the light switch to a junction box in the ceiling and from the junction box to the light bulb .
and when you turn the switch on , the light goes on .
and when you turn the switch off , the light goes off .
so people imagine the nervous system is just like that .
if you hit your thumb with a hammer , these wires in your arm - that , of course , we call nerves - transmit the information into the junction box in the spinal cord where new wires , new nerves , take the information up to the brain where you become consciously aware that your thumb is now hurt .
but the situation , of course , in the human body is far more complicated than that .
instead of it being the case that that junction box in the spinal cord is just simple where one nerve connects with the next nerve by releasing these little brown packets of chemical information called neurotransmitters in a linear one-on-one fashion , in fact , what happens is the neurotransmitters spill out in three dimensions - laterally , vertically , up and down in the spinal cord - and they start interacting with other adjacent cells .
these cells , called glial cells , were once thought to be unimportant structural elements of the spinal cord that did nothing more than hold all the important things together , like the nerves .
but it turns out the glial cells have a vital role in the modulation , amplification and , in the case of pain , the distortion of sensory experiences .
these glial cells become activated .
their dna starts to synthesize new proteins , which spill out and interact with adjacent nerves , and they start releasing their neurotransmitters , and those neurotransmitters spill out and activate adjacent glial cells , and so on and so forth , until what we have is a positive feedback loop .
it 's almost as if somebody came into your home and rewired your walls so that the next time you turned on the light switch , the toilet flushed three doors down , or your dishwasher went on , or your computer monitor turned off .
that 's crazy , but that 's , in fact , what happens with chronic pain .
and that 's why pain becomes its own disease .
the nervous system has plasticity .
it changes , and it morphs in response to stimuli .
well , what do we do about that ?
what can we do in a case like chandler 's ?
we treat these patients in a rather crude fashion at this point in time .
we treat them with symptom-modifying drugs - painkillers - which are , frankly , not very effective for this kind of pain .
we take nerves that are noisy and active that should be quiet , and we put them to sleep with local anesthetics .
and most importantly , what we do is we use a rigorous , and often uncomfortable , process of physical therapy and occupational therapy to retrain the nerves in the nervous system to respond normally to the activities and sensory experiences that are part of everyday life .
and we support all of that with an intensive psychotherapy program to address the despondency , despair and depression that always accompanies severe , chronic pain .
it 's successful , as you can see from this video of chandler , who , two months after we first met her , is now doings a back flip .
and i had lunch with her yesterday because she 's a college student studying dance at long beach here , and she 's doing absolutely fantastic .
but the future is actually even brighter .
the future holds the promise that new drugs will be developed that are not symptom-modifying drugs that simply mask the problem , as we have now , but that will be disease-modifying drugs that will actually go right to the root of the problem and attack those glial cells , or those pernicious proteins that the glial cells elaborate , that spill over and cause this central nervous system wind-up , or plasticity , that so is capable of distorting and amplifying the sensory experience that we call pain .
so i have hope that in the future , the prophetic words of george carlin will be realized , who said , " my philosophy : no pain , no pain . "
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- today i 'm going to take you on a voyage to some place so deep , so dark , so unexplored that we know less about it than we know about the dark side of the moon .
it 's a place of myth and legend .
it 's a place marked on ancient maps as " here be monsters . "
it is a place where each new voyage of exploration brings back new discoveries of creatures so wondrous and strange that our forefathers would have considered them monstrous indeed .
instead , they just make me green with envy that my colleague from iucn was able to go on this journey to the south of madagascar seamounts to actually take photographs and to see these wondrous creatures of the deep .
we are talking about the high seas .
the " high seas " is a legal term , but in fact , it covers 50 percent of the planet .
with an average depth of the oceans of 4,000 meters , in fact , the high seas covers and provides nearly 90 percent of the habitat for life on this earth .
it is , in theory , the global commons , belonging to us all .
but in reality , it is managed by and for those who have the resources to go out and exploit it .
so today i 'm going to take you on a voyage to cast light on some of the outdated myths and legends and assumptions that have kept us as the true stakeholders in the high seas in the dark .
we 're going to voyage to some of these special places that we 've been discovering in the past few years to show why we really need to care .
and then finally , we 're going to try to develop and pioneer a new perspective on high seas governance that 's rooted in ocean-basin-wide conservation , but framed in an arena of global norms of precaution and respect .
so here is a picture of the high seas as seen from above - that area in the darker blue .
to me , as an international lawyer , this scared me far more than any of the creatures or the monsters we may have seen , for it belies the notion that you can actually protect the ocean , the global ocean , that provides us all with carbon storage , with heat storage , with oxygen , if you can only protect 36 percent .
this is indeed the true heart of the planet .
some of the problems that we have to confront are that the current international laws - for example , shipping - provide more protection to the areas closest to shore .
for example , garbage discharge , something you would think just simply goes away , but the laws regulating ship discharge of garbage actually get weaker the further you are from shore .
as a result , we have garbage patches the size of twice-texas .
it 's unbelievable .
we used to think the solution to pollution was dilution , but that has proved to be no longer the case .
so what we have learned from social scientists and economists like elinor ostrom , who are studying the phenomenon of management of the commons on a local scale , is that there are certain prerequisites that you can put into place that enable you to manage and access open space for the good of one and all .
and these include a sense of shared responsibility , common norms that bind people together as a community .
conditional access : you can invite people in , but they have to be able to play by the rules .
and of course , if you want people to play by the rules , you still need an effective system of monitoring and enforcement , for as we 've discovered , you can trust , but you also need to verify .
what i 'd also like to convey is that it is not all doom and gloom that we are seeing in the high seas .
for a group of very dedicated individuals - scientists , conservationists , photographers and states - were able to actually change a tragic trajectory that was destroying fragile seascapes such as this coral garden that you see in front of you .
that is , we 're able to save it from a fate of deep-sea bottom trawling .
and how did we do that ?
well , as i said , we had a group of photographers that went out on board ships and actually photographed the activities in process .
but we also spent many hours in the basements of the united nations , trying to work with governments to make them understand what was going on so far away from land that few of us had ever even imagined that these creatures existed .
so within three years , from 2003 to 2006 , we were able to get norm in place that actually changed the paradigm of how fishers went about deep-sea bottom trawling .
instead of " go anywhere , do anything you want , " we actually created a regime that required prior assessment of where you 're going and a duty to prevent significant harm .
in 2009 , when the u.n. reviewed progress , they discovered that almost 100 million square-kilometers of seabed had been protected .
this does not mean that it 's the final solution , or that this even provides permanent protection .
but what it does mean is that a group of individuals can form a community to actually shape the way high seas are governed , to create a new regime .
so i 'm looking optimistically at our opportunities for creating a true , blue perspective for this beautiful planet .
sylvia 's wish provides us with that leverage , that access to the heart of human beings , you might say , who have rarely seen places beyond their own toes , but are now hopefully going to become interested in the full life-cycle of creatures like these sea turtles , who indeed spend most of their time in the high seas .
today , we 're just going to voyage to a small sampling of some of these special areas , just to give you an idea of the flavor of the riches and wonders they do contain .
the sargasso sea , for example , is not a sea bounded by coastlines , but it is bounded by oceanic currents that contain and envelope this wealth of sargassum that grows and aggregates there .
it 's also known as the spawning ground for eels from northern european and northern american rivers that are now so dwindling in numbers that they 've actually stopped showing up in stockholm , and five showed up in the u.k. just recently .
but the sargasso sea , the same way it aggregates sargassum weed , actually is pulling in the plastic from throughout the region .
this picture does n't exactly show the plastics that i would like it to show , because i have n't been out there myself .
but there has just been a study that was released in february that showed there are 200,000 pieces of plastic per square-kilometer now floating in the surface of the sargasso sea , and that is affecting the habitat for the many species in their juvenile stages who come to the sargasso sea for its protection and its food .
the sargasso sea is also a wondrous place for the aggregation of these unique species that have developed to mimic the sargassum habitat .
it also provides a special habitat for these flying fish to lay their eggs .
but what i 'd like to get from this picture is that we truly do have an opportunity to launch a global initiative for protection .
thus , the government of bermuda has recognized the need and its responsibility as having some of the sargasso sea within its national jurisdiction - but the vast majority is beyond - to help spearhead a movement to achieve protection for this vital area .
spinning down to someplace a little bit cooler than here right now : the ross sea in the southern ocean .
it 's actually a bay .
it 's considered high seas , because the continent has been put off limits to territorial claims .
so anything in the water is treated as if it 's the high seas .
but what makes the ross sea important is the vast sea of pack ice that in the spring and summer provides a wealth of phytoplankton and krill that supports what , till recently , has been a virtually intact near-shore ecosystem .
but unfortunately , ccamlr , the regional commission in charge of conserving and managing fish stocks and other living marine resources , is unfortunately starting to give in to fishing interests and has authorized the expansion of toothfish fisheries in the region .
the captain of a new zealand vessel who was just down there is reporting a significant decline in the number of the ross sea killer whales , who are directly dependent on the antarctic toothfish as their main source of food .
so what we need to do is to stand up boldly , singly and together , to push governments , to push regional fisheries management organizations , to declare our right to declare certain areas off-limits to high seas fishing , so that the freedom to fish no longer means the freedom to fish anywhere and anytime .
coming closer to here , the costa rica dome is a recently discovered area - potentially year-round habitat for blue whales .
there 's enough food there to last them the summer and the winter long .
but what 's unusual about the costa rica dome is , in fact , it 's not a permanent place .
it 's an oceanographic phenomenon that shifts in time and space on a seasonal basis .
so , in fact , it 's not permanently in the high seas .
it 's not permanently in the exclusive economic zones of these five central american countries , but it moves with the season .
as such , it does create a challenge to protect , but we also have a challenge protecting the species that move along with it .
we can use the same technologies that fishers use to identify where the species are , in order to close the area when it 's most vulnerable , which may , in some cases , be year-round .
getting closer to shore , where we are , this was in fact taken in the galapagos .
many species are headed through this region , which is why there 's been so much attention put into conservation of the eastern tropical pacific seascape .
this is the initiative that 's been coordinated by conservation international with a variety of partners and governments to actually try to bring integrated management regime throughout the area .
that is , it provides a wonderful example of where you can go with a real regional initiative .
it 's protecting five world heritage sites .
unfortunately , the world heritage convention does not recognize the need to protect areas beyond national jurisdiction , at present .
so a place like the costa rica dome could not technically qualify the time it 's in the high seas .
so what we 've been suggesting is that we either need to amend the world heritage convention , so that it can adopt and urge universal protection of these world heritage sites , or we need to change the name and call it half-the-world heritage convention .
but what we also know is that species like these sea turtles do not stay put in the eastern tropical pacific seascape .
these happen to go down to a vast south pacific gyre , where they spend most of their time and often end up getting hooked like this , or as bycatch .
so what i 'd really like to suggest is that we need to scale-up .
we need to work locally , but we also need to work ocean-basin-wide .
we have the tools and technologies now to enable us to take a broader ocean-basin-wide initiative .
we 've heard about the tagging of pacific predators project , one of the 17 census of marine life projects .
it 's provided us data like this , of tiny , little sooty shearwaters that make the entire ocean basin their home .
they fly 65,000 kilometers in less than a year .
so we have the tools and treasures coming from the census of marine life .
and its culminating year that 's going to be launched in october .
so stay tuned for further information .
what i find so exciting is that the census of marine life has looked at more than the tagging of pacific predators ; it 's also looked in the really unexplored mid-water column , where creatures like this flying sea cucumber have been found .
and fortunately , we 've been able , as iucn , to team up with the census of marine life and many of the scientists working there to actually try to translate much of this information to policymakers .
we have the support of governments now behind us .
we 've been revealing this information through technical workshops .
and the exciting thing is that we do have sufficient information to move ahead to protect some of these significant hope spots , hotspots .
at the same time we 're saying , " yes , we need more . we need to move forward . "
but many of you have said , if you get these marine protected areas , or a reasonable regime for high seas fisheries management in place , how are you going to enforce it ?
which leads me to my second passion besides ocean science , which is outer space technology .
i wanted to be an astronaut , so i 've constantly followed what are the tools available to monitor earth from outer space - and that we have incredible tools like we 've been learning about , in terms of being able to follow tagged species throughout their life-cycles in the open ocean .
we can also tag and track fishing vessels .
many already have transponders on board that allow us to find out where they are and even what they 're doing .
but not all the vessels have those to date .
it does not take too much rocket science to actually try to create new laws to mandate , if you 're going to have the privilege of accessing our high seas resources , we need to know - someone needs to know - where you are and what you 're doing .
so it brings me to my main take-home message , which is we can avert a tragedy of the commons .
we can stop the collision course of 50 percent of the planet with the high seas .
but we need to think broad-scale . we need to think globally .
we need to change how we actually go about managing these resources .
we need to get the new paradigm of precaution and respect .
at the same time , we need to think locally , which is the joy and marvel of sylvia 's hope spot wish , is that we can shine a spotlight on many of these previously unknown areas , and to bring people to the table , if you will , to actually make them feel part of this community that truly has a stake in their future management .
and third is that we need to look at ocean-basin-wide management .
our species are ocean-basin-wide .
many of the deep-sea communities have genetic distribution that goes ocean-basin-wide .
we need to better understand , but we also need to start to manage and protect .
and in order to do that , you also need ocean-basin management regimes .
that is , we have regional management regimes within the exclusive economic zone , but we need to scale these up , we need to build their capacity , so they 're like the southern ocean , where they do have the two-pronged fisheries and conservation organization .
so with that , i would just like to sincerely thank and honor sylvia earle for her wish , for it is helping us to put a face on the high seas and the deep seas beyond national jurisdiction .
it 's helping to bring an incredible group of talented people together to really try to solve and penetrate these problems that have created our obstacles to management and rational use of this area that was once so far away and remote .
so on this tour , i hope i provided you with a new perspective of the high seas : one , that it is our home too , and that we need to work together if we are to make this a sustainable ocean future for us all .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i want to share with you over the next 18 minutes a pretty incredible idea .
actually , it 's a really big idea .
but to get us started , i want to ask if everyone could just close your eyes for two seconds and try and think of a technology or a bit of science that you think has changed the world .
now i bet , in this audience , you 're thinking of some really incredible technology , some stuff that i have n't even heard of , i 'm absolutely sure .
but i 'm also sure , pretty sure , that absolutely nobody is thinking of this .
this is a polio vaccine .
and it 's a great thing actually that nobody 's had to think about it here today because it means that we can take this for granted .
this is a great technology .
we can take it completely for granted .
but it was n't always that way .
even here in california , if we were to go back just a few years , it was a very different story .
people were terrified of this disease .
they were terrified of polio , and it would cause public panic .
and it was because of scenes like this .
in this scene , people are living in an iron lung .
these are people who were perfectly healthy two or three days before , and then two days later , they can no longer breathe , and this polio virus has paralyzed not only their arms and their legs , but also their breathing muscles .
and they were going to spend the rest of their lives , usually , in this iron lung to breathe for them .
this disease was terrifying .
there was no cure , and there was no vaccine .
the disease was so terrifying that the president of the united states launched an extraordinary national effort to find a way to stop it .
twenty years later , they succeeded and developed the polio vaccine .
it was hailed as a scientific miracle in the late 1950s .
finally , a vaccine that could stop this awful disease , and here in the united states it had an incredible impact .
as you can see , the virus stopped , and it stopped very , very fast .
but this was n't the case everywhere in the world .
and it happened so fast in the united states , however , that even just last month jon stewart said this : -lrb- video -rrb- jon stewart : where is polio still active ?
because i thought that had been eradicated in the way that smallpox had been eradicated .
bruce aylward : oops . jon , polio 's almost been eradicated .
but the reality is that polio still exists today .
we made this map for jon to try to show him exactly where polio still exists .
this is the picture .
there 's not very much left in the world .
but the reason there 's not very much left is because there 's been an extraordinary public / private partnership working behind the scenes , almost unknown , i 'm sure to most of you here today .
it 's been working for 20 years to try and eradicate this disease , and it 's got it down to these few cases that you can see here on this graphic .
but just last year , we had an incredible shock and realized that almost just is n't good enough with a virus like polio .
and this is the reason : in two countries that had n't had this disease for more than probably a decade , on opposite sides of the globe , there was suddenly terrible polio outbreaks .
hundreds of people were paralyzed .
hundreds of people died - children as well as adults .
and in both cases , we were able to use genetic sequencing to look at the polio viruses , and we could tell these viruses were not from these countries .
they had come from thousands of miles away .
and in one case , it originated on another continent .
and not only that , but when they came into these countries , then they got on commercial jetliners probably and they traveled even farther to other places like russia , where , for the first time in over a decade last year , children were crippled and paralyzed by a disease that they had not seen for years .
now all of these outbreaks that i just showed you , these are under control now , and it looks like they 'll probably stop very , very quickly .
but the message was very clear .
polio is still a devastating , explosive disease .
it 's just happening in another part of the world .
and our big idea is that the scientific miracle of this decade should be the complete eradication of poliomyelitis .
so i want to tell you a little bit about what this partnership , the polio partnership , is trying to do .
we 're not trying to control polio .
we 're not trying to get it down to just a few cases , because this disease is like a root fire ; it can explode again if you do n't snuff it out completely .
so what we 're looking for is a permanent solution .
we want a world in which every child , just like you guys , can take for granted a polio-free world .
so we 're looking for a permanent solution , and this is where we get lucky .
this is one of the very few viruses in the world where there are big enough cracks in its armor that we can try to do something truly extraordinary .
this virus can only survive in people .
it ca n't live for a very long time in people .
it does n't survive in the environment hardly at all .
and we 've got pretty good vaccines , as i 've just showed you .
so we are trying to wipe out this virus completely .
what the polio eradication program is trying to do is to kill the virus itself that causes polio everywhere on earth .
now we do n't have a great track record when it comes to doing something like this , to eradicating diseases .
it 's been tried six times in the last century , and it 's been successful exactly once .
and this is because disease eradication , it 's still the venture capital of public health .
the risks are massive , but the pay-off - economic , humanitarian , motivational - it 's absolutely huge .
one congressman here in the united states thinks that the entire investment that the u.s. put into smallpox eradication pays itself off every 26 days - in foregone treatment costs and vaccination costs .
and if we can finish polio eradication , the poorest countries in the world are going to save over 50 billion dollars in the next 25 years alone .
so those are the kind of stakes that we 're after .
but smallpox eradication was hard ; it was very , very hard .
and polio eradication , in many ways , is even tougher , and there 's a few reasons for that .
the first is that , when we started trying to eradicate polio about 20 years ago , more than twice as many countries were infected than had been when we started off with smallpox .
and there were more than 10 times as many people living in these countries .
so it was a massive effort .
the second challenge we had was - in contrast to the smallpox vaccine , which was very stable , and a single dose protected you for life - the polio vaccine is incredibly fragile .
it deteriorates so quickly in the tropics that we 've had to put this special vaccine monitor on every single vial so that it will change very quickly when it 's exposed to too much heat , and we can tell that it 's not a good vaccine to use on a child - it 's not potent ; it 's not going to protect them .
even then , kids need many doses of the vaccine .
but the third challenge we have - and probably even bigger one , the biggest challenge - is that , in contrast to smallpox where you could always see your enemy - every single person almost who was infected with smallpox had this telltale rash .
so you could get around the disease ; you could vaccinate around the disease and cut it off .
with polio it 's almost completely different .
the vast majority of people who are infected with the polio virus show absolutely no sign of the disease .
so you ca n't see the enemy most of the time , and as a result , we 've needed a very different approach to eradicate polio than what was done with smallpox .
we 've had to create one of the largest social movements in history .
there 's over 10 million people , probably 20 million people , largely volunteers , who have been working over the last 20 years in what has now been called the largest internationally-coordinated operation in peacetime .
these people , these 20 million people , vaccinate over 500 million children every single year , multiple times at the peak of our operation .
now giving the polio vaccine is simple .
it 's just two drops , like that .
but reaching 500 million people is much , much tougher .
and these vaccinators , these volunteers , they have got to dive headlong into some of the toughest , densest urban slums in the world .
they 've got to trek under sweltering suns to some of the most remote , difficult to reach places in the world .
and they also have to dodge bullets , because we have got to operate during shaky cease-fires and truces to try and vaccinate children , even in areas affected by conflict .
one reporter who was watching our program in somalia about five years ago - a place which has eradicated polio , not once , but twice , because they got reinfected .
he was sitting outside of the road , watching one of these polio campaigns unfold , and a few months later he wrote : " this is foreign aid at its most heroic . "
and these heroes , they come from every walk of life , all sorts of backgrounds .
but one of the most extraordinary is rotary international .
this is a group whose million-strong army of volunteers have been working to eradicate polio for over 20 years .
they 're right at the center of the whole thing .
now it took years to build up the infrastructure for polio eradication - more than 15 years , much longer than it should have - but once it was built , the results were striking .
within a couple of years , every country that started polio eradication rapidly eradicated all three of their polio viruses , with the exception of four countries that you see here .
and in each of those , it was only part of the country .
and then , by 1999 , one of the three polio viruses that we were trying to eradicate had been completely eradicated worldwide - proof of concept .
and then today , there 's been a 99 percent reduction - greater than 99 percent reduction - in the number of children who are being paralyzed by this awful disease .
when we started , over 20 years ago , 1,000 children were being paralyzed every single day by this virus .
last year , it was 1,000 .
and at the same time , the polio eradication program has been working to help with a lot of other areas .
it 's been working to help control pandemic flu , sars for example .
it 's also tried to save children by doing other things - giving vitamin a drops , giving measles shots , giving bed nets against malaria even during some of these campaigns .
but the most exciting thing that the polio eradication program has been doing has been to force us , the international community , to reach every single child , every single community , the most vulnerable people in the world , with the most basic of health services , irrespective of geography , poverty , culture and even conflict .
so things were looking very exciting , and then about five years ago , this virus , this ancient virus , started to fight back .
the first problem we ran into was that , in these last four countries , the strongholds of this virus , we just could n't seem to get the virus rooted out .
and then to make the matters even worse , the virus started to spread out of these four places , especially northern india and northern nigeria , into much of africa , asia , and even into europe , causing horrific outbreaks in places that had not seen this disease for decades .
and then , in one of the most important , tenacious and toughest reservoirs of the polio virus in the world , we found that our vaccine was working half as well as it should have .
in conditions like this , the vaccine just could n't get the grip it needed to in the guts of these children and protect them the way that it needed to .
now at that time , there was a great , as you can imagine , frustration - let 's call it frustration - it started to grow very , very quickly .
and all of a sudden , some very important voices in the world of public health started to say , " hang on .
we should abandon this idea of eradication .
let 's settle for control - that 's good enough . "
now as seductive as the idea of control sounds , it 's a false premise .
the brutal truth is , if we do n't have the will or the skill , or even the money that we need to reach children , the most vulnerable children in the world , with something as simple as an oral polio vaccine , then pretty soon , more than 200,000 children are again going to be paralyzed by this disease every single year .
there 's absolutely no question .
these are children like umar .
umar is seven years old , and he 's from northern nigeria .
he lives in a family home there with his eight brothers and sisters .
umar also has polio .
umar was paralyzed for life .
his right leg was paralyzed in 2004 .
this leg , his right leg , now takes an awful beating because he has to half-crawl , because it 's faster to move that way to keep up with his friends , keep up with his brothers and sisters , than to get up on his crutches and walk .
but umar is a fantastic student . he 's an incredible kid .
as you probably ca n't see the detail here , but this is his report card , and you 'll see , he 's got perfect scores .
he got 100 percent in all the important things , like nursery rhymes , for example there .
but you know i 'd love to be able to tell you that umar is a typical kid with polio these days , but it 's not true .
umar is an exceptional kid in exceptional circumstances .
the reality of polio today is something very different .
polio strikes the poorest communities in the world .
it leaves their children paralyzed , and it drags their families deeper into poverty , because they 're desperately searching and they 're desperately spending the little bit of savings that they have , trying in vain to find a cure for their children .
we think children deserve better .
and so when the going got really tough in the polio eradication program about two years ago , when people were saying , " we should call it off , " the polio partnership decided to buckle down once again and try and find innovative new solutions , new ways to get to the children that we were missing again and again .
in northern india , we started mapping the cases using satellite imaging like this , so that we could guide our investments and vaccinator shelters , so we could get to the millions of children on the koshi river basin where there are no other health services .
in northern nigeria , the political leaders and the traditional muslim leaders , they got directly involved in the program to help solve the problems of logistics and community confidence .
and now they 've even started using these devices - speaking of cool technology - these little devices , little gis trackers like this , which they put into the vaccine carriers of their vaccinators .
and then they can track them , and at the end of the day , they look and see , did these guys get every single street , every single house .
this is the kind of commitment now we 're seeing to try and reach all of the children we 've been missing .
and in afghanistan , we 're trying new approaches - access negotiators .
we 're working closely with the international committee of the red cross to ensure that we can reach every child .
but as we tried these extraordinary things , as people went to this trouble to try and rework their tactics , we went back to the vaccine - it 's a 50-year-old vaccine - and we thought , surely we can make a better vaccine , so that when they finally get to these kids , we can have a better bang for our buck .
and this started an incredible collaboration with industry , and within six months , we were testing a new polio vaccine that targeted , just two years ago , the last two types of polio in the world .
now june the ninth , 2009 , we got the first results from the first trial with this vaccine , and it turned out to be a game-changer .
the new vaccine had twice the impact on these last couple of viruses as the old vaccine had , and we immediately started using this .
well , in a couple of months we had to get it out of production .
and it started rolling off the production lines and into the mouths of children around the world .
and we did n't start with the easy places .
the first place this vaccine was used was in southern afghanistan , because it 's in places like that where kids are going to benefit the most from technologies like this .
now here at ted , over the last couple of days , i 've seen people challenging the audience again and again to believe in the impossible .
so this morning at about seven o 'clock , i decided that we 'd try to drive chris and the production crew here berserk by downloading all of our data from india again , so that you could see something that 's just unfolding today , which proves that the impossible is possible .
and only two years ago , people were saying that this is impossible .
now remember , northern india is the perfect storm when it comes to polio .
over 500,000 children are born in the two states that have never stopped polio - uttar pradesh and bihar - 500,000 children every single month .
sanitation is terrible , and our old vaccine , you remember , worked half as well as it should have .
and yet , the impossible is happening .
today marks exactly six months - and for the first time in history , not a single child has been paralyzed in uttar pradesh or bihar .
-lrb- applause -rrb- india 's not unique .
in umar 's home country of nigeria , a 95 percent reduction in the number of children paralyzed by polio last year .
and in the last six months , we 've had less places reinfected by polio than at any other time in history .
ladies and gentlemen , with a combination of smart people , smart technology and smart investments , polio can now be eradicated anywhere .
we have major challenges , you can imagine , to finish this job , but as you 've also seen , it 's doable , it has great secondary benefits , and polio eradication is a great buy .
and as long as any child anywhere is paralyzed by this virus , it 's a stark reminder that we are failing , as a society , to reach children with the most basic of services .
and for that reason , polio eradication : it 's the ultimate in equity and it 's the ultimate in social justice .
the huge social movement that 's been involved in polio eradication is ready to do way more for these children .
it 's ready to reach them with bed nets , with other things .
but capitalizing on their enthusiasm , capitalizing on their energy means finishing the job that they started 20 years ago .
finishing polio is a smart thing to do , and it 's the right thing to do .
now we 're in tough times economically .
but as david cameron of the united kingdom said about a month ago when he was talking about polio , " there 's never a wrong time to do the right thing . "
finishing polio eradication is the right thing to do .
and we are at a crossroads right now in this great effort over the last 20 years .
we have a new vaccine , we have new resolve , and we have new tactics .
we have the chance to write an entirely new polio-free chapter in human history .
but if we blink now , we will lose forever the chance to eradicate an ancient disease .
here 's a great idea to spread : end polio now .
help us tell the story .
help us build the momentum so that very soon every child , every parent everywhere can also take for granted a polio-free life forever .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- bill gates : well bruce , where do you think the toughest places are going to be ?
where would you say we need to be the smartest ?
ba : the four places where you saw , that we 've never stopped - northern nigeria , northern india , the southern corner of afghanistan and bordering areas of pakistan - they 're going to be the toughest .
but the interesting thing is , of those three , india 's looking real good , as you just saw in the data .
and afghanistan , afghanistan , we think has probably stopped polio repeatedly .
it keeps getting reinfected .
so the tough ones : going to get the top of nigeria finished and getting pakistan finished .
they 're going to be the tough ones .
bg : now what about the money ?
give us a sense of how much the campaign costs a year .
and is it easy to raise that money ?
and what 's it going to be like the next couple of years ?
ba : it 's interesting .
we spend right now about 750 million to 800 million dollars a year .
that 's what it costs to reach 500 million children .
it sounds like a lot of money ; it is a lot of money .
but when you 're reaching 500 million children multiple times - 20 , 30 cents to reach a child - that 's not very much money .
but right now we do n't have enough of that .
we have a big gap in that money . we 're cutting corners , and every time we cut corners , more places get infected that should n't have , and it just slows us down .
and that great buy costs us a little bit more .
bg : well , hopefully we 'll get the word out , and the governments will keep their generosity up .
so good luck . we 're all in this with you .
thank you . -lrb- ba : thank you . -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- i grew up in new york city , between harlem and the bronx .
growing up as a boy , we were taught that men had to be tough , had to be strong , had to be courageous , dominating - no pain , no emotions , with the exception of anger - and definitely no fear ; that men are in charge , which means women are not ; that men lead , and you should just follow and do what we say ; that men are superior ; women are inferior ; that men are strong ; women are weak ; that women are of less value , property of men , and objects , particularly sexual objects .
i 've later come to know that to be the collective socialization of men , better known as the " man box . "
see this man box has in it all the ingredients of how we define what it means to be a man .
now i also want to say , without a doubt , there are some wonderful , wonderful , absolutely wonderful things about being a man .
but at the same time , there 's some stuff that 's just straight up twisted , and we really need to begin to challenge , look at it and really get in the process of deconstructing , redefining , what we come to know as manhood .
this is my two at home , kendall and jay .
they 're 11 and 12 .
kendall 's 15 months older than jay .
there was a period of time when my wife - her name is tammie - and i , we just got real busy and whip , bam , boom : kendall and jay .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and when they were about five and six , four and five , jay could come to me , come to me crying .
it did n't matter what she was crying about , she could get on my knee , she could snot my sleeve up , just cry , cry it out .
daddy 's got you . that 's all that 's important .
now kendall on the other hand - and like i said , he 's only 15 months older than her - he 'd come to me crying , it 's like as soon as i would hear him cry , a clock would go off .
i would give the boy probably about 30 seconds , which means , by the time he got to me , i was already saying things like , " why are you crying ?
hold your head up . look at me .
explain to me what 's wrong .
tell me what 's wrong . i ca n't understand you .
why are you crying ? "
and out of my own frustration of my role and responsibility of building him up as a man to fit into these guidelines and these structures that are defining this man box , i would find myself saying things like , " just go in your room .
just go on , go on in your room .
sit down , get yourself together and come back and talk to me when you can talk to me like a - " what ?
-lrb- audience : man . -rrb- like a man .
and he 's five years old .
and as i grow in life , i would say to myself , " my god , what 's wrong with me ?
what am i doing ? why would i do this ? "
and i think back .
i think back to my father .
there was a time in my life where we had a very troubled experience in our family .
my brother , henry , he died tragically when we were teenagers .
we lived in new york city , as i said .
we lived in the bronx at the time , and the burial was in a place called long island , it was about two hours outside of the city .
and as we were preparing to come back from the burial , the cars stopped at the bathroom to let folks take care of themselves before the long ride back to the city .
and the limousine empties out .
my mother , my sister , my auntie , they all get out , but my father and i stayed in the limousine , and no sooner than the women got out , he burst out crying .
he did n't want cry in front of me , but he knew he was n't going to make it back to the city , and it was better me than to allow himself to express these feelings and emotions in front of the women .
and this is a man who , 10 minutes ago , had just put his teenage son in the ground - something i just ca n't even imagine .
the thing that sticks with me the most is that he was apologizing to me for crying in front of me , and at the same time , he was also giving me props , lifting me up , for not crying .
i come to also look at this as this fear that we have as men , this fear that just has us paralyzed , holding us hostage to this man box .
i can remember speaking to a 12-year-old boy , a football player , and i asked him , i said , " how would you feel if , in front of all the players , your coach told you you were playing like a girl ? "
now i expected him to say something like , i 'd be sad ; i 'd be mad ; i 'd be angry , or something like that .
no , the boy said to me - the boy said to me , " it would destroy me . "
and i said to myself , " god , if it would destroy him to be called a girl , what are we then teaching him about girls ? "
-lrb- applause -rrb- it took me back to a time when i was about 12 years old .
i grew up in tenement buildings in the inner city .
at this time we 're living in the bronx , and in the building next to where i lived there was a guy named johnny .
he was about 16 years old , and we were all about 12 years old - younger guys .
and he was hanging out with all us younger guys .
and this guy , he was up to a lot of no good .
he was the kind of kid who parents would have to wonder , " what is this 16-year-old boy doing with these 12-year-old boys ? "
and he did spend a lot of time up to no good .
he was a troubled kid .
his mother had died from a heroin overdose .
he was being raised by his grandmother .
his father was n't on the set .
his grandmother had two jobs .
he was home alone a lot .
but i 've got to tell you , we young guys , we looked up to this dude , man .
he was cool . he was fine .
that 's what the sisters said , " he was fine . "
he was having sex .
we all looked up to him .
so one day , i 'm out in front of the house doing something - just playing around , doing something - i do n't know what .
he looks out his window ; he calls me upstairs ; he said , " hey anthony . "
they called me anthony growing up as a kid .
" hey anthony , come on upstairs . "
johnny call , you go .
so i run right upstairs .
as he opens the door , he says to me , " do you want some ? "
now i immediately knew what he meant .
because for me growing up at that time , and our relationship with this man box , " do you want some ? " meant one of two things : sex or drugs - and we were n't doing drugs .
now my box , my card , my man box card , was immediately in jeopardy .
two things : one , i never had sex .
we do n't talk about that as men .
you only tell your dearest , closest friend , sworn to secrecy for life , the first time you had sex .
for everybody else , we go around like we 've been having sex since we were two .
there ai n't no first time .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the other thing i could n't tell him is that i did n't want any .
that 's even worse . we 're supposed to always be on the prowl .
women are objects , especially sexual objects .
anyway , so i could n't tell him any of that .
so , like my mother would say , make a long story short , i just simply said to johnny , " yes . "
he told me to go in his room .
i go in his room . on his bed is a girl from the neighborhood named sheila .
she 's 16 years old .
she 's nude .
she 's what i know today to be mentally ill , higher-functioning at times than others .
we had a whole choice of inappropriate names for her .
anyway , johnny had just gotten through having sex with her .
well actually , he raped her , but he would say he had sex with her .
because , while sheila never said no , she also never said yes .
so he was offering me the opportunity to do the same .
so when i go in the room , i close the door .
folks , i 'm petrified .
i stand with my back to the door so johnny ca n't bust in the room and see that i 'm not doing anything , and i stand there long enough that i could have actually done something .
so now i 'm no longer trying to figure out what i 'm going to do ; i 'm trying to figure out how i 'm going to get out of this room .
so in my 12 years of wisdom , i zip my pants down , i walk out into the room , and lo and behold to me , while i was in the room with sheila , johnny was back at the window calling guys up .
so now there 's a living room full of guys .
it was like the waiting room in the doctor 's office .
and they asked me how was it , and i say to them , " it was good , " and i zip my pants up in front of them , and i head for the door .
now i say this all with remorse , and i was feeling a tremendous amount of remorse at that time , but i was conflicted , because , while i was feeling remorse , i was excited , because i did n't get caught .
but i knew i felt bad about what was happening .
this fear , getting outside the man box , totally enveloped me .
it was way more important to me , about me and my man box card than about sheila and what was happening to her .
see collectively , we as men are taught to have less value in women , to view them as property and the objects of men .
we see that as an equation that equals violence against women .
we as men , good men , the large majority of men , we operate on the foundation of this whole collective socialization .
we kind of see ourselves separate , but we 're very much a part of it .
you see , we have to come to understand that less value , property and objectification is the foundation and the violence ca n't happen without it .
so we 're very much a part of the solution as well as the problem .
the center for disease control says that men 's violence against women is at epidemic proportions , is the number one health concern for women in this country and abroad .
so quickly , i 'd like to just say , this is the love of my life , my daughter jay .
the world i envision for her - how do i want men to be acting and behaving ?
i need you on board . i need you with me .
i need you working with me and me working with you on how we raise our sons and teach them to be men - that it 's okay to not be dominating , that it 's okay to have feelings and emotions , that it 's okay to promote equality , that it 's okay to have women who are just friends and that 's it , that it 's okay to be whole , that my liberation as a man is tied to your liberation as a woman . -lrb- applause -rrb- i remember asking a nine-year-old boy , i asked a nine-year-old boy , " what would life be like for you , if you did n't have to adhere to this man box ? "
he said to me , " i would be free . "
thank you folks .
-lrb- applause -rrb- ten years ago , on a tuesday morning , i conducted a parachute jump at fort bragg , north carolina .
it was a routine training jump , like many more i 'd done since i became a paratrooper 27 years before .
we went down to the airfield early because this is the army and you always go early .
you do some routine refresher training , and then you go to put on your parachute and a buddy helps you .
and you put on the t-10 parachute .
and you 're very careful how you put the straps , particularly the leg straps because they go between your legs .
and then you put on your reserve , and then you put on your heavy rucksack .
and then a jumpmaster comes , and he 's an experienced nco in parachute operations .
he checks you out , he grabs your adjusting straps and he tightens everything so that your chest is crushed , your shoulders are crushed down , and , of course , he 's tightened so your voice goes up a couple octaves as well .
then you sit down , and you wait a little while , because this is the army .
then you load the aircraft , and then you stand up and you get on , and you kind of lumber to the aircraft like this , in a line of people , and you sit down on canvas seats on either side of the aircraft .
and you wait a little bit longer , because this is the air force teaching the army how to wait .
then you take off .
and it 's painful enough now - and i think it 's designed this way - it 's painful enough so you want to jump .
you did n't really want to jump , but you want out .
so you get in the aircraft , you 're flying along , and at 20 minutes out , these jumpmasters start giving you commands .
they give 20 minutes - that 's a time warning .
you sit there , ok .
then they give you 10 minutes .
and of course , you 're responding with all of these .
and that 's to boost everybody 's confidence , to show that you 're not scared .
then they give you , " get ready . "
then they go , " outboard personnel , stand up . "
if you 're an outboard personnel , now you stand up .
if you 're an inboard personnel , stand up .
and then you hook up , and you hook up your static line .
and at that point , you think , " hey , guess what ?
i 'm probably going to jump .
there 's no way to get out of this at this point . "
you go through some additional checks , and then they open the door .
and this was that tuesday morning in september , and it was pretty nice outside .
so nice air comes flowing in .
the jumpmasters start to check the door .
and then when it 's time to go , a green light goes and the jumpmaster goes , " go . "
the first guy goes , and you 're just in line , and you just kind of lumber to the door .
jump is a misnomer ; you fall .
you fall outside the door , you 're caught in the slipstream .
the first thing you do is lock into a tight body position - head down in your chest , your arms extended , put over your reserve parachute .
you do that because , 27 years before , an airborne sergeant had taught me to do that .
i have no idea whether it makes any difference , but he seemed to make sense , and i was n't going to test the hypothesis that he 'd be wrong .
and then you wait for the opening shock for your parachute to open .
if you do n't get an opening shock , you do n't get a parachute - you 've got a whole new problem set .
but typically you do ; typically it opens .
and of course , if your leg straps are n't set right , at that point you get another little thrill .
boom .
so then you look around , you 're under a canopy and you say , " this is good . "
now you prepare for the inevitable .
you are going to hit the ground .
you ca n't delay that much .
and you really ca n't decide where you hit very much , because they pretend you can steer , but you 're being delivered .
so you look around , where you 're going to land , you try to make yourself ready .
and then as you get close , you lower your rucksack below you on a lowering line , so that it 's not on you when you land , and you prepare to do a parachute-landing fall .
now the army teaches you to do five points of performance - the toes of your feet , your calves , your thighs , your buttocks and your push-up muscles .
it 's this elegant little land , twist and roll .
and that 's not going to hurt .
in 30-some years of jumping , i never did one .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i always landed like a watermelon out of a third floor window .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and as soon as i hit , the first thing i did is i 'd see if i 'd broken anything that i needed .
i 'd shake my head , and i 'd ask myself the eternal question : " why did n't i go into banking ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i 'd look around , and then i 'd see another paratrooper , a young guy or girl , and they 'd have pulled out their m4 carbine and they 'd be picking up their equipment .
they 'd be doing everything that we had taught them .
and i realized that , if they had to go into combat , they would do what we had taught them and they would follow leaders .
and i realized that , if they came out of combat , it would be because we led them well .
and i was hooked again on the importance of what i did .
so now i do that tuesday morning jump , but it 's not any jump - that was september 11th , 2001 .
and when we took off from the airfield , america was at peace .
when we landed on the drop-zone , everything had changed .
and what we thought about the possibility of those young soldiers going into combat as being theoretical was now very , very real - and leadership seemed important .
but things had changed ; i was a 46-year-old brigadier general .
i 'd been successful , but things changed so much that i was going to have to make some significant changes , and on that morning , i did n't know it .
i was raised with traditional stories of leadership : robert e. lee , john buford at gettysburg .
and i also was raised with personal examples of leadership .
this was my father in vietnam .
and i was raised to believe that soldiers were strong and wise and brave and faithful ; they did n't lie , cheat , steal or abandon their comrades .
and i still believe real leaders are like that .
but in my first 25 years of career , i had a bunch of different experiences .
one of my first battalion commanders , i worked in his battalion for 18 months and the only conversation he ever had with lt. mcchrystal was at mile 18 of a 25-mile road march , and he chewed my ass for about 40 seconds .
and i 'm not sure that was real interaction .
but then a couple of years later , when i was a company commander , i went out to the national training center .
and we did an operation , and my company did a dawn attack - you know , the classic dawn attack : you prepare all night , move to the line of departure .
and i had an armored organization at that point .
we move forward , and we get wiped out - i mean , wiped out immediately .
the enemy did n't break a sweat doing it .
and after the battle , they bring this mobile theater and they do what they call an " after action review " to teach you what you 've done wrong .
sort of leadership by humiliation .
they put a big screen up , and they take you through everything : " and then you did n't do this , and you did n't do this , etc . "
i walked out feeling as low as a snake 's belly in a wagon rut .
and i saw my battalion commander , because i had let him down .
and i went up to apologize to him , and he said , " stanley , i thought you did great . "
and in one sentence , he lifted me , put me back on my feet , and taught me that leaders can let you fail and yet not let you be a failure .
when 9/11 came , 46-year-old brig. gen. mcchrystal sees a whole new world .
first , the things that are obvious , that you 're familiar with : the environment changed - the speed , the scrutiny , the sensitivity of everything now is so fast , sometimes it evolves faster than people have time to really reflect on it .
but everything we do is in a different context .
more importantly , the force that i led was spread over more than 20 countries .
and instead of being able to get all the key leaders for a decision together in a single room and look them in the eye and build their confidence and get trust from them , i 'm now leading a force that 's dispersed , and i 've got to use other techniques .
i 've got to use video teleconferences , i 've got to use chat , i 've got to use email , i 've got to use phone calls - i 've got to use everything i can , not just for communication , but for leadership .
a 22-year-old individual operating alone , thousands of miles from me , has got to communicate to me with confidence .
i have to have trust in them and vice versa .
and i also have to build their faith .
and that 's a new kind of leadership for me .
we had one operation where we had to coordinate it from multiple locations .
an emerging opportunity came - did n't have time to get everybody together .
so we had to get complex intelligence together , we had to line up the ability to act .
it was sensitive , we had to go up the chain of command , convince them that this was the right thing to do and do all of this on electronic medium .
we failed .
the mission did n't work .
and so now what we had to do is i had to reach out to try to rebuild the trust of that force , rebuild their confidence - me and them , and them and me , and our seniors and us as a force - all without the ability to put a hand on a shoulder .
entirely new requirement .
also , the people had changed .
you probably think that the force that i led was all steely-eyed commandos with big knuckle fists carrying exotic weapons .
in reality , much of the force i led looked exactly like you .
it was men , women , young , old - not just from military ; from different organizations , many of them detailed to us just from a handshake .
and so instead of giving orders , you 're now building consensus and you 're building a sense of shared purpose .
probably the biggest change was understanding that the generational difference , the ages , had changed so much .
i went down to be with a ranger platoon on an operation in afghanistan , and on that operation , a sergeant in the platoon had lost about half his arm throwing a taliban hand grenade back at the enemy after it had landed in his fire team .
we talked about the operation , and then at the end i did what i often do with a force like that .
i asked , " where were you on 9/11 ? "
and one young ranger in the back - his hair 's tousled and his face is red and windblown from being in combat in the cold afghan wind - he said , " sir , i was in the sixth grade . "
and it reminded me that we 're operating a force that must have shared purpose and shared consciousness , and yet he has different experiences , in many cases a different vocabulary , a completely different skill set in terms of digital media than i do and many of the other senior leaders .
and yet , we need to have that shared sense .
it also produced something which i call an inversion of expertise , because we had so many changes at the lower levels in technology and tactics and whatnot , that suddenly the things that we grew up doing was n't what the force was doing anymore .
so how does a leader stay credible and legitimate when they have n't done what the people you 're leading are doing ?
and it 's a brand new leadership challenge .
and it forced me to become a lot more transparent , a lot more willing to listen , a lot more willing to be reverse-mentored from lower .
and yet , again , you 're not all in one room .
then another thing .
there 's an effect on you and on your leaders .
there 's an impact , it 's cumulative .
you do n't reset , or recharge your battery every time .
i stood in front of a screen one night in iraq with one of my senior officers and we watched a firefight from one of our forces .
and i remembered his son was in our force .
and i said , " john , where 's your son ? and how is he ? "
and he said , " sir , he 's fine . thanks for asking . "
i said , " where is he now ? "
and he pointed at the screen , he said , " he 's in that firefight . "
think about watching your brother , father , daughter , son , wife in a firefight in real time and you ca n't do anything about it .
think about knowing that over time .
and it 's a new cumulative pressure on leaders .
and you have to watch and take care of each other .
i probably learned the most about relationships .
i learned they are the sinew which hold the force together .
i grew up much of my career in the ranger regiment .
and every morning in the ranger regiment , every ranger - and there are more than 2,000 of them - says a six-stanza ranger creed .
you may know one line of it , it says , " i 'll never leave a fallen comrade to fall into the hands of the enemy . "
and it 's not a mindless mantra , and it 's not a poem .
it 's a promise .
every ranger promises every other ranger , " no matter what happens , no matter what it costs me , if you need me , i 'm coming . "
and every ranger gets that same promise from every other ranger .
think about it . it 's extraordinarily powerful .
it 's probably more powerful than marriage vows .
and they 've lived up to it , which gives it special power .
and so the organizational relationship that bonds them is just amazing .
and i learned personal relationships were more important than ever .
we were in a difficult operation in afghanistan in 2007 , and an old friend of mine , that i had spent many years at various points of my career with - godfather to one of their kids - he sent me a note , just in an envelope , that had a quote from sherman to grant that said , " i knew if i ever got in a tight spot , that you would come , if alive . "
and having that kind of relationship , for me , turned out to be critical at many points in my career .
and i learned that you have to give that in this environment , because it 's tough .
that was my journey .
i hope it 's not over .
i came to believe that a leader is n't good because they 're right ; they 're good because they 're willing to learn and to trust .
this is n't easy stuff .
it 's not like that electronic abs machine where , 15 minutes a month , you get washboard abs .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and it is n't always fair .
you can get knocked down , and it hurts and it leaves scars .
but if you 're a leader , the people you 've counted on will help you up .
and if you 're a leader , the people who count on you need you on your feet .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so i tried to do a small good thing for my wife .
it makes me to stand here , the fame , the money i got out of it .
so what i did , i 'd gone back to my early marriage days .
what you did in the early marriage days , you tried to impress your wife . i did the same .
on that occasion , i found my wife carrying something like this .
i saw . " what is that ? " i asked .
my wife replied , " none of your business . "
then , being her husband , i ran behind her and saw she had a nasty rag cloth .
i do n't even use that cloth to clean my two-wheeler .
then i understood this - adapting that unhygienic method to manage her period days .
then i immediately asked her , why are you -lsb- using -rsb- that unhygienic method ?
she replied , i also know about -lsb- sanitary pads -rsb- , but myself and my sisters , if they start using that , we have to cut our family milk budget .
then i was shocked . what is the connection between using a sanitary pad and a milk budget ?
and it 's called affordability .
i tried to impress my new wife by offering her a packet of sanitary pads .
i went to a local shop , i tried to buy her a sanitary pad packet .
that fellow looks left and right , and spreads a newspaper , rolls it into the newspaper , gives it to me like a banned item , something like that .
i do n't know why . i did not ask for a condom .
then i took that pad . i want to see that . what is inside it ?
the very first time , at the age of 29 , that day i am touching the sanitary pad , first ever .
i must know : how many of the guys here have touched a sanitary pad ?
they are not going to touch that , because it 's not your matter .
then i thought to myself , white substance , made of cotton - oh my god , that guy is just using a penny value of raw material - inside they are selling for pounds , dollars .
why not make a local sanitary pad for my new wife ?
that 's how all this started , but after making a sanitary pad , where can i check it ?
it 's not like i can just check it in the lab .
i need a woman volunteer . where can i get one in india ?
even in bangalore you wo n't get -lsb- one -rsb- , in india .
so only problem : the only available victim is my wife .
then i made a sanitary pad and handed it to shanti - my wife 's name is shanti .
" close your eyes . whatever i give , it will be not a diamond pendant not a diamond ring , even a chocolate , i will give you a surprise with a lot of tinsel paper rolled up with it .
close your eyes . "
because i tried to make it intimate .
because it 's an arranged marriage , not a love marriage .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so one day she said , openly , i 'm not going to support this research .
then other victims , they got into my sisters .
but even sisters , wives , they 're not ready to support in the research .
that 's why i am always jealous with the saints in india .
they are having a lot of women volunteers around them .
why i am not getting -lsb- any -rsb- ?
you know , without them even calling , they 'll get a lot of women volunteers .
then i used , tried to use the medical college girls .
they also refused . finally , i decide , use sanitary pad myself .
now i am having a title like the first man to set foot on the moon .
armstrong . then tenzing -lsb- and -rsb- hillary , in everest , like that muruganantham is the first man wore a sanitary pad across the globe .
i wore a sanitary pad . i filled animal blood in a football bottle , i tied it up here , there is a tube going into my panties , while i 'm walking , while i 'm cycling , i made a press , doses of blood will go there .
that makes me bow down to any woman in front of me to give full respect . that five days i 'll never forget - the messy days , the lousy days , that wetness .
my god , it 's unbelievable .
but here the problem is , one company is making napkin out of cotton . it is working well .
but i am also trying to make sanitary pad with the good cotton . it 's not working .
that makes me to want to refuse to continue this research and research and research .
you need first funds .
not only financial crises , but because of the sanitary pad research , i come through all sorts of problems , including a divorce notice from my wife .
why is this ? i used medical college girls .
she suspects i am using as a trump card to run behind medical college girls .
finally , i came to know it is a special cellulose derived from a pinewood , but even after that , you need a multimillion-dollar plant like this to process that material . again , a stop-up .
then i spend another four years to create my own machine tools , a simple machine tool like this .
in this machine , any rural woman can apply the same raw materials that they are processing in the multinational plant , anyone can make a world-class napkin at your dining hall .
that is my invention .
so after that , what i did , usually if anyone got a patent or an invention , immediately you want to make , convert into this .
i never did this . i dropped it just like this , because you do this , if anyone runs after money , their life will not -lsb- have -rsb- any beauty . it is boredom .
a lot of people making a lot of money , billion , billions of dollars accumulating .
why are they coming for , finally , for philanthropy ?
why the need for accumulating money , then doing philanthropy ?
what if one decided to start philanthropy from the day one ?
that 's why i am giving this machine only in rural india , for rural women , because in india , -lsb- you 'll be -rsb- surprised , only two percent of women are using sanitary pads . the rest , they 're using a rag cloth , a leaf , husk , -lsb- saw -rsb- dust , everything except sanitary pads .
it is the same in the 21st century . that 's why i am going to decide to give this machine only for poor women across india .
so far , 630 installations happened in 23 states in six other countries .
now i 'm on my seventh year sustaining against multinational , transnational giants - makes all mba students a question mark .
a school dropout from coimbatore , how he is able to sustaining ?
that makes me a visiting professor and guest lecturer in all iims .
-lrb- applause -rrb- play video one .
-lrb- video -rrb- arunachalam muruganantham : the thing i saw in my wife 's hand , " why are you using that nasty cloth ? "
she replied immediately , " i know about napkins , but if i start using napkins , then we have to cut our family milk budget . "
why not make myself a low-cost napkin ?
so i decided i 'm going to sell this new machine only for women self help groups .
that is my idea .
am : and previously , you need a multimillion investment for machine and all . now , any rural woman can .
they are performing puja .
-lrb- video -rrb- : -lrb- singing -rrb- you just think , competing giants , even from harvard , oxford , is difficult .
i make a rural woman to compete with multinationals .
i 'm sustaining on seventh year .
already 600 installations . what is my mission ?
i 'm going to make india -lsb- into -rsb- a 100-percent-sanitary-napkin-using country in my lifetime .
in this way i 'm going to provide not less than a million rural employment that i 'm going to create .
that 's why i 'm not running after this bloody money .
i 'm doing something serious .
if you chase a girl , the girl wo n't like you .
do your job simply , the girl will chase you .
like that , i never chased mahalakshmi .
mahalakshmi is chasing me , i am keeping in the back pocket .
not in front pocket . i 'm a back pocket man .
that 's all . a school dropout saw your problem in the society of not using sanitary pad .
i am becoming a solution provider . i 'm very happy .
i do n't want to make this as a corporate entity .
i want to make this as a local sanitary pad movement across the globe . that 's why i put all the details on public domain like an open software .
now 110 countries are accessing it . okay ?
so i classify the people into three : uneducated , little educated , surplus educated .
little educated , done this . surplus educated , what are you going to do for the society ?
thank you very much . bye !
-lrb- applause -rrb- so i 'd like you to come back with me just for a few minutes to a dark night in china , the night i met my husband .
it was a city so long ago that it was still called peking .
so i went to a party .
i sat down next to a stout , middle-aged man with owl glasses and a bow tie , and he turned out to be a fulbright scholar , there in china specifically to study sino-soviet relations .
what a gift it was to the eager , young foreign correspondent that i was then .
i 'd pump him for information , i 'm mentally scribbling notes for the stories i plan to write .
i talk to him for hours .
only months later , i discover who he really was .
he was the china representative for the american soybean association .
" i do n't understand . soybeans ?
you told me you were a fulbright scholar . "
" well , how long would you have talked to me if i told you we 're in soybeans ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i said , " you jerk . "
only jerk was n't the word i used .
i said , " you could 've gotten me fired . "
and he said , " let 's get married . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " travel the world and have lots of kids . "
so we did .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- and what an alive man terence bryan foley turned out to be .
he was a chinese scholar who later , in his 60s , got a ph.d. in chinese history .
he spoke six languages , he played 15 musical instruments , he was a licensed pilot , he had once been a san francisco cable car operator , he was an expert in swine nutrition , dairy cattle , dixieland jazz , film noir , and we did travel the country , and the world , and we did have a lot of kids .
we followed my job , and it seemed like there was nothing that we could n't do .
so when we found the cancer , it does n't seem strange to us at all that without saying a word to each other , we believed that , if we were smart enough and strong enough and brave enough , and we worked hard enough , we could keep him from dying ever .
and for years , it seemed like we were succeeding .
the surgeon emerged from the surgery .
what 'd he say ? he said what surgeons always say : " we got it all . "
then there was a setback when the pathologists looked at the kidney cancer closely .
it turned out to be a rare , exceedingly aggressive type , with a diagnosis that was almost universally fatal in several weeks at most .
and yet , he did not die .
mysteriously , he lived on .
he coached little league for our son .
he built a playhouse for our daughter .
and meanwhile , i 'm burying myself in the internet looking for specialists .
i 'm looking for a cure .
so a year goes by before the cancer , as cancers do , reappears , and with it comes another death sentence , this time nine months .
so we try another treatment , aggressive , nasty .
it makes him so sick , he has to quit it , yet still he lives on .
then another year goes by .
two years go by .
more specialists .
we take the kids to italy .
we take the kids to australia .
and then more years pass , and the cancer begins to grow .
this time , there 's new treatments on the horizon .
they 're exotic . they 're experimental .
they 're going to attack the cancer in new ways .
so he enters a clinical trial , and it works .
the cancer begins to shrink , and for the third time , we 've dodged death .
so now i ask you , how do i feel when the time finally comes and there 's another dark night , sometime between midnight and 2 a.m. ?
this time it 's on the intensive care ward when a twentysomething resident that i 've never met before tells me that terence is dying , perhaps tonight .
so what do i say when he says , " what do you want me to do ? "
there 's another drug out there .
it 's newer . it 's more powerful .
he started it just two weeks ago .
perhaps there 's still hope ahead .
so what do i say ?
i say , " keep him alive if you can . "
and terence died six days later .
so we fought , we struggled , we triumphed .
it was an exhilarating fight , and i 'd repeat the fight today without a moment 's hesitation .
we fought together , we lived together .
it turned what could have been seven of the grimmest years of our life into seven of the most glorious .
it was also an expensive fight .
it was the kind of fight and the kind of choices that everyone here agrees pump up the cost of end-of-life care , and of healthcare for all of us .
and for me , for us , we pushed the fight right over the edge , and i never got the chance to say to him what i say to him now almost every day : " hey , buddy , it was a hell of a ride . "
we never got the chance to say goodbye .
we never thought it was the end .
we always had hope .
so what do we make of all of this ?
being a journalist , after terence died , i wrote a book , " the cost of hope . "
i wrote it because i wanted to know why i did what i did , why he did what he did , why everyone around us did what they did .
and what did i discover ?
well , one of the things i discovered is that experts think that one answer to what i did at the end was a piece of paper , the advance directive , to help families get past the seemingly irrational choices .
yet i had that piece of paper .
we both did .
and they were readily available .
i had them right at hand .
both of them said the same thing : do nothing if there is no further hope .
i knew terence 's wishes as clearly and as surely as i knew my own .
yet we never got to no further hope .
even with that clear-cut paper in our hands , we just kept redefining hope .
i believed i could keep him from dying , and i 'd be embarrassed to say that if i had n't seen so many people and have talked to so many people who have felt exactly the same way .
right up until days before his death , i felt strongly and powerfully , and , you might say , irrationally , that i could keep him from dying ever .
now , what do the experts call this ?
they say it 's denial .
it 's a strong word , is n't it ?
yet i will tell you that denial is n't even close to a strong enough word to describe what those of us facing the death of our loved ones go through .
and i hear the medical professionals say , " well , we 'd like to do such-and-such , but the family 's in denial .
the family wo n't listen to reason .
they 're in denial .
how can they insist on this treatment at the end ?
it 's so clear , yet they 're in denial . "
now , i think this maybe is n't a very useful way of thinking .
it 's not just families either .
the medical professionals too , you out there , you 're in denial too .
you want to help . you want to fix .
you want to do .
you 've succeeded in everything you 've done , and having a patient die , well , that must feel like failure .
i saw it firsthand .
just days before terence died , his oncologist said , " tell terence that better days are just ahead . "
days before he died .
yet ira byock , the director of palliative medicine at dartmouth said , " you know , the best doctor in the world has never succeeded in making anyone immortal . "
so what the experts call " denial , " i call " hope , " and i 'd like to borrow a phrase from my friends in software design .
you just redefine denial and hope , and it becomes a feature of being human .
it 's not a bug .
it 's a feature .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so we need to think more constructively about this very common , very profound and very powerful human emotion .
it 's part of the human condition , and yet our system and our thinking is n't built to accommodate it .
so terence told me a story on that long-ago night , and i believed it .
maybe i wanted to believe it .
and during terence 's illness , i , we , we wanted to believe the story of our fight together too .
giving up the fight - for that 's how it felt , it felt like giving up - meant giving up not only his life but also our story , our story of us as fighters , the story of us as invincible , and for the doctors , the story of themselves as healers .
so what do we need ?
maybe we do n't need a new piece of paper .
maybe we need a new story , not a story about giving up the fight or of hopelessness , but rather a story of victory and triumph , of a valiant battle and , eventually , a graceful retreat , a story that acknowledges that not even the greatest general defeats every foe , that no doctor has ever succeeded in making anyone immortal , and that no wife , no matter how hard she tried , has ever stopped even the bravest , wittiest and most maddeningly lovable husband from dying when it was his time to go .
people did mention hospice , but i would n't listen .
hospice was for people who were dying , and terence was n't dying .
as a result , he spent just four days in hospice , is a pretty typical outcome , and we never said goodbye because we were unprepared for the end .
we have a noble path to curing the disease , patients and doctors alike , but there does n't seem to be a noble path to dying .
dying is seen as failing , and we had a heroic narrative for fighting together , but we did n't have a heroic narrative for letting go .
so maybe we need a narrative for acknowledging the end , and for saying goodbye , and maybe our new story will be about a hero 's fight , and a hero 's goodbye .
terence loved poetry , and the greek poet constantine cavafy is one of my favorite poets .
so i 'll give you a couple lines from him .
this is a poem about mark antony .
you know mark antony , the conquering hero , cleopatra 's guy ?
actually , one of cleopatra 's guys .
and he 's been a pretty good general .
he 's won all the fights , he 's eluded all the people that are out to get him , and yet this time , finally , he 's come to the city of alexandria and realized he 's lost .
the people are leaving . they 're playing instruments .
they 're singing .
and suddenly he knows he 's been defeated .
and he suddenly knows he 's been deserted by the gods , and it 's time to let go .
and the poet tells him what to do .
he tells him how to say a noble goodbye , a goodbye that 's fit for a hero .
" as if long-prepared , as if courageous , as it becomes you who were worthy of such a city , approach the window with a firm step , and with emotion , but not with the entreaties or the complaints of a coward , listen to the sounds , the exquisite instruments of the musical troops , and bid her farewell , the alexandria you are losing . "
that 's a goodbye for a man who was larger than life , a goodbye for a man for whom anything , well , almost anything , was possible , a goodbye for a man who kept hope alive .
and is n't that what we 're missing ?
how can we learn that people 's decisions about their loved ones are often based strongly , powerfully , many times irrationally , on the slimmest of hopes ?
the overwhelming presence of hope is n't denial .
it 's part of our dna as humans , and maybe it 's time our healthcare system - doctors , patients , insurance companies , us , started accounting for the power of that hope .
hope is n't a bug .
it 's a feature .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- you know , there 's a small country nestled in the himalayan mountains , far from these beautiful mountains , where the people of the kingdom of bhutan have decided to do something different , which is to measure their gross national happiness rather than their gross national product .
and why not ?
after all , happiness is not just a privilege for the lucky few , but a fundamental human right for all .
and what is happiness ?
happiness is the freedom of choice .
the freedom to chose where to live , what to do , what to buy , what to sell , from whom , to whom , when and how .
where does choice come from ?
and who gets to express it , and how do we express it ?
well , one way to express choice is through the market .
well-functioning markets provide choices , and ultimately , the ability to express one 's pursuit for happiness .
the great indian economist , amartya sen , was awarded the nobel prize for demonstrating that famine is not so much about the availability of food supply , but rather the ability to acquire or entitle oneself to that food through the market .
in 1984 , in what can only be considered one of the greatest crimes of humanity , nearly one million people died of starvation in my country of birth , ethiopia .
not because there was not enough food - because there was actually a surplus of food in the fertile regions of the south parts of the country - but because in the north , people could not access or entitle themselves to that food .
that was a turning point for my life .
most africans today , by far , are farmers .
and most of africa 's farmers are , by and large , small farmers in terms of land that they operate , and very , very small farmers in terms of the capital they have at their disposal .
african agriculture today is among , or is , the most under-capitalized in the world .
only seven percent of arable land in africa is irrigated , compared to 40 percent in asia .
african farmers only use some 22 kilograms of fertilizer per hectare , compared to 144 in asia .
road density is six times greater in asia than it is in rural africa .
there are eight times more tractors in latin america , and three times more tractors in asia , than in africa .
the small farmer in africa today lives a life without much choice , and therefore without much freedom .
his livelihood is predetermined by the conditions of grinding poverty .
he comes to the market when prices are lowest , with the meager fruits of his hard labor , just after the harvest , because he has no choice .
she comes back to the market some months later , when prices are highest , in what we call the lean season - when food is scarce - because she has to feed her family and has no choice .
the real question is , how can markets be developed in rural africa to harness the power of innovation and entrepreneurship that we know exists ?
another notable economist , theodore schultz , in 1974 won the nobel prize for demonstrating that farmers are efficient , but poor .
meaning , in fact , that farmers are rational and profit-minded just like everybody else .
well , we do n't need , now , any more nobel prizes to know that farmers want a fair shake at the market and want to make money , just like everyone else .
and one thing is clear , which is at least now we know that africa is open for business .
and that business is agriculture .
over two decades ago , the world insisted to africa that markets must be liberalized , that economies must be structurally adjusted .
this meant that governments were to remove themselves from the business of buying and selling - which they did rather inefficiently - and let the private market do its magic .
well , what happened over the last 25 years ?
did africa feed itself ?
did our farmers turn into highly productive commercial actors ?
i think we 're all in this room , probably , because we know that , in fact , africa is the only region in the world where hunger and malnutrition are projected to go up over the next 10 years , where the food import bill is now double what it was 20 years ago , where food production per capita has stagnated , and where fertilizer use has declined rather than increased .
so why did n't agriculture markets perform to expectations ?
the market reforms prompted by the west - and i 've spent some 15 years traveling around the continent doing research on agricultural markets , and have interviewed traders in 10 to 15 countries in this continent , hundreds of traders - trying to understand what went wrong with our market reform .
and it seems to me that the reforms might have like its agriculture , africa 's markets are highly under-capitalized and inefficient .
we know from our work around the continent that transaction costs of reaching the market , and the risks of transacting in rural , agriculture markets , are extremely high .
in fact , only one third of agricultural output produced in africa even reaches the market .
africa 's markets are weak not only because of weak infrastructure in terms of roads and telecommunications , but also because of the virtual absence of necessary market institutions , such as market information , grades and standards , and reliable ways to connect buyers and sellers .
because of this , commodity buyers and sellers typically transact in small circles , in narrow networks of people they know and trust .
and because of that , as grain changes hands - and i 've measured that it changes hands four , five times in its trajectory from the farmer to the consumer - every time it changes hands - and i 've seen this all over rural africa - it also changes sacks .
and i thought that was incredibly peculiar .
and really realized that that was because - as traders would tell me over and over - that 's the only way people know what they 're getting in terms of the quantity and the product quality .
and that actually has huge implications for the ability of markets to quickly respond to price signals , and situations where there are deficits , for example .
it also has very high cost implications .
i have measured that 26 percent of the marketing margin is simply due to the fact that , because of the absence of grades and standards and market information , sacks have to be constantly changed .
and this leads to very high handling costs .
for their part , small farmers , who produce the bulk of our agricultural output in africa , come to the market with virtually no information at all - blind - trusting that they 're going to have some sort of demand for their produce , and completely at the mercy of the merchants in the only market , the nearest local market they know - where they 're unable to negotiate better prices or reduce their risk .
speaking of risk , we have seen that price volatility of food crops in africa is the highest in the world .
in africa , small farmers bear the brunt of this risk .
in fact , in my view , there is no region of the world and no period in history that farmers have been expected to bear the kind of market risk that africa 's farmers have to bear .
and in my view , there is simply no place in the world that has grown its agriculture on the kind of risk that our farmers in africa today face .
in ethiopia , for example , the variation in maize prices from year to year is as much as 50 percent annually .
this kind of market risk is mind-boggling , and has direct implications for not only the incentives of farmers to invest in higher productivity technology , such as modern seeds and fertilizers , but also direct implications for food security .
to give you an example , between 2001 and 2002 , ethiopian maize farmers produced two years of bumper harvest .
that in turn , because of the weak marketing system , led to an 80 percent collapse in maize prices in the country .
this made it unprofitable for some farmers to even harvest the grain from the fields .
and we calculated that some 300,000 tons of grain was left in the fields to rot in early 2002 .
not six months later , in july 2002 , ethiopia announced a major food crisis , to the same proportions as 1984:14 million people at risk of starvation .
what also happened that year is in the areas where there were good rains , and where farmers had previously produced surplus grain , farmers had decided to withdraw from the fertilizer market , not use fertilizer and actually had dropped their use of fertilizer by 27 percent .
this is a tragic example of arrested development , or a budding green revolution stopped in its tracks .
and this is not just specific to ethiopia , but happens over and over , all over africa .
well , i 'm not here today to lament about the situation , or wring my hands .
i am here to tell you that change is in the air .
africa today is not the africa waiting for aid solutions , or cookie-cutter foreign expert policy prescriptions .
africa has learned , or is learning somewhat slowly , that markets do n't happen by themselves .
in the 1980s , it was very fashionable to talk about getting prices right .
there was a very influential book about that , which was mainly about getting governments out of the market .
we now recognize that getting markets right is about not just price incentives , but also investing in the right infrastructure and the appropriate and necessary institutions to create the conditions to unleash the power of innovation in the market .
when conditions are right , we know and see that that innovation is ready to explode in rural africa , just like anywhere else .
nearly three years ago , i decided to leave my comfortable job as a world bank senior economist in washington and come back to my country of birth , ethiopia , after nearly 30 years abroad .
i did so for a simple reason .
after having spent more than a decade understanding , studying , and trying to convince policymakers and donors about what was wrong with africa 's agricultural markets , i decided it was time to do something about it .
i currently lead , in ethiopia , an exciting new initiative to establish the first ethiopia commodity exchange , or ecx .
now , the commodity exchange itself , that concept , is not new to the world .
in fact , in 1848 , 82 grain merchants and farmers got together in a small town at the crossroads of the illinois river and lake michigan to establish a way to trade better amongst themselves .
that was , of course , the birth of the chicago board of trade , which is the most famous commodity exchange in the world .
the chicago board of trade was established then for precisely the same reasons that our farmers today would benefit from a commodity exchange .
in the american midwest , farmers used to load grain onto barges and send it upriver to the chicago market .
but once it arrived , if no buyer was to be found , or if prices suddenly dropped , farmers would incur tremendous losses .
and in fact , would even dump the grain in lake michigan , rather than spend more money transporting it back to their farms .
well , the need to avoid these huge risks and tremendous losses led to the birth of the futures market , and the underlying system of grading grain and receipting - issuing warehouse receipts on the basis of which trade could be done .
from there , the greatest innovation of all came about in this market , which is that buyers and sellers could transact grain without actually having to physically or visually inspect the grain .
that meant that grain could be traded across tremendous distances , and even across time - as far forward as 18 months into the future .
this innovation is at the heart of the transformation of american agriculture , and the rise of chicago to a global market , agricultural market , superpower from where it was , a small regional town .
now , over the last century , we tend to think of commodity exchanges as the purview of western industrialized countries , and that the reference prices for cotton , coffee , cocoa - products produced mainly in the south - are actually a reference price , or a price discovered in these organized commodity exchanges in the northern countries .
but that is actually changing .
and we 're seeing a shift - powered mainly because of information technology - a shift in market dominance towards the emerging markets .
and over the last decade , you see that the share of western exchanges - and this is the u.s. share of exchanges in the world - has gone down by nearly half in just the last decade .
similarly , there 's been explosive growth in india , for example , where rural farmers are using exchanges - growing here over the last three years by 270 percent a year .
this is powered by low-cost vsat technology , aggressively trying to reach farmers to bring them into the market .
china 's dalian commodity exchange , three years ago , 2004 , overtook the chicago board of trade to become the second largest commodity exchange in the world .
now , in ethiopia , we 're in the process of designing the first organized ethiopia commodity exchange .
we 're not trying to cut and paste the chicago model or the india model , but creating a system uniquely tailored to ethiopia 's needs and realities , ethiopia 's small farmers .
so , the ecx is an ethiopian exchange for ethiopia .
we 're creating a system that serves all market actors , that creates integrity , trust , efficiency , transparency and enables small farmers to manage the risks that i have described .
in the design of our commodity exchange in ethiopia , we 've done something rather unique , which is to take the approach of an integrated perspective , or what we call the ecx edge .
the ecx edge pretty much creates the entire ecosystem in which the market will develop itself .
and this is because one of the things we 've learned over the last decade of studying market development in africa is that the piecemeal approach does not work .
you 've got one donor trying to develop market information , another trying to work on or sponsor grades and standards , another ict , and yet another on warehousing , or warehouse receipts .
in our approach in ethiopia , we 've decided to put together the entire ecosystem , or environment , in which trade takes place .
that means that the exchange will operate a trading system , which will initially start as an open outcry , because we do n't think the country 's ready for full electronic trading .
but at the same time , we 'll do something which i think no exchange in the world has ever done , which is itself to operate something like an internet cafe in the rural areas .
so that farmers and small traders can actually come to a terminal center - what we call the remote access terminal centers - and actually , without having to buy a computer or figure out how to dial up or any of those things , simply see the trading that 's happening on the addis ababa trading floor .
at the same time , what 's very fundamental to this market is that - and again , an innovation that we 've designed for our exchange - is that the exchange will operate warehouses around the country , in which grade certification and warehouse receipting will be done .
and in turn , we 'll operate an in-house clearing system , to assure that payment is done appropriately , in the right amount and at the right time , so that basically , we create trust and integrity in the system .
obviously , we work with exchange actors , and as we 're developing the exchange market itself , we 're also developing the regulatory infrastructure and legal framework , the overarching legal framework for making this market work .
so , in fact , our proclamation is going to parliament next month .
what 's really important is that the ecx will operate a market information system to disseminate prices in real time to farmers around the country , using vsat technology to bring an electronic price dissemination directly to farmers .
what this does is transforms , fundamentally , the farmers ' relationship to the market .
whereas before the farmer used to think local - meaning that he or she would go to the nearest local market , eight to 10 kilometers away on average , and sell whatever they happened to have , without any idea of what the price premium or anything else was - now farmers come with knowledge of what prices are at the national market .
and they start to think national , and even global .
they start to make not only commercial marketing decisions , but also planting decisions , on the basis of information coming from the futures price market .
and they come to the market knowing what grades their products will achieve in terms of a price premium .
so all of this will transform farmers .
it will also transform the way traders do business .
it will stop them from doing simple , back-to-back , limited arbitrage to really thinking strategically about how to move grain across long distances from -lsb- surplus regions -rsb- to -lsb- deficit areas -rsb- .
can ethiopia do this ?
it seems very ambitious .
but it will create new opportunities .
we believe that this initiative requires great political will , and we 'll have to align the financial sector , as well as the ict sector , and really even the underlying legal framework .
we believe that the winds of change are here , and that we can do it .
ecx is the market for ethiopia 's new millennium , which starts in about eight months .
the last parliament of our century opened with our president announcing to the country that this was the most important economic initiative for the country today .
we believe that the stakes are high , but that the returns will be even greater .
ecx , moreover , can become a trading platform for a pan-african market in agricultural commodities .
ethiopia 's domestic market is about one billion dollars of value .
and we feel that over the next five years , if ethiopia can capture even 40 percent , just 40 percent , of the domestic market , and add just 25 percent value to that market , the value of the market doubles .
ethiopia 's agricultural market is 30 percent higher than south africa 's grain production , and , in fact , ethiopia is the second largest maize producer in africa .
so the potential is there .
the will is there .
the commitment is there .
so we feel that we have a winning value proposition to transform farmers ' choices , to grow our agriculture , and to change africa .
so , we are in the business of finding our happiness .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- what i 'd like to start off with is an observation , which is that if i 've learned anything over the last year , it 's that the supreme irony of publishing a book about slowness is that you have to go around promoting it really fast .
i seem to spend most of my time these days zipping from city to city , studio to studio , interview to interview , serving up the book in really tiny bite-size chunks .
because everyone these days wants to know how to slow down , but they want to know how to slow down really quickly . so ...
so i did a spot on cnn the other day where i actually spent more time in makeup than i did talking on air .
and i think that - that 's not really surprising though , is it ?
because that 's kind of the world that we live in now , a world stuck in fast-forward .
a world obsessed with speed , with doing everything faster , with cramming more and more into less and less time .
every moment of the day feels like a race against the clock .
to borrow a phrase from carrie fisher , which is in my bio there ; i 'll just toss it out again - " these days even instant gratification takes too long . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- and if you think about how we to try to make things better , what do we do ?
no , we speed them up , do n't we ? so we used to dial ; now we speed dial .
we used to read ; now we speed read . we used to walk ; now we speed walk .
and of course , we used to date and now we speed date .
and even things that are by their very nature slow - we try and speed them up too .
so i was in new york recently , and i walked past a gym that had an advertisement in the window for a new course , a new evening course .
and it was for , you guessed it , speed yoga .
so this - the perfect solution for time-starved professionals who want to , you know , salute the sun , but only want to give over about 20 minutes to it .
i mean , these are sort of the extreme examples , and they 're amusing and good to laugh at .
but there 's a very serious point , and i think that in the headlong dash of daily life , we often lose sight of the damage that this roadrunner form of living does to us .
we 're so marinated in the culture of speed that we almost fail to notice the toll it takes on every aspect of our lives - on our health , our diet , our work , our relationships , the environment and our community .
and sometimes it takes a wake-up call , does n't it , to alert us to the fact that we 're hurrying through our lives , instead of actually living them ; that we 're living the fast life , instead of the good life .
and i think for many people , that wake-up call takes the form of an illness .
you know , a burnout , or eventually the body says , " i ca n't take it anymore , " and throws in the towel .
or maybe a relationship goes up in smoke because we have n't had the time , or the patience , or the tranquility , to be with the other person , to listen to them .
and my wake-up call came when i started reading bedtime stories to my son , and i found that at the end of day , i would go into his room and i just could n't slow down - you know , i 'd be speed reading " the cat in the hat . "
i 'd be - you know , i 'd be skipping lines here , paragraphs there , sometimes a whole page , and of course , my little boy knew the book inside out , so we would quarrel .
and what should have been the most relaxing , the most intimate , the most tender moment of the day , when a dad sits down to read to his son , became instead this kind of gladiatorial battle of wills , a clash between my speed and his slowness .
and this went on for some time , until i caught myself scanning a newspaper article with timesaving tips for fast people .
and one of them made reference to a series of books called " the one-minute bedtime story . "
and i wince saying those words now , but my first reaction at the time was very different .
my first reflex was to say , " hallelujah - what a great idea !
this is exactly what i 'm looking for to speed up bedtime even more . "
but thankfully , a light bulb went on over my head , and my next reaction was very different , and i took a step back , and i thought , " whoa - you know , has it really come to this ?
am i really in such a hurry that i 'm prepared to fob off my son with a sound byte at the end of the day ? "
and i put away the newspaper - and i was getting on a plane - and i sat there , and i did something i had n't done for a long time - which is i did nothing .
i just thought , and i thought long and hard .
and by the time i got off that plane , i 'd decided i wanted to do something about it .
i wanted to investigate this whole roadrunner culture , and what it was doing to me and to everyone else .
and i had two questions in my head .
the first was , how did we get so fast ?
and the second is , is it possible , or even desirable , to slow down ?
now , if you think about how our world got so accelerated , the usual suspects rear their heads .
you think of , you know , urbanization , consumerism , the workplace , technology .
but i think if you cut through those forces , you get to what might be the deeper driver , the nub of the question , which is how we think about time itself .
in other cultures , time is cyclical .
it 's seen as moving in great , unhurried circles .
it 's always renewing and refreshing itself .
whereas in the west , time is linear .
it 's a finite resource ; it 's always draining away .
you either use it , or lose it .
" time is money , " as benjamin franklin said .
and i think what that does to us psychologically is it creates an equation .
time is scarce , so what do we do ?
well - well , we speed up , do n't we ?
we try and do more and more with less and less time .
we turn every moment of every day into a race to the finish line - a finish line , incidentally , that we never reach , but a finish line nonetheless .
and i guess that the question is , is it possible to break free from that mindset ?
and thankfully , the answer is yes , because what i discovered , when i began looking around , that there is a global backlash against this culture that tells us that faster is always better , and that busier is best .
right across the world , people are doing the unthinkable : they 're slowing down , and finding that , although conventional wisdom tells you that if you slow down , you 're road kill , the opposite turns out to be true : that by slowing down at the right moments , people find that they do everything better .
they eat better ; they make love better ; they exercise better ; they work better ; they live better .
and , in this kind of cauldron of moments and places and acts of deceleration , lie what a lot of people now refer to as the " international slow movement . "
now if you 'll permit me a small act of hypocrisy , i 'll just give you a very quick overview of what 's going on inside the slow movement . if you think of food , many of you will have heard of the slow food movement .
started in italy , but has spread across the world , and now has 100,000 members in 50 countries .
and it 's driven by a very simple and sensible message , which is that we get more pleasure and more health from our food when we cultivate , cook and consume it at a reasonable pace .
i think also the explosion of the organic farming movement , and the renaissance of farmers ' markets , are other illustrations of the fact that people are desperate to get away from eating and cooking and cultivating their food on an industrial timetable .
they want to get back to slower rhythms .
and out of the slow food movement has grown something called the slow cities movement , which has started in italy , but has spread right across europe and beyond .
and in this , towns begin to rethink how they organize the urban landscape , so that people are encouraged to slow down and smell the roses and connect with one another .
so they might curb traffic , or put in a park bench , or some green space .
and in some ways , these changes add up to more than the sum of their parts , because i think when a slow city becomes officially a slow city , it 's kind of like a philosophical declaration .
it 's saying to the rest of world , and to the people in that town , that we believe that in the 21st century , slowness has a role to play .
in medicine , i think a lot of people are deeply disillusioned with the kind of quick-fix mentality you find in conventional medicine .
and millions of them around the world are turning to complementary and alternative forms of medicine , which tend to tap into sort of slower , gentler , more holistic forms of healing .
now , obviously the jury is out on many of these complementary therapies , and i personally doubt that the coffee enema will ever , you know , gain mainstream approval .
but other treatments such as acupuncture and massage , and even just relaxation , clearly have some kind of benefit .
and blue-chip medical colleges everywhere are starting to study these things to find out how they work , and what we might learn from them .
sex . there 's an awful lot of fast sex around , is n't there ?
i was coming to - well - no pun intended there .
i was making my way , let 's say , slowly to oxford , and i went through a news agent , and i saw a magazine , a men 's magazine , and it said on the front , " how to bring your partner to orgasm in 30 seconds . "
so , you know , even sex is on a stopwatch these days .
now , you know , i like a quickie as much as the next person , but i think that there 's an awful lot to be gained from slow sex - from slowing down in the bedroom .
you know , you tap into that - those deeper , sort of , psychological , emotional , spiritual currents , and you get a better orgasm with the buildup .
you can get more bang for your buck , let 's say .
i mean , the pointer sisters said it most eloquently , did n't they , when they sang the praises of " a lover with a slow hand . "
now , we all laughed at sting a few years ago when he went tantric , but you fast-forward a few years , and now you find couples of all ages flocking to workshops , or maybe just on their own in their own bedrooms , finding ways to put on the brakes and have better sex .
and of course , in italy where - i mean , italians always seem to know where to find their pleasure - they 've launched an official slow sex movement .
the workplace .
right across much of the world - north america being a notable exception - working hours have been coming down .
and europe is an example of that , and people finding that their quality of life improves as they 're working less , and also that their hourly productivity goes up .
now , clearly there are problems with the 35-hour workweek in france - too much , too soon , too rigid .
but other countries in europe , notably the nordic countries , are showing that it 's possible to have a kick-ass economy without being a workaholic .
and norway , sweden , denmark and finland now rank among the top six most competitive nations on earth , and they work the kind of hours that would make the average american weep with envy .
and if you go beyond sort of the country level , down at the micro-company level , more and more companies now are realizing that they need to allow their staff either to work fewer hours or just to unplug - to take a lunch break , or to go sit in a quiet room , to switch off their blackberrys and laptops - you at the back - mobile phones , during the work day or on the weekend , so that they have time to recharge and for the brain to slide into that kind of creative mode of thought .
it 's not just , though , these days , adults who overwork , though , is it ? it 's children , too .
i 'm 37 , and my childhood ended in the mid- ' 80s , and i look at kids now , and i 'm just amazed by the way they race around with more homework , more tutoring , more extracurriculars than we would ever have conceived of a generation ago .
and some of the most heartrending emails that i get on my website are actually from adolescents hovering on the edge of burnout , pleading with me to write to their parents , to help them slow down , to help them get off this full-throttle treadmill .
but thankfully , there is a backlash there in parenting as well , and you 're finding that , you know , towns in the united states are now banding together and banning extracurriculars on a particular day of the month , so that people can , you know , decompress and have some family time , and slow down .
homework is another thing . there are homework bans springing up all over the developed world in schools which had been piling on the homework for years , and now they 're discovering that less can be more .
so there was a case up in scotland recently where a fee-paying , high-achieving private school banned homework for everyone under the age of 13 , and the high-achieving parents freaked out and said , " what are you - you know , our kids will fall " - the headmaster said , " no , no , your children need to slow down at the end of the day . "
and just this last month , the exam results came in , and in math , science , marks went up 20 percent on average last year .
and i think what 's very revealing is that the elite universities , who are often cited as the reason that people drive their kids and hothouse them so much , are starting to notice the caliber of students coming to them is falling . these kids have wonderful marks ; they have cvs jammed with extracurriculars , to the point that would make your eyes water .
but they lack spark ; they lack the ability to think creatively and think outside - they do n't know how to dream . and so what these ivy league schools , and oxford and cambridge and so on , are starting to send a message to parents and students that they need to put on the brakes a little bit .
and in harvard , for instance , they send out a letter to undergraduates - freshmen - telling them that they 'll get more out of life , and more out of harvard , if they put on the brakes , if they do less , but give time to things , the time that things need , to enjoy them , to savor them .
and even if they sometimes do nothing at all .
and that letter is called - very revealing , i think - " slow down ! " - with an exclamation mark on the end .
so wherever you look , the message , it seems to me , is the same : that less is very often more , that slower is very often better . but that said , of course , it 's not that easy to slow down , is it ?
i mean , you heard that i got a speeding ticket while i was researching my book on the benefits of slowness , and that 's true , but that 's not all of it .
i was actually en route to a dinner held by slow food at the time .
and if that 's not shaming enough , i got that ticket in italy .
and if any of you have ever driven on an italian highway , you 'll have a pretty good idea of how fast i was going .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but why is it so hard to slow down ?
i think there are various reasons .
one is that speed is fun , you know , speed is sexy .
it 's all that adrenaline rush . it 's hard to give it up .
i think there 's a kind of metaphysical dimension - that speed becomes a way of walling ourselves off from the bigger , deeper questions .
we fill our head with distraction , with busyness , so that we do n't have to ask , am i well ? am i happy ? are my children growing up right ?
are politicians making good decisions on my behalf ?
another reason - although i think , perhaps , the most powerful reason - why we find it hard to slow down is the cultural taboo that we 've erected against slowing down .
" slow " is a dirty word in our culture .
it 's a byword for " lazy , " " slacker , " for being somebody who gives up .
you know , " he 's a bit slow . " it 's actually synonymous with being stupid .
i guess what the slow movement - the purpose of the slow movement , or its main goal , really , is to tackle that taboo , and to say that yes , sometimes slow is not the answer , that there is such a thing as " bad slow . "
you know , i got stuck on the m25 , which is a ring road around london , recently , and spent three-and-a-half hours there . and i can tell you , that 's really bad slow .
but the new idea , the sort of revolutionary idea , of the slow movement , is that there is such a thing as " good slow , " too .
and good slow is , you know , taking the time to eat a meal with your family , with the tv switched off .
or taking the time to look at a problem from all angles in the office to make the best decision at work .
or even simply just taking the time to slow down and savor your life .
now , one of the things that i found most uplifting about all of this stuff that 's happened around the book since it came out , is the reaction to it .
and i knew that when my book on slowness came out , it would be welcomed by the new age brigade , but it 's also been taken up , with great gusto , by the corporate world - you know , business press , but also big companies and leadership organizations .
because people at the top of the chain , people like you , i think , are starting to realize that there 's too much speed in the system , there 's too much busyness , and it 's time to find , or get back to that lost art of shifting gears .
another encouraging sign , i think , is that it 's not just in the developed world that this idea 's been taken up . in the developing world , in countries that are on the verge of making that leap into first world status - china , brazil , thailand , poland , and so on - these countries have embraced the idea of the slow movement , many people in them , and there 's a debate going on in their media , on the streets .
because i think they 're looking at the west , and they 're saying , " well , we like that aspect of what you 've got , but we 're not so sure about that . "
so all of that said , is it , i guess , is it possible ?
that 's really the main question before us today . is it possible to slow down ? and i 'm happy to be able to say to you that the answer is a resounding yes .
and i present myself as exhibit a , a kind of reformed and rehabilitated speed-aholic .
i still love speed . you know , i live in london , and i work as a journalist , and i enjoy the buzz and the busyness , and the adrenaline rush that comes from both of those things .
i play squash and ice hockey , two very fast sports , and i would n't give them up for the world .
but i 've also , over the last year or so , got in touch with my inner tortoise .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and what that means is that i no longer overload myself gratuitously .
my default mode is no longer to be a rush-aholic .
i no longer hear time 's winged chariot drawing near , or at least not as much as i did before .
i can actually hear it now , because i see my time is ticking off .
and the upshot of all of that is that i actually feel a lot happier , healthier , more productive than i ever have .
i feel like i 'm living my life rather than actually just racing through it .
and perhaps , the most important measure of the success of this is that i feel that my relationships are a lot deeper , richer , stronger .
and for me , i guess , the litmus test for whether this would work , and what it would mean , was always going to be bedtime stories , because that 's sort of where the journey began . and there too the news is rosy . you know , at the end of the day , i go into my son 's room .
i do n't wear a watch . i switch off my computer , so i ca n't hear the email pinging into the basket , and i just slow down to his pace and we read .
and because children have their own tempo and internal clock , they do n't do quality time , where you schedule 10 minutes for them to open up to you .
they need you to move at their rhythm .
i find that 10 minutes into a story , you know , my son will suddenly say , " you know , something happened in the playground today that really bothered me . "
and we 'll go off and have a conversation on that .
and i now find that bedtime stories used to be a box on my to-do list , something that i dreaded , because it was so slow and i had to get through it quickly .
it 's become my reward at the end of the day , something i really cherish .
and i have a kind of hollywood ending to my talk this afternoon , which goes a little bit like this : a few months ago , i was getting ready to go on another book tour , and i had my bags packed .
i was downstairs by the front door , and i was waiting for a taxi , and my son came down the stairs and he 'd made a card for me . and he was carrying it .
he 'd gone and stapled two cards , very like these , together , and put a sticker of his favorite character , tintin , on the front .
and he said to me , or he handed this to me , and i read it , and it said , " to daddy , love benjamin . "
and i thought , " aw , that 's really sweet .
is that a good luck on the book tour card ? "
and he said , " no , no , no , daddy - this is a card for being the best story reader in the world . "
and i thought , " yeah , you know , this slowing down thing really does work . "
thank you very much .
i am a reformed marketer , and i now work in international development .
in october , i spent some time in the democratic republic of congo , which is the -lsb- second -rsb- largest country in africa .
in fact , it 's as large as western europe , but it only has 300 miles of paved roads .
the drc is a dangerous place .
in the past 10 years , five million people have died due to a war in the east .
but war is n't the only reason that life is difficult in the drc .
there are many health issues as well .
in fact , the hiv prevalence rate is 1.3 percent among adults .
this might not sound like a large number , but in a country with 76 million people , it means there are 930,000 that are infected .
and due to the poor infrastructure , only 25 percent of those are receiving the life-saving drugs that they need .
which is why , in part , donor agencies provide condoms at low or no cost .
and so while i was in the drc , i spent a lot of time talking to people about condoms , including damien .
damien runs a hotel outside of kinshasa .
it 's a hotel that 's only open until midnight , so it 's not a place that you stay .
but it is a place where sex workers and their clients come .
now damien knows all about condoms , but he does n't sell them .
he said there 's just not in demand .
it 's not surprising , because only three percent of people in the drc use condoms .
joseph and christine , who run a pharmacy where they sell a number of these condoms , said despite the fact that donor agencies provide them at low or no cost , and they have marketing campaigns that go along with them , their customers do n't buy the branded versions .
they like the generics .
and as a marketer , i found that curious .
and so i started to look at what the marketing looked like .
and it turns out that there are three main messages used by the donor agencies for these condoms : fear , financing and fidelity .
they name the condoms things like vive , " to live " or trust .
they package it with the red ribbon that reminds us of hiv , put it in boxes that remind you who paid for them , show pictures of your wife or husband and tell you to protect them or to act prudently .
now these are not the kinds of things that someone is thinking about just before they go get a condom .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- what is it that you think about just before you get a condom ?
sex !
and the private companies that sell condoms in these places , they understand this .
their marketing is slightly different .
the name might not be much different , but the imagery sure is .
some brands are aspirational , and certainly the packaging is incredibly provocative .
and this made me think that perhaps the donor agencies had just missed out on a key aspect of marketing : understanding who 's the audience .
and for donor agencies , unfortunately , the audience tends to be people that are n't even in the country they 're working -lsb- in -rsb- .
it 's people back home , people that support their work , people like these .
but if what we 're really trying to do is stop the spread of hiv , we need to think about the customer , the people whose behavior needs to change - the couples , the young women , the young men - whose lives depend on it .
and so the lesson is this : it does n't really matter what you 're selling ; you just have to think about who is your customer , and what are the messages that are going to get them to change their behavior .
it might just save their lives .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- 18 minutes is an absolutely brutal time limit , so i 'm going to dive straight in , right at the point where i get this thing to work .
here we go . i 'm going to talk about five different things .
i 'm going to talk about why defeating aging is desirable .
i 'm going to talk about why we have to get our shit together , and actually talk about this a bit more than we do .
i 'm going to talk about feasibility as well , of course .
i 'm going to talk about why we are so fatalistic about doing anything about aging .
and then i 'm going spend perhaps the second half of the talk talking about , you know , how we might actually be able to prove that fatalism is wrong , namely , by actually doing something about it .
i 'm going to do that in two steps .
how to get from a relatively modest amount of life extension - which i 'm going to define as 30 years , applied to people who are already in middle-age when you start - to a point which can genuinely be called defeating aging .
namely , essentially an elimination of the relationship between how old you are and how likely you are to die in the next year - or indeed , to get sick in the first place .
and of course , the last thing i 'm going to talk about is how to reach that intermediate step , that point of maybe 30 years life extension .
so i 'm going to start with why we should .
now , i want to ask a question .
hands up : anyone in the audience who is in favor of malaria ?
that was easy . ok .
ok . hands up : anyone in the audience who 's not sure whether malaria is a good thing or a bad thing ?
ok . so we all think malaria is a bad thing .
that 's very good news , because i thought that was what the answer would be .
that the main reason why we think that malaria is a bad thing is because of a characteristic of malaria that it shares with aging .
and here is that characteristic .
the only real difference is that aging kills considerably more people than malaria does .
now , i like in an audience , in britain especially , to talk about the comparison with foxhunting , which is something that was banned after a long struggle , by the government not very many months ago .
i mean , i know i 'm with a sympathetic audience here , but , as we know , a lot of people are not entirely persuaded by this logic .
and this is actually a rather good comparison , it seems to me .
you know , a lot of people said , " well , you know , city boys have no business telling us rural types what to do with our time .
it 's a traditional part of the way of life , and we should be allowed to carry on doing it .
it 's ecologically sound ; it stops the population explosion of foxes . "
but ultimately , the government prevailed in the end , because the majority of the british public , and certainly the majority of members of parliament , came to the conclusion that it was really something that should not be tolerated in a civilized society .
and i think that human aging shares all of these characteristics in spades .
what part of this do people not understand ?
it 's not just about life , of course - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - it 's about healthy life , you know - getting frail and miserable and dependent is no fun , whether or not dying may be fun .
so really , this is how i would like to describe it .
it 's a global trance .
these are the sorts of unbelievable excuses that people give for aging .
and , i mean , ok , i 'm not actually saying that these excuses are completely valueless .
there are some good points to be made here , things that we ought to be thinking about , forward planning so that nothing goes too - well , so that we minimize the turbulence when we actually figure out how to fix aging .
but these are completely crazy , when you actually remember your sense of proportion .
you know , these are arguments ; these are things that would be legitimate to be concerned about .
but the question is , are they so dangerous - these risks of doing something about aging - that they outweigh the downside of doing the opposite , namely , leaving aging as it is ?
are these so bad that they outweigh condemning 100,000 people a day to an unnecessarily early death ?
you know , if you have n't got an argument that 's that strong , then just do n't waste my time , is what i say .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , there is one argument that some people do think really is that strong , and here it is .
people worry about overpopulation ; they say , " well , if we fix aging , no one 's going to die to speak of , or at least the death toll is going to be much lower , only from crossing st. giles carelessly .
and therefore , we 're not going to be able to have many kids , and kids are really important to most people . "
and that 's true .
and you know , a lot of people try to fudge this question , and give answers like this .
i do n't agree with those answers . i think they basically do n't work .
i think it 's true , that we will face a dilemma in this respect .
we will have to decide whether to have a low birth rate , or a high death rate .
a high death rate will , of course , arise from simply rejecting these therapies , in favor of carrying on having a lot of kids .
and , i say that that 's fine - the future of humanity is entitled to make that choice .
what 's not fine is for us to make that choice on behalf of the future .
if we vacillate , hesitate , and do not actually develop these therapies , then we are condemning a whole cohort of people - who would have been young enough and healthy enough to benefit from those therapies , but will not be , because we have n't developed them as quickly as we could - we 'll be denying those people an indefinite life span , and i consider that that is immoral .
that 's my answer to the overpopulation question .
right . so the next thing is , now why should we get a little bit more active on this ?
and the fundamental answer is that the pro-aging trance is not as dumb as it looks .
it 's actually a sensible way of coping with the inevitability of aging .
aging is ghastly , but it 's inevitable , so , you know , we 've got to find some way to put it out of our minds , and it 's rational to do anything that we might want to do , to do that .
like , for example , making up these ridiculous reasons why aging is actually a good thing after all .
but of course , that only works when we have both of these components .
and as soon as the inevitability bit becomes a little bit unclear - and we might be in range of doing something about aging - this becomes part of the problem .
this pro-aging trance is what stops us from agitating about these things .
and that 's why we have to really talk about this a lot - evangelize , i will go so far as to say , quite a lot - in order to get people 's attention , and make people realize that they are in a trance in this regard .
so that 's all i 'm going to say about that .
i 'm now going to talk about feasibility .
and the fundamental reason , i think , why we feel that aging is inevitable is summed up in a definition of aging that i 'm giving here .
a very simple definition .
aging is a side effect of being alive in the first place , which is to say , metabolism .
this is not a completely tautological statement ; it 's a reasonable statement .
aging is basically a process that happens to inanimate objects like cars , and it also happens to us , despite the fact that we have a lot of clever self-repair mechanisms , because those self-repair mechanisms are not perfect .
so basically , metabolism , which is defined as basically everything that keeps us alive from one day to the next , has side effects .
those side effects accumulate and eventually cause pathology .
that 's a fine definition . so we can put it this way : we can say that , you know , we have this chain of events .
and there are really two games in town , according to most people , with regard to postponing aging .
they 're what i 'm calling here the " gerontology approach " and the " geriatrics approach . "
the geriatrician will intervene late in the day , when pathology is becoming evident , and the geriatrician will try and hold back the sands of time , and stop the accumulation of side effects from causing the pathology quite so soon .
of course , it 's a very short-term-ist strategy ; it 's a losing battle , because the things that are causing the pathology are becoming more abundant as time goes on .
the gerontology approach looks much more promising on the surface , because , you know , prevention is better than cure .
but unfortunately the thing is that we do n't understand metabolism very well .
in fact , we have a pitifully poor understanding of how organisms work - even cells we 're not really too good on yet .
we 've discovered things like , for example , rna interference only a few years ago , and this is a really fundamental component of how cells work .
basically , gerontology is a fine approach in the end , but it is not an approach whose time has come when we 're talking about intervention .
so then , what do we do about that ?
i mean , that 's a fine logic , that sounds pretty convincing , pretty ironclad , does n't it ?
but it is n't .
before i tell you why it is n't , i 'm going to go a little bit into what i 'm calling step two .
just suppose , as i said , that we do acquire - the ability to confer 30 extra years of healthy life on people who are already in middle age , let 's say 55 .
i 'm going to call that " robust human rejuvenation . " ok .
what would that actually mean for how long people of various ages today - or equivalently , of various ages at the time that these therapies arrive - would actually live ?
in order to answer that question - you might think it 's simple , but it 's not simple .
we ca n't just say , " well , if they 're young enough to benefit from these therapies , then they 'll live 30 years longer . "
that 's the wrong answer .
and the reason it 's the wrong answer is because of progress .
there are two sorts of technological progress really , for this purpose .
there are fundamental , major breakthroughs , and there are incremental refinements of those breakthroughs .
now , they differ a great deal in terms of the predictability of time frames .
fundamental breakthroughs : very hard to predict how long it 's going to take to make a fundamental breakthrough .
it was a very long time ago that we decided that flying would be fun , and it took us until 1903 to actually work out how to do it .
but after that , things were pretty steady and pretty uniform .
i think this is a reasonable sequence of events that happened in the progression of the technology of powered flight .
we can think , really , that each one is sort of beyond the imagination of the inventor of the previous one , if you like .
the incremental advances have added up to something which is not incremental anymore .
this is the sort of thing you see after a fundamental breakthrough .
and you see it in all sorts of technologies .
computers : you can look at a more or less parallel time line , happening of course a bit later .
you can look at medical care . i mean , hygiene , vaccines , antibiotics - you know , the same sort of time frame .
so i think that actually step two , that i called a step a moment ago , is n't a step at all .
that in fact , the people who are young enough to benefit from these first therapies that give this moderate amount of life extension , even though those people are already middle-aged when the therapies arrive , will be at some sort of cusp .
they will mostly survive long enough to receive improved treatments that will give them a further 30 or maybe 50 years .
in other words , they will be staying ahead of the game .
the therapies will be improving faster than the remaining imperfections in the therapies are catching up with us .
this is a very important point for me to get across .
because , you know , most people , when they hear that i predict that a lot of people alive today are going to live to 1,000 or more , they think that i 'm saying that we 're going to invent therapies in the next few decades that are so thoroughly eliminating aging that those therapies will let us live to 1,000 or more .
i 'm not saying that at all .
i 'm saying that the rate of improvement of those therapies will be enough .
they 'll never be perfect , but we 'll be able to fix the things that 200-year-olds die of , before we have any 200-year-olds .
and the same for 300 and 400 and so on .
i decided to give this a little name , which is " longevity escape velocity . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- well , it seems to get the point across .
so , these trajectories here are basically how we would expect people to live , in terms of remaining life expectancy , as measured by their health , for given ages that they were at the time that these therapies arrive .
if you 're already 100 , or even if you 're 80 - and an average 80-year-old , we probably ca n't do a lot for you with these therapies , because you 're too close to death 's door for the really initial , experimental therapies to be good enough for you .
you wo n't be able to withstand them .
but if you 're only 50 , then there 's a chance that you might be able to pull out of the dive and , you know - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - eventually get through this and start becoming biologically younger in a meaningful sense , in terms of your youthfulness , both physical and mental , and in terms of your risk of death from age-related causes .
and of course , if you 're a bit younger than that , then you 're never really even going to get near to being fragile enough to die of age-related causes .
so this is a genuine conclusion that i come to , that the first 150-year-old - we do n't know how old that person is today , because we do n't know how long it 's going to take to get these first-generation therapies .
but irrespective of that age , i 'm claiming that the first person to live to 1,000 - subject of course , to , you know , global catastrophes - is actually , probably , only about 10 years younger than the first 150-year-old .
and that 's quite a thought .
alright , so finally i 'm going to spend the rest of the talk , my last seven-and-a-half minutes , on step one ; namely , how do we actually get to this moderate amount of life extension that will allow us to get to escape velocity ?
and in order to do that , i need to talk about mice a little bit .
i have a corresponding milestone to robust human rejuvenation .
i 'm calling it " robust mouse rejuvenation , " not very imaginatively .
and this is what it is .
i say we 're going to take a long-lived strain of mouse , which basically means mice that live about three years on average .
we do exactly nothing to them until they 're already two years old .
and then we do a whole bunch of stuff to them , and with those therapies , we get them to live , on average , to their fifth birthday .
so , in other words , we add two years - we treble their remaining lifespan , starting from the point that we started the therapies .
the question then is , what would that actually mean for the time frame until we get to the milestone i talked about earlier for humans ?
which we can now , as i 've explained , equivalently call either robust human rejuvenation or longevity escape velocity .
secondly , what does it mean for the public 's perception of how long it 's going to take for us to get to those things , starting from the time we get the mice ?
and thirdly , the question is , what will it do to actually how much people want it ?
and it seems to me that the first question is entirely a biology question , and it 's extremely hard to answer .
one has to be very speculative , and many of my colleagues would say that we should not do this speculation , that we should simply keep our counsel until we know more .
i say that 's nonsense .
i say we absolutely are irresponsible if we stay silent on this .
we need to give our best guess as to the time frame , in order to give people a sense of proportion so that they can assess their priorities .
so , i say that we have a 50/50 chance of reaching this rhr milestone , robust human rejuvenation , within 15 years from the point that we get to robust mouse rejuvenation .
15 years from the robust mouse .
the public 's perception will probably be somewhat better than that .
the public tends to underestimate how difficult scientific things are .
so they 'll probably think it 's five years away .
they 'll be wrong , but that actually wo n't matter too much .
and finally , of course , i think it 's fair to say that a large part of the reason why the public is so ambivalent about aging now is the global trance i spoke about earlier , the coping strategy .
that will be history at this point , because it will no longer be possible to believe that aging is inevitable in humans , since it 's been postponed so very effectively in mice .
so we 're likely to end up with a very strong change in people 's attitudes , and of course that has enormous implications .
so in order to tell you now how we 're going to get these mice , i 'm going to add a little bit to my description of aging .
i 'm going to use this word " damage " to denote these intermediate things that are caused by metabolism and that eventually cause pathology .
because the critical thing about this is that even though the damage only eventually causes pathology , the damage itself is caused ongoing-ly throughout life , starting before we 're born .
but it is not part of metabolism itself .
and this turns out to be useful .
because we can re-draw our original diagram this way .
we can say that , fundamentally , the difference between gerontology and geriatrics is that gerontology tries to inhibit the rate at which metabolism lays down this damage .
and i 'm going to explain exactly what damage is and geriatricians try to hold back the sands of time by stopping the damage converting into pathology .
and the reason it 's a losing battle is because the damage is continuing to accumulate .
so there 's a third approach , if we look at it this way .
we can call it the " engineering approach , " and i claim that the engineering approach is within range .
the engineering approach does not intervene in any processes .
it does not intervene in this process or this one .
and that 's good because it means that it 's not a losing battle , and it 's something that we are within range of being able to do , because it does n't involve improving on evolution .
the engineering approach simply says , " let 's go and periodically repair all of these various types of damage - not necessarily repair them completely , but repair them quite a lot , so that we keep the level of damage down below the threshold that must exist , that causes it to be pathogenic . "
we know that this threshold exists , because we do n't get age-related diseases until we 're in middle age , even though the damage has been accumulating since before we were born .
why do i say that we 're in range ? well , this is basically it .
the point about this slide is actually the bottom .
if we try to say which bits of metabolism are important for aging , we will be here all night , because basically all of metabolism is important for aging in one way or another .
this list is just for illustration ; it is incomplete .
the list on the right is also incomplete .
it 's a list of types of pathology that are age-related , and it 's just an incomplete list .
but i would like to claim to you that this list in the middle is actually complete - this is the list of types of thing that qualify as damage , side effects of metabolism that cause pathology in the end , or that might cause pathology .
and there are only seven of them .
they 're categories of things , of course , but there 's only seven of them .
cell loss , mutations in chromosomes , mutations in the mitochondria and so on .
first of all , i 'd like to give you an argument for why that list is complete .
of course one can make a biological argument .
one can say , " ok , what are we made of ? "
we 're made of cells and stuff between cells .
what can damage accumulate in ?
the answer is : long-lived molecules , because if a short-lived molecule undergoes damage , but then the molecule is destroyed - like by a protein being destroyed by proteolysis - then the damage is gone , too .
it 's got to be long-lived molecules .
so , these seven things were all under discussion in gerontology a long time ago and that is pretty good news , because it means that , you know , we 've come a long way in biology in these 20 years , so the fact that we have n't extended this list is a pretty good indication that there 's no extension to be done .
however , it 's better than that ; we actually know how to fix them all , in mice , in principle - and what i mean by in principle is , we probably can actually implement these fixes within a decade .
some of them are partially implemented already , the ones at the top .
i have n't got time to go through them at all , but my conclusion is that , if we can actually get suitable funding for this , then we can probably develop robust mouse rejuvenation in only 10 years , but we do need to get serious about it .
we do need to really start trying .
so of course , there are some biologists in the audience , and i want to give some answers to some of the questions that you may have .
you may have been dissatisfied with this talk , but fundamentally you have to go and read this stuff .
i 've published a great deal on this ; i cite the experimental work on which my optimism is based , and there 's quite a lot of detail there .
the detail is what makes me confident of my rather aggressive time frames that i 'm predicting here .
so if you think that i 'm wrong , you 'd better damn well go and find out why you think i 'm wrong .
and of course the main thing is that you should n't trust people who call themselves gerontologists because , as with any radical departure from previous thinking within a particular field , you know , you expect people in the mainstream to be a bit resistant and not really to take it seriously .
so , you know , you 've got to actually do your homework , in order to understand whether this is true .
and we 'll just end with a few things .
one thing is , you know , you 'll be hearing from a guy in the next session who said some time ago that he could sequence the human genome in half no time , and everyone said , " well , it 's obviously impossible . "
and you know what happened .
so , you know , this does happen .
we have various strategies - there 's the methuselah mouse prize , which is basically an incentive to innovate , and to do what you think is going to work , and you get money for it if you win .
there 's a proposal to actually put together an institute .
this is what 's going to take a bit of money .
but , i mean , look - how long does it take to spend that on the war in iraq ?
not very long . ok .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's got to be philanthropic , because profits distract biotech , but it 's basically got a 90 percent chance , i think , of succeeding in this .
and i think we know how to do it . and i 'll stop there .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : ok . i do n't know if there 's going to be any questions but i thought i would give people the chance .
audience : since you 've been talking about aging and trying to defeat it , why is it that you make yourself appear like an old man ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ag : because i am an old man . i am actually 158 .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- audience : species on this planet have evolved with immune systems to fight off all the diseases so that individuals live long enough to procreate .
however , as far as i know , all the species have evolved to actually die , so when cells divide , the telomerase get shorter , and eventually species die .
so , why does - evolution has - seems to have selected against immortality , when it is so advantageous , or is evolution just incomplete ?
ag : brilliant . thank you for asking a question that i can answer with an uncontroversial answer .
i 'm going to tell you the genuine mainstream answer to your question , which i happen to agree with , which is that , no , aging is not a product of selection , evolution ; -lsb- aging -rsb- is simply a product of evolutionary neglect .
in other words , we have aging because it 's hard work not to have aging ; you need more genetic pathways , more sophistication in your genes in order to age more slowly , and that carries on being true the longer you push it out .
so , to the extent that evolution does n't matter , does n't care whether genes are passed on by individuals , living a long time or by procreation , there 's a certain amount of modulation of that , which is why different species have different lifespans , but that 's why there are no immortal species .
ca : the genes do n't care but we do ?
ag : that 's right .
audience : hello . i read somewhere that in the last 20 years , the average lifespan of basically anyone on the planet has grown by 10 years .
if i project that , that would make me think that i would live until 120 if i do n't crash on my motorbike .
that means that i 'm one of your subjects to become a 1,000-year-old ?
ag : if you lose a bit of weight .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- your numbers are a bit out .
the standard numbers are that lifespans have been growing at between one and two years per decade .
so , it 's not quite as good as you might think , you might hope .
but i intend to move it up to one year per year as soon as possible .
audience : i was told that many of the brain cells we have as adults are actually in the human embryo , and that the brain cells last 80 years or so .
if that is indeed true , biologically are there implications in the world of rejuvenation ?
if there are cells in my body that live all 80 years , as opposed to a typical , you know , couple of months ?
ag : there are technical implications certainly .
basically what we need to do is replace cells in those few areas of the brain that lose cells at a respectable rate , especially neurons , but we do n't want to replace them any faster than that - or not much faster anyway , because replacing them too fast would degrade cognitive function .
what i said about there being no non-aging species earlier on was a little bit of an oversimplification .
there are species that have no aging - hydra for example - but they do it by not having a nervous system - and not having any tissues in fact that rely for their function on very long-lived cells .
last year when i was here , i was speaking to you about a swim which i did across the north pole .
and while that swim took place three years ago , i can remember it as if it was yesterday .
i remember standing on the edge of the ice , about to dive into the water , and thinking to myself , i have never ever seen any place on this earth which is just so frightening .
the water is completely black .
the water is minus 1.7 degrees centigrade , or 29 degrees fahrenheit .
it 's flipping freezing in that water .
and then a thought came across my mind : if things go pear-shaped on this swim , how long will it take for my frozen body to sink the four and a half kilometers to the bottom of the ocean ?
and then i said to myself , i 've just got to get this thought out of my mind as quickly as possible .
and the only way i can dive into that freezing cold water and swim a kilometer is by listening to my ipod and really revving myself up , listening to everything from beautiful opera all the way across to puff daddy , and then committing myself a hundred percent - there is nothing more powerful than the made-up mind - and then walking up to the edge of the ice and just diving into the water .
and that swim took me 18 minutes and 50 seconds , and it felt like 18 days .
and i remember getting out of the water and my hands feeling so painful and looking down at my fingers , and my fingers were literally the size of sausages because - you know , we 're made partially of water - when water freezes it expands , and so the cells in my fingers had frozen and expanded and burst .
and the most immediate thought when i came out of that water was the following : i 'm never , ever going to do another cold water swim anyway , last year , i heard about the himalayas and the melting of the - -lrb- laughter -rrb- and the melting of the glaciers because of climate change .
i heard about this lake , lake imja .
this lake has been formed in the last couple of years because of the melting of the glacier .
the glacier 's gone all the way up the mountain and left in its place this big lake .
and i firmly believe that what we 're seeing in the himalayas is the next great , big battleground on this earth .
nearly two billion people - so one in three people on this earth - rely on the water from the himalayas .
and with a population increasing as quickly as it is , and with the water supply from these glaciers - because of climate change - decreasing so much , i think we have a real risk of instability .
north , you 've got china ; south , you 've india , pakistan , bangladesh , all these countries .
and so i decided to walk up to mt . everest , the highest mountain on this earth , and go and do a symbolic swim underneath the summit of mt . everest .
now , i do n't know if any of you have had the opportunity to go to mt . everest , but it 's quite an ordeal getting up there .
28 great , big , powerful yaks carrying all the equipment up onto this mountain - i do n't just have my speedo , but there 's a big film crew who then send all the images around the world .
the other thing which was so challenging about this swim is not just the altitude .
i wanted to do the swim at 5,300 meters above sea level .
so it 's right up in the heavens .
it 's very , very difficult to breath . you get altitude sickness .
i feels like you 've got a man standing behind you with a hammer just hitting your head all the time .
that 's not the worst part of it .
the worst part was this year was the year where they decided to do a big cleanup operation on mt . everest .
many , many people have died on mt . everest , and this was the year they decided to go and recover all the bodies of the mountaineers and then bring them down the mountain .
and when you 're walking up the mountain to attempt to do something which no human has ever done before , and , in fact , no fish - there are no fish up there swimming at 5,300 meters - when you 're trying to do that , and then the bodies are coming past you , it humbles you , and you also realize very , very clearly that nature is so much more powerful than we are .
and we walked up this pathway , all the way up .
and to the right hand side of us was this great khumbu glacier .
and all the way along the glacier we saw these big pools of melting ice .
and then we got up to this small lake underneath the summit of mt . everest , and i prepared myself the same way as i 've always prepared myself , for this swim which was going to be so very difficult .
i put on my ipod , i listened to some music , i got myself as aggressive as possible - but controlled aggression - and then i hurled myself into that water .
i swam as quickly as i could for the first hundred meters , and then i realized very , very quickly , i had a huge problem on my hands .
i could barely breathe .
i was gasping for air .
i then began to choke , and then it quickly led to me vomiting in the water .
and it all happened so quickly : i then - i do n't know how it happened - but i went underwater .
and luckily , the water was quite shallow , and i was able to push myself off the bottom of the lake and get up and then take another gasp of air .
and then i said , carry on . carry on . carry on .
i carried on for another five or six strokes , and then i had nothing in my body , and i went down to the bottom of the lake .
and i do n't where i got it from , but i was able to somehow pull myself up and as quickly as possible get to the side of the lake .
i 've heard it said that drowning is the most peaceful death that you can have .
i have never , ever heard such utter bollocks .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it is the most frightening and panicky feeling that you can have .
i got myself to the side of the lake .
my crew grabbed me , and then we walked as quickly as we could down - over the rubble - down to our camp .
and there , we sat down , and we did a debrief about what had gone wrong there on mt . everest .
and my team just gave it to me straight .
they said , lewis , you need to have a radical tactical shift if you want to do this swim .
every single thing which you have learned in the past 23 years of swimming , you must forget .
every single thing which you learned when you were serving in the british army , about speed and aggression , you put that to one side .
we want you to walk up the hill in another two days ' time .
take some time to rest and think about things .
we want you to walk up the mountain in two days ' time , and instead of swimming fast , swim as slowly as possible .
instead of swimming crawl , swim breaststroke .
and remember , never ever swim with aggression .
this is the time to swim with real humility .
and so we walked back up to the mountain two days later .
and i stood there on the edge of the lake , and i looked up at mt . everest - and she is one of the most beautiful mountains on the earth - and i said to myself , just do this slowly .
and i swam across the lake .
and i ca n't begin to tell you how good i felt when i came to the other side .
but i learned two very , very important lessons there on mt . everest , and i thank my team of sherpas who taught me this .
the first one is that just because something has worked in the past so well , does n't mean it 's going to work in the future .
and similarly , now , before i do anything , i ask myself what type of mindset do i require to successfully complete a task .
and taking that into the world of climate change - which is , frankly , the mt . everest of all problems - just because we 've lived the way we have lived for so long , just because we have consumed the way we have for so long and populated the earth the way we have for so long , does n't mean that we can carry on the way we are carrying on .
the warning signs are all there .
when i was born , the world 's population was 3.5 billion people .
we 're now 6.8 billion people , and we 're expected to be 9 billion people by 2050 .
and then the second lesson , the radical , tactical shift .
and i 've come here to ask you today : what radical tactical shift can you take in your relationship to the environment , which will ensure that our children and our grandchildren live in a safe world and a secure world , and most importantly , in a sustainable world ?
and i ask you , please , to go away from here and think about that one radical tactical shift which you could make , which will make that big difference , and then commit a hundred percent to doing it .
blog about it , tweet about it , talk about it , and commit a hundred percent , because very , very few things are impossible to achieve if we really put our whole minds to it .
so thank you very , very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- today i 'm going to unpack for you three examples of iconic design , and it makes perfect sense that i should be the one to do it because i have a bachelor 's degree in literature .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but i 'm also a famous minor television personality and an avid collector of design within reach catalogs , so i pretty much know everything there is .
now , i 'm sure you recognize this object ; many of you probably saw it as you were landing your private zeppelins at los angeles international airport over the past couple of days .
this is known as the theme building ; that is its name for reasons that are still very murky .
and it is perhaps the best example we have in los angeles of ancient extraterrestrial architecture .
it was first excavated in 1961 as they were building lax , although scientists believe that it dates back to the year 2000 before common era , when it was used as a busy transdimensional space port by the ancient astronauts who first colonized this planet and raised our species from savagery by giving us the gift of written language and technology and the gift of revolving restaurants .
it is thought to have been a replacement for the older space ports located , of course , at stonehenge and considered to be quite an improvement due to the uncluttered design , the lack of druids hanging around all the time and obviously , the much better access to parking .
when it was uncovered , it ushered in a new era of streamlined , archaically futuristic design called googie , which came to be synonymous with the jet age , a misnomer .
after all , the ancient astronauts who used it did not travel by jet very often , preferring instead to travel by feathered serpent powered by crystal skulls .
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- ah yes , a table .
we use these every day .
and on top of it , the juicy salif .
this is a design by philippe starck , who i believe is in the audience at this very moment .
and you can tell it is a starck design by its precision , its playfulness , its innovation and its promise of imminent violence .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it is a design that challenges your intuition - it is not what you think it is when you first see it .
it is not a fork designed to grab three hors d 'oeuvres at a time , which would be useful out in the lobby , i would say .
and despite its obvious influence by the ancient astronauts and its space agey-ness and tripodism , it is not something designed to attach to your brain and suck out your thoughts .
it is in fact a citrus juicer and when i say that , you never see it as anything else again .
it is also not a monument to design , it is a monument to design 's utility .
you can take it home with you , unlike the theme building , which will stay where it is forever .
this is affordable and can come home with you and , as such , it can sit on your kitchen counter - it ca n't go in your drawers ; trust me , i found that out the hard way - and make your kitchen counter into a monument to design .
one other thing about it , if you do have one at home , let me tell you one of the features you may not know : when you fall asleep , it comes alive and it walks around your house and goes through your mail and watches you as you sleep .
-lrb- applause -rrb- okay , what is this object ?
i have no idea . i do n't know what that thing is .
it looks terrible . is it a little hot plate ?
i do n't get it .
does anyone know ? chi ?
it 's an ... iphone. iphone .
oh yes , that 's right , i remember those ; i had my whole bathroom tiles redone with those back in the good old days .
no , i have an iphone . of course i do .
here is my well-loved iphone .
i do so many things on this little device .
i like to read books on it .
more than that , i like to buy books on it that i never have to feel guilty about not reading because they go in here and i never look at them again and it 's perfect .
i use it every day to measure the weight of an ox , for example .
every now and then , i admit that i complete a phone call on it occasionally .
and yet i forget about it all the time .
this is a design that once you saw it , you forgot about it .
it is easy to forget the gasp-inducement that occurred in 2007 when you first touched this thing because it became so quickly pervasive and because of how instantly we adopted these gestures and made it an extension of our life .
unlike the theme building , this is not alien technology .
or i should say , what it did was it took technology which , unlike people in this room , to many other people in the world , still feels very alien , and made it immediately and instantly feel familiar and intimate .
and unlike the juicy salif , it does not threaten to attach itself to your brain , rather , it simply attaches itself to your brain .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and you did n't even notice it happened .
so there you go . my name is john hodgman .
i just explained design .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 've always written primarily about architecture , about buildings , and writing about architecture is based on certain assumptions .
an architect designs a building , and it becomes a place , or many architects design many buildings , and it becomes a city , and regardless of this complicated mix of forces of politics and culture and economics that shapes these places , at the end of the day , you can go and you can visit them . you can walk around them .
you can smell them . you can get a feel for them .
you can experience their sense of place .
but what was striking to me over the last several years was that less and less was i going out into the world , and more and more , i was sitting in front of my computer screen .
and especially since about 2007 , when i got an iphone , i was not only sitting in front of my screen all day , but i was also getting up at the end of the day and looking at this little screen that i carried in my pocket .
and what was surprising to me was how quickly my relationship to the physical world had changed .
in this very short period of time , you know , whether you call it the last 15 years or so of being online , or the last , you know , four or five years of being online all the time , our relationship to our surroundings had changed in that our attention is constantly divided . you know , we 're both looking inside the screens and we 're looking out in the world around us .
and what was even more striking to me , and what i really got hung up on , was that the world inside the screen seemed to have no physical reality of its own .
if you went and looked for images of the internet , this was all that you found , this famous image by opte of the internet as the kind of milky way , this infinite expanse where we do n't seem to be anywhere on it .
we can never seem to grasp it in its totality .
it 's always reminded me of the apollo image of the earth , the blue marble picture , and it 's similarly meant to suggest , i think , that we ca n't really understand it as a whole .
we 're always sort of small in the face of its expanse .
so if there was this world and this screen , and if there was the physical world around me , i could n't ever get them together in the same place .
and then this happened .
my internet broke one day , as it occasionally does , and the cable guy came to fix it , and he started with the dusty clump of cables behind the couch , and he followed it to the front of my building and into the basement and out to the back yard , and there was this big jumble of cables against the wall .
and then he saw a squirrel running along the wire , and he said , " there 's your problem .
a squirrel is chewing on your internet . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- and this seemed astounding . the internet is a transcendent idea . it 's a set of protocols that has changed everything from shopping to dating to revolutions .
it was unequivocally not something a squirrel could chew on . -lrb- laughter -rrb- but that in fact seemed to be the case .
a squirrel had in fact chewed on my internet . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and then i got this image in my head of what would happen if you yanked the wire from the wall and if you started to follow it . where would it go ?
was the internet actually a place that you could visit ?
could i go there ? who would i meet ?
you know , was there something actually out there ?
and the answer , by all accounts , was no .
this was the internet , this black box with a red light on it , as represented in the sitcom " the it crowd . "
normally it lives on the top of big ben , because that 's where you get the best reception , but they had negotiated that their colleague could borrow it for the afternoon to use in an office presentation .
the elders of the internet were willing to part with it for a short while , and she looks at it and she says , " this is the internet ? the whole internet ? is it heavy ? "
they say , " of course not , the internet does n't weigh anything . "
and i was embarrassed . i was looking for this thing that only fools seem to look for .
the internet was that amorphous blob , or it was a silly black box with a blinking red light on it .
it was n't a real world out there .
but , in fact , it is . there is a real world of the internet out there , and that 's what i spent about two years visiting , these places of the internet . i was in large data centers that use as much power as the cities in which they sit , and i visited places like this , 60 hudson street in new york , which is one of the buildings in the world , one of a very short list of buildings , about a dozen buildings , where more networks of the internet connect to each other than anywhere else .
and that connection is an unequivocally physical process .
it 's about the router of one network , a facebook or a google or a b.t. or a comcast or a time warner , whatever it is , connecting with usually a yellow fiber optic cable up into the ceiling and down into the router of another network , and that 's unequivocally physical , and it 's surprisingly intimate .
a building like 60 hudson , and a dozen or so others , has 10 times more networks connecting within it than the next tier of buildings .
there 's a very short list of these places .
and 60 hudson in particular is interesting because it 's home to about a half a dozen very important networks , which are the networks which serve the undersea cables that travel underneath the ocean that connect europe and america and connect all of us .
and it 's those cables in particular that i want to focus on .
if the internet is a global phenomenon , if we live in a global village , it 's because there are cables underneath the ocean , cables like this .
and in this dimension , they are incredibly small .
you can you hold them in your hand . they 're like a garden hose .
but in the other dimension they are incredibly expansive , as expansive as you can imagine .
they stretch across the ocean . they 're three or five or eight thousand miles in length , and if the material science and the computational technology is incredibly complicated , the basic physical process is shockingly simple . light goes in on one end of the ocean and comes out on the other , and it usually comes from a building called a landing station that 's often tucked away inconspicuously in a little seaside neighborhood , and there are amplifiers that sit on the ocean floor that look kind of like bluefin tuna , and every 50 miles they amplify the signal , and since the rate of transmission
is incredibly fast , the basic unit is a 10-gigabit-per-second wavelength of light , maybe a thousand times your own connection , or capable of carrying 10,000 video streams , but not only that , but you 'll put not just one wavelength of light through one of the fibers , but you 'll put maybe 50 or 60 or 70 different wavelengths or colors of light through a single fiber , and then you 'll have maybe eight fibers in a cable , four going in each direction .
and they 're tiny . they 're the thickness of a hair .
and then they connect to the continent somewhere .
they connect in a manhole like this . literally , this is where the 5,000-mile cable plugs in .
this is in halifax , a cable that stretches from halifax to ireland .
and the landscape is changing . three years ago , when i started thinking about this , there was one cable down the western coast of africa , represented in this map by steve song as that thin black line .
now there are six cables and more coming , three down each coast .
because once a country gets plugged in by one cable , they realize that it 's not enough . if they 're going to build an industry around it , they need to know that their connection is n't tenuous but permanent , because if a cable breaks , you have to send a ship out into the water , throw a grappling hook over the side , pick it up , find the other end , and then fuse the two ends back together and then dump it over .
it 's an intensely , intensely physical process .
so this is my friend simon cooper , who until very recently worked for tata communications , the communications wing of tata , the big indian industrial conglomerate .
and i 've never met him . we 've only communicated via this telepresence system , which always makes me think of him as the man inside the internet . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and he is english . the undersea cable industry is dominated by englishmen , and they all seem to be 42 .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- because they all started at the same time with the boom about 20 years ago .
and tata had gotten its start as a communications business when they bought two cables , one across the atlantic and one across the pacific , and proceeded to add pieces onto them , until they had built a belt around the world , which means they will send your bits to the east or the west .
they have - this is literally a beam of light around the world , and if a cable breaks in the pacific , it 'll send it around the other direction . and then having done that , they started to look for places to wire next .
they looked for the unwired places , and that 's meant north and south , primarily these cables to africa .
but what amazes me is simon 's incredible geographic imagination .
he thinks about the world with this incredible expansiveness .
and i was particularly interested because i wanted to see one of these cables being built . see , you know , all the time online we experience these fleeting moments of connection , these sort of brief adjacencies , a tweet or a facebook post or an email , and it seemed like there was a physical corollary to that .
it seemed like there was a moment when the continent was being plugged in , and i wanted to see that .
and simon was working on a new cable , wacs , the west africa cable system , that stretched from lisbon down the west coast of africa , to cote d 'ivoire , to ghana , to nigeria , to cameroon .
and he said there was coming soon , depending on the weather , but he 'd let me know when , and so with about four days notice , he said to go to this beach south of lisbon , and a little after 9 , this guy will walk out of the water . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and he 'll be carrying a green nylon line , a lightweight line , called a messenger line , and that was the first link between sea and land , this link that would then be leveraged into this 9,000-mile path of light .
then a bulldozer began to pull the cable in from this specialized cable landing ship , and it was floated on these buoys until it was in the right place .
then you can see the english engineers looking on .
and then , once it was in the right place , he got back in the water holding a big knife , and he cut each buoy off , and the buoy popped up into the air , and the cable dropped to the sea floor , and he did that all the way out to the ship , and when he got there , they gave him a glass of juice and a cookie , and then he jumped back in , and he swam back to shore , and then he lit a cigarette . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and then once that cable was on shore , they began to prepare to connect it to the other side ,
for the cable that had been brought down from the landing station .
and first they got it with a hacksaw , and then they start sort of shaving away at this plastic interior with a - sort of working like chefs , and then finally they 're working like jewelers to get these hair-thin fibers to line up with the cable that had come down , and with this hole-punch machine they fuse it together .
and when you see these guys going at this cable with a hacksaw , you stop thinking about the internet as a cloud .
it starts to seem like an incredibly physical thing .
and what surprised me as well was that as much as this is based on the most sophisticated technology , as much as this is an incredibly new thing , the physical process itself has been around for a long time , and the culture is the same .
you see the local laborers . you see the english engineer giving directions in the background . and more importantly , the places are the same . these cables still connect these classic port cities , places like lisbon , mombasa , mumbai , singapore , new york .
and then the process on shore takes around three or four days , and then , when it 's done , they put the manhole cover back on top , and they push the sand over that , and we all forget about it .
and it seems to me that we talk a lot about the cloud , but every time we put something on the cloud , we give up some responsibility for it .
we are less connected to it . we let other people worry about it .
and that does n't seem right .
there 's a great neal stephenson line where he says that wired people should know something about wires .
and we should know , i think , we should know where our internet comes from , and we should know what it is that physically , physically connects us all .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- thanks . -lrb- applause -rrb- a human child is born , and for quite a long time is a consumer .
it can not be consciously a contributor .
it is helpless .
it does n't know how to survive , even though it is endowed with an instinct to survive .
it needs the help of mother , or a foster mother , to survive .
it ca n't afford to doubt the person who tends the child .
it has to totally surrender , as one surrenders to an anesthesiologist .
it has to totally surrender .
that implies a lot of trust .
that implies the trusted person wo n't violate the trust .
as the child grows , it begins to discover that the person trusted is violating the trust .
it does n't know even the word " violation . "
therefore , it has to blame itself , a wordless blame , which is more difficult to really resolve - the wordless self-blame .
as the child grows to become an adult : so far , it has been a consumer , but the growth of a human being lies in his or her capacity to contribute , to be a contributor .
one can not contribute unless one feels secure , one feels big , one feels : i have enough .
to be compassionate is not a joke .
it 's not that simple .
one has to discover a certain bigness in oneself .
that bigness should be centered on oneself , not in terms of money , not in terms of power you wield , not in terms of any status that you can command in the society , but it should be centered on oneself .
the self : you are self-aware .
on that self , it should be centered - a bigness , a wholeness .
otherwise , compassion is just a word and a dream .
you can be compassionate occasionally , more moved by empathy than by compassion .
thank god we are empathetic .
when somebody 's in pain , we pick up the pain .
in a wimbledon final match , these two guys fight it out .
each one has got two games .
it can be anybody 's game .
what they have sweated so far has no meaning .
one person wins .
the tennis etiquette is , both the players have to come to the net and shake hands .
the winner boxes the air and kisses the ground , throws his shirt as though somebody is waiting for it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and this guy has to come to the net .
when he comes to the net , you see , his whole face changes .
it looks as though he 's wishing that he did n't win .
why ? empathy .
that 's human heart .
no human heart is denied of that empathy .
no religion can demolish that by indoctrination .
no culture , no nation and nationalism - nothing can touch it because it is empathy .
and that capacity to empathize is the window through which you reach out to people , you do something that makes a difference in somebody 's life - even words , even time .
compassion is not defined in one form .
there 's no indian compassion .
there 's no american compassion .
it transcends nation , the gender , the age .
why ? because it is there in everybody .
it 's experienced by people occasionally .
then this occasional compassion , we are not talking about - it will never remain occasional .
by mandate , you can not make a person compassionate .
you ca n't say , " please love me . "
love is something you discover .
it 's not an action , but in the english language , it is also an action .
i will come to it later .
so one has got to discover a certain wholeness .
i am going to cite the possibility of being whole , which is within our experience , everybody 's experience .
in spite of a very tragic life , one is happy in moments which are very few and far between .
and the one who is happy , even for a slapstick joke , accepts himself and also the scheme of things in which one finds oneself .
that means the whole universe , known things and unknown things .
all of them are totally accepted because you discover your wholeness in yourself .
the subject - " me " - and the object - the scheme of things - fuse into oneness , an experience nobody can say , " i am denied of , " an experience common to all and sundry .
that experience confirms that , in spite of all your limitations - all your wants , desires , unfulfilled , and the credit cards and layoffs and , finally , baldness - you can be happy .
but the extension of the logic is that you do n't need to fulfill your desire to be happy .
you are the very happiness , the wholeness that you want to be .
there 's no choice in this : that only confirms the reality that the wholeness can not be different from you , can not be minus you .
it has got to be you .
you can not be a part of wholeness and still be whole .
your moment of happiness reveals that reality , that realization , that recognition : " maybe i am the whole .
maybe the swami is right .
maybe the swami is right . " you start your new life .
then everything becomes meaningful .
i have no more reason to blame myself .
if one has to blame oneself , one has a million reasons plus many .
but if i say , in spite of my body being limited - if it is black it is not white , if it is white it is not black : body is limited any which way you look at it . limited .
your knowledge is limited , health is limited , and power is therefore limited , and the cheerfulness is going to be limited .
compassion is going to be limited .
everything is going to be limitless .
you can not command compassion unless you become limitless , and nobody can become limitless , either you are or you are not . period .
and there is no way of your being not limitless too .
your own experience reveals , in spite of all limitations , you are the whole .
and the wholeness is the reality of you when you relate to the world .
it is love first .
when you relate to the world , the dynamic manifestation of the wholeness is , what we say , love .
and itself becomes compassion if the object that you relate to evokes that emotion .
then that again transforms into giving , into sharing .
you express yourself because you have compassion .
to discover compassion , you need to be compassionate .
to discover the capacity to give and share , you need to be giving and sharing .
there is no shortcut : it is like swimming by swimming .
you learn swimming by swimming .
you can not learn swimming on a foam mattress and enter into water .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you learn swimming by swimming . you learn cycling by cycling .
you learn cooking by cooking , having some sympathetic people around you to eat what you cook .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and , therefore , what i say , you have to fake it and make it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you need to .
my predecessor meant that .
you have to act it out .
you have to act compassionately .
there is no verb for compassion , but you have an adverb for compassion .
that 's interesting to me .
you act compassionately .
but then , how to act compassionately if you do n't have compassion ?
that is where you fake .
you fake it and make it . this is the mantra of the united states of america .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you fake it and make it .
you act compassionately as though you have compassion : grind your teeth , take all the support system .
if you know how to pray , pray .
ask for compassion .
let me act compassionately .
do it .
you 'll discover compassion and also slowly a relative compassion , and slowly , perhaps if you get the right teaching , you 'll discover compassion is a dynamic manifestation of the reality of yourself , which is oneness , wholeness , and that 's what you are .
with these words , thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the kraken , a beast so terrifying it was said to devour men and ships and whales , and so enormous it could be mistaken for an island .
in assessing the merits of such tales , it 's probably wise to keep in mind that old sailor 's saw that the only difference between a fairytale and a sea story is a fairytale begins , " once upon a time , " and a sea story begins , " this ai n't no shit . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- every fish that gets away grows with every telling of the tale .
nevertheless , there are giants in the ocean , and we now have video proof , as those of you that saw the discovery channel documentary are no doubt aware .
i was one of the three scientists on this expedition that took place last summer off japan .
i 'm the short one .
the other two are dr. tsunemi kubodera and dr. steve o 'shea .
i owe my participation in this now-historic event to ted .
in 2010 , there was a ted event called mission blue held aboard the lindblad explorer in the galapagos as part of the fulfillment of sylvia earle 's ted wish .
i spoke about a new way of exploring the ocean , one that focuses on attracting animals instead of scaring them away .
mike degruy was also invited , and he spoke with great passion about his love of the ocean , and he also talked to me about applying my approach to something he 's been involved with for a very long time , which is the hunt for the giant squid .
it was mike that got me invited to the squid summit , a gathering of squid experts at the discovery channel that summer during shark week . -lrb- laughter -rrb- i gave a talk on unobtrusive viewing and optical luring of deep sea squid in which i emphasized the importance of using quiet , unobtrusive platforms for exploration .
this came out of hundreds of dives i have made , farting around in the dark using these platforms , and my impression that i saw more animals working from the submersible than i did with either of the remote-operated vehicles .
but that could just be because the submersible has a wider field of view .
but i also felt like i saw more animals working with the tiburon than the ventana , two vehicles with the same field of view but different propulsion systems .
so my suspicion was that it might have something to do with the amount of noise they make .
so i set up a hydrophone on the bottom of the ocean , and i had each of these fly by at the same speed and distance and recorded the sound they made .
the johnson sea-link - -lrb- whirring noise -rrb- - which you can probably just barely hear here , uses electric thrusters - very , very quiet .
the tiburon also uses electric powered thrusters .
it 's also pretty quiet , but a bit noisier . -lrb- louder whirring noise -rrb- but most deep-diving rovs these days use hydraulics and they sound like the ventana . -lrb- loud beeping noise -rrb- i think that 's got to be scaring a lot of animals away .
so for the deep sea squid hunt , i proposed using an optical lure attached to a camera platform with no thrusters , no motors , just a battery-powered camera , and the only illumination coming from red light that 's invisible to most deep-sea animals that are adapted to see primarily blue .
that 's visible to our eye , but it 's the equivalent of infrared in the deep sea .
so this camera platform , which we called the medusa , could just be thrown off the back of the ship , attached to a float at the surface with over 2,000 feet of line , it would just float around passively carried by the currents , and the only light visible to the animals in the deep would be the blue light of the optical lure , which we called the electronic jellyfish , or e-jelly , because it was designed to imitate the bioluminescent display of the common deep sea jellyfish atolla .
now , this pinwheel of light that the atolla produces is known as a bioluminescent burglar alarm and is a form of defense .
the reason that the electronic jellyfish worked as a lure is not because giant squid eat jellyfish , but it 's because this jellyfish only resorts to producing this light when it 's being chewed on by a predator and its only hope for escape may be to attract the attention of a larger predator that will attack its attacker and thereby afford it an opportunity for escape .
it 's a scream for help , a last-ditch attempt for escape , and a common form of defense in the deep sea .
the approach worked .
whereas all previous expeditions had failed to garner a single video glimpse of the giant , we managed six , and the first triggered wild excitement .
edith widder -lrb- on video -rrb- : oh my god . oh my god ! are you kidding me ? other scientists : oh ho ho ! that 's just hanging there .
ew : it was like it was teasing us , doing a kind of fan dance - now you see me , now you do n't - and we had four such teasing appearances , and then on the fifth , it came in and totally wowed us .
-lrb- music -rrb- narrator : -lrb- speaking in japanese -rrb- scientists : ooh . bang ! oh my god ! whoa !
-lrb- applause -rrb- ew : the full monty .
what really wowed me about that was the way it came in up over the e-jelly and then attacked the enormous thing next to it , which i think it mistook for the predator on the e-jelly .
but even more incredible was the footage shot from the triton submersible .
what was not mentioned in the discovery documentary was that the bait squid that dr. kubodera used , a one-meter long diamondback squid had a light attached to it , a squid jig of the type that longline fishermen use , and i think it was this light that brought the giant in .
now , what you 're seeing is the intensified camera 's view under red light , and that 's all dr. kubodera could see when the giant comes in here .
and then he got so excited , he turned on his flashlight because he wanted to see better , and the giant did n't run away , so he risked turning on the white lights on the submersible , bringing a creature of legend from the misty history into high-resolution video .
it was absolutely breathtaking , and had this animal had its feeding tentacles intact and fully extended , it would have been as tall as a two-story house .
how could something that big live in our ocean and yet remain unfilmed until now ?
we 've only explored about five percent of our ocean .
there are great discoveries yet to be made down there , fantastic creatures representing millions of years of evolution and possibly bioactive compounds that could benefit us in ways that we ca n't even yet imagine .
yet we have spent only a tiny fraction of the money on ocean exploration that we 've spent on space exploration .
we need a nasa-like organization for ocean exploration , because we need to be exploring and protecting our life support systems here on earth .
we need - thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- exploration is the engine that drives innovation .
innovation drives economic growth .
so let 's all go exploring , but let 's do it in a way that does n't scare the animals away , or , as mike degruy once said , " if you want to get away from it all and see something you 've never seen , or have an excellent chance of seeing something that no one 's ever seen , get in a sub . "
he should have been with us for this adventure .
we miss him .
-lrb- applause -rrb- okay , it 's great to be back at ted .
why do n't i just start by firing away with the video ?
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- video -rrb- man : okay , glass , record a video .
woman : this is it . we 're on in two minutes .
man 2 : okay glass , hang out with the flying club .
man 3 : google " photos of tiger heads . " hmm .
man 4 : you ready ? you ready ? -lrb- barking -rrb- woman 2 : right there . okay , glass , take a picture .
-lrb- child shouting -rrb- man 5 : go !
man 6 : holy -lsb- beep -rsb- ! that is awesome .
child : whoa ! look at that snake !
woman 3 : okay , glass , record a video !
man 7 : after this bridge , first exit .
man 8 : okay , a12 , right there !
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- children singing -rrb- man 9 : google , say " delicious " in thai .
google glass : อร ่ อยman 9 : mmm , อร ่ อย .
woman 4 : google " jellyfish . "
-lrb- music -rrb- man 10 : it 's beautiful .
-lrb- applause -rrb- sergey brin : oh , sorry , i just got this message from a nigerian prince .
he needs help getting 10 million dollars .
i like to pay attention to these because that 's how we originally funded the company , and it 's gone pretty well .
though in all seriousness , this position that you just saw me in , looking down at my phone , that 's one of the reasons behind this project , project glass .
because we ultimately questioned whether this is the ultimate future of how you want to connect to other people in your life , how you want to connect to information .
should it be by just walking around looking down ?
but that was the vision behind glass , and that 's why we 've created this form factor .
okay . and i do n't want to go through all the things it does and whatnot , but i want to tell you a little bit more about the motivation behind what led to it .
in addition to potentially socially isolating yourself when you 're out and about looking at your phone , it 's kind of , is this what you 're meant to do with your body ?
you 're standing around there and you 're just rubbing this featureless piece of glass .
you 're just kind of moving around .
so when we developed glass , we thought really about , can we make something that frees your hands ?
you saw all of the things people are doing in the video back there .
they were all wearing glass , and that 's how we got that footage .
and also you want something that frees your eyes .
that 's why we put the display up high , out of your line of sight , so it would n't be where you 're looking and it would n't be where you 're making eye contact with people .
and also we wanted to free up the ears , so the sound actually goes through , conducts straight to the bones in your cranium , which is a little bit freaky at first , but you get used to it .
and ironically , if you want to hear it better , you actually just cover your ear , which is kind of surprising , but that 's how it works .
my vision when we started google 15 years ago was that eventually you would n't have to have a search query at all .
you 'd just have information come to you as you needed it .
and this is now , 15 years later , sort of the first form factor that i think can deliver that vision when you 're out and about on the street talking to people and so forth .
this project has lasted now , been just over two years .
we 've learned an amazing amount .
it 's been really important to make it comfortable .
so our first prototypes we built were huge .
it was like cell phones strapped to your head .
it was very heavy , pretty uncomfortable .
we had to keep it secret from our industrial designer until she actually accepted the job , and then she almost ran away screaming .
but we 've come a long way .
and the other really unexpected surprise was the camera .
our original prototypes did n't have cameras at all , but it 's been really magical to be able to capture moments spent with my family , my kids .
i just never would have dug out a camera or a phone or something else to take that moment .
and lastly i 've realized , in experimenting with this device , that i also kind of have a nervous tic .
the cell phone is - yeah , you have to look down on it and all that , but it 's also kind of a nervous habit .
like if i smoked , i 'd probably just smoke instead .
i would just light up a cigarette . it would look cooler .
you know , i 'd be like - but in this case , you know , i whip this out and i sit there and look as if i have something very important to do or attend to .
but it really opened my eyes to how much of my life i spent just secluding away , be it email or social posts or whatnot , even though it was n't really - there 's nothing really that important or that pressing .
and with this , i know i will get certain messages if i really need them , but i do n't have to be checking them all the time .
yeah , i 've really enjoyed actually exploring the world more , doing more of the crazy things like you saw in the video .
thank you all very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- like many of you , i 'm one of the lucky people .
i was born to a family where education was pervasive .
i 'm a third-generation phd , a daughter of two academics .
in my childhood , i played around in my father 's university lab .
so it was taken for granted that i attend some of the best universities , which in turn opened the door to a world of opportunity .
unfortunately , most of the people in the world are not so lucky .
in some parts of the world , for example , south africa , education is just not readily accessible .
in south africa , the educational system was constructed in the days of apartheid for the white minority .
and as a consequence , today there is just not enough spots for the many more people who want and deserve a high quality education .
that scarcity led to a crisis in january of this year at the university of johannesburg .
there were a handful of positions left open from the standard admissions process , and the night before they were supposed to open that for registration , thousands of people lined up outside the gate in a line a mile long , hoping to be first in line to get one of those positions .
when the gates opened , there was a stampede , and 20 people were injured and one woman died .
she was a mother who gave her life trying to get her son a chance at a better life .
but even in parts of the world like the united states where education is available , it might not be within reach .
there has been much discussed in the last few years about the rising cost of health care .
what might not be quite as obvious to people is that during that same period the cost of higher education tuition has been increasing at almost twice the rate , for a total of 559 percent since 1985 .
this makes education unaffordable for many people .
finally , even for those who do manage to get the higher education , the doors of opportunity might not open .
only a little over half of recent college graduates in the united states who get a higher education actually are working in jobs that require that education .
this , of course , is not true for the students who graduate from the top institutions , but for many others , they do not get the value for their time and their effort .
tom friedman , in his recent new york times article , captured , in the way that no one else could , the spirit behind our effort .
he said the big breakthroughs are what happen when what is suddenly possible meets what is desperately necessary .
i 've talked about what 's desperately necessary .
let 's talk about what 's suddenly possible .
what 's suddenly possible was demonstrated by three big stanford classes , each of which had an enrollment of 100,000 people or more .
so to understand this , let 's look at one of those classes , the machine learning class offered by my colleague and cofounder andrew ng .
andrew teaches one of the bigger stanford classes .
it 's a machine learning class , and it has 400 people enrolled every time it 's offered .
when andrew taught the machine learning class to the general public , it had 100,000 people registered .
so to put that number in perspective , for andrew to reach that same size audience by teaching a stanford class , he would have to do that for 250 years .
of course , he 'd get really bored .
so , having seen the impact of this , andrew and i decided that we needed to really try and scale this up , to bring the best quality education to as many people as we could .
so we formed coursera , whose goal is to take the best courses from the best instructors at the best universities and provide it to everyone around the world for free .
we currently have 43 courses on the platform from four universities across a range of disciplines , and let me show you a little bit of an overview of what that looks like .
-lrb- video -rrb- robert ghrist : welcome to calculus .
ezekiel emanuel : fifty million people are uninsured .
scott page : models help us design more effective institutions and policies .
we get unbelievable segregation .
scott klemmer : so bush imagined that in the future , you 'd wear a camera right in the center of your head .
mitchell duneier : mills wants the student of sociology to develop the quality of mind ...
rg : hanging cable takes on the form of a hyperbolic cosine .
nick parlante : for each pixel in the image , set the red to zero .
paul offit : ... vaccine allowed us to eliminate polio virus .
dan jurafsky : does lufthansa serve breakfast and san jose ? well , that sounds funny .
daphne koller : so this is which coin you pick , and this is the two tosses .
andrew ng : so in large-scale machine learning , we 'd like to come up with computational ...
-lrb- applause -rrb- dk : it turns out , maybe not surprisingly , that students like getting the best content from the best universities for free .
since we opened the website in february , we now have 640,000 students from 190 countries .
we have 1.5 million enrollments , 6 million quizzes in the 15 classes that have launched so far have been submitted , and 14 million videos have been viewed .
but it 's not just about the numbers , it 's also about the people .
whether it 's akash , who comes from a small town in india and would never have access in this case to a stanford-quality course and would never be able to afford it .
or jenny , who is a single mother of two and wants to hone her skills so that she can go back and complete her master 's degree .
or ryan , who ca n't go to school , because his immune deficient daughter ca n't be risked to have germs come into the house , so he could n't leave the house .
i 'm really glad to say - recently , we 've been in correspondence with ryan - that this story had a happy ending .
baby shannon - you can see her on the left - is doing much better now , and ryan got a job by taking some of our courses .
so what made these courses so different ?
after all , online course content has been available for a while .
what made it different was that this was real course experience .
it started on a given day , and then the students would watch videos on a weekly basis and do homework assignments .
and these would be real homework assignments for a real grade , with a real deadline .
you can see the deadlines and the usage graph .
these are the spikes showing that procrastination is global phenomenon .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- at the end of the course , the students got a certificate .
they could present that certificate to a prospective employer and get a better job , and we know many students who did .
some students took their certificate and presented this to an educational institution at which they were enrolled for actual college credit .
so these students were really getting something meaningful for their investment of time and effort .
let 's talk a little bit about some of the components that go into these courses .
the first component is that when you move away and design content explicitly for an online format , you can break away from , for example , the monolithic one-hour lecture .
you can break up the material , for example , into these short , modular units of eight to 12 minutes , each of which represents a coherent concept .
students can traverse this material in different ways , depending on their background , their skills or their interests .
so , for example , some students might benefit from a little bit of preparatory material that other students might already have .
other students might be interested in a particular enrichment topic that they want to pursue individually .
so this format allows us to break away from the one-size-fits-all model of education , and allows students to follow a much more personalized curriculum .
of course , we all know as educators that students do n't learn by sitting and passively watching videos .
perhaps one of the biggest components of this effort is that we need to have students who practice with the material in order to really understand it .
there 's been a range of studies that demonstrate the importance of this .
this one that appeared in science last year , for example , demonstrates that even simple retrieval practice , where students are just supposed to repeat what they already learned gives considerably improved results on various achievement tests down the line than many other educational interventions .
we 've tried to build in retrieval practice into the platform , as well as other forms of practice in many ways .
for example , even our videos are not just videos .
every few minutes , the video pauses and the students get asked a question .
-lrb- video -rrb- sp : ... these four things . prospect theory , hyperbolic discounting , status quo bias , base rate bias . they 're all well documented .
so they 're all well documented deviations from rational behavior .
dk : so here the video pauses , and the student types in the answer into the box and submits . obviously they were n't paying attention .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so they get to try again , and this time they got it right .
there 's an optional explanation if they want .
and now the video moves on to the next part of the lecture .
this is a kind of simple question that i as an instructor might ask in class , but when i ask that kind of a question in class , 80 percent of the students are still scribbling the last thing i said , 15 percent are zoned out on facebook , and then there 's the smarty pants in the front row who blurts out the answer before anyone else has had a chance to think about it , and i as the instructor am terribly gratified that somebody actually knew the answer .
and so the lecture moves on before , really , most of the students have even noticed that a question had been asked .
here , every single student has to engage with the material .
and of course these simple retrieval questions are not the end of the story .
one needs to build in much more meaningful practice questions , and one also needs to provide the students with feedback on those questions .
now , how do you grade the work of 100,000 students if you do not have 10,000 tas ?
the answer is , you need to use technology to do it for you .
now , fortunately , technology has come a long way , and we can now grade a range of interesting types of homework .
in addition to multiple choice and the kinds of short answer questions that you saw in the video , we can also grade math , mathematical expressions as well as mathematical derivations .
we can grade models , whether it 's financial models in a business class or physical models in a science or engineering class and we can grade some pretty sophisticated programming assignments .
let me show you one that 's actually pretty simple but fairly visual .
this is from stanford 's computer science 101 class , and the students are supposed to color-correct that blurry red image .
they 're typing their program into the browser , and you can see they did n't get it quite right , lady liberty is still seasick .
and so , the student tries again , and now they got it right , and they 're told that , and they can move on to the next assignment .
this ability to interact actively with the material and be told when you 're right or wrong is really essential to student learning .
now , of course we can not yet grade the range of work that one needs for all courses .
specifically , what 's lacking is the kind of critical thinking work that is so essential in such disciplines as the humanities , the social sciences , business and others .
so we tried to convince , for example , some of our humanities faculty that multiple choice was not such a bad strategy .
that did n't go over really well .
so we had to come up with a different solution .
and the solution we ended up using is peer grading .
it turns out that previous studies show , like this one by saddler and good , that peer grading is a surprisingly effective strategy for providing reproducible grades .
it was tried only in small classes , but there it showed , for example , that these student-assigned grades on the y-axis are actually very well correlated with the teacher-assigned grade on the x-axis .
what 's even more surprising is that self-grades , where the students grade their own work critically - so long as you incentivize them properly so they ca n't give themselves a perfect score - are actually even better correlated with the teacher grades .
and so this is an effective strategy that can be used for grading at scale , and is also a useful learning strategy for the students , because they actually learn from the experience .
so we now have the largest peer-grading pipeline ever devised , where tens of thousands of students are grading each other 's work , and quite successfully , i have to say .
but this is not just about students sitting alone in their living room working through problems .
around each one of our courses , a community of students had formed , a global community of people around a shared intellectual endeavor .
what you see here is a self-generated map from students in our princeton sociology 101 course , where they have put themselves on a world map , and you can really see the global reach of this kind of effort .
students collaborated in these courses in a variety of different ways .
first of all , there was a question and answer forum , where students would pose questions , and other students would answer those questions .
and the really amazing thing is , because there were so many students , it means that even if a student posed a question at 3 o 'clock in the morning , somewhere around the world , there would be somebody who was awake and working on the same problem .
and so , in many of our courses , the median response time for a question on the question and answer forum was 22 minutes .
which is not a level of service i have ever offered to my stanford students .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and you can see from the student testimonials that students actually find that because of this large online community , they got to interact with each other in many ways that were deeper than they did in the context of the physical classroom .
students also self-assembled , without any kind of intervention from us , into small study groups .
some of these were physical study groups along geographical constraints and met on a weekly basis to work through problem sets .
this is the san francisco study group , but there were ones all over the world .
others were virtual study groups , sometimes along language lines or along cultural lines , and on the bottom left there , you see our multicultural universal study group where people explicitly wanted to connect with people from other cultures .
there are some tremendous opportunities to be had from this kind of framework .
the first is that it has the potential of giving us a completely unprecedented look into understanding human learning .
because the data that we can collect here is unique .
you can collect every click , every homework submission , every forum post from tens of thousands of students .
so you can turn the study of human learning from the hypothesis-driven mode to the data-driven mode , a transformation that , for example , has revolutionized biology .
you can use these data to understand fundamental questions like , what are good learning strategies that are effective versus ones that are not ?
and in the context of particular courses , you can ask questions like , what are some of the misconceptions that are more common and how do we help students fix them ?
so here 's an example of that , also from andrew 's machine learning class .
this is a distribution of wrong answers to one of andrew 's assignments .
the answers happen to be pairs of numbers , so you can draw them on this two-dimensional plot .
each of the little crosses that you see is a different wrong answer .
the big cross at the top left is where 2,000 students gave the exact same wrong answer .
now , if two students in a class of 100 give the same wrong answer , you would never notice .
but when 2,000 students give the same wrong answer , it 's kind of hard to miss .
so andrew and his students went in , looked at some of those assignments , understood the root cause of the misconception , and then they produced a targeted error message that would be provided to every student whose answer fell into that bucket , which means that students who made that same mistake would now get personalized feedback telling them how to fix their misconception much more effectively .
so this personalization is something that one can then build by having the virtue of large numbers .
personalization is perhaps one of the biggest opportunities here as well , because it provides us with the potential of solving a 30-year-old problem .
educational researcher benjamin bloom , in 1984 , posed what 's called the 2 sigma problem , which he observed by studying three populations .
the first is the population that studied in a lecture-based classroom .
the second is a population of students that studied but with a mastery-based approach , so the students could n't move on to the next topic before demonstrating mastery of the previous one .
and finally , there was a population of students that were taught in a one-on-one instruction using a tutor .
the mastery-based population was a full standard deviation , or sigma , in achievement scores better than the standard lecture-based class , and the individual tutoring gives you 2 sigma improvement in performance .
to understand what that means , let 's look at the lecture-based classroom , and let 's pick the median performance as a threshold .
so in a lecture-based class , half the students are above that level and half are below .
in the individual tutoring instruction , 98 percent of the students are going to be above that threshold .
imagine if we could teach so that 98 percent of our students would be above average .
hence , the 2 sigma problem .
because we can not afford , as a society , to provide every student with an individual human tutor .
but maybe we can afford to provide each student with a computer or a smartphone .
so the question is , how can we use technology to push from the left side of the graph , from the blue curve , to the right side with the green curve ?
mastery is easy to achieve using a computer , because a computer does n't get tired of showing you the same video five times .
and it does n't even get tired of grading the same work multiple times , we 've seen that in many of the examples that i 've shown you .
and even personalization whether it 's via the personalized trajectory through the curriculum or some of the personalized feedback that we 've shown you .
so the goal here is to try and push , and see how far we can get towards the green curve .
so , if this is so great , are universities now obsolete ?
well , mark twain certainly thought so .
he said that , " college is a place where a professor 's lecture notes go straight to the students ' lecture notes , without passing through the brains of either . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i beg to differ with mark twain , though .
i think what he was complaining about is not universities but rather the lecture-based format that so many universities spend so much time on .
so let 's go back even further , to plutarch , who said that , " the mind is not a vessel that needs filling , but wood that needs igniting . "
and maybe we should spend less time at universities filling our students ' minds with content by lecturing at them , and more time igniting their creativity , their imagination and their problem-solving skills by actually talking with them .
so how do we do that ?
we do that by doing active learning in the classroom .
so there 's been many studies , including this one , that show that if you use active learning , interacting with your students in the classroom , performance improves on every single metric - on attendance , on engagement and on learning as measured by a standardized test .
you can see , for example , that the achievement score almost doubles in this particular experiment .
so maybe this is how we should spend our time at universities .
so to summarize , if we could offer a top quality education to everyone around the world for free , what would that do ? three things .
first it would establish education as a fundamental human right , where anyone around the world with the ability and the motivation could get the skills that they need to make a better life for themselves , their families and their communities .
second , it would enable lifelong learning .
it 's a shame that for so many people , learning stops when we finish high school or when we finish college .
by having this amazing content be available , we would be able to learn something new every time we wanted , whether it 's just to expand our minds or it 's to change our lives .
and finally , this would enable a wave of innovation , because amazing talent can be found anywhere .
maybe the next albert einstein or the next steve jobs is living somewhere in a remote village in africa .
and if we could offer that person an education , they would be able to come up with the next big idea and make the world a better place for all of us .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- in 1975 , i met in florence a professor , carlo pedretti , my former professor of art history , and today a world-renowned scholar of leonardo da vinci .
well , he asked me if i could find some technological way to unfold a five-centuries-old mystery related to a lost masterpiece by leonardo da vinci , the " battle of anghiari , " which is supposed to be located in the hall of the 500 in palazzo vecchio , in florence .
well , in the mid- ' 70s , there were not great opportunities for a bioengineer like me , especially in italy , and so i decided , with some researchers from the united states and the university of florence , to start probing the murals decorated by vasari on the long walls of the hall of the 500 searching for the lost leonardo .
unfortunately , at that time we did not know that that was not exactly where we should be looking , because we had to go much deeper in , and so the research came to a halt , and it was only taken up in 2000 thanks to the interest and the enthusiasm of the guinness family .
well , this time , we focused on trying to reconstruct the way the hall of the 500 was before the remodeling , and the so-called sala grande , which was built in 1494 , and to find out the original doors , windows , and in order to do that , we first created a 3d model , and then , with thermography , we went on to discover hidden windows . these are the original windows of the hall of the sala grande . we also found out about the height of the ceiling , and we managed to reconstruct , therefore , all the layout of this original hall the way it was before there came vasari ,
and restructured the whole thing , including a staircase that was very important in order to precisely place " the battle of anghiari " on a specific area of one of the two walls .
well , we also learned that vasari , who was commissioned to remodel the hall of the 500 between 1560 and 1574 by the grand duke cosimo i of the medici family , we have at least two instances when he saved masterpieces specifically by placing a brick wall in front of it and leaving a small air gap .
one that we -lsb- see -rsb- here , masaccio , the church of santa maria novella in florence , so we just said , well maybe , visari has done something like that in the case of this great work of art by leonardo , since he was a great admirer of leonardo da vinci .
and so we built some very sophisticated radio antennas just for probing both walls and searching for an air gap .
and we did find many on the right panel of the east wall , an air gap , and that 's where we believe " the battle of anghiari , " or at least the part that we know has been painted , which is called " the fight for the standard , " should be located .
well , from there , unfortunately , in 2004 , the project came to a halt . many political reasons .
so i decided to go back to my alma mater , and , at the university of california , san diego , and i proposed to open up a research center for engineering sciences for cultural heritage .
and in 2007 , we created cisa3 as a research center for cultural heritage , specifically art , architecture and archaeology . so students started to flow in , and we started to build technologies , because that 's basically what we also needed in order to move forward and go and do fieldwork .
we came back in the hall of the 500 in 2011 , and this time , with a great group of students , and my colleague , professor falko kuester , who is now the director at cisa3 , and we came back just since we knew already where to look for to find out if there was still something left .
well , we were confined though , limited , i should rather say , for several reasons that it 's not worth explaining , to endoscopy only , of the many other options we had , and with a 4mm camera attached to it , we were successful in documenting and taking some fragments of what it turns out to be a reddish color , black color , and there is some beige fragments that later on we ran a much more sophisticated exams , xrf , x-ray diffraction , and the results are very positive so far . it seems to indicate that indeed we have found some pigments , and since we know for sure
that no other artist has painted on that wall before vasari came in about 60 years later , well , those pigments are therefore firmly related to mural painting and most likely to leonardo .
well , we are searching for the highest and highly praised work of art ever achieved by mankind .
as a matter of fact , this is by far the most important commission that leonardo has ever had , and for doing this great masterpiece , he was named the number one artist influence at the time .
i had also had the privilege since the last 37 years to work on several masterpieces as you can see behind me , but basically to do what ? well , to assess , for example , the state of conservation . see here the face of the madonna of the chair that when just shining a uv light on it you suddenly see another , different lady , aged lady , i should rather say .
there is a lot of varnish still sitting there , several retouches , and some over cleaning . it becomes very visible .
but also , technology has helped to write new pages of our history , or at least to update pages of our histories .
for example , the " lady with the unicorn , " another painting by rafael , well , you see the unicorn .
a lot has been said and written about the unicorn , but if you take an x-ray of the unicorn , it becomes a puppy dog .
and - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - no problem , but , unfortunately , continuing with the scientific examination of this painting came out that rafael did not paint the unicorn , did not paint the puppy dog , actually left the painting unfinished , so all this writing about the exotic symbol of the unicorn - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - unfortunately , is not very reliable . -lrb- laughter -rrb- well , also , authenticity . just think for a moment if science really could move in the field of authenticity of works of art . there would be a cultural revolution to say the least , but also , i would say , a market revolution , let me add . take this example :
otto marseus , nice painting , which is " still life " at the pitti gallery , and just have an infrared camera peering through , and luckily for art historians , it just was confirmed that there is a signature of otto marseus . it even says when it was made and also the location .
so that was a good result . sometimes , it 's not that good , and so , again , authenticity and science could go together and change the way , not attributions being made , but at least lay the ground for a more objective , or , i should rather say , less subjective attribution , as it is done today .
but i would say the discovery that really caught my imagination , my admiration , is the incredibly vivid drawing under this layer , brown layer , of " the adoration of the magi . " here you see a handmade setting xyz scanner with an infrared camera put on it , and just peering through this brown layer of this masterpiece to reveal what could have been underneath .
well , this happens to be the most important painting we have in italy by leonardo da vinci , and look at the wonderful images of faces that nobody has seen for five centuries . look at these portraits .
they 're magnificent . you see leonardo at work .
you see the geniality of his creation , right directly on the ground layer of the panel , and see this cool thing , finding , i should rather say , an elephant . -lrb- laughter -rrb- because of this elephant , over 70 new images came out , never seen for centuries .
this was an epiphany . we came to understand and to prove that the brown coating that we see today was not done by leonardo da vinci , which left us only the other drawing that for five centuries we were not able to see , so thanks only to technology .
well , the tablet . well , we thought , well , if we all have this pleasure , this privilege to see all this , to find all these discoveries , what about for everybody else ?
so we thought of an augmented reality application using a tablet . let me show you just simulating what we could be doing , any of us could be doing , in a museum environment .
so let 's say that we go to a museum with a tablet , okay ?
and we just aim the camera of the tablet to the painting that we are interested to see , like this .
okay ? and i will just click on it , we pause , and now let me turn to you so the moment the image , or , i should say , the camera , has locked in the painting , then the images you just saw up there in the drawing are being loaded . and so , see .
we can , as we said , we can zoom in . then we can scroll .
okay ? let 's go and find the elephant .
so all we need is one finger . just wipe off and we see the elephant . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- okay ? and then if we want , we can continue the scroll to find out , for example , on the staircase , the whole iconography is going to be changed . there are a lot of laymen reconstructing from the ruins of an old temple a new temple , and there are a lot of figures showing up . see ?
this is not just a curiosity , because it changes not just the iconography as you see it , but the iconology , the meaning of the painting , and we believe this is a cool way , easy way , that everybody could have access to , to become more the protagonist of your own discovery , and not just be so passive about it , as we are when we walk through endless rooms of museums .
-lrb- applause -rrb- another concept is the digital clinical chart , which sounds very obvious if we were to talk about real patients , but when we talk about works of art , unfortunately , it 's never been tapped as an idea .
well , we believe , again , that this should be the beginning , the very first step , to do real conservation , and allowing us to really explore and to understand everything related to the state of our conservation , the technique , materials , and also if , when , and why we should restore , or , rather , to intervene on the environment surrounding the painting .
well , our vision is to rediscover the spirit of the renaissance , create a new discipline where engineering for cultural heritage is actually a symbol of blending art and science together .
we definitely need a new breed of engineers that will go out and do this kind of work and rediscover for us these values , these cultural values that we badly need , especially today .
and if you want to summarize in one just single word , well , this is what we 're trying to do .
we 're trying to give a future to our past in order to have a future .
as long as we live a life of curiosity and passion , there is a bit of leonardo in all of us . thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- in 1991 i had maybe the most profound and transformative experience of my life .
i was in the third year of my seven-year undergraduate degree .
i took a couple victory laps in there .
and i was on a college choir tour up in northern california , and we had stopped for the day after all day on the bus , and we were relaxing next to this beautiful idyllic lake in the mountains .
and there were crickets and birds and frogs making noise , and as we sat there , over the mountains coming in from the north were these steven spielbergian clouds rolling toward us , and as the clouds got about halfway over the valley , so help me god , every single animal in that place stopped making noise at the same time .
-lrb- whoosh -rrb- this electric hush , as if they could sense what was about to happen .
and then the clouds came over us , and then , boom ! this massive thunderclap , and sheets of rain .
it was just extraordinary , and when i came back home i found a poem by the mexican poet octavio paz , and decided to set it to music , a piece for choir called " cloudburst , " which is the piece that we 'll perform for you in just a moment .
now fast forward to just three years ago .
-lrb- music -rrb- and we released to youtube this , the virtual choir project , 185 singers from 12 different countries .
you can see my little video there conducting these people , alone in their dorm rooms or in their living rooms at home .
two years ago , on this very stage , we premiered virtual choir 2 , 2,052 singers from 58 different countries , this time performing a piece that i had written called " sleep . "
and then just last spring we released virtual choir 3 , " water night , " another piece that i had written , this time nearly 4,000 singers from 73 different countries .
-lrb- music -rrb- and when i was speaking to chris about the future of virtual choir and where we might be able to take this , he challenged me to push the technology as far as we possibly could .
could we do this all in real time ?
could we have people singing together in real time ?
and with the help of skype , that is what we are going to attempt today .
now , we 'll perform " cloudburst " for you .
the first half will be performed by the live singers here on stage .
i 'm joined by singers from cal state long beach , cal state fullerton and riverside community college , some of the best amateur choirs in the country , and - -lrb- applause -rrb- - and in the second half of the piece , the virtual choir will join us , 30 different singers from 30 different countries .
now , we 've pushed the technology as far as it can go , but there 's still less than a second of latency , but in musical terms , that 's a lifetime .
we deal in milliseconds .
so what i 've done is , i 've adapted " cloudburst " so that it embraces the latency and the performers sing into the latency instead of trying to be exactly together .
so with deep humility , and for your approval , we present " cloudburst . "
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- piano -rrb- -lsb- the rain ... -rsb- -lsb- eyes of shadow-water -rsb- -lsb- eyes of well-water -rsb- -lsb- eyes of dream-water . -rsb- -lsb- blue suns , green whirlwinds , -rsb- -lsb- birdbeaks of light pecking open -rsb- -lsb- pomegranate stars . -rsb- -lsb- but tell me , burnt earth , is there no water ? -rsb- -lsb- only blood , only dust , -rsb- -lsb- only naked footsteps on the thorns ? -rsb- -lsb- the rain awakens ... -rsb- -lsb- we must sleep with open eyes , -rsb- -lsb- we must dream with our hands , -rsb- -lsb- we must dream the dreams of a river seeking its course , -rsb- -lsb- of the sun dreaming its worlds . -rsb- -lsb- we must dream aloud , -rsb- -lsb- we must sing till the song puts forth roots , -rsb- -lsb- trunk , branches , birds , stars . -rsb- -lsb- we must find the lost word , -rsb- -lsb- and remember what the blood , -rsb-
-lsb- the tides , the earth , and the body say , -rsb- -lsb- and return to the point of departure ... -rsb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- -lsb- " cloudburst " octavio paz -rsb- -lsb- translation by lysander kemp , adapted by eric whitacre -rsb- eric whitacre : beth . annabelle , where are you ? jacob .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
hi . i 'm kevin allocca , i 'm the trends manager at youtube , and i professionally watch youtube videos .
it 's true .
so we 're going to talk a little bit today about how videos go viral and then why that even matters .
we all want to be stars - celebrities , singers , comedians - and when i was younger , that seemed so very , very hard to do .
but now web video has made it so that any of us or any of the creative things that we do can become completely famous in a part of our world 's culture .
any one of you could be famous on the internet by next saturday .
but there are over 48 hours of video uploaded to youtube every minute .
and of that , only a tiny percentage ever goes viral and gets tons of views and becomes a cultural moment .
so how does it happen ?
three things : tastemakers , communities of participation and unexpectedness .
all right , let 's go .
-lrb- video -rrb- bear vasquez : oh , my god . oh , my god .
oh , my god !
wooo !
ohhhhh , wowwww !
ka : last year , bear vasquez posted this video that he had shot outside his home in yosemite national park .
in 2010 , it was viewed 23 million times .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this is a chart of what it looked like when it first became popular last summer .
but he did n't actually set out to make a viral video , bear .
he just wanted to share a rainbow .
because that 's what you do when your name is yosemite mountain bear .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and he had posted lots of nature videos in fact .
and this video had actually been posted all the way back in january .
so what happened here ?
jimmy kimmel actually .
jimmy kimmel posted this tweet that would eventually propel the video to be as popular as it would become .
because tastemakers like jimmy kimmel introduce us to new and interesting things and bring them to a larger audience .
-lrb- video -rrb- rebecca black : ♫ it 's friday , friday . gotta get down on friday . ♫ ♫ everybody 's looking forward to the weekend , weekend . ♫ ♫ friday , friday . gettin ' down on friday . ♫ ka : so you did n't think that we could actually have this conversation without talking about this video i hope .
rebecca black 's " friday " is one of the most popular videos of the year .
it 's been seen nearly 200 million times this year .
this is a chart of what it looked like .
and similar to " double rainbow , " it seems to have just sprouted up out of nowhere .
so what happened on this day ?
well it was a friday , this is true .
and if you 're wondering about those other spikes , those are also fridays .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but what about this day , this one particular friday ?
well tosh.0 picked it up , a lot of blogs starting writing about .
michael j. nelson from mystery science theater was one of the first people to post a joke about the video on twitter .
but what 's important is that an individual or a group of tastemakers took a point of view and they shared that with a larger audience , accelerating the process .
and so then this community formed of people who shared this big inside joke and they started talking about it and doing things with it .
and now there are 10,000 parodies of " friday " on youtube .
even in the first seven days , there was one parody for every other day of the week .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- unlike the one-way entertainment of the 20th century , this community participation is how we become a part of the phenomenon - either by spreading it or by doing something new with it .
-lrb- music -rrb- so " nyan cat " is a looped animation with looped music .
it 's this , just like this .
it 's been viewed nearly 50 million times this year .
and if you think that that is weird , you should know that there is a three-hour version of this that 's been viewed four million times .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- even cats were watching this video .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- cats were watching other cats watch this video .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but what 's important here is the creativity that it inspired amongst this techie , geeky internet culture .
there were remixes .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- someone made an old timey version .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and then it went international .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- an entire remix community sprouted up that brought it from being just a stupid joke to something that we can all actually be a part of .
because we do n't just enjoy now , we participate .
and who could have predicted any of this ?
who could have predicted " double rainbow " or rebecca black or " nyan cat ? "
what scripts could you have written that would have contained this in it ?
in a world where over two days of video get uploaded every minute , only that which is truly unique and unexpected can stand out in the way that these things have .
when a friend of mine told me that i needed to see this great video about a guy protesting bicycle fines in new york city , i admit i was n't very interested .
-lrb- video -rrb- casey niestat : so i got a ticket for not riding in the bike lane , but often there are obstructions that keep you from properly riding in the bike lane .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ka : by being totally surprising and humorous , casey niestat got his funny idea and point seen five million times .
and so this approach holds for anything new that we do creatively .
and so it all brings us to one big question ...
-lrb- video -rrb- bear vasquez : what does this mean ?
ohhhh .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ka : what does it mean ?
tastemakers , creative participating communities , complete unexpectedness , these are characteristics of a new kind of media and a new kind of culture where anyone has access and the audience defines the popularity .
i mean , as mentioned earlier , one of the biggest stars in the world right now , justin bieber , got his start on youtube .
no one has to green-light your idea .
and we all now feel some ownership in our own pop culture .
and these are not characteristics of old media , and they 're barely true of the media of today , but they will define the entertainment of the future .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- hi . i 'm here to talk to you about the importance of praise , admiration and thank you , and having it be specific and genuine .
and the way i got interested in this was , i noticed in myself , when i was growing up , and until about a few years ago , that i would want to say thank you to someone , i would want to praise them , i would want to take in their praise of me and i 'd just stop it .
and i asked myself , why ?
i felt shy , i felt embarrassed .
and then my question became , am i the only one who does this ?
so , i decided to investigate .
i 'm fortunate enough to work in the rehab facility , so i get to see people who are facing life and death with addiction .
and sometimes it comes down to something as simple as , their core wound is their father died without ever saying he 's proud of them .
but then , they hear from all the family and friends that the father told everybody else that he was proud of him , but he never told the son .
it 's because he did n't know that his son needed to hear it .
so my question is , why do n't we ask for the things that we need ?
i know a gentleman , married for 25 years , who 's longing to hear his wife say , " thank you for being the breadwinner , so i can stay home with the kids , " but wo n't ask .
i know a woman who 's good at this .
she , once a week , meets with her husband and says , " i 'd really like you to thank me for all these things i did in the house and with the kids . "
and he goes , " oh , this is great , this is great . "
and praise really does have to be genuine , but she takes responsibility for that .
and a friend of mine , april , who i 've had since kindergarten , she thanks her children for doing their chores .
and she said , " why would n't i thank it , even though they 're supposed to do it ? "
so , the question is , why was i blocking it ?
why were other people blocking it ?
why can i say , " i 'll take my steak medium rare , i need size six shoes , " but i wo n't say , " would you praise me this way ? "
and it 's because i 'm giving you critical data about me .
i 'm telling you where i 'm insecure .
i 'm telling you where i need your help .
and i 'm treating you , my inner circle , like you 're the enemy .
because what can you do with that data ?
you could neglect me .
you could abuse it .
or you could actually meet my need .
and i took my bike into the bike store - i love this - same bike , and they 'd do something called " truing " the wheels .
the guy said , " you know , when you true the wheels , it 's going to make the bike so much better . "
i get the same bike back , and they 've taken all the little warps out of those same wheels i 've had for two and a half years , and my bike is like new .
so , i 'm going to challenge all of you .
i want you to true your wheels : be honest about the praise that you need to hear .
what do you need to hear ? go home to your wife - go ask her , what does she need ?
go home to your husband - what does he need ?
go home and ask those questions , and then help the people around you .
and it 's simple .
and why should we care about this ?
we talk about world peace .
how can we have world peace with different cultures , different languages ?
i think it starts household by household , under the same roof .
so , let 's make it right in our own backyard .
and i want to thank all of you in the audience for being great husbands , great mothers , friends , daughters , sons .
and maybe somebody 's never said that to you , but you 've done a really , really good job .
and thank you for being here , just showing up and changing the world with your ideas .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- it 's a great honor today to share with you the digital universe , which was created for humanity to really see where we are in the universe .
and so i think we can roll the video that we have .
-lsb- the himalayas . -rsb- -lrb- music -rrb- the flat horizon that we 've evolved with has been a metaphor for the infinite : unbounded resources and unlimited capacity for disposal of waste .
it was n't until we really left earth , got above the atmosphere and had seen the horizon bend back on itself , that we could understand our planet as a limited condition .
the digital universe atlas has been built at the american museum of natural history over the past 12 years .
we maintain that , put that together as a project to really chart the universe across all scales .
what we see here are satellites around the earth and the earth in proper registration against the universe , as we see .
nasa supported this work 12 years ago as part of the rebuilding of the hayden planetarium so that we would share this with the world .
the digital universe is the basis of our space show productions that we do - our main space shows in the dome .
but what you see here is the result of , actually , internships that we hosted with linkoping university in sweden .
i 've had 12 students work on this for their graduate work , and the result has been this software called uniview and a company called sciss in sweden .
this software allows interactive use , so this actual flight path and movie that we see here was actually flown live .
i captured this live from my laptop in a cafe called earth matters on the lower east side of manhattan , where i live , and it was done as a collaborative project with the rubin museum of himalayan art for an exhibit on comparative cosmology .
and so as we move out , we see continuously from our planet all the way out into the realm of galaxies , as we see here , light-travel time , giving you a sense of how far away we are .
as we move out , the light from these distant galaxies have taken so long , we 're essentially backing up into the past .
we back so far up we 're finally seeing a containment around us - the afterglow of the big bang .
this is the wmap microwave background that we see .
we 'll fly outside it here , just to see this sort of containment .
if we were outside this , it would almost be meaningless , in the sense as before time .
but this our containment of the visible universe .
we know the universe is bigger than that which we can see .
coming back quickly , we see here the radio sphere that we jumped out of in the beginning , but these are positions , the latest positions of exoplanets that we 've mapped , and our sun here , obviously , with our own solar system .
what you 're going to see - we 're going to have to jump in here pretty quickly between several orders of magnitude to get down to where we see the solar system - these are the paths of voyager 1 , voyager 2 , pioneer 11 and pioneer 10 , the first four spacecraft to have left the solar system .
coming in closer , picking up earth , orbit of the moon , and we see the earth .
this map can be updated , and we can add in new data .
i know dr. carolyn porco is the camera p.i.
for the cassini mission .
but here we see the complex trajectory of the cassini mission color coded for different mission phases , ingeniously developed so that 45 encounters with the largest moon , titan , which is larger that the planet mercury , diverts the orbit into different parts of mission phase .
this software allows us to come close and look at parts of this .
this software can also be networked between domes .
we have a growing user base of this , and we network domes .
and we can network between domes and classrooms .
we 're actually sharing tours of the universe with the first sub-saharan planetarium in ghana as well as new libraries that have been built in the ghettos in columbia and a high school in cambodia .
and the cambodians have actually controlled the hayden planetarium from their high school .
this is an image from saturday , photographed by the aqua satellite , but through the uniview software .
so you 're seeing the edge of the earth .
this is nepal .
this is , in fact , right here is the valley of lhasa , right here in tibet .
but we can see the haze from fires and so forth in the ganges valley down below in india .
this is nepal and tibet .
and just in closing , i 'd just like to say this beautiful world that we live on - here we see a bit of the snow that some of you may have had to brave in coming out - so i 'd like to just say that what the world needs now is a sense of being able to look at ourselves in this much larger condition now and a much larger sense of what home is .
because our home is the universe , and we are the universe , essentially .
we carry that in us .
and to be able to see our context in this larger sense at all scales helps us all , i think , in understanding where we are and who we are in the universe .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- you know , what i do is write for children , and i 'm probably america 's most widely read children 's author , in fact .
and i always tell people that i do n't want to show up looking like a scientist .
you can have me as a farmer , or in leathers , and no one has ever chose farmer .
i 'm here today to talk to you about circles and epiphanies .
and you know , an epiphany is usually something you find that you dropped someplace .
you 've just got to go around the block to see it as an epiphany .
that 's a painting of a circle .
a friend of mine did that - richard bollingbroke .
it 's the kind of complicated circle that i 'm going to tell you about .
my circle began back in the ' 60s in high school in stow , ohio where i was the class queer .
i was the guy beaten up bloody every week in the boys ' room , until one teacher saved my life .
she saved my life by letting me go to the bathroom in the teachers ' lounge .
she did it in secret .
she did it for three years .
and i had to get out of town .
i had a thumb , i had 85 dollars , and i ended up in san francisco , california - met a lover - and back in the ' 80s , found it necessary to begin work on aids organizations .
about three or four years ago , i got a phone call in the middle of the night from that teacher , mrs. posten , who said , " i need to see you .
i 'm disappointed that we never got to know each other as adults .
could you please come to ohio , and please bring that man that i know you have found by now .
and i should mention that i have pancreatic cancer , and i 'd like you to please be quick about this . "
well , the next day we were in cleveland .
we took a look at her , we laughed , we cried , and we knew that she needed to be in a hospice .
we found her one , we got her there , and we took care of her and watched over her family , because it was necessary .
it 's something we knew how to do .
and just as the woman who wanted to know me as an adult got to know me , she turned into a box of ashes and was placed in my hands .
and what had happened was the circle had closed , it had become a circle - and that epiphany i talked about presented itself .
the epiphany is that death is a part of life .
she saved my life ; i and my partner saved hers .
and you know , that part of life needs everything that the rest of life does .
it needs truth and beauty , and i 'm so happy it 's been mentioned so much here today .
it also needs - it needs dignity , love and pleasure , and it 's our job to hand those things out .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- trees epitomize stasis .
trees are rooted in the ground in one place for many human generations , but if we shift our perspective from the trunk to the twigs , trees become very dynamic entities , moving and growing .
and i decided to explore this movement by turning trees into artists .
i simply tied the end of a paintbrush onto a twig .
i waited for the wind to come up and held up a canvas , and that produced art .
the piece of art you see on your left is painted by a western red cedar and that on your right by a douglas fir , and what i learned was that different species have different signatures , like a picasso versus a monet .
but i was also interested in the movement of trees and how this art might let me capture that and quantify it , so to measure the distance that a single vine maple tree - which produced this painting - moved in a single year , i simply measured and summed each of those lines .
i multiplied them by the number of twigs per branch and the number of branches per tree and then divided that by the number of minutes per year .
and so i was able to calculate how far a single tree moved in a single year .
you might have a guess .
the answer is actually 186,540 miles , or seven times around the globe .
and so simply by shifting our perspective from a single trunk to the many dynamic twigs , we are able to see that trees are not simply static entities , but rather extremely dynamic .
and i began to think about ways that we might consider this lesson of trees , to consider other entities that are also static and stuck , but which cry for change and dynamicism , and one of those entities is our prisons .
prisons , of course , are where people who break our laws are stuck , confined behind bars .
and our prison system itself is stuck .
the united states has over 2.3 million incarcerated men and women .
that number is rising .
of the 100 incarcerated people that are released , 60 will return to prison .
funds for education , for training and for rehabilitation are declining , so this despairing cycle of incarceration continues .
i decided to ask whether the lesson i had learned from trees as artists could be applied to a static institution such as our prisons , and i think the answer is yes .
in the year 2007 , i started a partnership with the washington state department of corrections .
working with four prisons , we began bringing science and scientists , sustainability and conservation projects to four state prisons .
we give science lectures , and the men here are choosing to come to our science lectures instead of watching television or weightlifting .
that , i think , is movement .
we partnered with the nature conservancy for inmates at stafford creek correctional center to grow endangered prairie plants for restoration of relic prairie areas in washington state .
that , i think , is movement .
we worked with the washington state department of fish and wildlife to grow endangered frogs - the oregon spotted frog - for later release into protected wetlands .
that , i think , is movement .
and just recently , we 've begun to work with those men who are segregated in what we call supermax facilities .
they 've incurred violent infractions by becoming violent with guards and with other prisoners .
they 're kept in bare cells like this for 23 hours a day .
when they have meetings with their review boards or mental health professionals , they 're placed in immobile booths like this .
for one hour a day they 're brought to these bleak and bland exercise yards .
although we ca n't bring trees and prairie plants and frogs into these environments , we are bringing images of nature into these exercise yards , putting them on the walls , so at least they get contact with visual images of nature .
this is mr. lopez , who has been in solitary confinement for 18 months , and he 's providing input on the types of images that he believes would make him and his fellow inmates more serene , more calm , less apt to violence .
and so what we see , i think , is that small , collective movements of change can perhaps move an entity such as our own prison system in a direction of hope .
we know that trees are static entities when we look at their trunks .
but if trees can create art , if they can encircle the globe seven times in one year , if prisoners can grow plants and raise frogs , then perhaps there are other static entities that we hold inside ourselves , like grief , like addictions , like racism , that can also change .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- as an architect , i often ask myself , what is the origin of the forms that we design ?
what kind of forms could we design if we would n't work with references anymore ?
if we had no bias , if we had no preconceptions , what kind of forms could we design if we could free ourselves from our experience ?
if we could free ourselves from our education ?
what would these unseen forms look like ?
would they surprise us ? would they intrigue us ?
would they delight us ?
if so , then how can we go about creating something that is truly new ?
i propose we look to nature .
nature has been called the greatest architect of forms .
and i 'm not saying that we should copy nature , i 'm not saying we should mimic biology , instead i propose that we can borrow nature 's processes .
we can abstract them and to create something that is new .
nature 's main process of creation , morphogenesis , is the splitting of one cell into two cells .
and these cells can either be identical , or they can be distinct from each other through asymmetric cell division .
if we abstract this process , and simplify it as much as possible , then we could start with a single sheet of paper , one surface , and we could make a fold and divide the surface into two surfaces .
we 're free to choose where we make the fold .
and by doing so , we can differentiate the surfaces .
through this very simple process , we can create an astounding variety of forms .
now , we can take this form and use the same process to generate three-dimensional structures , but rather than folding things by hand , we 'll bring the structure into the computer , and code it as an algorithm .
and in doing so , we can suddenly fold anything .
we can fold a million times faster , we can fold in hundreds and hundreds of variations .
and as we 're seeking to make something three-dimensional , we start not with a single surface , but with a volume .
a simple volume , the cube .
if we take its surfaces and fold them again and again and again and again , then after 16 iterations , 16 steps , we end up with 400,000 surfaces and a shape that looks , for instance , like this .
and if we change where we make the folds , if we change the folding ratio , then this cube turns into this one .
we can change the folding ratio again to produce this shape , or this shape .
so we exert control over the form by specifying the position of where we 're making the fold , but essentially you 're looking at a folded cube .
and we can play with this .
we can apply different folding ratios to different parts of the form to create local conditions .
we can begin to sculpt the form .
and because we 're doing the folding on the computer , we are completely free of any physical constraints .
so that means that surfaces can intersect themselves , they can become impossibly small .
we can make folds that we otherwise could not make .
surfaces can become porous .
they can stretch . they can tear .
and all of this expounds the scope of forms that we can produce .
but in each case , i did n't design the form .
i designed the process that generated the form .
in general , if we make a small change to the folding ratio , which is what you 're seeing here , then the form changes correspondingly .
but that 's only half of the story - 99.9 percent of the folding ratios produce not this , but this , the geometric equivalent of noise .
the forms that i showed before were made actually through very long trial and error .
a far more effective way to create forms , i have found , is to use information that is already contained in forms .
a very simple form such as this one actually contains a lot of information that may not be visible to the human eye .
so , for instance , we can plot the length of the edges .
white surfaces have long edges , black ones have short ones .
we can plot the planarity of the surfaces , their curvature , how radial they are - all information that may not be instantly visible to you , but that we can bring out , that we can articulate , and that we can use to control the folding .
so now i 'm not specifying a single ratio anymore to fold it , but instead i 'm establishing a rule , i 'm establishing a link between a property of a surface and how that surface is folded .
and because i 've designed the process and not the form , i can run the process again and again and again to produce a whole family of forms .
these forms look elaborate , but the process is a very minimal one .
there is a simple input , it 's always a cube that i start with , and it 's a very simple operation - it 's making a fold , and doing this over and over again .
so let 's bring this process to architecture .
how ? and at what scale ?
i chose to design a column .
columns are architectural archetypes .
they 've been used throughout history to express ideals about beauty , about technology .
a challenge to me was how we could express this new algorithmic order in a column .
i started using four cylinders .
through a lot of experimentation , these cylinders eventually evolved into this .
and these columns , they have information at very many scales .
we can begin to zoom into them .
the closer one gets , the more new features one discovers .
some formations are almost at the threshold of human visibility .
and unlike traditional architecture , it 's a single process that creates both the overall form and the microscopic surface detail .
these forms are undrawable .
an architect who 's drawing them with a pen and a paper would probably take months , or it would take even a year to draw all the sections , all of the elevations , you can only create something like this through an algorithm .
the more interesting question , perhaps , is , are these forms imaginable ?
usually , an architect can somehow envision the end state of what he is designing .
in this case , the process is deterministic .
there 's no randomness involved at all , but it 's not entirely predictable .
there 's too many surfaces , there 's too much detail , one ca n't see the end state .
so this leads to a new role for the architect .
one needs a new method to explore all of the possibilities that are out there .
for one thing , one can design many variants of a form , in parallel , and one can cultivate them .
and to go back to the analogy with nature , one can begin to think in terms of populations , one can talk about permutations , about generations , about crossing and breeding to come up with a design .
and the architect is really , he moves into the position of being an orchestrator of all of these processes .
but enough of the theory .
at one point i simply wanted to jump inside this image , so to say , i bought these red and blue 3d glasses , got up very close to the screen , but still that was n't the same as being able to walk around and touch things .
so there was only one possibility - to bring the column out of the computer .
there 's been a lot of talk now about 3d printing .
for me , or for my purpose at this moment , there 's still too much of an unfavorable tradeoff between scale , on the one hand , and resolution and speed , on the other .
so instead , we decided to take the column , and we decided to build it as a layered model , made out of very many slices , thinly stacked over each other .
what you 're looking at here is an x-ray of the column that you just saw , viewed from the top .
unbeknownst to me at the time , because we had only seen the outside , the surfaces were continuing to fold themselves , to grow on the inside of the column , which was quite a surprising discovery .
from this shape , we calculated a cutting line , and then we gave this cutting line to a laser cutter to produce - and you 're seeing a segment of it here - very many thin slices , individually cut , on top of each other .
and this is a photo now , it 's not a rendering , and the column that we ended up with after a lot of work , ended up looking remarkably like the one that we had designed in the computer .
almost all of the details , almost all of the surface intricacies were preserved .
but it was very labor intensive .
there 's a huge disconnect at the moment still between the virtual and the physical .
it took me several months to design the column , but ultimately it takes the computer about 30 seconds to calculate all of the 16 million faces .
the physical model , on the other hand , is 2,700 layers , one millimeter thick , it weighs 700 kilos , it 's made of sheet that can cover this entire auditorium .
and the cutting path that the laser followed goes from here to the airport and back again .
but it is increasingly possible .
machines are getting faster , it 's getting less expensive , and there 's some promising technological developments just on the horizon .
these are images from the gwangju biennale .
and in this case , i used abs plastic to produce the columns , we used the bigger , faster machine , and they have a steel core inside , so they 're structural , they can bear loads for once .
each column is effectively a hybrid of two columns .
you can see a different column in the mirror , if there 's a mirror behind the column that creates a sort of an optical illusion .
so where does this leave us ?
i think this project gives us a glimpse of the unseen objects that await us if we as architects begin to think about designing not the object , but a process to generate objects .
i 've shown one simple process that was inspired by nature ; there 's countless other ones .
in short , we have no constraints .
instead , we have processes in our hands right now that allow us to create structures at all scales that we could n't even have dreamt up .
and , if i may add , at one point we will build them .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- ok . we 've heard a lot of people speak at this conference about the power of the human mind .
and what i 'd like to do today is give you a vivid example of how that power can be unleashed when someone is in a survival situation , how the will to survive can bring that out in people .
this is an incident which occurred on mount everest ; it was the worst disaster in the history of everest .
and when it occurred , i was the only doctor on the mountain .
so i 'll take you through that and we 'll see what it 's like when someone really summons the will to survive .
ok , this is mount everest .
it 's 29,035 feet high .
i 've been there six times : four times i did work with national geographic , making tectonic plate measurements ; twice , i went with nasa doing remote sensing devices .
it was on my fourth trip to everest that a comet passed over the mountain . hyakutake .
and the sherpas told us then that was a very bad omen , and we should have listened to them .
everest is an extreme environment .
there 's only one-third as much oxygen at the summit as there is at sea level .
near the summit , temperatures can be 40 degrees below zero .
you can have winds 20 to 40 miles an hour .
it 's actually a wind-chill factor which is lower than a summer day on mars .
i remember one time being up near the summit , i reached into my down jacket for a drink from my water bottle , inside my down jacket , only to discover that the water was already frozen solid .
that gives you an idea of just how severe things are near the summit .
ok , this is the route up everest .
it starts at base camp , at 17,500 feet .
camp one , 2,000 feet higher .
camp two , another 2,000 feet higher up , what 's called the western cwm .
campthree is at the base of lhotse , which is the fourth highest mountain in the world , but it 's dwarfed by everest .
and then camp four is the highest camp ; that 's 3,000 feet short of the summit .
this is a view of base camp .
this is pitched on a glacier at 17,500 feet .
it 's the highest point you can bring your yaks before you have to unload .
and this is what they unloaded for me : i had four yak loads of medical supplies , which are dumped in a tent , and here i am trying to arrange things .
this was our expedition .
it was a national geographic expedition , but it was organized by the explorers club .
there were three other expeditions on the mountain , an american team , a new zealand team and an imax team .
and , after actually two months of preparation , we built our camps all the way up the mountain .
this is a view looking up the icefall , the first 2,000 feet of the climb up from base camp .
and here 's a picture in the icefall ; it 's a waterfall , but it 's frozen , but it moves very slowly , and it actually changes every day .
when you 're in it , you 're like a rat in a maze ; you ca n't even see over the top .
this is near the top of the icefall .
you want to climb through at night when the ice is frozen .
that way , it 's less likely to tumble down on you .
these are some climbers reaching the top of the icefall just at sun-up .
this is me crossing a crevasse .
we cross on aluminum ladders with safety ropes attached .
that 's another crevasse .
some of these things are 10 stories deep or more , and one of my climbing friends says that the reason we actually climb at night is because if we ever saw the bottom of what we 're climbing over , we would never do it .
okay . this is camp one .
it 's the first flat spot you can reach after you get up to the top of the icefall .
and from there we climb up to camp two , which is sort of the foreground .
these are climbers moving up the lhotse face , that mountain toward camp three .
they 're on fixed ropes here .
a fall here , if you were n't roped in , would be 5,000 feet down .
this is a view taken from camp three .
you can see the lhotse face is in profile , it 's about a 45 degree angle . it takes two days to climb it , so you put the camp halfway through .
if you notice , the summit of everest is black .
there 's no ice over it .
and that 's because everest is so high , it 's in the jet stream , and winds are constantly scouring the face , so no snow gets to accumulate .
what looks like a cloud behind the summit ridge is actually snow being blown off the summit .
this is on the way up from camp three to camp four , moving in , up through the clouds .
and this is at camp four .
once you get to camp four , you have maybe 24 hours to decide if you 're going to go for the summit or not .
everybody 's on oxygen , your supplies are limited , and you either have to go up or go down , make that decision very quickly .
this is a picture of rob hall .
he was the leader of the new zealand team .
this is a radio he used later to call his wife that i 'll tell you about .
these are some climbers waiting to go to the summit .
they 're up at camp four , and you can see that there 's wind blowing off the summit .
this is not good weather to climb in , so the climbers are just waiting , hoping that the wind 's going to die down .
and , in fact , the wind does die down at night .
it becomes very calm , there 's no wind at all .
this looks like a good chance to go for the summit .
so here are some climbers starting out for the summit on what 's called the triangular face .
it 's the first part of climb .
it 's done in the dark , because it 's actually less steep than what comes next , and you can gain daylight hours if you do this in the dark .
so that 's what happened .
the climbers got on the southeast ridge .
this is the view looking at the southeast ridge .
the summit would be in the foreground .
from here , it 's about 1,500 feet up at a 30-degree angle to the summit .
but what happened that year was the wind suddenly and unexpectedly picked up .
a storm blew in that no one was anticipating .
you can see here some ferocious winds blowing snow way high off the summit .
and there were climbers on that summit ridge .
this is a picture of me in that area taken a year before , and you can see i 've got an oxygen mask on with a rebreather .
i have an oxygen hose connected here .
you can see on this climber , we have two oxygen tanks in the backpack - little titanium tanks , very lightweight - and we 're not carrying much else .
this is all you 've got . you 're very exposed on the summit ridge .
ok , this is a view taken on the summit ridge itself .
this is on the way toward the summit , on that 1,500-foot bridge .
all the climbers here are climbing unroped , and the reason is because the drop off is so sheer on either side that if you were roped to somebody , you 'd wind up just pulling them off with you .
so each person climbs individually .
and it 's not a straight path at all , it 's very difficult climbing , and there 's always the risk of falling on either side .
if you fall to your left , you 're going to fall 8,000 feet into nepal ; if you fall to your right , you 're going to fall 12,000 feet into tibet .
so it 's probably better to fall into tibet because you 'll live longer .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but , either way , you fall for the rest of your life .
ok . those climbers were up near the summit , along that summit ridge that you see up there , and i was down here in camp three .
my expedition was down in camp three , while these guys were up there in the storm .
the storm was so fierce that we had to lay , fully dressed , fully equipped , laid out on the tent floor to stop the tent from blowing off the mountain .
it was the worst winds i 've ever seen .
and the climbers up on the ridge were that much higher , 2,000 feet higher , and completely exposed to the elements .
we were in radio contact with some of them .
this is a view taken along the summit ridge .
rob hall , we heard by radio , was up here , at this point in the storm with doug hansen .
and we heard that rob was ok , but doug was too weak to come down .
he was exhausted , and rob was staying with him .
we also got some bad news in the storm that beck weathers , another climber , had collapsed in the snow and was dead .
there were still 18 other climbers that we were n't aware of their condition .
they were lost . there was total confusion on the mountain ; all the stories were confusing , most of them were conflicting .
we really had no idea what was going on during that storm .
we were just hunkered down in our tents at camp three .
our two strongest climbers , todd burleson and pete athans , decided to go up to try to rescue who they could even though there was a ferocious storm going .
they tried to radio a message to rob hall , who was a superb climber stuck , sort of , with a weak climber up near the summit .
i expected them to say to rob , " hold on . we 're coming . "
but in fact , what they said was , " leave doug and come down yourself .
there 's no chance of saving him , and just try to save yourself at this point . "
and rob got that message , but his answer was , " we 're both listening . "
todd and pete got up to the summit ridge , up in here , and it was a scene of complete chaos up there .
but they did what they could to stabilize the people .
i gave them radio advice from camp three , and we sent down the climbers that could make it down under their own power .
the ones that could n't we just sort of decided to leave up at camp four .
so the climbers were coming down along this route .
this is taken from camp three , where i was .
and they all came by me so i could take a look at them and see what i could do for them , which is really not much , because camp three is a little notch cut in the ice in the middle of a 45-degree angle .
you can barely stand outside the tent .
it 's really cold ; it 's 24,000 feet .
the only supplies i had at that altitude were two plastic bags with preloaded syringes of painkiller and steroids .
so , as the climbers came by me , i sort of assessed whether or not they were in condition to continue on further down .
the ones that were n't that lucid or were not that well coordinated , i would give an injection of steroids to try to give them some period of lucidity and coordination where they could then work their way further down the mountain .
it 's so awkward to work up there that sometimes i even gave the injections right through their clothes .
it was just too hard to maneuver any other way up there .
while i was taking care of them , we got more news about rob hall .
there was no way we could get up high enough to rescue him .
he called in to say that he was alone now .
apparently , doug had died higher up on the mountain .
but rob was now too weak to come down himself , and with the fierce winds and up at that altitude , he was just beyond rescue and he knew it .
at that point , he asked to be paged into his wife .
he was carrying a radio .
his wife was home in new zealand , seven months pregnant with their first child , and rob asked to be patched into her . that was done , and rob and his wife had their last conversation .
they picked the name for their baby .
rob then signed off , and that was the last we ever heard of him .
i was faced with treating a lot of critically ill patients at 24,000 feet , which was an impossibility .
so what we did was , we got the victims down to 21,000 feet , where it was easier for me to treat them .
this was my medical kit .
it 's a tackle box filled with medical supplies .
this is what i carried up the mountain .
i had more supplies lower down , which i asked to be brought up to meet me at the lower camp .
and this was scene at the lower camp .
the survivors came in one by one .
some of them were hypothermic , some of them were frostbitten , some were both .
what we did was try to warm them up as best we could , put oxygen on them and try to revive them , which is difficult to do at 21,000 feet , when the tent is freezing .
this is some severe frostbite on the feet , severe frostbite on the nose .
this climber was snow blind .
as i was taking care of these climbers , we got a startling experience .
out of nowhere , beck weathers , who we had already been told was dead , stumbled into the tent , just like a mummy , he walked into the tent .
i expected him to be incoherent , but , in fact , he walked into the tent and said to me , " hi , ken . where should i sit ? "
and then he said , " do you accept my health insurance ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- he really said that .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so he was completely lucid , but he was very severely frostbitten .
you can see his hand is completely white ; his face , his nose , is burned .
first , it turns white , and then when it 's completed necrosis , it turns black , and then it falls off .
it 's the last stage , just like a scar .
so , as i was taking care of beck , he related what had been going on up there .
he said he had gotten lost in the storm , collapsed in the snow , and just laid there , unable to move .
some climbers had come by and looked at him , and he heard them say , " he 's dead . "
but beck was n't dead ; he heard that , but he was completely unable to move .
he was in some sort of catatonic state where he could be aware of his surroundings , but could n't even blink to indicate that he was alive .
so the climbers passed him by , and beck lay there for a day , a night and another day , in the snow .
and then he said to himself , " i do n't want to die .
i have a family to come back to . "
and the thoughts of his family , his kids and his wife , generated enough energy , enough motivation in him , so that he actually got up .
after laying in the snow that long a time , he got up and found his way back to the camp .
and beck told me that story very quietly , but i was absolutely stunned by it .
i could n't imagine anybody laying in the snow that long a time and then getting up .
he apparently reversed an irreversible hypothermia .
and i can only try to speculate on how he did it .
so , what if we had beck hooked up to a spect scan , something that could actually measure brain function ?
just very simply , the three parts of the brain : the frontal lobe , where you focus your attention and concentration ; you have the temporal lobe , where you form images and keep memories ; and the posterior part of your brain , which contains the cerebellum , which controls motion ; and the brain stem , where you have your basic maintenance functions , like heartbeat and respiration .
so let 's take a cut through the brain here , and imagine that beck was hooked up to a spect scan .
this measures dynamic blood flow and therefore energy flow within the brain .
so you have the prefrontal cortex here , lighting up in red .
this is a pretty evenly distributed scan .
you have the middle area , where the temporal lobe might be , in here , and the posterior portion , where the maintenance functions are in the back .
this is a roughly normal scan , showing equal distribution of energy .
now , you go to this one and you see how much more the frontal lobes are lighting up .
this might be what beck would be experiencing when he realizes he 's in danger .
he 's focusing all his attention on getting himself out of trouble .
these parts of the brain are quieting down .
he 's not thinking about his family or anybody else at this point , and he 's working pretty hard .
he 's trying to get his muscles going and get out of this .
ok , but he 's losing ground here .
he 's running out of energy .
it 's too cold ; he ca n't keep his metabolic fires going , and , you see , there 's no more red here ; his brain is quieting down .
he 's collapsed in the snow here . everything is quiet , there 's very little red anywhere .
beck is powering down .
he 's dying .
you go on to the next scan , but , in beck 's case , you can see that the middle part of his brain is beginning to light up again .
he 's beginning to think about his family .
he 's beginning to have images that are motivating him to get up .
he 's developing energy in this area through thought .
and this is how he 's going to turn thought back into action .
this part of the brain is called the anterior cingulate gyrus .
it 's an area in which a lot of neuroscientists believe the seat of will exists .
this is where people make decisions , where they develop willpower .
and , you can see , there 's an energy flow going from the mid portion of his brain , where he 's got images of his family , into this area , which is powering his will .
okay . this is getting stronger and stronger to the point where it 's actually going to be a motivating factor .
he 's going to develop enough energy in that area - after a day , a night and a day - to actually motivate himself to get up .
and you can see here , he 's starting to get more energy into the frontal lobe .
he 's beginning to focus , he can concentrate now .
he 's thinking about what he 's got to do to save himself .
so this energy has been transmitted up toward the front of his brain , and it 's getting quieter down here , but he 's using this energy to think about what he has to do to get himself going .
and then , that energy is sort of spreading throughout his thought areas .
he 's not thinking about his family now , and he 's getting himself motivated .
this is the posterior part , where his muscles are going to be moving , and he 's going to be pacing himself .
his heart and lungs are going to pick up speed .
so this is what i can speculate might have been going on had we been able to do a spect scan on beck during this survival epic .
so here i am taking care of beck at 21,000 feet , and i felt what i was doing was completely trivial compared to what he had done for himself .
it just shows you what the power of the mind can do .
he was critically ill , there were other critically ill patients ; luckily , we were able to get a helicopter in to rescue these guys .
a helicopter came in at 21,000 feet and carried out the highest helicopter rescue in history .
it was able to land on the ice , take away beck and the other survivors , one by one , and get them off to kathmandu in a clinic before we even got back to base camp .
this is a scene at base camp , at one of the camps where some of the climbers were lost .
and we had a memorial service there a few days later .
these are serphas lighting juniper branches .
they believe juniper smoke is holy .
and the climbers stood around on the high rocks and spoke of the climbers who were lost up near the summit , turning to the mountain , actually , to talk to them directly .
there were five climbers lost here .
this was scott fischer , rob hall , andy harris , doug hansen and yasuko namba .
and one more climber should have died that day , but did n't , and that 's beck weathers .
he was able to survive because he was able to generate that incredible willpower , he was able to use all the power of his mind to save himself .
these are tibetan prayer flags .
these sherpas believe that if you write prayers on these flags , the message will be carried up to the gods , and that year , beck 's message was answered .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- penelope jagessar chaffer : i was going to ask if there 's a doctor in the house .
no , i 'm just joking .
it 's interesting , because it was six years ago when i was pregnant with my first child that i discovered that the most commonly used preservative in baby care products mimics estrogen when it gets into the human body .
now it 's very easy actually to get a chemical compound from products into the human body through the skin .
and these preservatives had been found in breast cancer tumors .
that was the start of my journey to make this film , " toxic baby . "
and it does n't take much time to discover some really astonishing statistics with this issue .
one is that you and i all have between 30 to 50,000 chemicals in our bodies that our grandparents did n't have .
and many of these chemicals are now linked to the skyrocketing incidents of chronic childhood disease that we 're seeing across industrialized nations .
i 'll show you some statistics .
so for example , in the united kingdom , the incidence of childhood leukemia has risen by 20 percent just in a generation .
very similar statistic for childhood cancer in the u.s.
in canada , we 're now looking at one in 10 canadian children with asthma .
that 's a four-fold increase .
again , similar story around the world .
in the united states , probably the most astonishing statistic is a 600 percent increase in autism and autistic spectrum disorders and other learning disabilities .
again , we 're seeing that trend across europe , across north america .
and in europe , there 's certain parts of europe , where we 're seeing a four-fold increase in certain genital birth defects .
interestingly , one of those birth defects has seen a 200 percent increase in the u.s.
so a real skyrocketing of chronic childhood disease that includes other things like obesity and juvenile diabetes , premature puberty .
so it 's interesting for me , when i 'm looking for someone who can really talk to me and talk to an audience about these things , that probably one of the most important people in the world who can discuss toxicity in babies is expert in frogs .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- tyrone hayes : it was a surprise to me as well that i would be talking about pesticides , that i 'd be talking about public health , because , in fact , i never thought i would do anything useful .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- frogs .
in fact , my involvement in the whole pesticide issue was sort of a surprise as well when i was approached by the largest chemical company in the world and they asked me if i would evaluate how atrazine affected amphibians , or my frogs .
it turns out , atrazine is the largest selling product for the largest chemical company in the world .
it 's the number one contaminant of groundwater , drinking water , rain water .
in 2003 , after my studies , it was banned in the european union , but in that same year , the united states epa re-registered the compound .
we were a bit surprised when we found out that when we exposed frogs to very low levels of atrazine - 0.1 parts per billion - that it produced animals that look like this .
these are the dissected gonads of an animal that has two testes , two ovaries , another large testis , more ovaries , which is not normal ...
-lrb- laughter -rrb- even for amphibians .
in some cases , another species like the north american leopard frog showed that males exposed to atrazine grew eggs in their testes .
and you can see these large , yolked-up eggs bursting through the surface of this male 's testes .
now my wife tells me , and i 'm sure penelope can as well , that there 's nothing more painful than childbirth - which that i 'll never experience , i ca n't really argue that - but i would guess that a dozen chicken eggs in my testicle would probably be somewhere in the top five .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- in recent studies that we 've published , we 've shown that some of these animals when they 're exposed to atrazine , some of the males grow up and completely become females .
so these are actually two brothers consummating a relationship .
and not only do these genetic males mate with other males , they actually have the capacity to lay eggs even though they 're genetic males .
what we proposed , and what we 've now generated support for , is that what atrazine is doing is wreaking havoc causing a hormone imbalance .
normally the testes should make testosterone , the male hormone .
but what atrazine does is it turns on an enzyme , the machinery if you will , aromatase , that converts testosterone into estrogen .
and as a result , these exposed males lose their testosterone , they 're chemically castrated , and they 're subsequently feminized because now they 're making the female hormone .
now this is what brought me to the human-related issues .
because it turns out that the number one cancer in women , breast cancer , is regulated by estrogen and by this enzyme aromatase .
so when you develop a cancerous cell in your breast , aromatase converts androgens into estrogens , and that estrogen turns on or promotes the growth of that cancer so that it turns into a tumor and spreads .
in fact , this aromatase is so important in breast cancer that the latest treatment for breast cancer is a chemical called letrozole , which blocks aromatase , blocks estrogen , so that if you developed a mutated cell , it does n't grow into a tumor .
now what 's interesting is , of course , that we 're still using 80 million pounds of atrazine , the number one contaminant in drinking water , that does the opposite - turns on aromatase , increases estrogen and promotes tumors in rats and is associated with tumors , breast cancer , in humans .
what 's interesting is , in fact , the same company that sold us 80 million pounds of atrazine , the breast cancer promoter , now sells us the blocker - the exact same company .
and so i find it interesting that instead of treating this disease by preventing exposure to the chemicals that promote it , we simply respond by putting more chemicals into the environment .
pjc : so speaking of estrogen , one of the other compounds that tyrone talks about in the film is something called bisphenol a , bpa , which has been in the news recently .
it 's a plasticizer .
it 's a compound that 's found in polycarbonate plastic , which is what baby bottles are made out of .
and what 's interesting about bpa is that it 's such a potent estrogen that it was actually once considered for use as a synthetic estrogen in hormone placement therapy .
and there have been many , many , many studies that have shown that bpa leaches from babies ' bottles into the formula , into the milk , and therefore into the babies .
so we 're dosing our babies , our newborns , our infants , with a synthetic estrogen .
now two weeks ago or so , the european union passed a law banning the use of bpa in babies ' bottles and sippy cups .
and for those of you who are not parents , sippy cups are those little plastic things that your child graduates to after using bottles .
but just two weeks before that , the u.s. senate refused to even debate the banning of bpa in babies ' bottles and sippy cups .
so it really makes you realize the onus on parents to have to look at this and regulate this and police this in their own lives and how astonishing that is .
-lrb- video -rrb- pjc : with many plastic baby bottles now proven to leak the chemical bisphenol a , it really shows how sometimes it is only a parent 's awareness that stands between chemicals and our children .
the baby bottle scenario proves that we can prevent unnecessary exposure .
however , if we parents are unaware , we are leaving our children to fend for themselves .
th : and what penelope says here is even more true .
for those of you who do n't know , we 're in the middle of the sixth mass extinction .
scientists agree now .
we are losing species from the earth faster than the dinosaurs disappeared , and leading that loss are amphibians .
80 percent of all amphibians are threatened and in come decline .
and i believe , many scientists believe that pesticides are an important part of that decline .
in part , amphibians are good indicators and more sensitive because they do n't have protection from contaminants in the water - no eggshells , no membranes and no placenta .
in fact , our invention - by " our " i mean we mammals - one of our big inventions was the placenta .
but we also start out as aquatic organisms .
but it turns out that this ancient structure that separates us from other animals , the placenta , can not evolve or adapt fast enough because of the rate that we 're generating new chemicals that it 's never seen before .
the evidence of that is that studies in rats , again with atrazine , show that the hormone imbalance atrazine generates causes abortion .
because maintaining a pregnancy is dependent on hormones .
of those rats that do n't abort , atrazine causes prostate disease in the pups so the sons are born with an old man 's disease .
of those that do n't abort , atrazine causes impaired mammary , or breast , development in the exposed daughters in utero , so that their breast do n't develop properly .
and as a result , when those rats grow up , their pups experience retarded growth and development because they ca n't make enough milk to nourish their pups .
so the pup you see on the bottom is affected by atrazine that its grandmother was exposed to .
and given the life of many of these chemicals , generations , years , dozens of years , that means that we right now are affecting the health of our grandchildren 's grandchildren by things that we 're putting into the environment today .
and this is not just philosophical , it 's already known , that chemicals like diethylstilbestrol and estrogen , pcbs , ddt cross the placenta and effectively determine and obesity and diabetes already when the baby 's in the womb .
in addition to that , after the baby 's born , our other unique invention as mammals is that we nourish our offspring after they 're born .
we already know that chemicals like ddt and des and atrazine can also pass over into milk , again , affecting our babies even after their born .
pjc : so when tyrone tells me that the placenta is an ancient organ , i 'm thinking , how do i demonstrate that ?
how do you show that ?
and it 's interesting when you make a film like this , because you 're stuck trying to visualize science that there 's no visualization for .
and i have to take a little bit of artistic license .
-lrb- video -rrb- -lrb- ringing -rrb- old man : placenta control .
what is it ?
oh what ?
-lrb- snoring -rrb- -lrb- honk -rrb- puffuffuff , what ?
perflourooctanoic acid .
blimey .
never heard of it .
pjc : and neither had i actually before i started making this film .
and so when you realize that chemicals can pass the placenta and go into your unborn child , it made me start to think , what would my fetus say to me ?
what would our unborn children say to us when they have an exposure -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- video -rrb- child : today , i had some octyphenols , some artificial musks and some bisphenol a.
help me .
pjc : it 's a very profound notion to know that we as women are at the vanguard of this .
this is our issue , because we collect these compounds our entire life and then we end up dumping it and dumping them into our unborn children .
we are in effect polluting our children .
and this was something that was really brought home to me a year ago when i found out i was pregnant and the first scan revealed that my baby had a birth defect associated with exposure to estrogenic chemicals in the womb and the second scan revealed no heartbeat .
so my child 's death , my baby 's death , really brought home the resonance of what i was trying to make in this film .
and it 's sometimes a weird place when the communicator becomes part of the story , which is not what you originally intend .
and so when tyrone talks about the fetus being trapped in a contaminated environment , this is my contaminated environment .
this is my toxic baby .
and that 's something that 's just profound and sad , but astonishing because so many of us do n't actually know this .
th : one of this things that 's exciting and appropriate for me to be here at tedwomen is that , well , i think it was summed up best last night at dinner when someone said , " turn to the man at your table and tell them , ' when the revolution starts , we 've got your back . " ' the truth is , women , you 've had our back on this issue for a very long time , starting with rachel carson 's " silent spring " to theo colborn 's " our stolen future " to sandra steingraber 's books " living downstream " and " having faith . "
and perhaps it 's the connection to our next generation - like my wife and my beautiful daughter here about 13 years ago - perhaps it 's that connection that makes women activists in this particular area .
but for the men here , i want to say it 's not just women and children that are at risk .
and the frogs that are exposed to atrazine , the testes are full of holes and spaces , because the hormone imbalance , instead of allowing sperm to be generated , such as in the testis here , the testicular tubules end up empty and fertility goes down by as much as 50 percent .
it 's not just my work in amphibians , but similar work has been shown in fish in europe , holes in the testes and absence of sperm in reptiles in a group from south america and in rats , an absence of sperm in the testicular tubules as well .
and of course , we do n't do these experiments in humans , but just by coincidence , my colleague has shown that men who have low sperm count , low semen quality have significantly more atrazine in their urine .
these are just men who live in an agricultural community .
men who actually work in agriculture have much higher levels of atrazine .
and the men who actually apply atrazine have even more atrazine in their urine , up to levels that are 24,000 times what we know to be active are present in the urine of these men .
of course , most of them , 90 percent are mexican , mexican-american .
and it 's not just atrazine they 're exposed to .
they 're exposed to chemicals like chloropicrin , which was originally used as a nerve gas .
and many of these workers have life expectancies of only 50 .
it should n't come to any surprise that the things that happen in wildlife are also a warning to us , just like rachel carson and others have warned .
as evident in this slide from lake nabugabo in uganda , the agricultural runoff from this crop , which goes into these buckets , is the sole source of drinking , cooking and bathing water for this village .
now if i told the men in this village that the frogs have pour immune function and eggs developing in their testes , the connection between environmental health and public health would be clear .
you would not drink water that you knew was having this kind of impact on the wildlife that lived in it .
the problem is , in my village , oakland , in most of our villages , we do n't see that connection .
we turn on the faucet , the water comes out , we assume it 's safe , and we assume that we are masters of our environment , rather than being part of it .
pjc : so it does n't take much to realize that actually this is an environmental issue .
and i kept thinking over and over again this question .
we know so much about global warming and climate change , and yet , we have no concept of what i 've been calling internal environmentalism .
we know what we 're putting out there , we have a sense of those repercussions , but we are so ignorant of this sense of what happens when we put things , or things are put into our bodies .
and it 's my feeling and it 's my urging being here to know that , as we women move forward as the communicators of this , but also as the ones who carry that burden of carrying the children , bearing the children , we hold most of the buying power in the household , is that it 's going to be us moving forward to carry the work of tyrone and other scientists around the world .
and my urging is that when we think about environmental issues that we remember that it 's not just about melting glaciers and ice caps , but it 's also about our children as well .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i was in new york during hurricane sandy , and this little white dog called maui was staying with me .
half the city was dark because of a power cut , and i was living on the dark side .
now , maui was terrified of the dark , so i had to carry him up the stairs , actually down the stairs first , for his walk , and then bring him back up .
i was also hauling gallons of bottles of water up to the seventh floor every day .
and through all of this , i had to hold a torch between my teeth .
the stores nearby were out of flashlights and batteries and bread .
for a shower , i walked 40 blocks to a branch of my gym .
but these were not the major preoccupations of my day .
it was just as critical for me to be the first person in at a cafe nearby with extension cords and chargers to juice my multiple devices .
i started to prospect under the benches of bakeries and the entrances of pastry shops for plug points .
i was n't the only one .
even in the rain , people stood between madison and 5th avenue under their umbrellas charging their cell phones from outlets on the street .
nature had just reminded us that it was stronger than all our technology , and yet here we were , obsessed about being wired .
i think there 's nothing like a crisis to tell you what 's really important and what 's not , and sandy made me realize that our devices and their connectivity matter to us right up there with food and shelter .
the self as we once knew it no longer exists , and i think that an abstract , digital universe has become a part of our identity , and i want to talk to you about what i think that means .
i 'm a novelist , and i 'm interested in the self because the self and fiction have a lot in common .
they 're both stories , interpretations .
you and i can experience things without a story .
we might run up the stairs too quickly and we might get breathless .
but the larger sense that we have of our lives , the slightly more abstract one , is indirect .
our story of our life is based on direct experience , but it 's embellished .
a novel needs scene after scene to build , and the story of our life needs an arc as well .
it needs months and years .
discrete moments from our lives are its chapters .
but the story is not about these chapters .
it 's the whole book .
it 's not only about the heartbreak and the happiness , the victories and the disappointments , but it 's because how because of these , and sometimes , more importantly , in spite of these , we find our place in the world and we change it and we change ourselves .
our story , therefore , needs two dimensions of time : a long arc of time that is our lifespan , and the timeframe of direct experience that is the moment .
now the self that experiences directly can only exist in the moment , but the one that narrates needs several moments , a whole sequence of them , and that 's why our full sense of self needs both immersive experience and the flow of time .
now , the flow of time is embedded in everything , in the erosion of a grain of sand , in the budding of a little bud into a rose .
without it , we would have no music .
our own emotions and state of mind often encode time , regret or nostalgia about the past , hope or dread about the future .
i think that technology has altered that flow of time .
the overall time that we have for our narrative , our lifespan , has been increasing , but the smallest measure , the moment , has shrunk .
it has shrunk because our instruments enable us in part to measure smaller and smaller units of time , and this in turn has given us a more granular understanding of the material world , and this granular understanding has generated reams of data that our brains can no longer comprehend and for which we need more and more complicated computers .
all of this to say that the gap between what we can perceive and what we can measure is only going to widen .
science can do things with and in a picosecond , but you and i are never going to have the inner experience of a millionth of a millionth of a second .
you and i answer only to nature 's rhythm and flow , to the sun , the moon and the seasons , and this is why we need that long arc of time with the past , the present and the future to see things for what they are , to separate signal from noise and the self from sensations .
we need time 's arrow to understand cause and effect , not just in the material world , but in our own intentions and our motivations .
what happens when that arrow goes awry ?
what happens when time warps ?
so many of us today have the sensation that time 's arrow is pointing everywhere and nowhere at once .
this is because time does n't flow in the digital world in the same way that it does in the natural one .
we all know that the internet has shrunk space as well as time .
far away over there is now here .
news from india is a stream on my smartphone app whether i 'm in new york or new delhi .
and that 's not all .
your last job , your dinner reservations from last year , your former friends , lie on a flat plain with today 's friends , because the internet also archives , and it warps the past .
with no distinction left between the past , the present and the future , and the here or there , we are left with this moment everywhere , this moment that i 'll call the digital now .
just how can we prioritize in the landscape of the digital now ?
this digital now is not the present , because it 's always a few seconds ahead , with twitter streams that are already trending and news from other time zones .
this is n't the now of a shooting pain in your foot or the second that you bite into a pastry or the three hours that you lose yourself in a great book .
this now bears very little physical or psychological reference to our own state .
its focus , instead , is to distract us at every turn on the road .
every digital landmark is an invitation to leave what you are doing now to go somewhere else and do something else .
are you reading an interview by an author ?
why not buy his book ? tweet it . share it .
like it . find other books exactly like his .
find other people reading those books .
travel can be liberating , but when it is incessant , we become permanent exiles without repose .
choice is freedom , but not when it 's constantly for its own sake .
not just is the digital now far from the present , but it 's in direct competition with it , and this is because not just am i absent from it , but so are you .
not just are we absent from it , but so is everyone else .
and therein lies its greatest convenience and horror .
i can order foreign language books in the middle of the night , shop for parisian macarons , and leave video messages that get picked up later .
at all times , i can operate at a different rhythm and pace from you , while i sustain the illusion that i 'm tapped into you in real time .
sandy was a reminder of how such an illusion can shatter .
there were those with power and water , and those without .
there are those who went back to their lives , and those who are still displaced after so many months .
for some reason , technology seems to perpetuate the illusion for those who have it that everyone does , and then , like an ironic slap in the face , it makes it true .
for example , it 's said that there are more people in india with access to cell phones than toilets .
now if this rift , which is already so great in many parts of the world , between the lack of infrastructure and the spread of technology , is n't somehow bridged , there will be ruptures between the digital and the real .
for us as individuals who live in the digital now and spend most of our waking moments in it , the challenge is to live in two streams of time that are parallel and almost simultaneous .
how does one live inside distraction ?
we might think that those younger than us , those who are born into this , will adapt more naturally .
possibly , but i remember my childhood .
i remember my grandfather revising the capitals of the world with me .
buda and pest were separated by the danube , and vienna had a spanish riding school .
if i were a child today , i could easily learn this information with apps and hyperlinks , but it really would n't be the same , because much later , i went to vienna , and i went to the spanish riding school , and i could feel my grandfather right beside me .
night after night , he took me up on the terrace , on his shoulders , and pointed out jupiter and saturn and the great bear to me .
and even here , when i look at the great bear , i get back that feeling of being a child , hanging onto his head and trying to balance myself on his shoulder , and i can get back that feeling of being a child again .
what i had with my grandfather was wrapped so often in information and knowledge and fact , but it was about so much more than information or knowledge or fact .
time-warping technology challenges our deepest core , because we are able to archive the past and some of it becomes hard to forget , even as the current moment is increasingly unmemorable .
we want to clutch , and we are left instead clutching at a series of static moments .
they 're like soap bubbles that disappear when we touch them .
by archiving everything , we think that we can store it , but time is not data .
it can not be stored .
you and i know exactly what it means like to be truly present in a moment .
it might have happened while we were playing an instrument , or looking into the eyes of someone we 've known for a very long time .
at such moments , our selves are complete .
the self that lives in the long narrative arc and the self that experiences the moment become one .
the present encapsulates the past and a promise for the future .
the present joins a flow of time from before and after .
i first experienced these feelings with my grandmother .
i wanted to learn to skip , and she found an old rope and she tucked up her sari and she jumped over it .
i wanted to learn to cook , and she kept me in the kitchen , cutting , cubing and chopping for a whole month .
my grandmother taught me that things happen in the time they take , that time ca n't be fought , and because it will pass and it will move , we owe the present moment our full attention .
attention is time .
one of my yoga instructors once said that love is attention , and definitely from my grandmother , love and attention were one and the same thing .
the digital world cannibalizes time , and in doing so , i want to suggest that what it threatens is the completeness of ourselves .
it threatens the flow of love .
but we do n't need to let it .
we can choose otherwise .
we 've seen again and again just how creative technology can be , and in our lives and in our actions , we can choose those solutions and those innovations and those moments that restore the flow of time instead of fragmenting it .
we can slow down and we can tune in to the ebb and flow of time .
we can choose to take time back .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- being a child , and sort of crawling around the house , i remember these turkish carpets , and there were these scenes , these battle scenes , these love scenes .
i mean , look , this animal is trying to fight back this spear from this soldier .
and my mom took these pictures actually , last week , of our carpets , and i remember this to this day .
there was another object , this sort of towering piece of furniture with creatures and gargoyles and nudity - pretty scary stuff , when you 're a little kid .
what i remember today from this is that objects tell stories , so storytelling has been a really strong influence in my work .
and then there was another influence .
i was a teenager , and at 15 or 16 , i guess like all teenagers , we want to just do what we love and what we believe in .
and so , i fused together the two things i loved the most , which was skiing and windsurfing .
those are pretty good escapes from the drab weather in switzerland .
so , i created this compilation of the two : i took my skis and i took a board and i put a mast foot in there , and some foot straps , and some metal fins , and here i was , going really fast on frozen lakes .
it was really a death trap . i mean , it was incredible , it worked incredibly well , but it was really dangerous .
and i realized then i had to go to design school .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i mean , look at those graphics there .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , i went to design school , and it was the early ' 90s when i finished .
and i saw something extraordinary happening in silicon valley , so i wanted to be there , and i saw that the computer was coming into our homes , that it had to change in order to be with us in our homes .
and so i got myself a job and i was working for a consultancy , and we would get in to these meetings , and these managers would come in , and they would say , " well , what we 're going to do here is really important , you know . "
and they would give the projects code names , you know , mostly from " star wars , " actually : things like c3po , yoda , luke .
so , in anticipation , i would be this young designer in the back of the room , and i would raise my hand , and i would ask questions .
i mean , in retrospect , probably stupid questions , but things like , " what 's this caps lock key for ? "
or " what 's this num lock key for ? " you know , that thing ?
" you know , do people really use it ?
do they need it ? do they want it in their homes ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- what i realized then is , they did n't really want to change the legacy stuff ; they did n't want to change the insides .
they were really looking for us , the designers , to create the skins , to put some pretty stuff outside of the box .
and i did n't want to be a colorist .
it was n't what i wanted to do .
i did n't want to be a stylist in this way .
and then i saw this quote : " advertising is the price companies pay for being unoriginal . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , i had to start on my own . so i moved to san francisco , and i started a little company , fuseproject .
and what i wanted to work on is important stuff .
and i wanted to really not just work on the skins , but i wanted to work on the entire human experience .
and so the first projects were sort of humble , but they took technology and maybe made it into things that people would use in a new way , and maybe finding some new functionality .
this is a watch we made for mini cooper , the car company , right when it launched , and it 's the first watch that has a display that switches from horizontal to vertical .
and that allows me to check my timer discretely , here , without bending my elbow .
and other projects , which were really about transformation , about matching the human need .
this is a little piece of furniture for an italian manufacturer , and it ships completely flat , and then it folds into a coffee table and a stool and whatnot .
and something a little bit more experimental : this is a light fixture for swarovski , and what it does is , it changes shape .
so , it goes from a circle , to a round , to a square , to a figure eight .
and just by drawing on a little computer tablet , the entire light fixture adjusts to what shape you want .
and then finally , the leaf lamp for herman miller .
this is a pretty involved process ; it took us about four and a half years .
but i really was looking for creating a unique experience of light , a new experience of light .
so , we had to design both the light and the light bulb .
and that 's a unique opportunity , i would say , in design .
and the new experience i was looking for is giving the choice for the user to go from a warm , sort of glowing kind of mood light , all the way to a bright work light .
so , the light bulb actually does that .
it allows the person to switch , and to mix these two colorations .
and it 's done in a very simple way : one just touches the base of the light , and on one side , you can mix the brightness , and on the other , the coloration of the light .
so , all of these projects have a humanistic sense to them , and i think as designers we need to really think about how we can create a different relationship between our work and the world , whether it 's for business , or , as i 'm going to show , on some civic-type projects .
because i think everybody agrees that as designers we bring value to business , value to the users also , but i think it 's the values that we put into these projects that ultimately create the greater value .
and the values we bring can be about environmental issues , about sustainability , about lower power consumption .
you know , they can be about function and beauty ; they can be about business strategy .
but designers are really the glue that brings these things together .
so jawbone is a project that you 're familiar with , and it has a humanistic technology .
it feels your skin . it rests on your skin , and it knows when it is you 're talking .
and by knowing when it is you 're talking , it gets rid of the other noises that it knows about , which is the environmental noises .
but the other thing that is humanistic about jawbone is that we really decided to take out all the techie stuff , and all the nerdy stuff out of it , and try to make it as beautiful as we can .
i mean , think about it : the care we take in selecting sunglasses , or jewelry , or accessories is really important , so if it is n't beautiful , it really does n't belong on your face .
and this is what we 're pursuing here .
but how we work on jawbone is really unique .
i want to point at something here , on the left .
this is the board , this is one of the things that goes inside that makes this technology work .
but this is the design process : there 's somebody changing the board , putting tracers on the board , changing the location of the ics , as the designers on the other side are doing the work .
so , it 's not about slapping skins , anymore , on a technology .
it 's really about designing from the inside out .
and then , on the other side of the room , the designers are making small adjustments , sketching , drawing by hand , putting it in the computer .
and it 's what i call being design driven .
you know , there is some push and pull , but design is really helping define the whole experience from the inside out .
and then , of course , design is never done .
and this is - the other new way that is unique in how we work is , because it 's never done , you have to do all this other stuff .
the packaging , and the website , and you need to continue to really touch the user , in many ways .
but how do you retain somebody , when it 's never done ?
and hosain rahman , the ceo of aliph jawbone , you know , really understands that you need a different structure .
so , in a way , the different structure is that we 're partners , it 's a partnership . we can continue to work and dedicate ourselves to this project , and then we also share in the rewards .
and here 's another project , another partnership-type approach .
this is called y water , and it 's this guy from los angeles , thomas arndt , austrian originally , who came to us , and all he wanted to do was to create a healthy drink , or an organic drink for his kids , to replace the high-sugar-content sodas that he 's trying to get them away from .
so , we worked on this bottle , and it 's completely symmetrical in every dimension .
and this allows the bottle to turn into a game .
the bottles connect together , and you can create different shapes , different forms .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and then while we were doing this , the shape of the bottle upside down reminded us of a y , and then we thought , well these words , " why " and " why not , " are probably the most important words that kids ask .
so we called it y water . and so this is another place where it all comes together in the same room : the three-dimensional design , the ideas , the branding , it all becomes deeply connected .
and then the other thing about this project is , we bring intellectual property , we bring a marketing approach , we bring all this stuff , but i think , at the end of the day , what we bring is these values , and these values create a soul for the companies we work with .
and it 's especially rewarding when your design work becomes a creative endeavor , when others can be creative and do more with it .
here 's another project , which i think really emulates that .
this is the one laptop per child , the $ 100 laptop .
this picture is incredible .
in nigeria , people carry their most precious belongings on their heads .
this girl is going to school with a laptop on her head .
i mean , to me , it just means so much .
but when nicholas negroponte - and he has spoken about this project a lot , he 's the founder of olpc - came to us about two and a half years ago , there were some clear ideas .
he wanted to bring education and he wanted to bring technology , and those are pillars of his life , but also pillars of the mission of one laptop per child .
but the third pillar that he talked about was design .
and at the time , i was n't really working on computers .
i did n't really want to , from the previous adventure .
but what he said was really significant , is that design was going to be why the kids were going to love this product , how we were going to make it low cost , robust .
and plus , he said he was going to get rid of the caps lock key - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - and the num lock key , too .
so , i was convinced . we designed it to be iconic , to look different . to look like it 's for a kid , but not like a toy .
and then the integration of all these great technologies , which you 've heard about , the wi-fi antennas that allow the kids to connect ; the screen , which you can read in sunlight ; the keyboard , which is made out of rubber , and it 's protected from the environment .
you know , all these great technologies really happened because of the passion and the olpc people and the engineers .
they fought the suppliers , they fought the manufacturers .
i mean , they fought like animals for this to remain they way it is .
and in a way , it is that will that makes projects like this one - allows the process from not destroying the original idea .
and i think this is something really important .
so , now you get these pictures - you get up in the morning , and you see the kids in nigeria and you see them in uruguay with their computers , and in mongolia .
and we went away from obviously the beige .
i mean it 's colorful , it 's fun .
in fact , you can see each logo is a little bit different .
it 's because we were able to run , during the manufacturing process , 20 colors for the x and the o , which is the name of the computer , and by mixing them on the manufacturing floor , you get 20 times 20 : you get 400 different options there .
so , the lessons from seeing the kids using them in the developing world are incredible .
but this is my nephew , anthony , in switzerland , and he had the laptop for an afternoon , and i had to take it back . it was hard .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and it was a prototype . and a month and a half later , i come back to switzerland , and there he is playing with his own version .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- like paper , paper and cardboard .
so , i 'm going to finish with one last project , and this is a little bit more of adult play .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- some of you might have heard about the new york city condom .
it 's actually just launched , actually launched on valentine 's day , february 14 , about 10 days ago .
so , the department of health in new york came to us , and they needed a way to distribute 36 million condoms for free to the citizens of new york .
so a pretty big endeavor , and we worked on the dispensers .
these are the dispensers . there 's this friendly shape .
it 's a little bit like designing a fire hydrant , and it has to be easily serviceable : you have to know where it is and what it does .
and we also designed the condoms themselves .
and i was just in new york at the launch , and i went to see all these places where they 're installed : this is at a puerto rican little mom-and-pop store ; at a bar in christopher street ; at a pool hall .
i mean , they 're being installed in homeless clinics - everywhere .
of course , clubs and discos , too .
and here 's the public service announcement for this project .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- get some .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so , this is really where design is able to create a conversation .
i was in these venues , and people were , you know , really into getting them . they were excited .
it was breaking the ice , it was getting over a stigma , and i think that 's also what design can do .
so , i was going to throw some condoms in the room and whatnot , but i 'm not sure it 's the etiquette here .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- yeah ? all right , all right . i have only a few .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so , i have more , you can always ask me for some more later .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and if anybody asks why you 're carrying a condom , you can just say you like the design .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , i 'll finish with just one thought : if we all work together on creating value , but if we really keep in mind the values of the work that we do , i think we can change the work that we do .
we can change these values , can change the companies we work with , and eventually , together , maybe we can change the world .
so , thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you so much everyone from ted , and chris and amy in particular .
i can not believe i 'm here .
i have not slept in weeks .
neil and i were sitting there comparing how little we 've slept in anticipation for this . i 've never been so nervous - and i do this when i 'm nervous , i just realized . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so , i 'm going to talk about sort of what we did at this organization called 826 valencia , and then i 'm going to talk about how we all might join in and do similar things .
back in about 2000 , i was living in brooklyn , i was trying to finish my first book , i was wandering around dazed every day because i wrote from 12 a.m. to 5 a.m.
so i would walk around in a daze during the day .
i had no mental acuity to speak of during the day , but i had flexible hours .
in the brooklyn neighborhood that i lived in , park slope , there are a lot of writers - it 's like a very high per capita ratio of writers to normal people .
meanwhile , i had grown up around a lot of teachers .
my mom was a teacher , my sister became a teacher and after college so many of my friends went into teaching .
and so i was always hearing them talk about their lives and how inspiring they were , and they were really sort of the most hard-working and constantly inspiring people i knew .
but i knew so many of the things they were up against , so many of the struggles they were dealing with .
and one of them was that so many of my friends that were teaching in city schools were having trouble with their students keeping up at grade level , in their reading and writing in particular .
now , so many of these students had come from households where english is n't spoken in the home , where a lot of them have different special needs , learning disabilities . and of course they 're working in schools which sometimes and very often are under-funded .
and so they would talk to me about this and say , " you know , what we really need is just more people , more bodies , more one-on-one attention , more hours , more expertise from people that have skills in english and can work with these students one-on-one . "
now , i would say , " well , why do n't you just work with them one-on-one ? "
and they would say , " well , we have five classes of 30 to 40 students each .
this can lead up to 150 , 180 , 200 students a day .
how can we possibly give each student even one hour a week of one-on-one attention ? "
you 'd have to greatly multiply the workweek and clone the teachers .
and so we started talking about this .
and at the same time , i thought about this massive group of people i knew : writers , editors , journalists , graduate students , assistant professors , you name it .
all these people that had sort of flexible daily hours and an interest in the english word - i hope to have an interest in the english language , but i 'm not speaking it well right now . -lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'm trying . that clock has got me .
but everyone that i knew had an interest in the primacy of the written word in terms of nurturing a democracy , nurturing an enlightened life .
and so they had , you know , their time and their interest , but at the same time there was n't a conduit that i knew of in my community to bring these two communities together .
so when i moved back to san francisco , we rented this building .
and the idea was to put mcsweeney 's - mcsweeney 's quarterly , that we published twice or three times a year , and a few other magazines - we were going to move it into an office for the first time .
it used to be in my kitchen in brooklyn .
we were going to move it into an office , and we were going to actually share space with a tutoring center .
so we thought , " we 'll have all these writers and editors and everybody - sort of a writing community - coming into the office every day anyway , why do n't we just open up the front of the building for students to come in there after school , get extra help on their written homework , so you have basically no border between these two communities ? "
so the idea was that we would be working on whatever we 're working on , at 2:30 p.m. the students flow in and you put down what you 're doing , or you trade , or you work a little bit later or whatever it is .
you give those hours in the afternoon to the students in the neighborhood .
so , we had this place , we rented it , the landlord was all for it . we did this mural , that 's a chris ware mural , that basically explains the entire history of the printed word , in mural form - it takes a long time to digest and you have to stand in the middle of the road .
so we rented this space .
and everything was great except the landlord said , " well , the space is zoned for retail ; you have to come up with something .
you 've gotta sell something .
you ca n't just have a tutoring center . "
so we thought , " ha ha ! really ! "
and we could n't think of anything necessarily to sell , but we did all the necessary research .
it used to be a weight room , so there were rubber floors below , acoustic tile ceilings and fluorescent lights .
we took all that down , and we found beautiful wooden floors , whitewashed beams and it had the look - while we were renovating this place , somebody said , " you know , it really kind of looks like the hull of a ship . "
and we looked around and somebody else said , " well , you should sell supplies to the working buccaneer . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- and so this is what we did . so it made everybody laugh , and we said , " there 's a point to that .
let 's sell pirate supplies . " this is the pirate supply store .
you see , this is sort of a sketch i did on a napkin .
a great carpenter built all this stuff and you see , we made it look sort of pirate supply-like .
here you see planks sold by the foot and we have supplies to combat scurvy .
we have the peg legs there , that are all handmade and fitted to you .
up at the top , you see the eyepatch display , which is the black column there for everyday use for your eyepatch , and then you have the pastel and other colors for stepping out at night - special occasions , bar mitzvahs and whatever .
so we opened this place . and this is a vat that we fill with treasures that students dig in .
this is replacement eyes in case you lose one .
these are some signs that we have all over the place : " practical joking with pirates . "
while you 're reading the sign , we pull a rope behind the counter and eight mop heads drop on your head .
that was just my one thing - i said we had to have something that drops on people 's heads .
it became mop heads . and this is the fish theater , which is just a saltwater tank with three seats , and then right behind it we set up this space , which was the tutoring center .
so right there is the tutoring center , and then behind the curtain were the mcsweeney 's offices , where all of us would be working on the magazine and book editing and things like that .
the kids would come in - or we thought they would come in . i should back up .
we set the place up , we opened up , we spent months and months renovating this place .
we had tables , chairs , computers , everything .
i went to a dot-com auction at a holiday inn in palo alto and i bought 11 g4s with a stroke of a paddle .
anyway , we bought ' em , we set everything up and then we waited .
it was started with about 12 of my friends , people that i had known for years that were writers in the neighborhood .
and we sat . and at 2:30 p.m. we put a sandwich board out on the front sidewalk and it just said , " free tutoring for your english-related and writing-related needs - just come in , it 's all free . "
and we thought , " oh , they 're going to storm the gates , they 're gonna love it . " and they did n't .
and so we waited , we sat at the tables , we waited and waited .
and everybody was becoming very discouraged because it was weeks and weeks that we waited , really , where nobody came in .
and then somebody alerted us to the fact that maybe there was a trust gap , because we were operating behind a pirate supply store . -lrb- laughter -rrb- we never put it together , you know ?
and so then , around that time , i persuaded a woman named nineveh caligari , a longtime san francisco educator - she was teaching in mexico city , she had all the experience necessary , knew everything about education , was connected with all the teachers and community members in the neighborhood - i convinced her to move up from mexico city where she was teaching .
she took over as executive director .
immediately , she made the inroads with the teachers and the parents and the students and everything , and so suddenly it was actually full every day .
and what we were trying to offer every day was one-on-one attention .
the goal was to have a one-to-one ratio with every one of these students .
you know , it 's been proven that 35 to 40 hours a year with one-on-one attention , a student can get one grade level higher .
and so most of these students , english is not spoken in the home .
they come there , many times their parents - you ca n't see it , but there 's a church pew that i bought in a berkeley auction right there - the parents will sometimes watch while their kids are being tutored .
so that was the basis of it , was one-on-one attention .
and we found ourselves full every day with kids .
if you 're on valencia street within those few blocks at around 2 p.m. , 2:30 p.m. , you will get run over , often , by the kids and their big backpacks , or whatever , actually running to this space , which is very strange , because it 's school , in a way .
but there was something psychological happening there that was just a little bit different .
and the other thing was , there was no stigma .
kids were n't going into the " center-for-kids-that-need-more-help , " or something like that . it was 826 valencia .
first of all , it was a pirate supply store , which is insane .
and then secondly , there 's a publishing company in the back .
and so our interns were actually working at the same tables very often , and shoulder-to-shoulder , computer-next-to-computer with the students .
and so it became a tutoring center - publishing center , is what we called it - and a writing center .
they go in , and they might be working with a high school student actually working on a novel - because we had very gifted kids , too .
so there 's no stigma .
they 're all working next to each other . it 's all a creative endeavor .
they 're seeing adults . they 're modeling their behavior .
these adults , they 're working in their field .
they can lean over , ask a question of one of these adults and it all sort of feeds on each other .
there 's a lot of cross-pollination . the only problem , especially for the adults working at mcsweeney 's who had n't necessarily bought into all of this when they signed up , was that there was just the one bathroom . -lrb- laughter -rrb- with like 60 kids a day , this is a problem .
but you know , there 's something about the kids finishing their homework in a given day , working one-on-one , getting all this attention - they go home , they 're finished . they do n't stall .
they do n't do their homework in front of the tv .
they 're allowed to go home at 5:30 p.m. , enjoy their family , enjoy other hobbies , get outside , play .
and that makes a happy family .
a bunch of happy families in a neighborhood is a happy community .
a bunch of happy communities tied together is a happy city and a happy world .
so the key to it all is homework ! -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- there you have it , you know - one-on-one attention .
so we started off with about 12 volunteers , and then we had about 50 , and then a couple hundred .
and we now have 1,400 volunteers on our roster .
and we make it incredibly easy to volunteer .
the key thing is , even if you only have a couple of hours a month , those two hours shoulder-to-shoulder , next to one student , concentrated attention , shining this beam of light on their work , on their thoughts and their self-expression , is going to be absolutely transformative , because so many of the students have not had that ever before .
so we said , " even if you have two hours one sunday every six months , it does n't matter . that 's going to be enough . "
so that 's partly why the tutor corps grew so fast .
then we said , " well , what are we going to do with the space during the day , because it has to be used before 2:30 p.m. ? "
so we started bringing in classes during the day .
so every day , there 's a field trip where they together create a book - you can see it being typed up above .
this is one of the classes getting way too excited about writing .
you just point a camera at a class , and it always looks like this .
so this is one of the books that they do .
notice the title of the book , " the book that was never checked out : titanic . "
and the first line of that book is , " once there was a book named cindy that was about the titanic . "
so , meanwhile , there 's an adult in the back typing this up , taking it completely seriously , which blows their mind .
so then we still had more tutors to use .
this is a shot of just some of the tutors during one of the events .
the teachers that we work with - and everything is different to teachers - they tell us what to do .
we went in there thinking , " we 're ultimately , completely malleable . you 're going to tell us .
the neighborhood 's going to tell us , the parents are going to tell us .
the teachers are going to tell us how we 're most useful . "
so then they said , " why do n't you come into the schools ?
because what about the students that would n't come to you , necessarily , who do n't have really active parents that are bringing them in , or are n't close enough ? " so then we started saying , " well , we 've got 1,400 people on our tutor roster .
let 's just put out the word . " a teacher will say , " i need 12 tutors for the next five sundays .
we 're working on our college essays . send them in . "
so we put that out on the wire : 1,400 tutors .
whoever can make it signs up . they go in about a half an hour before the class .
the teacher tells them what to do , how to do it , what their training is , what their project is so far .
they work under the teacher 's guide , and it 's all in one big room .
and that 's actually the brunt of what we do is , people going straight from their workplace , straight from home , straight into the classroom and working directly with the students .
so then we 're able to work with thousands and thousands of more students .
then another school said , " well , what if we just give you a classroom and you can staff it all day ? "
so this is the everett middle school writers ' room , where we decorated it in buccaneer style .
it 's right off the library . and there we serve all 529 kids in this middle school .
this is their newspaper , the " straight-up news , " that has an ongoing column from mayor gavin newsom in both languages - english and spanish .
so then one day isabel allende wrote to us and said , " hey , why do n't you assign a book with high school students ?
i want them to write about how to achieve peace in a violent world . "
and so we went into thurgood marshall high school , which is a school that we had worked with on some other things , and we gave that assignment to the students .
and we said , " isabel allende is going to read all your essays at the end .
she 's going to publish them in a book .
she 's going to sponsor the printing of this book in paperback form .
it 's going to be available in all the bookstores in the bay area and throughout the world , on amazon and you name it . "
so these kids worked harder than they 've ever worked on anything in their lives , because there was that outside audience , there was isabel allende on the other end .
i think we had about 170 tutors that worked on this book with them and so this worked out incredibly well .
we had a big party at the end .
this is a book that you can find anywhere . so that led to a series of these .
you can see amy tan sponsored the next one , " i might get somewhere . "
and this became an ongoing thing . more and more books .
now we 're sort of addicted to the book thing .
the kids will work harder than they 've ever worked in their life if they know it 's going to be permanent , know it 's going to be on a shelf , know that nobody can diminish what they 've thought and said , that we 've honored their words , honored their thoughts with hundreds of hours of five drafts , six drafts - all this attention that we give to their thoughts .
and once they achieve that level , once they 've written at that level , they can never go back .
it 's absolutely transformative .
and so then they 're all sold in the store . this is near the planks .
we sell all the student books .
where else would you put them , right ?
so we sell ' em , and then something weird had been happening with the stores . the store , actually - even though we started out as just a gag - the store actually made money .
so it was paying the rent .
and maybe this is just a san francisco thing - i do n't know , i do n't want to judge .
but people would come in - and this was before the pirate movies and everything !
it was making a lot of money . not a lot of money , but it was paying the rent , paying a full-time staff member there .
there 's the ocean maps you can see on the left .
and it became a gateway to the community .
people would come in and say , " what the - ?
what is this ? " i do n't want to swear on the web . -lrb- laughter -rrb- is that a rule ? i do n't know .
they would say , " what is this ? "
and people would come in and learn more about it .
and then right beyond - there 's usually a little chain there - right beyond , they would see the kids being tutored .
this is a field trip going on . and so they would be shopping , and they might be more likely to buy some lard , or millet for their parrot , or , you know , a hook , or hook protector for nighttime , all of these things we sell .
so the store actually did really well .
but it brought in so many people - teachers , donors , volunteers , everybody - because it was street level . it was open to the public .
it was n't a non-profit buried , you know , on the 30th floor of some building downtown . it was right in the neighborhood that it was serving , and it was open all the time to the public .
so , it became this sort of weird , happy accident .
so all the people i used to know in brooklyn , they said , " well , why do n't we have a place like that here ? "
and a lot of them had been former educators or would-be educators , so they combined with a lot of local designers , local writers , and they just took the idea independently and they did their own thing .
they did n't want to sell pirate supplies .
they did n't think that that was going to work there .
so , knowing the crime-fighting community in new york , they opened the brooklyn superhero supply company .
this is sam potts ' great design that did this .
and this was to make it look sort of like one of those keysmith 's shops that has to have every service they 've ever offered , you know , all over there .
so they opened this place . inside , it 's like a costco for superheroes - all the supplies in kind of basic form .
these are all handmade .
these are all sort of repurposed other products , or whatever .
all the packaging is done by sam potts .
so then you have the villain containment unit , where kids put their parents . you have the office .
this is a little vault - you have to put your product in there , it goes up an electric lift and then the guy behind the counter tells you that you have to recite the vow of heroism , which you do , if you want to buy anything . and it limits , really , their sales .
personally , i think it 's a problem .
because they have to do it hand on heart and everything .
these are some of the products . these are all handmade .
this is a secret identity kit .
if you want to take on the identity of sharon boone , one american female marketing executive from hoboken , new jersey . it 's a full dossier on everything you would need to know about sharon boone .
so , this is the capery where you get fitted for your cape , and then you walk up these three steel-graded steps and then we turn on three hydraulic fans from every side and then you can see the cape in action .
there 's nothing worse than , you know , getting up there and the cape is bunching up or something like that .
so then , the secret door - this is one of the shelves you do n't see when you walk in , but it slowly opens .
you can see it there in the middle next to all the grappling hooks .
it opens and then this is the tutoring center in the back . -lrb- applause -rrb- so you can see the full effect !
but this is - i just want to emphasize - locally funded , locally built .
all the designers , all of the builders , everybody was local , all the time was pro-bono .
i just came and visited and said , " yes , you guys are doing great , " in all five boroughs of new york in the back . -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so this is the space during tutoring hours .
it 's very busy . same principles : one-on-one attention , complete devotion to the students ' work and a boundless optimism and sort of a possibility of creativity and ideas .
and this switch is flicked in their heads when they walk through those 18 feet of this bizarre store , right ?
so it 's school , but it 's not school .
it 's clearly not school , even though they 're working shoulder-to-shoulder on tables , pencils and papers , whatever .
this is one of the students , khaled hamdan .
you can read this quote .
addicted to video games and tv . could n't concentrate at home .
came in . got this concentrated attention .
and he could n't escape it .
so , soon enough , he was writing . he would finish his homework early - got really addicted to finishing his homework early .
it 's an addictive thing to sort of be done with it , and to have it checked , and to know he 's going to achieve the next thing and be prepared for school the next day .
so he got hooked on that , and then he started doing other things .
he 's now been published in five books .
he co-wrote a mockumentary about failed superheroes called " super-has-beens . "
he wrote a series on " penguin balboa , " which is a fighting - a boxing - penguin .
and then he read aloud just a few weeks ago to 500 people at symphony space , at a benefit for 826 new york . so he 's there every day .
he 's evangelical about it . he brings his cousins in now .
there 's four family members that come in every day .
so , i 'll go through really quickly .
this is l.a. , the echo park time travel mart : " whenever you are , we 're already then . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- this is sort of a 7-eleven for time travelers .
so you see everything : it 's exactly as a 7-eleven would be .
leeches . mammoth chunks . they even have their own slurpee machine : " out of order . come back yesterday . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- anyway . so i 'm going to jump ahead .
these are spaces that are only affiliated with us , doing this same thing : word st. in pittsfield , massachusetts ; ink spot in cincinnati ; youth speaks , san francisco , california , which inspired us ; studio st. louis in st. louis ; austin bat cave in austin ; fighting words in dublin , ireland , started by roddy doyle , this will be open in april .
now i 'm going to the ted wish - is that okay ?
all right , i 've got a minute . so , the ted wish : i wish that you - you personally and every creative individual and organization you know - will find a way to directly engage with a public school in your area and that you 'll then tell the story of how you got involved , so that within a year we have a thousand examples - a thousand ! - of transformative partnerships .
profound leaps forward !
and these can be things that maybe you 're already doing .
i know that so many people in this room are already doing really interesting things .
i know that for a fact . so , tell us these stories and inspire others on the website .
we created a website .
i 'm going to switch to " we , " and not " i , " hope : we hope that the attendees of this conference will usher in a new era of participation in our public schools .
we hope that you will take the lead in partnering your innovative spirit and expertise with that of innovative educators in your community .
always let the teachers lead the way .
they will tell you how to be useful . i hope that you 'll step in and help out .
there are a million ways .
you can walk up to your local school and consult with the teachers . they 'll always tell you how to help .
so , this is with hot studio in san francisco , they did this phenomenal job .
this website is already up , it 's already got a bunch of stories , a lot of ideas . it 's called " once upon a school , " which is a great title , i think .
this site will document every story , every project that comes out of this conference and around the world . so you go to the website , you see a bunch of ideas you can be inspired by and then you add your own projects once you get started .
hot studio did a great job in a very tight deadline . so , visit the site .
if you have any questions , you can ask this guy , who 's our director of national programs . he 'll be on the phone .
you email him , he 'll answer any question you possibly want .
and he 'll get you inspired and get you going and guide you through the process so that you can affect change .
and it can be fun ! that 's the point of this talk - it need n't be sterile . it need n't be bureaucratically untenable .
you can do and use the skills that you have .
the schools need you . the teachers need you .
students and parents need you . they need your actual person : your physical personhood and your open minds and open ears and boundless compassion , sitting next to them , listening and nodding and asking questions for hours at a time .
some of these kids just do n't plain know how good they are : how smart and how much they have to say .
you can tell them . you can shine that light on them , one human interaction at a time . so we hope you 'll join us .
thank you so much .
today i want to talk about design , but not design as we usually think about it .
i want to talk about what is happening now in our scientific , biotechnological culture , where , for really the first time in history , we have the power to design bodies , to design animal bodies , to design human bodies .
in the history of our planet , there have been three great waves of evolution .
the first wave of evolution is what we think of as darwinian evolution .
so , as you all know , species lived in particular ecological niches and particular environments , and the pressures of those environments selected which changes , through random mutation in species , were going to be preserved .
then human beings stepped out of the darwinian flow of evolutionary history and created the second great wave of evolution , which was we changed the environment in which we evolved .
we altered our ecological niche by creating civilization .
and that has been the second great - couple 100,000 years , 150,000 years - by changing our environment , we put new pressures on our bodies to evolve .
whether it was through settling down in agricultural communities , all the way through modern medicine , we have changed our own evolution .
now we 're entering a third great wave of evolutionary history , which has been called many things : " intentional evolution , " " evolution by design " - very different than intelligent design - whereby we are actually now intentionally designing and altering the physiological forms that inhabit our planet .
so i want to take you through a kind of whirlwind tour of that and then at the end talk a little bit about what some of the implications are for us and for our species , as well as our cultures , because of this change .
now we actually have been doing it for a long time .
we started selectively breeding animals many , many thousands of years ago .
and if you think of dogs for example , dogs are now intentionally-designed creatures .
there is n't a dog on this earth that 's a natural creature .
dogs are the result of selectively breeding traits that we like .
but we had to do it the hard way in the old days by choosing offspring that looked a particular way and then breeding them .
we do n't have to do it that way anymore .
this is a beefalo .
a beefalo is a buffalo-cattle hybrid .
and they are now making them , and someday , perhaps pretty soon , you will have beefalo patties in your local supermarket .
this is a geep , a goat-sheep hybrid .
the scientists that made this cute little creature ended up slaughtering it and eating it afterwards .
i think they said it tasted like chicken .
this is a cama .
a cama is a camel-llama hybrid , created to try to get the hardiness of a camel with some of the personality traits of a llama .
and they are now using these in certain cultures .
then there 's the liger .
this is the largest cat in the world - the lion-tiger hybrid .
it 's bigger than a tiger .
and in the case of the liger , there actually have been one or two that have been seen in the wild .
but these were created by scientists using both selective breeding and genetic technology .
and then finally , everybody 's favorite , the zorse .
none of this is photoshopped . these are real creatures .
and so one of the things we 've been doing is using genetic enhancement , or genetic manipulation , of normal selective breeding pushed a little bit through genetics .
and if that were all this was about , then it would be an interesting thing .
but something much , much more powerful is happening now .
these are normal mammalian cells genetically engineered with a bioluminescent gene taken out of deep-sea jellyfish .
we all know that some deep-sea creatures glow .
well , they 've now taken that gene , that bioluminescent gene , and put it into mammal cells .
these are normal cells .
and what you see here is these cells glowing in the dark under certain wavelengths of light .
once they could do that with cells , they could do it with organisms .
so they did it with mouse pups , kittens .
and by the way , the reason the kittens here are orange and these are green is because that 's a bioluminescent gene from coral , while this is from jellyfish .
they did it with pigs .
they did it with puppies .
and , in fact , they did it with monkeys .
and if you can do it with monkeys - though the great leap in trying to genetically manipulate is actually between monkeys and apes - if they can do it in monkeys , they can probably figure out how to do it in apes , which means they can do it in human beings .
in other words , it is theoretically possible that before too long we will be biotechnologically capable of creating human beings that glow in the dark .
be easier to find us at night .
and in fact , right now in many states , you can go out and you can buy bioluminescent pets .
these are zebra fish . they 're normally black and silver .
these are zebra fish that have been genetically engineered to be yellow , green , red , and they are actually available now in certain states .
other states have banned them .
nobody knows what to do with these kinds of creatures .
there is no area of the government - not the epa or the fda - that controls genetically-engineered pets .
and so some states have decided to allow them , some states have decided to ban them .
some of you may have read about the fda 's consideration right now of genetically-engineered salmon .
the salmon on top is a genetically engineered chinook salmon , using a gene from these salmon and from one other fish that we eat , to make it grow much faster using a lot less feed .
and right now the fda is trying to make a final decision on whether , pretty soon , you could be eating this fish - it 'll be sold in the stores .
and before you get too worried about it , here in the united states , the majority of food you buy in the supermarket already has genetically-modified components to it .
so even as we worry about it , we have allowed it to go on in this country - much different in europe - without any regulation , and even without any identification on the package .
these are all the first cloned animals of their type .
so in the lower right here , you have dolly , the first cloned sheep - now happily stuffed in a museum in edinburgh ; ralph the rat , the first cloned rat ; cc the cat , for cloned cat ; snuppy , the first cloned dog - snuppy for seoul national university puppy - created in south korea by the very same man that some of you may remember had to end up resigning in disgrace because he claimed he had cloned a human embryo , which he had not .
he actually was the first person to clone a dog , which is a very difficult thing to do , because dog genomes are very plastic .
this is prometea , the first cloned horse .
it 's a haflinger horse cloned in italy , a real " gold ring " of cloning , because there are many horses that win important races who are geldings .
in other words , the equipment to put them out to stud has been removed .
but if you can clone that horse , you can have both the advantage of having a gelding run in the race and his identical genetic duplicate can then be put out to stud .
these were the first cloned calves , the first cloned grey wolves , and then , finally , the first cloned piglets : alexis , chista , carrel , janie and dotcom .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- in addition , we 've started to use cloning technology to try to save endangered species .
this is the use of animals now to create drugs and other things in their bodies that we want to create .
so with antithrombin in that goat - that goat has been genetically modified so that the molecules of its milk actually include the molecule of antithrombin that gtc genetics wants to create .
and then in addition , transgenic pigs , knockout pigs , from the national institute of animal science in south korea , are pigs that they are going to use , in fact , to try to create all kinds of drugs and other industrial types of chemicals that they want the blood and the milk of these animals to produce for them , instead of producing them in an industrial way .
these are two creatures that were created in order to save endangered species .
the guar is an endangered southeast asian ungulate .
a somatic cell , a body cell , was taken from its body , gestated in the ovum of a cow , and then that cow gave birth to a guar .
same thing happened with the mouflon , where it 's an endangered species of sheep .
it was gestated in a regular sheep body , which actually raises an interesting biological problem .
we have two kinds of dna in our bodies .
we have our nucleic dna that everybody thinks of as our dna , but we also have dna in our mitochondria , which are the energy packets of the cell .
that dna is passed down through our mothers .
so really , what you end up having here is not a guar and not a mouflon , but a guar with cow mitochondria , and therefore cow mitochondrial dna , and a mouflon with another species of sheep 's mitochondrial dna .
these are really hybrids , not pure animals .
and it raises the question of how we 're going to define animal species in the age of biotechnology - a question that we 're not really sure yet how to solve .
this lovely creature is an asian cockroach .
and what they 've done here is they 've put electrodes in its ganglia and its brain and then a transmitter on top , and it 's on a big computer tracking ball .
and now , using a joystick , they can send this creature around the lab and control whether it goes left or right , forwards or backwards .
they 've created a kind of insect bot , or bugbot .
it gets worse than that - or perhaps better than that .
this actually is one of darpa 's very important - darpa is the defense research agency - one of their projects .
these goliath beetles are wired in their wings .
they have a computer chip strapped to their backs , and they can fly these creatures around the lab .
they can make them go left , right . they can make them take off .
they ca n't actually make them land .
they put them about one inch above the ground , and then they shut everything off and they go pfft .
but it 's the closest they can get to a landing .
and in fact , this technology has gotten so developed that this creature - this is a moth - this is the moth in its pupa stage , and that 's when they put the wires in and they put in the computer technology , so that when the moth actually emerges as a moth , it is already prewired .
the wires are already in its body , and they can just hook it up to their technology , and now they 've got these bugbots that they can send out for surveillance .
they can put little cameras on them and perhaps someday deliver other kinds of ordinance to warzones .
it 's not just insects .
this is the ratbot , or the robo-rat by sanjiv talwar at suny downstate .
again , it 's got technology - it 's got electrodes going into its left and right hemispheres ; it 's got a camera on top of its head .
the scientists can make this creature go left , right .
they have it running through mazes , controlling where it 's going .
they 've now created an organic robot .
the graduate students in sanjiv talwar 's lab said , " is this ethical ?
we 've taken away the autonomy of this animal . "
i 'll get back to that in a minute .
there 's also been work done with monkeys .
this is miguel nicolelis of duke .
he took owl monkeys , wired them up so that a computer watched their brains while they moved , especially looking at the movement of their right arm .
the computer learned what the monkey brain did to move its arm in various ways .
they then hooked it up to a prosthetic arm , which you see here in the picture , put the arm in another room .
pretty soon , the computer learned , by reading the monkey 's brainwaves , to make that arm in the other room do whatever the monkey 's arm did .
then he put a video monitor in the monkey 's cage that showed the monkey this prosthetic arm , and the monkey got fascinated .
the monkey recognized that whatever she did with her arm , this prosthetic arm would do .
and eventually she was moving it and moving it , and eventually stopped moving her right arm and , staring at the screen , could move the prosthetic arm in the other room only with her brainwaves - which means that monkey became the first primate in the history of the world to have three independent functional arms .
and it 's not just technology that we 're putting into animals .
this is thomas demarse at the university of florida .
he took 20,000 and then 60,000 disaggregated rat neurons - so these are just individual neurons from rats - put them on a chip .
they self-aggregated into a network , became an integrated chip .
and he used that as the it piece of a mechanism which ran a flight simulator .
so now we have organic computer chips made out of living , self-aggregating neurons .
finally , mussa-ivaldi of northwestern took a completely intact , independent lamprey eel brain .
this is a brain from a lamprey eel .
it is living - fully-intact brain in a nutrient medium with these electrodes going off to the sides , attached photosensitive sensors to the brain , put it into a cart - here 's the cart , the brain is sitting there in the middle - and using this brain as the sole processor for this cart , when you turn on a light and shine it at the cart , the cart moves toward the light ; when you turn it off , it moves away .
it 's photophilic .
so now we have a complete living lamprey eel brain .
is it thinking lamprey eel thoughts , sitting there in its nutrient medium ?
i do n't know , but in fact it is a fully living brain that we have managed to keep alive to do our bidding .
so , we are now at the stage where we are creating creatures for our own purposes .
this is a mouse created by charles vacanti of the university of massachusetts .
he altered this mouse so that it was genetically engineered to have skin that was less immunoreactive to human skin , put a polymer scaffolding of an ear under it and created an ear that could then be taken off the mouse and transplanted onto a human being .
genetic engineering coupled with polymer physiotechnology coupled with xenotransplantation .
this is where we are in this process .
finally , not that long ago , craig venter created the first artificial cell , where he took a cell , took a dna synthesizer , which is a machine , created an artificial genome , put it in a different cell - the genome was not of the cell he put it in - and that cell then reproduced as the other cell .
in other words , that was the first creature in the history of the world that had a computer as its parent - it did not have an organic parent .
and so , asks the economist : " the first artificial organism and its consequences . "
so you may have thought that the creation of life was going to happen in something that looked like that .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but in fact , that 's not what frankenstein 's lab looks like .
this is a dna synthesizer , and here at the bottom are just bottles of a , t , c and g - the four chemicals that make up our dna chain .
and so , we need to ask ourselves some questions .
for the first time in the history of this planet , we are able to directly design organisms .
we can manipulate the plasmas of life with unprecedented power , and it confers on us a responsibility .
is everything okay ?
is it okay to manipulate and create whatever creatures we want ?
do we have free reign to design animals ?
do we get to go someday to pets ' r ' us and say , " look , i want a dog .
i 'd like it to have the head of a dachshund , the body of a retriever , maybe some pink fur , and let 's make it glow in the dark " ?
does industry get to create creatures who , in their milk , in their blood , and in their saliva and other bodily fluids , create the drugs and industrial molecules we want and then warehouse them as organic manufacturing machines ?
do we get to create organic robots , where we remove the autonomy from these animals and turn them just into our playthings ?
and then the final step of this , once we perfect these technologies in animals and we start using them in human beings , what are the ethical guidelines that we will use then ?
it 's already happening . it 's not science fiction .
we are not only already using these things in animals , some of them we 're already beginning to use on our own bodies .
we are now taking control of our own evolution .
we are directly designing the future of the species of this planet .
it confers upon us an enormous responsibility that is not just the responsibility of the scientists and the ethicists who are thinking about it and writing about it now .
it is the responsibility of everybody because it will determine what kind of planet and what kind of bodies we will have in the future .
thanks .
-lrb- applause -rrb- let me introduce to you rezero .
this little fellow was developed by a group of 10 undergraduate students at the autonomous systems laboratory at eth-zurich .
our robot belongs to a family of robots called ballbots .
instead of wheels , a ballbot is balancing and moving on one single ball .
the main characteristics of such a system is that there 's one sole contact point to the ground .
this means that the robot is inherently unstable .
it 's like when i am trying to stand on one foot .
you might ask yourself , what 's the usefulness of a robot that 's unstable ?
now we 'll explain that in a second .
let me first explain how rezero actually keeps his balance .
rezero keeps his balance by constantly measuring his pitch angle with a sensor .
he then counteracts and avoids toppling over by turning the motors appropriately .
this happens 160 times per second , and if anything fails in this process , rezero would immediately fall to the ground .
now to move and to balance , rezero needs to turn the ball .
the ball is driven by three special wheels that allow rezero to move into any direction and also move around his own axis at the same time .
due to his instability , rezero is always in motion . now here 's the trick .
it 's indeed exactly this instability that allows a robot to move very -lsb- dynamically -rsb- .
let 's play a little .
you may have wondered what happens if i give the robot a little push .
in this mode , he 's trying to maintain his position .
for the next demo , i 'd like you to introduce to my colleagues michael , on the computer , and thomas who 's helping me onstage .
in the next mode , rezero is passive , and we can move him around .
with almost no force i can control his position and his velocity .
i can also make him spin .
in the next mode , we can get rezero to follow a person .
he 's now keeping a constant distance to thomas .
this works with a laser sensor that 's mounted on top of rezero .
with the same method , we can also get him to circle a person .
we call this the orbiting mode .
all right , thank you , thomas .
-lrb- applause -rrb- now , what 's the use of this technology ?
for now , it 's an experiment , but let me show you some possible future applications .
rezero could be used in exhibitions or parks .
with a screen it could inform people or show them around in a fun and entertaining way .
in a hospital , this device could be used to carry around medical equipment .
due to the ballbot system , it has a very small footprint and it 's also easy to move around .
and of course , who would n't like to take a ride on one of these .
and these are more practical applications .
but there 's also a certain beauty within this technology .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
there are two groups of women when it comes to screening mammography - women in whom mammography works very well and has saved thousands of lives and women in whom it does n't work well at all .
do you know which group you 're in ?
if you do n't , you 're not alone .
because the breast has become are very political organ .
the truth has become lost in all the rhetoric coming from the press , politicians , radiologists and medical imaging companies .
i will do my best this morning to tell you what i think is the truth .
but first , my disclosures .
i am not a breast cancer survivor .
i 'm not a radiologist .
i do n't have any patents , and i 've never received any money from a medical imaging company , and i am not seeking your vote .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- what i am is a doctor of internal medicine who became passionately interested in this topic about 10 years ago when a patient asked me a question .
she came to see me after discovering a breast lump .
her sister had been diagnosed with breast cancer in her 40s .
she and i were both very pregnant at that time , and my heart just ached for her , imagining how afraid she must be .
fortunately , her lump proved to be benign .
but she asked me a question : how confident was i that i would find a tumor early on her mammogram if she developed one ?
so i studied her mammogram , and i reviewed the radiology literature , and i was shocked to discover that , in her case , our chances of finding a tumor early on the mammogram were less than the toss of a coin .
you may recall a year ago when a firestorm erupted after the united states preventive services task force reviewed the world 's mammography screening literature and issued a guideline recommending against screening mammograms in women in their 40s .
now everybody rushed to criticize the task force , even though most of them were n't in anyway familiar with the mammography studies .
it took the senate just 17 days to ban the use of the guidelines in determining insurance coverage .
radiologists were outraged by the guidelines .
the pre-eminent mammographer in the united states issued the following quote to the washington post .
the radiologists were , in turn , criticized for protecting their own financial self-interest .
but in my view , the radiologists are heroes .
there 's a shortage of radiologists qualified to read mammograms , and that 's because mammograms are one of the most complex of all radiology studies to interpret , and because radiologists are sued more often over missed breast cancer than any other cause .
but that very fact is telling .
where there is this much legal smoke , there is likely to be some fire .
the factor most responsible for that fire is breast density .
breast density refers to the relative amount of fat - pictured here in yellow - versus connective and epithelial tissues - pictured in pink .
and that proportion is primarily genetically determined .
two-thirds of women in their 40s have dense breast tissue , which is why mammography does n't work as well in them .
and although breast density generally declines with age , up to a third of women retain dense breast tissue for years after menopause .
so how do you know if your breasts are dense ?
well , you need to read the details of your mammography report .
radiologists classify breast density into four categories based on the appearance of the tissue on a mammogram .
if the breast is less than 25 percent dense , that 's called fatty-replaced .
the next category is scattered fibroglandular densities , followed by heterogeneously dense and extremely dense .
and breasts that fall into these two categories are considered dense .
the problem with breast density is that it 's truly the wolf in sheep 's clothing .
both tumors and dense breast tissue appear white on a mammogram , and the x-ray often ca n't distinguish between the two .
so it 's easy to see this tumor in the upper part of this fatty breast .
but imagine how difficult it would be to find that tumor in this dense breast .
that 's why mammograms find over 80 percent of tumors in fatty breasts , but as few as 40 percent in extremely dense breasts .
now it 's bad enough that breast density makes it hard to find a cancer , but it turns out that it 's also a powerful predictor of your risk for breast cancer .
it 's a stronger risk factor than having a mother or a sister with breast cancer .
at the time my patient posed this question to me , breast density was an obscure topic in the radiology literature , and very few women having mammograms , or the physicians ordering them , knew about this .
but what else could i offer her ?
mammograms have been around since the 1960 's , and it 's changed very little .
there have been surprisingly few innovations , until digital mammography was approved in 2000 .
digital mammography is still an x-ray of the breast , but the images can be stored and manipulated digitally , just like we can with a digital camera .
the u.s. has invested four billion dollars converting to digital mammography equipment , and what have we gained from that investment ?
in a study funded by over 25 million taxpayer dollars , digital mammography was found to be no better over all than traditional mammography , and in fact , it was worse in older women .
but it was better in one group , and that was women under 50 who were pre-menopausal and had dense breasts , and in those women , digital mammography found twice as many cancers , but it still only found 60 percent .
so digital mammography has been a giant leap forward for manufacturers of digital mammography equipment , but it 's been a very small step forward for womankind .
what about ultrasound ?
ultrasound generates more biopsies that are unnecessary relative to other technologies , so it 's not widely used .
and mri is exquisitely sensitive for finding tumors , but it 's also very expensive .
if we think about disruptive technology , we see an almost ubiquitous pattern of the technology getting smaller and less expensive .
think about ipods compared to stereos .
but it 's the exact opposite in health care .
the machines get ever bigger and ever more expensive .
screening the average young woman with an mri is kind of like driving to the grocery store in a hummer .
it 's just way too much equipment .
one mri scan costs 10 times what a digital mammogram costs .
and sooner or later , we 're going to have to accept the fact that health care innovation ca n't always come at a much higher price .
malcolm gladwell wrote an article in the new yorker on innovation , and he made the case that scientific discoveries are rarely the product of one individual 's genius .
rather , big ideas can be orchestrated , if you can simply gather people with different perspectives in a room and get them to talk about things that they do n't ordinarily talk about .
it 's like the essence of ted .
he quotes one innovator who says , " the only time a physician and a physicist get together is when the physicist gets sick . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this makes no sense , because physicians have all kinds of problems that they do n't realize have solutions .
and physicists have all kinds of solutions for things that they do n't realize are problems .
now , take a look at this cartoon that accompanied gladwell 's article , and tell me if you see something disturbing about this depiction of innovative thinkers .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so if you will allow me a little creative license , i will tell you the story of the serendipitous collision of my patient 's problem with a physicist 's solution .
shortly after her visit , i was introduced to a nuclear physicist at mayo who was a specialist in cardiac imaging , something i had nothing to do with .
and he happened to tell me about a conference he 'd just returned from in israel , where they were talking about a new type of gamma detector .
now gamma imaging has been around for a long time to image the heart , and it had even been tried to image the breast .
but the problem was that the gamma detectors were these huge , bulky tubes , and they were filled with these scintillating crystals , and you just could n't get them close enough around the breast to find small tumors .
but the potential advantage was that gamma rays , unlike x-rays , are not influenced by breast density .
but this technology could not find tumors when they 're small , and finding a small tumor is critical for survival .
if you can find a tumor when it 's less than a centimeter , survival exceeds 90 percent , but drops off rapidly as tumor size increases .
but michael told me about a new type of gamma detector that he 'd seen , and this is it .
it 's made not of a bulky tube , but of a thin layer of a semiconductor material that serves as the gamma detector .
and i started talking to him about this problem with breast density , and we realized that we might be able to get this detector close enough around the breast to actually find small tumors .
so after putting together a grid of these cubes with tape - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - michael hacked off the x-ray plate of a mammography machine that was about to be thrown out , and we attached the new detector , and we decided to call this machine molecular breast imaging , or mbi .
this is an image from our first patient .
and you can see , using the old gamma technology , that it just looked like noise .
but using our new detector , we could begin to see the outline of a tumor .
so here we were , a nuclear physicist , an internist , soon joined by carrie hruska , a biomedical engineer , and two radiologists , and we were trying to take on the entrenched world of mammography with a machine that was held together by duct tape .
to say that we faced high doses of skepticism in those early years is just a huge understatement , but we were so convinced that we might be able to make this work that we chipped away with incremental modifications to this system .
this is our current detector .
and you can see that it looks a lot different .
the duct tape is gone , and we added a second detector on top of the breast , which has further improved our tumor detection .
so how does this work ?
the patient receives an injection of a radio tracer that 's taken up by rapidly proliferating tumor cells , but not by normal cells , and this is the key difference from mammography .
mammography relies on differences in the appearance of the tumor from the background tissue , and we 've seen that those differences can be obscured in a dense breast .
but mbi exploits the different molecular behavior of tumors , and therefore , it 's impervious to breast density .
after the injection , the patient 's breast is placed between the detectors .
and if you 've ever had a mammogram - if you 're old enough to have had a mammogram - you know what comes next : pain .
you may be surprised to know that mammography is the only radiologic study that 's regulated by federal law , and the law requires that the equivalent of a 40-pound car battery come down on your breast during this study .
but with mbi , we use just light , pain-free compression .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and the detector then transmits the image to the computer .
so here 's an example .
you can see , on the right , a mammogram showing a faint tumor , the edges of which are blurred by the dense tissue .
but the mbi image shows that tumor much more clearly , as well as a second tumor , which profoundly influence that patient 's surgical options .
in this example , although the mammogram found one tumor , we were able to demonstrate three discrete tumors - one is small as three millimeters .
our big break came in 2004 .
after we had demonstrated that we could find small tumors , we used these images to submit a grant to the susan g. komen foundation .
and we were elated when they took a chance on a team of completely unknown investigators and funded us to study 1,000 women with dense breasts , comparing a screening mammogram to an mbi .
of the tumors that we found , mammography found only 25 percent of those tumors .
mbi found 83 percent .
here 's an example from that screening study .
the digital mammogram was read as normal and shows lots of dense tissue , but the mbi shows an area of intense uptake , which correlated with a two-centimeter tumor .
in this case , a one-centimeter tumor .
and in this case , a 45-year-old medical secretary at mayo , who had lost her mother to breast cancer when she was very young , wanted to enroll in our study .
and her mammogram showed an area of very dense tissue , but her mbi showed an area of worrisome uptake , which we can also see on a color image .
and this corresponded to a tumor the size of a golf ball .
but fortunately it was removed before it had spread to her lymph nodes .
so now that we knew that this technology could find three times more tumors in a dense breast , we had to solve one very important problem .
we had to figure out how to lower the radiation dose , and we have spent the last three years making modifications to every aspect of the imaging system to allow this .
and i 'm very happy to report that we 're now using a dose of radiation that is equivalent to the effective dose from one digital mammogram .
and at this low dose , we 're continuing this screening study , and this image from three weeks ago in a 67-year-old woman shows a normal digital mammogram , but an mbi image showing an uptake that proved to be a large cancer .
so this is not just young women that it 's benefiting .
it 's also older women with dense tissue .
and we 're now routinely using one-fifth the radiation dose that 's used in any other type of gamma technology .
mbi generates four images per breast .
mri generates over a thousand .
it takes a radiologist years of specialty training to become expert in differentiating the normal anatomic detail from the worrisome finding .
but i suspect even the non-radiologists in the room can find the tumor on the mbi image .
but this is why mbi is so potentially disruptive - it 's as accurate as mri , it 's far less complex to interpret , and it 's a fraction of the cost .
but you can understand why there may be forces in the breast-imaging world who prefer the status quo .
after achieving what we felt were remarkable results , our manuscript was rejected by four journals .
after the fourth rejection , we requested reconsideration of the manuscript , because we strongly suspected that one of the reviewers who had rejected it had a financial conflict of interest in a competing technology .
our manuscript was then accepted and will be published later this month in the journal radiology .
-lrb- applause -rrb- we still need to complete the screening study using the low dose , and then our findings will need to be replicated at other institutions , and this could take five or more years .
if this technology is widely adopted , i will not benefit financially in any way , and that is very important to me , because it allows me to continue to tell you the truth .
but i recognize - -lrb- applause -rrb- i recognize that the adoption of this technology will depend as much on economic and political forces as it will on the soundness of the science .
the mbi unit has now been fda approved , but it 's not yet widely available .
so until something is available for women with dense breasts , there are things that you should know to protect yourself .
first , know your density .
ninety percent of women do n't , and 95 percent of women do n't know that it increases your breast cancer risk .
the state of connecticut became the first and only state to mandate that women receive notification of their breast density after a mammogram .
i was at a conference of 60,000 people in breast-imaging last week in chicago , and i was stunned that there was a heated debate as to whether we should be telling women what their breast density is .
of course we should .
and if you do n't know , please ask your doctor or read the details of your mammography report .
second , if you 're pre-menopausal , try to schedule your mammogram in the first two weeks of your menstrual cycle , when breast density is relatively lower .
third , if you notice a persistent change in your breast , insist on additional imaging .
and fourth and most important , the mammography debate will rage on , but i do believe that all women 40 and older should have an annual mammogram .
mammography is n't perfect , but it 's the only test that 's been proven to reduce mortality from breast cancer .
but this mortality banner is the very sword which mammography 's most ardent advocates use to deter innovation .
some women who develop breast cancer die from it many years later , and most women , thankfully , survive .
so it takes 10 or more years for any screening method to demonstrate a reduction in mortality from breast cancer .
mammography 's the only one that 's been around long enough to have a chance of making that claim .
it is time for us to accept both the extraordinary successes of mammography and the limitations .
we need to individualize screening based on density .
for women without dense breasts , mammography is the best choice .
but for women with dense breasts ; we should n't abandon screening altogether , we need to offer them something better .
the babies that we were carrying when my patient first asked me this question are now both in middle school , and the answer has been so slow to come .
she 's given me her blessing to share this story with you .
after undergoing biopsies that further increased her risk for cancer and losing her sister to cancer , she made the difficult decision to have a prophylactic mastectomy .
we can and must do better , not just in time for her granddaughters and my daughters , but in time for you .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- dan holzman : please throw out the beanbag chairs . here we go .
barry friedman : there are all kinds of high-tech chairs here today , but this is really , i think , when it reached its peak as far as ergonomics , comfort , design , flexibility ...
dh : now obviously , this is not something we do on our regular show ; it 's something we just kind of learned for this , so we 're going to try . but can we have some inspirational music for the beanbag chairs ?
bf : nice show , daniel , nice show . you are the man !
nice show . man , that was good !
dh : thank you .
bf : you know , sometimes when people do those , they go all the way down .
you actually just did that . -lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's the kind of extra effort that 's gotten us where we are today ...
dh : all right , let 's show them something special .
bf : ... without a macarthur grant .
yeah , look at this . you know , all kinds of different ...
ted is about invention , let 's be honest . right ? dh : yeah , it is .
bf : last night , michael moschen showed some juggling props he has invented and working on .
right now , dan 's going to show something he actually invented .
dh : a type of juggling i actually invented , right after i saw another juggler do it .
bf : shut up . -lrb- laughter -rrb- dh : and this is a small excerpt from a longer piece .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- folks , this is shaker cup juggling . it 's not a showstopper but it certainly slows it down .
bf : oh yeah , it does . -lrb- drum roll -rrb- bf : oh , daniel .
-lrb- applause -rrb- dh : one more ? -lrb- drum roll -rrb- perfect . -lrb- drum roll -rrb- perfect . -lrb- drum roll -rrb- bf : ok . dh : oh ! all right .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm now pushing my luck : i 'm skipping right to six cups .
in order to do six cups , i must have perfect control over three with my right hand . -lrb- drum roll -rrb- bf : also three with his left .
dh : perfect .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and now , all six cups . should i do it on the first try or should i miss once on purpose ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- bf : first try ? once on purpose ?
-lrb- audience : once on purpose ! -rrb- dh : how about if i try first and then decide ?
bf : good idea . -lrb- laughter -rrb- let 's leave that . we 'll leave that door open .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- dh : he 's looking at me .
bf : that 's all right , he does that . all right .
dh : oh ! it 's time for richard 's help . -lrb- laughter -rrb- oh , good . all right .
bf : you know , over the years , every year at the conference , it 's kind of become a tradition for us to do something dangerous with richard . and we 've always done something with the bullwhips in our act . it 's funny , for years i did it with daniel holding balloons .
and then we thought , " how stupid . "
dh : excuse me , could we work on the design of the microphone ?
bf : i think that 's the next session .
dh : next session ?
bf : yeah . and so we 've actually found a way to incorporate richard in this .
he actually assumes more of the danger in this .
dh : please stand up , richard . -lrb- whip cracks -rrb- oh , sorry . -lrb- laughter -rrb- dh : now richard , please ... -lrb- whip cracks -rrb- bf : ok , sorry .
dh : jesus christ . richard , please stand in front of me .
richard wurman : can i say something ?
bf : sure .
rw : in all past years i 've rehearsed with them , the things that have happened to me - i have no idea what 's going to happen and that 's the truth .
dh : all right , please stand here in front ...
god , i hate that . put your hands out like this , please .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- bf : no , come stay up with him .
dan used to actually hold them but now he 's got you for protection .
it 's kind of neat . ok .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- dh : wow , you 've been working out .
bf : no , shut up !
-lrb- laughter -rrb- having a little bit of richard time . that 's nice , that 's good .
ok , here we go .
have him hold your wrist so i can ...
dh : please hold my wrist , will you . bf : yeah , hold this a minute .
there you go .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ok .
ok , hold on .
rw : hmmm .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- dh : first one .
bf : all those mid-year phone calls are coming back to me now , richard .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- dh : so richard , what were we on the list ? like 1,020 ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- what happened there ?
bf : i think we were just outside .
dh : i do n't get it . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- dh : sorry . bf : having some bad flashbacks .
rw : do you want me to hold you or not ? dh : do n't hold me that hard .
bf : here we go , i 'm taking it . -lrb- balloon pops -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- dh : one more , one more .
bf : we 've got one more we 're going to do .
rw : do i get to hold them ?
bf : you do n't want to hold these , trust me .
dh : could you spread your legs a little bit ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- bf : gloria , you want to do it ? it 's very cool .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- one more try . man , i do n't want to get too close .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- could you just push that ?
-lrb- applause -rrb- dh : wow ! boy !
bf : that 's cool . i always wanted to try that .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- dh : let 's jump this way , though .
now , we risked richard 's life , it 's only fair we risk our own lives .
so to do that , i will juggle these three razor-sharp sickles .
and if that was n't enough , and judging by your response , it 's not ...
-lrb- laughter -rrb- dh : wow ! bf : hoping for a little more build .
dh : true . barry ...
bf : i 'm going to run up behind him .
dh : leap over my shoulder .
bf : up and over his shoulders .
dh : grab the blades in mid-air , land right there in a pool of blood ...
-lrb- laughter -rrb- still juggling . -lrb- laughter -rrb- impossible , you say ?
bf : incredible , you say ?
dh : why bother , you say ?
bf : here we go .
dh : just do it juggler boys , you say ?
bf : this guy , this guy invented air .
dh : i think so , that 's right .
even the pencil .
bf : he invented the pencil .
dh : all right , we 'll do this trick , but please remember it took us over 10 years to perfect .
bf : ten years to perfect , which you 're about to see .
dh : it 's not that difficult , we just do n't like to practice that much .
bf : no , it 's a hassle . traveling too much .
actually , we will take a second to prove - this could be fake - that the blades are indeed razor-sharp .
dh : will someone please throw a small farm animal up onto the stage ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- or a virgin for a sacrifice ?
bf : anything ?
dh : where 's gloria ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- bf : no , she 's got ... farm animal .
dh : do you have a small farm animal ?
just trying to play the odds . all right , here we go .
bf : over the top , over the top .
dh : how you feeling , barry ? you feeling all right ?
bf : yeah , it 's all right .
dh : do you feel everything 's ok ? the atmosphere , the ...
bf : yeah , a little sketchy .
dh : everything up here 's ok ?
bf : yeah .
dh : then here we go .
bf : this one 's a little ... who 's doing the lights ? could you point that a little more directly into my eyeballs ? is that possible ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- i can still see a little .
dh : and turn up the intensity ; we 're still pink in the middle .
we went too far . -lrb- laughter -rrb- bf : yeah , it 's too far . it 's too much of a visual .
the design of the body is a whole different thing .
dh : ready , barry ? bf : over the top .
dh : may we have our jumping music please ? -lrb- silence -rrb- may we have it a bit louder ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- bf : they 're a good crew ! whoa !
dh : whoa , sorry . all right .
bf : we 're going on .
dh : all right , we 'll try again .
bf : all right ? oh my gosh . oh .
dh : all right , here we go . sorry about that .
bf : i thought i had the hard part . ok .
dh : whenever you 're ready .
bf : there we go !
-lrb- applause -rrb- all right , get up ! come on and dance ! dh : dance , come on . bf : come on and dance !
somebody dance ! come on !
-lrb- applause -rrb- wow , wow , ok , stop .
weird , no one dances . we 're two guys doing this . -lrb- laughter -rrb- i think that 's uncomfortable for everyone .
dh : the french judge ...
bf : one more quick thing .
dh : the french judge gives it a 5.2 .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- bf : well , you know ...
dh : there you go ... bf : oh , yeah . another one coming in .
dh : tell them about our bio and stuff .
bf : yeah . in our bio , some of you may have read that we 've won two world juggling championships .
and believe it or not , you do n't win juggling champions for doing things with bullwhips or shaker cups .
we 're going to show you right now an excerpt from a routine that we used to wipe out the other juggling team competition .
dh : that 's right .
bf : good .
dh : i know what you 're thinking : other juggling teams must really suck .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- bf : juggling 's got a bad rap .
dh : but wait , barry , there 's still one more club lying there by my foot .
and look , it has a twin !
bf : shut up . -lrb- laughter -rrb- dh : there 's still one more by my foot .
what do you want me to do with it ?
bf : richard you tell him , it 's your last year . -lrb- laughter -rrb- dh : that 's a pretty good setup , richard .
bf : yeah , it 's a good setup . that 's a big setup .
dh : you ca n't get any better than that . all right . what i will do : i will use my panther-like reflexes .
bf : nice .
dh : i got that - to reach down and grab that club in my grip of steel .
bf : nice .
dh : i touched it , barry . that should be enough .
bf : it 's progress , that 's the thing .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- dh : how about that ? i 'll do it again .
oh wait , it 's on your side , barry .
and it 's awfully windy over there .
bf : it is , it 's weird . you would n't think it would affect half the stage , but it is . it 's weird .
watch this : what i 'm going to do is slide the seventh one onto my foot .
dh : wow ! what a great trick , barry !
oh , look how it lies there .
oh , barry , is there nothing you ca n't do ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you are my hero . you 're my jim shea , jr .
too much olympics .
bf : from my foot , i 'll attempt to kick the seventh club . here we go .
dh : where , barry ? where ? tell us , barry .
-lsb- unclear -rsb- eagerly awaits your next syllable . what will it be ?
what gem of knowledge ?
what pearl of wisdom ?
do you want to buy a vowel , barry ?
is that your final answer ?
bf : all right ! you have to turn off the tv from time to time .
dh : i do , i do .
bf : from my foot , the kick up in the seven .
dh : we will juggle seven .
bf : from six to seven . dh : that 's a world 's record . bf : really ? dh : for us .
bf : yes .
dh : whenever you 're ready there , big guy .
put your tongue away , barry .
bf : oh , oh , whoa .
-lrb- applause -rrb- dh : please , please stay seated . stay seated . thank you .
because now , to make this twice as difficult , we 'll juggle the seven clubs back ...
bf : seven-club juggling .
dh : ... to back .
bf : thank you , that 's it .
bf : thank you guys !
dh : thank you very much !
so let me just start with my story .
so i tore my knee joint meniscus cartilage playing soccer in college .
then i went on to tear my acl , the ligament in my knee , and then developed an arthritic knee .
and i 'm sure that many of you in this audience have that same story , and , by the way , i married a woman who has exactly the same story .
so this motivated me to become an orthopedic surgeon and to see if i could n't focus on solutions for those problems that would keep me playing sports and not limit me .
so with that , let me just show you a quick video to get you in the mood of what we 're trying to explain .
narrator : we are all aware of the risk of cancer , but there 's another disease that 's destined to affect even more of us : arthritis .
cancer may kill you , but when you look at the numbers , arthritis ruins more lives .
assuming you live a long life , there 's a 50 percent chance you 'll develop arthritis .
and it 's not just aging that causes arthritis .
common injuries can lead to decades of pain , until our joints quite literally grind to a halt .
desperate for a solution , we 've turned to engineering to design artificial components to replace our worn-out body parts , but in the midst of the modern buzz around the promises of a bionic body , should n't we stop and ask if there 's a better , more natural way ?
let 's consider an alternative path .
what if all the replacements our bodies need already exist in nature , or within our own stem cells ?
this is the field of biologic replacements , where we replace worn-out parts with new , natural ones .
kevin stone : and so , the mission is : how do i treat these things biologically ?
and let 's talk about both what i did for my wife , and what i 've done for hundreds of other patients .
first thing for my wife , and the most common thing i hear from my patients , particularly in the 40- to 80-year-old age group , 70-year-old age group , is they come in and say , " hey , doc , is n't there just a shock absorber you can put in my knee ?
i 'm not ready for joint replacement . "
and so for her , i put in a human meniscus allograft donor right into that -lsb- knee -rsb- joint space .
and -lsb- the allograft -rsb- replaces -lsb- the missing meniscus -rsb- .
and then for that unstable ligament , we put in a human donor ligament to stabilize the knee .
and then for the damaged arthritis on the surface , we did a stem cell paste graft , which we designed in 1991 , to regrow that articular cartilage surface and give it back a smooth surface there .
so here 's my wife 's bad knee on the left , and her just hiking now four months later in aspen , and doing well .
and it works , not just for my wife , but certainly for other patients .
the girl on the video , jen hudak , just won the superpipe in aspen just nine months after having destroyed her knee , as you see in the other image - and having a paste graft to that knee .
and so we can regrow these surfaces biologically .
so with all this success , why is n't that good enough , you might ask .
well the reason is because there 's not enough donor cycles .
there 's not enough young , healthy people falling off their motorcycle and donating that tissue to us .
and the tissue 's very expensive .
and so that 's not going to be a solution that 's going to get us global with biologic tissue .
but the solution is animal tissue because it 's plentiful , it 's cheap , you can get it from young , healthy tissues , but the barrier is immunology .
and the specific barrier is a specific epitope called the galactosyl , or gal epitope .
so if we 're going to transplant animal tissues to people , we have to figure out a way to get rid of that epitope .
so my story in working with animal tissues starts in 1984 .
and i started first with cow achilles tendon , where we would take the cow achilles tendon , which is type-i collagen , strip it of its antigens by degrading it with an acid and detergent wash and forming it into a regeneration template .
we would then take that regeneration template and insert it into the missing meniscus cartilage to regrow that in a patient 's knee .
we 've now done that procedure , and it 's been done worldwide in over 4,000 cases , so it 's an fda-approved and worldwide-accepted way to regrow the meniscus .
and that 's great when i can degrade the tissue .
but what happens for your ligament when i need an intact ligament ?
i ca n't grind it up in a blender .
so in that case , i have to design - and we designed with uri galili and tom turek - an enzyme wash to wash away , or strip , those galactosyl epitopes with a specific enzyme .
and we call that a " gal stripping " technique .
what we do is humanize the tissue .
it 's by gal stripping that tissue we humanize it -lrb- laughter -rrb- , and then we can put it back into a patient 's knee .
and we 've done that . now we 've taken pig ligament - young , healthy , big tissue , put it into 10 patients in an fda-approved trial - and then one of our patients went on to have three canadian masters downhill championships - on his " pig-lig , " as he calls it . so we know it can work .
and there 's a wide clinical trial of this tissue now pending .
so what about the next step ?
what about getting to a total biologic knee replacement , not just the parts ?
how are we going to revolutionize artificial joint replacement ?
well here 's how we 're going to do it .
so what we 're going to do is take an articular cartilage from a young , healthy pig , strip it of its antigens , load it with your stem cells , then put it back on to that arthritic surface in your knee , tack it on there , have you heal that surface and then create a new biologic surface for your knee .
so that 's our biologic approach right now .
we 're going to rebuild your knee with the parts .
we 're going to resurface it with a completely new surface .
but we have other advantages from the animal kingdom .
there 's a benefit of 400 million years of ambulation .
we can harness those benefits .
we can use thicker , younger , better tissues than you might have injured in your knee , or that you might have when you 're 40 , 50 or 60 .
we can do it as an outpatient procedure .
we can strip that tissue very economically , and so this is how we can get biologic knee replacement to go global .
and so welcome to super biologics .
it 's not hardware .
it 's not software .
it 's bioware .
it 's version 2.0 of you .
and so with that , coming to a - -lrb- laughter -rrb- coming to an operating theater near you soon , i believe .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- okay , i 'm going to show you again something about our diets .
and i would like to know what the audience is , and so who of you ever ate insects ?
that 's quite a lot .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but still , you 're not representing the overall population of the earth .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- because there 's 80 percent out there that really eats insects .
but this is quite good .
why not eat insects ? well first , what are insects ?
insects are animals that walk around on six legs .
and here you see just a selection .
there 's six million species of insects on this planet , six million species .
there 's a few hundreds of mammals - six million species of insects .
in fact , if we count all the individual organisms , we would come at much larger numbers .
in fact , of all animals on earth , of all animal species , 80 percent walks on six legs .
but if we would count all the individuals , and we take an average weight of them , it would amount to something like 200 to 2,000 kilograms for each of you and me on earth .
that means that in terms of biomass , insects are more abundant than we are , and we 're not on a planet of men , but we 're on a planet of insects .
insects are not only there in nature , but they also are involved in our economy , usually without us knowing .
there was an estimation , a conservative estimation , a couple of years ago that the u.s. economy benefited by 57 billion dollars per year .
it 's a number - very large - a contribution to the economy of the united states for free .
and so i looked up what the economy was paying for the war in iraq in the same year .
it was 80 billion u.s. dollars .
well we know that that was not a cheap war .
so insects , just for free , contribute to the economy of the united states with about the same order of magnitude , just for free , without everyone knowing .
and not only in the states , but in any country , in any economy .
what do they do ?
they remove dung , they pollinate our crops .
a third of all the fruits that we eat are all a result of insects taking care of the reproduction of plants .
they control pests , and they 're food for animals .
they 're at the start of food chains .
small animals eat insects .
even larger animals eat insects .
but the small animals that eat insects are being eaten by larger animals , still larger animals .
and at the end of the food chain , we are eating them as well .
there 's quite a lot of people that are eating insects .
and here you see me in a small , provincial town in china , lijiang - about two million inhabitants .
if you go out for dinner , like in a fish restaurant , where you can select which fish you want to eat , you can select which insects you would like to eat .
and they prepare it in a wonderful way .
and here you see me enjoying a meal with caterpillars , locusts , bee pupae - delicacies .
and you can eat something new everyday .
there 's more than 1,000 species of insects that are being eaten all around the globe .
that 's quite a bit more than just a few mammals that we 're eating , like a cow or a pig or a sheep .
more than 1,000 species - an enormous variety .
and now you may think , okay , in this provincial town in china they 're doing that , but not us .
well we 've seen already that quite some of you already ate insects maybe occasionally , but i can tell you that every one of you is eating insects , without any exception .
you 're eating at least 500 grams per year .
what are you eating ?
tomato soup , peanut butter , chocolate , noodles - any processed food that you 're eating contains insects , because insects are here all around us , and when they 're out there in nature they 're also in our crops .
some fruits get some insect damage .
those are the fruits , if they 're tomato , that go to the tomato soup .
if they do n't have any damage , they go to the grocery .
and that 's your view of a tomato .
but there 's tomatoes that end up in a soup , and as long as they meet the requirements of the food agency , there can be all kinds of things in there , no problem .
in fact , why would we put these balls in the soup , there 's meat in there anyway ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- in fact , all our processed foods contain more proteins than we would be aware of .
so anything is a good protein source already .
now you may say , " okay , so we 're eating 500 grams just by accident . "
we 're even doing this on purpose .
in a lot of food items that we have - i have only two items here on the slide - pink cookies or surimi sticks or , if you like , campari - a lot of our food products that are of a red color are dyed with a natural dye .
the surimi sticks -lsb- of -rsb- crabmeat , or is being sold as crab meat , is white fish that 's being dyed with cochineal .
cochineal is a product of an insect that lives off these cacti .
it 's being produced in large amounts , 150 to 180 metric tons per year in the canary islands in peru , and it 's big business .
one gram of cochineal costs about 30 euros .
one gram of gold is 30 euros .
so it 's a very precious thing that we 're using to dye our foods .
now the situation in the world is going to change for you and me , for everyone on this earth .
the human population is growing very rapidly and is growing exponentially .
where , at the moment , we have something between six and seven billion people , it will grow to about nine billion in 2050 .
that means that we have a lot more mouths to feed , and this is something that worries more and more people .
there was an fao conference last october that was completely devoted to this .
how are we going to feed this world ?
and if you look at the figures up there , it says that we have a third more mouths to feed , but we need an agricultural production increase of 70 percent .
and that 's especially because this world population is increasing , and it 's increasing , not only in numbers , but we 're also getting wealthier , and anyone that gets wealthier starts to eat more and also starts to eat more meat .
and meat , in fact , is something that costs a lot of our agricultural production .
our diet consists , -lsb- in -rsb- some part , of animal proteins , and at the moment , most of us here get it from livestock , from fish , from game .
and we eat quite a lot of it .
in the developed world it 's on average 80 kilograms per person per year , which goes up to 120 in the united states and a bit lower in some other countries , but on average 80 kilograms per person per year .
in the developing world it 's much lower .
it 's 25 kilograms per person per year .
but it 's increasing enormously .
in china in the last 20 years , it increased from 20 to 50 , and it 's still increasing .
so if a third of the world population is going to increase its meat consumption from 25 to 80 on average , and a third of the world population is living in china and in india , we 're having an enormous demand on meat .
and of course , we are not there to say that 's only for us , it 's not for them .
they have the same share that we have .
now to start with , i should say that we are eating way too much meat in the western world .
we could do with much , much less - and i know , i 've been a vegetarian for a long time , and you can easily do without anything .
you 'll get proteins in any kind of food anyway .
but then there 's a lot of problems that come with meat production , and we 're being faced with that more and more often .
the first problem that we 're facing is human health .
pigs are quite like us .
they 're even models in medicine , and we can even transplant organs from a pig to a human .
that means that pigs also share diseases with us .
and a pig disease , a pig virus , and a human virus can both proliferate , and because of their kind of reproduction , they can combine and produce a new virus .
this has happened in the netherlands in the 1990s during the classical swine fever outbreak .
you get a new disease that can be deadly .
we eat insects - they 're so distantly related from us that this does n't happen .
so that 's one point for insects .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and there 's the conversion factor .
you take 10 kilograms of feed , you can get one kilogram of beef , but you can get nine kilograms of locust meat .
so if you would be an entrepreneur , what would you do ?
with 10 kilograms of input , you can get either one or nine kg. of output .
so far we 're taking the one , or up to five kilograms of output .
we 're not taking the bonus yet .
we 're not taking the nine kilograms of output yet .
so that 's two points for insects .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and there 's the environment .
if we take 10 kilograms of food - -lrb- laughter -rrb- and it results in one kilogram of beef , the other nine kilograms are waste , and a lot of that is manure .
if you produce insects , you have less manure per kilogram of meat that you produce .
so less waste .
furthermore , per kilogram of manure , you have much , much less ammonia and fewer greenhouse gases when you have insect manure than when you have cow manure .
so you have less waste , and the waste that you have is not as environmental malign as it is with cow dung .
so that 's three points for insects .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now there 's a big " if , " of course , and it is if insects produce meat that is of good quality .
well there have been all kinds of analyses and in terms of protein , or fat , or vitamins , it 's very good .
in fact , it 's comparable to anything we eat as meat at the moment .
and even in terms of calories , it is very good .
one kilogram of grasshoppers has the same amount of calories as 10 hot dogs , or six big macs .
so that 's four points for insects .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i can go on , and i could make many more points for insects , but time does n't allow this .
so the question is , why not eat insects ?
i gave you at least four arguments in favor .
we 'll have to .
even if you do n't like it , you 'll have to get used to this because at the moment , 70 percent of all our agricultural land is being used to produce livestock .
that 's not only the land where the livestock is walking and feeding , but it 's also other areas where the feed is being produced and being transported .
we can increase it a bit at the expense of rainforests , but there 's a limitation very soon .
and if you remember that we need to increase agricultural production by 70 percent , we 're not going to make it that way .
we could much better change from meat , from beef , to insects .
and then 80 percent of the world already eats insects , so we are just a minority - in a country like the u.k. , the usa , the netherlands , anywhere .
on the left-hand side , you see a market in laos where they have abundantly present all kinds of insects that you choose for dinner for the night .
on the right-hand side you see a grasshopper .
so people there are eating them , not because they 're hungry , but because they think it 's a delicacy .
it 's just very good food .
you can vary enormously .
it has many benefits .
in fact , we have delicacy that 's very much like this grasshopper : shrimps , a delicacy being sold at a high price .
who would n't like to eat a shrimp ?
there are a few people who do n't like shrimp , but shrimp , or crabs , or crayfish , are very closely related .
they are delicacies .
in fact , a locust is a " shrimp " of the land , and it would make very good into our diet .
so why are we not eating insects yet ?
well that 's just a matter of mindset .
we 're not used to it , and we see insects as these organisms that are very different from us .
that 's why we 're changing the perception of insects .
and i 'm working very hard with my colleague , arnold van huis , in telling people what insects are , what magnificent things they are , what magnificent jobs they do in nature .
and in fact , without insects , we would not be here in this room , because if the insects die out , we will soon die out as well .
if we die out , the insects will continue very happily .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so we have to get used to the idea of eating insects .
and some might think , well they 're not yet available .
well they are .
there are entrepreneurs in the netherlands that produce them , and one of them is here in the audience , marian peeters , who 's in the picture .
i predict that later this year , you 'll get them in the supermarkets - not visible , but as animal protein in the food .
and maybe by 2020 , you 'll buy them just knowing that this is an insect that you 're going to eat .
and they 're being made in the most wonderful ways .
a dutch chocolate maker .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so there 's even a lot of design to it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- well in the netherlands , we have an innovative minister of agriculture , and she puts the insects on the menu in her restaurant in her ministry .
and when she got all the ministers of agriculture of the e.u.
over to the hague recently , she went to a high-class restaurant , and they ate insects all together .
it 's not something that is a hobby of mine .
it 's really taken off the ground .
so why not eat insects ?
you should try it yourself .
a couple of years ago , we had 1,750 people all together in a square in wageningen town , and they ate insects at the same moment , and this was still big , big news .
i think soon it will not be big news anymore when we all eat insects , because it 's just a normal way of doing .
so you can try it yourself today , and i would say , enjoy .
and i 'm going to show to bruno some first tries , and he can have the first bite .
-lrb- applause -rrb- bruno giussani : look at them first . look at them first .
marcel dicke : it 's all protein .
bg : that 's exactly the same -lsb- one -rsb- you saw in the video actually .
and it looks delicious .
they just make it -lsb- with -rsb- nuts or something .
md : thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i want to talk about what we learn from conservatives .
and i 'm at a stage in life where i 'm yearning for my old days , so i want to confess to you that when i was a kid , indeed , i was a conservative .
i was a young republican , a teenage republican , a leader in the teenage republicans .
indeed , i was the youngest member of any delegation in the 1980 convention that elected ronald reagan to be the republican nominee for president .
now , i know what you 're thinking .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you 're thinking , " that 's not what the internets say . "
you 're thinking , " wikipedia does n't say this fact . "
and indeed , this is just one of the examples of the junk that flows across the tubes in these internets here .
wikipedia reports that this guy , this former congressman from erie , pennsylvania was , at the age of 20 , one of the youngest people at the republican national convention , but it 's just not true .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- indeed , it drives me so nuts , let me just change this little fact here .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- all right . okay , so ... perfect .
perfect .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- okay , speaker lawrence lessig , right .
okay .
finally , truth will be brought here .
okay , see ? it 's done . it 's almost done . here we go .
... " youngest republican , " okay , we 're finished .
that 's it . please save this .
great , here we go .
and ... wikipedia is fixed , finally .
okay , but no , this is really besides the point .
-lrb- applause -rrb- but the thing i want you to think about when we think about conservatives - not so much this issue of the 1980 convention - the thing to think about is this : they go to church .
now , you know , i mean , a lot of people go to church .
i 'm not talking about that only conservatives go to church .
and i 'm not talking about the god thing .
i do n't want to get into that , you know ; that 's not my point .
they go to church , by which i mean , they do lots of things for free for each other .
they hold potluck dinners .
indeed , they sell books about potluck dinners .
they serve food to poor people .
they share , they give , they give away for free .
and it 's the very same people leading wall street firms who , on sundays , show up and share .
and not only food , right .
these very same people are strong believers , in lots of contexts , in the limits on the markets .
they are in many important places against markets .
indeed , they , like all of us , celebrate this kind of relationship .
but they 're very keen that we do n't let money drop into that relationship , else it turns into something like this .
they want to regulate us , those conservatives , to stop us from allowing the market to spread in those places .
because they understand : there are places for the market and places where the market should not exist , where we should be free to enjoy the fellowship of others .
they recognize : both of these things have to live together .
and the second great thing about conservatives : they get ecology .
right , it was the first great republican president of the 20th century who taught us about environmental thinking - teddy roosevelt .
they first taught us about ecology in the context of natural resources .
and then they began to teach us in the context of innovation , economics .
they understand , in that context , " free . " they understand " free " is an important essential part of the cultural ecology as well .
that 's the thing i want you to think about them .
now , i know you do n't believe me , really , here .
so here 's exhibit number one .
i want to share with you my latest hero , julian sanchez , a libertarian who works at the , for many people , " evil " cato institute .
okay , so julian made this video .
he 's a terrible producer of videos , but it 's great content , so i 'm going to give you a little bit of it .
so here he is beginning .
julian sanchez : i 'm going to make an observation about the way remix culture seems to be evolving ...
larry lessig : so what he does is he begins to tell us about these three videos .
this is this fantastic brat pack remix set to lisztomania .
which , of course , spread virally .
hugely successful .
-lrb- music -rrb- and then some people from brooklyn saw it .
they decided they wanted to do the same .
-lrb- music -rrb- and then , of course , people from san fransisco saw it .
and san franciscans thought they had to do the same as well .
-lrb- music -rrb- and so they 're beautiful , but this libertarian has some important lessons he wants us to learn from this .
here 's lesson number one .
js : there 's obviously also something really deeply great about this .
they are acting in the sense that they 're emulating the original mashup .
and the guy who shot it obviously has a strong eye and some experience with video editing .
but this is also basically just a group of friends having an authentic social moment and screwing around together .
it should feel familiar and kind of resonate for anyone who 's had a sing-a-long or a dance party with a group of good friends .
ll : or ...
js : so that 's importantly different from the earlier videos we looked at because here , remix is n't just about an individual doing something alone in his basement ; it becomes an act of social creativity .
and it 's not just that it yields a different kind of product at the end , it 's that potentially it changes the way that we relate to each other .
all of our normal social interactions become a kind of invitation to this sort of collective expression .
it 's our real social lives themselves that are transmuted into art .
ll : and so then , what this libertarian draws from these two points ...
js : one remix is about individuals using our shared culture as a kind of language to communicate something to an audience .
stage two , social remix , is really about using it to mediate people 's relationships to each other .
first , within each video , the brat pack characters are used as a kind of template for performing the social reality of each group .
but there 's also a dialogue between the videos , where , once the basic structure is established , it becomes a kind of platform for articulating the similarities and differences between the groups ' social and physical worlds .
ll : and then , here 's for me , the critical key to what julian has to say ...
js : copyright policy is n't just about how to incentivize the production of a certain kind of artistic commodity ; it 's about what level of control we 're going to permit to be exercised social realities that are now inevitably permeated by pop culture .
i think it 's important that we keep these two different kinds of public goods in mind .
if we 're only focused on how to maximize i think we risk suppressing this different and richer and , in some ways , maybe even more important one .
ll : right . bingo . point .
freedom needs this opportunity to both have the commercial success of the great commercial works and the opportunity to build this different kind of culture .
and for that to happen , you need ideas like fair use to be central and protected , to enable this kind of innovation , as this libertarian tells us , between these two creative cultures , a commercial and a sharing culture .
the point is they , he , here , gets that culture .
now , my concern is , we dems , too often , not so much .
all right , take for example this great company .
in the good old days when this republican ran that company , their greatest work was work that built on the past , right .
all of the great disney works were works that took works that were in the public domain and remixed them , or waited until they entered the public domain to remix them , to celebrate this add-on remix creativity .
indeed , mickey mouse himself , of course , as " steamboat willie , " is a remix of the then , very dominant , very popular " steamboat bill " by buster keaton .
this man was a remixer extraordinaire .
he is the celebration and ideal of exactly this kind of creativity .
but then the company passes through this dark stage to this democrat .
wildly different .
this is the mastermind behind the eventual passage of what we call the sonny bono copyright term extension act , extending the term of existing copyrights by 20 years , so that no one could do to disney what disney did to the brothers grimm .
now , when we tried to challenge this , going to the supreme court , getting the supreme court , the bunch of conservatives there - if we could get them to wake up to this - to strike it down , we had the assistance of nobel prize winners including this right-wing nobel prize winner , milton friedman , who said he would join our brief only if the word " no brainer " was in the brief somewhere .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but apparently , no brains existed in this place when democrats passed and signed this bill into law .
now , tiny little quibble of a footnote : sonny bono , you might say , was a republican , but i do n't buy it .
this guy is no republican .
okay , for a second example , think about this cultural hero , icon on the left , creator of this character .
look at the site that he built : " star wars " mashups , inviting people to come and use their creative energy to produce a new generation of attention towards this extraordinarily important cultural icon .
read the license .
the license for these remixers assigns all of the rights to the remix back to lucas .
the mashup is owned by lucas .
indeed , anything you add to the mashup , music you might add , lucas has a worldwide perpetual right to exploit that for free .
there is no creator here to be recognized .
the creator does n't have any rights .
the creator is a sharecropper in this story .
and we should remember who employed the sharecroppers : the democrats , right ?
so the point is the republicans here recognize that there 's a certain need of ownership , a respect for ownership , the respect we should give the creator , the remixer , the owner , the property owner , the copyright owner of this extraordinarily powerful stuff , and not a generation of sharecroppers .
now , i think there are lessons we should learn here , lessons about openness .
our lives are sharing activities , at least in part .
even for the head of goldman sachs , at least in part .
and for that sharing activity to happen , we have to have well-protected spaces of fair use .
that 's number one . number two : this ecology of sharing needs freedom within which to create .
freedom , which means without permission from anyone , the ability to create .
and number three : we need to respect the creator , the creator of these remixes through rights that are directly tied to them .
now , this explains the right-wing nonprofit creative commons .
actually , it 's not a right-wing nonprofit , but of course - let me just tie it here - the creative commons , which is offering authors this simple way to mark their content with the freedoms they intended to carry .
so that we go from a " all rights reserved " world to a " some rights reserved " world so that people can know the freedoms they have attached to the content , building and creating on the basis of this creative copyrighted work .
these tools that we built enable this sharing in parts through licenses that make it clear and a freedom to create without requiring permission first because the permission has already been granted and a respect for the creator because it builds upon a copyright the creator has licensed freely .
and it explains the vast right-wing conspiracy that 's obviously developed around these licenses , as now more than 350 million digital objects are out there , licensed freely in this way .
now that picture of an ecology of creativity , the picture of an ecology of balanced creativity , is that the ecology of creativity we have right now ?
well , as you all know , not many of us believe we do .
i tripped on the reality of this ecology of creativity just last week .
i created a video which was based on a wireside chat that i 'd given , and i uploaded it to youtube .
i then got this email from youtube weirdly notifying me that there was content in that owned by the mysterious wmg that matched their content id .
so i did n't think much about it .
and then on twitter , somebody said to me , " your talk on youtube was dmca 'd . was that your purpose ? "
imagining that i had this deep conspiracy to reveal the obvious flaws in the dmca .
i answered , " no . " i did n't even think about it .
but then i went to the site and all of the audio in my site had been silenced .
my whole 45-minute video had been silenced because there were snippets in that video , a video about fair use , that included warner music group music .
now , interestingly , they still sold ads for that music , if you played the silent video .
you could still buy the music , but you could n't hear anything because it had been silenced .
so i did what the current regime says i must do to be free to use youtube to talk about fair use .
i went to this site , and i had to answer these questions .
and then in an extraordinarily bart simpson-like , juvenile way you 've actually got to type out these words and get them right to reassert your freedom to speak .
and i felt like i was in third grade again .
" i will not put tacks on the teacher 's chair .
i will not put tacks on the teacher 's chair . "
this is absurd .
it is outrageous .
it is an extraordinary perversion of the system of freedom we should be encouraging .
and the question i ask you is : who 's fighting it ?
well , interestingly , in the last presidential election , who was the number one , active opponent of this system of regulation in online speech ?
john mccain .
letter after letter attacking youtube 's refusal to be more respectful of fair use with their extraordinary notice and take down system , that led his campaign so many times to be thrown off the internet .
now , that was the story of me then , my good old days of right-wing lunacy .
let me come back to now , now when i 'm a little leftist - i 'm certainly left-handed , so at least a lefty - and i wonder , can we on the left expect to build this ecology of freedom , now , in a world where we know the extraordinarily powerful influences against it , where even icons of the left like this entertain and push bills that would effectively ban the requirement of open access for government-funded research ?
the president , who has supported a process that secretly negotiates agreements , which effectively lock us into the insane system of dmca that we have adopted and likely lock us down a path of three strikes , you 're out that , of course , the rest of the world are increasingly adopting .
not a single example of reform has been produced yet .
and we 're not going to see this change in this system anytime soon .
so here 's the lessons of openness that i think we need to learn .
openness is a commitment to a certain set of values .
we need to speak of those values .
the value of freedom . it 's a value of community .
it 's a value of the limits in regulation .
it 's a value respecting the creator .
now , if we can learn those values from at least some influences on the right , if we can take them and incorporate them , maybe we could do a little trade .
we learn those values on the left , and maybe they 'll do health care or global warming legislation or something in the right .
anyway , please join me in teaching these values .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- what i want to talk about is , as background , is the idea that cars are art .
this is actually quite meaningful to me , because car designers tend to be a little bit low on the totem pole - we do n't do coffee table books with just one lamp inside of it - and cars are thought so much as a product that it 's a little bit difficult to get into the aesthetic side under the same sort of terminology that one would discuss art .
and so cars , as art , brings it into an emotional plane - if you accept that - that you have to deal with on the same level you would with art with a capital a.
now at this point you 're going to see a picture of michelangelo .
this is completely different than automobiles .
automobiles are self-moving things , right ? elevators are automobiles .
and they 're not very emotional ; they solve a purpose ; and certainly automobiles have been around for 100 years and have made our lives functionally a lot better in many ways ; they 've also been a real pain in the ass , because automobiles are really the thing we have to solve .
we have to solve the pollution , we have to solve the congestion - but that 's not what interests me in this speech .
what interests me in this speech is cars . automobiles may be what you use , but cars are what we are , in many ways .
and as long as we can solve the problems of automobiles , and i believe we can , with fuel cells or hydrogen , like bmw is really hip on , and lots of other things , then i think we can look past that and try and understand why this hook is in many of us - of this car-y-ness - and what that means , what we can learn from it .
that 's what i want to get to . cars are not a suit of clothes ; cars are an avatar . cars are an expansion of yourself : they take your thoughts , your ideas , your emotions , and they multiply it - your anger , whatever . it 's an avatar .
it 's a super-waldo that you happen to be inside of , and if you feel sexy , the car is sexy . and if you 're full of road rage , you 've got a " chevy : like a rock , " right ?
cars are a sculpture - did you know this ?
that every car you see out there is sculpted by hand .
many people think , " well , it 's computers , and it 's done by machines and stuff like that . "
well , they reproduce it , but the originals are all done by hand .
it 's done by men and women who believe a lot in their craft .
and they put that same kind of tension into the sculpting of a car that you do in a great sculpture that you would go and look at in a museum .
that tension between the need to express , the need to discover , then you put something new into it , and at the same time you have bounds of craftsmanship .
rules that say , this is how you handle surfaces ; this is what control is all about ; this is how you show you 're a master of your craft .
and that tension , that discovery , that push for something new - and at the same time , that sense of obligation to the regards of craftsmanship - that 's as strong in cars as it is in anything .
we work in clay , which has n't changed much since michelangelo started screwing around with it , and there 's a very interesting analogy to that too .
real quickly - michelangelo once said he 's there to " discover the figure within , " ok ?
there we go , the automobile .
that was 100 years right there - did you catch that ?
between that one there , and that one there , it changed a lot did n't it ?
ok , it 's not marketing ; there 's a very interesting car concept here , but the marketing part is not what i want to talk about here .
i want to talk about this .
why it means you have to wash a car , what is it , that sensuality you have to touch about it ? that 's the sculpture that goes into it . that sensuality .
and it 's done by men and women working just like this , making cars .
now this little quote about sculpture from henry moore , i believe that that " pressure within " that moore 's talking about - at least when it comes to cars - comes right back to this idea of the mean .
it 's that will to live , that need to survive , to express itself , that comes in a car , and takes over people like me .
and we tell other people , " do this , do this , do this , " until this thing comes alive .
we are completely infected . and beauty can be the result of this infectiousness ; it 's quite wonderful .
this sculpture is , of course , at the heart of all of it , and it 's really what puts the craftsmanship into our cars .
and it 's not a whole lot different , really , when they 're working like this , or when somebody works like this .
it 's that same kind of commitment , that same kind of beauty .
now , now i get to the point . i want to talk about cars as art .
art , in the platonic sense , is truth ; it 's beauty , and love .
now this is really where designers in car business diverge from the engineers .
we do n't really have a problem talking about love .
we do n't have a problem talking about truth or beauty in that sense .
that 's what we 're searching for - when we 're working our craft , we are really trying to find that truth out there .
we 're not trying to find vanity and beauty .
we 're trying to find the beauty in the truth .
however , engineers tend to look at things a little bit more newtonian , instead of this quantum approach .
we 're dealing with irrationalisms , and we 're dealing with paradoxes that we admit exist , and the engineers tend to look things a little bit more like two and two is four , and if you get 4.0 it 's better , and 4.000 is even better .
and that sometimes leads to bit of a divergence in why we 're doing what we 're doing .
we 've pretty much accepted the fact , though , that we are the women in the organization at bmw - bmw is a very manly type business , - men , men , men ; it 's engineers .
and we 're kind of the female side to that . that 's ok , that 's cool . you go off and be manly . we 're going to be a little bit more female .
because what we 're interested in is finding form that 's more than just a function .
we 're interested in finding beauty that 's more than just an aesthetic ; it 's really a truth .
and i think this idea of soul , as being at the heart of great cars , is very applicable . you all know it . you know a car when you 've seen it , with soul . you know how strong this is .
well , this experience of love , and the experience of design , to me , are interchangeable . and now i 'm coming to my story .
i discovered something about love and design through a project called deep blue .
and first of all , you have to go with me for a second , and say , you know , you could take the word " love " out of a lot of things in our society , put the word " design " in , and it still works , like this quote here , you know . it kind of works , you know ?
you can understand that . it works in truisms .
" all is fair in design and war . "
certainly we live in a competitive society .
i think this one here , there 's a pop song that really describes philippe starck for me , you know , this is like you know , this is like puppy love , you know , this is cool right ?
toothbrush , cool .
it really only gets serious when you look at something like this . ok ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this is one substitution that i believe all of us , in design management , are guilty of .
and this idea that there is more to love , more to design , when it gets down to your neighbor , your other , it can be physical like this , and maybe in the future it will be .
but right now it 's in dealing with our own people , our own teams who are doing the creating . so , to my story .
the idea of people-work is what we work with here , and i have to make a bond with my designers when we 're creating bmws .
we have to have a shared intimacy , a shared vision - that means we have to work as one family ; we have to understand ourselves that way .
there 's good times ; there 's interesting times ; and there 's some stress times too .
you want to do cars , you 've got to go outside .
you 've got to do cars in the rain ; you 've got to do cars in the snow .
that 's , by the way , is a presentation we made to our board of directors .
we haul their butts out in the snow , too . you want to know cars outside ?
well , you 've got to stand outside to do this .
and because these are artists , they have very artistic temperaments .
all right ? now one thing about art is , art is discovery , and art is discovering yourself through your art . right ?
and one thing about cars is we 're all a little bit like pygmalion , we are completely in love with our own creations .
this is one of my favorite paintings , it really describes our relationship with cars .
this is sick beyond belief .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but because of this , the intimacy with which we work together as a team takes on a new dimension , a new meaning .
we have a shared center ; we have a shared focus - that car stays at the middle of all our relationships .
and it 's my job , in the competitive process , to narrow this down .
i heard today about joseph 's death genes that have to go in and kill cell reproduction .
you know , that 's what i have to do sometimes .
we start out with 10 cars ; we narrow it down to five cars , down to three cars , down to two cars , down to one car , and i 'm in the middle of that killing , basically .
someone 's love , someone 's baby .
this is very difficult , and you have to have a bond with your team that permits you to do this , because their life is wrapped up in that too .
they 've got that gene infected in them as well , and they want that to live , more than anything else .
well , this project , deep blue , put me in contact with my team in a way that i never expected , and i want to pass it on to you , because i want you to reflect on this , perhaps in your own relationships .
we wanted to a do a car which was a complete leap of faith for bmw .
we wanted to do a team which was so removed from the way we 'd done it , that i only had a phone number that connected me to them .
so , what we did was : instead of having a staff of artists that are just your wrist , we decided to free up a team of creative designers and engineers to find out what 's the successor to the suv phenomenon in america .
this is 1996 we did this project . and so we sent them off with this team name , deep blue . now many people know deep blue from ibm - we actually stole it from them because we figured if anybody read our faxes they 'd think we 're talking about computers .
it turned out it was quite clever because deep blue , in a company like bmw , has a hook - " deep blue , " wow , cool name .
so people get wrapped up in it . and we took a team of designers , and we sent them off to america . and we gave them a budget , what we thought was a set of deliverables , a timetable , and nothing else .
like i said , i just had a phone number that connected me to them .
and a group of engineers worked in germany , and the idea was they would work separately on this problem of what 's the successor to the suv .
they would come together , compare notes . then they would work apart , come together , and they would produce together a monumental set of diverse opinions that did n't pollute each other 's ideas - but at the same time came together and resolved the problems .
hopefully , really understand the customer at its heart , where the customer is , live with them in america . so - sent the team off , and actually something different happened . they went other places .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- they disappeared , quite honestly , and all i got was postcards .
now , i got some postcards of these guys in las vegas , and i got some postcards of these guys in the grand canyon , and i got these postcards of niagara falls , and pretty soon they 're in new york , and i do n't know where else .
and i 'm telling myself , " this is going to be a great car , they 're doing research that i 've never even thought about before . "
right ? and they decided that instead of , like , having a studio , and six or seven apartments , it was cheaper to rent elizabeth taylor 's ex-house in malibu .
and - at least they told me it was her house , i guess it was at one time , she had a party there or something .
but anyway , this was the house , and they all lived there .
now this is 24/7 living , half-a-dozen people who 'd left their - some had left their wives behind and families behind , and they literally lived in this house for the entire six months the project was in america , but the first three months were the most intensive .
and one of the young women in the project , she was a fantastic lady , she actually built her room in the bathroom .
the bathroom was so big , she built the bed over the bathtub - it 's quite fascinating .
on the other hand , i did n't know anything about this . ok ?
nothing . this is all going on , and all i 'm getting is postcards of these guys in las vegas , or whatever , saying , " do n't worry chris , this is really going to be good . " ok ?
so my concept of what a design studio was probably - i was n't up to speed on where these guys were .
however , the engineers back in munich had taken on this kind of newtonian solution , and they were trying to find how many cup holders can dance on the head of a pin , and , you know , these really serious questions that are confronting the modern consumer .
and one was hoping that these two teams would get together , and this collusion of incredible creativity , under these incredible surroundings , and these incredibly stressed-out engineers , would create some incredible solutions .
well , what i did n't know was , and what we found out was - these guys , they ca n't even like talk to each other under those conditions .
you get a divergence of newtonian and quantum thinking at that point , you have a split in your dialog that is so deep , and so far , that they can not bring this together at all .
and so we had our first meeting , after three months , in tiburon , which is just up the road from here - you know tiburon ?
and the idea was after the first three months of this independent research they would present it all to dr. goschel - who is now my boss , and at that time he was co-mentor on the project - and they would present their results .
we would see where we were going , we would see the first indication of what could be the successive phenomenon to the suv in america .
and so i had these ideas in my head , that this is going to be great .
i mean , i 'm going to see so much work , it 's so intense - i know probably las vegas meant a lot about it , and i 'm not really sure where the grand canyon came in either - but somehow all this is going to come together , and i 'm going to see some really great product .
so we went to tiburon , after three months , and the team had gotten together the week before , many days ahead of time .
the engineers flew over , and designers got together with them , and they put their presentation together .
well , it turns out that the engineers had n't done anything .
and they had n't done anything because - kind of , like in car business , engineers are there to solve problems , and we were asking them to create a problem .
and the engineers were waiting for the designers to say , " this is the problem that we 've created , now help us solve it . "
and they could n't talk about it . so what happened was , the engineers showed up with nothing .
and the engineers told the designers , " if you go in with all your stuff , we 'll walk out , we 'll walk right out of the project . "
so i did n't know any of this , and we got a presentation that had an agenda , looked like this .
there was a whole lot of dialog .
we spent four hours being told all about vocabulary that needs to be built between engineers and designers .
and here i 'm expecting at any moment , " ok , they 're going to turn the page , and i 'm going to see the cars , i 'm going to see the sketches , i 'm going to see maybe some idea of where it 's going . "
dialog kept on going , with mental maps of words , and pretty soon it was becoming obvious that instead of being dazzled with brilliance , i was seriously being baffled with bullshit .
and if you can imagine what this is like , to have these months of postcard indication of how great this team is working , and they 're out there spending all this money , and they 're learning , and they 're doing all this stuff .
i went fucking ballistic , right ? i went nuts .
you can probably remember tiburon , it used to look like this .
after four hours of this , i stood up , and i took this team apart .
i screamed at them , i yelled at them , " what the hell are you doing ?
you 're letting me down , you 're my designers , you 're supposed to be the creative ones , what the hell is going on around here ? "
it was probably one of my better tirades , i have some good ones , but this was probably one of my better ones . and i went into these people ; how could they take bmw 's money , how could they have a holiday for three months and produce nothing , nothing ?
because of course they did n't tell us that they had three station wagons full of drawings , model concepts , pictures - everything i wanted , they 'd locked up in the cars , because they had shown solidarity with the engineers - and they 'd decided not to show me anything , in order to give the chance for problem solving a chance to start , because they had n't realized , of course , that they could n't do problem creating .
so we went to lunch - -lrb- laughter -rrb- and i 've got to tell you , this was one seriously quiet lunch .
the engineers all sat at one end of the table , the designers and i sat at the other end of the table , really quiet .
and i was just fucking furious , furious . ok ?
probably because they had all the fun and i did n't , you know .
that 's what you get furious about right ?
and somebody asked me about catherine , my wife , you know , did she fly out with me or something ?
i said , " no , " and it triggered a set of thoughts about my wife .
and i recalled that when catherine and i were married , the priest gave a very nice sermon , and he said something very important .
he said , " love is not selfish , " he said , " love does not mean counting how many times i say , ' i love you . ' it does n't mean you had sex this many times this month , and it 's two times less than last month , so that means you do n't love me as much .
love is not selfish . " and i thought about this , and i thought , " you know , i 'm not showing love here . i 'm seriously not showing love .
i 'm in the air , i 'm in the air without trust .
this can not be . this can not be that i 'm expecting a certain number of sketches , and to me that 's my quantification method for qualifying a team .
this can not be . "
so i told them this story . i said , " guys , i 'm thinking about something here , this is n't right . i ca n't have a relationship with you guys based on a premise that is a quantifiable one .
based on a dictate premise that says , ' i 'm a boss , you do what i say , without trust . " ' i said " this ca n't be . "
actually , we all broke down into tears , to be quite honest about it , because they still could not tell me how much frustration they had built up inside of them , not being able to show me what i wanted , and merely having to ask me to trust them that it would come .
and i think we felt much closer that day , we cut a lot of strings that did n't need to be there , and we forged the concept for what real team and creativity is all about .
we put the car back at the center of our thoughts , and we put love , i think , truly back into the center of the process .
by the way , that team went on to create six different concepts for the next model of what would be the proposal for the next generation after suvs in america .
one of those was the idea of a crossover coupes - you see it downstairs , the x coupe - they had a lot of fun with that .
it was the rendition of our motorcycle , the gs , as carl magnusson says , " brute-iful , " as the idea of what could be a motorcycle , if you add two more wheels .
and so , in conclusion , my lesson that i wanted to pass on to you , was this one here . i 'm also going to steal a little quote out of " little prince . "
there 's a lot to be said about trust and love , if you know that those two words are synonymous for design .
i had a very , very meaningful relationship with my team that day , and it 's stayed that way ever since .
and i hope that you too find that there 's more to design , and more towards the art of the design , than doing it yourself .
it 's true that the trust and the love , that makes it worthwhile .
thanks so much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- let me tell you a story .
it 's my first year as a new high school science teacher , and i 'm so eager .
i 'm so excited , i 'm pouring myself into my lesson plans .
but i 'm slowly coming to this horrifying realization that my students just might not be learning anything .
this happens one day : i 'd just assigned my class to read this textbook chapter about my favorite subject in all of biology : viruses and how they attack .
and so i 'm so excited to discuss this with them , and i come in and i say , " can somebody please explain the main ideas and why this is so cool ? "
there 's silence .
finally , my favorite student , she looks me straight in the eye , and she says , " the reading sucked . "
and then she clarified . she said , " you know what , i do n't mean that it sucks . it means that i did n't understand a word of it .
it 's boring . um , who cares , and it sucks . "
these sympathetic smiles spread all throughout the room now , and i realize that all of my other students are in the same boat , that maybe they took notes or they memorized definitions from the textbook , but not one of them really understood the main ideas .
not one of them can tell me why this stuff is so cool , why it 's so important .
i 'm totally clueless .
i have no idea what to do next .
so the only thing i can think of is say , " listen . let me tell you a story .
the main characters in the story are bacteria and viruses .
these guys are blown up a couple million times .
the real bacteria and viruses are so small we ca n't see them without a microscope , and you guys might know bacteria and viruses because they both make us sick .
but what a lot of people do n't know is that viruses can also make bacteria sick . "
now , the story that i start telling my kids , it starts out like a horror story .
once upon a time there 's this happy little bacterium .
do n't get too attached to him .
maybe he 's floating around in your stomach or in some spoiled food somewhere , and all of a sudden he starts to not feel so good .
maybe he ate something bad for lunch , and then things get really horrible , as his skin rips apart , and he sees a virus coming out from his insides .
and then it gets horrible when he bursts open and an army of viruses floods out from his insides .
if - ouch is right ! - if you see this , and you 're a bacterium , this is like your worst nightmare .
but if you 're a virus and you see this , you cross those little legs of yours and you think , " we rock . "
because it took a lot of crafty work to infect this bacterium .
here 's what had to happen .
a virus grabbed onto a bacterium and it slipped its dna into it .
the next thing is , that virus dna made stuff that chopped up the bacteria dna .
and now that we 've gotten rid of the bacteria dna , the virus dna takes control of the cell and it tells it to start making more viruses .
because , you see , dna is like a blueprint that tells living things what to make .
so this is kind of like going into a car factory and replacing the blueprints with blueprints for killer robots .
the workers still come the next day , they do their job , but they 're following different instructions .
so replacing the bacteria dna with virus dna turns the bacteria into a factory for making viruses - that is , until it 's so filled with viruses that it bursts .
but that 's not the only way that viruses infect bacteria .
some are much more crafty .
when a secret agent virus infects a bacterium , they do a little espionage .
here , this cloaked , secret agent virus is slipping his dna into the bacterial cell , but here 's the kicker : it does n't do anything harmful - not at first .
instead , it silently slips into the bacteria 's own dna , and it just stays there like a terrorist sleeper cell , waiting for instructions .
and what 's interesting about this is now whenever this bacteria has babies , the babies also have the virus dna in them .
so now we have a whole extended bacteria family , filled with virus sleeper cells .
they 're just happily living together until a signal happens and - bam ! - all of the dna pops out .
it takes control of these cells , turns them into virus-making factories , and they all burst , a huge , extended bacteria family , all dying with viruses spilling out of their guts , the viruses taking over the bacterium .
so now you understand how viruses can attack cells .
there are two ways : on the left is what we call the lytic way , where the viruses go right in and take over the cells .
on the -lsb- right -rsb- is the lysogenic way that uses secret agent viruses .
so this stuff is not that hard , right ?
and now all of you understand it .
but if you 've graduated from high school , i can almost guarantee you 've seen this information before .
but i bet it was presented in a way that it did n't exactly stick in your mind .
so when my students were first learning this , why did they hate it so much ?
well , there were a couple of reasons .
first of all , i can guarantee you that their textbooks did n't have secret agent viruses , and they did n't have horror stories .
you know , in the communication of science there is this obsession with seriousness .
it kills me . i 'm not kidding .
i used to work for an educational publisher , and as a writer , i was always told never to use stories or fun , engaging language , because then my work might not be viewed as " serious " and " scientific . "
right ? i mean , because god forbid somebody have fun when they 're learning science .
so we have this field of science that 's all about slime , and color changes . check this out .
and then we have , of course , as any good scientist has to have , explosions !
but if a textbook seems too much fun , it 's somehow unscientific .
now another problem was that the language in their textbook was truly incomprehensible .
if we want to summarize that story that i told you earlier , we could start by saying something like , " these viruses make copies of themselves by slipping their dna into a bacterium . "
the way this showed up in the textbook , it looked like this : " bacteriophage replication is initiated through the introduction of viral nucleic acid into a bacterium . "
that 's great , perfect for 13-year-olds .
but here 's the thing . there are plenty of people in science education who would look at this and say there 's no way that we could ever give that to students , because it contains some language that is n't completely accurate .
for example , i told you that viruses have dna .
well , a very tiny fraction of them do n't .
they have something called rna instead .
so a professional science writer would circle that and say , " that has to go .
we have to change it to something much more technical . "
and after a team of professional science editors went over this really simple explanation , they 'd find fault with almost every word i 've used , and they 'd have to change anything that was n't serious enough , and they 'd have to change everything that was n't 100 percent perfect .
then it would be accurate , but it would be completely impossible to understand .
this is horrifying .
you know , i keep talking about this idea of telling a story , and it 's like science communication has taken on this idea of what i call the tyranny of precision , where you ca n't just tell a story .
it 's like science has become that horrible storyteller that we all know , who gives us all the details nobody cares about , where you 're like , " oh , i met my friend for lunch the other day , and she was wearing these ugly jeans .
i mean , they were n't really jeans , they were more kind of , like , leggings , but , like , i guess they 're actually kind of more like jeggings , like , but i think - " and you 're just like , " oh my god .
what is the point ? "
or even worse , science education is becoming like that guy who always says , " actually . "
right ? you want to be like , " oh , dude , we had to get up in the middle of the night and drive a hundred miles in total darkness . "
and that guy 's like , " actually , it was 87.3 miles . "
and you 're like , " actually , shut up !
i 'm just trying to tell a story . "
because good storytelling is all about emotional connection .
we have to convince our audience that what we 're talking about matters .
but just as important is knowing which details we should leave out so that the main point still comes across .
i 'm reminded of what the architect mies van der rohe said , and i paraphrase , when he said that sometimes you have to lie in order to tell the truth .
i think this sentiment is particularly relevant to science education .
now , finally , i am often so disappointed when people think that i 'm advocating a dumbing down of science .
that 's not true at all .
i 'm currently a ph.d. student at mit , and i absolutely understand the importance of detailed , specific scientific communication between experts , but not when we 're trying to teach 13-year-olds .
if a young learner thinks that all viruses have dna , that 's not going to ruin their chances of success in science .
but if a young learner ca n't understand anything in science and learns to hate it because it all sounds like this , that will ruin their chances of success .
this needs to stop , and i wish that the change could come from the institutions at the top that are perpetuating these problems , and i beg them , i beseech them to just stop it .
but i think that 's unlikely .
so we are so lucky that we have resources like the internet , where we can circumvent these institutions from the bottom up .
there 's a growing number of online resources that are dedicated to just explaining science in simple , understandable ways .
i dream of a wikipedia-like website that would explain any scientific concept you can think of in simple language any middle schooler can understand .
and i myself spend most of my free time making these science videos that i put on youtube .
i explain chemical equilibrium using analogies to awkward middle school dances , and i talk about fuel cells with stories about boys and girls at a summer camp .
the feedback that i get is sometimes misspelled and it 's often written in lolcats , but nonetheless it 's so appreciative , so thankful that i know this is the right way we should be communicating science .
there 's still so much work left to be done , though , and if you 're involved with science in any way i urge you to join me .
pick up a camera , start to write a blog , whatever , but leave out the seriousness , leave out the jargon .
make me laugh . make me care .
leave out those annoying details that nobody cares about and just get to the point .
how should you start ?
why do n't you say , " listen , let me tell you a story " ?
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- hi . i am an architect .
i am the only architect in the world making buildings out of paper like this cardboard tube , and this exhibition is the first one i did using paper tubes .
1986 , much , much longer before people started talking about ecological issues and environmental issues , i just started testing the paper tube in order to use this as a building structure .
it 's very complicated to test the new material for the building , but this is much stronger than i expected , and also it 's very easy to waterproof , and also , because it 's industrial material , it 's also possible to fireproof .
then i built the temporary structure , 1990 .
this is the first temporary building made out of paper .
there are 330 tubes , diameter 55 -lsb- centimeters -rsb- , there are only 12 tubes with a diameter of 120 centimeters , or four feet , wide .
as you see it in the photo , inside is the toilet .
in case you 're finished with toilet paper , you can tear off the inside of the wall . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so it 's very useful .
year 2000 , there was a big expo in germany .
i was asked to design the building , because the theme of the expo was environmental issues .
so i was chosen to build the pavilion out of paper tubes , recyclable paper .
my goal of the design is not when it 's completed .
my goal was when the building was demolished , because each country makes a lot of pavilions but after half a year , we create a lot of industrial waste , so my building has to be reused or recycled .
after , the building was recycled .
so that was the goal of my design .
then i was very lucky to win the competition to build the second pompidou center in france in the city of metz .
because i was so poor , i wanted to rent an office in paris , but i could n't afford it , so i decided to bring my students to paris to build our office on top of the pompidou center in paris by ourselves .
so we brought the paper tubes and the wooden joints to complete the 35-meter-long office .
we stayed there for six years without paying any rent .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you . i had one big problem .
because we were part of the exhibition , even if my friend wanted to see me , they had to buy a ticket to see me .
that was the problem .
then i completed the pompidou center in metz .
it 's a very popular museum now , and i created a big monument for the government .
but then i was very disappointed at my profession as an architect , because we are not helping , we are not working for society , but we are working for privileged people , rich people , government , developers .
they have money and power .
those are invisible .
so they hire us to visualize their power and money by making monumental architecture .
that is our profession , even historically it 's the same , even now we are doing the same .
so i was very disappointed that we are not working for society , even though there are so many people who lost their houses by natural disasters .
but i must say they are no longer natural disasters .
for example , earthquakes never kill people , but collapse of the buildings kill people .
that 's the responsibility of architects .
then people need some temporary housing , but there are no architects working there because we are too busy working for privileged people .
so i thought , even as architects , we can be involved in the reconstruction of temporary housing .
we can make it better .
so that is why i started working in disaster areas .
1994 , there was a big disaster in rwanda , africa .
two tribes , hutu and tutsi , fought each other .
over two million people became refugees .
but i was so surprised to see the shelter , refugee camp organized by the u.n.
they 're so poor , and they are freezing with blankets during the rainy season , in the shelters built by the u.n. , they were just providing a plastic sheet , and the refugees had to cut the trees , and just like this .
but over two million people cut trees .
it just became big , heavy deforestation and an environmental problem .
that is why they started providing aluminum pipes , aluminum barracks .
very expensive , they throw them out for money , then cutting trees again .
so i proposed my idea to improve the situation using these recycled paper tubes because this is so cheap and also so strong , but my budget is only 50 u.s. dollars per unit .
we built 50 units to do that as a monitoring test for the durability and moisture and termites , so on .
and then , year afterward , 1995 , in kobe , japan , we had a big earthquake .
nearly 7,000 people were killed , and the city like this nagata district , all the city was burned in a fire after the earthquake .
and also i found out there 's many vietnamese refugees suffering and gathering at a catholic church - all the building was totally destroyed .
so i went there and also i proposed to the priests , " why do n't we rebuild the church out of paper tubes ? "
and he said , " oh god , are you crazy ?
after a fire , what are you proposing ? "
so he never trusted me , but i did n't give up .
i started commuting to kobe , and i met the society of vietnamese people .
they were living like this with very poor plastic sheets in the park .
so i proposed to rebuild . i raised - did fundraising .
i made a paper tube shelter for them , and in order to make it easy to be built by students and also easy to demolish , i used beer crates as a foundation .
i asked the kirin beer company to propose , because at that time , the asahi beer company made their plastic beer crates red , which does n't go with the color of the paper tubes .
the color coordination is very important .
and also i still remember , we were expecting to have a beer inside the plastic beer crate , but it came empty . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so i remember it was so disappointing .
so during the summer with my students , we built over 50 units of the shelters .
finally the priest , finally he trusted me to rebuild .
he said , " as long as you collect money by yourself , bring your students to build , you can do it . "
so we spent five weeks rebuilding the church .
it was meant to stay there for three years , but actually it stayed there 10 years because people loved it .
then , in taiwan , they had a big earthquake , and we proposed to donate this church , so we dismantled them , we sent them over to be built by volunteer people .
it stayed there in taiwan as a permanent church even now .
so this building became a permanent building .
then i wonder , what is a permanent and what is a temporary building ?
even a building made in paper can be permanent as long as people love it .
even a concrete building can be very temporary if that is made to make money .
in 1999 , in turkey , the big earthquake , i went there to use the local material to build a shelter .
2001 , in west india , i built also a shelter .
in 2004 , in sri lanka , after the sumatra earthquake and tsunami , i rebuilt islamic fishermen 's villages .
and in 2008 , in chengdu , sichuan area in china , nearly 70,000 people were killed , and also especially many of the schools were destroyed because of the corruption between the authority and the contractor .
i was asked to rebuild the temporary church .
i brought my japanese students to work with the chinese students .
in one month , we completed nine classrooms , over 500 square meters .
it 's still used , even after the current earthquake in china .
in 2009 , in italy , l 'aquila , also they had a big earthquake .
and this is a very interesting photo : former prime minister berlusconi and japanese former former former former prime minister mr. aso - you know , because we have to change the prime minister ever year .
and they are very kind , affording my model .
i proposed a big rebuilding , a temporary music hall , because l 'aquila is very famous for music and all the concert halls were destroyed , so musicians were moving out .
so i proposed to the mayor , i 'd like to rebuild the temporary auditorium .
he said , " as long as you bring your money , you can do it . "
and i was very lucky .
mr. berlusconi brought g8 summit , and our former prime minister came , so they helped us to collect money , and i got half a million euros from the japanese government to rebuild this temporary auditorium .
year 2010 in haiti , there was a big earthquake , but it 's impossible to fly over , so i went to santo domingo , next-door country , to drive six hours to get to haiti with the local students in santo domingo to build 50 units of shelter out of local paper tubes .
this is what happened in japan two years ago , in northern japan .
after the earthquake and tsunami , people had to be evacuated in a big room like a gymnasium .
but look at this . there 's no privacy .
people suffer mentally and physically .
so we went there to build partitions with all the student volunteers with paper tubes , just a very simple shelter out of the tube frame and the curtain .
however , some of the facility authority does n't want us to do it , because , they said , simply , it 's become more difficult to control them .
but it 's really necessary to do it .
they do n't have enough flat area to build standard government single-story housing like this one .
look at this . even civil government is doing such poor construction of the temporary housing , so dense and so messy because there is no storage , nothing , water is leaking , so i thought , we have to make multi-story building because there 's no land and also it 's not very comfortable .
so i proposed to the mayor while i was making partitions .
finally i met a very nice mayor in onagawa village in miyagi .
he asked me to build three-story housing on baseball -lsb- fields -rsb- .
i used the shipping container and also the students helped us to make all the building furniture to make them comfortable , within the budget of the government but also the area of the house is exactly the same , but much more comfortable .
many of the people want to stay here forever .
i was very happy to hear that .
now i am working in new zealand , christchurch .
about 20 days before the japanese earthquake happened , also they had a big earthquake , and many japanese students were also killed , and the most important cathedral of the city , the symbol of christchurch , was totally destroyed .
and i was asked to come to rebuild the temporary cathedral .
so this is under construction .
and i 'd like to keep building monuments that are beloved by people .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you very much . -lrb- applause -rrb- i have 18 minutes to tell you what happened over the past six million years .
all right .
we all have come from a long way , here in africa , and converged in this region of africa , which is a place where 90 percent of our evolutionary process took place .
and i say that not because i am african , but it 's in africa that you find the earliest evidence for human ancestors , upright walking traces , even the first technologies in the form of stone tools .
so we all are africans , and welcome home .
all right .
i 'm a paleoanthropologist , and my job is to define man 's place in nature and explore what makes us human .
and today , i will use selam , the earliest child ever discovered , to tell you a story of all of us .
selam is our most complete skeleton of a three-year-old girl who lived and died 3.3 million years ago .
she belongs to the species known as australopithecus afarensis .
you do n't need to remember that .
that 's the lucy species , and was found by my research team in december of 2000 in an area called dikika .
it 's in the northeastern part of ethiopia .
and selam means peace in many ethiopian languages .
we use that name to celebrate peace in the region and in the planet .
and the fact that it was the cover story of all these famous magazines gives you already an idea of her significance , i think .
after i was invited by ted , i did some digging , because that 's what we do , to know about my host .
you do n't just jump into an invitation .
and i learned that the first technology appeared in the form of stone tools , 2.6 million years ago .
first entertainment comes evidence from flutes that are 35,000 years old .
and evidence for first design comes 75,000 years old - beads .
and you can do the same with your genes and track them back in time .
and dna analysis of living humans and chimpanzees teaches us today that we diverged sometime around seven million years ago and that these two species share over 98 percent of the same genetic material .
i think knowing this is a very useful context within which we can think of our ancestry .
however , dna analysis informs us only about the beginning and the end , telling us nothing about what happened in the middle .
so , for us , paleoanthropologists , our job is to find the hard evidence , the fossil evidence , to fill in this gap and see the different stages of development .
because it 's only when you do that , that you can talk about - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - it 's only when you do that , -lsb- that -rsb- you can talk about how we looked like and how we behaved at different times , and how those likes and looks and behaviors changed through time .
that then gives you an access to explore the biological mechanisms and forces that are responsible for this gradual change that made us what we are today .
but finding the hard evidence is a very complicated endeavor .
it 's a systematic and scientific approach , which takes you to places that are remote , hot , hostile and often with no access .
just to give you an example , when i went to dikika , where selam was found , in ' 99 - and it 's about 500 kilometers from addis ababa , the capital of ethiopia .
it took us only seven hours to do the first 470 kilometers of the 500 , but took four , solid hours to do the last only 30 kilometers .
with the help of the locals and using just shovels and picks , i made my way .
i was the first person to actually drive a car to the spot .
when you get there , this is what you see , and it 's the vastness of the place which makes you feel helpless and vulnerable .
and once you make it there , the big question is where to start .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and you find nothing for years and years .
when i go to places like this , which are paleontological sites , it 's like going to a game park , an extinct game park .
but what you find are not the human remains , such as selam and lucy , on a day-to-day basis .
you find elephants , rhinos , monkeys , pigs , etc .
but you could ask , how could these large mammals live in this desert environment ?
of course , they can not , but i 'm telling you already that the environment and the carrying capacity of this region was drastically different from what we have today .
a very important environmental lesson could be learned from this .
anyway , once we made it there , then it 's a game park , as i said , an extinct game park .
and our ancestors lived in that game park , but were just the minorities . they were not as successful and as widespread as the homo sapiens that we are .
to tell you just an example , an anecdote about their rarity , i was going to this place every year and would do fieldwork here , and the assistants , of course , helped me do the surveys .
they would find a bone and tell me , " here is what you 're looking for . "
i would say , " no , that 's an elephant . "
again , another one , " that 's a monkey . " " that 's a pig , " etc .
so one of my assistants , who never went to school , said to me , " listen , zeray .
you either do n't know what you 're looking for , or you 're looking in the wrong place , " he said .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i said , " why ? " " because there were elephants and lions , and the people were scared and went somewhere else .
let 's go somewhere else . "
well , he was very tired , and it 's really tiring .
it was then , after such hard work and many frustrating years that we found selam , and you see the face here covered by sandstone .
and here is actually the spinal column and the whole torso encased in a sandstone block , because she was buried by a river .
what you have here seems to be nothing , but contains an incredible amount of scientific information that helps us explore what makes us human .
this is the earliest and most complete juvenile human ancestor ever found in the history of paleoanthropology , an amazing piece of our long , long history .
there were these three people and me , and i am taking the pictures , that 's why i am not in .
how would you feel if you were me ? you have something extraordinary in your hand , but you are in the middle of nowhere ?
the feeling i had was a deep and quiet happiness and excitement , of course accompanied by a huge sense of responsibility , of making sure everything is safe .
here is a close-up of the fossil , after five years of cleaning , preparation and description , which was very long , as i had to expose the bones from the sandstone block i just showed you in the previous slide .
it took five years .
in a way , this was like the second birth for the child , after 3.3 million years , but the labor was very long .
and here is full scale - it 's a tiny bone .
and in the middle is the minister of ethiopian tourism , who came to visit the national museum of ethiopia while i was working there .
and you see me worried and trying to protect my child , because you do n't leave anyone with this kind of child , even a minister .
so then , once you 've done that , the next stage is to know what it is .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- once that was done , then it was possible to compare .
we were able to tell that she belonged to the human family tree because the legs , the foot , and some features clearly showed that she walked upright , and upright walking is a hallmark in humanity .
but in addition , if you compare the skull with a comparably aged chimpanzee and little george bush here , you see that you have vertical forehead .
and you see that in humans , because of the development of the pre-frontal cortex , it 's called .
you do n't see that in chimpanzees , and you do n't see this very projecting canine .
so she belongs to our family tree , but within that , of course , you do detailed analysis , and we know now that she belongs to the lucy species , known as australopithecus afarensis .
the next exciting question is , girl or boy ?
and how old was she when she died ?
you can determine the sex of the individual based on the size of the teeth .
how ?
you know , in primates , there is this phenomenon called sexual dimorphism , which simply means males are larger than females and males have larger teeth than the females .
but to do that , you need the permanent dentition , which you do n't see here , because what you have here are the baby teeth .
but using the ct scanning technology , which is normally used for medical purposes , you can go deep into the mouth and come up with this beautiful image showing you both the baby teeth here and the still-growing adult teeth here .
so when you measure those teeth , it was clear that she turned out to be a girl with very small canine teeth .
and to know how old she was when she died , what you do is you do an informed estimate , and you say , how much time would be required to form this amount of teeth , and the answer was three .
so , this girl died when she was about three , 3.3 million years ago .
so , with all that information , the big question is - what do we actually - what does she tell us ?
to answer this question , we can phrase another question .
what do we actually know about our ancestors ?
we want to know how they looked like , how they behaved , how they walked around , and how they lived and grew up .
and among the answers that you can get from this skeleton are included : first , this skeleton documents , for the first time , how infants looked over three million years ago .
and second , she tells us that she walked upright , but had some adaptation for tree climbing .
and more interesting , however , is the brain in this child was still growing .
at age three , if you have a still-growing brain , it 's a human behavior .
in chimps , by age three , the brain is formed over 90 percent .
that 's why they can cope with their environment very easily after birth - faster than us , anyway .
but in humans , we continue to grow our brains .
that 's why we need care from our parents .
but that care means also you learn .
you spend more time with your parents .
and that 's very characteristic of humans and it 's called childhood , which is this extended dependence of human children on their family or parents .
so , the still-growing brain in this individual tells us that childhood , which requires an incredible social organization , a very complex social organization , emerged over three million years ago .
so , by being at the cusp of our evolutionary history , selam unites us all and gives us a unique account on what makes us human .
but not everything was human , and i will give you a very exciting example .
this is called the hyoid bone . it 's a bone which is right here .
it supports your tongue from behind .
it 's , in a way , your voice box .
it determines the type of voice you produce .
it was not known in the fossil record , and we have it in this skeleton .
when we did the analysis of this bone , it was clear that it looked very chimp-like , chimpanzee-like .
so if you were there 3.3 million years ago , to hear when this girl was crying out for her mother , she would have sounded more like a chimpanzee than a human .
maybe you 're wondering , " so , you see this ape feature , human feature , ape feature .
what does that tell us ? "
you know , that is very exciting for us , because it demonstrates that things were changing slowly and progressively , and that evolution is in the making .
to summarize the significance of this fossil , we can say the following .
up to now , the knowledge that we had about our ancestors came essentially from adult individuals because the fossils , the baby fossils , were missing .
they do n't preserve well , as you know .
so the knowledge that we had about our ancestors , on how they looked like , how they behaved , was kind of biased toward adults .
imagine somebody coming from mars and his job is to report on the type of people occupying our planet earth , and you hide all the babies , the children , and he goes back and reports .
can you imagine how much biased his report would be ?
that 's what somehow we were doing so far in the absence of the fossil children , so i think the new fossil fixes this problem .
so , i think the most important question at the end is , what do we actually learn from specimens like this and from our past in general ?
of course , in addition to extracting this huge amount of scientific information as to what makes us human , you know , the many human ancestors that have existed over the past six million years - and there are more than 10 - they did not have the knowledge , the technology and sophistications that we , homo sapiens , have today .
but if this species , ancient species , would travel in time and see us today , they would very much be very proud of their legacy , because they became the ancestors of the most successful species in the universe .
and they were probably not aware of this future legacy , but they did great .
now the question is , we homo sapiens today are in a position to decide about the future of our planet , possibly more .
so the question is , are we up to the challenge ?
and can we really do better than these primitive , small-brained ancestors ?
among the most pressing challenges that our species is faced with today are the chronic problems of africa .
needless to list them here , and there are more competent people to talk about this .
still , in my opinion , we have two choices .
one is to continue to see a poor , ill , crying africa , carrying guns , that depends on other people forever , or to promote an africa which is confident , peaceful , independent , but cognizant of its huge problems and great values at the same time .
i am for the second option , and i 'm sure many of you are .
and the key is to promote a positive african attitude towards africa .
that 's because we africans concentrate - i am from ethiopia , by the way - we concentrate too much on how we are seen from elsewhere , or from outside .
i think it 's important to promote in a more positive way on how we see ourselves .
that 's what i call positive african attitude .
so finally , i would like to say , so let 's help africa walk upright and forward , then we all can be proud of our future legacy as a species .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- when we park in a big parking lot , how do we remember where we parked our car ?
here 's the problem facing homer .
and we 're going to try to understand what 's happening in his brain .
so we 'll start with the hippocampus , shown in yellow , which is the organ of memory .
if you have damage there , like in alzheimer 's , you ca n't remember things including where you parked your car .
it 's named after latin for " seahorse , " which it resembles .
and like the rest of the brain , it 's made of neurons .
so the human brain has about a hundred billion neurons in it .
and the neurons communicate with each other by sending little pulses or spikes of electricity via connections to each other .
the hippocampus is formed of two sheets of cells , which are very densely interconnected .
and scientists have begun to understand how spatial memory works by recording from individual neurons in rats or mice while they forage or explore an environment looking for food .
so we 're going to imagine we 're recording from a single neuron in the hippocampus of this rat here .
and when it fires a little spike of electricity , there 's going to be a red dot and a click .
so what we see is that this neuron knows whenever the rat has gone into one particular place in its environment .
and it signals to the rest of the brain by sending a little electrical spike .
so we could show the firing rate of that neuron as a function of the animal 's location .
and if we record from lots of different neurons , we 'll see that different neurons fire when the animal goes in different parts of its environment , like in this square box shown here .
so together they form a map for the rest of the brain , telling the brain continually , " where am i now within my environment ? "
place cells are also being recorded in humans .
so epilepsy patients sometimes need the electrical activity in their brain monitoring .
and some of these patients played a video game where they drive around a small town .
and place cells in their hippocampi would fire , become active , start sending electrical impulses whenever they drove through a particular location in that town .
so how does a place cell know where the rat or person is within its environment ?
well these two cells here show us that the boundaries of the environment are particularly important .
so the one on the top likes to fire sort of midway between the walls of the box that their rat 's in .
and when you expand the box , the firing location expands .
the one below likes to fire whenever there 's a wall close by to the south .
and if you put another wall inside the box , then the cell fires in both place wherever there 's a wall to the south as the animal explores around in its box .
so this predicts that sensing the distances and directions of boundaries around you - extended buildings and so on - is particularly important for the hippocampus .
and indeed , on the inputs to the hippocampus , cells are found which project into the hippocampus , which do respond exactly to detecting boundaries or edges at particular distances and directions from the rat or mouse as it 's exploring around .
so the cell on the left , you can see , it fires whenever the animal gets near to a wall or a boundary to the east , whether it 's the edge or the wall of a square box or the circular wall of the circular box or even the drop at the edge of a table , which the animals are running around .
and the cell on the right there fires whenever there 's a boundary to the south , whether it 's the drop at the edge of the table or a wall or even the gap between two tables that are pulled apart .
so that 's one way in which we think place cells determine where the animal is as it 's exploring around .
we can also test where we think objects are , like this goal flag , in simple environments - or indeed , where your car would be .
so we can have people explore an environment and see the location they have to remember .
and then , if we put them back in the environment , generally they 're quite good at putting a marker down where they thought that flag or their car was .
but on some trials , we could change the shape and size of the environment like we did with the place cell .
in that case , we can see how where they think the flag had been changes as a function of how you change the shape and size of the environment .
and what you see , for example , if the flag was where that cross was in a small square environment , and then if you ask people where it was , but you 've made the environment bigger , where they think the flag had been stretches out in exactly the same way that the place cell firing stretched out .
it 's as if you remember where the flag was by storing the pattern of firing across all of your place cells at that location , and then you can get back to that location by moving around so that you best match the current pattern of firing of your place cells with that stored pattern .
that guides you back to the location that you want to remember .
but we also know where we are through movement .
so if we take some outbound path - perhaps we park and we wander off - we know because our own movements , which we can integrate over this path roughly what the heading direction is to go back .
and place cells also get this kind of path integration input from a kind of cell called a grid cell .
now grid cells are found , again , on the inputs to the hippocampus , and they 're a bit like place cells .
but now as the rat explores around , each individual cell fires in a whole array of different locations which are laid out across the environment in an amazingly regular triangular grid .
and if you record from several grid cells - shown here in different colors - each one has a grid-like firing pattern across the environment , and each cell 's grid-like firing pattern is shifted slightly relative to the other cells .
so the red one fires on this grid and the green one on this one and the blue on on this one .
so together , it 's as if the rat can put a virtual grid of firing locations across its environment - a bit like the latitude and longitude lines that you 'd find on a map , but using triangles .
and as it moves around , the electrical activity can pass from one of these cells to the next cell to keep track of where it is , so that it can use its own movements to know where it is in its environment .
do people have grid cells ?
well because all of the grid-like firing patterns have the same axes of symmetry , the same orientations of grid , shown in orange here , it means that the net activity of all of the grid cells in a particular part of the brain should change according to whether we 're running along these six directions or running along one of the six directions in between .
so we can put people in an mri scanner and have them do a little video game like the one i showed you and look for this signal .
and indeed , you do see it in the human entorhinal cortex , which is the same part of the brain that you see grid cells in rats .
so back to homer .
he 's probably remembering where his car was in terms of the distances and directions to extended buildings and boundaries around the location where he parked .
and that would be represented by the firing of boundary-detecting cells .
he 's also remembering the path he took out of the car park , which would be represented in the firing of grid cells .
now both of these kinds of cells can make the place cells fire .
and he can return to the location where he parked by moving so as to find where it is that best matches the firing pattern of the place cells in his brain currently with the stored pattern where he parked his car .
and that guides him back to that location irrespective of visual cues like whether his car 's actually there .
maybe it 's been towed .
but he knows where it was , so he knows to go and get it .
so beyond spatial memory , if we look for this grid-like firing pattern throughout the whole brain , we see it in a whole series of locations which are always active when we do all kinds of autobiographical memory tasks , like remembering the last time you went to a wedding , for example .
so it may be that the neural mechanisms for representing the space around us are also used for generating visual imagery so that we can recreate the spatial scene , at least , of the events that have happened to us when we want to imagine them .
so if this was happening , your memories could start by place cells activating each other via these dense interconnections and then reactivating boundary cells to create the spatial structure of the scene around your viewpoint .
and grid cells could move this viewpoint through that space .
another kind of cell , head direction cells , which i did n't mention yet , they fire like a compass according to which way you 're facing .
they could define the viewing direction from which you want to generate an image for your visual imagery , so you can imagine what happened when you were at this wedding , for example .
so this is just one example of a new era really in cognitive neuroscience where we 're beginning to understand psychological processes like how you remember or imagine or even think in terms of the actions of the billions of individual neurons that make up our brains .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- hammer -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- microwave beeps -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- you probably all agree with me that this is a very nice road .
it 's made of asphalt , and asphalt is a very nice material to drive on , but not always , especially not on these days as today , when it 's raining a lot .
then you can have a lot of splash water in the asphalt .
and especially if you then ride with your bicycle , and pass these cars , then that 's not very nice .
also , asphalt can create a lot of noise .
it 's a noisy material , and if we produce roads like in the netherlands , very close to cities , then we would like a silent road .
the solution for that is to make roads out of porous asphalt .
porous asphalt , a material that we use now in most of the highways in the netherlands , it has pores and water can just rain through it , so all the rainwater will flow away to the sides , and you have a road that 's easy to drive on , so no splash water anymore .
also the noise will disappear in these pores .
because it 's very hollow , all the noise will disappear , so it 's a very silent road .
it also has disadvantages , of course , and the disadvantage of this road is that raveling can occur .
what is raveling ? you see that in this road that the stones at the surface come off .
first you get one stone , then several more , and more and more and more and more , and then they - well , i will not do that . -lrb- laughter -rrb- but they can damage your windshield , so you 're not happy with that .
and finally , this raveling can also lead to more and more damage .
sometimes you can create potholes with that .
ha . he 's ready .
potholes , of course , that can become a problem , but we have a solution .
here you see actually how the damage appears in this material .
it 's a porous asphalt , like i said , so you have only a small amount of binder between the stones .
due to weathering , due to u.v. light , due to oxidation , this binder , this bitumen , the glue between the aggregates is going to shrink , and if it shrinks , it gets micro-cracks , and it delaminates from the aggregates .
then if you drive over the road , you take out the aggregates - what we just saw here .
to solve this problem , we thought of self-healing materials .
if we can make this material self-healing , then probably we have a solution .
so what we can do is use steel wool just to clean pans , and the steel wool we can cut in very small pieces , and these very small pieces we can mix to the bitumen .
so then you have asphalt with very small pieces of steel wool in it .
then you need a machine , like you see here , that you can use for cooking - an induction machine .
induction can heat , especially steel ; it 's very good at that .
then what you do is you heat up the steel , you melt the bitumen , and the bitumen will flow into these micro-cracks , and the stones are again fixed to the surface .
today i use a microwave because i can not take the big induction machine here onstage .
so a microwave is a similar system .
so i put the specimen in , which i 'm now going to take out to see what happened .
so this is the specimen coming out now .
so i said we have such an industrial machine in the lab to heat up the specimens .
we tested a lot of specimens there , and then the government , they actually saw our results , and they thought , " well , that 's very interesting . we have to try that . "
so they donated to us a piece of highway , 400 meters of the a58 , where we had to make a test track to test this material .
so that 's what we did here . you see where we were making the test road , and then of course this road will last several years without any damage . that 's what we know from practice .
so we took a lot of samples from this road and we tested them in the lab .
so we did aging on the samples , did a lot of loading on it , healed them with our induction machine , and healed them and tested them again .
several times we can repeat that .
so actually , the conclusion from this research is that if we go on the road every four years with our healing machine - this is the big version we have made to go on the real road - if we go on the road every four years we can double the surface life of this road , which of course saves a lot of money .
well , to conclude , i can say that we made a material using steel fibers , the addition of steel fibers , using induction energy to really increase the surface life of the road , double the surface life you can even do , so it will really save a lot of money with very simple tricks .
and now you 're of course curious if it also worked .
so we still have the specimen here . it 's quite warm .
actually , it still has to cool down first before i can show you that the healing works .
but i will do a trial .
let 's see . yeah , it worked .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- isadora duncan - -lrb- music -rrb- - crazy , long-legged woman from san francisco , got tired of this country , and she wanted to get out .
isadora was famous somewhere around 1908 for putting up a blue curtain , and she would stand with her hands over her solar plexus and she would wait , and she would wait , and then , she would move .
-lrb- music -rrb- josh and i and somi call this piece " the red circle and the blue curtain . "
red circle .
blue curtain .
but , this is not the beginning of the 20th century .
this is a morning in vancouver in 2015 .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- singing -rrb- come on , josh !
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- singing -rrb- go !
are we there yet ?
i do n't think so .
hey , yeah !
-lrb- music -rrb- what time is it ?
-lrb- music -rrb- where are we ?
josh .
somi .
bill t.
josh .
somi .
bill t.
-lrb- applause -rrb- yeah , yeah !
what i thought i would do is i would start with a simple request .
i 'd like all of you to pause for a moment , you wretched weaklings , and take stock of your miserable existence .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now that was the advice that st. benedict gave his rather startled followers in the fifth century .
it was the advice that i decided to follow myself when i turned 40 .
up until that moment , i had been that classic corporate warrior - i was eating too much , i was drinking too much , i was working too hard and i was neglecting the family .
and i decided that i would try and turn my life around .
in particular , i decided i would try to address the thorny issue of work-life balance .
so i stepped back from the workforce , and i spent a year at home with my wife and four young children .
but all i learned about work-life balance from that year was that i found it quite easy to balance work and life when i did n't have any work .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- not a very useful skill , especially when the money runs out .
so i went back to work , and i 've spent these seven years since struggling with , studying and writing about work-life balance .
and i have four observations i 'd like to share with you today .
the first is : if society 's to make any progress on this issue , we need an honest debate .
but the trouble is so many people talk so much rubbish about work-life balance .
all the discussions about flexi-time or dress-down fridays or paternity leave only serve to mask the core issue , which is that certain job and career choices are fundamentally incompatible with being meaningfully engaged on a day-to-day basis with a young family .
now the first step in solving any problem is acknowledging the reality of the situation you 're in .
and the reality of the society that we 're in is there are thousands and thousands of people out there leading lives of quiet , screaming desperation , where they work long , hard hours at jobs they hate to enable them to buy things they do n't need to impress people they do n't like .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- it 's my contention that going to work on friday in jeans and -lsb- a -rsb- t-shirt is n't really getting to the nub of the issue .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the second observation i 'd like to make is we need to face the truth that governments and corporations are n't going to solve this issue for us .
we should stop looking outside .
it 's up to us as individuals to take control and responsibility for the type of lives that we want to lead .
if you do n't design your life , someone else will design it for you , and you may just not like their idea of balance .
it 's particularly important - this is n't on the world wide web , is it ? i 'm about to get fired - it 's particularly important that you never put the quality of your life in the hands of a commercial corporation .
now i 'm not talking here just about the bad companies - the " abattoirs of the human soul , " as i call them .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'm talking about all companies .
because commercial companies are inherently designed to get as much out of you -lsb- as -rsb- they can get away with .
it 's in their nature ; it 's in their dna ; it 's what they do - even the good , well-intentioned companies .
on the one hand , putting childcare facilities in the workplace is wonderful and enlightened .
on the other hand , it 's a nightmare - it just means you spend more time at the bloody office .
we have to be responsible for setting and enforcing the boundaries that we want in our life .
the third observation is we have to be careful with the time frame that we choose upon which to judge our balance .
before i went back to work after my year at home , i sat down and i wrote out a detailed , step-by-step description of the ideal balanced day that i aspired to .
and it went like this : wake up well rested after a good night 's sleep .
have sex .
walk the dog .
have breakfast with my wife and children .
have sex again .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- drive the kids to school on the way to the office .
do three hours ' work .
play a sport with a friend at lunchtime .
do another three hours ' work .
meet some mates in the pub for an early evening drink .
drive home for dinner with my wife and kids .
meditate for half an hour .
have sex .
walk the dog . have sex again .
go to bed .
-lrb- applause -rrb- how often do you think i have that day ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we need to be realistic .
you ca n't do it all in one day .
we need to elongate the time frame upon which we judge the balance in our life , but we need to elongate it without falling into the trap of the " i 'll have a life when i retire , when my kids have left home , when my wife has divorced me , my health is failing , i 've got no mates or interests left . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- a day is too short ; " after i retire " is too long .
there 's got to be a middle way .
a fourth observation : we need to approach balance in a balanced way .
a friend came to see me last year - and she does n't mind me telling this story - a friend came to see me last year and said , " nigel , i 've read your book .
and i realize that my life is completely out of balance .
it 's totally dominated by work .
i work 10 hours a day ; i commute two hours a day .
all of my relationships have failed .
there 's nothing in my life apart from my work .
so i 've decided to get a grip and sort it out .
so i joined a gym . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now i do n't mean to mock , but being a fit 10-hour-a-day office rat is n't more balanced ; it 's more fit .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- lovely though physical exercise may be , there are other parts to life - there 's the intellectual side ; there 's the emotional side ; there 's the spiritual side .
and to be balanced , i believe we have to attend to all of those areas - not just do 50 stomach crunches .
now that can be daunting .
because people say , " bloody hell mate , i have n't got time to get fit .
you want me to go to church and call my mother . "
and i understand .
i truly understand how that can be daunting .
but an incident that happened a couple of years ago gave me a new perspective .
my wife , who is somewhere in the audience today , called me up at the office and said , " nigel , you need to pick our youngest son " - harry - " up from school . "
because she had to be somewhere else with the other three children for that evening .
so i left work an hour early that afternoon and picked harry up at the school gates .
we walked down to the local park , messed around on the swings , played some silly games .
i then walked him up the hill to the local cafe , and we shared a pizza for two , then walked down the hill to our home , and i gave him his bath and put him in his batman pajamas .
i then read him a chapter of roald dahl 's " james and the giant peach . "
i then put him to bed , tucked him in , gave him a kiss on his forehead and said , " goodnight , mate , " and walked out of his bedroom .
as i was walking out of his bedroom , he said , " dad ? " i went , " yes , mate ? "
he went , " dad , this has been the best day of my life , ever . "
i had n't done anything , had n't taken him to disney world or bought him a playstation .
now my point is the small things matter .
being more balanced does n't mean dramatic upheaval in your life .
with the smallest investment in the right places , you can radically transform the quality of your relationships and the quality of your life .
moreover , i think , it can transform society .
because if enough people do it , we can change society 's definition of success away from the moronically simplistic notion that the person with the most money when he dies wins , to a more thoughtful and balanced definition of what a life well lived looks like .
and that , i think , is an idea worth spreading .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm going to speak today about the relationship between science and human values .
now , it 's generally understood that questions of morality - questions of good and evil and right and wrong - are questions about which science officially has no opinion .
it 's thought that science can help us get what we value , but it can never tell us what we ought to value .
and , consequently , most people - i think most people probably here - think that science will never answer the most important questions in human life : questions like , " what is worth living for ? "
" what is worth dying for ? "
" what constitutes a good life ? "
so , i 'm going to argue that this is an illusion - that the separation between science and human values is an illusion - and actually quite a dangerous one at this point in human history .
now , it 's often said that science can not give us a foundation for morality and human values , because science deals with facts , and facts and values seem to belong to different spheres .
it 's often thought that there 's no description of the way the world is that can tell us how the world ought to be .
but i think this is quite clearly untrue .
values are a certain kind of fact .
they are facts about the well-being of conscious creatures .
why is it that we do n't have ethical obligations toward rocks ?
why do n't we feel compassion for rocks ?
it 's because we do n't think rocks can suffer . and if we 're more concerned about our fellow primates than we are about insects , as indeed we are , it 's because we think they 're exposed to a greater range of potential happiness and suffering .
now , the crucial thing to notice here is that this is a factual claim : this is something that we could be right or wrong about . and if we have misconstrued the relationship between biological complexity and the possibilities of experience well then we could be wrong about the inner lives of insects .
and there 's no notion , no version of human morality and human values that i 've ever come across that is not at some point reducible to a concern about conscious experience and its possible changes .
even if you get your values from religion , even if you think that good and evil ultimately relate to conditions after death - either to an eternity of happiness with god or an eternity of suffering in hell - you are still concerned about consciousness and its changes .
and to say that such changes can persist after death is itself a factual claim , which , of course , may or may not be true .
now , to speak about the conditions of well-being in this life , for human beings , we know that there is a continuum of such facts .
we know that it 's possible to live in a failed state , where everything that can go wrong does go wrong - where mothers can not feed their children , where strangers can not find the basis for peaceful collaboration , where people are murdered indiscriminately .
and we know that it 's possible to move along this continuum towards something quite a bit more idyllic , to a place where a conference like this is even conceivable .
and we know - we know - that there are right and wrong answers to how to move in this space .
would adding cholera to the water be a good idea ?
probably not .
would it be a good idea for everyone to believe in the evil eye , so that when bad things happened to them they immediately blame their neighbors ? probably not .
there are truths to be known about how human communities flourish , whether or not we understand these truths .
and morality relates to these truths .
so , in talking about values we are talking about facts .
now , of course our situation in the world can be understood at many levels - from the level of the genome on up to the level of economic systems and political arrangements .
but if we 're going to talk about human well-being we are , of necessity , talking about the human brain .
because we know that our experience of the world and of ourselves within it is realized in the brain - whatever happens after death .
even if the suicide bomber does get 72 virgins in the afterlife , in this life , his personality - his rather unfortunate personality - is the product of his brain .
so the contributions of culture - if culture changes us , as indeed it does , it changes us by changing our brains .
and so therefore whatever cultural variation there is in how human beings flourish can , at least in principle , be understood in the context of a maturing science of the mind - neuroscience , psychology , etc .
so , what i 'm arguing is that value 's reduced to facts - to facts about the conscious experience of conscious beings .
and we can therefore visualize a space of possible changes in the experience of these beings .
and i think of this as kind of a moral landscape , with peaks and valleys that correspond to differences in the well-being of conscious creatures , both personal and collective .
and one thing to notice is that perhaps there are states of human well-being that we rarely access , that few people access .
and these await our discovery .
perhaps some of these states can be appropriately called mystical or spiritual .
perhaps there are other states that we ca n't access because of how our minds are structured but other minds possibly could access them .
now , let me be clear about what i 'm not saying . i 'm not saying that science is guaranteed to map this space , or that we will have scientific answers to every conceivable moral question .
i do n't think , for instance , that you will one day consult a supercomputer to learn whether you should have a second child , or whether we should bomb iran 's nuclear facilities , or whether you can deduct the full cost of ted as a business expense .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but if questions affect human well-being then they do have answers , whether or not we can find them .
and just admitting this - just admitting that there are right and wrong answers to the question of how humans flourish - will change the way we talk about morality , and will change our expectations of human cooperation in the future .
for instance , there are 21 states in our country where corporal punishment in the classroom is legal , where it is legal for a teacher to beat a child with a wooden board , hard , and raising large bruises and blisters and even breaking the skin .
and hundreds of thousands of children , incidentally , are subjected to this every year .
the locations of these enlightened districts , i think , will fail to surprise you .
we 're not talking about connecticut .
and the rationale for this behavior is explicitly religious .
the creator of the universe himself has told us not to spare the rod , lest we spoil the child - this is in proverbs 13 and 20 , and i believe , 23 .
but we can ask the obvious question : is it a good idea , generally speaking , to subject children to pain and violence and public humiliation as a way of encouraging healthy emotional development and good behavior ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- is there any doubt that this question has an answer , and that it matters ?
now , many of you might worry that the notion of well-being is truly undefined , and seemingly perpetually open to be re-construed .
and so , how therefore can there be an objective notion of well-being ?
well , consider by analogy , the concept of physical health .
the concept of physical health is undefined .
as we just heard from michael specter , it has changed over the years .
when this statue was carved the average life expectancy was probably 30 .
it 's now around 80 in the developed world .
there may come a time when we meddle with our genomes in such a way that not being able to run a marathon at age 200 will be considered a profound disability .
people will send you donations when you 're in that condition .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- notice that the fact that the concept of health is open , genuinely open for revision , does not make it vacuous .
the distinction between a healthy person and a dead one is about as clear and consequential as any we make in science .
another thing to notice is there may be many peaks on the moral landscape : there may be equivalent ways to thrive ; there may be equivalent ways to organize a human society so as to maximize human flourishing .
now , why would n't this undermine an objective morality ?
well think of how we talk about food : i would never be tempted to argue to you that there must be one right food to eat .
there is clearly a range of materials that constitute healthy food .
but there 's nevertheless a clear distinction between food and poison .
the fact that there are many right answers to the question , " what is food ? "
does not tempt us to say that there are no truths to be known about human nutrition .
many people worry that a universal morality would require moral precepts that admit of no exceptions .
so , for instance , if it 's really wrong to lie , it must always be wrong to lie , and if you can find an exception , well then there 's no such thing as moral truth .
why would we think this ?
consider , by analogy , the game of chess .
now , if you 're going to play good chess , a principle like , " do n't lose your queen , " is very good to follow .
but it clearly admits some exceptions .
there are moments when losing your queen is a brilliant thing to do .
there are moments when it is the only good thing you can do .
and yet , chess is a domain of perfect objectivity .
the fact that there are exceptions here does not change that at all .
now , this brings us to the sorts of moves that people are apt to make in the moral sphere .
consider the great problem of women 's bodies : what to do about them ?
well this is one thing you can do about them : you can cover them up .
now , it is the position , generally speaking , of our intellectual community that while we may not like this , we might think of this as " wrong " in boston or palo alto , who are we to say that the proud denizens of an ancient culture are wrong to force their wives and daughters to live in cloth bags ?
and who are we to say , even , that they 're wrong to beat them with lengths of steel cable , or throw battery acid in their faces if they decline the privilege of being smothered in this way ?
well , who are we not to say this ?
who are we to pretend that we know so little about human well-being that we have to be non-judgmental about a practice like this ?
i 'm not talking about voluntary wearing of a veil - women should be able to wear whatever they want , as far as i 'm concerned .
but what does voluntary mean in a community where , when a girl gets raped , her father 's first impulse , rather often , is to murder her out of shame ?
just let that fact detonate in your brain for a minute : your daughter gets raped , and what you want to do is kill her .
what are the chances that represents a peak of human flourishing ?
now , to say this is not to say that we have got the perfect solution in our own society .
for instance , this is what it 's like to go to a newsstand almost anywhere in the civilized world .
now , granted , for many men it may require a degree in philosophy to see something wrong with these images .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but if we are in a reflective mood , we can ask , " is this the perfect expression of psychological balance with respect to variables like youth and beauty and women 's bodies ? "
i mean , is this the optimal environment in which to raise our children ?
probably not . ok , so perhaps there 's some place on the spectrum between these two extremes that represents a place of better balance .
-lrb- applause -rrb- perhaps there are many such places - again , given other changes in human culture there may be many peaks on the moral landscape .
but the thing to notice is that there will be many more ways not to be on a peak .
now the irony , from my perspective , is that the only people who seem to generally agree with me and who think that there are right and wrong answers to moral questions are religious demagogues of one form or another .
and of course they think they have right answers to moral questions because they got these answers from a voice in a whirlwind , not because they made an intelligent analysis of the causes and condition of human and animal well-being .
in fact , the endurance of religion as a lens through which most people view moral questions has separated most moral talk from real questions of human and animal suffering .
this is why we spend our time talking about things like gay marriage and not about genocide or nuclear proliferation or poverty or any other hugely consequential issue .
but the demagogues are right about one thing : we need a universal conception of human values .
now , what stands in the way of this ?
well , one thing to notice is that we do something different when talking about morality - especially secular , academic , scientist types .
when talking about morality we value differences of opinion in a way that we do n't in any other area of our lives .
so , for instance the dalai lama gets up every morning meditating on compassion , and he thinks that helping other human beings is an integral component of human happiness .
on the other hand , we have someone like ted bundy ; ted bundy was very fond of abducting and raping and torturing and killing young women .
so , we appear to have a genuine difference of opinion about how to profitably use one 's time .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- most western intellectuals look at this situation and say , " well , there 's nothing for the dalai lama to be really right about - really right about - or for ted bundy to be really wrong about that admits of a real argument that potentially falls within the purview of science .
he likes chocolate , he likes vanilla .
there 's nothing that one should be able to say to the other that should persuade the other . "
notice that we do n't do this in science .
on the left you have edward witten .
he 's a string theorist .
if you ask the smartest physicists around who is the smartest physicist around , in my experience half of them will say ed witten .
the other half will tell you they do n't like the question .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , what would happen if i showed up at a physics conference and said , " string theory is bogus .
it does n't resonate with me . it 's not how i chose to view the universe at a small scale .
i 'm not a fan . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- well , nothing would happen because i 'm not a physicist ; i do n't understand string theory .
i 'm the ted bundy of string theory .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i would n't want to belong to any string theory club that would have me as a member .
but this is just the point .
whenever we are talking about facts certain opinions must be excluded .
that is what it is to have a domain of expertise .
that is what it is for knowledge to count .
how have we convinced ourselves that in the moral sphere there is no such thing as moral expertise , or moral talent , or moral genius even ?
how have we convinced ourselves that every opinion has to count ?
how have we convinced ourselves that every culture has a point of view on these subjects worth considering ?
does the taliban have a point of view on physics that is worth considering ? no .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- how is their ignorance any less obvious on the subject of human well-being ?
-lrb- applause -rrb- so , this , i think , is what the world needs now .
it needs people like ourselves to admit that there are right and wrong answers to questions of human flourishing , and morality relates to that domain of facts .
it is possible for individuals , and even for whole cultures , to care about the wrong things , which is to say that it 's possible for them to have beliefs and desires that reliably lead to needless human suffering .
just admitting this will transform our discourse about morality .
we live in a world in which the boundaries between nations mean less and less , and they will one day mean nothing .
we live in a world filled with destructive technology , and this technology can not be uninvented ; it will always be easier to break things than to fix them .
it seems to me , therefore , patently obvious that we can no more respect and tolerate vast differences in notions of human well-being than we can respect or tolerate vast differences in the notions about how disease spreads , or in the safety standards of buildings and airplanes .
we simply must converge on the answers we give to the most important questions in human life .
and to do that , we have to admit that these questions have answers .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : so , some combustible material there .
whether in this audience or people elsewhere in the world , hearing some of this , may well be doing the screaming-with-rage thing , after as well , some of them .
language seems to be really important here .
when you 're talking about the veil , you 're talking about women dressed in cloth bags .
i 've lived in the muslim world , spoken with a lot of muslim women .
and some of them would say something else . they would say , " no , you know , this is a celebration of female specialness , it helps build that and it 's a result of the fact that " - and this is arguably a sophisticated psychological view - " that male lust is not to be trusted . "
i mean , can you engage in a conversation with that kind of woman without seeming kind of cultural imperialist ?
sam harris : yeah , well i think i tried to broach this in a sentence , watching the clock ticking , but the question is : what is voluntary in a context where men have certain expectations , and you 're guaranteed to be treated in a certain way if you do n't veil yourself ?
and so , if anyone in this room wanted to wear a veil , or a very funny hat , or tattoo their face - i think we should be free to voluntarily do whatever we want , but we have to be honest about the constraints that these women are placed under .
and so i think we should n't be so eager to always take their word for it , especially when it 's 120 degrees out and you 're wearing a full burqa .
ca : a lot of people want to believe in this concept of moral progress .
but can you reconcile that ?
i think i understood you to say that you could reconcile that with a world that does n't become one dimensional , where we all have to think the same .
paint your picture of what rolling the clock 50 years forward , 100 years forward , how you would like to think of the world , balancing moral progress with richness .
sh : well , i think once you admit that we are on the path toward understanding our minds at the level of the brain in some important detail , then you have to admit that we are going to understand all of the positive and negative qualities of ourselves in much greater detail .
so , we 're going to understand positive social emotion like empathy and compassion , and we 're going to understand the factors that encourage it - whether they 're genetic , whether they 're how people talk to one another , whether they 're economic systems , and insofar as we begin to shine light on that we are inevitably going to converge on that fact space .
so , everything is not going to be up for grabs .
it 's not going to be like veiling my daughter from birth is just as good as teaching her to be confident and well-educated in the context of men who do desire women .
i mean i do n't think we need an nsf grant to know that compulsory veiling is a bad idea - but at a certain point we 're going to be able to scan the brains of everyone involved and actually interrogate them .
do people love their daughters just as much in these systems ?
and i think there are clearly right answers to that .
ca : and if the results come out that actually they do , are you prepared to shift your instinctive current judgment on some of these issues ?
sh : well yeah , modulo one obvious fact , that you can love someone in the context of a truly delusional belief system .
so , you can say like , " because i knew my gay son was going to go to hell if he found a boyfriend , i chopped his head off . and that was the most compassionate thing i could do . "
if you get all those parts aligned , yes i think you could probably be feeling the emotion of love .
but again , then we have to talk about well-being in a larger context .
it 's all of us in this together , not one man feeling ecstasy and then blowing himself up on a bus .
ca : sam , this is a conversation i would actually love to continue for hours .
we do n't have that , but maybe another time . thank you for coming to ted .
sh : really an honor . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- salaam . namaskar .
good morning .
given my ted profile , you might be expecting that i 'm going to speak to you about the latest philanthropic trends - the one that 's currently got wall street and the world bank buzzing - how to invest in women , how to empower them , how to save them .
not me .
i am interested in how women are saving us .
they 're saving us by redefining and re-imagining a future that defies and blurs accepted polarities , polarities we 've taken for granted for a long time , like the ones between modernity and tradition , first world and third world , oppression and opportunity .
in the midst of the daunting challenges we face as a global community , there 's something about this third way raga that is making my heart sing .
what intrigues me most is how women are doing this , despite a set of paradoxes that are both frustrating and fascinating .
why is it that women are , on the one hand , viciously oppressed by cultural practices , and yet at the same time , are the preservers of cultures in most societies ?
is the hijab or the headscarf a symbol of submission or resistance ?
when so many women and girls are beaten , raped , maimed on a daily basis in the name of all kinds of causes - honor , religion , nationality - what allows women to replant trees , to rebuild societies , to lead radical , non-violent movements for social change ?
is it different women who are doing the preserving and the radicalizing ?
or are they one and the same ?
are we guilty , as chimamanda adichie reminded us at the ted conference in oxford , of assuming that there is a single story of women 's struggles for their rights while there are , in fact , many ?
and what , if anything , do men have to do with it ?
much of my life has been a quest to get some answers to these questions .
it 's taken me across the globe and introduced me to some amazing people .
in the process , i 've gathered a few fragments that help me shed some light on this puzzle .
among those who 've helped open my eyes to a third way are : a devout muslim in afghanistan , a group of harmonizing lesbians in croatia and a taboo breaker in liberia .
i 'm indebted to them , as i am to my parents , who for some set of misdemeanors in their last life , were blessed with three daughters in this one .
and for reasons equally unclear to me , seem to be inordinately proud of the three of us .
i was born and raised here in india , and i learned from an early age to be deeply suspicious of the aunties and uncles who would bend down , pat us on the head and then say to my parents with no problem at all , " poor things . you only have three daughters .
but you 're young , you could still try again . "
my sense of outrage about women 's rights was brought to a boil when i was about 11 .
my aunt , an incredibly articulate and brilliant woman , was widowed early .
a flock of relatives descended on her .
they took off her colorful sari .
they made her wear a white one .
they wiped her bindi off her forehead .
they broke her bangles .
her daughter , rani , a few years older than me , sat in her lap bewildered , not knowing what had happened to the confident woman she once knew as her mother .
late that night , i heard my mother begging my father , " please do something ramu . ca n't you intervene ? "
and my father , in a low voice , muttering , " i 'm just the youngest brother , there 's nothing i can do .
this is tradition . "
that 's the night i learned the rules about what it means to be female in this world .
women do n't make those rules , but they define us , and they define our opportunities and our chances .
and men are affected by those rules too .
my father , who had fought in three wars , could not save his own sister from this suffering .
by 18 , under the excellent tutelage of my mother , i was therefore , as you might expect , defiantly feminist .
on the streets chanting , " -lsb- hindi -rsb- -lsb- hindi -rsb- we are the women of india .
we are not flowers , we are sparks of change . "
by the time i got to beijing in 1995 , it was clear to me , the only way to achieve gender equality was to overturn centuries of oppressive tradition .
soon after i returned from beijing , i leapt at the chance to work for this wonderful organization , founded by women , to support women 's rights organizations around the globe .
but barely six months into my new job , i met a woman who forced me to challenge all my assumptions .
her name is sakena yacoobi .
she walked into my office at a time when no one knew where afghanistan was in the united states .
she said to me , " it is not about the burka . "
she was the most determined advocate for women 's rights i had ever heard .
she told me women were running underground schools in her communities inside afghanistan , and that her organization , the afghan institute of learning , had started a school in pakistan .
she said , " the first thing anyone who is a muslim knows is that the koran requires and strongly supports literacy .
the prophet wanted every believer to be able to read the koran for themselves . "
had i heard right ?
was a women 's rights advocate invoking religion ?
but sakena defies labels .
she always wears a headscarf , but i 've walked alongside with her on a beach with her long hair flying in the breeze .
she starts every lecture with a prayer , but she 's a single , feisty , financially independent woman in a country where girls are married off at the age of 12 .
she is also immensely pragmatic .
" this headscarf and these clothes , " she says , " give me the freedom to do what i need to do to speak to those whose support and assistance are critical for this work .
when i had to open the school in the refugee camp , i went to see the imam .
i told him , ' i 'm a believer , and women and children in these terrible conditions need their faith to survive . " ' she smiles slyly .
" he was flattered .
he began to come twice a week to my center because women could not go to the mosque .
and after he would leave , women and girls would stay behind .
we began with a small literacy class to read the koran , then a math class , then an english class , then computer classes .
in a few weeks , everyone in the refugee camp was in our classes . "
sakena is a teacher at a time when to educate women is a dangerous business in afghanistan .
she is on the taliban 's hit list .
i worry about her every time she travels across that country .
she shrugs when i ask her about safety .
" kavita jaan , we can not allow ourselves to be afraid .
look at those young girls who go back to school when acid is thrown in their face . "
and i smile , and i nod , realizing i 'm watching women and girls using their own religious traditions and practices , turning them into instruments of opposition and opportunity .
their path is their own and it looks towards an afghanistan that will be different .
being different is something the women of lesbor in zagreb , croatia know all too well .
to be a lesbian , a dyke , a homosexual in most parts of the world , including right here in our country , india , is to occupy a place of immense discomfort and extreme prejudice .
in post-conflict societies like croatia , where a hyper-nationalism and religiosity have created an environment unbearable for anyone who might be considered a social outcast .
so enter a group of out dykes , young women who love the old music that once spread across that region from macedonia to bosnia , from serbia to slovenia .
these folk singers met at college at a gender studies program .
many are in their 20s , some are mothers .
many have struggled to come out to their communities , in families whose religious beliefs make it hard to accept that their daughters are not sick , just queer .
as leah , one of the founders of the group , says , " i like traditional music very much .
i also like rock and roll .
so lesbor , we blend the two .
i see traditional music like a kind of rebellion , in which people can really speak their voice , especially traditional songs from other parts of the former yugoslav republic .
after the war , lots of these songs were lost , but they are a part of our childhood and our history , and we should not forget them . "
improbably , this lgbt singing choir has demonstrated how women are investing in tradition to create change , like alchemists turning discord into harmony .
their repertoire includes the croatian national anthem , a bosnian love song and serbian duets .
and , leah adds with a grin , " kavita , we especially are proud of our christmas music , because it shows we are open to religious practices even though catholic church hates us lgbt . "
their concerts draw from their own communities , yes , but also from an older generation : a generation that might be suspicious of homosexuality , but is nostalgic for its own music and the past it represents .
one father , who had initially balked at his daughter coming out in such a choir , now writes songs for them .
in the middle ages , troubadours would travel across the land singing their tales and sharing their verses : lesbor travels through the balkans like this , singing , connecting people divided by religion , nationality and language .
bosnians , croats and serbs find a rare shared space of pride in their history , and lesbor reminds them that the songs one group often claims as theirs alone really belong to them all .
-lrb- singing -rrb- yesterday , mallika sarabhai showed us that music can create a world more accepting of difference than the one we have been given .
the world leymah gbowee was given was a world at war .
liberia had been torn apart by civil strife for decades .
leymah was not an activist , she was a mother of three .
but she was sick with worry : she worried her son would be abducted and taken off to be a child soldier , she worried her daughters would be raped , she worried for their lives .
one night , she had a dream .
she dreamt she and thousands of other women ended the bloodshed .
the next morning at church , she asked others how they felt .
they were all tired of the fighting .
we need peace , and we need our leaders to know we will not rest until there is peace .
among leymah 's friends was a policewoman who was muslim .
she promised to raise the issue with her community .
at the next friday sermon , the women who were sitting in the side room of the mosque began to share their distress at the state of affairs .
" what does it matter ? " they said , " a bullet does n't distinguish between a muslim and a christian . "
this small group of women , determined to bring an end to the war , and they chose to use their traditions to make a point : liberian women usually wear lots of jewelry and colorful clothing .
but no , for the protest , they dressed all in white , no makeup .
as leymah said , " we wore the white saying we were out for peace . "
they stood on the side of the road on which charles taylor 's motorcade passed every day .
they stood for weeks - first just 10 , then 20 , then 50 , then hundreds of women - wearing white , singing , dancing , saying they were out for peace .
eventually , opposing forces in liberia were pushed to hold peace talks in ghana .
the peace talks dragged on and on and on .
leymah and her sisters had had enough .
with their remaining funds , they took a small group of women down to the venue of the peace talks and they surrounded the building .
in a now famous cnn clip , you can see them sitting on the ground , their arms linked .
we know this in india . it 's called a -lsb- hindi -rsb- .
then things get tense .
the police are called in to physically remove the women .
as the senior officer approaches with a baton , leymah stands up with deliberation , reaches her arms up over her head , and begins , very slowly , to untie her headdress that covers her hair .
you can see the policeman 's face .
he looks embarrassed . he backs away .
and the next thing you know , the police have disappeared .
leymah said to me later , " it 's a taboo , you know , in west africa .
if an older woman undresses in front of a man because she wants to , the man 's family is cursed . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- she said , " i do n't know if he did it because he believed , but he knew we were not going to leave .
we were not going to leave until the peace accord was signed . "
and the peace accord was signed .
and the women of liberia then mobilized in support of ellen johnson sirleaf , a woman who broke a few taboos herself becoming the first elected woman head of state in africa in years .
when she made her presidential address , she acknowledged these brave women of liberia who allowed her to win against a football star - that 's soccer for you americans - no less .
women like sakena and leah and leymah have humbled me and changed me and made me realize that i should not be so quick to jump to assumptions of any kind .
they 've also saved me from my righteous anger by offering insights into this third way .
a filipina activist once said to me , " how do you cook a rice cake ?
with heat from the bottom and heat from the top . "
the protests , the marches , the uncompromising position that women 's rights are human rights , full stop .
that 's the heat from the bottom .
that 's malcolm x and the suffragists and gay pride parades .
but we also need the heat from the top .
and in most parts of the world , that top is still controlled by men .
so to paraphrase marx : women make change , but not in circumstances of their own choosing .
they have to negotiate .
they have to subvert tradition that once silenced them in order to give voice to new aspirations .
and they need allies from their communities .
allies like the imam , allies like the father who now writes songs for a lesbian group in croatia , allies like the policeman who honored a taboo and backed away , allies like my father , who could n't help his sister but has helped three daughters pursue their dreams .
maybe this is because feminism , unlike almost every other social movement , is not a struggle against a distinct oppressor - it 's not the ruling class or the occupiers or the colonizers - it 's against a deeply held set of beliefs and assumptions that we women , far too often , hold ourselves .
and perhaps this is the ultimate gift of feminism , that the personal is in fact the political .
so that , as eleanor roosevelt said once of human rights , the same is true of gender equality : that it starts in small places , close to home .
on the streets , yes , but also in negotiations at the kitchen table and in the marital bed and in relationships between lovers and parents and sisters and friends .
and then you realize that by integrating aspects of tradition and community into their struggles , women like sakena and leah and leymah - but also women like sonia gandhi here in india and michelle bachelet in chile and shirin ebadi in iran - are doing something else .
they 're challenging the very notion of western models of development .
they are saying , we do n't have to be like you to make change .
we can wear a sari or a hijab or pants or a boubou , and we can be party leaders and presidents and human rights lawyers .
we can use our tradition to navigate change .
we can demilitarize societies and pour resources , instead , into reservoirs of genuine security .
it is in these little stories , these individual stories , that i see a radical epic being written by women around the world .
it is in these threads that are being woven into a resilient fabric that will sustain communities , that i find hope .
and if my heart is singing , it 's because in these little fragments , every now and again , you catch a glimpse of a whole , of a whole new world .
and she is definitely on her way .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so it 's 1995 , i 'm in college , and a friend and i go on a road trip from providence , rhode island to portland , oregon .
and you know , we 're young and unemployed , so we do the whole thing on back roads through state parks and national forests - basically the longest route we can possibly take .
and somewhere in the middle of south dakota , i turn to my friend and i ask her a question that 's been bothering me for 2,000 miles .
" what 's up with the chinese character i keep seeing by the side of the road ? "
my friend looks at me totally blankly .
there 's actually a gentleman in the front row who 's doing a perfect imitation of her look .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i 'm like , " you know , all the signs we keep seeing with the chinese character on them . "
she just stares at me for a few moments , and then she cracks up , because she figures out what i 'm talking about .
and what i 'm talking about is this .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- right , the famous chinese character for picnic area .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i 've spent the last five years of my life thinking about situations exactly like this - why we sometimes misunderstand the signs around us , and how we behave when that happens , and what all of this can tell us about human nature .
in other words , as you heard chris say , i 've spent the last five years thinking about being wrong .
this might strike you as a strange career move , but it actually has one great advantage : no job competition .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- in fact , most of us do everything we can to avoid thinking about being wrong , or at least to avoid thinking about the possibility that we ourselves are wrong .
we get it in the abstract .
we all know everybody in this room makes mistakes .
the human species , in general , is fallible - okay fine .
but when it comes down to me , right now , to all the beliefs i hold , here in the present tense , suddenly all of this abstract appreciation of fallibility goes out the window - and i ca n't actually think of anything i 'm wrong about .
and the thing is , the present tense is where we live .
we go to meetings in the present tense ; we go on family vacations in the present tense ; we go to the polls and vote in the present tense .
so effectively , we all kind of wind up traveling through life , trapped in this little bubble of feeling very right about everything .
i think this is a problem .
i think it 's a problem for each of us as individuals , in our personal and professional lives , and i think it 's a problem for all of us collectively as a culture .
so what i want to do today is , first of all , talk about why we get stuck inside this feeling of being right .
and second , why it 's such a problem .
and finally , i want to convince you that it is possible to step outside of that feeling and that if you can do so , it is the single greatest moral , intellectual and creative leap you can make .
so why do we get stuck in this feeling of being right ?
one reason , actually , has to do with a feeling of being wrong .
so let me ask you guys something - or actually , let me ask you guys something , because you 're right here : how does it feel - emotionally - how does it feel to be wrong ?
dreadful . thumbs down .
embarrassing . okay , wonderful , great .
dreadful , thumbs down , embarrassing - thank you , these are great answers , but they 're answers to a different question .
you guys are answering the question : how does it feel to realize you 're wrong ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- realizing you 're wrong can feel like all of that and a lot of other things , right ?
i mean it can be devastating , it can be revelatory , it can actually be quite funny , like my stupid chinese character mistake .
but just being wrong does n't feel like anything .
i 'll give you an analogy .
do you remember that loony tunes cartoon where there 's this pathetic coyote who 's always chasing and never catching a roadrunner ?
in pretty much every episode of this cartoon , there 's a moment where the coyote is chasing the roadrunner and the roadrunner runs off a cliff , which is fine - he 's a bird , he can fly .
but the thing is , the coyote runs off the cliff right after him .
and what 's funny - at least if you 're six years old - is that the coyote 's totally fine too .
he just keeps running - right up until the moment that he looks down and realizes that he 's in mid-air .
that 's when he falls .
when we 're wrong about something - not when we realize it , but before that - we 're like that coyote after he 's gone off the cliff and before he looks down .
you know , we 're already wrong , we 're already in trouble , but we feel like we 're on solid ground .
so i should actually correct something i said a moment ago .
it does feel like something to be wrong ; it feels like being right .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so this is one reason , a structural reason , why we get stuck inside this feeling of rightness .
i call this error blindness .
most of the time , we do n't have any kind of internal cue to let us know that we 're wrong about something , until it 's too late .
but there 's a second reason that we get stuck inside this feeling as well - and this one is cultural .
think back for a moment to elementary school .
you 're sitting there in class , and your teacher is handing back quiz papers , and one of them looks like this .
this is not mine , by the way .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so there you are in grade school , and you know exactly what to think about the kid who got this paper .
it 's the dumb kid , the troublemaker , the one who never does his homework .
so by the time you are nine years old , you 've already learned , first of all , that people who get stuff wrong are lazy , irresponsible dimwits - and second of all , that the way to succeed in life is to never make any mistakes .
we learn these really bad lessons really well .
and a lot of us - and i suspect , especially a lot of us in this room - deal with them by just becoming perfect little a students , perfectionists , over-achievers .
right , mr. cfo , astrophysicist , ultra-marathoner ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you 're all cfo , astrophysicists , ultra-marathoners , it turns out .
okay , so fine .
except that then we freak out at the possibility that we 've gotten something wrong .
because according to this , getting something wrong means there 's something wrong with us .
so we just insist that we 're right , because it makes us feel smart and responsible and virtuous and safe .
so let me tell you a story .
a couple of years ago , a woman comes into beth israel deaconess medical center for a surgery .
beth israel 's in boston .
it 's the teaching hospital for harvard - one of the best hospitals in the country .
so this woman comes in and she 's taken into the operating room .
she 's anesthetized , the surgeon does his thing - stitches her back up , sends her out to the recovery room .
everything seems to have gone fine .
and she wakes up , and she looks down at herself , and she says , " why is the wrong side of my body in bandages ? "
well the wrong side of her body is in bandages because the surgeon has performed a major operation on her left leg instead of her right one .
when the vice president for health care quality at beth israel spoke about this incident , he said something very interesting .
he said , " for whatever reason , the surgeon simply felt that he was on the correct side of the patient . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the point of this story is that trusting too much in the feeling of being on the correct side of anything can be very dangerous .
this internal sense of rightness that we all experience so often is not a reliable guide to what is actually going on in the external world .
and when we act like it is , and we stop entertaining the possibility that we could be wrong , well that 's when we end up doing things like dumping 200 million gallons of oil into the gulf of mexico , or torpedoing the global economy .
so this is a huge practical problem .
but it 's also a huge social problem .
think for a moment about what it means to feel right .
it means that you think that your beliefs just perfectly reflect reality .
and when you feel that way , you 've got a problem to solve , which is , how are you going to explain all of those people who disagree with you ?
it turns out , most of us explain those people the same way , by resorting to a series of unfortunate assumptions .
the first thing we usually do when someone disagrees with us is we just assume they 're ignorant .
they do n't have access to the same information that we do , and when we generously share that information with them , they 're going to see the light and come on over to our team .
when that does n't work , when it turns out those people have all the same facts that we do and they still disagree with us , then we move on to a second assumption , which is that they 're idiots .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- they have all the right pieces of the puzzle , and they are too moronic to put them together correctly .
and when that does n't work , when it turns out that people who disagree with us have all the same facts we do and are actually pretty smart , then we move on to a third assumption : they know the truth , and they are deliberately distorting it for their own malevolent purposes .
so this is a catastrophe .
this attachment to our own rightness keeps us from preventing mistakes when we absolutely need to and causes us to treat each other terribly .
but to me , what 's most baffling and most tragic about this is that it misses the whole point of being human .
it 's like we want to imagine that our minds are just these perfectly translucent windows and we just gaze out of them and describe the world as it unfolds .
and we want everybody else to gaze out of the same window and see the exact same thing .
that is not true , and if it were , life would be incredibly boring .
the miracle of your mind is n't that you can see the world as it is .
it 's that you can see the world as it is n't .
we can remember the past , and we can think about the future , and we can imagine what it 's like to be some other person in some other place .
and we all do this a little differently , which is why we can all look up at the same night sky and see this and also this and also this .
and yeah , it is also why we get things wrong .
1,200 years before descartes said his famous thing about " i think therefore i am , " this guy , st. augustine , sat down and wrote " fallor ergo sum " - " i err therefore i am . "
augustine understood that our capacity to screw up , it 's not some kind of embarrassing defect in the human system , something we can eradicate or overcome .
it 's totally fundamental to who we are .
because , unlike god , we do n't really know what 's going on out there .
and unlike all of the other animals , we are obsessed with trying to figure it out .
to me , this obsession is the source and root of all of our productivity and creativity .
last year , for various reasons , of the public radio show this american life .
and so i 'm listening and i 'm listening , and at some point , i start feeling like all the stories are about being wrong .
and my first thought was , " i 've lost it .
i 've become the crazy wrongness lady .
i just imagined it everywhere , " which has happened .
but a couple of months later , i actually had a chance to interview ira glass , who 's the host of the show .
and i mentioned this to him , and he was like , " no actually , that 's true .
in fact , " he says , " as a staff , we joke that every single episode of our show has the same crypto-theme .
and the crypto-theme is : ' i thought this one thing was going to happen and something else happened instead . ' and the thing is , " says ira glass , " we need this .
we need these moments of surprise and reversal and wrongness to make these stories work . "
and for the rest of us , audience members , as listeners , as readers , we eat this stuff up .
we love things like plot twists and red herrings and surprise endings .
when it comes to our stories , we love being wrong .
but , you know , our stories are like this because our lives are like this .
we think this one thing is going to happen and something else happens instead .
george bush thought he was going to invade iraq , find a bunch of weapons of mass destruction , liberate the people and bring democracy to the middle east .
and something else happened instead .
and hosni mubarak thought he was going to be the dictator of egypt for the rest of his life , until he got too old or too sick and could pass the reigns of power onto his son .
and something else happened instead .
and maybe you thought you were going to grow up and marry your high school sweetheart and move back to your hometown and raise a bunch of kids together .
and something else happened instead .
and i have to tell you that i thought i was writing an incredibly nerdy book about a subject everybody hates for an audience that would never materialize .
and something else happened instead .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i mean , this is life .
for good and for ill , we generate these incredible stories about the world around us , and then the world turns around and astonishes us .
no offense , but this entire conference is an unbelievable monument to our capacity to get stuff wrong .
we just spent an entire week talking about innovations and advancements and improvements , but you know why we need all of those innovations and advancements and improvements ?
because half the stuff that 's the most mind-boggling and world-altering - ted 1998 - eh .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- did n't really work out that way , did it ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- where 's my jet pack , chris ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so here we are again .
and that 's how it goes .
we come up with another idea .
we tell another story .
we hold another conference .
the theme of this one , as you guys have now heard seven million times , is the rediscovery of wonder .
and to me , if you really want to rediscover wonder , you need to step outside of that tiny , terrified space of rightness and look around at each other and look out at the vastness and complexity and mystery of the universe and be able to say , " wow , i do n't know .
maybe i 'm wrong . "
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you guys .
-lrb- applause -rrb- many times i go around the world to speak , and people ask me questions about the challenges , my moments , some of my regrets .
1998 : a single mother of four , three months after the birth of my fourth child , i went to do a job as a research assistant .
i went to northern liberia .
and as part of the work , the village would give you lodgings .
and they gave me lodging with a single mother and her daughter .
this girl happened to be the only girl in the entire village who had made it to the ninth grade .
she was the laughing stock of the community .
her mother was often told by other women , " you and your child will die poor . "
after two weeks of working in that village , it was time to go back .
the mother came to me , knelt down , and said , " leymah , take my daughter .
i wish for her to be a nurse . "
dirt poor , living in the home with my parents , i could n't afford to .
with tears in my eyes , i said , " no . "
two months later , i go to another village on the same assignment and they asked me to live with the village chief .
the women 's chief of the village has this little girl , fair color like me , totally dirty .
and all day she walked around only in her underwear .
when i asked , " who is that ? "
she said , " that 's wei .
the meaning of her name is pig .
her mother died while giving birth to her , and no one had any idea who her father was . "
for two weeks , she became my companion , slept with me .
i bought her used clothes and bought her her first doll .
the night before i left , she came to the room and said , " leymah , do n't leave me here .
i wish to go with you .
i wish to go to school . "
dirt poor , no money , living with my parents , i again said , " no . "
two months later , both of those villages fell into another war .
till today , i have no idea where those two girls are .
fast-forward , 2004 : in the peak of our activism , the minister of gender liberia called me and said , " leymah , i have a nine-year-old for you .
i want you to bring her home because we do n't have safe homes . "
the story of this little girl : she had been raped by her paternal grandfather every day for six months .
she came to me bloated , very pale .
every night i 'd come from work and lie on the cold floor .
she 'd lie beside me and say , " auntie , i wish to be well .
i wish to go to school . "
2010 : a young woman stands before president sirleaf and gives her testimony of how she and her siblings live together , their father and mother died during the war .
she 's 19 ; her dream is to go to college to be able to support them .
she 's highly athletic .
one of the things that happens is that she applies for a scholarship .
full scholarship . she gets it .
her dream of going to school , her wish of being educated , is finally here .
she goes to school on the first day .
the director of sports who 's responsible for getting her into the program asks her to come out of class .
and for the next three years , her fate will be having sex with him every day , as a favor for getting her in school .
globally , we have policies , international instruments , work leaders .
great people have made commitments - we will protect our children from want and from fear .
the u.n. has the convention on the rights of the child .
countries like america , we 've heard things like no child left behind .
other countries come with different things .
there is a millennium development called three that focuses on girls .
all of these great works by great people aimed at getting young people to where we want to get them globally , i think , has failed .
in liberia , for example , the teenage pregnancy rate is three to every 10 girls .
teen prostitution is at its peak .
in one community , we 're told , you wake up in the morning and see used condoms like used chewing gum paper .
girls as young as 12 being prostituted for less than a dollar a night .
it 's disheartening , it 's sad .
and then someone asked me , just before my tedtalk , a few days ago , " so where is the hope ? "
several years ago , a few friends of mine decided we needed to bridge the disconnect between our generation and the generation of young women .
it 's not enough to say you have two nobel laureates from the republic of liberia when your girls ' kids are totally out there and no hope , or seemingly no hope .
we created a space called the young girls transformative project .
we go into rural communities and all we do , like has been done in this room , is create the space .
when these girls sit , you unlock intelligence , you unlock passion , you unlock commitment , you unlock focus , you unlock great leaders .
today , we 've worked with over 300 .
and some of those girls who walked in the room very shy have taken bold steps , as young mothers , to go out there and advocate for the rights of other young women .
one young woman i met , teen mother of four , never thought about finishing high school , graduated successfully ; never thought about going to college , enrolled in college .
one day she said to me , " my wish is to finish college and be able to support my children . "
she 's at a place where she ca n't find money to go to school .
she sells water , sells soft drinks and sells recharge cards for cellphones .
and you would think she would take that money and put it back into her education .
juanita is her name .
she takes that money and finds single mothers in her community to send back to school .
says , " leymah , my wish is to be educated .
and if i ca n't be educated , when i see some of my sisters being educated , my wish has been fulfilled .
i wish for a better life .
i wish for food for my children .
i wish that sexual abuse and exploitation in schools would stop . "
this is the dream of the african girl .
several years ago , there was one african girl .
this girl had a son who wished for a piece of doughnut because he was extremely hungry .
angry , frustrated , really upset about the state of her society and the state of her children , this young girl started a movement , a movement of ordinary women banding together to build peace .
i will fulfill the wish .
this is another african girl 's wish .
i failed to fulfill the wish of those two girls .
i failed to do this .
these were the things that were going through the head of this other young woman - i failed , i failed , i failed .
so i will do this .
women came out , protested a brutal dictator , fearlessly spoke .
not only did the wish of a piece of doughnut come true , the wish of peace came true .
this young woman wished also to go to school .
she went to school .
this young woman wished for other things to happen , it happened for her .
today , this young woman is me , a nobel laureate .
i 'm now on a journey to fulfill the wish , in my tiny capacity , of little african girls - the wish of being educated .
we set up a foundation .
we 're giving full four-year scholarships to girls from villages that we see with potential .
i do n't have much to ask of you .
i 've also been to places in this u.s. , and i know that girls in this country also have wishes , a wish for a better life somewhere in the bronx , a wish for a better life somewhere in downtown l.a. , a wish for a better life somewhere in texas , a wish for a better life somewhere in new york , a wish for a better life somewhere in new jersey .
will you journey with me to help that girl , be it an african girl or an american girl or a japanese girl , fulfill her wish , fulfill her dream , achieve that dream ?
because all of these great innovators and inventors that we 've talked to and seen over the last few days are also sitting in tiny corners in different parts of the world , and all they 're asking us to do is create that space to unlock the intelligence , unlock the passion , unlock all of the great things that they hold within themselves .
let 's journey together . let 's journey together .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : thank you so much .
right now in liberia , what do you see as the main issue that troubles you ?
lg : i 've been asked to lead the liberian reconciliation initiative .
as part of my work , i 'm doing these tours in different villages and towns - 13 , 15 hours on dirt roads - and there is no community that i 've gone into that i have n't seen intelligent girls .
but sadly , the vision of a great future , or the dream of a great future , is just a dream , because you have all of these vices .
teen pregnancy , like i said , is epidemic .
so what troubles me is that i was at that place and somehow i 'm at this place , and i just do n't want to be the only one at this place .
i 'm looking for ways for other girls to be with me .
i want to look back 20 years from now and see that there 's another liberian girl , ghanaian girl , nigerian girl , ethiopian girl standing on this ted stage .
and maybe , just maybe , saying , " because of that nobel laureate i 'm here today . "
so i 'm troubled when i see them like there 's no hope .
but i 'm also not pessimistic , because i know it does n't take a lot to get them charged up .
ca : and in the last year , tell us one hopeful thing that you 've seen happening .
lg : i can tell you many hopeful things that i 've seen happening .
but in the last year , where president sirleaf comes from , her village , we went there to work with these girls .
and we could not find 25 girls in high school .
all of these girls went to the gold mine , and they were predominantly prostitutes doing other things .
we took 50 of those girls and we worked with them .
and this was at the beginning of elections .
this is one place where women were never - even the older ones barely sat in the circle with the men .
these girls banded together and formed a group and launched a campaign for voter registration .
this is a real rural village .
and the theme they used was : " even pretty girls vote . "
they were able to mobilize young women .
but not only did they do that , they went to those who were running for seats to ask them , " what is it that you will give the girls of this community when you win ? "
and one of the guys who already had a seat was very - because liberia has one of the strongest rape laws , and he was one of those really fighting in parliament to overturn that law because he called it barbaric .
rape is not barbaric , but the law , he said , was barbaric .
and when the girls started engaging him , he was very hostile towards them .
these little girls turned to him and said , " we will vote you out of office . "
he 's out of office today .
-lrb- applause -rrb- ca : leymah , thank you . thank you so much for coming to ted .
lg : you 're welcome . -lrb- ca : thank you . -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- hi . so i 'd like to talk a little bit about the people who make the things we use every day : our shoes , our handbags , our computers and cell phones .
now , this is a conversation that often calls up a lot of guilt .
imagine the teenage farm girl who makes less than a dollar an hour stitching your running shoes , or the young chinese man who jumps off a rooftop after working overtime assembling your ipad .
we , the beneficiaries of globalization , seem to exploit these victims with every purchase we make , and the injustice feels embedded in the products themselves .
after all , what 's wrong with a world in which a worker on an iphone assembly line ca n't even afford to buy one ?
it 's taken for granted that chinese factories are oppressive , and that it 's our desire for cheap goods that makes them so .
so , this simple narrative equating western demand and chinese suffering is appealing , especially at a time when many of us already feel guilty about our impact on the world , but it 's also inaccurate and disrespectful .
we must be peculiarly self-obsessed to imagine that we have the power to drive tens of millions of people on the other side of the world to migrate and suffer in such terrible ways .
in fact , china makes goods for markets all over the world , including its own , thanks to a combination of factors : its low costs , its large and educated workforce , and a flexible manufacturing system that responds quickly to market demands .
by focusing so much on ourselves and our gadgets , we have rendered the individuals on the other end into invisibility , as tiny and interchangeable as the parts of a mobile phone .
chinese workers are not forced into factories because of our insatiable desire for ipods .
they choose to leave their homes in order to earn money , to learn new skills , and to see the world .
in the ongoing debate about globalization , what 's been missing is the voices of the workers themselves .
here are a few .
bao yongxiu : " my mother tells me to come home and get married , but if i marry now , before i have fully developed myself , i can only marry an ordinary worker , so i 'm not in a rush . "
chen ying : " when i went home for the new year , everyone said i had changed . they asked me , what did you do that you have changed so much ?
i told them that i studied and worked hard . if you tell them more , they wo n't understand anyway . "
wu chunming : " even if i make a lot of money , it wo n't satisfy me .
just to make money is not enough meaning in life . "
xiao jin : " now , after i get off work , i study english , because in the future , our customers wo n't be only chinese , so we must learn more languages . "
all of these speakers , by the way , are young women , 18 or 19 years old .
so i spent two years getting to know assembly line workers like these in the south china factory city called dongguan .
certain subjects came up over and over : how much money they made , what kind of husband they hoped to marry , whether they should jump to another factory or stay where they were .
other subjects came up almost never , including living conditions that to me looked close to prison life : 10 or 15 workers in one room , 50 people sharing a single bathroom , days and nights ruled by the factory clock .
everyone they knew lived in similar circumstances , and it was still better than the dormitories and homes of rural china .
the workers rarely spoke about the products they made , and they often had great difficulty explaining what exactly they did .
when i asked lu qingmin , the young woman i got to know best , what exactly she did on the factory floor , she said something to me in chinese that sounded like " qiu xi . "
only much later did i realize that she had been saying " qc , " or quality control .
she could n't even tell me what she did on the factory floor .
all she could do was parrot a garbled abbreviation in a language she did n't even understand .
karl marx saw this as the tragedy of capitalism , the alienation of the worker from the product of his labor .
unlike , say , a traditional maker of shoes or cabinets , the worker in an industrial factory has no control , no pleasure , and no true satisfaction or understanding in her own work .
but like so many theories that marx arrived at sitting in the reading room of the british museum , he got this one wrong .
just because a person spends her time making a piece of something does not mean that she becomes that , a piece of something .
what she does with the money she earns , what she learns in that place , and how it changes her , these are the things that matter .
what a factory makes is never the point , and the workers could not care less who buys their products .
journalistic coverage of chinese factories , on the other hand , plays up this relationship between the workers and the products they make .
many articles calculate : how long would it take for this worker to work in order to earn enough money to buy what he 's making ?
for example , an entry-level-line assembly line worker in china in an iphone plant would have to shell out two and a half months ' wages for an iphone .
but how meaningful is this calculation , really ?
for example , i recently wrote an article in the new yorker magazine , but i ca n't afford to buy an ad in it .
but , who cares ? i do n't want an ad in the new yorker , and most of these workers do n't really want iphones .
their calculations are different .
how long should i stay in this factory ?
how much money can i save ?
how much will it take to buy an apartment or a car , to get married , or to put my child through school ?
the workers i got to know had a curiously abstract relationship with the product of their labor .
about a year after i met lu qingmin , or min , she invited me home to her family village for the chinese new year .
on the train home , she gave me a present : a coach brand change purse with brown leather trim .
i thanked her , assuming it was fake , like almost everything else for sale in dongguan .
after we got home , min gave her mother another present : a pink dooney & bourke handbag , and a few nights later , her sister was showing off a maroon lesportsac shoulder bag .
slowly it was dawning on me that these handbags were made by their factory , and every single one of them was authentic .
min 's sister said to her parents , " in america , this bag sells for 320 dollars . "
her parents , who are both farmers , looked on , speechless .
" and that 's not all - coach is coming out with a new line , 2191 , " she said . " one bag will sell for 6,000 . "
she paused and said , " i do n't know if that 's 6,000 yuan or 6,000 american dollars , but anyway , it 's 6,000 . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- min 's sister 's boyfriend , who had traveled home with her for the new year , said , " it does n't look like it 's worth that much . "
min 's sister turned to him and said , " some people actually understand these things . you do n't understand shit . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- in min 's world , the coach bags had a curious currency .
they were n't exactly worthless , but they were nothing close to the actual value , because almost no one they knew wanted to buy one , or knew how much it was worth .
once , when min 's older sister 's friend got married , she brought a handbag along as a wedding present .
another time , after min had already left the handbag factory , her younger sister came to visit , bringing two coach signature handbags as gifts .
i looked in the zippered pocket of one , and i found a printed card in english , which read , " an american classic .
in 1941 , the burnished patina of an all-american baseball glove inspired the founder of coach to create a new collection of handbags from the same luxuriously soft gloved-hand leather .
six skilled leatherworkers crafted 12 signature handbags with perfect proportions and a timeless flair .
they were fresh , functional , and women everywhere adored them . a new american classic was born . "
i wonder what karl marx would have made of min and her sisters .
their relationship with the product of their labor was more complicated , surprising and funny than he could have imagined .
and yet , his view of the world persists , and our tendency to see the workers as faceless masses , to imagine that we can know what they 're really thinking .
the first time i met min , she had just turned 18 and quit her first job on the assembly line of an electronics factory .
over the next two years , i watched as she switched jobs five times , eventually landing a lucrative post in the purchasing department of a hardware factory .
later , she married a fellow migrant worker , moved with him to his village , gave birth to two daughters , and saved enough money to buy a secondhand buick for herself and an apartment for her parents .
she recently returned to dongguan on her own to take a job in a factory that makes construction cranes , temporarily leaving her husband and children back in the village .
in a recent email to me , she explained , " a person should have some ambition while she is young so that in old age she can look back on her life and feel that it was not lived to no purpose . "
across china , there are 150 million workers like her , one third of them women , who have left their villages to work in the factories , the hotels , the restaurants and the construction sites of the big cities .
together , they make up the largest migration in history , and it is globalization , this chain that begins in a chinese farming village and ends with iphones in our pockets and nikes on our feet and coach handbags on our arms that has changed the way these millions of people work and marry and live and think .
very few of them would want to go back to the way things used to be .
when i first went to dongguan , i worried that it would be depressing to spend so much time with workers .
i also worried that nothing would ever happen to them , or that they would have nothing to say to me .
instead , i found young women who were smart and funny and brave and generous .
by opening up their lives to me , they taught me so much about factories and about china and about how to live in the world .
this is the coach purse that min gave me on the train home to visit her family .
i keep it with me to remind me of the ties that tie me to the young women i wrote about , ties that are not economic but personal in nature , measured not in money but in memories .
this purse is also a reminder that the things that you imagine , sitting in your office or in the library , are not how you find them when you actually go out into the world .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : thank you , leslie , that was an insight that a lot of us have n't had before .
but i 'm curious . if you had a minute , say , with apple 's head of manufacturing , what would you say ?
leslie chang : one minute ?
ca : one minute . -lrb- laughter -rrb- lc : you know , what really impressed me about the workers is how much they 're self-motivated , self-driven , resourceful , and the thing that struck me , what they want most is education , to learn , because most of them come from very poor backgrounds .
they usually left school when they were in 7th or 8th grade .
their parents are often illiterate , and then they come to the city , and they , on their own , at night , during the weekends , they 'll take a computer class , they 'll take an english class , and learn really , really rudimentary things , you know , like how to type a document in word , or how to say really simple things in english .
so , if you really want to help these workers , start these small , very focused , very pragmatic classes in these schools , and what 's going to happen is , all your workers are going to move on , but hopefully they 'll move on into higher jobs within apple , and you can help their social mobility and their self-improvement .
when you talk to workers , that 's what they want .
they do not say , " i want better hot water in the showers .
i want a nicer room . i want a tv set . "
i mean , it would be nice to have those things , but that 's not why they 're in the city , and that 's not what they care about .
ca : was there a sense from them of a narrative that things were kind of tough and bad , or was there a narrative of some kind of level of growth , that things over time were getting better ?
lc : oh definitely , definitely . i mean , you know , it was interesting , because i spent basically two years hanging out in this city , dongguan , and over that time , you could see immense change in every person 's life : upward , downward , sideways , but generally upward .
if you spend enough time , it 's upward , and i met people who had moved to the city 10 years ago , and who are now basically urban middle class people , so the trajectory is definitely upward .
it 's just hard to see when you 're suddenly sucked into the city . it looks like everyone 's poor and desperate , but that 's not really how it is .
certainly , the factory conditions are really tough , and it 's nothing you or i would want to do , but from their perspective , where they 're coming from is much worse , and where they 're going is hopefully much better , and i just wanted to give that context of what 's going on in their minds , not what necessarily is going on in yours .
ca : thanks so much for your talk .
thank you very much . -lrb- applause -rrb- the things we make have one supreme quality - they live longer than us .
we perish , they survive ; we have one life , they have many lives , and in each life they can mean different things .
which means that , while we all have one biography , they have many .
i want this morning to talk about the story , the biography - or rather the biographies - of one particular object , one remarkable thing .
it does n't , i agree , look very much .
it 's about the size of a rugby ball .
it 's made of clay , and it 's been fashioned into a cylinder shape , covered with close writing and then baked dry in the sun .
and as you can see , it 's been knocked about a bit , which is not surprising because it was made two and a half thousand years ago and was dug up in 1879 .
but today , this thing is , i believe , a major player in the politics of the middle east .
and it 's an object with fascinating stories and stories that are by no means over yet .
the story begins in the iran-iraq war and that series of events that culminated in the invasion of iraq by foreign forces , the removal of a despotic ruler and instant regime change .
and i want to begin with one episode from that sequence of events that most of you would be very familiar with , belshazzar 's feast - because we 're talking about the iran-iraq war of 539 bc .
and the parallels between the events of 539 bc and 2003 and in between are startling .
what you 're looking at is rembrandt 's painting , now in the national gallery in london , illustrating the text from the prophet daniel in the hebrew scriptures .
and you all know roughly the story .
belshazzar , the son of nebuchadnezzar , nebuchadnezzar who 'd conquered israel , sacked jerusalem and captured the people and taken the jews back to babylon .
not only the jews , he 'd taken the temple vessels .
he 'd ransacked , desecrated the temple .
and the great gold vessels of the temple in jerusalem had been taken to babylon .
belshazzar , his son , decides to have a feast .
and in order to make it even more exciting , he added a bit of sacrilege to the rest of the fun , and he brings out the temple vessels .
he 's already at war with the iranians , with the king of persia .
and that night , daniel tells us , at the height of the festivities a hand appeared and wrote on the wall , " you are weighed in the balance and found wanting , and your kingdom is handed over to the medes and the persians . "
and that very night cyrus , king of the persians , entered babylon and the whole regime of belshazzar fell .
it is , of course , a great moment in the history of the jewish people .
it 's a great story . it 's story we all know .
" the writing on the wall " is part of our everyday language .
what happened next was remarkable , and it 's where our cylinder enters the story .
cyrus , king of the persians , has entered babylon without a fight - the great empire of babylon , which ran from central southern iraq to the mediterranean , falls to cyrus .
and cyrus makes a declaration .
and that is what this cylinder is , the declaration made by the ruler guided by god who had toppled the iraqi despot and was going to bring freedom to the people .
in ringing babylonian - it was written in babylonian - he says , " i am cyrus , king of all the universe , the great king , the powerful king , king of babylon , king of the four quarters of the world . "
they 're not shy of hyperbole as you can see .
this is probably the first real press release by a victorious army that we 've got .
and it 's written , as we 'll see in due course , by very skilled p.r. consultants .
so the hyperbole is not actually surprising .
and what is the great king , the powerful king , the king of the four quarters of the world going to do ?
he goes on to say that , having conquered babylon , he will at once let all the peoples that the babylonians - nebuchadnezzar and belshazzar - have captured and enslaved go free .
he 'll let them return to their countries .
and more important , he will let them all recover the gods , the statues , the temple vessels that had been confiscated .
all the peoples that the babylonians had repressed and removed will go home , and they 'll take with them their gods .
and they 'll be able to restore their altars and to worship their gods in their own way , in their own place .
this is the decree , this object is the evidence for the fact that the jews , after the exile in babylon , the years they 'd spent sitting by the waters of babylon , weeping when they remembered jerusalem , those jews were allowed to go home .
they were allowed to return to jerusalem and to rebuild the temple .
it 's a central document in jewish history .
and the book of chronicles , the book of ezra in the hebrew scriptures reported in ringing terms .
this is the jewish version of the same story .
" thus said cyrus , king of persia , ' all the kingdoms of the earth have the lord god of heaven given thee , and he has charged me to build him a house in jerusalem .
who is there among you of his people ?
the lord god be with him , and let him go up . " ' " go up " - aaleh .
the central element , still , of the notion of return , a central part of the life of judaism .
as you all know , that return from exile , the second temple , reshaped judaism .
and that change , that great historic moment , was made possible by cyrus , the king of persia , reported for us in hebrew in scripture and in babylonian in clay .
two great texts , what about the politics ?
what was going on was the fundamental shift in middle eastern history .
the empire of iran , the medes and the persians , united under cyrus , became the first great world empire .
cyrus begins in the 530s bc .
and by the time of his son darius , the whole of the eastern mediterranean is under persian control .
this empire is , in fact , the middle east as we now know it , and it 's what shapes the middle east as we now know it .
it was the largest empire the world had known until then .
much more important , it was the first multicultural , multifaith state on a huge scale .
and it had to be run in a quite new way .
it had to be run in different languages .
the fact that this decree is in babylonian says one thing .
and it had to recognize their different habits , different peoples , different religions , different faiths .
all of those are respected by cyrus .
cyrus sets up a model of how you run a great multinational , multifaith , multicultural society .
and the result of that was an empire that included the areas you see on the screen , and which survived for 200 years of stability until it was shattered by alexander .
it left a dream of the middle east as a unit , and a unit where people of different faiths could live together .
the greek invasions ended that .
and of course , alexander could n't sustain a government and it fragmented .
but what cyrus represented remained absolutely central .
the greek historian xenophon wrote his book " cyropaedia " promoting cyrus as the great ruler .
and throughout european culture afterward , cyrus remained the model .
this is a 16th century image to show you how widespread his veneration actually was .
and xenophon 's book on cyrus on how you ran a diverse society was one of the great textbooks that inspired the founding fathers of the american revolution .
jefferson was a great admirer - the ideals of cyrus obviously speaking to those 18th century ideals of how you create religious tolerance in a new state .
meanwhile , back in babylon , things had not been going well .
after alexander , the other empires , babylon declines , falls into ruins , and all the traces of the great babylonian empire are lost - until 1879 when the cylinder is discovered by a british museum exhibition digging in babylon .
and it enters now another story .
it enters that great debate in the middle of the 19th century : are the scriptures reliable ? can we trust them ?
we only knew about the return of the jews and the decree of cyrus from the hebrew scriptures .
no other evidence .
suddenly , this appeared .
and great excitement to a world where those who believed in the scriptures had had their faith in creation shaken by evolution , by geology , here was evidence that the scriptures were historically true .
it 's a great 19th century moment .
but - and this , of course , is where it becomes complicated - the facts were true , hurrah for archeology , but the interpretation was rather more complicated .
because the cylinder account and the hebrew bible account differ in one key respect .
the babylonian cylinder is written by the priests of the great god of bablyon , marduk .
and , not surprisingly , they tell you that all this was done by marduk .
" marduk , we hold , called cyrus by his name . "
marduk takes cyrus by the hand , calls him to shepherd his people and gives him the rule of babylon .
marduk tells cyrus that he will do these great , generous things of setting the people free .
and this is why we should all be grateful to and worship marduk .
the hebrew writers in the old testament , you will not be surprised to learn , take a rather different view of this .
for them , of course , it ca n't possibly by marduk that made all this happen .
it can only be jehovah .
and so in isaiah , we have the wonderful texts giving all the credit of this , not to marduk but to the lord god of israel - the lord god of israel who also called cyrus by name , also takes cyrus by the hand and talks of him shepherding his people .
it 's a remarkable example of two different priestly appropriations of the same event , two different religious takeovers of a political fact .
god , we know , is usually on the side of the big battalions .
the question is , which god was it ?
and the debate unsettles everybody in the 19th century to realize that the hebrew scriptures are part of a much wider world of religion .
and it 's quite clear the cylinder is older than the text of isaiah , and yet , jehovah is speaking in words very similar to those used by marduk .
and there 's a slight sense that isaiah knows this , because he says , this is god speaking , of course , " i have called thee by thy name though thou hast not known me . "
i think it 's recognized that cyrus does n't realize that he 's acting under orders from jehovah .
and equally , he 'd have been surprised that he was acting under orders from marduk .
because interestingly , of course , cyrus is a good iranian with a totally different set of gods who are not mentioned in any of these texts .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's 1879 .
40 years on and we 're in 1917 , and the cylinder enters a different world .
this time , the real politics of the contemporary world - the year of the balfour declaration , the year when the new imperial power in the middle east , britain , decides that it will declare a jewish national home , it will allow the jews to return .
and the response to this by the jewish population in eastern europe is rhapsodic .
and across eastern europe , jews display pictures of cyrus and of george v side by side - the two great rulers who have allowed the return to jerusalem .
and the cyrus cylinder comes back into public view and the text of this as a demonstration of why what is going to happen after the war is over in 1918 is part of a divine plan .
you all know what happened .
the state of israel is setup , and 50 years later , in the late 60s , it 's clear that britain 's role as the imperial power is over .
and another story of the cylinder begins .
the region , the u.k. and the u.s. decide , has to be kept safe from communism , and the superpower that will be created to do this would be iran , the shah .
and so the shah invents an iranian history , or a return to iranian history , that puts him in the center of a great tradition and produces coins showing himself with the cyrus cylinder .
when he has his great celebrations in persepolis , he summons the cylinder and the cylinder is lent by the british museum , goes to tehran , and is part of those great celebrations of the pahlavi dynasty .
cyrus cylinder : guarantor of the shah .
10 years later , another story : iranian revolution , 1979 .
islamic revolution , no more cyrus ; we 're not interested in that history , we 're interested in islamic iran - until iraq , the new superpower that we 've all decided should be in the region , attacks .
then another iran-iraq war .
and it becomes critical for the iranians to remember their great past , their great past when they fought iraq and won .
it becomes critical to find a symbol that will pull together all iranians - muslims and non-muslims , christians , zoroastrians , jews living in iran , people who are devout , not devout .
and the obvious emblem is cyrus .
so when the british museum and tehran national musuem cooperate and work together , as we 've been doing , the iranians ask for one thing only as a loan .
it 's the only object they want .
they want to borrow the cyrus cylinder .
and last year , the cyrus cylinder went to tehran for the second time .
it 's shown being presented here , put into its case by the director of the national museum of tehran , one of the many women in iran in very senior positions , mrs. ardakani .
it was a huge event .
this is the other side of that same picture .
it 's seen in tehran by between one and two million people in the space of a few months .
this is beyond any blockbuster exhibition in the west .
and it 's the subject of a huge debate about what this cylinder means , what cyrus means , but above all , cyrus as articulated through this cylinder - cyrus as the defender of the homeland , the champion , of course , of iranian identity and of the iranian peoples , tolerant of all faiths .
and in the current iran , zoroastrians and christians have guaranteed places in the iranian parliament , something to be very , very proud of .
to see this object in tehran , thousands of jews living in iran came to tehran to see it .
it became a great emblem , a great subject of debate about what iran is at home and abroad .
is iran still to be the defender of the oppressed ?
will iran set free the people that the tyrants have enslaved and expropriated ?
this is heady national rhetoric , and it was all put together in a great pageant launching the return .
here you see this out-sized cyrus cylinder on the stage with great figures from iranian history gathering to take their place in the heritage of iran .
it was a narrative presented by the president himself .
and for me , to take this object to iran , to be allowed to take this object to iran was to be allowed to be part of an extraordinary debate led at the highest levels about what iran is , what different irans there are and how the different histories of iran might shape the world today .
it 's a debate that 's still continuing , and it will continue to rumble , because this object is one of the great declarations of a human aspiration .
it stands with the american constitution .
it certainly says far more about real freedoms than magna carta .
it is a document that can mean so many things , for iran and for the region .
a replica of this is at the united nations .
in new york this autumn , it will be present when the great debates about the future of the middle east take place .
and i want to finish by asking you what the next story will be in which this object figures .
it will appear , certainly , in many more middle eastern stories .
and what story of the middle east , what story of the world , do you want to see reflecting what is said , what is expressed in this cylinder ?
the right of peoples to live together in the same state , worshiping differently , freely - a middle east , a world , in which religion is not the subject of division or of debate .
in the world of the middle east at the moment , the debates are , as you know , shrill .
but i think it 's possible that the most powerful and the wisest voice of all of them may well be the voice of this mute thing , the cyrus cylinder .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- what we 're really here to talk about is the " how . "
okay , so how exactly do we create this world-shattering , if you will , innovation ?
now , i want to tell you a quick story .
we 'll go back a little more than a year .
in fact , the date - i 'm curious to know if any of you know what happened on this momentous date ?
it was february 3rd , 2008 .
anyone remember what happened , february 3rd , 2008 ?
super bowl . i heard it over here . it was the date of the super bowl .
and the reason that this date was so momentous is that what my colleagues , john king and halee fischer-wright , and i noticed as we began to debrief various super bowl parties , is that it seemed to us that across the united states , if you will , tribal councils had convened .
and they had discussed things of great national importance .
like , " do we like the budweiser commercial ? "
and , " do we like the nachos ? " and , " who is going to win ? "
but they also talked about which candidate they were going to support .
and if you go back in time to february 3rd , it looked like hilary clinton was going to get the democratic nomination .
and there were even some polls that were saying she was going to go all the way .
but when we talked to people , it appeared that a funnel effect had happened in these tribes all across the united states .
now what is a tribe ? a tribe is a group of about 20 - so kind of more than a team - 20 to about 150 people .
and it 's within these tribes that all of our work gets done .
but not just work . it 's within these tribes that societies get built , that important things happen .
and so as we surveyed the , if you will , representatives from various tribal councils that met , also known as super bowl parties , we sent the following email off to 40 newspaper editors the following day .
february 4th , we posted it on our website . this was before super tuesday .
we said , " the tribes that we 're in are saying it 's going to be obama . "
now , the reason we knew that was because we spent the previous 10 years studying tribes , studying these naturally occurring groups .
all of you are members of tribes .
in walking around at the break , many of you had met members of your tribe . and you were talking to them .
and many of you were doing what great , if you will , tribal leaders do , which is to find someone who is a member of a tribe , and to find someone else who is another member of a different tribe , and make introductions .
that is in fact what great tribal leaders do .
so here is the bottom line .
if you focus in on a group like this - this happens to be a usc game - and you zoom in with one of those super satellite cameras and do magnification factors so you could see individual people , you would in fact see not a single crowd , just like there is not a single crowd here , but you would see these tribes that are then coming together .
and from a distance it appears that it 's a single group .
and so people form tribes .
they always have . they always will .
just as fish swim and birds fly , people form tribes . it 's just what we do .
but here 's the rub .
not all tribes are the same , and what makes the difference is the culture .
now here is the net out of this .
you 're all a member of tribes .
if you can find a way to take the tribes that you 're in and nudge them forward , along these tribal stages to what we call stage five , which is the top of the mountain .
but we 're going to start with what we call stage one .
now , this is the lowest of the stages .
you do n't want this . okay ?
this is a bit of a difficult image to put up on the screen .
but it 's one that i think we need to learn from .
stage one produces people who do horrible things .
this is the kid who shot up virginia tech .
stage one is a group where people systematically sever relationships from functional tribes , and then pool together with people who think like they do .
stage one is literally the culture of gangs and it is the culture of prisons .
now , again , we do n't often deal with stage one .
and i want to make the point that as members of society , we need to .
it 's not enough to simply write people off .
but let 's move on to stage two .
now , stage one , you 'll notice , says , in effect , " life sucks . "
so , this other book that steve mentioned , that just came out , called " the three laws of performance , " my colleague , steve zaffron and i , argue that as people see the world , so they behave .
well , if people see the world in such a way that life sucks , then their behavior will follow automatically from that .
it will be despairing hostility .
they 'll do whatever it takes to survive , even if that means undermining other people .
now , my birthday is coming up shortly , and my driver 's license expires .
and the reason that that 's relevant is that very soon i will be walking into what we call a stage two tribe , which looks like this .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , am i saying that in every department of motor vehicles across the land , you find a stage two culture ?
no . but in the one near me , where i have to go in just a few days , what i will say when i 'm standing in line is , " how can people be so dumb , and yet live ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , am i saying that there are dumb people working here ?
actually , no , i 'm not .
but i 'm saying the culture makes people dumb .
so in a stage two culture - and we find these in all sorts of different places - you find them , in fact , in the best organizations in the world .
you find them in all places in society .
i 've come across them at the organizations that everybody raves about as being best in class .
but here is the point . if you believe and you say to people in your tribe , in effect , " my life sucks .
i mean , if i got to go to tedx usc my life would n't suck . but i do n't . so it does . "
if that 's how you talked , imagine what kind of work would get done .
what kind of innovation would get done ?
the amount of world-changing behavior that would happen ?
in fact it would be basically nil .
now when we go on to stage three : this is the one that hits closest to home for many of us .
because it is in stage three that many of us move .
and we park . and we stay .
stage three says , " i 'm great . and you 're not . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'm great and you 're not .
now imagine having a whole room of people saying , in effect , " i 'm great and you 're not . "
or , " i 'm going to find some way to compete with you and come out on top as a result of that . "
a whole group of people communicating that way , talking that way .
i know this sounds like a joke . three doctors walk into a bar .
but , in this case , three doctors walk into an elevator .
i happened to be in the elevator collecting data for this book .
and one doctor said to the others , " did you see my article in the new england journal of medicine ? "
and the other said , " no . that 's great . congratulations ! "
the next one got kind of a wry smile on his face and said , " well while you were , you know , doing your research , " - notice the condescending tone - " while you were off doing your research , i was off doing more surgeries than anyone else in the department of surgery at this institution . "
and the third one got the same wry smile and said , " well , while you were off doing your research , and you were off doing your monkey meatball surgery , that eventually we 'll train monkeys to do , or cells or robots , or maybe not even need to do it at all , i was off running the future of the residency program , which is really the future of medicine . "
and they all kind of laughed and they patted him on the back .
and the elevator door opened , and they all walked out .
that is a meeting of a stage three tribe .
now , we find these in places where really smart , successful people show up .
like , oh , i do n't know , tedx usc .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- here is the greatest challenge we face in innovation .
it is moving from stage three to stage four .
let 's take a look at a quick video snippet .
this is from a company called zappos , located outside las vegas .
and my question on the other side is just going to be , " what do you think they value ? "
it was not christmas time . there was a christmas tree .
this is their lobby .
employees volunteer time in the advice booth .
notice it looks like something out of a peanuts cartoon .
okay , we 're going through the hallway here at zappos .
this is a call center . notice how it 's decorated .
notice people are applauding for us .
they do n't know who we are and they do n't care . and if they did they probably would n't applaud .
but you 'll notice the level of excitement .
notice , again , how they decorate their office .
now , what 's important to people at zappos , these may not be the things that are important to you .
but they value things like fun . and they value creativity .
one of their stated values is , " be a little bit weird . "
and you 'll notice they are a little bit weird .
so when individuals come together and find something that unites them that 's greater than their individual competence , then something very important happens .
the group gels . and it changes from a group of highly motivated but fairly individually-centric people into something larger , into a tribe that becomes aware of its own existence .
stage four tribes can do remarkable things .
but you 'll notice we 're not at the top of the mountain yet .
there is , in fact , another stage .
now , some of you may not recognize the scene that 's up here .
and if you take a look at the headline of stage five , which is " life is great , " this may seem a little incongruous .
this is a scene or snippet from the truth and reconciliation process in south africa for which desmond tutu won the nobel prize .
now think about that . south africa , terrible atrocities had happened in the society .
and people came together focused only on those two values : truth and reconciliation .
there was no road map . no one had ever done anything like this before .
and in this atmosphere , where the only guidance was people 's values and their noble cause , what this group accomplished was historic .
and people , at the time , feared that south africa would end up going the way that rwanda has gone , descending into one skirmish after another in a civil war that seems to have no end .
in fact , south africa has not gone down that road .
largely because people like desmond tutu set up a stage five process to involve the thousands and perhaps millions of tribes in the country , to bring everyone together .
so , people hear this and they conclude the following , as did we in doing the study .
okay , got it . i do n't want to talk stage one .
that 's like , you know , " life sucks . " who wants to talk that way ?
i do n't want to talk like they do at the particular dmv that 's close to where dave lives .
i really do n't want to just say " i 'm great , " because that kind of sounds narcissistic , and then i wo n't have any friends .
saying , " we 're great " - that sounds pretty good .
but i should really talk stage five , right ? " life is great . "
well , in fact , there are three somewhat counter-intuitive findings that come out of all this .
the first one , if you look at the declaration of independence and actually read it , the phrase that sticks in many of our minds is things about inalienable rights .
i mean , that 's stage five , right ? life is great , oriented only by our values , no other guidance .
in fact , most of the document is written at stage two .
" my life sucks because i live under a tyrant , also known as king george .
we 're great ! who is not great ? england ! "
sorry . -lrb- laughter -rrb- well , what about other great leaders ? what about gandhi ?
what about martin luther king ?
i mean , surely these were just people who preached , " life is great , " right ?
just one little bit of happiness and joy after another .
in fact , martin luther king 's most famous line was at stage three .
he did n't say " we have a dream . " he said , " i have a dream . "
why did he do that ? because most people are not at stage five .
two percent are at stage one .
about 25 percent are at stage two , saying , in effect , " my life sucks . "
48 percent of working tribes say , these are employed tribes , say , " i 'm great and you 're not . "
and we have to duke it out every day , so we resort to politics .
only about 22 percent of tribes are at stage four , oriented by our values , saying " we 're great .
and our values are beginning to unite us . "
only two percent , only two percent of tribes get to stage five .
and those are the ones that change the world .
so the first little finding from this is that leaders need to be able to talk all the levels so that you can touch every person in society .
but you do n't leave them where you found them . okay ?
tribes can only hear one level above and below where they are .
so we have to have the ability to talk all the levels , to go to where they are .
and then leaders nudge people within their tribes to the next level .
i 'd like to show you some examples of this .
one of the people we interviewed was frank jordan , former mayor of san francisco . before that he was chief of police in san francisco .
and he grew up essentially in stage one .
and you know what changed his life ? it was walking into one of these , a boys and girls club .
now here is what happened to this person who eventually became mayor of san francisco .
he went from being alive and passionate at stage one - remember , " life sucks , despairing hostility , i will do whatever it takes to survive " - to walking into a boys and girls club , folding his arms , sitting down in a chair , and saying , " wow . my life really sucks .
i do n't know anybody .
i mean , if i was into boxing , like they were , then my life would n't suck . but i do n't . so it does .
so i 'm going to sit here in my chair and not do anything . "
in fact , that 's progress .
we move people from stage one to stage two by getting them in a new tribe and then , over time , getting them connected .
so , what about moving from stage three to stage four ?
i want to argue that we 're doing that right here .
ted represents a set of values , and as we unite around these values , something really interesting begins to emerge .
if you want this experience to live on as something historic , then at the reception tonight i 'd like to encourage you to do something beyond what people normally do and call networking .
which is not just to meet new people and extend your reach , extend your influence , but instead , find someone you do n't know , and find someone else you do n't know , and introduce them .
that 's called a triadic relationship .
see , people who build world-changing tribes do that .
they extend the reach of their tribes by connecting them , not just to myself , so that my following is greater , but i connect people who do n't know each other to something greater than themselves .
and ultimately that adds to their values .
but we 're not done yet . because then how do we go from stage four , which is great , to stage five ?
the story that i like to end with is this . it comes out of a place called the gallup organization .
you know they do polls , right ?
so it 's stage four . we 're great . who is not great ?
pretty much everybody else who does polls .
if gallup releases a poll on the same day that nbc releases a poll , people will pay attention to the gallup poll . okay , we understand that .
so , they were bored .
they wanted to change the world . so here is the question someone asked .
" how could we , instead of just polling what asia thinks or what the united states thinks , or who thinks what about obama versus mccain or something like that , what does the entire world think ? "
and they found a way to do the first-ever world poll .
they had people involved who were nobel laureates in economics , who reported being bored .
and suddenly they pulled out sheets of paper and were trying to figure out , " how do we survey the population of sub-saharan africa ?
how do we survey populations that do n't have access to technology , and speak languages we do n't speak , and we do n't know anyone who speaks those languages . because in order to achieve on this great mission , we have to be able to do it .
incidentally , they did pull it off .
and they released the first-ever world poll .
so i 'd like to leave you with these thoughts .
first of all : we all form tribes , all of us .
you 're in tribes here . hopefully you 're extending the reach of the tribes that you have .
but the question on the table is this : what kind of an impact are the tribes that you are in making ?
you 're hearing one presentation after another , often representing a group of people , a tribe , about how they have changed the world .
if you do what we 've talked about , you listen for how people actually communicate in the tribes that you 're in .
and you do n't leave them where they are . you nudge them forward .
you remember to talk all five culture stages .
because we 've got people in all five , around us .
and the question that i 'd like to leave you with is this : will your tribes change the world ?
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the greatest irony in global health is that the poorest countries carry the largest disease burden .
if we resize the countries of the globe in proportion to the subject of interest , we see that sub-saharan africa is the worst hit region by hiv / aids .
this is the most devastating epidemic of our time .
we also see that this region has the least capability in terms of dealing with the disease .
there are very few doctors and , quite frankly , these countries do not have the resources that are needed to cope with such epidemics .
so what the western countries , developed countries , have generously done is they have proposed to provide free drugs to all people in third world countries who actually ca n't afford these medications .
and this has already saved millions of lives , and it has prevented entire economies from capsizing in sub-saharan africa .
but there is a fundamental problem that is killing the efforts in fighting this disease , because if you keep throwing drugs out at people who do n't have diagnostic services , you end up creating a problem of drug resistance .
this is already beginning to happen in sub-saharan africa .
the problem is that , what begins as a tragedy in the third world could easily become a global problem .
and the last thing we want to see is drug-resistant strains of hiv popping up all over the world , because it will make treatment more expensive and it could also restore the pre-arv carnage of hiv / aids .
i experienced this firsthand as a high school student in uganda .
this was in the 90s during the peak of the hiv epidemic , before there were any arvs in sub-saharan africa .
and during that time , i actually lost more relatives , as well as the teachers who taught me , to hiv / aids .
so this became one of the driving passions of my life , to help find real solutions that could address these kinds of problems .
we all know about the miracle of miniaturization .
back in the day , computers used to fill this entire room , and people actually used to work inside the computers .
but what electronic miniaturization has done is that it has allowed people to shrink technology into a cell phone .
and i 'm sure everyone here enjoys cell phones that can actually be used in the remote areas of the world , in the third world countries .
the good news is that the same technology that allowed miniaturization of electronics is now allowing us to miniaturize biological laboratories .
so , right now , we can actually miniaturize biological and chemistry laboratories onto microfluidic chips .
i was very lucky to come to the us right after high school , and was able to work on this technology and develop some devices .
this is a microfluidic chip that i developed .
a close look at how the technology works : these are channels that are about the size of a human hair - so you have integrated valves , pumps , mixers and injectors - so you can fit entire diagnostic experiments onto a microfluidic system .
so what i plan to do with this technology is to actually take the current state of the technology and build an hiv kit in a microfluidic system .
so , with one microfluidic chip , which is the size of an iphone , you can actually diagnose 100 patients at the same time .
for each patient , we will be able to do up to 100 different viral loads per patient .
and this is only done in four hours , 50 times faster than the current state of the art , at a cost that will be five to 500 times cheaper than the current options .
so this will allow us to create personalized medicines in the third world at a cost that is actually achievable and make the world a safer place .
i invite your interest as well as your involvement in driving this vision to a point of practical reality .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- do you know how many species of flowering plants there are ?
there are a quarter of a million - at least those are the ones we know about - a quarter of a million species of flowering plants .
and flowers are a real bugger .
they 're really difficult for plants to produce .
they take an enormous amount of energy and a lot of resources .
why would they go to that bother ?
and the answer of course , like so many things in the world , is sex .
i know what 's on your mind when you 're looking at these pictures .
and the reason that sexual reproduction is so important - there are lots of other things that plants can do to reproduce .
you can take cuttings ; they can sort of have sex with themselves ; they can pollinate themselves .
but they really need to spread their genes to mix with other genes so that they can adapt to environmental niches .
evolution works that way .
now the way that plants transmit that information is through pollen .
some of you may have seen some of these pictures before .
as i say , every home should have a scanning electron microscope to be able to see these .
and there is as many different kinds of pollen as there are flowering plants .
and that 's actually rather useful for forensics and so on .
most pollen that causes hay fever for us is from plants that use the wind to disseminate the pollen , and that 's a very inefficient process , which is why it gets up our noses so much .
because you have to chuck out masses and masses of it , hoping that your sex cells , your male sex cells , which are held within the pollen , will somehow reach another flower just by chance .
so all the grasses , which means all of the cereal crops , and most of the trees have wind-borne pollen .
but most species actually use insects to do their bidding , and that 's more intelligent in a way , because the pollen , they do n't need so much of it .
the insects and other species can take the pollen , transfer it directly to where it 's required .
so we 're aware , obviously , of the relationship between insects and plants .
there 's a symbiotic relationship there , whether it 's flies or birds or bees , they 're getting something in return , and that something in return is generally nectar .
sometimes that symbiosis has led to wonderful adaptations - the hummingbird hawk-moth is beautiful in its adaptation .
the plant gets something , and the hawk-moth spreads the pollen somewhere else .
plants have evolved to create little landing strips here and there for bees that might have lost their way .
there are markings on many plants that look like other insects .
these are the anthers of a lily , cleverly done so that when the unsuspecting insect lands on it , the anther flips up and whops it on the back with a great load of pollen that it then goes to another plant with .
and there 's an orchid that might look to you as if it 's got jaws , and in a way , it has ; it forces the insect to crawl out , getting covered in pollen that it takes somewhere else .
orchids : there are 20,000 , at least , species of orchids - amazingly , amazingly diverse .
and they get up to all sorts of tricks .
they have to try and attract pollinators to do their bidding .
this orchid , known as darwin 's orchid , because it 's one that he studied and made a wonderful prediction when he saw it - you can see that there 's a very long nectar tube that descends down from the orchid .
and basically what the insect has to do - we 're in the middle of the flower - it has to stick its little proboscis right into the middle of that and all the way down that nectar tube to get to the nectar .
and darwin said , looking at this flower , " i guess something has coevolved with this . "
and sure enough , there 's the insect .
and i mean , normally it kind of rolls it away , but in its erect form , that 's what it looks like .
now you can imagine that if nectar is such a valuable thing and expensive for the plant to produce and it attracts lots of pollinators , then , just as in human sex , people might start to deceive .
they might say , " i 've got a bit of nectar . do you want to come and get it ? "
now this is a plant .
this is a plant here that insects in south africa just love , and they 've evolved with a long proboscis to get the nectar at the bottom .
and this is the mimic .
so this is a plant that is mimicking the first plant .
and here is the long-probosced fly that has not gotten any nectar from the mimic , because the mimic does n't give it any nectar . it thought it would get some .
so not only has the fly not got the nectar from the mimic plant , it 's also - if you look very closely just at the head end , you can see that it 's got a bit of pollen that it would be transmitting to another plant , if only some botanist had n't come along and stuck it to a blue piece of card .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now deceit carries on through the plant kingdom .
this flower with its black dots : they might look like black dots to us , but if i tell you , to a male insect of the right species , that looks like two females who are really , really hot to trot .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and when the insect gets there and lands on it , dousing itself in pollen , of course , that it 's going to take to another plant , if you look at the every-home-should-have-one scanning electron microscope picture , you can see that there are actually some patterning there , which is three-dimensional .
so it probably even feels good for the insect , as well as looking good .
and these electron microscope pictures - here 's one of an orchid mimicking an insect - you can see that different parts of the structure have different colors and different textures to our eye , have very , very different textures to what an insect might perceive .
and this one is evolved to mimic a glossy metallic surface you see on some beetles .
and under the scanning electron microscope , you can see the surface there - really quite different from the other surfaces we looked at .
sometimes the whole plant mimics an insect , even to us .
i mean , i think that looks like some sort of flying animal or beast .
it 's a wonderful , amazing thing .
this one 's clever . it 's called obsidian .
i think of it as insidium sometimes .
to the right species of bee , this looks like another very aggressive bee , and it goes and bonks it on the head lots and lots of times to try and drive it away , and , of course , covers itself with pollen .
the other thing it does is that this plant mimics another orchid that has a wonderful store of food for insects .
and this one does n't have anything for them .
so it 's deceiving on two levels - fabulous .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- here we see ylang ylang , the component of many perfumes .
i actually smelt someone with some on earlier .
and the flowers do n't really have to be that gaudy .
they 're sending out a fantastic array of scent to any insect that 'll have it .
this one does n't smell so good .
this is a flower that really , really smells pretty nasty and is designed , again , evolved , to look like carrion .
so flies love this .
they fly in and they pollinate .
this , which is helicodiceros , is also known as dead horse arum .
i do n't know what a dead horse actually smells like , but this one probably smells pretty much like it .
it 's really horrible .
and blowflies just ca n't help themselves .
they fly into this thing , and they fly all the way down it .
they lay their eggs in it , thinking it 's a nice bit of carrion , and not realizing that there 's no food for the eggs , that the eggs are going to die , but the plant , meanwhile , has benefited , because the bristles release and the flies disappear to pollinate the next flower - fantastic .
here 's arum , arum maculatum , " lords and ladies , " or " cuckoo-pint " in this country .
i photographed this thing last week in dorset .
this thing heats up by about 15 degrees above ambient temperature - amazing .
and if you look down into it , there 's this sort of dam past the spadix , flies get attracted by the heat - which is boiling off volatile chemicals , little midges - and they get trapped underneath in this container .
they drink this fabulous nectar and then they 're all a bit sticky .
at night they get covered in pollen , which showers down over them , and then the bristles that we saw above , they sort of wilt and allow all these midges out , covered in pollen - fabulous thing .
now if you think that 's fabulous , this is one of my great favorites .
this is the philodendron selloum .
for anyone here from brazil , you 'll know about this plant .
this is the most amazing thing .
that sort of phallic bit there is about a foot long .
and it does something that no other plant that i know of does , and that is that when it flowers - that 's the spadix in the middle there - for a period of about two days , it metabolizes in a way which is rather similar to mammals .
so instead of having starch , which is the food of plants , it takes something rather similar to brown fat and burns it at such a rate that it 's burning fat , metabolizing , about the rate of a small cat .
and that 's twice the energy output , weight for weight , than a hummingbird - absolutely astonishing .
this thing does something else which is unusual .
not only will it raise itself to 115 fahrenheit , 43 or 44 degrees centigrade , for two days , but it keeps constant temperature .
there 's a thermoregulation mechanism in there that keeps constant temperature .
" now why does it do this , " i hear you ask .
now would n't you know it , there 's some beetles that just love to make love at that temperature .
and they get inside , and they get it all on .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and the plant showers them with pollen , and off they go and pollinate .
and what a wonderful thing it is .
now most pollinators that we think about are insects , but actually in the tropics , many birds and butterflies pollinate .
and many of the tropical flowers are red , and that 's because butterflies and birds see similarly to us , we think , and can see the color red very well .
but if you look at the spectrum , birds and us , we see red , green and blue and see that spectrum .
insects see green , blue and ultraviolet , and they see various shades of ultraviolet .
so there 's something that goes on off the end there .
" and would n't it be great if we could somehow see what that is , " i hear you ask .
well yes we can .
so what is an insect seeing ?
last week i took these pictures of rock rose , helianthemum , in dorset .
these are little yellow flowers like we all see , little yellow flowers all over the place .
and this is what it looks like with visible light .
this is what it looks like if you take out the red .
most bees do n't perceive red .
and then i put some ultraviolet filters on my camera and took a very , very long exposure with the particular frequencies of ultraviolet light and this is what i got .
and that 's a real fantastic bull 's eye .
now we do n't know exactly what a bee sees , any more than you know what i 'm seeing when i call this red .
we ca n't know what 's going on in - let alone an insect 's - another human being 's mind .
but the contrast will look something like that , so standing out a lot from the background .
here 's another little flower - different range of ultraviolet frequencies , different filters to match the pollinators .
and that 's the sort of thing that it would be seeing .
just in case you think that all yellow flowers have this property - no flower was damaged in the process of this shot ; it was just attached to the tripod , not killed - then under ultraviolet light , look at that .
and that could be the basis of a sunscreen because sunscreens work by absorbing ultraviolet light .
so maybe the chemical in that would be useful .
finally , there 's one of evening primrose that bjorn rorslett from norway sent me - fantastic hidden pattern .
and i love the idea of something hidden .
i think there 's something poetic here , that these pictures taken with ultraviolet filter , the main use of that filter is for astronomers to take pictures of venus - actually the clouds of venus .
that 's the main use of that filter .
venus , of course , is the god of love and fertility , which is the flower story .
and just as flowers spend a lot of effort trying to get pollinators to do their bidding , they 've also somehow managed to persuade us to plant great fields full of them and give them to each other at times of birth and death , and particularly at marriage , which , when you think of it , is the moment that encapsulates the transfer of genetic material from one organism to another .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the theme of my talk today is , " be an artist , right now . "
most people , when this subject is brought up , get tense and resist it : " art does n't feed me , and right now i 'm busy .
i have to go to school , get a job , send my kids to lessons ... " you think , " i 'm too busy . i do n't have time for art . "
there are hundreds of reasons why we ca n't be artists right now .
do n't they just pop into your head ?
there are so many reasons why we ca n't be , indeed , we 're not sure why we should be .
we do n't know why we should be artists , but we have many reasons why we ca n't be .
why do people instantly resist the idea of associating themselves with art ?
perhaps you think art is for the greatly gifted or for the thoroughly and professionally trained .
and some of you may think you 've strayed too far from art .
well you might have , but i do n't think so .
this is the theme of my talk today .
we are all born artists .
if you have kids , you know what i mean .
almost everything kids do is art .
they draw with crayons on the wall .
they dance to son dam bi 's dance on tv , but you ca n't even call it son dam bi 's dance - it becomes the kids ' own dance .
so they dance a strange dance and inflict their singing on everyone .
perhaps their art is something only their parents can bear , and because they practice such art all day long , people honestly get a little tired around kids .
kids will sometimes perform monodramas - playing house is indeed a monodrama or a play .
and some kids , when they get a bit older , start to lie .
usually parents remember the very first time their kid lies .
they 're shocked .
" now you 're showing your true colors , " mom says . she thinks , " why does he take after his dad ? "
she questions him , " what kind of a person are you going to be ? "
but you should n't worry .
the moment kids start to lie is the moment storytelling begins .
they are talking about things they did n't see .
it 's amazing . it 's a wonderful moment .
parents should celebrate .
" hurray ! my boy finally started to lie ! "
all right ! it calls for celebration .
for example , a kid says , " mom , guess what ? i met an alien on my way home . "
then a typical mom responds , " stop that nonsense . "
now , an ideal parent is someone who responds like this : " really ? an alien , huh ? what did it look like ? did it say anything ?
where did you meet it ? " " um , in front of the supermarket . "
when you have a conversation like this , the kid has to come up with the next thing to say to be responsible for what he started .
soon , a story develops .
of course this is an infantile story , but thinking up one sentence after the next is the same thing a professional writer like me does .
in essence , they are not different .
roland barthes once said of flaubert 's novels , " flaubert did not write a novel .
he merely connected one sentence after another .
the eros between sentences , that is the essence of flaubert 's novel . "
that 's right - a novel , basically , is writing one sentence , then , without violating the scope of the first one , writing the next sentence .
and you continue to make connections .
take a look at this sentence : " one morning , as gregor samsa was waking up from anxious dreams , he discovered that in his bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug . "
yes , it 's the first sentence of franz kafka 's " the metamorphosis . "
writing such an unjustifiable sentence and continuing in order to justify it , kafka 's work became the masterpiece of contemporary literature .
kafka did not show his work to his father .
he was not on good terms with his father .
on his own , he wrote these sentences .
had he shown his father , " my boy has finally lost it , " he would 've thought .
and that 's right . art is about going a little nuts and justifying the next sentence , which is not much different from what a kid does .
a kid who has just started to lie is taking the first step as a storyteller .
kids do art .
they do n't get tired and they have fun doing it .
i was in jeju island a few days ago .
when kids are on the beach , most of them love playing in the water .
but some of them spend a lot of time in the sand , making mountains and seas - well , not seas , but different things - people and dogs , etc .
but parents tell them , " it will all be washed away by the waves . "
in other words , it 's useless .
there 's no need .
but kids do n't mind .
they have fun in the moment and they keep playing in the sand .
kids do n't do it because someone told them to .
they are n't told by their boss or anyone , they just do it .
when you were little , i bet you spent time enjoying the pleasure of primitive art .
when i ask my students to write about their happiest moment , many write about an early artistic experience they had as a kid .
learning to play piano for the first time and playing four hands with a friend , or performing a ridiculous skit with friends looking like idiots - things like that .
or the moment you developed the first film you shot with an old camera .
they talk about these kinds of experiences .
you must have had such a moment .
in that moment , art makes you happy because it 's not work .
work does n't make you happy , does it ? mostly it 's tough .
the french writer michel tournier has a famous saying .
it 's a bit mischievous , actually .
" work is against human nature . the proof is that it makes us tired . "
right ? why would work tire us if it 's in our nature ?
playing does n't tire us .
we can play all night long .
if we work overnight , we should be paid for overtime .
why ? because it 's tiring and we feel fatigue .
but kids , usually they do art for fun . it 's playing .
they do n't draw to sell the work to a client or play the piano to earn money for the family .
of course , there were kids who had to .
you know this gentleman , right ?
he had to tour around europe to support his family - wolfgang amadeus mozart - but that was centuries ago , so we can make him an exception .
unfortunately , at some point our art - such a joyful pastime - ends .
kids have to go to lessons , to school , do homework and of course they take piano or ballet lessons , but they are n't fun anymore .
you 're told to do it and there 's competition . how can it be fun ?
if you 're in elementary school and you still draw on the wall , you 'll surely get in trouble with your mom .
besides , if you continue to act like an artist as you get older , you 'll increasingly feel pressure - people will question your actions and ask you to act properly .
here 's my story : i was an eighth grader and i entered a drawing contest at school in gyeongbokgung .
i was trying my best , and my teacher came around and asked me , " what are you doing ? "
" i 'm drawing diligently , " i said .
" why are you using only black ? "
indeed , i was eagerly coloring the sketchbook in black .
and i explained , " it 's a dark night and a crow is perching on a branch . "
then my teacher said , " really ? well , young-ha , you may not be good at drawing but you have a talent for storytelling . "
or so i wished .
" now you 'll get it , you rascal ! " was the response . -lrb- laughter -rrb- " you 'll get it ! " he said .
you were supposed to draw the palace , the gyeonghoeru , etc . , but i was coloring everything in black , so he dragged me out of the group .
there were a lot of girls there as well , so i was utterly mortified .
none of my explanations or excuses were heard , and i really got it big time .
if he was an ideal teacher , he would have responded like i said before , " young-ha may not have a talent for drawing , but he has a gift for making up stories , " and he would have encouraged me .
but such a teacher is seldom found .
later , i grew up and went to europe 's galleries - i was a university student - and i thought this was really unfair .
look what i found . -lrb- laughter -rrb- works like this were hung in basel while i was punished and stood in front of the palace with my drawing in my mouth .
look at this . does n't it look just like wallpaper ?
contemporary art , i later discovered , is n't explained by a lame story like mine .
no crows are brought up .
most of the works have no title , untitled .
anyways , contemporary art in the 20th century is about doing something weird and filling the void with explanation and interpretation - essentially the same as i did .
of course , my work was very amateur , but let 's turn to more famous examples .
this is picasso 's .
he stuck handlebars into a bike seat and called it " bull 's head . " sounds convincing , right ?
next , a urinal was placed on its side and called " fountain . "
that was duchamp .
so filling the gap between explanation and a weird act with stories - that 's indeed what contemporary art is all about .
picasso even made the statement , " i draw not what i see but what i think . "
yes , it means i did n't have to draw gyeonghoeru .
i wish i knew what picasso said back then . i could have argued better with my teacher .
unfortunately , the little artists within us are choked to death before we get to fight against the oppressors of art .
they get locked in .
that 's our tragedy .
so what happens when little artists get locked in , banished or even killed ?
our artistic desire does n't go away .
we want to express , to reveal ourselves , but with the artist dead , the artistic desire reveals itself in dark form .
in karaoke bars , there are always people who sing " she 's gone " or " hotel california , " miming the guitar riffs .
usually they sound awful . awful indeed .
some people turn into rockers like this .
or some people dance in clubs .
people who would have enjoyed telling stories end up trolling on the internet all night long .
that 's how a writing talent reveals itself on the dark side .
sometimes we see dads get more excited than their kids playing with legos or putting together plastic robots .
they go , " do n't touch it . daddy will do it for you . "
the kid has already lost interest and is doing something else , but the dad alone builds castles .
this shows the artistic impulses inside us are suppressed , not gone .
but they can often reveal themselves negatively , in the form of jealousy .
you know the song " i would love to be on tv " ? why would we love it ?
tv is full of people who do what we wished to do , but never got to .
they dance , they act - and the more they do , they are praised .
so we start to envy them .
we become dictators with a remote and start to criticize the people on tv .
" he just ca n't act . " " you call that singing ? she ca n't hit the notes . "
we easily say these sorts of things .
we get jealous , not because we 're evil , but because we have little artists pent up inside us .
that 's what i think .
what should we do then ?
yes , that 's right .
right now , we need to start our own art .
right this minute , we can turn off tv , log off the internet , get up and start to do something .
where i teach students in drama school , there 's a course called dramatics .
in this course , all students must put on a play .
however , acting majors are not supposed to act .
they can write the play , for example , and the writers may work on stage art .
likewise , stage art majors may become actors , and in this way you put on a show .
students at first wonder whether they can actually do it , but later they have so much fun . i rarely see anyone who is miserable doing a play .
in school , the military or even in a mental institution , once you make people do it , they enjoy it .
i saw this happen in the army - many people had fun doing plays .
i have another experience : in my writing class , i give students a special assignment .
i have students like you in the class - many who do n't major in writing .
some major in art or music and think they ca n't write .
so i give them blank sheets of paper and a theme .
it can be a simple theme : write about the most unfortunate experience in your childhood .
there 's one condition : you must write like crazy . like crazy !
i walk around and encourage them , " come on , come on ! " they have to write like crazy for an hour or two .
they only get to think for the first five minutes .
the reason i make them write like crazy is because when you write slowly and lots of thoughts cross your mind , the artistic devil creeps in .
this devil will tell you hundreds of reasons why you ca n't write : " people will laugh at you . this is not good writing !
what kind of sentence is this ? look at your handwriting ! "
it will say a lot of things .
you have to run fast so the devil ca n't catch up .
the really good writing i 've seen in my class was not from the assignments with a long deadline , but from the 40- to 60-minute crazy writing students did in front of me with a pencil .
the students go into a kind of trance .
after 30 or 40 minutes , they write without knowing what they 're writing .
and in this moment , the nagging devil disappears .
so i can say this : it 's not the hundreds of reasons why one ca n't be an artist , but rather , the one reason one must be that makes us artists .
why we can not be something is not important .
most artists became artists because of the one reason .
when we put the devil in our heart to sleep and start our own art , enemies appear on the outside .
mostly , they have the faces of our parents . -lrb- laughter -rrb- sometimes they look like our spouses , but they are not your parents or spouses .
they are devils . devils .
they came to earth briefly transformed to stop you from being artistic , from becoming artists .
and they have a magic question .
when we say , " i think i 'll try acting . there 's a drama school in the community center , " or " i 'd like to learn italian songs , " they ask , " oh , yeah ? a play ? what for ? "
the magic question is , " what for ? "
but art is not for anything .
art is the ultimate goal .
it saves our souls and makes us live happily .
it helps us express ourselves and be happy without the help of alcohol or drugs .
so in response to such a pragmatic question , we need to be bold .
" well , just for the fun of it . sorry for having fun without you , " is what you should say . " i 'll just go ahead and do it anyway . "
the ideal future i imagine is where we all have multiple identities , at least one of which is an artist .
once i was in new york and got in a cab . i took the backseat , and in front of me i saw something related to a play .
so i asked the driver , " what is this ? "
he said it was his profile . " then what are you ? " i asked . " an actor , " he said .
he was a cabby and an actor . i asked , " what roles do you usually play ? "
he proudly said he played king lear .
king lear .
" who is it that can tell me who i am ? " - a great line from king lear .
that 's the world i dream of .
someone is a golfer by day and writer by night .
or a cabby and an actor , a banker and a painter , secretly or publicly performing their own arts .
in 1990 , martha graham , the legend of modern dance , came to korea .
the great artist , then in her 90s , arrived at gimpo airport and a reporter asked her a typical question : " what do you have to do to become a great dancer ?
any advice for aspiring korean dancers ? "
now , she was the master . this photo was taken in 1948 and she was already a celebrated artist .
in 1990 , she was asked this question .
and here 's what she answered : " just do it . "
wow . i was touched .
only those three words and she left the airport . that 's it .
so what should we do now ?
let 's be artists , right now . right away . how ?
just do it !
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- video : narrator : an event seen from one point of view gives one impression .
seen from another point of view , it gives quite a different impression .
but it 's only when you get the whole picture you can fully understand what 's going on .
sasha vucinic : it 's a great clip , is n't it ?
and i found that in 29 seconds , it tells more about the power of , and importance of , independent media than i could say in an hour .
so i thought that it will be good to start with it .
and also start with a little bit of statistics .
according to relevant researchers , 83 percent of the population of this planet lives in the societies without independent press .
think about that number : 83 percent of the population on the whole planet does not really know what is going on in their countries .
the information they get gets filtered through somebody who either twists that information , or colors that information , does something with it .
so they 're deprived of understanding their reality .
that is just to understand how big and important this problem is .
now those of you who are lucky enough to live in those societies that represent 17 percent , i think should enjoy it until it lasts .
you know , sunday morning , you flick the paper , get your cappuccino .
enjoy it while it lasts .
because as we heard yesterday , countries can lose stars from their flags , but they can also lose press freedom , as i guess americans among us can tell us more about .
but that 's totally another and separate topic .
so i can go back to my story .
my story starts - the story i want to share - starts in 1991 .
at that time i was running b92 , the only independent , for that matter the only electronic media , in the country .
and i guess we were sharing - we had that regular life of the only independent media in the country , operating in hostile environment , where government really wants to make your life miserable .
and there are different ways .
yeah , it was the usual cocktail : a little bit of threats , a little bit of friendly advice , a little bit of financial police , a little bit of text control , so you always have somebody who never leaves your office .
but what they really do , which is very powerful , and that is what governments in the late ' 90s started doing if they do n't like independent media companies - you know , they threaten your advertisers .
once they threaten your advertisers , market forces are actually , you know , destroyed , and the advertisers do not want to come - no matter how much does it make sense for them - do not want to come and advertise .
and you have a problem making ends meet .
at that time at the beginning of the ' 90s , we had that problem , which was , you know , survival below one side , but what was really painful for me was , remember , the beginning of the ' 90s , yugoslavia is falling apart .
we were sitting over there with a country in a downfall , in a slow-motion downfall .
and we all had all of that on tapes .
we had the ability to understand what was going on .
we were actually recording history .
the problem was that we had to re-tape that history a week later ; because if we did not , we could not afford enough tapes to keep archives of that history .
so if i gave you that picture , i do n't want to go too long on that .
in that context a gentleman came to my office at that time .
it was still 1991 .
he was running a media systems organization which is still in business , the gentleman is still in business .
and what did i know at that time about media systems ?
i would think media systems were organizations , which means they should help you .
so i prepared two plans for that meeting , two strategic plans : the small one and the big one .
the small one was , i just wanted him to help us get those damn tapes , so we can keep that archive for the next 50 years .
the big plan was to ask him for a 1,000,000-dollar loan .
because i thought , i still maintain , that serious and independent media companies are great business .
and i thought that b92 will survive and be a great company once milosevic is gone , which turned out to be true .
it 's now probably either the biggest or the second biggest media company in the country .
and i thought that the only thing that we needed at that time was 1,000,000-dollar loan to take us through those hard times .
to make a long story short , the gentleman comes into the office , great suit and tie .
i gave him what i thought was a brilliant explanation of the political situation and explained how hard and difficult the war will be .
actually , i underestimated the atrocities , i have to admit .
anyway , after that whole , big , long explanation , the only question he had for me - and this is not a joke - is , are we paying royalties after we broadcast music of michael jackson ?
that was really the only question he had .
he left , and i remember being actually very angry at myself because i thought there must be an institution in the world that is providing loans to media companies .
it 's so obvious , straight in your face , and somebody must have thought of it .
somebody must have started something like that .
and i thought , i 'm just dumb and i can not find it .
you know , in my defense , there was no google at that time ; you could not just google in ' 91 .
so i thought that that 's actually my problem .
now we go from here , fast forward to 1995 .
i have - i left the country , i have a meeting with george soros , trying for the third time to convince him that his foundation should invest in something that should operate like a media bank .
and basically what i was saying is very simple .
you know , forget about charity ; it does n't work .
forget about handouts ; 20,000 dollars do not help anybody .
what you should do is you should treat media companies as a business .
it 's business anywhere .
media business , or any other business , it needs to be capitalized .
and what these guys need , actually , is access to capital .
so third meeting , arguments are pretty well exercised .
at the end of the meeting he says , look , it is not going to work ; you will never see your money back ; but my foundations will put 500,000 dollars so you can test the idea .
see that it will not work .
he said , i 'll give you a rope to hang yourself .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i knew two things after that meeting .
first , under no circumstances i want to hang myself .
and second , that i have no idea how to make it work .
you see , at the level of a concept , it was a great concept .
but it 's one thing to have a concept ; it 's a totally separate thing to actually make it work .
so i had absolutely no idea how that could actually work .
had the wrong idea ; i thought that we can be a bank .
you see banks - i do n't know if there are any bankers over here ; i apologize in advance - but it 's the best job in the world .
you know , you find somebody who is respectable and has a lot of money .
you give them more money ; they repay you that over a time .
you collect interest and do nothing in between .
so i thought , why do n't we get into that business ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so here we are having our first client , brilliant .
first independent newspaper in slovakia .
the government cutting them off from all the printing facilities in bratislava .
so here 's the daily newspaper that has to be printed 400 kilometers away from the capital .
it 's a daily newspaper with a deadline of 4 p.m.
that means that they have no sports ; they have no latest news ; circulation goes down .
it 's a kind of very nice , sophisticated way how to economically strangle a daily newspaper .
they come to us with a request for a loan .
they want to - the only way for them to survive is to get a printing press .
and we said , that 's fine ; let 's meet ; you 'll bring us your business plan , which eventually they did .
we start the meeting .
i get these two pieces of paper , not like this , a4 format , so it 's much bigger .
a lot of numbers there . a lot of numbers .
but however you put it , you know , the numbers do not make any sense .
and that 's the best they could do .
we were the best that they could do .
so that is how we understood what our method is .
it 's not a bank . we had to actually go into these companies and earn our return by fixing them - by establishing management systems , by providing all that knowledge , how do you run a business on one side - while they all know how to run , how to create content .
just quickly on the results .
over these 10 years , 40 million dollars in affordable financing , average interest rate five percent to six percent .
lately we are going wild , charging seven percent from time to time .
we do it in 17 countries of the developing world .
and here is the most stunning number .
return rate - the one that soros was so worried about - 97 percent .
97 percent of all the scheduled repayments came back to us on time .
what do we typically finance ?
we finance anything that a media company would need , from printing presses to transmitters .
what is most important is we do it either in form of loans , equities , lease - whatever is appropriate for , you know , supporting anybody .
but what is most important here is , who do we finance ?
we believe that in the last 10 years companies that we 've financed are actually the best media companies in the developing world .
that is a " who is who " list .
and i could spend hours talking about them , because they 're all kind of heroes .
and i can , but i 'll give you just , maybe one , and depending on time i may give you two examples who we work with .
you see we started working in eastern and central europe , and moved to russia .
our first loan in russia was in chelyabinsk .
i 'll bet half of you have never heard of that place .
in the south of russia there 's a guy called boris nikolayevich kirshin , who is running an independent newspaper there .
the city was closed until early ' 90s because , of all things , they were producing glass for tupolev planes .
anyway , he 's running independent newspaper there .
after two years working with us , he becomes the most respected newspaper in that small place .
governor comes to him one day , actually invites him to come to his office .
he goes and sees the governor . the governor says , boris nikolayevich , i understand you are doing a great job , and you are the most respected newspaper in our district .
and i want to offer you a deal .
can you please give me your newspaper for the next nine months , because i have elections - there are elections coming up in nine months .
i will not run , but it 's very important for me who is going to succeed me .
so give me the paper for nine months . i 'll give it back to you .
i have no interest in being in media business .
how much would that cost ?
boris nikolayevich says , " it 's not for sale . "
the governor says , " we will close you . "
boris nikolayevich says , " no , you can not do it . "
six months later the newspaper was closed .
luckily , we had enough time to help boris nikolayevich take all the assets out of that company and bring him into a new one , to get all the subscription lists , rehire staff .
so what the governor got was an empty shell .
but that is what happens if you 're in business of independent media , and if you are a banker for independent media .
so it sounds like a great story .
somewhere down the road we opened a media management center .
we started our media lab , sounds like a real great story .
but there is a second angle to that .
the second angle , like in this clip .
if you take the camera above , you start thinking about these numbers again .
40 million dollars over 10 years spread over 17 countries .
that is not too much , is it ?
it 's actually just a drop in the sea .
because when you think about the importance , some of the issues that we were talking about last night - this last session we had about africa and his hypothetical 50 billion dollars destined for africa .
all of those , not all , half of those problems mentioned last night - government accountability , corruption , how do you fight corruption , giving voice to unheard , to poor - it 's why independent media is in business .
and it 's why it was invented .
so from that perspective , what we did is just really one drop in the sea of that need that we can identify .
now ours is just one story .
i 'm sure that in this room there are , like , 15 other wonderful stories of nonprofits doing spectacular work .
here is where the problem is , and i 'll explain to you as well as i can what the problem is .
and it 's called fundraising .
imagine that this third of this room is filled with people who represent different foundations .
imagine two thirds over here running excellent organizations , doing very important work .
now imagine that every second person over here is deaf , does not hear , and switch the lights off .
now that is how difficult it is to match people from this side of the room with people of that side of the room .
so we thought that some kind of a big idea is needed to reform , to totally rethink fundraising .
you know , instead of people running in this dark , trying to find their own match , who will be willing , who has the same goals .
instead of all of that we thought there is - something new needs to be invented .
and we came up with this idea of issuing bonds , press freedom bonds .
if there are investors willing to finance u.s. government budget deficit , why would n't we find investors willing to finance press freedom deficit ?
we 've decided to do it this fall ; we will issue them , probably in denominations of 1,000 dollars .
i do n't want to advertise them too much ; that 's not the point .
but the point is , if we ever survive to actually issue them , find enough investors that this can be considered a success , there 's nothing stopping the next organization to start to issue bonds next spring .
and those can be environmental bonds .
and then two weeks later , iqbal quadir can issue his electricity in bangladesh bonds .
and before you know it , any social cause can be actually financed in this way .
now we do daydreaming in 11:30 with 55 seconds left .
but let 's take the idea further .
you do it , you start it in the states , because it 's , you know , concepts are very , very close to american minds .
but you can actually bring it to europe , too .
you can bring it to asia .
you can , once you have all of those different points , you can make it easy for investors .
put all of those bonds at one place and they sit down and click .
once you have more than 10 of them you have to develop some kind of a matrix .
what do investors get ?
on one side financial , on the other side social .
so that brings the idea of some kind of rating agency , morningstar type .
it says , you know , social impact over here is spectacular , five stars .
financial , they give you one percent , only one star .
now take it to the last step .
once you have all of that put together , there 's not one reason why you could n't actually have a marketplace for all of that , where you can not dispose of all of those bonds in a pretty quick way .
and in that way you organize the financing so there are no dark rooms , no blind people running around to find each other .
thank you .
so i really consider myself a storyteller .
but i do n't really tell stories in the usual way , in the sense that i do n't usually tell my own stories .
instead , i 'm really interested in building tools that allow large numbers of other people to tell their stories , people all around the world .
i do this because i think that people actually have a lot in common .
i think people are very similar , but i also think that we have trouble seeing that .
you know , as i look around the world i see a lot of gaps , and i think we all see a lot of gaps .
and we define ourselves by our gaps .
there 's language gaps , there 's ethnicity and racial gaps , there 's age gaps , there 's gender gaps , there 's sexuality gaps , there 's wealth and money gaps , there 's education gaps , there 's also religious gaps .
you know , we have all these gaps and i think we like our gaps because they make us feel like we identify with something , some smaller community .
but i think that actually , despite our gaps , we really have a lot in common .
and i think one thing we have in common is a very deep need to express ourselves .
i think this is a very old human desire . it 's nothing new .
but the thing about self-expression is that there 's traditionally been this imbalance between the desire that we have to express ourselves and the number of sympathetic friends who are willing to stand around and listen .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this , also , is nothing new .
since the dawn of human history , we 've tried to rectify this imbalance by making art , writing poems , singing songs , scripting editorials and sending them in to a newspaper , gossiping with friends . this is nothing new .
what 's new is that in the last several years a lot of these very traditional physical human activities , these acts of self-expression , have been moving onto the internet .
and as that 's happened , people have been leaving behind footprints , footprints that tell stories of their moments of self-expression .
and so what i do is , i write computer programs that study very large sets of these footprints , and then try to draw conclusions about the people who left them - what they feel , what they think , what 's different in the world today than usual , these sorts of questions .
one project that explores these ideas , which was made about a year ago , is a piece called we feel fine .
this is a piece that every two or three minutes scans the world 's newly-posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases " i feel " or " i am feeling . "
and when it finds one of those phrases , it grabs the sentence up to the period , and then automatically tries to deduce the age , gender and geographical location of the person that wrote that sentence .
then , knowing the geographical location and the time , we can also then figure out the weather when that person wrote the sentence .
all of this information is saved in a database that collects about 20,000 feelings a day .
it 's been running for about a year and a half .
it 's reached about seven-and-a-half million human feelings now .
and i 'll show you a glimpse of how this information is then visualized . so this is we feel fine .
what you see here is a madly swarming mass of particles , each of which represents a single human feeling that was stated in the last few hours .
the color of each particle corresponds to the type of feeling inside - so that happy , positive feelings are brightly colored .
and sad , negative feelings are darkly colored .
the diameter of each dot represents the length of the sentence inside , so that the large dots contain large sentences , and the small dots contain small sentences .
any dot can be clicked and expanded . and we see here , " i would just feel so much better if i could curl up in his arms right now and feel his affection for me in the embrace of his body and the tenderness of his lips . "
so it gets pretty hot and steamy sometimes in the world of human emotions .
and all of these are stated by people : " i know that objectively it really does n't mean much , but after spending so many years as a small fish in a big pond , it 's nice to feel bigger again . "
the dots exhibit human qualities . they kind of have their own physics , and they swarm wildly around , kind of exploring the world of life .
and then they also exhibit curiosity .
you can see a few of them are swarming around the cursor right now .
you can see some other ones are swarming around the bottom left corner of the screen around six words . those six words represent the six movements of we feel fine . we 're currently seeing madness .
there 's also murmurs , montage , mobs , metrics and mounds .
and i 'll walk you through a few of those now .
murmurs causes all of the feelings to fly to the ceiling .
and then , one by one , in reverse chronological order , they excuse themselves , entering the scrolling list of feelings .
" i feel a bit better now . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " i feel confused and unsure of what the hell i want to do . "
" i feel gypped out of something awesome here . "
" i feel so free ; i feel so good . "
" i feel like i 'm in this fog of depression that i ca n't get out of . "
and you can click any of these to go out and visit the blog from which it was collected . and in that way , you can connect with the authors of these statements if you feel some degree of empathy .
the next movement is called montage .
montage causes all of the feelings that contain photographs to become extracted and display themselves in a grid .
this grid is then said to represent the picture of the world 's feelings in the last few hours , if you will .
each of these can be clicked and we can blow it up .
we see , " i just feel like i 'm not going to have fun if it 's not the both of us . " that was from someone in michigan .
we see , " i feel like i have been at a computer all day . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- these are automatically constructed using the found objects : " i think i feel a little full . "
the next movement is called mobs .
mobs provides different statistical breakdowns of the population of the world 's feelings in the last few hours .
we see that " better " is the most frequent feeling right now , followed by " good , " " bad , " " guilty , " " right , " " down , " " sick " and so on .
we can also get a gender breakdown .
and we see that women are slightly more prolific talking about their emotions in the last few hours than men .
we can do an age breakdown , which gives us a histogram of the world 's emotional distribution by age .
we see people in their twenties are the most prolific , followed by teenagers , and then people in their thirties , and it dies out very quickly from there .
in weather , the feelings assume the physical characteristics of the weather that they represent , so that the ones collected on a sunny day swirl around as if they 're part of the sun .
the cloudy ones float along as if they 're on a breeze .
the rainy ones fall down as if they 're in a rainstorm , and the snowy ones kind of flutter to the ground .
finally , location causes the feelings to move to their positions on a world map showing the geographical distribution of feelings .
metrics provides more numerical views on the data .
we see that the world is feeling " used " at 3.3 times the normal level right now .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- they 're feeling " warm " at 2.9 times the normal level , and so on .
other views are also available .
here are gender , age , weather , location .
the final movement is called mounds .
it 's a bit different from the others .
mounds visualizes the entire dataset as large , gelatinous blobs which kind of jiggle .
and if i hold down my cursor , they do a little dance .
we see " better " is the most frequent feeling , followed by " bad . "
and then if i go over here , the list begins to scroll , and there are actually thousands of feelings that have been collected .
you can see the little pink cursor moving along , representing our position .
here we see people that feel " slipping , " " nauseous , " " responsible . "
there 's also a search capability , if you 're interested in finding out about a certain population .
for instance , you could find women who feel " addicted " in their 20s when it was cloudy in bangladesh .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but i 'll spare you that .
so here are some of my favorite montages that have been collected : " i feel so much of my dad alive in me that there is n't even room for me . "
" i feel very lonely . "
" i need to be in some backwoods redneck town so that i can feel beautiful . "
" i feel invisible to you . "
" i would n't hide it if society did n't make me feel like i needed to . "
" i feel in love with carolyn . " " i feel so naughty . "
" i feel these weirdoes are actually an asset to college life . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " i love how i feel today . "
so as you can see , we feel fine uses a technique that i call " passive observation . "
what i mean by that is that it passively observes people as they live their lives . it scans the world 's blogs and looks at what people are writing , and these people do n't know they 're being watched or interviewed .
and because of that , you end up getting very honest , candid , sincere responses that are often very moving .
and this is a technique that i usually prefer in my work because people do n't know they 're being interviewed .
they 're just living life , and they end up just acting like that .
another technique is directly questioning people .
and this is a technique that i explored in a different project , the yahoo ! time capsule , which was designed to take a fingerprint of the world in 2006 .
it was divided into ten very simple themes - love , anger , sadness and so on - each of which contained a single , very open-ended question put to the world : what do you love ? what makes you angry ?
what makes you sad ? what do you believe in ? and so on .
the time capsule was available for one month online , translated into 10 languages , and this is what it looked like .
it 's a spinning globe , the surface of which is entirely composed of the pictures and words and drawings of people that submitted to the time capsule .
the ten themes radiate out and orbit the time capsule .
you can sift through this data and see what people have submitted .
this is in response to , what 's beautiful ? " miss world . "
there are two modes to the time capsule .
there 's one world , which presents the spinning globe , and many voices , which splits the data out into film strips and lets you sift through them one by one .
so this project was punctuated by a really amazing event , which was held in the desert outside albuquerque in new mexico at the jemez pueblo , where for three consecutive nights , the contents of the capsule were projected onto the sides of the ancient red rock canyon walls , which stand about 200 feet tall . it was really incredible .
and we also projected the contents of the time capsule as binary code using a 35-watt laser into outer space .
you can see the orange line leaving the desert floor at about a 45 degree angle there . this was amazing because the first night i looked at all this information and really started seeing the gaps that i talked about earlier - the differences in age , gender and wealth and so on .
but , you know , as i looked at this more and more and more , and saw these images go across the rocks , i realized i was seeing the same archetypal events depicted again and again and again .
you know : weddings , births , funerals , the first car , the first kiss , the first camel or horse - depending on the culture .
and it was really moving . and this picture here was taken the final night from a distant cliff about two miles away , where the contents of the capsule were being beamed into space .
and there was something very moving about all of this human expression being shot off into the night sky .
and it started to make me think a lot about the night sky , and how humans have always used the night sky to project their great stories .
you know , as a child in vermont , on a farm where i grew up , i would often look up into the dark sky and see the three star belt of orion , the hunter .
and as an adult , i 've been more aware of the great greek myths playing out in the sky overhead every night .
you know , orion facing the roaring bull .
perseus flying to the rescue of andromeda .
zeus battling chronos for control of mount olympus .
i mean , these are the great tales of the greeks .
and it caused me to wonder about our world today .
and it caused me to wonder specifically , if we could make new constellations today , what would those look like ? what would those be ?
if we could make new pictures in the sky , what would we draw ?
what are the great stories of today ?
and those are the questions that inspired my new project , which is debuting here today at ted .
nobody 's seen this yet , publicly .
it 's called universe : revealing our modern mythology .
and it uses this metaphor of an interactive night sky .
so , it 's my great pleasure now to show this to you .
so , universe will open here .
and you 'll see that it leads with a shifting star field , and there 's an aurora borealis in the background , kind of morphing with color . the color of the aurora borealis can be controlled using this single bar of color at the bottom , and we 'll put it down here to red .
so you see this kind of - these stars moving along .
now , these are n't just little points of light , little pixels .
each of those stars actually represents a specific event in the real world - a quote that was stated by somebody , an image , a news story , a person , a company . you know , some kind of heroic personality .
and you might notice that as the cursor begins to touch some of these stars , that shapes begin to emerge .
we see here there 's a little man walking along , or maybe a woman .
and we see here a photograph with a head .
you can start to see words emerging here .
and those are the constellations of today .
and i can turn them all on , and you can see them moving across the sky now .
this is the universe of 2007 , the last two months .
the data from this is global news coverage from thousands of news sources around the world .
it 's using the api of a really great company that i work with in new york , actually , called daylife .
and it 's kind of the zeitgeist view at this level of the world 's current mythology over the last couple of months .
so we can see where it 's emerging here , like president ford , iraq , bush . and we can actually isolate just the words - i call them secrets - and we can cause them to form an alphabetical list . and we see anna nicole smith playing a big role recently .
president ford - this is gerald ford 's funeral .
we can actually click anything in universe and have it become the center of the universe , and everything else will enter its orbit .
so , we 'll click ford , and now that becomes the center .
and the things that relate to ford enter its orbit and swirl around it .
we can isolate just the photographs , and we now see those .
we can click on one of those and have the photograph be the center of the universe .
now the things that relate to it are swirling around .
we can click on this and we see this iconic image of betty ford kissing her husband 's coffin .
in universe , there 's kind of no end . it just goes infinitely , and you can just kind of click on stuff .
this is a photographic representation , called snapshots .
but we can actually be more specific in defining our universe .
so , if we want to , let 's check out what bill clinton 's universe looks like .
and let 's see , in the past week , what he 's been up to .
so now , we have a new universe , which is just constrained to all things bill clinton .
we can have his constellations emerge here .
we can pull out his secrets , and we see that it has a lot to do with candidates , hillary , presidential , barack obama .
we can see the stories that bill clinton is taking part in right now .
any of those can be opened up .
so we see obama and the clintons meet in alabama .
you can see that this is an important story ; there are a lot of things in its orbit . if we open this up , we get different perspectives on this story .
you can click any of those to go out and read the article at the source . this one 's from al jazeera .
we can also see the superstars . these would be the people that are kind of the looming heroes and heroines in the universe of bill clinton . so there 's bill clinton , hillary , iraq , george bush , barack obama , scooter libby - these are kind of the people of bill clinton .
we can also see a world map , so this shows us the geographic reach of bill clinton in the last week or so .
we can see he 's been focused in america because he 's been campaigning , probably , but a little bit of action over here in the middle east .
and then we can also see a timeline .
so we see that he was a bit quiet on saturday , but he was back to work on sunday morning , and actually been tapering off since then this week .
and it 's not limited to just people or dates , but we can actually put in concepts also .
so if i put in climate change for all of 2006 , we 'll see what that universe looks like .
here we have our star field . here we have our shapes .
here we have our secrets .
so we see again , climate change is large : nairobi , global conference , environmental .
and there are also quotes that you can see , if you 're interested in reading about quotes on climate change .
you know , this is really an infinite thing .
the superstars of climate change in 2006 : united states , britain , china . you know , these are the towering countries that kind of define this concept .
so this is a piece that demands exploration .
this will be online in several days , probably next tuesday .
and you 'll all be able to use it and kind of explore what your own personal mythology might be .
you 'll notice that in daylife - rather , in universe - it supports both the notion of a global mythology , which is represented by something as broad as , say , 2007 , and also a personal mythology .
as you search for the things that are important to you in your world , and then see what the constellations of those might look like .
so it 's been a pleasure . thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm here to enlist you in helping reshape the story about how humans and other critters get things done .
here is the old story - we 've already heard a little bit about it : biology is war in which only the fiercest survive ; businesses and nations succeed only by defeating , destroying and dominating competition ; politics is about your side winning at all costs .
but i think we can see the very beginnings of a new story beginning to emerge .
it 's a narrative spread across a number of different disciplines , in which cooperation , collective action and complex interdependencies play a more important role .
and the central , but not all-important , role of competition and survival of the fittest shrinks just a little bit to make room .
i started thinking about the relationship between communication , media and collective action when i wrote " smart mobs , " and i found that when i finished the book , i kept thinking about it .
in fact , if you look back , human communication media and the ways in which we organize socially have been co-evolving for quite a long time .
humans have lived for much , much longer than the approximately 10,000 years of settled agricultural civilization in small family groups . nomadic hunters bring down rabbits , gathering food .
the form of wealth in those days was enough food to stay alive .
but at some point , they banded together to hunt bigger game .
and we do n't know exactly how they did this , although they must have solved some collective action problems ; it only makes sense that you ca n't hunt mastodons while you 're fighting with the other groups .
and again , we have no way of knowing , but it 's clear that a new form of wealth must have emerged .
more protein than a hunter 's family could eat before it rotted .
so that raised a social question that i believe must have driven new social forms .
did the people who ate that mastodon meat owe something to the hunters and their families ?
and if so , how did they make arrangements ?
again , we ca n't know , but we can be pretty sure that some form of symbolic communication must have been involved .
of course , with agriculture came the first big civilizations , the first cities built of mud and brick , the first empires .
and it was the administers of these empires who began hiring people to keep track of the wheat and sheep and wine that was owed and the taxes that was owed on them by making marks ; marks on clay in that time .
not too much longer after that , the alphabet was invented .
and this powerful tool was really reserved , for thousands of years , for the elite administrators -lrb- laughter -rrb- who kept track of accounts for the empires .
and then another communication technology enabled new media : the printing press came along , and within decades , millions of people became literate .
and from literate populations , new forms of collective action emerged in the spheres of knowledge , religion and politics .
we saw scientific revolutions , the protestant reformation , constitutional democracies possible where they had not been possible before .
not created by the printing press , but enabled by the collective action that emerges from literacy .
and again , new forms of wealth emerged .
now , commerce is ancient . markets are as old as the crossroads .
but capitalism , as we know it , is only a few hundred years old , enabled by cooperative arrangements and technologies , such as the joint-stock ownership company , shared liability insurance , double-entry bookkeeping .
now of course , the enabling technologies are based on the internet , and in the many-to-many era , every desktop is now a printing press , a broadcasting station , a community or a marketplace .
evolution is speeding up .
more recently , that power is untethering and leaping off the desktops , and very , very quickly , we 're going to see a significant proportion , if not the majority of the human race , walking around holding , carrying or wearing supercomputers linked at speeds greater than what we consider to be broadband today .
now , when i started looking into collective action , the considerable literature on it is based on what sociologists call " social dilemmas . "
and there are a couple of mythic narratives of social dilemmas .
i 'm going to talk briefly about two of them : the prisoner 's dilemma and the tragedy of the commons .
now , when i talked about this with kevin kelly , he assured me that everybody in this audience pretty much knows the details of the prisoner 's dilemma , so i 'm just going to go over that very , very quickly .
if you have more questions about it , ask kevin kelly later . -lrb- laughter -rrb- the prisoner 's dilemma is actually a story that 's overlaid on a mathematical matrix that came out of the game theory in the early years of thinking about nuclear war : two players who could n't trust each other .
let me just say that every unsecured transaction is a good example of a prisoner 's dilemma .
person with the goods , person with the money , because they ca n't trust each other , are not going to exchange .
neither one wants to be the first one or they 're going to get the sucker 's payoff , but both lose , of course , because they do n't get what they want .
if they could only agree , if they could only turn a prisoner 's dilemma into a different payoff matrix called an assurance game , they could proceed .
twenty years ago , robert axelrod used the prisoner 's dilemma as a probe of the biological question : if we are here because our ancestors were such fierce competitors , how does cooperation exist at all ?
he started a computer tournament for people to submit prisoner 's dilemma strategies and discovered , much to his surprise , that a very , very simple strategy won - it won the first tournament , and even after everyone knew it won , it won the second tournament - that 's known as tit for tat .
another economic game that may not be as well known as the prisoner 's dilemma is the ultimatum game , and it 's also a very interesting probe of our assumptions about the way people make economic transactions .
here 's how the game is played : there are two players ; they 've never played the game before , they will not play the game again , they do n't know each other , and they are , in fact , in separate rooms .
first player is offered a hundred dollars and is asked to propose a split : 50/50 , 90/10 , whatever that player wants to propose . the second player either accepts the split - both players are paid and the game is over - or rejects the split - neither player is paid and the game is over .
now , the fundamental basis of neoclassical economics would tell you it 's irrational to reject a dollar because someone you do n't know in another room is going to get 99 .
yet in thousands of trials with american and european and japanese students , a significant percentage would reject any offer that 's not close to 50/50 .
and although they were screened and did n't know about the game and had never played the game before , proposers seemed to innately know this because the average proposal was surprisingly close to 50/50 .
now , the interesting part comes in more recently when anthropologists began taking this game to other cultures and discovered , to their surprise , that slash-and-burn agriculturalists in the amazon or nomadic pastoralists in central asia or a dozen different cultures - each had radically different ideas of what is fair .
which suggests that instead of there being an innate sense of fairness , that somehow the basis of our economic transactions can be influenced by our social institutions , whether we know that or not .
the other major narrative of social dilemmas is the tragedy of the commons .
garrett hardin used it to talk about overpopulation in the late 1960s .
he used the example of a common grazing area in which each person by simply maximizing their own flock led to overgrazing and the depletion of the resource .
he had the rather gloomy conclusion that humans will inevitably despoil any common pool resource in which people can not be restrained from using it .
now , elinor ostrom , a political scientist , in 1990 asked the interesting question that any good scientist should ask , which is : is it really true that humans will always despoil commons ?
so she went out and looked at what data she could find .
she looked at thousands of cases of humans sharing watersheds , forestry resources , fisheries , and discovered that yes , in case after case , humans destroyed the commons that they depended on .
but she also found many instances in which people escaped the prisoner 's dilemma ; in fact , the tragedy of the commons is a multiplayer prisoner 's dilemma .
and she said that people are only prisoners if they consider themselves to be .
they escape by creating institutions for collective action .
and she discovered , i think most interestingly , that among those institutions that worked , there were a number of common design principles , and those principles seem to be missing from those institutions that do n't work .
i 'm moving very quickly over a number of disciplines . in biology , the notions of symbiosis , group selection , evolutionary psychology are contested , to be sure .
but there is really no longer any major debate over the fact that cooperative arrangements have moved from a peripheral role to a central role in biology , from the level of the cell to the level of the ecology .
and again , our notions of individuals as economic beings have been overturned .
rational self-interest is not always the dominating factor .
in fact , people will act to punish cheaters , even at a cost to themselves .
and most recently , neurophysiological measures have shown that people who punish cheaters in economic games show activity in the reward centers of their brain .
which led one scientist to declare that altruistic punishment may be the glue that holds societies together .
now , i 've been talking about how new forms of communication and new media in the past have helped create new economic forms .
commerce is ancient . markets are very old . capitalism is fairly recent ; socialism emerged as a reaction to that .
and yet we see very little talk about how the next form may be emerging .
jim surowiecki briefly mentioned yochai benkler 's paper about open source , pointing to a new form of production : peer-to-peer production .
i simply want you to keep in mind that if in the past , new forms of cooperation enabled by new technologies create new forms of wealth , we may be moving into yet another economic form that is significantly different from previous ones .
very briefly , let 's look at some businesses . ibm , as you know , hp , sun - some of the most fierce competitors in the it world are open sourcing their software , are providing portfolios of patents for the commons .
eli lilly - in , again , the fiercely competitive pharmaceutical world - has created a market for solutions for pharmaceutical problems .
toyota , instead of treating its suppliers as a marketplace , treats them as a network and trains them to produce better , even though they are also training them to produce better for their competitors .
now none of these companies are doing this out of altruism ; they 're doing it because they 're learning that a certain kind of sharing is in their self-interest .
open source production has shown us that world-class software , like linux and mozilla , can be created with neither the bureaucratic structure of the firm nor the incentives of the marketplace as we 've known them .
google enriches itself by enriching thousands of bloggers through adsense .
amazon has opened its application programming interface to 60,000 developers , countless amazon shops .
they 're enriching others , not out of altruism but as a way of enriching themselves .
ebay solved the prisoner 's dilemma and created a market where none would have existed by creating a feedback mechanism that turns a prisoner 's dilemma game into an assurance game .
instead of , " neither of us can trust each other , so we have to make suboptimal moves , " it 's , " you prove to me that you are trustworthy and i will cooperate . "
wikipedia has used thousands of volunteers to create a free encyclopedia with a million and a half articles in 200 languages in just a couple of years .
we 've seen that thinkcycle has enabled ngos in developing countries to put up problems to be solved by design students around the world , including something that 's being used for tsunami relief right now : it 's a mechanism for rehydrating cholera victims that 's so simple to use it , illiterates can be trained to use it .
bittorrent turns every downloader into an uploader , making the system more efficient the more it is used .
millions of people have contributed their desktop computers when they 're not using them to link together through the internet into supercomputing collectives that help solve the protein folding problem for medical researchers - that 's folding @ home at stanford - to crack codes , to search for life in outer space .
i do n't think we know enough yet .
i do n't think we 've even begun to discover what the basic principles are , but i think we can begin to think about them .
and i do n't have enough time to talk about all of them , but think about self-interest .
this is all about self-interest that adds up to more .
in el salvador , both sides that withdrew from their civil war took moves that had been proven to mirror a prisoner 's dilemma strategy .
in the u.s. , in the philippines , in kenya , around the world , citizens have self-organized political protests and get out the vote campaigns using mobile devices and sms .
is an apollo project of cooperation possible ?
a transdisciplinary study of cooperation ?
i believe that the payoff would be very big .
i think we need to begin developing maps of this territory so that we can talk about it across disciplines .
and i am not saying that understanding cooperation is going to cause us to be better people - and sometimes people cooperate to do bad things - but i will remind you that a few hundred years ago , people saw their loved ones die from diseases they thought were caused by sin or foreigners or evil spirits .
descartes said we need an entire new way of thinking .
when the scientific method provided that new way of thinking and biology showed that microorganisms caused disease , suffering was alleviated .
what forms of suffering could be alleviated , what forms of wealth could be created if we knew a little bit more about cooperation ?
i do n't think that this transdisciplinary discourse is automatically going to happen ; it 's going to require effort .
so i enlist you to help me get the cooperation project started .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so a couple of years ago i started a program to try to get the rockstar tech and design people to take a year off and work in the one environment that represents pretty much everything they 're supposed to hate ; we have them work in government .
the program is called code for america , and it 's a little bit like a peace corps for geeks .
we select a few fellows every year and we have them work with city governments .
instead of sending them off into the third world , we send them into the wilds of city hall .
and there they make great apps , they work with city staffers .
but really what they 're doing is they 're showing what 's possible with technology today .
so meet al .
al is a fire hydrant in the city of boston .
here it kind of looks like he 's looking for a date , but what he 's really looking for is for someone to shovel him out when he gets snowed in , because he knows he 's not very good at fighting fires when he 's covered in four feet of snow .
now how did he come to be looking for help in this very unique manner ?
we had a team of fellows in boston last year through the code for america program .
they were there in february , and it snowed a lot in february last year .
and they noticed that the city never gets to digging out these fire hydrants .
but one fellow in particular , a guy named erik michaels-ober , noticed something else , and that 's that citizens are shoveling out sidewalks right in front of these things .
so he did what any good developer would do , he wrote an app .
it 's a cute little app where you can adopt a fire hydrant .
so you agree to dig it out when it snows .
if you do , you get to name it , and he called the first one al .
and if you do n't , someone can steal it from you .
so it 's got cute little game dynamics on it .
this is a modest little app .
it 's probably the smallest of the 21 apps that the fellows wrote last year .
but it 's doing something that no other government technology does .
it 's spreading virally .
there 's a guy in the i.t. department of the city of honolulu who saw this app and realized that he could use it , not for snow , but to get citizens to adopt tsunami sirens .
it 's very important that these tsunami sirens work , but people steal the batteries out of them .
so he 's getting citizens to check on them .
and then seattle decided to use it to get citizens to clear out clogged storm drains .
and chicago just rolled it out to get people to sign up to shovel sidewalks when it snows .
so we now know of nine cities that are planning to use this .
and this has spread just frictionlessly , organically , naturally .
if you know anything about government technology , you know that this is n't how it normally goes .
procuring software usually takes a couple of years .
we had a team that worked on a project in boston last year that took three people about two and a half months .
it was a way that parents could figure out which were the right public schools for their kids .
we were told afterward that if that had gone through normal channels , it would have taken at least two years and it would have cost about two million dollars .
and that 's nothing .
there is one project in the california court system right now that so far cost taxpayers two billion dollars , and it does n't work .
and there are projects like this at every level of government .
so an app that takes a couple of days to write and then spreads virally , that 's sort of a shot across the bow to the institution of government .
it suggests how government could work better - not more like a private company , as many people think it should .
and not even like a tech company , but more like the internet itself .
and that means permissionless , it means open , it means generative .
and that 's important .
but what 's more important about this app is that it represents how a new generation is tackling the problem of government - not as the problem of an ossified institution , but as a problem of collective action .
and that 's great news , because , it turns out , we 're very good at collective action with digital technology .
now there 's a very large community of people that are building the tools that we need to do things together effectively .
it 's not just code for america fellows , there are hundreds of people all over the country that are standing and writing civic apps every day in their own communities .
they have n't given up on government .
they are frustrated as hell with it , but they 're not complaining about it , they 're fixing it .
and these folks know something that we 've lost sight of .
and that 's that when you strip away all your feelings about politics and the line at the dmv and all those other things that we 're really mad about , government is , at its core , in the words of tim o 'reilly , " what we do together that we ca n't do alone . "
now a lot of people have given up on government .
and if you 're one of those people , i would ask that you reconsider , because things are changing .
politics is not changing ; government is changing .
and because government ultimately derives its power from us - remember " we the people ? " - how we think about it is going to effect how that change happens .
now i did n't know very much about government when i started this program .
and like a lot of people , i thought government was basically about getting people elected to office .
well after two years , i 've come to the conclusion that , especially local government , is about opossums .
this is the call center for the services and information line .
it 's generally where you will get if you call 311 in your city .
if you should ever have the chance to staff your city 's call center , as our fellow scott silverman did as part of the program - in fact , they all do that - you will find that people call government with a very wide range of issues , including having an opossum stuck in your house .
so scott gets this call .
he types " opossum " into this official knowledge base .
he does n't really come up with anything . he starts with animal control .
and finally , he says , " look , can you just open all the doors to your house and play music really loud and see if the thing leaves ? "
so that worked . so booya for scott .
but that was n't the end of the opossums .
boston does n't just have a call center .
it has an app , a web and mobile app , called citizens connect .
now we did n't write this app .
this is the work of the very smart people at the office of new urban mechanics in boston .
so one day - this is an actual report - this came in : " opossum in my trashcan . ca n't tell if it 's dead .
how do i get this removed ? "
but what happens with citizens connect is different .
so scott was speaking person-to-person .
but on citizens connect everything is public , so everybody can see this .
and in this case , a neighbor saw it .
and the next report we got said , " i walked over to this location , found the trashcan behind the house .
opossum ? check . living ? yep .
turned trashcan on its side . walked home .
goodnight sweet opossum . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- pretty simple .
so this is great . this is the digital meeting the physical .
and it 's also a great example of government getting in on the crowd-sourcing game .
but it 's also a great example of government as a platform .
and i do n't mean necessarily a technological definition of platform here .
i 'm just talking about a platform for people to help themselves and to help others .
so one citizen helped another citizen , but government played a key role here .
it connected those two people .
and it could have connected them with government services if they 'd been needed , but a neighbor is a far better and cheaper alternative to government services .
when one neighbor helps another , we strengthen our communities .
we call animal control , it just costs a lot of money .
now one of the important things we need to think about government is that it 's not the same thing as politics .
and most people get that , but they think that one is the input to the other .
that our input to the system of government is voting .
now how many times have we elected a political leader - and sometimes we spend a lot of energy getting a new political leader elected - and then we sit back and we expect government to reflect our values and meet our needs , and then not that much changes ?
that 's because government is like a vast ocean and politics is the six-inch layer on top .
and what 's under that is what we call bureaucracy .
and we say that word with such contempt .
but it 's that contempt that keeps this thing that we own and we pay for as something that 's working against us , this other thing , and then we 're disempowering ourselves .
people seem to think politics is sexy .
if we want this institution to work for us , we 're going to have to make bureaucracy sexy .
because that 's where the real work of government happens .
we have to engage with the machinery of government .
so that 's occupythesec movement has done .
have you seen these guys ?
it 's a group of concerned citizens that have written a very detailed 325-page report that 's a response to the sec 's request for comment on the financial reform bill .
that 's not being politically active , that 's being bureaucratically active .
now for those of us who 've given up on government , it 's time that we asked ourselves about the world that we want to leave for our children .
you have to see the enormous challenges that they 're going to face .
do we really think we 're going to get where we need to go without fixing the one institution that can act on behalf of all of us ?
we ca n't do without government , but we do need it to be more effective .
the good news is that technology is making it possible to fundamentally reframe the function of government in a way that can actually scale by strengthening civil society .
and there 's a generation out there that 's grown up on the internet , and they know that it 's not that hard to do things together , you just have to architect the systems the right way .
now the average age of our fellows is 28 , so i am , begrudgingly , almost a generation older than most of them .
this is a generation that 's grown up taking their voices pretty much for granted .
they 're not fighting that battle that we 're all fighting about who gets to speak ; they all get to speak .
they can express their opinion on any channel at any time , and they do .
so when they 're faced with the problem of government , they do n't care as much about using their voices .
they 're using their hands .
they 're using their hands to write applications that make government work better .
and those applications let us use our hands to make our communities better .
that could be shoveling out a hydrant , pulling a weed , turning over a garbage can with an opossum in it .
and certainly , we could have been shoveling out those fire hydrants all along , and many people do .
but these apps are like little digital reminders that we 're not just consumers , and we 're not just consumers of government , putting in our taxes and getting back services .
we 're more than that , we 're citizens .
and we 're not going to fix government until we fix citizenship .
so the question i have for all of you here : when it comes to the big , important things that we need to do together , all of us together , are we just going to be a crowd of voices , or are we also going to be a crowd of hands ?
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- can i say how delighted i am to be away from the calm of westminster and whitehall ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- this is kim , a nine-year-old vietnam girl , her back ruined by napalm , and she awakened the conscience of the nation of america to begin to end the vietnam war .
this is birhan , who was the ethiopian girl who launched live aid in the 1980s , 15 minutes away from death when she was rescued , and that picture of her being rescued is one that went round the world .
this is tiananmen square .
a man before a tank became a picture that became a symbol for the whole world of resistance .
this next is the sudanese girl , a few moments from death , a vulture hovering in the background , a picture that went round the world and shocked people into action on poverty .
this is neda , the iranian girl who was shot while at a demonstration with her father in iran only a few weeks ago , and she is now the focus , rightly so , of the youtube generation .
and what do all these pictures and events have in common ?
what they have in common is what we see unlocks what we can not see .
what we see unlocks the invisible ties and bonds of sympathy that bring us together to become a human community .
what these pictures demonstrate is that we do feel the pain of others , however distantly .
what i think these pictures demonstrate is that we do believe in something bigger than ourselves .
what these pictures demonstrate is that there is a moral sense across all religions , across all faiths , across all continents - a moral sense that not only do we share the pain of others , and believe in something bigger than ourselves but we have a duty to act when we see things that are wrong that need righted , see injuries that need to be corrected , see problems that need to be rectified .
there is a story about olof palme , the swedish prime minister , going to see ronald reagan in america in the 1980s .
before he arrived ronald reagan said - and he was the swedish social democratic prime minister - " is n't this man a communist ? "
the reply was , " no , mr president , he 's an anti-communist . "
and ronald reagan said , " i do n't care what kind of communist he is ! "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ronald reagan asked olof palme , the social democratic prime minister of sweden , " well , what do you believe in ? do you want to abolish the rich ? "
he said , " no , i want to abolish the poor . "
our responsibility is to let everyone have the chance to realize their potential to the full .
i believe there is a moral sense and a global ethic that commands attention from people of every religion and every faith , and people of no faith .
but i think what 's new is that we now have the capacity to communicate instantaneously across frontiers right across the world .
we now have the capacity to find common ground with people who we will never meet , but who we will meet through the internet and through all the modern means of communication ; that we now have the capacity to organize and take collective action together to deal with the problem or an injustice that we want to deal with ; and i believe that this makes this a unique age in human history , and it is the start of what i would call the creation of a truly global society .
go back 200 years when the slave trade was under pressure from william wilberforce and all the protesters .
they protested across britain .
they won public opinion over a long period of time .
but it took 24 years for the campaign to be successful .
what could they have done with the pictures that they could have shown if they were able to use the modern means of communication to win people 's hearts and minds ?
or if you take eglantyne jebb , the woman who created save the children 90 years ago .
she was so appalled by what was happening in austria as a result of the first world war and what was happening to children who were part of the defeated families of austria , that in britain she wanted to take action , but she had to go house to house , leaflet to leaflet , to get people to attend a rally in the royal albert hall that eventually gave birth to save the children , an international organization that is now fully recognized as one of the great institutions in our land and in the world .
but what more could she have done if she 'd had the modern means of communications available to her to create a sense that the injustice that people saw had to be acted upon immediately ?
now look at what 's happened in the last 10 years .
in philippines in 2001 , president estrada - a million people texted each other about the corruption of that regime , eventually brought it down and it was , of course , called the " coup de text . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- then you have in zimbabwe the first election under robert mugabe a year ago .
because people were able to take mobile phone photographs of what was happening at the polling stations , it was impossible for that premier to fix that election in the way that he wanted to do .
or take burma and the monks that were blogging out , a country that nobody knew anything about that was happening , until these blogs told the world that there was a repression , meaning that lives were being lost and people were being persecuted and aung san suu kyi , who is one of the great prisoners of conscience of the world , had to be listened to .
then take iran itself , and what people are doing today : following what happened to neda , people who are preventing the security services of iran finding those people who are blogging out of iran , any by everybody who is blogging , changing their address to tehran , iran , and making it difficult for the security services .
take , therefore , what modern technology is capable of : the power of our moral sense allied to the power of communications and our ability to organize internationally .
that , in my view , gives us the first opportunity as a community to fundamentally change the world .
foreign policy can never be the same again . it can not be run by elites ; it 's got to be run by listening to the public opinions of peoples who are blogging , who are communicating with each other around the world .
200 years ago the problem we had to solve was slavery .
150 years ago i suppose the main problem in a country like ours was how young people , children , had the right to education .
100 years ago in most countries in europe , the pressure was for the right to vote .
50 years ago the pressure was for the right to social security and welfare .
in the last 50-60 years we have seen fascism , anti-semitism , racism , apartheid , discrimination on the basis of sex and gender and sexuality ; all these have come under pressure because of the campaigns that have been run by people to change the world .
i was with nelson mandela a year ago , when he was in london .
i was at a concert that he was attending to mark his birthday and for the creation of new resources for his foundation .
i was sitting next to nelson mandela - i was very privileged to do so - when amy winehouse came onto the stage . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and nelson mandela was quite surprised at the appearance of the singer and i was explaining to him at the time who she was .
amy winehouse said , " nelson mandela and i have a lot in common .
my husband too has spent a long time in prison . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- nelson mandela then went down to the stage and he summarized the challenge for us all .
he said in his lifetime he had climbed a great mountain , the mountain of challenging and then defeating racial oppression and defeating apartheid .
he said that there was a greater challenge ahead , the challenge of poverty , of climate change - global challenges that needed global solutions and needed the creation of a truly global society .
we are the first generation which is in a position to do this .
combine the power of a global ethic with the power of our ability to communicate and organize globally , with the challenges that we now face , most of which are global in their nature .
climate change can not be solved in one country , but has got to be solved by the world working together .
a financial crisis , just as we have seen , could not be solved by america alone or europe alone ; it needed the world to work together .
take the problems of security and terrorism and , equally , the problem of human rights and development : they can not be solved by africa alone ; they can not be solved by america or europe alone .
we can not solve these problems unless we work together .
so the great project of our generation , it seems to me , is to build for the first time , out of a global ethic and our global ability to communicate and organize together , a truly global society , built on that ethic but with institutions that can serve that global society and make for a different future .
we have now , and are the first generation with , the power to do this .
take climate change . is it not absolutely scandalous that we have a situation where we know that there is a climate change problem , where we know also that that will mean we have to give more resources to the poorest countries to deal with that , when we want to create a global carbon market , but there is no global institution that people have been able to agree upon to deal with this problem ?
one of the things that has got to come out of copenhagen in the next few months is an agreement that there will be a global environmental institution that is able to deal with the problems of persuading the whole of the world to move along a climate-change agenda .
-lrb- applause -rrb- one of the reasons why an institution is not in itself enough is that we have got to persuade people around the world to change their behavior as well , so you need that global ethic of fairness and responsibility across the generations .
take the financial crisis .
if people in poorer countries can be hit by a crisis that starts in new york or starts in the sub-prime market of the united states of america .
if people can find that that sub-prime product has been transferred across nations many , many times until it ends up in banks in iceland or the rest in britain , and people 's ordinary savings are affected by it , then you can not rely on a system of national supervision .
you need in the long run for stability , for economic growth , for jobs , as well as for financial stability , global economic institutions that make sure that growth to be sustained has to be shared , and are built on the principle that the prosperity of this world is indivisible .
so another challenge for our generation is to create global institutions that reflect our ideas of fairness and responsibility , not the ideas that were the basis of the last stage of financial development over these recent years .
then take development and take the partnership we need between our countries and the rest of the world , the poorest part of the world .
we do not have the basis of a proper partnership for the future , and yet , out of people 's desire for a global ethic and a global society that can be done .
i have just been talking to the president of sierra leone .
this is a country of six and a half million people , but it has only 80 doctors ; it has 200 nurses ; it has 120 midwives .
you can not begin to build a healthcare system for six million people with such limited resources .
or take the girl i met when i was in tanzania , a girl called miriam .
she was 11 years old ; her parents had both died from aids , her mother and then her father .
she was an aids orphan being handed across different extended families to be cared for .
she herself was suffering from hiv ; she was suffering from tuberculosis .
i met her in a field , she was ragged , she had no shoes .
when you looked in her eyes , any girl at the age of eleven is looking forward to the future , but there was an unreachable sadness in that girl 's eyes and if i could have translated that to the rest of the world for that moment , i believe that all the work that it had done for the global hiv / aids fund would be rewarded by people being prepared to make donations .
we must then build a proper relationship between the richest and the poorest countries based on our desire that they are able to fend for themselves with the investment that is necessary in their agriculture , so that africa is not a net importer of food , but an exporter of food .
take the problems of human rights and the problems of security in so many countries around the world .
burma is in chains , zimbabwe is a human tragedy , in sudan thousands of people have died unnecessarily for wars that we could prevent .
in the rwanda children 's museum , there is a photograph of a 10-year-old boy and the children 's museum is commemorating the lives that were lost in the rwandan genocide where a million people died .
there is a photograph of a boy called david .
beside that photograph there is the information about his life .
it said " david , age 10 . "
david : ambition to be a doctor .
favorite sport : football . what did he enjoy most ?
making people laugh .
how did he die ?
tortured to death .
last words said to his mother who was also tortured to death : " do n't worry . the united nations are coming . "
and we never did .
and that young boy believed our promises that we would help people in difficulty in rwanda , and we never did .
so we have got to create in this world also institutions for peacekeeping and humanitarian aid , but also for reconstruction and security for some of the conflict-ridden states of the world .
so my argument today is basically this .
we have the means by which we could create a truly global society .
the institutions of this global society can be created by our endeavors .
that global ethic can infuse the fairness and responsibility that is necessary for these institutions to work , but we should not lose the chance in this generation , in this decade in particular , with president obama in america , with other people working with us around the world , to create global institutions for the environment , and for finance , and for security and for development , that make sense of our responsibility to other peoples , our desire to bind the world together , and our need to tackle problems that everybody knows exist .
it is said that in ancient rome that when cicero spoke to his audiences , people used to turn to each other and say about cicero , " great speech . "
but it is said that in ancient greece when demosthenes spoke to his audiences , people turned to each other and did n't say " great speech . "
they said , " let 's march . "
we should be marching towards a global society .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- we see with the eyes , but we see with the brain as well .
and seeing with the brain is often called imagination .
and we are familiar with the landscapes of our own imagination , our inscapes . we 've lived with them all our lives .
but there are also hallucinations as well , and hallucinations are completely different .
they do n't seem to be of our creation .
they do n't seem to be under our control .
they seem to come from the outside , and to mimic perception .
so i am going to be talking about hallucinations , and a particular sort of visual hallucination which i see among my patients .
a few months ago , i got a phone call from a nursing home where i work .
they told me that one of their residents , an old lady in her 90s , was seeing things , and they wondered if she 'd gone bonkers or , because she was an old lady , whether she 'd had a stroke , or whether she had alzheimer 's .
and so they asked me if i would come and see rosalie , the old lady .
i went in to see her .
it was evident straight away that she was perfectly sane and lucid and of good intelligence , but she 'd been very startled and very bewildered , because she 'd been seeing things .
and she told me - the nurses had n't mentioned this - that she was blind , that she had been completely blind from macular degeneration for five years .
but now , for the last few days , she 'd been seeing things .
so i said , " what sort of things ? "
and she said , " people in eastern dress , in drapes , walking up and down stairs .
a man who turns towards me and smiles .
but he has huge teeth on one side of his mouth .
animals too .
i see a white building . it 's snowing , a soft snow .
i see this horse with a harness , dragging the snow away .
then , one night , the scene changes .
i see cats and dogs walking towards me .
they come to a certain point and then stop .
then it changes again .
i see a lot of children . they are walking up and down stairs .
they wear bright colors , rose and blue , like eastern dress . "
sometimes , she said , before the people come on , she may hallucinate pink and blue squares on the floor , which seem to go up to the ceiling .
i said , " is this like a dream ? "
and she said , " no , it 's not like a dream . it 's like a movie . "
she said , " it 's got color . it 's got motion .
but it 's completely silent , like a silent movie . "
and she said that it 's a rather boring movie .
she said , " all these people with eastern dress , walking up and down , very repetitive , very limited . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and she has a sense of humor .
she knew it was a hallucination .
but she was frightened . she 'd lived 95 years and she 'd never had a hallucination before .
she said that the hallucinations were unrelated to anything she was thinking or feeling or doing , that they seemed to come on by themselves , or disappear .
she had no control over them .
she said she did n't recognize any of the people or places in the hallucinations .
and none of the people or the animals , well , they all seemed oblivious of her .
and she did n't know what was going on .
she wondered if she was going mad or losing her mind .
well , i examined her carefully .
she was a bright old lady , perfectly sane . she had no medical problems .
she was n't on any medications which could produce hallucinations .
but she was blind .
and i then said to her , " i think i know what you have . "
i said , " there is a special form of visual hallucination which may go with deteriorating vision or blindness .
this was originally described , " i said , " right back in the 18th century , by a man called charles bonnet .
and you have charles bonnet syndrome .
there is nothing wrong with your brain . there is nothing wrong with your mind .
you have charles bonnet syndrome . "
and she was very relieved at this , that there was nothing seriously the matter , and also rather curious .
she said , " who is this charles bonnet ? "
she said , " did he have them himself ? "
and she said , " tell all the nurses that i have charles bonnet syndrome . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " i 'm not crazy . i 'm not demented . i have charles bonnet syndrome . "
well , so i did tell the nurses .
now this , for me , is a common situation .
i work in old-age homes , largely .
i see a lot of elderly people who are hearing impaired or visually impaired .
about 10 percent of the hearing impaired people get musical hallucinations .
and about 10 percent of the visually impaired people get visual hallucinations .
you do n't have to be completely blind , only sufficiently impaired .
now with the original description in the 18th century , charles bonnet did not have them .
his grandfather had these hallucinations .
his grandfather was a magistrate , an elderly man .
he 'd had cataract surgery .
his vision was pretty poor .
and in 1759 , he described to his grandson various things he was seeing .
the first thing he said was he saw a handkerchief in midair .
it was a large blue handkerchief with four orange circles .
and he knew it was a hallucination .
you do n't have handkerchiefs in midair .
and then he saw a big wheel in midair .
but sometimes he was n't sure whether he was hallucinating or not , because the hallucinations would fit in the context of the visions .
so on one occasion , when his granddaughters were visiting them , he said , " and who are these handsome young men with you ? "
and they said , " alas , grandpapa , there are no handsome young men . "
and then the handsome young men disappeared .
it 's typical of these hallucinations that they may come in a flash and disappear in a flash .
they do n't usually fade in and out .
they are rather sudden , and they change suddenly .
charles lullin , the grandfather , saw hundreds of different figures , different landscapes of all sorts .
on one occasion , he saw a man in a bathrobe smoking a pipe , and realized it was himself .
that was the only figure he recognized .
on one occasion when he was walking in the streets of paris , he saw - this was real - a scaffolding .
but when he got back home , he saw a miniature of the scaffolding six inches high , on his study table .
this repetition of perception is sometimes called palinopsia .
with him and with rosalie , what seems to be going on - and rosalie said , " what 's going on ? " - and i said that as you lose vision , as the visual parts of the brain are no longer getting any input , they become hyperactive and excitable , and they start to fire spontaneously .
and you start to see things .
the things you see can be very complicated indeed .
with another patient of mine , who , also had some vision , the vision she had could be disturbing .
on one occasion , she said she saw a man in a striped shirt in a restaurant .
and he turned around . and then he divided into six figures in striped shirts , who started walking towards her .
and then the six figures came together again , like a concertina .
once , when she was driving , or rather , her husband was driving , the road divided into four and she felt herself going simultaneously up four roads .
she had very mobile hallucinations as well .
a lot of them had to do with a car .
sometimes she would see a teenage boy sitting on the hood of the car .
he was very tenacious and he moved rather gracefully when the car turned .
and then when they came to a stop , the boy would do a sudden vertical takeoff , 100 foot in the air , and then disappear .
another patient of mine had a different sort of hallucination .
this was a woman who did n't have trouble with her eyes , but the visual parts of her brain , a little tumor in the occipital cortex .
and , above all , she would see cartoons .
these cartoons would be transparent and would cover half the visual field , like a screen .
and especially she saw cartoons of kermit the frog .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , i do n't watch sesame street , but she made a point of saying , " why kermit ? " she said , " kermit the frog means nothing to me .
you know , i was wondering about freudian determinants .
why kermit ?
kermit the frog means nothing to me . "
she did n't mind the cartoons too much .
but what did disturb her was she got very persistent images or hallucinations of faces and as with rosalie , the faces were often deformed , with very large teeth or very large eyes .
and these frightened her .
well , what is going on with these people ?
as a physician , i have to try and define what 's going on , and to reassure people , especially to reassure them that they 're not going insane .
something like 10 percent , as i said , of visually impaired people get these .
but no more than one percent of the people acknowledge them , because they are afraid they will be seen as insane or something .
and if they do mention them to their own doctors they may be misdiagnosed .
in particular , the notion is that if you see things or hear things , you 're going mad , but the psychotic hallucinations are quite different .
psychotic hallucinations , whether they are visual or vocal , they address you . they accuse you .
they seduce you . they humiliate you .
they jeer at you .
you interact with them .
there is none of this quality of being addressed with these charles bonnet hallucinations .
there is a film . you 're seeing a film which has nothing to do with you , or that 's how people think about it .
there is also a rare thing called temporal lobe epilepsy , and sometimes , if one has this , one may feel oneself transported back to a time and place in the past .
you 're at a particular road junction .
you smell chestnuts roasting .
you hear the traffic . all the senses are involved .
and you 're waiting for your girl .
and it 's that tuesday evening back in 1982 .
and the temporal lobe hallucinations are all-sense hallucinations , full of feeling , full of familiarity , located in space and time , coherent , dramatic .
the charles bonnet ones are quite different .
so in the charles bonnet hallucinations , you have all sorts of levels , from the geometrical hallucinations - the pink and blue squares the woman had - up to quite elaborate hallucinations with figures and especially faces .
faces , and sometimes deformed faces , are the single commonest thing in these hallucinations .
and one of the second commonest is cartoons .
so , what is going on ?
fascinatingly , in the last few years , it 's been possible to do functional brain imagery , to do fmri on people as they are hallucinating .
and in fact , to find that different parts of the visual brain are activated as they are hallucinating .
when people have these simple geometrical hallucinations , the primary visual cortex is activated .
this is the part of the brain which perceives edges and patterns .
you do n't form images with your primary visual cortex .
when images are formed , a higher part of the visual cortex is involved in the temporal lobe .
and in particular , one area of the temporal lobe is called the fusiform gyrus .
and it 's known that if people have damage in the fusiform gyrus , they maybe lose the ability to recognize faces .
but if there is an abnormal activity in the fusiform gyrus , they may hallucinate faces , and this is exactly what you find in some of these people .
there is an area in the anterior part of this gyrus where teeth and eyes are represented , and that part of the gyrus is activated when people get the deformed hallucinations .
there is another part of the brain which is especially activated when one sees cartoons .
it 's activated when one recognizes cartoons , when one draws cartoons , and when one hallucinates them .
it 's very interesting that that should be specific .
there are other parts of the brain which are specifically involved with the recognition and hallucination of buildings and landscapes .
around 1970 , it was found that there were not only parts of the brain , but particular cells .
" face cells " were discovered around 1970 .
and now we know that there are hundreds of other sorts of cells , which can be very , very specific .
so you may not only have " car " cells , you may have " aston martin " cells .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i saw an aston martin this morning .
i had to bring it in .
and now it 's in there somewhere .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , at this level , in what 's called the inferotemporal cortex , there are only visual images , or figments or fragments .
it 's only at higher levels that the other senses join in and there are connections with memory and emotion .
and in the charles bonnet syndrome , you do n't go to those higher levels .
you 're in these levels of inferior visual cortex where you have thousands and tens of thousands and millions of images , or figments , or fragmentary figments , all neurally encoded in particular cells or small clusters of cells .
normally these are all part of the integrated stream of perception , or imagination , and one is not conscious of them .
it is only if one is visually impaired or blind that the process is interrupted .
and instead of getting normal perception , you 're getting an anarchic , convulsive stimulation , or release , of all of these visual cells in the inferotemporal cortex .
so , suddenly you see a face . suddenly you see a car .
suddenly this , and suddenly that .
the mind does its best to organize and to give some sort of coherence to this , but not terribly successfully .
when these were first described , it was thought that they could be interpreted like dreams .
but in fact people say , " i do n't recognize the people . i ca n't form any associations . "
" kermit means nothing to me . "
you do n't get anywhere thinking of them as dreams .
well , i 've more or less said what i wanted .
i think i just want to recapitulate and say this is common .
think of the number of blind people .
there must be hundreds of thousands of blind people who have these hallucinations , but are too scared to mention them .
so this sort of thing needs to be brought into notice , for patients , for doctors , for the public .
finally , i think they are infinitely interesting and valuable , for giving one some insight as to how the brain works .
charles bonnet said , 250 years ago - he wondered how , thinking these hallucinations , how , as he put it , the theater of the mind could be generated by the machinery of the brain .
now , 250 years later , i think we 're beginning to glimpse how this is done .
thanks very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : that was superb . thank you so much .
you speak about these things with so much insight and empathy for your patients .
have you yourself experienced any of the syndromes you write about ?
oliver sacks : i was afraid you 'd ask that .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- well , yeah , a lot of them .
and actually i 'm a little visually impaired myself .
i 'm blind in one eye , and not terribly good in the other .
and i see the geometrical hallucinations .
but they stop there .
ca : and they do n't disturb you ?
because you understand what 's doing it , it does n't make you worried ?
os : well they do n't disturb me any more than my tinnitus , which i ignore .
they occasionally interest me , and i have many pictures of them in my notebooks .
i 've gone and had an fmri myself , to see how my visual cortex is taking over .
and when i see all these hexagons and complex things , which i also have , in visual migraine , i wonder whether everyone sees things like this , and whether things like cave art or ornamental art may have been derived from them a bit .
ca : that was an utterly , utterly fascinating talk .
thank you so much for sharing .
os : thank you . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm here today to share with you an extraordinary journey - extraordinarily rewarding journey , actually - which brought me into training rats to save human lives by detecting landmines and tuberculosis .
as a child , i had two passions .
one was a passion for rodents .
i had all kinds of rats , mice , hamsters , gerbils , squirrels .
you name it , i bred it , and i sold them to pet shops .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i also had a passion for africa .
growing up in a multicultural environment , we had african students in the house , and i learned about their stories , so different backgrounds , dependency on imported know-how , goods , services , exuberant cultural diversity .
africa was truly fascinating for me .
i became an industrial engineer , engineer in product development , and i focused on appropriate detection technologies , actually the first appropriate technologies for developing countries .
i started working in the industry , but i was n't really happy to contribute to a material consumer society in a linear , extracting and manufacturing mode .
i quit my job to focus on the real world problem : landmines .
we 're talking ' 95 now .
princess diana is announcing on tv that landmines form a structural barrier to any development , which is really true .
as long as these devices are there , or there is suspicion of landmines , you ca n't really enter into the land .
actually , there was an appeal worldwide for new detectors sustainable in the environments where they 're needed to produce , which is mainly in the developing world .
we chose rats .
why would you choose rats ?
because , are n't they vermin ?
well , actually rats are , in contrary to what most people think about them , rats are highly sociable creatures .
and actually , our product - what you see here .
there 's a target somewhere here .
you see an operator , a trained african with his rats in front who actually are left and right .
there , the animal finds a mine .
it scratches on the soil .
and the animal comes back for a food reward .
very , very simple .
very sustainable in this environment .
here , the animal gets its food reward .
and that 's how it works .
very , very simple .
now why would you use rats ?
rats have been used since the ' 50s last century , in all kinds of experiments .
rats have more genetic material allocated to olfaction than any other mammal species .
they 're extremely sensitive to smell .
moreover , they have the mechanisms to map all these smells and to communicate about it .
now how do we communicate with rats ?
well do n't talk rat , but we have a clicker , a standard method for animal training , which you see there .
a clicker , which makes a particular sound with which you can reinforce particular behaviors .
first of all , we associate the click sound with a food reward , which is smashed banana and peanuts together in a syringe .
once the animal knows click , food , click , food , click , food - so click is food - we bring it in a cage with a hole , and actually the animal learns to stick the nose in the hole under which a target scent is placed , and to do that for five seconds - five seconds , which is long for a rat .
once the animal knows this , we make the task a bit more difficult .
it learns how to find the target smell in a cage with several holes , up to 10 holes .
then the animal learns to walk on a leash in the open and find targets .
in the next step , animals learn to find real mines in real minefields .
they are tested and accredited according to international mine action standards , just like dogs have to pass a test .
this consists of 400 square meters .
there 's a number of mines placed blindly , and the team of trainer and their rat have to find all the targets .
if the animal does that , it gets a license as an accredited animal to be operational in the field - just like dogs , by the way .
maybe one slight difference : we can train rats at a fifth of the price of training the mining dog .
this is our team in mozambique : one tanzanian trainer , who transfers the skills to these three mozambican fellows .
and you should see the pride in the eyes of these people .
they have a skill , which makes them much less dependent on foreign aid .
moreover , this small team together with , of course , you need the heavy vehicles and the manual de-miners to follow-up .
but with this small investment in a rat capacity , we have demonstrated in mozambique that we can reduce the cost-price per square meter up to 60 percent of what is currently normal - two dollars per square meter , we do it at $ 1.18 , and we can still bring that price down .
question of scale .
if you can bring in more rats , we can actually make the output even bigger .
we have a demonstration site in mozambique .
eleven african governments have seen that they can become less dependent by using this technology .
they have signed the pact for peace and treaty in the great lakes region , and they endorse hero rats to clear their common borders of landmines .
but let me bring you to a very different problem .
and there 's about 6,000 people last year that walked on a landmine , but worldwide last year , almost 1.9 million died from tuberculosis as a first cause of infection .
especially in africa where t.b. and hiv are strongly linked , there is a huge common problem .
microscopy , the standard who procedure , reaches from 40 to 60 percent reliability .
in tanzania - the numbers do n't lie - 45 percent of people - t.b. patients - get diagnosed with t.b. before they die .
it means that , if you have t.b. , you have more chance that you wo n't be detected , but will just die from t.b. secondary infections and so on .
and if , however , you are detected very early , diagnosed early , treatment can start , and even in hiv-positives , it makes sense .
you can actually cure t.b. , even in hiv-positives .
so in our common language , dutch , the name for t.b.
is " tering , " which , etymologically , refers to the smell of tar .
already the old chinese and the greek , hippocrates , have actually published , documented , that t.b. can be diagnosed based on the volatiles exuding from patients .
so what we did is we collected some samples - just as a way of testing - from hospitals , trained rats on them and see if this works , and wonder , well , we can reach 89 percent sensitivity , 86 percent specificity using multiple rats in a row .
this is how it works , and really , this is a generic technology .
we 're talking now explosives , tuberculosis , but can you imagine , you can actually put anything under there .
so how does it work ?
you have a cassette with 10 samples .
you put these 10 samples at once in the cage .
an animal only needs two hundredths of a second to discriminate the scent , so it goes extremely fast .
here it 's already at the third sample .
this is a positive sample .
it gets a click sound and comes for the food reward .
and by doing so , very fast , we can have like a second-line opinion to see which patients are positive , which are negative .
just as an indication , whereas a microscopist can process 40 samples in a day , a rat can process the same amount of samples in seven minutes only .
a cage like this - -lrb- applause -rrb- a cage like this - provided that you have rats , and we have now currently 25 tuberculosis rats - a cage like this , operating throughout the day , can process 1,680 samples .
can you imagine the potential offspring applications - environmental detection of pollutants in soils , customs applications , detection of illicit goods in containers and so on .
but let 's stick first to tuberculosis .
i just want to briefly highlight , the blue rods are the scores of microscopy only at the five clinics in dar es salaam on a population of 500,000 people , where 15,000 reported to get a test done .
microscopy for 1,800 patients .
and by just presenting the samples once more to the rats and looping those results back , we were able to increase case detection rates by over 30 percent .
throughout last year , we 've been - depending on which intervals you take - we 've been consistently increasing case detection rates in five hospitals in dar es salaam between 30 and 40 percent .
so this is really considerable .
knowing that a missed patient by microscopy infects up to 15 people , healthy people , per year , you can be sure that we have saved lots of lives .
at least our hero rats have saved lots of lives .
the way forward for us is now to standardize this technology .
like , for instance , we have a small laser in the sniffer hole where the animal has to stick for five seconds .
so , to standardize this .
also , to standardize the pellets , the food rewards , and to semi-automate this in order to replicate this on a much larger scale and affect the lives of many more people .
to conclude , there are also other applications at the horizon .
here is a first prototype of our camera rat , which is a rat with a rat backpack with a camera that can go under rubble to detect for victims this is in a prototype stage .
we do n't have a working system here yet .
to conclude , i would actually like to say , you may think this is about rats , these projects , but in the end it is about people .
it is about empowering vulnerable communities to tackle difficult , expensive and dangerous humanitarian detection tasks , and doing that with a local resource , plenty available .
so something completely different is to keep on challenging your perception about the resources surrounding you , whether they are environmental , technological , animal , or human .
and to respectfully harmonize with them in order to foster a sustainable world .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the value of nothing : out of nothing comes something .
that was an essay i wrote when i was 11 years old and i got a b + . -lrb- laughter -rrb- what i 'm going to talk about : nothing out of something , and how we create .
and i 'm gonna try and do that within the 18-minute time span that we were told to stay within , and to follow the ted commandments : that is , actually , something that creates a near-death experience , but near-death is good for creativity .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ok .
so , i also want to explain , because dave eggers said he was going to heckle me if i said anything that was a lie , or not true to universal creativity .
and i 've done it this way for half the audience , who is scientific .
when i say we , i do n't mean you , necessarily ; i mean me , and my right brain , my left brain and the one that 's in between that is the censor and tells me what i 'm saying is wrong .
and i 'm going do that also by looking at what i think is part of my creative process , which includes a number of things that happened , actually - the nothing started even earlier than the moment in which i 'm creating something new .
and that includes nature , and nurture , and what i refer to as nightmares .
now in the nature area , we look at whether or not we are innately equipped with something , perhaps in our brains , some abnormal chromosome that causes this muse-like effect .
and some people would say that we 're born with it in some other means .
and others , like my mother , would say that i get my material from past lives .
some people would also say that creativity may be a function of some other neurological quirk - van gogh syndrome - that you have a little bit of , you know , psychosis , or depression .
i do have to say , somebody - i read recently that van gogh was n't really necessarily psychotic , that he might have had temporal lobe seizures , and that might have caused his spurt of creativity , and i do n't - i suppose it does something in some part of your brain .
and i will mention that i actually developed temporal lobe seizures a number of years ago , but it was during the time i was writing my last book , and some people say that book is quite different .
i think that part of it also begins with a sense of identity crisis : you know , who am i , why am i this particular person , why am i not black like everybody else ?
and sometimes you 're equipped with skills , but they may not be the kind of skills that enable creativity .
i used to draw . i thought i would be an artist .
and i had a miniature poodle .
and it was n't bad , but it was n't really creative .
because all i could really do was represent in a very one-on-one way .
and i have a sense that i probably copied this from a book .
and then , i also was n't really shining in a certain area that i wanted to be , and you know , you look at those scores , and it was n't bad , but it was not certainly predictive that i would one day make my living out of the artful arrangement of words .
also , one of the principles of creativity is to have a little childhood trauma .
and i had the usual kind that i think a lot of people had , and that is that , you know , i had expectations placed on me .
that figure right there , by the way , figure right there was a toy given to me when i was but nine years old , and it was to help me become a doctor from a very early age .
i have some ones that were long lasting : from the age of five to 15 , this was supposed to be my side occupation , and it led to a sense of failure .
but actually , there was something quite real in my life that happened when i was about 14 .
and it was discovered that my brother , in 1967 , and then my father , six months later , had brain tumors .
and my mother believed that something had gone wrong , and she was gonna find out what it was , and she was gonna fix it .
my father was a baptist minister , and he believed in miracles , and that god 's will would take care of that .
but , of course , they ended up dying , six months apart .
and after that , my mother believed that it was fate , or curses - she went looking through all the reasons in the universe why this would have happened .
everything except randomness . she did not believe in randomness .
there was a reason for everything .
and one of the reasons , she thought , was that her mother , who had died when she was very young , was angry at her .
and so , i had this notion of death all around me , because my mother also believed that i would be next , and she would be next .
and when you are faced with the prospect of death very soon , you begin to think very much about everything .
you become very creative , in a survival sense .
and this , then , led to my big questions .
and they 're the same ones that i have today .
and they are : why do things happen , and how do things happen ?
and the one my mother asked : how do i make things happen ?
it 's a wonderful way to look at these questions , when you write a story .
because , after all , in that framework , between page one and 300 , you have to answer this question of why things happen , how things happen , in what order they happen . what are the influences ?
how do i , as the narrator , as the writer , also influence that ?
and it 's also one that , i think , many of our scientists have been asking .
it 's a kind of cosmology , and i have to develop a cosmology of my own universe , as the creator of that universe .
and you see , there 's a lot of back and forth in trying to make that happen , trying to figure it out - years and years , oftentimes .
so , when i look at creativity , i also think that it is this sense or this inability to repress , my looking at associations in practically anything in life .
and i got a lot of them during what 's been going on throughout this conference , almost everything that 's been going on .
and so i 'm going to use , as the metaphor , this association : quantum mechanics , which i really do n't understand , but i 'm still gonna use it as the process for explaining how it is the metaphor .
so , in quantum mechanics , of course , you have dark energy and dark matter .
and it 's the same thing in looking at these questions of how things happen .
there 's a lot of unknown , and you often do n't know what it is except by its absence .
but when you make those associations , you want them to come together in a kind of synergy in the story , and what you 're finding is what matters . the meaning .
and that 's what i look for in my work , a personal meaning .
there is also the uncertainty principle , which is part of quantum mechanics , as i understand it . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and this happens constantly in the writing .
and there 's the terrible and dreaded observer effect , in which you 're looking for something , and you know , things are happening simultaneously , and you 're looking at it in a different way , and you 're trying to really look for the about-ness , or what is this story about . and if you try too hard , then you will only write the about .
you wo n't discover anything .
and what you were supposed to find , what you hoped to find in some serendipitous way , is no longer there .
now , i do n't want to ignore the other side of what happens in our universe , like many of our scientists have .
and so , i am going to just throw in string theory here , and just say that creative people are multidimensional , and there are 11 levels , i think , of anxiety .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and they all operate at the same time .
there is also a big question of ambiguity .
and i would link that to something called the cosmological constant .
and you do n't know what is operating , but something is operating there .
and ambiguity , to me , is very uncomfortable in my life , and i have it . moral ambiguity .
it is constantly there . and , just as an example , this is one that recently came to me .
it was something i read in an editorial by a woman who was talking about the war in iraq . and she said , " save a man from drowning , you are responsible to him for life . "
a very famous chinese saying , she said .
and that means because we went into iraq , we should stay there until things were solved . you know , maybe even 100 years .
so , there was another one that i came across , and it 's " saving fish from drowning . "
and it 's what buddhist fishermen say , because they 're not supposed to kill anything .
and they also have to make a living , and people need to be fed .
so their way of rationalizing that is they are saving the fish from drowning , and unfortunately , in the process the fish die .
now , what 's encapsulated in both these drowning metaphors - actually , one of them is my mother 's interpretation , and it is a famous chinese saying , because she said it to me : " save a man from drowning , you are responsible to him for life . "
and it was a warning - do n't get involved in other people 's business , or you 're going to get stuck .
ok . i think if somebody really was drowning , she 'd save them .
but , both of these sayings - saving a fish from drowning , or saving a man from drowning - to me they had to do with intentions .
and all of us in life , when we see a situation , we have a response .
and then we have intentions .
there 's an ambiguity of what that should be that we should do , and then we do something .
and the results of that may not match what our intentions had been .
maybe things go wrong . and so , after that , what are our responsibilities ?
what are we supposed to do ?
do we stay in for life , or do we do something else and justify and say , well , my intentions were good , and therefore i can not be held responsible for all of it ?
that is the ambiguity in my life that really disturbed me , and led me to write a book called " saving fish from drowning . "
i saw examples of that . once i identified this question , it was all over the place .
i got these hints everywhere .
and then , in a way , i knew that they had always been there .
and then writing , that 's what happens . i get these hints , these clues , and i realize that they 've been obvious , and yet they have not been .
and what i need , in effect , is a focus .
and when i have the question , it is a focus .
and all these things that seem to be flotsam and jetsam in life actually go through that question , and what happens is those particular things become relevant .
and it seems like it 's happening all the time .
you think there 's a sort of coincidence going on , a serendipity , in which you 're getting all this help from the universe .
and it may also be explained that now you have a focus .
and you are noticing it more often .
but you apply this .
you begin to look at things having to do with your tensions .
your brother , who 's fallen in trouble , do you take care of him ?
why or why not ?
it may be something that is perhaps more serious - as i said , human rights in burma .
i was thinking that i should n't go because somebody said , if i did , it would show that i approved of the military regime there .
and then , after a while , i had to ask myself , " why do we take on knowledge , why do we take on assumptions that other people have given us ? "
and it was the same thing that i felt when i was growing up , and was hearing these rules of moral conduct from my father , who was a baptist minister .
so i decided that i would go to burma for my own intentions , and still did n't know that if i went there , what the result of that would be , if i wrote a book - and i just would have to face that later , when the time came .
we are all concerned with things that we see in the world that we are aware of .
we come to this point and say , what do i as an individual do ?
not all of us can go to africa , or work at hospitals , so what do we do , if we have this moral response , this feeling ?
also , i think one of the biggest things we are all looking at , and we talked about today , is genocide .
this leads to this question .
when i look at all these things that are morally ambiguous and uncomfortable , and i consider what my intentions should be , i realize it goes back to this identity question that i had when i was a child - and why am i here , and what is the meaning of my life , and what is my place in the universe ?
it seems so obvious , and yet it is not .
we all hate moral ambiguity in some sense , and yet it is also absolutely necessary .
in writing a story , it is the place where i begin .
sometimes i get help from the universe , it seems .
my mother would say it was the ghost of my grandmother from the very first book , because it seemed i knew things i was not supposed to know .
instead of writing that the grandmother died accidentally , from an overdose of opium , while having too much of a good time , i actually put down in the story that the woman killed herself , and that actually was the way it happened .
and my mother decided that that information must have come from my grandmother .
there are also things , quite uncanny , which bring me information that will help me in the writing of the book .
in this case , i was writing a story that included some kind of detail , period of history , a certain location .
and i needed to find something historically that would match that .
and i took down this book , and i - first page that i flipped it to was exactly the setting , and the time period , and the kind of character i needed - was the taiping rebellion , happening in the area near guilin , outside of that , and a character who thought he was the son of god .
you wonder , are these things random chance ?
well , what is random ? what is chance ? what is luck ?
what are things that you get from the universe that you ca n't really explain ?
and that goes into the story , too .
these are the things i constantly think about from day to day .
especially when good things happen , and , in particular , when bad things happen .
but i do think there 's a kind of serendipity , and i do want to know what those elements are , so i can thank them , and also try to find them in my life .
because , again , i think that when i am aware of them , more of them happen .
another chance encounter is when i went to a place - i just was with some friends , and we drove randomly to a different place , and we ended up in this non-tourist location , a beautiful village , pristine .
and we walked three valleys beyond , and the third valley , there was something quite mysterious and ominous , a discomfort i felt . and then i knew that had to be -lsb- the -rsb- setting of my book .
and in writing one of the scenes , it happened in that third valley .
for some reason i wrote about cairns - stacks of rocks - that a man was building .
and i did n't know exactly why i had it , but it was so vivid .
i got stuck , and a friend , when she asked if i would go for a walk with her dogs , that i said , sure . and about 45 minutes later , walking along the beach , i came across this .
and it was a man , a chinese man , and he was stacking these things , not with glue , not with anything .
and i asked him , " how is it possible to do this ? "
and he said , " well , i guess with everything in life , there 's a place of balance . "
and this was exactly the meaning of my story at that point .
i had so many examples - i have so many instances like this , when i 'm writing a story , and i can not explain it .
is it because i had the filter that i have such a strong coincidence in writing about these things ?
or is it a kind of serendipity that we can not explain , like the cosmological constant ?
a big thing that i also think about is accidents .
and as i said , my mother did not believe in randomness .
what is the nature of accidents ?
and how are we going to assign what the responsibility and the causes are , outside of a court of law ?
i was able to see that in a firsthand way , when i went to beautiful dong village , in guizhou , the poorest province of china .
and i saw this beautiful place . i knew i wanted to come back .
and i had a chance to do that , when national geographic asked me if i wanted to write anything about china .
and i said yes , about this village of singing people , singing minority .
and they agreed , and between the time i saw this place and the next time i went , there was a terrible accident . a man , an old man , fell asleep , and his quilt dropped in a pan of fire that kept him warm .
60 homes were destroyed , and 40 were damaged .
responsibility was assigned to the family .
the man 's sons were banished to live three kilometers away , in a cowshed .
and , of course , as westerners , we say , " well , it was an accident . that 's not fair .
it 's the son , not the father . "
when i go on a story , i have to let go of those kinds of beliefs .
it takes a while , but i have to let go of them and just go there , and be there .
and so i was there on three occasions , different seasons .
and i began to sense something different about the history , and what had happened before , and the nature of life in a very poor village , and what you find as your joys , and your rituals , your traditions , your links with other families . and i saw how this had a kind of justice , in its responsibility .
i was able to find out also about the ceremony that they were using , a ceremony they had n't used in about 29 years . and it was to send some men - a feng shui master sent men down to the underworld on ghost horses .
now you , as westerners , and i , as westerners , would say well , that 's superstition . but after being there for a while , and seeing the amazing things that happened , you begin to wonder whose beliefs are those that are in operation in the world , determining how things happen .
so i remained with them , and the more i wrote that story , the more i got into those beliefs , and i think that 's important for me - to take on the beliefs , because that is where the story is real , and that is where i 'm gonna find the answers to how i feel about certain questions that i have in life .
years go by , of course , and the writing , it does n't happen instantly , as i 'm trying to convey it to you here at ted .
the book comes and it goes . when it arrives , it is no longer my book .
it is in the hands of readers , and they interpret it differently .
but i go back to this question of , how do i create something out of nothing ?
and how do i create my own life ?
and i think it is by questioning , and saying to myself that there are no absolute truths .
i believe in specifics , the specifics of story , and the past , the specifics of that past , and what is happening in the story at that point .
i also believe that in thinking about things - my thinking about luck , and fate , and coincidences and accidents , god 's will , and the synchrony of mysterious forces - i will come to some notion of what that is , how we create .
i have to think of my role . where i am in the universe , and did somebody intend for me to be that way , or is it just something i came up with ?
and i also can find that by imagining fully , and becoming what is imagined - and yet is in that real world , the fictional world .
and that is how i find particles of truth , not the absolute truth , or the whole truth .
and they have to be in all possibilities , including those i never considered before .
so , there are never complete answers .
or rather , if there is an answer , it is to remind myself that there is uncertainty in everything , and that is good , because then i will discover something new .
and if there is a partial answer , a more complete answer from me , it is to simply imagine .
and to imagine is to put myself in that story , until there was only - there is a transparency between me and the story that i am creating .
and that 's how i 've discovered that if i feel what is in the story - in one story - then i come the closest , i think , to knowing what compassion is , to feeling that compassion .
because for everything , in that question of how things happen , it has to do with the feeling .
i have to become the story in order to understand a lot of that .
we 've come to the end of the talk , and i will reveal what is in the bag , and it is the muse , and it is the things that transform in our lives , that are wonderful and stay with us .
there she is .
thank you very much !
-lrb- applause -rrb- thomas dolby : for pure pleasure please welcome the lovely , the delectable , and the bilingual rachelle garniez .
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- bells -rrb- -lrb- trumpet -rrb- rachelle garniez : ♫ quand il me prend dans ses bras ♫ ♫ il me parle tout bas , ♫ ♫ je vois la vie en rose . ♫ ♫ il me dit des mots d 'amour , ♫ ♫ des mots de tous les jours , ♫ ♫ et ca me fait quelque chose . ♫ ♫ il est entre dans mon coeur ♫ ♫ une part de bonheur ♫ ♫ dont je connais la cause . ♫ ♫ c 'est lui pour moi . moi pour lui ♫ ♫ dans la vie , ♫ ♫ il me l 'a dit , l 'a jure -lsb- pour -rsb- la vie . ♫ ♫ et des que je l 'apercois ♫
♫ alors je sens en moi ♫ ♫ mon coeur qui bat ♫ -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lsb- sanskrit -rsb- this is an ode to the mother goddess , that most of us in india learn when we are children .
i learned it when i was four at my mother 's knee .
that year she introduced me to dance , and thus began my tryst with classical dance .
since then - it 's been four decades now - i 've trained with the best in the field , performed across the globe , taught young and old alike , created , collaborated , choreographed , and wove a rich tapestry of artistry , achievement and awards .
the crowning glory was in 2007 , when i received this country 's fourth highest civilian award , the padma shri , for my contribution to art .
-lrb- applause -rrb- but nothing , nothing prepared me for what i was to hear on the first of july 2008 .
i heard the word " carcinoma . "
yes , breast cancer .
as i sat dumbstruck in my doctor 's office , i heard other words : " cancer , " " stage , " " grade . "
until then , cancer was the zodiac sign of my friend , stage was what i performed on , and grades were what i got in school .
that day , i realized i had an unwelcome , uninvited , new life partner .
as a dancer , i know the nine rasas or the navarasas : anger , valor , disgust , humor and fear .
i thought i knew what fear was .
that day , i learned what fear was .
overcome with the enormity of it all and the complete feeling of loss of control , i shed copious tears and asked my dear husband , jayant .
i said , " is this it ? is this the end of the road ?
is this the end of my dance ? "
and he , the positive soul that he is , said , " no , this is just a hiatus , a hiatus during the treatment , and you 'll get back to doing what you do best . "
i realized then that i , who thought i had complete control of my life , had control of only three things : my thought , my mind - the images that these thoughts created - and the action that derived from it .
so here i was wallowing in a vortex of emotions and depression and what have you , with the enormity of the situation , wanting to go to a place of healing , health and happiness .
i wanted to go from where i was to where i wanted to be , for which i needed something .
i needed something that would pull me out of all this .
so i dried my tears , and i declared to the world at large ...
i said , " cancer 's only one page in my life , and i will not allow this page to impact the rest of my life . "
i also declared to the world at large that i would ride it out , and i would not allow cancer to ride me .
but to go from where i was to where i wanted to be , i needed something .
i needed an anchor , an image , a peg to peg this process on , so that i could go from there .
and i found that in my dance , my dance , my strength , my energy , my passion , my very life breath .
but it was n't easy .
believe me , it definitely was n't easy .
how do you keep cheer when you go from beautiful to bald in three days ?
how do you not despair when , with the body ravaged by chemotherapy , climbing a mere flight of stairs was sheer torture , that to someone like me who could dance for three hours ?
how do you not get overwhelmed by the despair and the misery of it all ?
all i wanted to do was curl up and weep .
but i kept telling myself fear and tears are options i did not have .
so i would drag myself into my dance studio - body , mind and spirit - every day into my dance studio , and learn everything i learned when i was four , all over again , reworked , relearned , regrouped .
it was excruciatingly painful , but i did it .
difficult .
i focused on my mudras , on the imagery of my dance , on the poetry and the metaphor and the philosophy of the dance itself .
and slowly , i moved out of that miserable state of mind .
but i needed something else .
i needed something to go that extra mile , and i found it in that metaphor which i had learned from my mother when i was four .
the metaphor of mahishasura mardhini , of durga .
durga , the mother goddess , the fearless one , created by the pantheon of hindu gods .
durga , resplendent , bedecked , beautiful , her 18 arms ready for warfare , as she rode astride her lion into the battlefield to destroy mahishasur .
durga , the epitome of creative feminine energy , or shakti .
durga , the fearless one .
i made that image of durga and her every attribute , her every nuance , my very own .
powered by the symbology of a myth and the passion of my training , i brought laser-sharp focus into my dance , laser-sharp focus to such an extent that i danced a few weeks after surgery .
i danced through chemo and radiation cycles , much to the dismay of my oncologist .
i danced between chemo and radiation cycles and badgered him to fit it to my performing dance schedule .
what i had done is i had tuned out of cancer and tuned into my dance .
yes , cancer has just been one page in my life .
my story is a story of overcoming setbacks , obstacles and challenges that life throws at you .
my story is the power of thought .
my story is the power of choice .
it 's the power of focus .
it 's the power of bringing ourselves to the attention of something that so animates you , so moves you , that something even like cancer becomes insignificant .
my story is the power of a metaphor .
it 's the power of an image .
mine was that of durga , durga the fearless one .
she was also called simhanandini , the one who rode the lion .
as i ride out , as i ride my own inner strength , my own inner resilience , armed as i am with what medication can provide and continue treatment , as i ride out into the battlefield of cancer , asking my rogue cells to behave , i want to be known not as a cancer survivor , but as a cancer conqueror .
i present to you an excerpt of that work " simhanandini . "
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- jambo , bonjour , zdravstvujtye , dayo : these are a few of the languages that i 've spoken little bits of over the course of the last six weeks , as i 've been to 17 countries i think i 'm up to , on this crazy tour i 've been doing , checking out various aspects of the project that we 're doing .
and i 'm going to tell you a little bit about later on .
and visiting some pretty incredible places , places like mongolia , cambodia , new guinea , south africa , tanzania twice - i was here a month ago .
and the opportunity to make a whirlwind tour of the world like that is utterly amazing , for lots of reasons .
you see some incredible stuff .
and you get to make these spot comparisons between people all around the globe .
and the thing that you really take away from that , the kind of surface thing that you take away from it , is not that we 're all one , although i 'm going to tell you about that , but rather how different we are .
there is so much diversity around the globe .
6,000 different languages spoken by six and a half billion people , all different colors , shapes , sizes .
you walk down the street in any big city , you travel like that , and you are amazed at the diversity in the human species .
how do we explain that diversity ?
well , that 's what i 'm going to talk about today , is how we 're using the tools of genetics , population genetics in particular , to tell us how we generated this diversity , and how long it took .
now , the problem of human diversity , like all big scientific questions - how do you explain something like that - can be broken down into sub-questions .
and you can ferret away at those little sub-questions .
first one is really a question of origins .
do we all share a common origin , in fact ?
and given that we do - and that 's the assumption everybody , i think , in this room would make - when was that ?
when did we originate as a species ?
how long have we been divergent from each other ?
and the second question is related , but slightly different .
if we do spring from a common source , how did we come to occupy every corner of the globe , and in the process generate all of this diversity , the different ways of life , the different appearances , the different languages around the world ?
well , the question of origins , as with so many other questions in biology , seems to have been answered by darwin over a century ago .
in " the descent of man , " he wrote , " in each great region of the world , the living mammals are closely related to the extinct species of the same region .
it 's therefore probable that africa was formerly inhabited by extinct apes closely allied to the gorilla and chimpanzee , and as these two species are now man 's nearest allies , it 's somewhat more probable that our early progenitors lived on the african continent than elsewhere . "
so we 're done , we can go home - finished the origin question .
well , not quite . because darwin was talking about our distant ancestry , our common ancestry with apes .
and it is quite clear that apes originated on the african continent .
around 23 million years ago , they appear in the fossil record .
africa was actually disconnected from the other landmasses at that time , due to the vagaries of plate tectonics , floating around the indian ocean .
bumped into eurasia around 16 million years ago , and then we had the first african exodus , as we call it .
the apes that left at that time ended up in southeast asia , became the gibbons and the orangutans .
and the ones that stayed on in africa evolved into the gorillas , the chimpanzees and us .
so , yes , if you 're talking about our common ancestry with apes , it 's very clear , by looking at the fossil record , we started off here .
but that 's not really the question i 'm asking .
i 'm asking about our human ancestry , things that we would recognize as being like us if they were sitting here in the room .
if they were peering over your shoulder , you would n't leap back , like that . what about our human ancestry ?
because if we go far enough back , we share a common ancestry with every living thing on earth .
dna ties us all together , so we share ancestry with barracuda and bacteria and mushrooms , if you go far enough back - over a billion years .
what we 're asking about though is human ancestry .
how do we study that ?
well , historically , it has been studied using the science of paleoanthropology .
digging things up out of the ground , and largely on the basis of morphology - the way things are shaped , often skull shape - saying , " this looks a little bit more like us than that , so this must be my ancestor .
this must be who i 'm directly descended from . "
the field of paleoanthropology , i 'll argue , gives us lots of fascinating possibilities about our ancestry , but it does n't give us the probabilities that we really want as scientists .
what do i mean by that ?
you 're looking at a great example here .
these are three extinct species of hominids , potential human ancestors .
all dug up just west of here in olduvai gorge , by the leakey family .
and they 're all dating to roughly the same time .
from left to right , we 've got homo erectus , homo habilis , and australopithecus - now called paranthropus boisei , the robust australopithecine . three extinct species , same place , same time .
that means that not all three could be my direct ancestor .
which one of these guys am i actually related to ?
possibilities about our ancestry , but not the probabilities that we 're really looking for .
well , a different approach has been to look at morphology in humans using the only data that people really had at hand until quite recently - again , largely skull shape .
the first person to do this systematically was linnaeus , carl von linne , a swedish botanist , who in the eighteenth century took it upon himself to categorize every living organism on the planet .
you think you 've got a tough job ?
and he did a pretty good job .
he categorized about 12,000 species in " systema naturae . "
he actually coined the term homo sapiens - it means wise man in latin .
but looking around the world at the diversity of humans , he said , " well , you know , we seem to come in discreet sub-species or categories . "
and he talked about africans and americans and asians and europeans , and a blatantly racist category he termed " monstrosus , " which basically included all the people he did n't like , including imaginary folk like elves .
it 's easy to dismiss this as the perhaps well-intentioned but ultimately benighted musings of an eighteenth century scientist working in the pre-darwinian era .
except , if you had taken physical anthropology as recently as 20 or 30 years ago , in many cases you would have learned basically that same classification of humanity .
human races that according to physical anthropologists of 30 , 40 years ago - carlton coon is the best example - had been diverging from each other - this was in the post-darwinian era - for over a million years , since the time of homo erectus .
but based on what data ?
very little . very little . morphology and a lot of guesswork .
well , what i 'm going to talk about today , what i 'm going to talk about now is a new approach to this problem .
instead of going out and guessing about our ancestry , digging things up out of the ground , possible ancestors , and saying it on the basis of morphology - which we still do n't completely understand , we do n't know the genetic causes underlying this morphological variation - what we need to do is turn the problem on its head .
because what we 're really asking is a genealogical problem , or a genealogical question .
what we 're trying to do is construct a family tree for everybody alive today .
and as any genealogist will tell you - anybody have a member of the family , or maybe you have tried to construct a family tree , trace back in time ?
you start in the present , with relationships you 're certain about .
you and your siblings , you have a parent in common .
you and your cousins share a grandparent in common .
you gradually trace further and further back into the past , adding these ever more distant relationships .
but eventually , no matter how good you are at digging up the church records , and all that stuff , you hit what the genealogists call a brick wall .
a point beyond which you do n't know anything else about your ancestors , and you enter this dark and mysterious realm we call history that we have to feel our way through with whispered guidance .
who were these people who came before ?
we have no written record . well , actually , we do .
written in our dna , in our genetic code - we have a historical document that takes us back in time to the very earliest days of our species . and that 's what we study .
now , a quick primer on dna .
i suspect that not everybody in the audience is a geneticist .
it is a very long , linear molecule , a coded version of how to make another copy of you . it 's your blueprint .
it 's composed of four subunits : a , c , g and t , we call them .
and it 's the sequence of those subunits that defines that blueprint .
how long is it ? well , it 's billions of these subunits in length .
a haploid genome - we actually have two copies of all of our chromosomes - a haploid genome is around 3.2 billion nucleotides in length .
and the whole thing , if you add it all together , is over six billion nucleotides long .
if you take all the dna out of one cell in your body , and stretch it end to end , it 's around two meters long .
if you take all the dna out of every cell in your body , and you stretch it end to end , it would reach from here to the moon and back , thousands of times . it 's a lot of information .
and so when you 're copying this dna molecule to pass it on , it 's a pretty tough job .
imagine the longest book you can think of , " war and peace . "
now multiply it by 100 .
and imagine copying that by hand .
and you 're working away until late at night , and you 're very , very careful , and you 're drinking coffee and you 're paying attention , but , occasionally , when you 're copying this by hand , you 're going to make a little typo , a spelling mistake - substitute an i for an e , or a c for a t.
same thing happens to our dna as it 's being passed on through the generations .
it does n't happen very often . we have a proofreading mechanism built in .
but when it does happen , and these changes get transmitted down through the generations , they become markers of descent .
if you share a marker with someone , it means you share an ancestor at some point in the past , the person who first had that change in their dna .
and it 's by looking at the pattern of genetic variation , the pattern of these markers in people all over the world , and assessing the relative ages when they occurred throughout our history , that we 've been able to construct a family tree for everybody alive today .
these are two pieces of dna that we use quite widely in our work .
mitochondrial dna , tracing a purely maternal line of descent .
you get your mtdna from your mother , and your mother 's mother , all the way back to the very first woman .
the y chromosome , the piece of dna that makes men men , traces a purely paternal line of descent .
everybody in this room , everybody in the world , falls into a lineage somewhere on these trees .
now , even though these are simplified versions of the real trees , they 're still kind of complicated , so let 's simplify them .
turn them on their sides , combine them so that they look like a tree with the root at the bottom and the branches going up .
what 's the take-home message ?
well , the thing that jumps out at you first is that the deepest lineages in our family trees are found within africa , among africans .
that means that africans have been accumulating this mutational diversity for longer .
and what that means is that we originated in africa . it 's written in our dna .
every piece of dna we look at has greater diversity within africa than outside of africa .
and at some point in the past , a sub-group of africans left the african continent to go out and populate the rest of the world .
now , how recently do we share this ancestry ?
was it millions of years ago , which we might suspect by looking at all this incredible variation around the world ?
no , the dna tells a story that 's very clear .
within the last 200,000 years , we all share an ancestor , a single person - mitochondrial eve , you might have heard about her - in africa , an african woman who gave rise to all the mitochondrial diversity in the world today .
but what 's even more amazing is that if you look at the y-chromosome side , the male side of the story , the y-chromosome adam only lived around 60,000 years ago .
that 's only about 2,000 human generations , the blink of an eye in an evolutionary sense .
that tells us we were all still living in africa at that time .
this was an african man who gave rise to all the y chromosome diversity around the world .
it 's only within the last 60,000 years that we have started to generate this incredible diversity we see around the world .
such an amazing story .
we 're all effectively part of an extended african family .
now , that seems so recent . why did n't we start to leave earlier ?
why did n't homo erectus evolve into separate species , or sub-species rather , human races around the world ?
why was it that we seem to have come out of africa so recently ?
well , that 's a big question . these " why " questions , particularly in genetics and the study of history in general , are always the big ones , the ones that are tough to answer .
and so when all else fails , talk about the weather .
what was going on to the world 's weather around 60,000 years ago ?
well , we were going into the worst part of the last ice age .
the last ice age started roughly 120,000 years ago .
it went up and down , and it really started to accelerate around 70,000 years ago .
lots of evidence from sediment cores and the pollen types , oxygen isotopes and so on .
we hit the last glacial maximum around 16,000 years ago , but basically , from 70,000 years on , things were getting really tough , getting very cold . the northern hemisphere had massive growing ice sheets .
new york city , chicago , seattle , all under a sheet of ice .
most of britain , all of scandinavia , covered by ice several kilometers thick .
now , africa is the most tropical continent on the planet - about 85 percent of it lies between cancer and capricorn - and there are n't a lot of glaciers here , except on the high mountains here in east africa .
so what was going on here ? we were n't covered in ice in africa .
rather , africa was drying out at that time .
this is a paleo-climatological map of what africa looked like between 60,000 and 70,000 years ago , reconstructed from all these pieces of evidence that i mentioned before .
the reason for that is that ice actually sucks moisture out of the atmosphere .
if you think about antarctica , it 's technically a desert , it gets so little precipitation .
so the whole world was drying out .
the sea levels were dropping . and africa was turning to desert .
the sahara was much bigger then than it is now .
and the human habitat was reduced to just a few small pockets , compared to what we have today .
the evidence from genetic data is that the human population around this time , roughly 70,000 years ago , crashed to fewer than 2,000 individuals .
we nearly went extinct . we were hanging on by our fingernails .
and then something happened . a great illustration of it .
look at some stone tools .
the ones on the left are from africa , from around a million years ago .
the ones on the right were made by neanderthals , our distant cousins , not our direct ancestors , living in europe , and they date from around 50,000 or 60,000 years ago .
now , at the risk of offending any paleoanthropologists or physical anthropologists in the audience , basically there 's not a lot of change between these two stone tool groups .
the ones on the left are pretty similar to the ones on the right .
we are in a period of long cultural stasis from a million years ago until around 60,000 to 70,000 years ago .
the tool styles do n't change that much .
the evidence is that the human way of life did n't change that much during that period .
but then 50 , 60 , 70 thousand years ago , somewhere in that region , all hell breaks loose . art makes its appearance .
the stone tools become much more finely crafted .
the evidence is that humans begin to specialize in particular prey species , at particular times of the year .
the population size started to expand .
probably , according to what many linguists believe , fully modern language , syntactic language - subject , verb , object - that we use to convey complex ideas , like i 'm doing now , appeared around that time .
we became much more social . the social networks expanded .
this change in behavior allowed us to survive these worsening conditions in africa , and they allowed us to start to expand around the world .
we 've been talking at this conference about african success stories .
well , you want the ultimate african success story ?
look in the mirror . you 're it . the reason you 're alive today is because of those changes in our brains that took place in africa - probably somewhere in the region where we 're sitting right now , around 60 , 70 thousand years ago - allowing us not only to survive in africa , but to expand out of africa .
an early coastal migration along the south coast of asia , leaving africa around 60,000 years ago , reaching australia very rapidly , by 50,000 years ago .
a slightly later migration up into the middle east .
these would have been savannah hunters .
so those of you who are going on one of the post-conference tours , you 'll get to see what a real savannah is like .
and it 's basically a meat locker .
people who would have specialized in killing the animals , hunting the animals on those meat locker savannahs , moving up , following the grasslands into the middle east around 45,000 years ago , during one of the rare wet phases in the sahara .
migrating eastward , following the grasslands , because that 's what they were adapted to live on .
and when they reached central asia , they reached what was effectively a steppe super-highway , a grassland super-highway .
the grasslands at that time - this was during the last ice age - stretched basically from germany all the way over to korea , and the entire continent was open to them .
entering europe around 35,000 years ago , and finally , a small group migrating up through the worst weather imaginable , siberia , inside the arctic circle , during the last ice age - temperature was at -70 , -80 , even -100 , perhaps - migrating into the americas , ultimately reaching that final frontier .
an amazing story , and it happened first in africa .
the changes that allowed us to do that , the evolution of this highly adaptable brain that we all carry around with us , allowing us to create novel cultures , allowing us to develop the diversity that we see on a whirlwind trip like the one i 've just been on .
now , that story i just told you is literally a whirlwind tour of how we populated the world , the great paleolithic wanderings of our species .
and that 's the story that i told a couple of years ago in my book , " the journey of man , " and a film that we made with the same title .
and as we were finishing up that film - it was co-produced with national geographic - i started talking to the folks at ng about this work .
and they got really excited about it . they liked the film , but they said , " you know , we really see this as kind of the next wave in the study of human origins , where we all came from , using the tools of dna to map the migrations around the world .
you know , the study of human origins is kind of in our dna , and we want to take it to the next level .
what do you want to do next ? "
which is a great question to be asked by national geographic .
and i said , " well , you know , what i 've sketched out here is just that .
it is a very coarse sketch of how we migrated around the planet .
and it 's based on a few thousand people we 've sampled from , you know , a handful of populations around the world .
studied a few genetic markers , and there are lots of gaps on this map .
we 've just connected the dots . what we need to do is increase our sample size by an order of magnitude or more - hundreds of thousands of dna samples from people all over the world . "
and that was the genesis of the genographic project .
the project launched in april 2005 .
it has three core components . obviously , science is a big part of it .
the field research that we 're doing around the world with indigenous peoples .
people who have lived in the same location for a long period of time retain a connection to the place where they live that many of the rest of us have lost .
so my ancestors come from all over northern europe .
i live in the eastern seaboard of north america when i 'm not traveling .
where am i indigenous to ? nowhere really . my genes are all jumbled up .
but there are people who retain that link to their ancestors that allows us to contextualize the dna results .
that 's the focus of the field research , the centers that we 've set up all over the world - 10 of them , top population geneticists .
but , in addition , we wanted to open up this study to anybody around the world .
how often do you get to participate in a big scientific project ?
the human genome project , or a mars rover mission .
in this case , you actually can .
you can go onto our website , nationalgeographic.com / genographic .
you can order a kit . you can test your own dna .
and you can actually submit those results to the database , and tell us a little about your genealogical background , have the data analyzed as part of the scientific effort .
now , this is all a nonprofit enterprise , and so the money that we raise , after we cover the cost of doing the testing and making the kit components , gets plowed back into the project .
the majority going to something we call the legacy fund .
it 's a charitable entity , basically a grant-giving entity that gives money back to indigenous groups around the world for educational , cultural projects initiated by them .
they apply to this fund in order to do various projects , and i 'll show you a couple of examples .
so how are we doing on the project ? we 've got about 25,000 samples collected from indigenous people around the world .
the most amazing thing has been the interest on the part of the public ; 210,000 people have ordered these participation kits since we launched two years ago , which has raised around five million dollars , the majority of which , at least half , is going back into the legacy fund .
we 've just awarded the first legacy grants totaling around 500,000 dollars .
projects around the world - documenting oral poetry in sierra leone , preserving traditional weaving patterns in gaza , language revitalization in tajikistan , etc . , etc .
so the project is going very , very well , and i urge you to check out the website and watch this space .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 've been playing ted for nearly a decade , and i 've very rarely played any new songs of my own .
and that was largely because there were n't any .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i 've been busy with a couple of projects , and one of them was this : the nutmeg .
a 1930s ship 's lifeboat , which i 've been restoring in the garden of my beach house in england .
and , so now , when the polar ice caps melt , my recording studio will rise up like an ark , and i 'll float off into the drowned world like a character from a j.g. ballard novel .
during the day , the nutmeg collects energy from solar panels on the roof of the wheelhouse , and from a 450 watt turbine up the mast .
so that when it gets dark , i 've got plenty of power .
and i can light up the nutmeg like a beacon .
and so i go in there until the early hours of the morning , and i work on new songs .
i 'd like to play to you guys , if you 're willing to be the first audience to hear it .
-lrb- applause -rrb- it 's about billie holiday .
and it appears that , some night in 1947 she left her physical space and was missing all night , until she reappeared in the morning .
but i know where she was .
she was with me on my lifeboat .
and she was hot .
-lrb- music -rrb- ♫ billie crept softly ♫ ♫ into my waking arms ♫ ♫ warm like a sip of sour mash ♫ ♫ strange fruit for ♫ ♫ a sweet hunk of trash ♫ ♫ panic at the stage door ♫ ♫ of carnegie hall ♫ ♫ " famous jazz singer gone awol " ♫ ♫ must have left the building ♫ ♫ body and soul ♫ ♫ on a creaky ♫ ♫ piano stool tonight ♫ ♫ as the moon is my ♫ ♫ only witness ♫ ♫ she was breathing ♫ ♫ in my ear ♫ ♫ " this time it 's love " ♫
♫ but love is a loaded pistol ♫ ♫ by daybreak she 's gone ♫ ♫ over the frozen river , home ♫ ♫ me and johnny walker ♫ ♫ see in the new age ♫ ♫ alone ♫ ♫ stay with me ♫ ♫ again tonight ♫ ♫ billie , time , ♫ ♫ time is a wily trickster ♫ ♫ still an echo ♫ ♫ in my heart says , ♫ ♫ " this time it 's love " ♫ -lrb- applause -rrb- i was basically concerned about what was going on in the world .
i could n't understand the starvation , the destruction , the killing of innocent people .
making sense of those things is a very difficult thing to do .
and when i was 12 , i became an actor .
i was bottom of the class . i have n't got any qualifications .
i was told i was dyslexic .
in fact , i have got qualifications .
i got a d in pottery , which was the one thing that i did get - which was useful , obviously .
and so concern is where all of this comes from .
and then , being an actor , i was doing these different kinds of things , and i felt the content of the work that i was involved in really was n't cutting it , that there surely had to be more .
and at that point , i read a book by frank barnaby , this wonderful nuclear physicist , and he said that media had a responsibility , that all sectors of society had a responsibility to try and progress things and move things forward .
and that fascinated me , because i 'd been messing around with a camera most of my life .
and then i thought , well maybe i could do something .
maybe i could become a filmmaker .
maybe i can use the form of film constructively to in some way make a difference .
maybe there 's a little change i can get involved in .
so i started thinking about peace , and i was obviously , as i said to you , very much moved by these images , trying to make sense of that .
could i go and speak to older and wiser people who would tell me how they made sense of the things that are going on ?
because it 's obviously incredibly frightening .
but i realized that , having been messing around with structure as an actor , that a series of sound bites in itself was n't enough , that there needed to be a mountain to climb , there needed to be a journey that i had to take .
and if i took that journey , no matter whether it failed or succeeded , it would be completely irrelevant .
the point was that i would have something to hook the questions of - is humankind fundamentally evil ?
is the destruction of the world inevitable ? should i have children ?
is that a responsible thing to do ? etc . , etc .
so i was thinking about peace , and then i was thinking , well where 's the starting point for peace ?
and that was when i had the idea .
there was no starting point for peace .
there was no day of global unity .
there was no day of intercultural cooperation .
there was no day when humanity came together , separate in all of those things and just shared it together - that we 're in this together , and that if we united and we interculturally cooperated , then that might be the key to humanity 's survival .
that might shift the level of consciousness around the fundamental issues that humanity faces - if we did it just for a day .
so obviously we did n't have any money .
i was living at my mom 's place .
and we started writing letters to everybody .
you very quickly work out what is it that you 've got to do to fathom that out .
how do you create a day voted by every single head of state in the world to create the first ever ceasefire nonviolence day , the 21st of september ?
and i wanted it to be the 21st of september because it was my granddad 's favorite number .
he was a prisoner of war .
he saw the bomb go off at nagasaki .
it poisoned his blood . he died when i was 11 .
so he was like my hero .
and the reason why 21 was the number is 700 men left , 23 came back , two died on the boat and 21 hit the ground .
and that 's why we wanted it to be the 21st of september as the date of peace .
so we began this journey , and we launched it in 1999 .
and we wrote to heads of state , their ambassadors , nobel peace laureates , ngos , faiths , various organizations - literally wrote to everybody .
and very quickly , some letters started coming back .
and we started to build this case .
and i remember the first letter .
one of the first letters was from the dalai lama .
and of course we did n't have the money ; we were playing guitars and getting the money for the stamps that we were sending out all of -lsb- this mail -rsb- .
a letter came through from the dalai lama saying , " this is an amazing thing . come and see me .
i 'd love to talk to you about the first ever day of peace . "
and we did n't have money for the flight .
and i rang sir bob ayling , who was ceo of ba at the time , and said , " mate , we 've got this invitation .
could you give me a flight ? because we 're going to go see him . "
and of course , we went and saw him and it was amazing .
and then dr. oscar arias came forward .
and actually , let me go back to that slide , because when we launched it in 1999 - this idea to create the first ever day of ceasefire and non-violence - we invited thousands of people .
well not thousands - hundreds of people , lots of people - all the press , because we were going to try and create the first ever world peace day , a peace day .
and we invited everybody , and no press showed up .
there were 114 people there - they were mostly my friends and family .
and that was kind of like the launch of this thing .
but it did n't matter because we were documenting , and that was the thing .
for me , it was really about the process .
it was n't about the end result .
and that 's the beautiful thing about the camera .
they used to say the pen is mightier than the sword . i think the camera is .
and just staying in the moment with it was a beautiful thing and really empowering actually .
so anyway , we began the journey .
and here you see people like mary robinson , i went to see in geneva .
i 'm cutting my hair , it 's getting short and long , because every time i saw kofi annan , i was so worried that he thought i was a hippie that i cut it , and that was kind of what was going on .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- yeah , i 'm not worried about it now .
so mary robinson , she said to me , " listen , this is an idea whose time has come . this must be created . "
kofi annan said , " this will be beneficial to my troops on the ground . "
the oau at the time , led by salim ahmed salim , said , " i must get the african countries involved . "
dr. oscar arias , nobel peace laureate , president now of costa rica , said , " i 'll do everything that i can . "
so i went and saw amr moussa at the league of arab states .
i met mandela at the arusha peace talks , and so on and so on and so on - while i was building the case to prove whether this idea would make sense .
and then we were listening to the people . we were documenting everywhere .
76 countries in the last 12 years , i 've visited .
and i 've always spoken to women and children wherever i 've gone .
i 've recorded 44,000 young people .
i 've recorded about 900 hours of their thoughts .
i 'm really clear about how young people feel when you talk to them about this idea of having a starting point for their actions for a more peaceful world through their poetry , their art , their literature , their music , their sport , whatever it might be .
and we were listening to everybody .
and it was an incredibly thing , working with the u.n.
and working with ngos and building this case .
i felt that i was presenting a case on behalf of the global community to try and create this day .
and the stronger the case and the more detailed it was , the better chance we had of creating this day .
and it was this stuff , this , where i actually was in the beginning kind of thinking no matter what happened , it did n't actually matter .
it did n't matter if it did n't create a day of peace .
the fact is that , if i tried and it did n't work , then i could make a statement about how unwilling the global community is to unite - until , it was in somalia , picking up that young girl .
and this young child who 'd taken about an inch and a half out of her leg with no antiseptic , and that young boy who was a child soldier , who told me he 'd killed people - he was about 12 - these things made me realize that this was not a film that i could just stop .
and that actually , at that moment something happened to me , which obviously made me go , " i 'm going to document .
if this is the only film that i ever make , i 'm going to document until this becomes a reality . "
because we 've got to stop , we 've got to do something where we unite - separate from all the politics and religion that , as a young person , is confusing me .
i do n't know how to get involved in that process .
and then on the seventh of september , i was invited to new york .
the costa rican government and the british government had put forward to the united nations general assembly , with 54 co-sponsors , the idea of the first ever ceasefire nonviolence day , the 21st of september , as a fixed calendar date , and it was unanimously adopted by every head of state in the world .
-lrb- applause -rrb- yeah , but there were hundreds of individuals , obviously , who made that a reality .
and thank you to all of them .
that was an incredible moment .
i was at the top of the general assembly just looking down into it and seeing it happen .
and as i mentioned , when it started , we were at the globe , and there was no press .
and now i was thinking , " well , the press it really going to hear this story . "
and suddenly , we started to institutionalize this day .
kofi annan invited me on the morning of september the 11th to do a press conference .
and it was 8:00 am when i stood there .
and i was waiting for him to come down , and i knew that he was on his way .
and obviously he never came down . the statement was never made .
the world was never told there was a day of global ceasefire and nonviolence .
and it was obviously a tragic moment for the thousands of people who lost their lives , there and then subsequently all over the world .
it never happened .
and i remember thinking , " this is exactly why , actually , we have to work even harder .
and we have to make this day work .
it 's been created ; nobody knows .
but we have to continue this journey , and we have to tell people , and we have to prove it can work . "
and i left new york freaked , but actually empowered .
and i felt inspired by the possibilities that if it did , then maybe we would n't see things like that .
i remember putting that film out and going to cynics .
i was showing the film , and i remember being in israel and getting it absolutely slaughtered by some guys having watched the film - that it 's just a day of peace , it does n't mean anything .
it 's not going to work ; you 're not going to stop the fighting in afghanistan ; the taliban wo n't listen , etc . , etc .
it 's just symbolism .
and that was even worse than actually what had just happened in many ways , because it could n't not work .
i 'd spoken in somalia , burundi , gaza , the west bank , india , sri lanka , congo , wherever it was , and they 'd all tell me , " if you can create a window of opportunity , we can move aid , we can vaccinate children .
children can lead their projects .
they can unite . they can come together . if people would stop , lives will be saved . "
that 's what i 'd heard .
and i 'd heard that from the people who really understood what conflict was about .
and so i went back to the united nations .
i decided that i 'd continue filming and make another movie .
and i went back to the u.n. for another couple of years .
we started moving around the corridors of the u.n. system , governments and ngos , trying desperately to find somebody to come forward and have a go at it , see if we could make it possible .
and after lots and lots of meetings obviously , i 'm delighted that this man , ahmad fawzi , one of my heroes and mentors really , he managed to get unicef involved .
and unicef , god bless them , they said , " okay , we 'll have a go . "
and then unama became involved in afghanistan .
it was historical . could it work in afghanistan with unama and who and civil society , etc . , etc . , etc . ?
and i was getting it all on film and i was recording it , and i was thinking , " this is it . this is the possibility of it maybe working .
but even if it does n't , at least the door is open and there 's a chance . "
and so i went back to london , and i went and saw this chap , jude law .
and i saw him because he was an actor , i was an actor , i had a connection to him , because we needed to get to the press , we needed this attraction , we needed the media to be involved .
because if we start pumping it up a bit maybe more people would listen and there 'd be more - when we got into certain areas , maybe there would be more people interested .
and maybe we 'd be helped financially a little bit more , which had been desperately difficult .
i wo n't go into that .
so jude said , " okay , i 'll do some statements for you . "
while i was filming these statements , he said to me , " where are you going next ? "
i said , " i 'm going to go to afghanistan . " he said , " really ? "
and i could sort of see a little look in his eye of interest .
so i said to him , " do you want to come with me ?
it 'd be really interesting if you came .
it would help and bring attention .
and that attention would help leverage the situation , as well as all of the other sides of it . "
i think there 's a number of pillars to success .
one is you 've got to have a great idea .
the other is you 've got to have a constituency , you 've got to have finance , and you 've got to be able to raise awareness .
and actually i could never raise awareness by myself , no matter what i 'd achieved .
so these guys were absolutely crucial .
so he said yes , and we found ourselves in afghanistan .
it was a really incredible thing that when we landed there , i was talking to various people , and they were saying to me , " you 've got to get everybody involved here .
you ca n't just expect it to work . you have to get out and work . "
and we did , and we traveled around , and we spoke to elders , we spoke to doctors , we spoke to nurses , we held press conferences , we went out with soldiers , we sat down with isaf , we sat down with nato , we sat down with the u.k. government .
i mean , we basically sat down with everybody - in and out of schools with ministers of education , holding these press conferences , which of course , now were loaded with press , everybody was there .
there was an interest in what was going on .
this amazing woman , fatima gailani , was absolutely instrumental in what went on as she was the spokesperson for the resistance against the russians .
and her afghan network was just absolutely everywhere .
and she was really crucial in getting the message in .
and then we went home . we 'd sort of done it .
we had to wait now and see what happened .
and i got home , and i remember one of the team bringing in a letter to me from the taliban .
and that letter basically said , " we 'll observe this day .
we will observe this day .
we see it as a window of opportunity .
and we will not engage . we 're not going to engage . "
and that meant that humanitarian workers would n't be kidnapped or killed .
and then suddenly , i obviously knew at this point , there was a chance .
and days later , 1.6 million children were vaccinated against polio as a consequence of everybody stopping .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and like the general assembly , obviously the most wonderful , wonderful moment .
and so then we wrapped the film up and we put it together because we had to go back .
we put it into dari and pashto . we put it in the local dialects .
we went back to afghanistan , because the next year was coming , and we wanted to support .
but more importantly , we wanted to go back , because these people in afghanistan were the heroes .
they were the people who believed in peace and the possibilities of it , etc . , etc . - and they made it real .
and we wanted to go back and show them the film and say , " look , you guys made this possible . and thank you very much . "
and we gave the film over .
obviously it was shown , and it was amazing .
and then that year , that year , 2008 , this isaf statement from kabul , afghanistan , september 17th : " general stanley mcchrystal , commander of international security assistance forces in afghanistan , announced today isaf will not conduct offensive military operations on the 21st of september . "
they were saying they would stop .
and then there was this other statement that came out from the u.n. department of security and safety saying that , in afghanistan , because of this work , the violence was down by 70 percent .
70 percent reduction in violence on this day at least .
and that completely blew my mind almost more than anything .
and i remember being stuck in new york , this time because of the volcano , which was obviously much less harmful .
and i was there thinking about what was going on .
and i kept thinking about this 70 percent .
70 percent reduction in violence - in what everyone said was completely impossible and you could n't do .
and that made me think that , if we can get 70 percent in afghanistan , then surely we can get 70 percent reduction everywhere .
we have to go for a global truce .
we have to utilize this day of ceasefire and nonviolence and go for a global truce , go for the largest recorded cessation of hostilities , both domestically and internationally , ever recorded .
that 's exactly what we must do .
and on the 21st of september this year , we 're going to launch that campaign at the o2 arena to go for that process , to try and create the largest recorded cessation of hostilities .
and we will utilize all kinds of things - have a dance and social media and visiting on facebook and visit the website , sign the petition .
and it 's in the six official languages of the united nations .
and we 'll globally link with government , inter-government , non-government , education , unions , sports .
and you can see the education box there .
we 've got resources at the moment in 174 countries trying to get young people to be the driving force behind the vision of that global truce .
and obviously the life-saving is increased , the concepts help .
linking up with the olympics - i went and saw seb coe . i said , " london 2012 is about truce .
ultimately , that 's what it 's about . "
why do n't we all team up ? why do n't we bring truce to life ?
why do n't you support the process of the largest ever global truce ?
we 'll make a new film about this process .
we 'll utilize sport and football .
on the day of peace , there 's thousands of football matches all played , from the favelas of brazil to wherever it might be .
so , utilizing all of these ways to inspire individual action .
and ultimately , we have to try that .
we have to work together .
and when i stand here in front of all of you , and the people who will watch these things , i 'm excited , on behalf of everybody i 've met , that there is a possibility that our world could unite , that we could come together as one , that we could lift the level of consciousness around the fundamental issues , brought about by individuals .
i was with brahimi , ambassador brahimi .
i think he 's one of the most incredible men in relation to international politics - in afghanistan , in iraq .
he 's an amazing man .
and i sat with him a few weeks ago .
and i said to him , " mr. brahimi , is this nuts , going for a global truce ?
is this possible ? is it really possible that we could do this ? "
he said , " it 's absolutely possible . "
i said , " what would you do ?
would you go to governments and lobby and use the system ? "
he said , " no , i 'd talk to the individuals . "
it 's all about the individuals .
it 's all about you and me .
it 's all about partnerships .
it 's about your constituencies ; it 's about your businesses .
because together , by working together , i seriously think we can start to change things .
and there 's a wonderful man sitting in this audience , and i do n't know where he is , who said to me a few days ago - because i did a little rehearsal - and he said , " i 've been thinking about this day and imagining it as a square with 365 squares , and one of them is white . "
and it then made me think about a glass of water , which is clear .
if you put one drop , one drop of something , in that water , it 'll change it forever .
by working together , we can create peace one day .
thank you ted . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thanks a lot .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you very much . thank you .
one of my favorite parts of my job at the gates foundation is that i get to travel to the developing world , and i do that quite regularly .
and when i meet the mothers in so many of these remote places , i 'm really struck by the things that we have in common .
they want what we want for our children and that is for their children to grow up successful , to be healthy , and to have a successful life .
but i also see lots of poverty , and it 's quite jarring , both in the scale and the scope of it .
my first trip in india , i was in a person 's home where they had dirt floors , no running water , no electricity , and that 's really what i see all over the world .
so in short , i 'm startled by all the things that they do n't have .
but i am surprised by one thing that they do have : coca-cola .
coke is everywhere .
in fact , when i travel to the developing world , coke feels ubiquitous .
and so when i come back from these trips , and i 'm thinking about development , and i 'm flying home and i 'm thinking , " we 're trying to deliver condoms to people or vaccinations , " you know , coke 's success kind of stops and makes you wonder : how is it that they can get coke to these far-flung places ?
if they can do that , why ca n't governments and ngos do the same thing ?
and i 'm not the first person to ask this question .
but i think , as a community , we still have a lot to learn .
it 's staggering , if you think about coca-cola .
they sell 1.5 billion servings every single day .
that 's like every man , woman and child on the planet having a serving of coke every week .
so why does this matter ?
well , if we 're going to speed up the progress and go even faster on the set of millennium development goals that we 're set as a world , we need to learn from the innovators , and those innovators come from every single sector .
i feel that , if we can understand what makes something like coca-cola ubiquitous , we can apply those lessons then for the public good .
coke 's success is relevant , because if we can analyze it , learn from it , then we can save lives .
so that 's why i took a bit of time to study coke .
and i think there are really three things we can take away from coca-cola .
they take real-time data and immediately feed it back into the product .
they tap into local entrepreneurial talent , and they do incredible marketing .
so let 's start with the data .
now coke has a very clear bottom line - they report to a set of shareholders , they have to turn a profit .
so they take the data , and they use it to measure progress .
they have this very continuous feedback loop .
they learn something , they put it back into the product , they put it back into the market .
they have a whole team called " knowledge and insight . "
it 's a lot like other consumer companies .
so if you 're running namibia for coca-cola , and you have a 107 constituencies , you know where every can versus bottle of sprite , fanta or coke was sold , whether it was a corner store , a supermarket or a pushcart .
so if sales start to drop , then the person can identify the problem and address the issue .
let 's contrast that for a minute to development .
in development , the evaluation comes at the very end of the project .
i 've sat in a lot of those meetings , and by then , it is way too late to use the data .
i had somebody from an ngo once describe it to me as bowling in the dark .
they said , " you roll the ball , you hear some pins go down .
it 's dark , you ca n't see which one goes down until the lights come on , and then you an see your impact . "
real-time data turns on the lights .
so what 's the second thing that coke 's good at ?
they 're good at tapping into that local entrepreneurial talent .
coke 's been in africa since 1928 , but most of the time they could n't reach the distant markets , because they had a system that was a lot like in the developed world , which was a large truck rolling down the street .
and in africa , the remote places , it 's hard to find a good road .
but coke noticed something - they noticed that local people were taking the product , buying it in bulk and then reselling it in these hard-to-reach places .
and so they took a bit of time to learn about that .
and they decided in 1990 that they wanted to start training the local entrepreneurs , giving them small loans .
they set them up as what they called micro-distribution centers , and those local entrepreneurs then hire sales people , who go out with bicycles and pushcarts and wheelbarrows to sell the product .
there are now some 3,000 of these centers employing about 15,000 people in africa .
in tanzania and uganda , they represent 90 percent of coke 's sales .
let 's look at the development side .
what is it that governments and ngos can learn from coke ?
governments and ngos need to tap into that local entrepreneurial talent as well , because the locals know how to reach the very hard-to-serve places , their neighbors , and they know what motivates them to make change .
i think a great example of this is ethiopia 's new health extension program .
the government noticed in ethiopia that many of the people were so far away from a health clinic , they were over a day 's travel away from a health clinic .
so if you 're in an emergency situation - or if you 're a mom about to deliver a baby - forget it , to get to the health care center .
they decided that was n't good enough , so they went to india and studied the indian state of kerala that also had a system like this , and they adapted it for ethiopia .
and in 2003 , the government of ethiopia started this new system in their own country .
they trained 35,000 health extension workers to deliver care directly to the people .
in just five years , their ratio went from one worker for every 30,000 people to one worker for every 2,500 people .
now , think about how this can change people 's lives .
health extension workers can help with so many things , whether it 's family planning , prenatal care , immunizations for the children , or advising the woman to get to the facility on time for an on-time delivery .
that is having real impact in a country like ethiopia , and it 's why you see their child mortality numbers coming down 25 percent from 2000 to 2008 .
in ethiopia , there are hundreds of thousands of children living because of this health extension worker program .
so what 's the next step for ethiopia ?
well , they 're already starting talk about this .
they 're starting to talk about , " how do you have the health community workers generate their own ideas ?
how do you incent them based on the impact that they 're getting out in those remote villages ? "
that 's how you tap into local entrepreneurial talent and you unlock people 's potential .
the third component of coke 's success is marketing .
ultimately , coke 's success depends on one crucial fact and that is that people want a coca-cola .
now the reason these micro-entrepreneurs can sell or make a profit is they have to sell every single bottle in their pushcart or their wheelbarrow .
so , they rely on coca-cola in terms of its marketing , and what 's the secret to their marketing ?
well , it 's aspirational .
it is associated that product with a kind of life that people want to live .
so even though it 's a global company , they take a very local approach .
coke 's global campaign slogan is " open happiness . "
but they localize it .
and they do n't just guess what makes people happy ; they go to places like latin america and they realize that happiness there is associated with family life .
and in south africa , they associate happiness with seriti or community respect .
now , that played itself out in the world cup campaign .
let 's listen to this song that coke created for it , " wavin ' flag " by a somali hip hop artist .
-lrb- video -rrb- k 'naan : ♫ oh oh oh oh oh o-oh ♫ ♫ oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh ♫ ♫ oh oh oh oh oh o-oh ♫ ♫ oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh o-oh ♫ ♫ give you freedom , give you fire ♫ ♫ give you reason , take you higher ♫ ♫ see the champions take the field now ♫ ♫ you define us , make us feel proud ♫ ♫ in the streets our heads are lifted ♫ ♫ as we lose our inhibition ♫ ♫ celebration , it 's around us ♫ ♫ every nation , all around us ♫
melinda french gates : it feels pretty good , right ?
well , they did n't stop there - they localized it into 18 different languages .
and it went number one on the pop chart in 17 countries .
it reminds me of a song that i remember from my childhood , " i 'd like to teach the world to sing , " that also went number one on the pop charts .
both songs have something in common : that same appeal of celebration and unity .
so how does health and development market ?
well , it 's based on avoidance , not aspirations .
i 'm sure you 've heard some of these messages .
" use a condom , do n't get aids . "
" wash you hands , you might not get diarrhea . "
it does n't sound anything like " wavin ' flag " to me .
and i think we make a fundamental mistake - we make an assumption , that we think that , if people need something , we do n't have to make them want that .
and i think that 's a mistake .
and there 's some indications around the world that this is starting to change .
one example is sanitation .
we know that a million and a half children die a year from diarrhea and a lot of it is because of open defecation .
but there 's a solution : you build a toilet .
but what we 're finding around the world , over and over again , is , if you build a toilet and you leave it there , it does n't get used .
people reuse it for a slab for their home .
they sometimes store grain in it .
i 've even seen it used for a chicken coop .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but what does marketing really entail that would make a sanitation solution get a result in diarrhea ?
well , you work with the community .
you start to talk to them about why open defecation is something that should n't be done in the village , and they agree to that .
but then you take the toilet and you position it as a modern , trendy convenience .
one state in northern india has gone so far as to link toilets to courtship .
and it works - look at these headlines .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'm not kidding .
women are refusing to marry men without toilets .
no loo , no " i do . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , it 's not just a funny headline - it 's innovative . it 's an innovative marketing campaign .
but more importantly , it saves lives .
take a look at this - this is a room full of young men and my husband , bill .
and can you guess what the young men are waiting for ?
they 're waiting to be circumcised .
can you you believe that ?
we know that circumcision reduces hiv infection by 60 percent in men .
and when we first heard this result inside the foundation , i have to admit , bill and i were scratching our heads a little bit and we were saying , " but who 's going to volunteer for this procedure ? "
but it turns out the men do , because they 're hearing from their girlfriends that they prefer it , and the men also believe it improves their sex life .
so if we can start to understand what people really want in health and development , we can change communities and we can change whole nations .
well , why is all of this so important ?
so let 's talk about what happens when this all comes together , when you tie the three things together .
and polio , i think , is one of the most powerful examples .
we 've seen a 99 percent reduction in polio in 20 years .
so if you look back to 1988 , there are about 350,000 cases of polio on the planet that year .
in 2009 , we 're down to 1,600 cases .
well how did that happen ?
let 's look at a country like india .
they have over a billion people in this country , but they have 35,000 local doctors who report paralysis , and clinicians , a huge reporting system in chemists .
they have two and a half million vaccinators .
but let me make the story a little bit more concrete for you .
let me tell you the story of shriram , an 18 month boy in bihar , a northern state in india .
this year on august 8th , he felt paralysis and on the 13th , his parents took him to the doctor .
on august 14th and 15th , they took a stool sample , and by the 25th of august , it was confirmed he had type 1 polio .
by august 30th , a genetic test was done , and we knew what strain of polio shriram had .
now it could have come from one of two places .
it could have come from nepal , just to the north , across the border , or from jharkhand , a state just to the south .
luckily , the genetic testing proved that , in fact , this strand came north , because , had it come from the south , it would have had a much wider impact in terms of transmission .
so many more people would have been affected .
so what 's the endgame ?
well on september 4th , there was a huge mop-up campaign , which is what you do in polio .
they went out and where shriram lives , they vaccinated two million people .
so in less than a month , we went from one case of paralysis to a targeted vaccination program .
and i 'm happy to say only one other person in that area got polio .
that 's how you keep a huge outbreak from spreading , and it shows what can happen when local people have the data in their hands ; they can save lives .
now one of the challenges in polio , still , is marketing , but it might not be what you think .
it 's not the marketing on the ground .
it 's not telling the parents , " if you see paralysis , take your child to the doctor or get your child vaccinated . "
we have a problem with marketing in the donor community .
the g8 nations have been incredibly generous on polio over the last 20 years , but we 're starting to have something called polio fatigue and that is that the donor nations are n't willing to fund polio any longer .
so by next summer , we 're sighted to run out of money on polio .
so we are 99 percent of the way there on this goal and we 're about to run short of money .
and i think that if the marketing were more aspirational , if we could focus as a community on how far we 've come and how amazing it would be to eradicate this disease , we could put polio fatigue and polio behind us .
and if we could do that , we could stop vaccinating everybody , worldwide , in all of our countries for polio .
and it would only be the second disease ever wiped off the face of the planet .
and we are so close .
and this victory is so possible .
so if coke 's marketers came to me and asked me to define happiness , i 'd say my vision of happiness is a mother holding healthy baby in her arms .
to me , that is deep happiness .
and so if we can learn lessons from the innovators in every sector , then in the future we make together , that happiness can be just as ubiquitous as coca-cola .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the allosphere : it 's a three-story metal sphere in an echo-free chamber .
think of the allosphere as a large , dynamically varying digital microscope that 's connected to a supercomputer .
20 researchers can stand on a bridge suspended inside of the sphere , and be completely immersed in their data .
imagine if a team of physicists could stand inside of an atom and watch and hear electrons spin .
imagine if a group of sculptors could be inside of a lattice of atoms and sculpt with their material .
imagine if a team of surgeons could fly into the brain , as though it was a world , and see tissues as landscapes , and hear blood density levels as music .
this is some of the research that you 're going to see that we 're undertaking at the allosphere .
but first a little bit about this group of artists , scientists , and engineers that are working together .
i 'm a composer , orchestrally-trained , and the inventor of the allosphere .
with my visual artist colleagues , we map complex mathematical algorithms that unfold in time and space , visually and sonically .
our scientist colleagues are finding new patterns in the information .
and our engineering colleagues are making one of the largest dynamically varying computers in the world for this kind of data exploration .
i 'm going to fly you into five research projects in the allosphere that are going to take you from biological macroscopic data all the way down to electron spin .
this first project is called the allobrain .
and it 's our attempt to quantify beauty by finding which regions of the brain are interactive while witnessing something beautiful .
you 're flying through the cortex of my colleague 's brain .
our narrative here is real fmri data that 's mapped visually and sonically .
the brain now a world that we can fly through and interact with .
you see 12 intelligent computer agents , the little rectangles that are flying in the brain with you .
they 're mining blood density levels .
and they 're reporting them back to you sonically .
higher density levels mean more activity in that point of the brain .
they 're actually singing these densities to you with higher pitches mapped to higher densities .
we 're now going to move from real biological data to biogenerative algorithms that create artificial nature in our next artistic and scientific installation .
in this artistic and scientific installation , biogenerative algorithms are helping us to understand self-generation and growth : very important for simulation in the nanoscaled sciences .
for artists , we 're making new worlds that we can uncover and explore .
these generative algorithms grow over time , and they interact and communicate as a swarm of insects .
our researchers are interacting with this data by injecting bacterial code , which are computer programs , that allow these creatures to grow over time .
we 're going to move now from the biological and the macroscopic world , down into the atomic world , as we fly into a lattice of atoms .
this is real afm - atomic force microscope - data from my colleagues in the solid state lighting and energy center .
they 've discovered a new bond , a new material for transparent solar cells .
we 're flying through 2,000 lattice of atoms - oxygen , hydrogen and zinc .
you view the bond in the triangle .
it 's four blue zinc atoms bonding with one white hydrogen atom .
you see the electron flow with the streamlines we as artists have generated for the scientists .
this is allowing them to find the bonding nodes in any lattice of atoms .
we think it makes a beautiful structural art .
the sound that you 're hearing are the actual emission spectrums of these atoms .
we 've mapped them into the audio domain , so they 're singing to you .
oxygen , hydrogen and zinc have their own signature .
we 're going to actually move even further down as we go from this lattice of atoms to one single hydrogen atom .
we 're working with our physicist colleagues that have given us the mathematical calculations of the n-dimensional schrödinger equation in time .
what you 're seeing here right now is a superposition of an electron in the lower three orbitals of a hydrogen atom .
you 're actually hearing and seeing the electron flow with the lines .
the white dots are the probability wave that will show you where the electron is in any given point of time and space in this particular three-orbital configuration .
in a minute we 're going to move to a two-orbital configuration , and you 're going to notice a pulsing .
and you 're going to hear an undulation between the sound .
this is actually a light emitter .
as the sound starts to pulse and contract , our physicists can tell when a photon is going to be emitted .
they 're starting to find new mathematical structures in these calculations .
and they 're understanding more about quantum mathematics .
we 're going to move even further down , and go to one single electron spin .
this will be the final project that i show you .
our colleagues in the center for quantum computation and spintronics are actually measuring with their lasers decoherence in a single electron spin .
we 've taken this information and we 've made a mathematical model out of it .
you 're actually seeing and hearing quantum information flow .
this is very important for the next step in simulating quantum computers and information technology .
so these brief examples that i 've shown you give you an idea of the kind of work that we 're doing at the university of california , santa barbara , to bring together , arts , science and engineering into a new age of math , science and art .
we hope that all of you will come to see the allosphere .
inspire us to think of new ways that we can use this unique instrument that we 've created at santa barbara .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i essentially drag sledges for a living , so it does n't take an awful lot to flummox me intellectually , but i 'm going to read this question from an interview earlier this year : " philosophically , does the constant supply of information steal our ability to imagine or replace our dreams of achieving ?
after all , if it is being done somewhere by someone , and we can participate virtually , then why bother leaving the house ? "
i 'm usually introduced as a polar explorer .
i 'm not sure that 's the most progressive or 21st-century of job titles , but i 've spent more than two percent now of my entire life living in a tent inside the arctic circle , so i get out of the house a fair bit .
and in my nature , i guess , i am a doer of things more than i am a spectator or a contemplator of things , and it 's that dichotomy , the gulf between ideas and action that i 'm going to try and explore briefly .
the pithiest answer to the question " why ? "
that 's been dogging me for the last 12 years was credited certainly to this chap , the rakish-looking gentleman standing at the back , second from the left , george lee mallory . many of you will know his name .
in 1924 he was last seen disappearing into the clouds near the summit of mt . everest .
he may or may not have been the first person to climb everest , more than 30 years before edmund hillary .
no one knows if he got to the top . it 's still a mystery .
but he was credited with coining the phrase , " because it 's there . "
now i 'm not actually sure that he did say that .
there 's very little evidence to suggest it , but what he did say is actually far nicer , and again , i 've printed this . i 'm going to read it out .
" the first question which you will ask and which i must try to answer is this : what is the use of climbing mt . everest ?
and my answer must at once be , it is no use .
there is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever .
oh , we may learn a little about the behavior of the human body at high altitudes , and possibly medical men may turn our observation to some account for the purposes of aviation , but otherwise nothing will come of it .
we shall not bring back a single bit of gold or silver , and not a gem , nor any coal or iron .
we shall not find a single foot of earth that can be planted with crops to raise food . so it is no use .
if you can not understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it , that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward , then you wo n't see why we go .
what we get from this adventure is just sheer joy , and joy , after all , is the end of life .
we do n't live to eat and make money .
we eat and make money to be able to enjoy life .
that is what life means , and that is what life is for . "
mallory 's argument that leaving the house , embarking on these grand adventures is joyful and fun , however , does n't tally that neatly with my own experience .
the furthest i 've ever got away from my front door was in the spring of 2004 . i still do n't know exactly what came over me , but my plan was to make a solo and unsupported crossing of the arctic ocean .
i planned essentially to walk from the north coast of russia to the north pole , and then to carry on to the north coast of canada .
no one had ever done this . i was 26 at the time .
a lot of experts were saying it was impossible , and my mum certainly was n't very keen on the idea .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the journey from a small weather station on the north coast of siberia up to my final starting point , the edge of the pack ice , the coast of the arctic ocean , took about five hours , and if anyone watched fearless felix baumgartner going up , rather than just coming down , you 'll appreciate the sense of apprehension , as i sat in a helicopter thundering north , and the sense , i think if anything , of impending doom .
i sat there wondering what on earth i had gotten myself into .
there was a bit of fun , a bit of joy .
i was 26 . i remember sitting there looking down at my sledge . i had my skis ready to go , i had a satellite phone , a pump-action shotgun in case i was attacked by a polar bear .
i remember looking out of the window and seeing the second helicopter .
we were both thundering through this incredible siberian dawn , and part of me felt a bit like a cross between jason bourne and wilfred thesiger . part of me felt quite proud of myself , but mostly i was just utterly terrified .
and that journey lasted 10 weeks , 72 days .
i did n't see anyone else . we took this photo next to the helicopter .
beyond that , i did n't see anyone for 10 weeks .
the north pole is slap bang in the middle of the sea , so i 'm traveling over the frozen surface of the arctic ocean .
nasa described conditions that year as the worst since records began .
i was dragging 180 kilos of food and fuel and supplies , about 400 pounds . the average temperature for the 10 weeks was minus 35 . minus 50 was the coldest .
so again , there was n't an awful lot of joy or fun to be had .
one of the magical things about this journey , however , is that because i 'm walking over the sea , over this floating , drifting , shifting crust of ice that 's floating on top of the arctic ocean is it 's an environment that 's in a constant state of flux .
the ice is always moving , breaking up , drifting around , refreezing , so the scenery that i saw for nearly 3 months was unique to me . no one else will ever , could ever , possibly see the views , the vistas , that i saw for 10 weeks .
and that , i guess , is probably the finest argument for leaving the house .
i can try to tell you what it was like , but you 'll never know what it was like , and the more i try to explain that i felt lonely , i was the only human being in 5.4 million square-miles , it was cold , nearly minus 75 with windchill on a bad day , the more words fall short , and i 'm unable to do it justice .
and it seems to me , therefore , that the doing , you know , to try to experience , to engage , to endeavor , rather than to watch and to wonder , that 's where the real meat of life is to be found , the juice that we can suck out of our hours and days .
and i would add a cautionary note here , however .
in my experience , there is something addictive about tasting life at the very edge of what 's humanly possible .
now i do n't just mean in the field of daft macho edwardian style derring-do , but also in the fields of pancreatic cancer , there is something addictive about this , and in my case , i think polar expeditions are perhaps not that far removed from having a crack habit .
i ca n't explain quite how good it is until you 've tried it , but it has the capacity to burn up all the money i can get my hands on , to ruin every relationship i 've ever had , so be careful what you wish for .
mallory postulated that there is something in man that responds to the challenge of the mountain , and i wonder if that 's the case whether there 's something in the challenge itself , in the endeavor , and particularly in the big , unfinished , chunky challenges that face humanity that call out to us , and in my experience that 's certainly the case .
there is one unfinished challenge that 's been calling out to me for most of my adult life .
many of you will know the story .
this is a photo of captain scott and his team .
scott set out just over a hundred years ago to try to become the first person to reach the south pole .
no one knew what was there . it was utterly unmapped at the time . we knew more about the surface of the moon than we did about the heart of antarctica .
scott , as many of you will know , was beaten to it by roald amundsen and his norwegian team , who used dogs and dogsleds . scott 's team were on foot , all five of them wearing harnesses and dragging around sledges , and they arrived at the pole to find the norwegian flag already there , i 'd imagine pretty bitter and demoralized .
all five of them turned and started walking back to the coast and all five died on that return journey .
there is a sort of misconception nowadays that it 's all been done in the fields of exploration and adventure .
when i talk about antarctica , people often say , " has n't , you know , that 's interesting , has n't that blue peter presenter just done it on a bike ? "
or , " that 's nice . you know , my grandmother 's going on a cruise to antarctica next year . you know .
is there a chance you 'll see her there ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but scott 's journey remains unfinished .
no one has ever walked from the very coast of antarctica to the south pole and back again .
it is , arguably , the most audacious endeavor of that edwardian golden age of exploration , and it seemed to me high time , given everything we have figured out in the century since from scurvy to solar panels , that it was high time someone had a go at finishing the job .
so that 's precisely what i 'm setting out to do .
this time next year , in october , i 'm leading a team of three .
it will take us about four months to make this return journey .
that 's the scale . the red line is obviously halfway to the pole .
we have to turn around and come back again .
i 'm well aware of the irony of telling you that we will be blogging and tweeting . you 'll be able to live vicariously and virtually through this journey in a way that no one has ever before .
and it 'll also be a four-month chance for me to finally come up with a pithy answer to the question , " why ? "
and our lives today are safer and more comfortable than they have ever been . there certainly is n't much call for explorers nowadays . my career advisor at school never mentioned it as an option .
if i wanted to know , for example , how many stars were in the milky way , how old those giant heads on easter island were , most of you could find that out right now without even standing up .
and yet , if i 've learned anything in nearly 12 years now of dragging heavy things around cold places , it is that true , real inspiration and growth only comes from adversity and from challenge , from stepping away from what 's comfortable and familiar and stepping out into the unknown .
in life , we all have tempests to ride and poles to walk to , and i think metaphorically speaking , at least , we could all benefit from getting outside the house a little more often , if only we could summon up the courage .
i certainly would implore you to open the door just a little bit and take a look at what 's outside .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- about four years ago , the new yorker published an article about a cache of dodo bones that was found in a pit on the island of mauritius .
now , the island of mauritius is a small island off the east coast of madagascar in the indian ocean , and it is the place where the dodo bird was discovered and extinguished , all within about 150 years .
everyone was very excited about this archaeological find , because it meant that they might finally be able to assemble a single dodo skeleton .
see , while museums all over the world have dodo skeletons in their collection , nobody - not even the actual natural history museum on the island of mauritius - has a skeleton that 's made from the bones of a single dodo .
well , this is n't exactly true .
the fact is , is that the british museum had a complete specimen of a dodo in their collection up until the 18th century - it was actually mummified , skin and all - but in a fit of space-saving zeal , they actually cut off the head and they cut off the feet and they burned the rest in a bonfire .
if you go look at their website today , they 'll actually list these specimens , saying , the rest was lost in a fire .
not quite the whole truth . anyway .
the frontispiece of this article was this photo , and i 'm one of the people that thinks that tina brown was great for bringing photos to the new yorker , because this photo completely rocked my world .
i became obsessed with the object - not just the beautiful photograph itself , and the color , the shallow depth of field , the detail that 's visible , the wire you can see on the beak there that the conservator used to put this skeleton together - there 's an entire story here .
and i thought to myself , would n't it be great if i had my own dodo skeleton ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i want to point out here at this point that i 've spent my life obsessed by objects and the stories that they tell , and this was the very latest one .
so i began looking around for - to see if anyone sold a kit , some kind of model that i could get , and i found lots of reference material , lots of lovely pictures .
no dice : no dodo skeleton for me . but the damage had been done .
i had saved a few hundred photos of dodo skeletons into my " creative projects " folder - it 's a repository for my brain , everything that i could possibly be interested in .
any time i have an internet connection , there 's a sluice of stuff moving into there , everything from beautiful rings to cockpit photos .
the key that the marquis du lafayette sent to george washington to celebrate the storming of the bastille .
russian nuclear launch key : the one on the top is the picture of the one i found on ebay ; the one on the bottom is the one i made for myself , because i could n't afford the one on ebay .
storm trooper costumes . maps of middle earth - that 's one i hand-drew myself . there 's the dodo skeleton folder .
this folder has 17,000 photos - over 20 gigabytes of information - and it 's growing constantly .
and one day , a couple of weeks later , it might have been maybe a year later , i was in the art store with my kids , and i was buying some clay tools - we were going to have a craft day .
i bought some super sculpeys , some armature wire , some various materials .
and i looked down at this sculpey , and i thought , maybe , yeah , maybe i could make my own dodo skull .
i should point out at this time - i 'm not a sculptor ; i 'm a hard-edged model maker .
you give me a drawing , you give me a prop to replicate , you give me a crane , scaffolding , parts from " star wars " - especially parts from " star wars " - i can do this stuff all day long .
it 's exactly how i made my living for 15 years .
but you give me something like this - my friend mike murnane sculpted this ; it 's a maquette for " star wars , episode two " - this is not my thing - this is something other people do - dragons , soft things .
however , i felt like i had looked at enough photos of dodo skulls to actually be able to understand the topology and perhaps replicate it - i mean , it could n't be that difficult .
so , i started looking at the best photos i could find .
i grabbed all the reference , and i found this lovely piece of reference .
this is someone selling this on ebay ; it was clearly a woman 's hand , hopefully a woman 's hand .
assuming it was roughly the size of my wife 's hand , i made some measurements of her thumb , and i scaled them out to the size of the skull .
i blew it up to the actual size , and i began using that , along with all the other reference that i had , comparing it to it as size reference for figuring out exactly how big the beak should be , exactly how long , etc .
and over a few hours , i eventually achieved what was actually a pretty reasonable dodo skull . and i did n't mean to continue , i - it 's kind of like , you know , you can only clean a super messy room by picking up one thing at a time ; you ca n't think about the totality .
i was n't thinking about a dodo skeleton ; i just noticed that as i finished this skull , the armature wire that i had been used to holding it up was sticking out of the back just where a spine would be .
and one of the other things i 'd been interested in and obsessed with over the years is spines and skeletons , having collected a couple of hundred .
i actually understood the mechanics of vertebrae enough to kind of start to imitate them .
and so button by button , vertebrae by vertebrae , i built my way down .
and actually , by the end of the day , i had a reasonable skull , a moderately good vertebrae and half of a pelvis .
and again , i kept on going , looking for more reference , every bit of reference i could find - drawings , beautiful photos .
this guy - i love this guy ! he put a dodo leg bones on a scanner with a ruler .
this is the kind of accuracy that i wanted , and i replicated every last bone and put it in .
and after about six weeks , i finished , painted , mounted my own dodo skeleton .
you can see that i even made a museum label for it that includes a brief history of the dodo .
and tap plastics made me - although i did n't photograph it - a museum vitrine .
i do n't have the room for this in my house , but i had to finish what i had started .
and this actually represented kind of a sea change to me .
again , like i said , my life has been about being fascinated by objects and the stories that they tell , and also making them for myself , obtaining them , appreciating them and diving into them .
and in this folder , " creative projects , " there are tons of projects that i 'm currently working on , projects that i 've already worked on , things that i might want to work on some day , and things that i may just want to find and buy and have and look at and touch .
but now there was potentially this new category of things that i could sculpt that was different , that i - you know , i have my own r2d2 , but that 's - honestly , relative to sculpting , to me , that 's easy .
and so i went back and looked through my " creative projects " folder , and i happened across the maltese falcon .
now , this is funny for me : to fall in love with an object from a hammett novel , because if it 's true that the world is divided into two types of people , chandler people and hammett people , i am absolutely a chandler person .
but in this case , it 's not about the author , it 's not about the book or the movie or the story , it 's about the object in and of itself .
and in this case , this object is - plays on a host of levels .
first of all , there 's the object in the world .
this is the " kniphausen hawk . "
it is a ceremonial pouring vessel made around 1700 for a swedish count , and it is very likely the object from which hammett drew his inspiration for the maltese falcon .
then there is the fictional bird , the one that hammett created for the book .
built out of words , it is the engine that drives the plot of his book and also the movie , in which another object is created : a prop that has to represent the thing that hammett created out of words , inspired by the kniphausen hawk , and this represents the falcon in the movie .
and then there is this fourth level , which is a whole new object in the world : the prop made for the movie , the representative of the thing , becomes , in its own right , a whole other thing , a whole new object of desire .
and so now it was time to do some research .
i actually had done some research a few years before - it 's why the folder was there .
i 'd bought a replica , a really crappy replica , of the maltese falcon on ebay , and had downloaded enough pictures to actually have some reasonable reference .
but i discovered , in researching further , really wanting precise reference , that one of the original lead birds had been sold at christie 's in 1994 , and so i contacted an antiquarian bookseller who had the original christie 's catalogue , and in it i found this magnificent picture , which included a size reference .
i was able to scan the picture , blow it up to exactly full size .
i found other reference . avi -lsb- ara -rsb- chekmayan , a new jersey editor , actually found this resin maltese falcon at a flea market in 1991 , although it took him five years to authenticate this bird to the auctioneers ' specifications , because there was a lot of controversy about it .
it was made out of resin , which was n't a common material for movie props about the time the movie was made .
it 's funny to me that it took a while to authenticate it , because i can see it compared to this thing , and i can tell you - it 's real , it 's the real thing , it 's made from the exact same mold that this one is .
in this one , because the auction was actually so controversial , profiles in history , the auction house that sold this - i think in 1995 for about 100,000 dollars - they actually included - you can see here on the bottom - not just a front elevation , but also a side , rear and other side elevation .
so now , i had all the topology i needed to replicate the maltese falcon .
what do they do , how do you start something like that ? i really do n't know .
so what i did was , again , like i did with the dodo skull , i blew all my reference up to full size , and then i began cutting out the negatives and using those templates as shape references .
so i took sculpey , and i built a big block of it , and i passed it through until , you know , i got the right profiles .
and then slowly , feather by feather , detail by detail , i worked out and achieved - working in front of the television and super sculpey - here 's me sitting next to my wife - it 's the only picture i took of the entire process .
as i moved through , i achieved a very reasonable facsimile of the maltese falcon .
but again , i am not a sculptor , and so i do n't know a lot of the tricks , like , i do n't know how my friend mike gets beautiful , shiny surfaces with his sculpey ; i certainly was n't able to get it .
so , i went down to my shop , and i molded it and i cast it in resin , because in the resin , then , i could absolutely get the glass smooth finished .
now there 's a lot of ways to fill and get yourself a nice smooth finish .
my preference is about 70 coats of this - matte black auto primer .
i spray it on for about three or four days , it drips to hell , but it allows me a really , really nice gentle sanding surface and i can get it glass-smooth .
oh , finishing up with triple-zero steel wool .
now , the great thing about getting it to this point was that because in the movie , when they finally bring out the bird at the end , and they place it on the table , they actually spin it .
so i was able to actually screen-shot and freeze-frame to make sure .
and i 'm following all the light kicks on this thing and making sure that as i 'm holding the light in the same position , i 'm getting the same type of reflection on it - that 's the level of detail i 'm going into this thing .
i ended up with this : my maltese falcon .
and it 's beautiful . and i can state with authority at this point in time , when i 'd finished it , of all of the replicas out there - and there is a few - this is by far the most accurate representation of the original maltese falcon than anyone has sculpted . now the original one , i should tell you , is sculpted by a guy named fred sexton .
this is where it gets weird .
fred sexton was a friend of this guy , george hodel .
terrifying guy - agreed by many to be the killer of the black dahlia .
now , james ellroy believes that fred sexton , the sculptor of the maltese falcon , killed james elroy 's mother .
i 'll go you one stranger than that : in 1974 , during the production of a weird comedy sequel to " the maltese falcon , " called " the black bird , " starring george segal , the los angeles county museum of art had a plaster original of the maltese falcon - one of the original six plasters , i think , made for the movie - stolen out of the museum . a lot of people thought it was a publicity stunt for the movie .
john 's grill , which actually is seen briefly in " the maltese falcon , " is still a viable san francisco eatery , counted amongst its regular customers elisha cook , who played wilmer cook in the movie , and he gave them one of his original plasters of the maltese falcon .
and they had it in their cabinet for about 15 years , until it got stolen in january of 2007 .
it would seem that the object of desire only comes into its own by disappearing repeatedly .
so here i had this falcon , and it was lovely . it looked really great , the light worked on it really well , it was better than anything that i could achieve or obtain out in the world .
but there was a problem . and the problem was that : i wanted the entirety of the object , i wanted the weight behind the object .
this thing was made of resin and it was too light .
there 's this group online that i frequent .
it 's a group of prop crazies just like me called the replica props forum , and it 's people who trade , make and travel in information about movie props .
and it turned out that one of the guys there , a friend of mine that i never actually met , but befriended through some prop deals , was the manager of a local foundry .
he took my master falcon pattern , he actually did lost wax casting in bronze for me , and this is the bronze i got back .
and this is , after some acid etching , the one that i ended up with .
and this thing , it 's deeply , deeply satisfying to me .
here , i 'm going to put it out there , later on tonight , and i want you to pick it up and handle it .
you want to know how obsessed i am . this project 's only for me , and yet i went so far as to buy on ebay a 1941 chinese san francisco-based newspaper , in order so that the bird could properly be wrapped ...
like it is in the movie .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- yeah , i know !
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- there you can see , it 's weighing in at 27 and a half pounds .
that 's half the weight of my dog , huxley .
but there 's a problem .
now , here 's the most recent progression of falcons .
on the far left is a piece of crap - a replica i bought on ebay .
there 's my somewhat ruined sculpey falcon , because i had to get it back out of the mold . there 's my first casting , there 's my master and there 's my bronze .
there 's a thing that happens when you mold and cast things , which is that every time you throw it into silicone and cast it in resin , you lose a little bit of volume , you lose a little bit of size .
and when i held my bronze one up against my sculpey one , it was shorter by three-quarters of an inch .
yeah , no , really , this was like aah - why did n't i remember this ?
why did n't i start and make it bigger ?
so what do i do ? i figure i have two options .
one , i can fire a freaking laser at it , which i have already done , to do a 3d scan - there 's a 3d scan of this falcon .
i had figured out the exact amount of shrinkage i achieved going from a wax master to a bronze master and blown this up big enough to make a 3d lithography master of this , which i will polish , then i will send to the mold maker and then i will have it done in bronze . or : there are several people who own originals , and i have been attempting to contact them and reach them , hoping that they will let me spend a few minutes in the presence of one of the real birds , maybe to take a picture , or even to pull out the hand-held laser scanner
that i happen to own that fits inside a cereal box , and could maybe , without even touching their bird , i swear , get a perfect 3d scan . and i 'm even willing to sign pages saying that i 'll never let anyone else have it , except for me in my office , i promise .
i 'll give them one if they want it .
and then , maybe , then i 'll achieve the end of this exercise .
but really , if we 're all going to be honest with ourselves , i have to admit that achieving the end of the exercise was never the point of the exercise to begin with , was it .
thank you .
i live and work from tokyo , japan .
and i specialize in human behavioral research , and applying what we learn to think about the future in different ways , and to design for that future .
and you know , to be honest , i 've been doing this for seven years , and i have n't got a clue what the future is going to be like .
but i 've got a pretty good idea how people will behave when they get there .
this is my office . it 's out there .
it 's not in the lab , and it 's increasingly in places like india , china , brazil , africa .
we live on a planet - 6.3 billion people .
about three billion people , by the end of this year , will have cellular connectivity .
and it 'll take about another two years to connect the next billion after that .
and i mention this because , if we want to design for that future , we need to figure out what those people are about .
and that 's , kind of , where i see what my job is and what our team 's job is .
our research often starts with a very simple question .
so i 'll give you an example . what do you carry ?
if you think of everything in your life that you own , when you walk out that door , what do you consider to take with you ?
when you 're looking around , what do you consider ?
of that stuff , what do you carry ?
and of that stuff , what do you actually use ?
so this is interesting to us , because the conscious and subconscious decision process implies that the stuff that you do take with you and end up using has some kind of spiritual , emotional or functional value .
and to put it really bluntly , you know , people are willing to pay for stuff that has value , right ?
so i 've probably done about five years ' research looking at what people carry .
i go in people 's bags . i look in people 's pockets , purses .
i go in their homes . and we do this worldwide , and we follow them around town with video cameras .
it 's kind of like stalking with permission .
and we do all this - and to go back to the original question , what do people carry ?
and it turns out that people carry a lot of stuff .
ok , that 's fair enough .
but if you ask people what the three most important things that they carry are - across cultures and across gender and across contexts - most people will say keys , money and , if they own one , a mobile phone .
and i 'm not saying this is a good thing , but this is a thing , right ?
i mean , i could n't take your phones off you if i wanted to .
you 'd probably kick me out , or something .
ok , it might seem like an obvious thing for someone who works for a mobile phone company to ask .
but really , the question is , why ? right ?
so why are these things so important in our lives ?
and it turns out , from our research , that it boils down to survival - survival for us and survival for our loved ones .
so , keys provide an access to shelter and warmth - transport as well , in the u.s. increasingly .
money is useful for buying food , sustenance , among all its other uses .
and a mobile phone , it turns out , is a great recovery tool .
if you prefer this kind of maslow 's hierarchy of needs , those three objects are very good at supporting the lowest rungs in maslow 's hierarchy of needs .
yes , they do a whole bunch of other stuff , but they 're very good at this .
and in particular , it 's the mobile phone 's ability to allow people to transcend space and time .
and what i mean by that is , you know , you can transcend space by simply making a voice call , right ?
and you can transcend time by sending a message at your convenience , and someone else can pick it up at their convenience .
and this is fairly universally appreciated , it turns out , which is why we have three billion plus people who have been connected .
and they value that connectivity .
but actually , you can do this kind of stuff with pcs .
and you can do them with phone kiosks .
and the mobile phone , in addition , is both personal - and so it also gives you a degree of privacy - and it 's convenient .
you do n't need to ask permission from anyone , you can just go ahead and do it , right ?
however , for these things to help us survive , it depends on them being carried .
but - and it 's a pretty big but - we forget .
we 're human , that 's what we do . it 's one of our features .
i think , quite a nice feature .
so we forget , but we 're also adaptable , and we adapt to situations around us pretty well .
and so we have these strategies to remember , and one of them was mentioned yesterday .
and it 's , quite simply , the point of reflection .
and that 's that moment when you 're walking out of a space , and you turn around , and quite often you tap your pockets .
even women who keep stuff in their bags tap their pockets .
and you turn around , and you look back into the space , and some people talk aloud .
and pretty much everyone does it at some point .
ok , the next thing is - most of you , if you have a stable home life , and what i mean is that you do n't travel all the time , and always in hotels , but most people have what we call a center of gravity .
and a center of gravity is where you keep these objects .
and these things do n't stay in the center of gravity , but over time , they gravitate there .
it 's where you expect to find stuff .
and in fact , when you 're turning around , and you 're looking inside the house , and you 're looking for this stuff , this is where you look first , right ?
ok , so when we did this research , we found the absolutely , 100 percent , guaranteed way to never forget anything ever , ever again .
and that is , quite simply , to have nothing to remember .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ok , now , that sounds like something you get on a chinese fortune cookie , right ?
but is , in fact , about the art of delegation .
and from a design perspective , it 's about understanding what you can delegate to technology and what you can delegate to other people .
and it turns out , delegation - if you want it to be - can be the solution for pretty much everything , apart from things like bodily functions , going to the toilet .
you ca n't ask someone to do that on your behalf .
and apart from things like entertainment , you would n't pay for someone to go to the cinema for you and have fun on your behalf , or , at least , not yet .
maybe sometime in the future , we will .
so , let me give you an example of delegation in practice , right .
so this is - probably the thing i 'm most passionate about is the research that we 've been doing on illiteracy and how people who are illiterate communicate .
so , the u.n. estimated - this is 2004 figures - that there are almost 800 million people who ca n't read and write , worldwide .
so , we 've been conducting a lot of research .
and one of the things we were looking at is - if you ca n't read and write , if you want to communicate over distances , you need to be able to identify the person that you want to communicate with .
it could be a phone number , it could be an e-mail address , it could be a postal address .
simple question : if you ca n't read and write , how do you manage your contact information ?
and the fact is that millions of people do it .
just from a design perspective , we did n't really understand how they did it , and so that 's just one small example of the kind of research that we were doing .
and it turns out that illiterate people are masters of delegation .
so they delegate that part of the task process to other people , the stuff that they ca n't do themselves .
let me give you another example of delegation .
this one 's a little bit more sophisticated , and this is from a study that we did in uganda about how people who are sharing devices , use those devices .
sente is a word in uganda that means money .
it has a second meaning , which is to send money as airtime . ok ?
and it works like this .
so let 's say , june , you 're in a village , rural village .
i 'm in kampala and i 'm the wage earner .
i 'm sending money back , and it works like this .
so , in your village , there 's one person in the village with a phone , and that 's the phone kiosk operator .
and it 's quite likely that they 'd have a quite simple mobile phone as a phone kiosk .
so what i do is , i buy a prepaid card like this .
and instead of using that money to top up my own phone , i call up the local village operator .
and i read out that number to them , and they use it to top up their phone .
so , they 're topping up the value from kampala , and it 's now being topped up in the village .
you take a 10 or 20 percent commission , and then you - the kiosk operator takes 10 or 20 percent commission , and passes the rest over to you in cash .
ok , there 's two things i like about this .
so the first is , it turns anyone who has access to a mobile phone - anyone who has a mobile phone - essentially into an atm machine .
it brings rudimentary banking services to places where there 's no banking infrastructure .
and even if they could have access to the banking infrastructure , they would n't necessarily be considered viable customers , because they 're not wealthy enough to have bank accounts .
there 's a second thing i like about this .
and that is that despite all the resources at my disposal , and despite all our kind of apparent sophistication , i know i could never have designed something as elegant and as totally in tune with the local conditions as this . ok ?
and , yes , there are things like grameen bank and micro-lending .
but the difference between this and that is , there 's no central authority trying to control this .
this is just street-up innovation .
so , it turns out the street is a never-ending source of inspiration for us .
and ok , if you break one of these things here , you return it to the carrier .
they 'll give you a new one .
they 'll probably give you three new ones , right ?
i mean , that 's buy three , get one free . that kind of thing .
if you go on the streets of india and china , you see this kind of stuff .
and this is where they take the stuff that breaks , and they fix it , and they put it back into circulation .
this is from a workbench in jilin city , in china , and you can see people taking down a phone and putting it back together .
they reverse-engineer manuals .
this is a kind of hacker 's manual , and it 's written in chinese and english .
they also write them in hindi .
you can subscribe to these .
there are training institutes where they 're churning out people for fixing these things as well .
but what i like about this is , it boils down to someone on the street with a small , flat surface , a screwdriver , a toothbrush for cleaning the contact heads - because they often get dust on the contact heads - and knowledge .
and it 's all about the social network of the knowledge , floating around .
and i like this because it challenges the way that we design stuff , and build stuff , and potentially distribute stuff .
it challenges the norms .
ok , for me the street just raises so many different questions .
like , this is viagra that i bought from a backstreet sex shop in china .
and china is a country where you get a lot of fakes .
and i know what you 're asking - did i test it ?
i 'm not going to answer that , ok .
but i look at something like this , and i consider the implications of trust and confidence in the purchase process .
and we look at this and we think , well , how does that apply , for example , for the design of - the lessons from this - apply to the design of online services , future services in these markets ?
this is a pair of underpants from - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - from tibet .
and i look at something like this , and honestly , you know , why would someone design underpants with a pocket , right ?
and i look at something like this and it makes me question , if we were to take all the functionality in things like this , and redistribute them around the body in some kind of personal area network , how would we prioritize where to put stuff ?
and yes , this is quite trivial , but actually the lessons from this can apply to that kind of personal area networks .
and what you see here is a couple of phone numbers written above the shack in rural uganda .
this does n't have house numbers . this has phone numbers .
so what does it mean when people 's identity is mobile ?
when those extra three billion people 's identity is mobile , it is n't fixed ?
your notion of identity is out-of-date already , ok , for those extra three billion people .
this is how it 's shifting .
and then i go to this picture here , which is the one that i started with .
and this is from delhi .
it 's from a study we did into illiteracy , and it 's a guy in a teashop .
you can see the chai being poured in the background .
and he 's a , you know , incredibly poor teashop worker , on the lowest rungs in the society .
and he , somehow , has the appreciation of the values of livestrong .
and it 's not necessarily the same values , but some kind of values of livestrong , to actually go out and purchase them , and actually display them .
for me , this kind of personifies this connected world , where everything is intertwined , and the dots are - it 's all about the dots joining together .
ok , the title of this presentation is " connections and consequences , " and it 's really a kind of summary of five years of trying to figure out what it 's going to be like when everyone on the planet has the ability to transcend space and time in a personal and convenient manner , right ?
when everyone 's connected .
and there are four things .
so , the first thing is the immediacy of ideas , the speed at which ideas go around .
and i know ted is about big ideas , but actually , the benchmark for a big idea is changing .
if you want a big idea , you need to embrace everyone on the planet , that 's the first thing .
the second thing is the immediacy of objects .
and what i mean by that is , as these become smaller , as the functionality that you can access through this becomes greater - things like banking , identity - these things quite simply move very quickly around the world .
and so the speed of the adoption of things is just going to become that much more rapid , in a way that we just totally can not conceive , when you get it to 6.3 billion and the growth in the world 's population .
the next thing is that , however we design this stuff - carefully design this stuff - the street will take it , and will figure out ways to innovate , as long as it meets base needs - the ability to transcend space and time , for example .
and it will innovate in ways that we can not anticipate .
in ways that , despite our resources , they can do it better than us .
that 's my feeling .
and if we 're smart , we 'll look at this stuff that 's going on , and we 'll figure out a way to enable it to inform and infuse both what we design and how we design .
and the last thing is that - actually , the direction of the conversation .
with another three billion people connected , they want to be part of the conversation .
and i think our relevance and ted 's relevance is really about embracing that and learning how to listen , essentially .
and we need to learn how to listen .
so thank you very , very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i write about food . i write about cooking .
i take it quite seriously , but i 'm here to talk about something that 's become very important to me in the last year or two .
it is about food , but it 's not about cooking , per se .
i 'm going to start with this picture of a beautiful cow .
i 'm not a vegetarian - this is the old nixon line , right ?
but i still think that this - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - may be this year 's version of this .
now , that is only a little bit hyperbolic .
and why do i say it ?
because only once before has the fate of individual people and the fate of all of humanity been so intertwined .
there was the bomb , and there 's now .
and where we go from here is going to determine not only the quality and the length of our individual lives , but whether , if we could see the earth a century from now , we 'd recognize it .
it 's a holocaust of a different kind , and hiding under our desks is n't going to help .
start with the notion that global warming is not only real , but dangerous .
since every scientist in the world now believes this , and even president bush has seen the light , or pretends to , we can take this is a given .
then hear this , please .
after energy production , livestock is the second-highest contributor to atmosphere-altering gases .
nearly one-fifth of all greenhouse gas is generated by livestock production - more than transportation .
now , you can make all the jokes you want about cow farts , but methane is 20 times more poisonous than co2 , and it 's not just methane .
livestock is also one of the biggest culprits in land degradation , air and water pollution , water shortages and loss of biodiversity .
there 's more .
like half the antibiotics in this country are not administered to people , but to animals .
but lists like this become kind of numbing , so let me just say this : if you 're a progressive , if you 're driving a prius , or you 're shopping green , or you 're looking for organic , you should probably be a semi-vegetarian .
now , i 'm no more anti-cattle than i am anti-atom , but it 's all in the way we use these things .
there 's another piece of the puzzle , which ann cooper talked about beautifully yesterday , and one you already know .
there 's no question , none , that so-called lifestyle diseases - diabetes , heart disease , stroke , some cancers - are diseases that are far more prevalent here than anywhere in the rest of the world .
and that 's the direct result of eating a western diet .
our demand for meat , dairy and refined carbohydrates - the world consumes one billion cans or bottles of coke a day - our demand for these things , not our need , our want , drives us to consume way more calories than are good for us .
and those calories are in foods that cause , not prevent , disease .
now global warming was unforeseen .
we did n't know that pollution did more than cause bad visibility .
maybe a few lung diseases here and there , but , you know , that 's not such a big deal .
the current health crisis , however , is a little more the work of the evil empire .
we were told , we were assured , that the more meat and dairy and poultry we ate , the healthier we 'd be .
no . overconsumption of animals , and of course , junk food , is the problem , along with our paltry consumption of plants .
now , there 's no time to get into the benefits of eating plants here , but the evidence is that plants - and i want to make this clear - it 's not the ingredients in plants , it 's the plants .
it 's not the beta-carotene , it 's the carrot .
the evidence is very clear that plants promote health .
this evidence is overwhelming at this point .
you eat more plants , you eat less other stuff , you live longer .
not bad .
but back to animals and junk food .
what do they have in common ?
one : we do n't need either of them for health .
we do n't need animal products , and we certainly do n't need white bread or coke .
two : both have been marketed heavily , creating unnatural demand .
we 're not born craving whoppers or skittles .
three : their production has been supported by government agencies at the expense of a more health- and earth-friendly diet .
now , let 's imagine a parallel .
let 's pretend that our government supported an oil-based economy , while discouraging more sustainable forms of energy , knowing all the while that the result would be pollution , war and rising costs .
incredible , is n't it ?
yet they do that .
and they do this here . it 's the same deal .
the sad thing is , when it comes to diet , is that even when well-intentioned feds try to do right by us , they fail .
either they 're outvoted by puppets of agribusiness , or they are puppets of agribusiness .
so , when the usda finally acknowledged that it was plants , rather than animals , that made people healthy , they encouraged us , via their overly simplistic food pyramid , to eat five servings of fruits and vegetables a day , along with more carbs .
what they did n't tell us is that some carbs are better than others , and that plants and whole grains should be supplanting eating junk food .
but industry lobbyists would never let that happen .
and guess what ?
half the people who developed the food pyramid have ties to agribusiness .
so , instead of substituting plants for animals , our swollen appetites simply became larger , and the most dangerous aspects of them remained unchanged .
so-called low-fat diets , so-called low-carb diets - these are not solutions .
but with lots of intelligent people focusing on whether food is organic or local , or whether we 're being nice to animals , the most important issues just are n't being addressed .
now , do n't get me wrong .
i like animals , and i do n't think it 's just fine to industrialize their production and to churn them out like they were wrenches .
but there 's no way to treat animals well , when you 're killing 10 billion of them a year .
that 's our number . 10 billion .
if you strung all of them - chickens , cows , pigs and lambs - to the moon , they 'd go there and back five times , there and back .
now , my math 's a little shaky , but this is pretty good , and it depends whether a pig is four feet long or five feet long , but you get the idea .
that 's just the united states .
and with our hyper-consumption of those animals producing greenhouse gases and heart disease , kindness might just be a bit of a red herring .
let 's get the numbers of the animals we 're killing for eating down , and then we 'll worry about being nice to the ones that are left .
another red herring might be exemplified by the word " locavore , " which was just named word of the year by the new oxford american dictionary .
seriously .
and locavore , for those of you who do n't know , is someone who eats only locally grown food - which is fine if you live in california , but for the rest of us it 's a bit of a sad joke .
between the official story - the food pyramid - and the hip locavore vision , you have two versions of how to improve our eating .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- .
they both get it wrong , though .
the first at least is populist , and the second is elitist .
how we got to this place is the history of food in the united states .
and i 'm going to go through that , at least the last hundred years or so , very quickly right now .
a hundred years ago , guess what ?
everyone was a locavore : even new york had pig farms nearby , and shipping food all over the place was a ridiculous notion .
every family had a cook , usually a mom .
and those moms bought and prepared food .
it was like your romantic vision of europe .
margarine did n't exist .
in fact , when margarine was invented , several states passed laws declaring that it had to be dyed pink , so we 'd all know that it was a fake .
there was no snack food , and until the ' 20s , until clarence birdseye came along , there was no frozen food .
there were no restaurant chains .
there were neighborhood restaurants run by local people , but none of them would think to open another one .
eating ethnic was unheard of unless you were ethnic .
and fancy food was entirely french .
as an aside , those of you who remember dan aykroyd in the 1970s doing julia child imitations can see where he got the idea of stabbing himself from this fabulous slide .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- back in those days , before even julia , back in those days , there was no philosophy of food .
you just ate .
you did n't claim to be anything .
there was no marketing . there were no national brands .
vitamins had not been invented .
there were no health claims , at least not federally sanctioned ones .
fats , carbs , proteins - they were n't bad or good , they were food .
you ate food .
hardly anything contained more than one ingredient , because it was an ingredient .
the cornflake had n't been invented .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the pop-tart , the pringle , cheez whiz , none of that stuff .
goldfish swam .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's hard to imagine . people grew food , and they ate food .
and again , everyone ate local .
in new york , an orange was a common christmas present , because it came all the way from florida .
from the ' 30s on , road systems expanded , trucks took the place of railroads , fresh food began to travel more .
oranges became common in new york .
the south and west became agricultural hubs , and in other parts of the country , suburbs took over farmland .
the effects of this are well known . they are everywhere .
and the death of family farms is part of this puzzle , as is almost everything from the demise of the real community to the challenge of finding a good tomato , even in summer .
eventually , california produced too much food to ship fresh , so it became critical to market canned and frozen foods .
thus arrived convenience .
it was sold to proto-feminist housewives as a way to cut down on housework .
now , i know everybody over the age of , like 45 - their mouths are watering at this point .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- if we had a slide of salisbury steak , even more so , right ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but this may have cut down on housework , but it cut down on the variety of food we ate as well .
many of us grew up never eating a fresh vegetable except the occasional raw carrot or maybe an odd lettuce salad .
i , for one - and i 'm not kidding - did n't eat real spinach or broccoli till i was 19 .
who needed it though ? meat was everywhere .
what could be easier , more filling or healthier for your family than broiling a steak ?
but by then cattle were already raised unnaturally .
rather than spending their lives eating grass , for which their stomachs were designed , they were forced to eat soy and corn .
they have trouble digesting those grains , of course , but that was n't a problem for producers .
new drugs kept them healthy .
well , they kept them alive .
healthy was another story .
thanks to farm subsidies , the fine collaboration between agribusiness and congress , soy , corn and cattle became king .
and chicken soon joined them on the throne .
it was during this period that the cycle of dietary and planetary destruction began , the thing we 're only realizing just now .
listen to this , between 1950 and 2000 , the world 's population doubled .
meat consumption increased five-fold .
now , someone had to eat all that stuff , so we got fast food .
and this took care of the situation resoundingly .
home cooking remained the norm , but its quality was down the tubes .
there were fewer meals with home-cooked breads , desserts and soups , because all of them could be bought at any store .
not that they were any good , but they were there .
most moms cooked like mine : a piece of broiled meat , a quickly made salad with bottled dressing , canned soup , canned fruit salad .
maybe baked or mashed potatoes , or perhaps the stupidest food ever , minute rice .
for dessert , store-bought ice cream or cookies .
my mom is not here , so i can say this now .
this kind of cooking drove me to learn how to cook for myself .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it was n't all bad .
by the ' 70s , forward-thinking people began to recognize the value of local ingredients .
we tended gardens , we became interested in organic food , we knew or we were vegetarians .
we were n't all hippies , either .
some of us were eating in good restaurants and learning how to cook well .
meanwhile , food production had become industrial . industrial .
perhaps because it was being produced rationally , as if it were plastic , food gained magical or poisonous powers , or both .
many people became fat-phobic .
others worshiped broccoli , as if it were god-like .
but mostly they did n't eat broccoli .
instead they were sold on yogurt , yogurt being almost as good as broccoli .
except , in reality , the way the industry sold yogurt was to convert it to something much more akin to ice cream .
similarly , let 's look at a granola bar .
you think that that might be healthy food , but in fact , if you look at the ingredient list , it 's closer in form to a snickers than it is to oatmeal .
sadly , it was at this time that the family dinner was put in a coma , if not actually killed - the beginning of the heyday of value-added food , which contained as many soy and corn products as could be crammed into it .
think of the frozen chicken nugget .
the chicken is fed corn , and then its meat is ground up , and mixed with more corn products to add bulk and binder , and then it 's fried in corn oil .
all you do is nuke it . what could be better ?
and zapped horribly , pathetically .
by the ' 70s , home cooking was in such a sad state that the high fat and spice contents of foods like mcnuggets and hot pockets - and we all have our favorites , actually - made this stuff more appealing than the bland things that people were serving at home .
at the same time , masses of women were entering the workforce , and cooking simply was n't important enough for men to share the burden .
so now , you 've got your pizza nights , you 've got your microwave nights , you 've got your grazing nights , you 've got your fend-for-yourself nights and so on .
leading the way - what 's leading the way ?
meat , junk food , cheese : the very stuff that will kill you .
so , now we clamor for organic food .
that 's good .
and as evidence that things can actually change , you can now find organic food in supermarkets , and even in fast-food outlets .
but organic food is n't the answer either , at least not the way it 's currently defined .
let me pose you a question .
can farm-raised salmon be organic , when its feed has nothing to do with its natural diet , even if the feed itself is supposedly organic , and the fish themselves are packed tightly in pens , swimming in their own filth ?
and if that salmon 's from chile , and it 's killed down there and then flown 5,000 miles , whatever , dumping how much carbon into the atmosphere ?
i do n't know .
packed in styrofoam , of course , before landing somewhere in the united states , and then being trucked a few hundred more miles .
this may be organic in letter , but it 's surely not organic in spirit .
now here is where we all meet .
the locavores , the organivores , the vegetarians , the vegans , the gourmets and those of us who are just plain interested in good food .
even though we 've come to this from different points , we all have to act on our knowledge to change the way that everyone thinks about food .
we need to start acting .
and this is not only an issue of social justice , as ann cooper said - and , of course , she 's completely right - but it 's also one of global survival .
which bring me full circle and points directly to the core issue , the overproduction and overconsumption of meat and junk food .
as i said , 18 percent of greenhouse gases are attributed to livestock production .
how much livestock do you need to produce this ?
70 percent of the agricultural land on earth , 30 percent of the earth 's land surface is directly or indirectly devoted to raising the animals we 'll eat .
and this amount is predicted to double in the next 40 years or so .
and if the numbers coming in from china are anything like what they look like now , it 's not going to be 40 years .
there is no good reason for eating as much meat as we do .
and i say this as a man who has eaten a fair share of corned beef in his life .
the most common argument is that we need nutrients - even though we eat , on average , twice as much protein as even the industry-obsessed usda recommends .
but listen : experts who are serious about disease reduction recommend that adults eat just over half a pound of meat per week .
what do you think we eat per day ? half a pound .
but do n't we need meat to be big and strong ?
is n't meat eating essential to health ?
wo n't a diet heavy in fruit and vegetables turn us into godless , sissy , liberals ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- some of us might think that would be a good thing .
but , no , even if we were all steroid-filled football players , the answer is no .
in fact , there 's no diet on earth that meets basic nutritional needs that wo n't promote growth , and many will make you much healthier than ours does .
we do n't eat animal products for sufficient nutrition , we eat them to have an odd form of malnutrition , and it 's killing us .
to suggest that in the interests of personal and human health americans eat 50 percent less meat - it 's not enough of a cut , but it 's a start .
it would seem absurd , but that 's exactly what should happen , and what progressive people , forward-thinking people should be doing and advocating , along with the corresponding increase in the consumption of plants .
i 've been writing about food more or less omnivorously - one might say indiscriminately - for about 30 years .
during that time , i 've eaten and recommended eating just about everything .
i 'll never stop eating animals , i 'm sure , but i do think that for the benefit of everyone , the time has come to stop raising them industrially and stop eating them thoughtlessly .
ann cooper 's right .
the usda is not our ally here .
we have to take matters into our own hands , not only by advocating for a better diet for everyone - and that 's the hard part - but by improving our own .
and that happens to be quite easy .
less meat , less junk , more plants .
it 's a simple formula : eat food .
eat real food .
we can continue to enjoy our food , and we continue to eat well , and we can eat even better .
we can continue the search for the ingredients we love , and we can continue to spin yarns about our favorite meals .
we 'll reduce not only calories , but our carbon footprint .
we can make food more important , not less , and save ourselves by doing so .
we have to choose that path .
thank you .
for the last 20 years i 've been designing puzzles .
and i 'm here today to give you a little tour , starting from the very first puzzle i designed , through what i 'm doing now .
i 've designed puzzles for books , printed things .
i 'm the puzzle columnist for discover magazine .
i 've been doing that for about 10 years .
i have a monthly puzzle calendar .
i do toys . the bulk of my work is in computer games .
i did puzzles for " bejeweled . "
-lrb- applause -rrb- i did n't invent " bejeweled . " i ca n't take credit for that .
so , very first puzzle , sixth grade , my teacher said , " oh , let 's see , that guy , he likes to make stuff .
i 'll have him cut out letters out of construction paper for the board . "
i thought this was a great assignment .
and so here is what i came up with . i start fiddling with it .
i came up with this letter . this is a letter of the alphabet that 's been folded just once .
the question is , which letter is it if i unfold it ?
one hint : it 's not " l. "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it could be an " l , " of course .
so , what else could it be ?
yeah , a lot of you got it .
oh yeah . so , clever thing .
now , that was my first puzzle . i got hooked .
i created something new , i was very excited because , you know , i 'd made crossword puzzles , but that 's sort of like filling in somebody else 's matrix .
this was something really original . i got hooked .
i read martin gardner 's columns in scientific american .
went on , and eventually decided to devote myself , full time , to that .
now , i should pause and say , what do i mean by puzzle ?
a puzzle is a problem that is fun to solve and has a right answer .
" fun to solve , " as opposed to everyday problems , which , frankly , are not very well-designed puzzles .
you know , they might have a solution .
it might take a long time . nobody wrote down the rules clearly .
who designed this ?
it 's like , you know , life is not a very well-written story so we have to hire writers to make movies .
well , i take everyday problems , and i make puzzles out of them .
and " right answer , " of course there might be more than one right answer ; many puzzles have more than one .
but as opposed to a couple other forms of play , toys and games - by toy i mean , something you play with that does n't have a particular goal .
you can create one out of legos .
you know , you can do anything you want .
or competitive games like chess where , well , you 're not trying to solve ... you can make a chess puzzle , but the goal really is to beat another player .
i consider that puzzles are an art form .
they 're very ancient . it goes back as long as there is written history .
it 's a very small form , like a joke , a poem , a magic trick or a song , very compact form .
at worst , they 're throwaways , they 're for amusement .
but at best they can reach for something more and create a memorable impression .
the progression of my career that you 'll see is looking for creating puzzles that have a memorable impact .
so , one thing i found early on , when i started doing computer games , is that i could create puzzles that will alter your perception .
i 'll show you how . here is a famous one .
so , it 's two profiles in black , or a white vase in the middle .
this is called a figure-ground illusion .
the artist m.c. escher exploited that in some of his wonderful prints .
here we have " day and night . "
here is what i did with figure and ground .
so , here we have " figure " in black .
here we have " figure " in white .
and it 's all part of the same design .
the background to one is the other .
originally i tried to do the words " figure " and " ground . "
but i could n't do that , i realized . i changed the problem .
it 's all " figure . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- a few other things . here is my name .
and that turns into the title of my first book , " inversions . "
these sorts of designs now go by the word " ambigram . "
i 'll show you just a couple others . here we have the numbers one through 10 , the digits zero through nine , actually .
each letter here is one of these digits .
not strictly an ambigram in the conventional sense .
i like pushing on what an ambigram can mean .
here 's the word " mirror . " no , it 's not the same upside-down .
it 's the same this way .
and a marvelous fellow from the media lab who just got appointed head of risd , is john maeda .
and so i did this for him . it 's sort of a visual canon .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and recently in magic magazine i 've done a number of ambigrams on magician 's names .
so here we have penn and teller , same upside-down .
this appears in my puzzle calendar .
okay , let 's go back to the slides .
thank you very much .
now , those are fun to look at .
now how would you do it interactively ?
for a while i was an interface designer .
and so i think a lot about interaction .
well , let 's first of all simplify the vases illusion , make the thing on the right .
now , if you could pick up the black vase , it would look like the figure on top .
if you could pick up the white area , it would look like the figure on the bottom .
well , you ca n't do that physically , but on a computer you can do it . let 's switch over to the p.c.
and here it is , figure-ground .
the goal here is to take the pieces on the left and make them so they look like the shape on the right .
and this follows the rules i just said : any black area that is surrounded by white can be picked up .
but that is also true of any white area .
so , here we got the white area in the middle , and you can pick it up .
i 'll just go one step further .
so , here is - here is a couple pieces . move them together , and now this is an active piece .
you can really get inside somebody 's perception and have them experience something .
it 's like the old maxim of " you can tell somebody something and show them , but if they do it they really learn it . "
here is another thing you can do .
there is a game called rush hour .
this is one of the true masterpieces in puzzle design besides rubik 's cube .
so , here we have a crowded parking lot with cars all over the place .
the goal is to get the red car out . it 's a sliding block puzzle .
it 's made by the company think fun .
it 's done very well . i love this puzzle .
well , let 's play one . here . so , here is a very simple puzzle .
well , that 's too simple , let 's add another piece .
okay , so how would you solve this one ?
well , move the blue one out of the way .
here , let 's make it a little harder . still pretty easy .
now we 'll make it harder , a little harder .
now , this one is a little bit trickier .
you know ? what do you do here ?
the first move is going to be what ?
you 're going to move the blue one up in order to get the lavender one to the right .
and you can make puzzles like this one that are n't solvable at all .
those four are locked in a pinwheel ; you ca n't get them apart .
i wanted to make a sequel .
i did n't come up with the original idea . but this is another way i work as an inventor is to create a sequel .
i came up with this . this is railroad rush hour .
it 's the same basic game except i introduced a new piece , a square piece that can move both horizontally and vertically .
in the other game the cars can only move forward and back .
created a whole bunch of levels for it .
now i 'm making it available to schools .
and it includes exercises that show you not just how to solve these puzzles , but how to extract the principles that will let you solve mathematical puzzles or problems in science , other areas .
so , i 'm really interested in you learning how to make your own puzzles as well as just me creating them .
garry trudeau calls himself an investigative cartoonist .
you know , he does a lot of research before he writes a cartoon .
in discover magazine , i 'm an investigative puzzle maker .
i got interested in gene sequencing .
and i said , " well , how on earth can you come up with a sequence of the base pairs in dna ? "
cut up the dna , you sequence individual pieces , and then you look for overlaps , and you basically match them at the edges . and i said , " this is kind of like a jigsaw puzzle , except the pieces overlap . "
so , here is what i created for discover magazine .
and it has to be solvable in a magazine .
you know , you ca n't cut out the pieces and move them around .
so , here is the nine pieces . and you 're supposed to put them into this grid .
and you have to choose pieces that overlap on the edge .
there is only one solution . it 's not that hard .
but it takes some persistence .
and when you 're done , it makes this design , which , if you squint , is the word " helix . "
so , that 's the form of the puzzle coming out of the content , rather than the other way around .
here is a couple more . here is a physics-based puzzle .
which way will these fall ?
one of these weighs 50 pounds , 30 pounds and 10 pounds .
and depending on which one weighs which amount , they 'll fall different directions .
and here is a puzzle based on color mixing .
i separated this image into cyan , magenta , yellow , black , the basic printing colors , and then mixed up the separations , and you get these peculiar pictures .
which separations were mixed up to make those pictures ?
gets you thinking about color .
finally , what i 'm doing now . so , shufflebrain.com , website you can go visit , i joined up with my wife , amy-jo kim .
she could easily be up here giving a talk about her work .
so , we 're making smart games for social media .
i 'll explain what that means . we 're looking at three trends .
this is what 's going on in the games industry right now .
first of all , you know , for a long time computer games meant things like " doom , " where you 're going around shooting things , very violent games , very fast , aimed at teenage boys . right ? that 's who plays computer games .
well , guess what ? that 's changing .
" bejeweled " is a big hit . it was the game that really broke open what 's called casual games .
and the main players are over 35 , and are female .
then recently " rock band " has been a big hit .
and it 's a game you play with other people .
it 's very physical . it looks nothing like a traditional game .
this is what 's becoming the dominant form of electronic gaming .
now , within that there is some interesting things happening .
there is also a trend towards games that are good for you .
why ? well , we aging boomers , baby boomers , we 're eating our healthy food , we 're exercising . what about our minds ?
oh no , our parents are getting alzheimer 's . we better do something .
turns out doing crossword puzzles can stave off some of the effects of alzheimer 's .
so , we got games like " brain age " coming out for the nintendo ds , huge hit .
a lot of people do sudoku . in fact some doctors prescribe it .
and then there is social media , and what 's happening on the internet .
everybody now considers themselves a creator , and not just a viewer .
and what does this add up to ?
here is what we see coming .
it 's games that fit into a healthy lifestyle .
they 're part of your life . they 're not necessarily a separate thing .
and they are both , something that is good for you , and they 're fun .
i 'm a puzzle guy . my wife is an expert in social media .
and we decided to combine our skills .
our first game is called " photo grab . " the game takes about a minute and 20 seconds .
this is your first time playing my game . okay .
let 's see how well we can do . there are three images .
and we have 24 seconds each .
where is that ?
i 'll play as fast as i can .
but if you can see it , shout out the answer .
you get more - down , okay , yeah where is that ?
oh , yeah . there , okay . j-o and - i guess that 's that part . we got the bow . that bow helps .
that 's his hair . you get a lot of figure-ground problems .
yeah , that one is easy . okay . so , ahhh ! okay on to the next one .
okay , so that 's the lens .
anybody ?
looks like a black shape . so , where is that ?
that 's the corner of the whole thing .
yeah , i 've played this image before , but even when i make up my own puzzles - and you can put your own images in here .
and we have people all over the world doing that now .
there we are . visit shufflebrain.com if you want to try it yourself . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this is the exact moment that i started creating something called tinkering school .
tinkering school is a place where kids can pick up sticks and hammers and other dangerous objects , and be trusted .
trusted not to hurt themselves , and trusted not to hurt others .
tinkering school does n't follow a set curriculum , and there are no tests .
we 're not trying to teach anybody any specific thing .
when the kids arrive they 're confronted with lots of stuff : wood and nails and rope and wheels , and lots of tools , real tools .
it 's a six-day immersive experience for the kids .
and within that context , we can offer the kids time - something that seems in short supply in their over-scheduled lives .
our goal is to ensure that they leave with a better sense of how to make things than when they arrived , and the deep internal realization that you can figure things out by fooling around .
nothing ever turns out as planned ... ever .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and the kids soon learn that all projects go awry - -lrb- laughter -rrb- and become at ease with the idea that every step in a project is a step closer to sweet success , or gleeful calamity .
we start from doodles and sketches .
and sometimes we make real plans .
and sometimes we just start building .
building is at the heart of the experience : hands on , deeply immersed and fully committed to the problem at hand .
robin and i , acting as collaborators , keep the landscape of the projects tilted towards completion .
success is in the doing , and failures are celebrated and analyzed .
problems become puzzles and obstacles disappear .
when faced with particularly difficult setbacks or complexities , a really interesting behavior emerges : decoration .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- decoration of the unfinished project is a kind of conceptual incubation .
from these interludes come deep insights and amazing new approaches to solving the problems that had them frustrated just moments before .
all materials are available for use .
even those mundane , hateful , plastic grocery bags can become a bridge stronger than anyone imagined .
and the things that they build amaze even themselves .
video : three , two , one , go !
gever tulley : a rollercoaster built by seven-year-olds .
video : yay !
-lrb- applause -rrb- gt : thank you . it 's been a great pleasure .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i do n't know what the hell i 'm doing here .
i was born in a scots presbyterian ghetto in canada , and dropped out of high school . i do n't own a cell phone , and i paint on paper using gouache , which has n't changed in 600 years .
but about three years ago i had an art show in new york , and i titled it " serious nonsense . "
so i think i 'm actually the first one here - i lead .
i called it " serious nonsense " because on the serious side , i use a technique of painstaking realism of editorial illustration from when i was a kid . i copied it and i never unlearned it - it 's the only style i know . and it 's very kind of staid and formal .
and meanwhile , i use nonsense , as you can see .
this is a scottish castle where people are playing golf indoors , and the trick was to bang the golf ball off of suits of armor - which you ca n't see there .
this was one of a series called " zany afternoons , " which became a book .
this is a home-built rocket-propelled car . that 's a 1953 henry j - i 'm a bug for authenticity - in a quiet neighborhood in toledo .
this is my submission for the l.a. museum of film .
you can probably tell frank gehry and i come from the same town .
my work is so personal and so strange that i have to invent my own lexicon for it .
and i work a lot in what i call " retrofuturism , " which is looking back to see how yesterday viewed tomorrow .
and they 're always wrong , always hilariously , optimistically wrong .
and the peak time for that was the 30s , because the depression was so dismal that anything to get away from the present into the future ...
and technology was going to carry us along .
this is popular workbench . popular science magazines in those days - i had a huge collection of them from the ' 30s - all they are is just poor people being asked to make sunglasses out of wire coat hangers and everything improvised and dreaming about these wonderful giant radio robots playing ice hockey at 300 miles an hour - it 's all going to happen , it 's all going to be wonderful .
automotive retrofuturism is one of my specialties .
i was both an automobile illustrator and an advertising automobile copywriter , so i have a lot of revenge to take on the subject .
detroit has always been halfway into the future - the advertising half .
this is the ' 58 bulgemobile : so new , they make tomorrow look like yesterday .
this is a chain gang of guys admiring the car .
that 's from a whole catalog - it 's 18 pages or so - ran back in the days of the lampoon , where i cut my teeth .
techno-archaeology is digging back and finding past miracles that never happened - for good reason , usually .
the zeppelin - this was from a brochure about the zeppelin based , obviously , on the hindenburg .
but the zeppelin was the biggest thing that ever moved made by man .
and it carried 56 people at the speed of a buick at an altitude you could hear dogs bark , and it cost twice as much as a first-class cabin on the normandie to fly it .
so the hindenburg was n't , you know , it was inevitable it was going to go .
this is auto-gyro jousting in malibu in the 30s .
the auto-gyro could n't wait for the invention of the helicopter , but it should have - it was n't a big success .
it 's the only spanish innovation , technologically , of the 20th century , by the way .
you needed to know that .
the flying car which never got off the ground - it was a post-war dream .
my old man used to tell me we were going to get a flying car .
this is pitched into the future from 1946 , looking at the day all american families have them .
" there 's moscow , shirley . hope they speak esperanto ! "
faux-nostalgia , which i 'm sort of - not , say , famous for , but i work an awful lot in it .
it 's the achingly sentimental yearning for times that never happened .
somebody once said that nostalgia is the one utterly most useless human emotion - so i think that 's a case for serious play .
this is emblematic of it - this is wing dining , recalling those balmy summer days somewhere over france in the 20s , dining on the wing of a plane . you ca n't see it very well here , but that 's hemingway reading some pages from his new novel to fitzgerald and ford madox ford until the slipstream blows him away .
this is tank polo in the south hamptons .
the brainless rich are more fun to make fun of than anybody . i do a lot of that .
and authenticity is a major part of my serious nonsense .
i think it adds a huge amount .
those , for example , are mark iv british tanks from 1916 .
they had two machine guns and a cannon , and they had 90 horsepower ricardo engines .
they went five miles an hour and inside it was 105 degrees in the pitch dark .
and they had a canary hung inside the thing to make sure the germans were n't going to use gas .
happy little story , is n't it ?
this is motor ritz towers in manhattan in the 30s , where you drove up to your front door , if you had the guts .
anybody who was anybody had an apartment there .
i managed to stick in both the zeppelin and an ocean liner out of sheer enthusiasm .
and i love cigars - there 's a cigar billboard down there .
and faux-nostalgia works even in serious subjects like war .
this is those wonderful days of the battle of britain in 1940 , when a messerschmitt me109 bursts into the house of commons and buzzes around , just to piss off churchill , who 's down there somewhere .
it 's a fond memory of times past .
hyperbolic overkill is a way of taking exaggeration to the absolute ultimate limit , just for the fun of it . this was a piece i did - a brochure again - " rms tyrannic : the biggest thing in all the world . "
the copy , which you ca n't see because it goes on and on for several pages , says that steerage passengers ca n't get their to bunks before the voyage is over , and it 's so safe it carries no insurance .
it 's obviously modeled on the titanic .
but it 's not a cri de coeur about man 's hubris in the face of the elements .
it 's just a sick , silly joke .
shamelessly cheap is something , i think - this will wake you up .
it has no meaning , just - desoto discovers the mississippi , and it 's a desoto discovering the mississippi .
i did that as a quick back page - i had like four hours to do a back page for an issue of the lampoon , and i did that , and i thought , " well , i 'm ashamed . i hope nobody knows it . "
people wrote in for reprints of that thing .
urban absurdism - that 's what the new yorker really calls for .
i try to make life in new york look even weirder than it is with those covers .
i 've done about 40 of them , and i 'd say 30 of them are based on that concept .
i was driving down 7th avenue one night at 3 a.m. , and this steam pouring out of the street , and i thought , " what causes that ? " and that - who 's to say ?
the temple of dendur at the metropolitan in new york - it 's a very somber place .
i thought i could jazz it up a bit , have a little fun with it .
this is a very un-pc cover . not in new york .
i could n't resist , and i got a nasty email from some environmental group saying , " this is too serious and solemn to make fun of . you should be ashamed , please apologize on our website . "
have n't got around to it yet but - i may .
this is the word side of my brain .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i love the word " eurotrash . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's all the eurotrash coming through jfk customs .
this was the new york bike messenger meeting the tour de france .
if you live in new york , you know how the bike messengers move .
except that he 's carrying a tube for blueprints and stuff - they all do - and a lot of people thought that meant it was a terrorist about to shoot rockets at the tour de france - sign of our times , i guess .
this is the only fashion cover i 've ever done .
it 's the little old lady that lives in a shoe , and then this thing - the title of that was , " there goes the neighborhood . "
i do n't know a hell of a lot about fashion - i was told to do what they call a mary jane , and then i got into this terrible fight between the art director and the editor saying : " put a strap on it " - " no , do n't put a strap on it " - " put a strap on it - " do n't put a strap on it " - because it obscures the logo and looks terrible and it 's bad and - i finally chickened out and did it for the sake of the authenticity of the shoe .
this is a tiny joke - e-zr pass . one letter makes an idea .
this is a big joke .
this is the audition for " king kong . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- people always ask me , where do you get your ideas , how do your ideas come ?
truth about that one is i had a horrible red wine hangover , in the middle of the night , this came to me like a xerox - all i had to do was write it down .
it was perfectly clear . i did n't do any thinking about it .
and then when it ran , a lovely lady , an old lady named mrs. edgar rosenberg - if you know that name - called me and said she loved the cover , it was so sweet .
her former name was fay wray , and so that was - i did n't have the wit to say , " take the painting . "
finally , this was a three-page cover , never done before , and i do n't think it will ever be done again - successive pages in the front of the magazine .
it 's the ascent of man using an escalator , and it 's in three parts .
you ca n't see it all together , unfortunately , but if you look at it enough , you can sort of start to see how it actually starts to move .
-lrb- applause -rrb- pretty elegant . nothing like a crash to end a joke . that completes my oeuvre .
i would just like to add a crass commercial - i have a kids ' book coming out in the fall called " marvel sandwiches , " a compendium of all the serious play that ever was , and it 's going to be available in fine bookstores , crummy bookstores , tables on the street in october .
so thank you very much .
so magic is a very introverted field .
while scientists regularly publish their latest research , we magicians do not like to share our methods and secrets .
that 's true even amongst peers .
but if you look at creative practice as a form of research , or art as a form of r & d for humanity , then how could a cyber illusionist like myself share his research ?
now my own speciality is combining digital technology and magic .
and about three years ago , i started an exercise in openness and inclusiveness by reaching out into the open-source software community to create new digital tools for magic - tools that could eventually be shared with other artists to start them off further on in the process and to get them to the poetry faster .
today , i 'd like to show you something which came out of these collaborations .
it 's an augmented reality projection tracking and mapping system , or a digital storytelling tool .
could we bring down the lights please ? thank you .
so let 's give this a try .
and i 'm going to use it to give you my take on the stuff of life .
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- terribly sorry . i forgot the floor .
wake up .
hey .
come on .
-lrb- music -rrb- please .
-lrb- music -rrb- come on .
ah , sorry about that .
forgot this .
-lrb- music -rrb- give it another try .
okay .
he figured out the system .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- uh oh .
-lrb- music -rrb- all right . let 's try this .
come on .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- hey .
-lrb- music -rrb- you heard her , go ahead .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- bye-bye .
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- music -rrb- ♫ slide into the shimmering surface ♫ ♫ between two worlds . ♫ ♫ standing at the center of time ♫ ♫ as it uncurls . ♫ ♫ cutting through the veil of illusion . ♫ ♫ moving beyond past conclusions . ♫ ♫ wondering if all my doubt and confusion will clear . ♫ ♫ if i could be anywhere , ♫ ♫ if i could be anywhere , ♫ ♫ if i could be anywhere right now , ♫ ♫ i would want to be here . ♫ ♫ searching for the future ♫ ♫ among the things we 're throwing away . ♫ ♫ trying to see the world ♫
♫ through the junk we produce everyday . ♫ ♫ they say nothing lasts forever , ♫ ♫ but all the plastic ever made is still here . ♫ ♫ and no amount of closing our eyes ♫ ♫ will make it disappear . ♫ ♫ if i could be anywhere , ♫ ♫ if i could be anywhere , ♫ ♫ if i could be anywhere in history , ♫ ♫ i would want to be here . ♫ ♫ the romans , the spanish ♫ ♫ the british , the dutch , ♫ ♫ american exceptionalism , so out of touch . ♫ ♫ the folly of empire repeating its course , ♫
♫ imposing its will ♫ ♫ and ruling by force ♫ ♫ on and on through time . ♫ ♫ but the world ca n't take it very much longer . ♫ ♫ we 're not going to make it ♫ ♫ unless we 're smarter and stronger . ♫ ♫ the world is going to shake itself free of our greed ♫ ♫ somehow . ♫ ♫ if i could be anywhere , ♫ ♫ if i could be anywhere in time , ♫ ♫ if i could be anywhere and change things , ♫ ♫ it would have to be now . ♫ ♫ they say nothing last forever , ♫
♫ but all the plastic ever made is still here . ♫ ♫ and no amount of closing our eyes ♫ ♫ will make it disappear . ♫ ♫ and the world ca n't take it ♫ ♫ very much longer . ♫ ♫ we 're not going to make it ♫ ♫ unless we 're smarter and stronger . ♫ ♫ the world 's gonna shake itself free of our greed ♫ ♫ somehow . ♫ ♫ and the world ca n't take it , that you can see . ♫ ♫ if the oceans do n't make it , neither will we . ♫ ♫ the world 's gonna shake itself all the way free ♫
♫ somehow . ♫ ♫ if i could be anywhere , ♫ ♫ if i could be anywhere in time , ♫ ♫ if i could be anywhere and change the outcome , ♫ ♫ it would have to be now . ♫ -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this is where i live . i live in kenya , at the south parts of the nairobi national park .
those are my dad 's cows at the back , and behind the cows , that 's the nairobi national park .
nairobi national park is not fenced in the south widely , which means wild animals like zebras migrate out of the park freely .
so predators like lions follow them , and this is what they do .
they kill our livestock .
this is one of the cows which was killed at night , and i just woke up in the morning and i found it dead , and i felt so bad , because it was the only bull we had .
my community , the maasai , we believe that we came from heaven with all our animals and all the land for herding them , and that 's why we value them so much .
so i grew up hating lions so much .
the morans are the warriors who protect our community and the livestock , and they 're also upset about this problem .
so they kill the lions .
it 's one of the six lions which were killed in nairobi .
and i think this is why the nairobi national park lions are few .
so a boy , from six to nine years old , in my community is responsible for his dad 's cows , and that 's the same thing which happened to me .
so i had to find a way of solving this problem .
and the first idea i got was to use fire , because i thought lions were scared of fire .
but i came to realize that that did n't really help , because it was even helping the lions to see through the cowshed .
so i did n't give up . i continued .
and a second idea i got was to use a scarecrow .
i was trying to trick the lions -lsb- into thinking -rsb- that i was standing near the cowshed .
but lions are very clever . -lrb- laughter -rrb- they will come the first day and they see the scarecrow , and they go back , but the second day , they 'll come and they say , this thing is not moving here , it 's always here . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so he jumps in and kills the animals .
so one night , i was walking around the cowshed with a torch , and that day , the lions did n't come .
and i discovered that lions are afraid of a moving light .
so i had an idea .
since i was a small boy , i used to work in my room for the whole day , and i even took apart my mom 's new radio , and that day she almost killed me , but i learned a lot about electronics . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so i got an old car battery , an indicator box . it 's a small device found in a motorcycle , and it helps motorists when they want to turn right or left . it blinks .
and i got a switch where i can switch on the lights , on and off .
and that 's a small torch from a broken flashlight .
so i set up everything .
as you can see , the solar panel charges the battery , and the battery supplies the power to the small indicator box . i call it a transformer .
and the indicator box makes the lights flash .
as you can see , the bulbs face outside , because that 's where the lions come from .
and that 's how it looks to lions when they come at night .
the lights flash and trick the lions into thinking i was walking around the cowshed , but i was sleeping in my bed .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- thanks .
so i set it up in my home two years ago , and since then , we have never experienced any problem with lions .
and my neighboring homes heard about this idea .
one of them was this grandmother .
she had a lot of her animals being killed by lions , and she asked me if i could put the lights for her .
and i said , " yes . "
so i put the lights . you can see at the back , those are the lion lights .
since now , i 've set up seven homes around my community , and they 're really working .
and my idea is also being used now all over kenya for scaring other predators like hyenas , leopards , and it 's also being used to scare elephants away from people 's farms .
because of this invention , i was lucky to get a scholarship in one of the best schools in kenya , brookhouse international school , and i 'm really excited about this .
my new school now is coming in and helping by fundraising and creating an awareness .
i even took my friends back to my community , and we 're installing the lights to the homes which do n't have -lsb- any -rsb- , and i 'm teaching them how to put them .
so one year ago , i was just a boy in the savanna grassland herding my father 's cows , and i used to see planes flying over , and i told myself that one day , i 'll be there inside .
and here i am today .
i got a chance to come by plane for my first time for ted .
so my big dream is to become an aircraft engineer and pilot when i grow up .
i used to hate lions , but now because my invention is saving my father 's cows and the lions , we are able to stay with the lions without any conflict .
ashê olên . it means in my language , thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : you have no idea how exciting it is to hear a story like yours .
so you got this scholarship.richard turere : yep .
ca : you 're working on other electrical inventions .
what 's the next one on your list ?
rt : my next invention is , i want to make an electric fence.ca : electric fence ?
rt : but i know electric fences are already invented , but i want to make mine .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ca : you already tried it once , right , and you - rt : i tried it before , but i stopped because it gave me a shock . -lrb- laughter -rrb- ca : in the trenches . richard turere , you are something else .
we 're going to cheer you on every step of the way , my friend .
thank you so much.rt : thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- i still remember the day in school when our teacher told us that the world population had become three billion people , and that was in 1960 .
i 'm going to talk now about how world population has changed from that year and into the future , but i will not use digital technology , as i 've done during my first five tedtalks .
instead , i have progressed , and i am , today , launching a brand new analog teaching technology that i picked up from ikea : this box .
this box contains one billion people .
and our teacher told us that the industrialized world , 1960 , had one billion people .
in the developing world , she said , they had two billion people .
and they lived away then .
there was a big gap between the one billion in the industrialized world and the two billion in the developing world .
in the industrialized world , people were healthy , educated , rich , and they had small families .
and their aspiration was to buy a car .
and in 1960 , all swedes were saving to try to buy a volvo like this .
this was the economic level at which sweden was .
but in contrast to this , in the developing world , far away , was to have food for the day .
they were saving to be able to buy a pair of shoes .
there was an enormous gap in the world when i grew up .
and this gap between the west and the rest has created a mindset of the world , which we still use linguistically when we talk about " the west " and " the developing world . "
but the world has changed , and it 's overdue to upgrade that mindset and that taxonomy of the world , and to understand it .
and that 's what i 'm going to show you , because since 1960 what has happened in the world up to 2010 is that a staggering four billion people just look how many .
the world population has doubled since i went to school .
and of course , there 's been economic growth in the west .
a lot of companies have happened to grow the economy , so the western population moved over to here .
and now their aspiration is not only to have a car .
now they want to have a holiday on a very remote destination and they want to fly .
so this is where they are today .
and the most successful of the developing countries , they have moved on , you know , and they have become emerging economies , we call them .
they are now buying cars .
and what happened a month ago was that the chinese company , geely , they acquired the volvo company , and then finally the swedes understood that something big had happened in the world .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so there they are .
and the tragedy is that the two billion over here that is struggling for food and shoes , they are still almost as poor as they were 50 years ago .
the new thing is that we have the biggest pile of billions , the three billions here , which are also becoming emerging economies , because they are quite healthy , relatively well-educated , and they already also have two to three children per woman , as those -lsb- richer also -rsb- have .
and their aspiration now is , of course , to buy a bicycle , and then later on they would like to have a motorbike also .
but this is the world we have today , no longer any gap .
but the distance from the poorest here , the very poorest , to the very richest over here is wider than ever .
but there is a continuous world from walking , biking , driving , flying - there are people on all levels , and most people tend to be somewhere in the middle .
this is the new world we have today in 2010 .
and what will happen in the future ?
well , i 'm going to project into 2050 .
i was in shanghai recently , and i listened to what 's happening in china , and it 's pretty sure that they will catch up , just as japan did .
all the projections -lsb- say that -rsb- this one -lsb- billion -rsb- will -lsb- only -rsb- grow with one to two or three percent .
-lsb- but this second -rsb- grows with seven , eight percent , and then they will end up here .
they will start flying .
and these lower or middle income countries , the emerging income countries , they will also forge forwards economically .
and if , but only if , we invest in the right green technology - so that we can avoid severe climate change , and energy can still be relatively cheap - then they will move all the way up here .
and they will start to buy electric cars .
this is what we will find there .
so what about the poorest two billion ?
what about the poorest two billion here ?
will they move on ?
well , here population -lsb- growth -rsb- comes in because there -lsb- among emerging economies -rsb- we already have two to three children per woman , family planning is widely used , and population growth is coming to an end .
here -lsb- among the poorest -rsb- , population is growing .
so these -lsb- poorest -rsb- two billion will , in the next decades , increase to three billion , and they will thereafter increase to four billion .
there is nothing - but a nuclear war of a kind we 've never seen - that can stop this -lsb- growth -rsb- from happening .
because we already have this -lsb- growth -rsb- in process .
but if , and only if , -lsb- the poorest -rsb- get out of poverty , they get education , they get improved child survival , they can buy a bicycle and a cell phone and come -lsb- to live -rsb- here , then population growth will stop in 2050 .
we can not have people on this level looking for food and shoes because then we get continued population growth .
and let me show you why by converting back to the old-time digital technology .
here i have on the screen my country bubbles .
every bubble is a country . the size is population .
the colors show the continent .
the yellow on there is the americas ; dark blue is africa ; brown is europe ; green is the middle east and this light blue is south asia .
that 's india and this is china . size is population .
here i have children per woman : two children , four children , six children , eight children - big families , small families .
the year is 1960 .
and down here , child survival , the percentage of children surviving childhood up to starting school : 60 percent , 70 percent , 80 percent , 90 , and almost 100 percent , as we have today in the wealthiest and healthiest countries .
but look , this is the world my teacher talked about in 1960 : one billion western world here - high child-survival , small families - and all the rest , the rainbow of developing countries , with very large families and poor child survival .
what has happened ? i start the world . here we go .
can you see , as the years pass by , child survival is increasing ?
they get soap , hygiene , education , vaccination , penicillin and then family planning . family size is decreasing .
-lsb- when -rsb- they get up to 90-percent child survival , then families decrease , and most of the arab countries in the middle east is falling down there -lsb- to small families -rsb- .
look , bangladesh catching up with india .
the whole emerging world joins the western world with good child survival and small family size , but we still have the poorest billion .
can you see the poorest billion , those -lsb- two -rsb- boxes i had over here ?
they are still up here .
and they still have a child survival of only 70 to 80 percent , meaning that if you have six children born , to the next generation .
and the population will double in one generation .
so the only way of really getting world population -lsb- growth -rsb- to stop is to continue to improve child survival to 90 percent .
that 's why investments by gates foundation , unicef and aid organizations , together with national government in the poorest countries , are so good ; because they are actually helping us to reach a sustainable population size of the world .
we can stop at nine billion if we do the right things .
child survival is the new green .
it 's only by child survival that we will stop population growth .
and will it happen ?
well , i 'm not an optimist , neither am i a pessimist .
i 'm a very serious " possibilist . "
it 's a new category where we take emotion apart , and we just work analytically with the world .
it can be done .
we can have a much more just world .
with green technology and with investments to alleviate poverty , and global governance , the world can become like this .
and look at the position of the old west .
remember when this blue box was all alone , leading the world , living its own life .
this will not happen -lsb- again -rsb- .
the role of the old west in the new world is to become the foundation of the modern world - nothing more , nothing less .
but it 's a very important role .
do it well and get used to it .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- ladies and gentlemen , gather around .
i would love to share with you a story .
once upon a time in 19th century germany , there was the book .
now during this time , the book was the king of storytelling .
it was venerable .
it was ubiquitous .
but it was a little bit boring .
because in its 400 years of existence , storytellers never evolved the book as a storytelling device .
but then one author arrived , and he changed the game forever .
-lrb- music -rrb- his name was lothar , lothar meggendorfer .
lothar meggendorfer put his foot down , and he said , " genug ist genug ! "
he grabbed his pen , he snatched his scissors .
this man refused to fold to the conventions of normalcy and just decided to fold .
history would know lothar meggendorfer as - who else ? - the world 's first true inventor of the children 's pop-up book .
-lrb- music -rrb- for this delight and for this wonder , people rejoiced .
-lrb- cheering -rrb- they were happy because the story survived , and that the world would keep on spinning .
lothar meggendorfer was n't the first to evolve the way a story was told , and he certainly was n't the last .
whether storytellers realized it or not , they were channeling meggendorfer 's spirit when they moved opera to vaudville , radio news to radio theater , film to film in motion to film in sound , color , 3d , on vhs and on dvd .
there seemed to be no cure for this meggendorferitis .
and things got a lot more fun when the internet came around .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- because , not only could people broadcast their stories throughout the world , but they could do so using what seemed to be an infinite amount of devices .
for example , one company would tell a story of love through its very own search engine .
one taiwanese production studio would interpret american politics in 3d .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and one man would tell the stories of his father by using a platform called twitter to communicate the excrement his father would gesticulate .
and after all this , everyone paused ; they took a step back .
they realized that , in 6,000 years of storytelling , they 've gone from depicting hunting on cave walls to depicting shakespeare on facebook walls .
and this was a cause for celebration .
the art of storytelling has remained unchanged .
and for the most part , the stories are recycled .
but the way that humans tell the stories has always evolved with pure , consistent novelty .
and they remembered a man , one amazing german , every time a new storytelling device popped up next .
and for that , the audience - the lovely , beautiful audience - would live happily ever after .
-lrb- applause -rrb- b.j. was one of many fellow inmates who had big plans for the future .
he had a vision . when he got out , he was going to leave the dope game for good and fly straight , and he was actually working on merging his two passions into one vision .
he 'd spent 10,000 dollars to buy a website that exclusively featured women having sex on top of or inside of luxury sports cars . -lrb- laughter -rrb- it was my first week in federal prison , and i was learning quickly that it was n't what you see on tv .
in fact , it was teeming with smart , ambitious men whose business instincts were in many cases as sharp as those of the ceos who had wined and dined me six months earlier when i was a rising star in the missouri senate .
now , 95 percent of the guys that i was locked up with had been drug dealers on the outside , but when they talked about what they did , they talked about it in a different jargon , but the business concepts that they talked about were n't unlike those that you 'd learn in a first year mba class at wharton : promotional incentives , you never charge a first-time user , focus-grouping new product launches , territorial expansion .
but they did n't spend a lot of time reliving the glory days .
for the most part , everyone was just trying to survive .
it 's a lot harder than you might think .
contrary to what most people think , people do n't pay , taxpayers do n't pay , for your life when you 're in prison . you 've got to pay for your own life .
you 've got to pay for your soap , your deodorant , toothbrush , toothpaste , all of it .
and it 's hard for a couple of reasons .
first , everything 's marked up 30 to 50 percent from what you 'd pay on the street , and second , you do n't make a lot of money .
i unloaded trucks . that was my full-time job , unloading trucks at a food warehouse , for $ 5.25 , not an hour , but per month .
so how do you survive ?
well , you learn to hustle , all kinds of hustles .
there 's legal hustles .
you pay everything in stamps . those are the currency .
you charge another inmate to clean his cell .
there 's sort of illegal hustles , like you run a barbershop out of your cell .
there 's pretty illegal hustles : you run a tattoo parlor out of your own cell .
and there 's very illegal hustles , which you smuggle in , you get smuggled in , drugs , pornography , cell phones , and just as in the outer world , there 's a risk-reward tradeoff , so the riskier the enterprise , the more profitable it can potentially be .
you want a cigarette in prison ? three to five dollars .
you want an old-fashioned cell phone that you flip open and is about as big as your head ? three hundred bucks .
you want a dirty magazine ?
well , it can be as much as 1,000 dollars .
so as you can probably tell , one of the defining aspects of prison life is ingenuity .
whether it was concocting delicious meals from stolen scraps from the warehouse , sculpting people 's hair with toenail clippers , or constructing weights from boulders in laundry bags tied on to tree limbs , prisoners learn how to make do with less , and many of them want to take this ingenuity that they 've learned to the outside and start restaurants , barber shops , personal training businesses .
but there 's no training , nothing to prepare them for that , no rehabilitation at all in prison , no one to help them write a business plan , figure out a way to translate the business concepts they intuitively grasp into legal enterprises , no access to the internet , even .
and then , when they come out , most states do n't even have a law prohibiting employers from discriminating against people with a background .
so none of us should be surprised that two out of three ex-offenders re-offend within five years .
look , i lied to the feds . i lost a year of my life from it .
but when i came out , i vowed that i was going to do whatever i could to make sure that guys like the ones i was locked up with did n't have to waste any more of their life than they already had .
so i hope that you 'll think about helping in some way .
the best thing we can do is figure out ways to nurture the entrepreneurial spirit and the tremendous untapped potential in our prisons , because if we do n't , they 're not going to learn any new skills that 's going to help them , and they 'll be right back .
all they 'll learn on the inside is new hustles .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music by anna oxygen -rrb- -lrb- music : " shells " by mirah -rrb- ♪ you learned how to be a diver ♪ ♪ put on a mask and believe ♪ ♪ gather a dinner of shells for me ♪ ♪ take the tank down so you can breathe ♪ ♪ below ♪ ♪ movements slow ♪ ♪ you are an island ♪ ♪ all the secrets until then ♪ ♪ pried open i held them ♪ ♪ until they were still ♪ ♪ until they were still ♪ ♪ until they were still ♪ -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- music by caroline lufkin -rrb- -lrb- music by anna oxygen -rrb-
♪ dream time , i will find you ♪ ♪ you are shady , you are new ♪ ♪ i 'm not so good at mornings ♪ ♪ i can see too clearly ♪ ♪ i prefer the nighttime ♪ ♪ dark and blurry ♪ ♪ falling night ♪ ♪ hovering light ♪ ♪ calling night ♪ ♪ hovering light ♪ ♪ in the moontime i will give up my life ♪ ♪ and in the deep dreams ♪ ♪ you will find me ♪ -lrb- applause -rrb- -lsb- excerpts from " myth and infrastructure " -rsb- bruno giussani : come back .
miwa matreyek !
-lrb- applause -rrb- i always wanted to become a walking laboratory of social engagement , to resonate other people 's feelings , thoughts , intentions , motivations , in the act of being with them .
as a scientist , i always wanted to measure that resonance , that sense of the other that happens so quickly , in the blink of an eye .
we intuit other people 's feelings .
we know the meaning of their actions even before they happen .
we 're always in this stance of being the object of somebody else 's subjectivity .
we do that all the time . we just ca n't shake it off .
it 's so important that the very tools that we use to understand ourselves , to understand the world around them , is shaped by that stance .
we are social to the core .
so my journey in autism really started when i lived in a residential unit for adults with autism .
most of those individuals had spent most of their lives in long-stay hospitals . this is a long time ago .
and for them , autism was devastating .
they had profound intellectual disabilities .
they did n't talk . but most of all , they were extraordinarily isolated from the world around them , from their environment and from the people .
in fact , at the time , if you walked into a school for individuals with autism , you 'd hear a lot of noise , plenty of commotion , actions , people doing things , but they 're always doing things by themselves .
so they may be looking at a light in the ceiling , or they may be isolated in the corner , or they might be engaged in these repetitive movements , in self-stimulatory movements that led them nowhere .
extremely , extremely isolated .
well , now we know that autism is this disruption , the disruption of this resonance that i am telling you .
these are survival skills .
these are survival skills that we inherited over many , many hundreds of thousands of years of evolution .
you see , babies are born in a state of utter fragility .
without the caregiver , they would n't survive , so it stands to reason that nature would endow them with these mechanisms of survival .
they orient to the caregiver .
from the first days and weeks of life , babies prefer to hear human sounds rather than just they prefer to look at people rather than at things , and even as they 're looking at people , they look at people 's eyes , because the eye is the window to the other person 's experiences , so much so that they even prefer to look at people who are looking at them rather than people who are looking away .
well , they orient to the caregiver .
the caregiver seeks the baby .
and it 's out of this mutually reinforcing choreography that a lot that is of importance to the emergence of mind , the social mind , the social brain , depends on .
we always think about autism as something that happens later on in life .
it does n't . it begins with the beginning of life .
as babies engage with caregivers , they soon realize that , well , there is something in between the ears that is very important - it 's invisible , you ca n't see - but is really critical , and that thing is called attention .
and they learn soon enough , even before they can utter one word that they can take that attention and move somewhere in order to get things they want .
they also learn to follow other people 's gaze , because whatever people are looking at is what they are thinking about .
and soon enough , they start to learn about the meaning of things , because when somebody is looking at something or somebody is pointing at something , they 're not just getting a directional cue , they are getting the other person 's meaning of that thing , the attitude , and soon enough they start building this body of meanings , but meanings that were acquired within the realm of social interaction .
those are meanings that are acquired as part of their shared experiences with others .
well , this is a little 15-month-old little girl , and she has autism .
and i am coming so close to her that i am maybe two inches from her face , and she 's quite oblivious to me .
imagine if i did that to you , and i came two inches from your face .
you 'd do probably two things , would n't you ?
you would recoil . you would call the police . -lrb- laughter -rrb- you would do something , because it 's literally impossible to penetrate somebody 's physical space and not get a reaction .
we do so , remember , intuitively , effortlessly .
this is our body wisdom . it 's not something that is mediated by our language . our body just knows that , and we 've known that for a long time .
and this is not something that happens to humans only .
it happens to some of our phylatic cousins , because if you 're a monkey , and you look at another monkey , and that monkey has a higher hierarchy position than you , and that is considered to be a signal or threat , well , you are not going to be alive for long .
so something that in other species are survival mechanisms , without them they would n't basically live , we bring into the context of human beings , and this is what we need to simply act , act socially .
now , she is oblivious to me , and i am so close to her , and you think , maybe she can see you , maybe she can hear you .
well , a few minutes later , she goes to the corner of the room , and she finds a tiny little piece of candy , an m & m.
so i could not attract her attention , but something , a thing , did .
now , most of us make a big dichotomy between the world of things and the world of people .
now , for this girl , that division line is not so clear , and the world of people is not attracting her as much as we would like .
now remember that we learn a great deal by sharing experiences .
now , what she is doing right now is that her path of learning is diverging moment by moment as she is isolating herself further and further .
so we feel sometimes that the brain is deterministic , the brain determines who we are going to be .
but in fact the brain also becomes who we are , and at the same time that her behaviors are taking away from the realm of social interaction , this is what 's happening with her mind and this is what 's happening with her brain .
well , autism is the most strongly genetic condition of all developmental disorders , and it 's a brain disorder .
it 's a disorder that begins much prior to the time that the child is born .
we now know that there is a very broad spectrum of autism .
there are those individuals who are profoundly intellectually disabled , but there are those that are gifted .
there are those individuals who do n't talk at all .
there are those individuals who talk too much .
there are those individuals that if you observe them in their school , you see them running the periphery fence of the school all day if you let them , to those individuals who can not stop coming to you and trying to engage you repeatedly , relentlessly , but often in an awkward fashion , without that immediate resonance .
well , this is much more prevalent than we thought at the time .
when i started in this field , we thought that there were four individuals with autism per 10,000 , a very rare condition .
well , now we know it 's more like one in 100 .
there are millions of individuals with autism all around us .
the societal cost of this condition is huge .
in the u.s. alone , maybe 35 to 80 billion dollars , and you know what ? most of those funds are associated with adolescents and particularly adults who are severely disabled , individuals who need wrap-around services , services that are very , very intensive , and those services can cost in excess of 60 to 80,000 dollars a year .
those are individuals who did not benefit from early treatment , because now we know that autism creates itself as they diverge in that pathway of learning that i mentioned to you .
were we to be able to identify this condition at an earlier point , and intervene and treat , i can tell you , and this has been probably something that has changed my life in the past 10 years , this notion that we can absolutely attenuate this condition .
also , we have a window of opportunity , because the brain is malleable for just so long , and that window of opportunity happens in the first three years of life .
it 's not that that window closes . it does n't .
but it diminishes considerably .
and yet , the median age of diagnosis in this country is still about five years , and in disadvantaged populations , the populations that do n't have access to clinical services , rural populations , minorities , the age of diagnosis is later still , which is almost as if i were to tell you that we are condemning those communities to have individuals with autism whose condition is going to be more severe .
so i feel that we have a bio-ethical imperative .
the science is there , but no science is of relevance if it does n't have an impact on the community , and we just ca n't afford that missed opportunity , because children with autism become adults with autism , and we feel that those things that we can do for these children , for those families , early on , will have lifetime consequences , for the child , for the family , and for the community at large .
so this is our view of autism .
there are over a hundred genes that are associated with autism . in fact , we believe that there are going to be something between 300 and 600 genes associated with autism , and genetic anomalies , much more than just genes .
and we actually have a bit of a question here , because if there are so many different causes of autism , how do you go from those liabilities to the actual syndrome ? because people like myself , when we walk into a playroom , we recognize a child as having autism .
so how do you go from multiple causes to a syndrome that has some homogeneity ?
and the answer is , what lies in between , which is development .
and in fact , we are very interested in those first two years of life , because those liabilities do n't necessarily convert into autism .
autism creates itself .
were we to be able to intervene during those years of life , we might attenuate for some , and god knows , maybe even prevent for others .
so how do we do that ?
how do we enter that feeling of resonance , how do we enter another person 's being ?
i remember when i interacted with that 15-month-older , that the thing that came to mind was , " how do you come into her world ?
is she thinking about me ? is she thinking about others ? "
well , it 's hard to do that , so we had to create the technologies . we had to basically step inside a body .
we had to see the world through her eyes .
and so in the past many years we 've been building these new technologies that are based on eye tracking .
we can see moment by moment what children are engaging with .
well , this is my colleague warren jones , with whom we 've been building these methods , these studies , for the past 12 years , and you see there a happy five-month-older , it 's a five-month little boy who is going to watch things that are brought from his world , his mom , the caregiver , but also experiences that he would have were he to be in his daycare .
what we want is to embrace that world and bring it into our laboratory , but in order for us to do that , we had to create these very sophisticated measures , measures of how people , how little babies , how newborns , engage with the world , moment by moment , what is important , and what is not .
well , we created those measures , and here , what you see is what we call a funnel of attention .
you 're watching a video .
those frames are separated by about a second through the eyes of 35 typically developing two-year-olds , and we freeze one frame , and this is what the typical children are doing .
in this scan pass , in green here , are two-year-olds with autism .
so on that frame , the children who are typical are watching this , the emotion of expression of that little boy as he 's fighting a little bit with the little girl .
what are the children with autism doing ?
they are focusing on the revolving door , opening and shutting .
well , i can tell you that this divergence that you 're seeing here does n't happen only in our five-minute experiment .
it happens moment by moment in their real lives , and their minds are being formed , and their brains are being specialized in something other than what is happening with their typical peers .
well , we took a construct from our pediatrician friends , the concept of growth charts .
you know , when you take a child to the pediatrician , and so you have physical height , and weight .
well we decided that we 're going to create growth charts of social engagement , and we sought children from the time that they are born , and what you see here on the x-axis is two , three , four , five , six months and nine , until about the age of 24 months , and this is the percent of their viewing time that they are focusing on people 's eyes , and this is their growth chart .
they start over here , they love people 's eyes , and it remains quite stable .
it sort of goes up a little bit in those initial months .
now , let 's see what 's happening with babies who became autistic .
it 's something very different .
it starts way up here , but then it 's a free fall .
it 's very much like they brought into this world the reflex that orients them to people , but it has no traction .
it 's almost as if that stimulus , you , you 're not exerting influence on what happens as they navigate their daily lives .
now , we thought that those data were so powerful in a way , that we wanted to see what happened in the first six months of life , because if you interact with a two- and a three-month-older , you 'd be surprised by how social those babies are .
and what we see in the first six months of life is that those two groups can be segregated very easily .
and using these kinds of measures , and many others , what we found out is that our science could , in fact , identify this condition early on .
we did n't have to wait for the behaviors of autism to emerge in the second year of life .
if we measured things that are , evolutionarily , highly conserved , and developmentally very early emerging , things that are online from the first weeks of life , we could push the detection of autism all the way to those first months , and that 's what we are doing now .
now , we can create the very best technologies and the very best methods to identify the children , but this would be for naught if we did n't have an impact on what happens in their reality in the community .
now we want those devices , of course , to be deployed by those who are in the trenches , our colleagues , the primary care physicians , who see every child , and we need to transform those technologies into something that is going to add value to their practice , because they have to see so many children .
and we want to do that universally so that we do n't miss any child , but this would be immoral if we also did not have an infrastructure for intervention , for treatment .
we need to be able to work with the families , to support the families , to manage those first years with them . we need to be able to really go from universal screening to universal access to treatment , because those treatments are going to change these children 's and those families ' lives .
now , when we think about what we -lsb- can -rsb- do in those first years , i can tell you , having been in this field for so long , one feels really rejuvenated .
there is a sense that the science that one worked on can actually have an impact on realities , preventing , in fact , those experiences that i really started in my journey in this field .
i thought at the time that this was an intractable condition .
no longer . we can do a great deal of things .
and the idea is not to cure autism .
that 's not the idea .
what we want is to make sure that those individuals with autism can be free from the devastating consequences that come with it at times , the profound intellectual disabilities , the lack of language , the profound , profound isolation .
we feel that individuals with autism , in fact , have a very special perspective on the world , and we need diversity , and they can work extremely well in some areas of strength : predictable situations , situations that can be defined .
because after all , they learn about the world almost like about it , rather than learning how to function in it .
but this is a strength , if you 're working , for example , in technology .
and there are those individuals who have incredible artistic abilities .
we want them to be free of that .
we want that the next generations of individuals with autism will be able not only to express their strengths but to fulfill their promise .
well thank you for listening to me . -lrb- applause -rrb- so here 's the good news about families .
the last 50 years have seen a revolution in what it means to be a family .
we have blended families , adopted families , we have nuclear families living in separate houses and divorced families living in the same house .
but through it all , the family has grown stronger .
eight in 10 say the family they have today is as strong or stronger than the family they grew up in .
now , here 's the bad news .
nearly everyone is completely overwhelmed by the chaos of family life .
every parent i know , myself included , feels like we 're constantly playing defense .
just when our kids stop teething , they start having tantrums .
just when they stop needing our help taking a bath , they need our help dealing with cyberstalking or bullying .
and here 's the worst news of all .
our children sense we 're out of control .
ellen galinsky of the families and work institute asked 1,000 children , " if you were granted one wish about your parents , what would it be ? "
the parents predicted the kids would say , spending more time with them .
they were wrong . the kids ' number one wish ?
that their parents be less tired and less stressed .
so how can we change this dynamic ?
are there concrete things we can do to reduce stress , draw our family closer , and generally prepare our children to enter the world ?
i spent the last few years trying to answer that question , traveling around , meeting families , talking to scholars , experts ranging from elite peace negotiators to warren buffett 's bankers to the green berets .
i was trying to figure out , what do happy families do right and what can i learn from them to make my family happier ?
i want to tell you about one family that i met , and why i think they offer clues .
at 7 p.m. on a sunday in hidden springs , idaho , where the six members of the starr family are sitting down to the highlight of their week : the family meeting .
the starrs are a regular american family with their share of regular american family problems .
david is a software engineer . eleanor takes care of their four children , ages 10 to 15 .
one of those kids tutors math on the far side of town .
one has lacrosse on the near side of town .
one has asperger syndrome . one has adhd .
" we were living in complete chaos , " eleanor said .
what the starrs did next , though , was surprising .
instead of turning to friends or relatives , they looked to david 's workplace .
they turned to a cutting-edge program called agile development that was just spreading from manufacturers in japan to startups in silicon valley .
in agile , workers are organized into small groups and do things in very short spans of time .
so instead of having executives issue grand proclamations , the team in effect manages itself .
you have constant feedback . you have daily update sessions .
you have weekly reviews . you 're constantly changing .
david said when they brought this system into their home , the family meetings in particular increased communication , decreased stress , and made everybody happier to be part of the family team .
when my wife and i adopted these family meetings and other techniques into the lives of our then-five-year-old twin daughters , it was the biggest single change we made since our daughters were born .
and these meetings had this effect while taking under 20 minutes .
so what is agile , and why can it help with something that seems so different , like families ?
in 1983 , jeff sutherland was a technologist at a financial firm in new england .
he was very frustrated with how software got designed .
companies followed the waterfall method , right , in which executives issued orders that slowly trickled down to programmers below , and no one had ever consulted the programmers .
eighty-three percent of projects failed .
they were too bloated or too out of date by the time they were done .
sutherland wanted to create a system where ideas did n't just percolate down but could percolate up from the bottom and be adjusted in real time .
he read 30 years of harvard business review before stumbling upon an article in 1986 called " the new new product development game . "
it said that the pace of business was quickening - and by the way , this was in 1986 - and the most successful companies were flexible .
it highlighted toyota and canon and likened their adaptable , tight-knit teams to rugby scrums .
as sutherland told me , we got to that article , and said , " that 's it . "
in sutherland 's system , companies do n't use large , massive projects that take two years .
they do things in small chunks .
nothing takes longer than two weeks .
so instead of saying , " you guys go off into that bunker and come back with a cell phone or a social network , " you say , " you go off and come up with one element , then bring it back . let 's talk about it . let 's adapt . "
you succeed or fail quickly .
today , agile is used in a hundred countries , and it 's sweeping into management suites .
inevitably , people began taking some of these techniques and applying it to their families .
you had blogs pop up , and some manuals were written .
even the sutherlands told me that they had an agile thanksgiving , where you had one group of people working on the food , one setting the table , and one greeting visitors at the door .
sutherland said it was the best thanksgiving ever .
so let 's take one problem that families face , crazy mornings , and talk about how agile can help .
a key plank is accountability , so teams use information radiators , these large boards in which everybody is accountable .
so the starrs , in adapting this to their home , created a morning checklist in which each child is expected to tick off chores .
so on the morning i visited , eleanor came downstairs , poured herself a cup of coffee , sat in a reclining chair , and she sat there , kind of amiably talking to each of her children as one after the other they came downstairs , checked the list , made themselves breakfast , checked the list again , put the dishes in the dishwasher , rechecked the list , fed the pets or whatever chores they had , checked the list once more , gathered their belongings , and made their way to the bus .
it was one of the most astonishing family dynamics i have ever seen .
and when i strenuously objected this would never work in our house , our kids needed way too much monitoring , eleanor looked at me .
" that 's what i thought , " she said .
" i told david , ' keep your work out of my kitchen . ' but i was wrong . "
so i turned to david : " so why does it work ? "
he said , " you ca n't underestimate the power of doing this . "
and he made a checkmark .
he said , " in the workplace , adults love it .
with kids , it 's heaven . "
the week we introduced a morning checklist into our house , it cut parental screaming in half . -lrb- laughter -rrb- but the real change did n't come until we had these family meetings .
so following the agile model , we ask three questions : what worked well in our family this week , what did n't work well , and what will we agree to work on in the week ahead ?
everyone throws out suggestions and then we pick two to focus on .
and suddenly the most amazing things started coming out of our daughters ' mouths .
what worked well this week ?
getting over our fear of riding bikes . making our beds .
what did n't work well ? our math sheets , or greeting visitors at the door .
like a lot of parents , our kids are something like bermuda triangles .
like , thoughts and ideas go in , but none ever comes out , i mean at least not that are revealing .
this gave us access suddenly to their innermost thoughts .
but the most surprising part was when we turned to , what are we going to work on in the week ahead ?
you know , the key idea of agile is that teams essentially manage themselves , and it works in software and it turns out that it works with kids .
our kids love this process .
so they would come up with all these ideas .
you know , greet five visitors at the door this week , get an extra 10 minutes of reading before bed .
kick someone , lose desserts for a month .
it turns out , by the way , our girls are little stalins .
we constantly have to kind of dial them back .
now look , naturally there 's a gap between their kind of conduct in these meetings and their behavior the rest of the week , but the truth is it did n't really bother us .
it felt like we were kind of laying these underground cables that would n't light up their world for many years to come .
three years later - our girls are almost eight now - we 're still holding these meetings .
my wife counts them among her most treasured moments as a mom .
so what did we learn ?
the word " agile " entered the lexicon in 2001 when jeff sutherland and a group of designers met in utah and wrote a 12-point agile manifesto .
i think the time is right for an agile family manifesto .
i 've taken some ideas from the starrs and from many other families i met .
i 'm proposing three planks .
plank number one : adapt all the time .
when i became a parent , i figured , you know what ?
we 'll set a few rules and we 'll stick to them .
that assumes , as parents , we can anticipate every problem that 's going to arise .
we ca n't . what 's great about the agile system is you build in a system of change so that you can react to what 's happening to you in real time .
it 's like they say in the internet world : if you 're doing the same thing today you were doing six months ago , you 're doing the wrong thing .
parents can learn a lot from that .
but to me , " adapt all the time " means something deeper , too .
we have to break parents out of this straitjacket that the only ideas we can try at home are ones that come from shrinks or self-help gurus or other family experts .
the truth is , their ideas are stale , whereas in all these other worlds there are these new ideas to make groups and teams work effectively .
let 's just take a few examples .
let 's take the biggest issue of all : family dinner .
everybody knows that having family dinner with your children is good for the kids .
but for so many of us , it does n't work in our lives .
i met a celebrity chef in new orleans who said , " no problem , i 'll just time-shift family dinner .
i 'm not home , ca n't make family dinner ?
we 'll have family breakfast . we 'll meet for a bedtime snack .
we 'll make sunday meals more important . "
and the truth is , recent research backs him up .
it turns out there 's only 10 minutes of productive time in any family meal .
the rest of it 's taken up with " take your elbows off the table " and " pass the ketchup . "
you can take that 10 minutes and move it to any part of the day and have the same benefit .
so time-shift family dinner . that 's adaptability .
an environmental psychologist told me , " if you 're sitting in a hard chair on a rigid surface , you 'll be more rigid .
if you 're sitting on a cushioned chair , you 'll be more open . "
she told me , " when you 're discipling your children , sit in an upright chair with a cushioned surface .
the conversation will go better . "
my wife and i actually moved where we sit for difficult conversations because i was sitting above in the power position .
so move where you sit . that 's adaptability .
the point is there are all these new ideas out there .
we 've got to hook them up with parents .
so plank number one : adapt all the time .
be flexible , be open-minded , let the best ideas win .
plank number two : empower your children .
our instinct as parents is to order our kids around .
it 's easier , and frankly , we 're usually right .
there 's a reason that few systems have been more waterfall over time than the family .
but the single biggest lesson we learned is to reverse the waterfall as much as possible .
enlist the children in their own upbringing .
just yesterday , we were having our family meeting , and we had voted to work on overreacting .
so we said , " okay , give us a reward and give us a punishment . okay ? "
so one of my daughters threw out , you get five minutes of overreacting time all week .
so we kind of liked that .
but then her sister started working the system .
she said , " do i get one five-minute overreaction or can i get 10 30-second overreactions ? "
i loved that . spend the time however you want .
now give us a punishment . okay .
if we get 15 minutes of overreaction time , that 's the limit .
every minute above that , we have to do one pushup .
so you see , this is working . now look , this system is n't lax .
there 's plenty of parental authority going on .
but we 're giving them practice becoming independent , which of course is our ultimate goal .
just as i was leaving to come here tonight , one of my daughters started screaming .
the other one said , " overreaction ! overreaction ! "
and started counting , and within 10 seconds it had ended .
to me that is a certified agile miracle .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- and by the way , research backs this up too .
children who plan their own goals , set weekly schedules , evaluate their own work build up their frontal cortex and take more control over their lives .
the point is , we have to let our children succeed on their own terms , and yes , on occasion , fail on their own terms .
i was talking to warren buffett 's banker , and he was chiding me for not letting my children make mistakes with their allowance .
and i said , " but what if they drive into a ditch ? "
he said , " it 's much better to drive into a ditch with a $ 6 allowance than a $ 60,000-a-year salary or a $ 6 million inheritance . "
so the bottom line is , empower your children .
plank number three : tell your story .
adaptability is fine , but we also need bedrock .
jim collins , the author of " good to great , " told me that successful human organizations of any kind have two things in common : they preserve the core , they stimulate progress .
so agile is great for stimulating progress , but i kept hearing time and again , you need to preserve the core .
so how do you do that ?
collins coached us on doing something that businesses do , which is define your mission and identify your core values .
so he led us through the process of creating a family mission statement .
we did the family equivalent of a corporate retreat .
we had a pajama party .
i made popcorn . actually , i burned one , so i made two .
my wife bought a flip chart .
and we had this great conversation , like , what 's important to us ?
what values do we most uphold ?
and we ended up with 10 statements .
we are travelers , not tourists .
we do n't like dilemmas . we like solutions .
again , research shows that parents should spend less time worrying about what they do wrong and more time focusing on what they do right , worry less about the bad times and build up the good times .
this family mission statement is a great way to identify what it is that you do right .
a few weeks later , we got a call from the school .
one of our daughters had gotten into a spat .
and suddenly we were worried , like , do we have a mean girl on our hands ?
and we did n't really know what to do , so we called her into my office .
the family mission statement was on the wall , and my wife said , " so , anything up there seem to apply ? "
and she kind of looked down the list , and she said , " bring people together ? "
suddenly we had a way into the conversation .
another great way to tell your story is to tell your children where they came from .
researchers at emory gave children a simple " what do you know " test .
do you know where your grandparents were born ?
do you know where your parents went to high school ?
do you know anybody in your family who had a difficult situation , an illness , and they overcame it ?
the children who scored highest on this " do you know " scale had the highest self-esteem and a greater sense they could control their lives .
the " do you know " test was the single biggest predictor of emotional health and happiness .
as the author of the study told me , children who have a sense of - they 're part of a larger narrative have greater self-confidence .
so my final plank is , tell your story .
spend time retelling the story of your family 's positive moments and how you overcame the negative ones .
if you give children this happy narrative , you give them the tools to make themselves happier .
i was a teenager when i first read " anna karenina " and its famous opening sentence , " all happy families are alike .
each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way . "
when i first read that , i thought , " that sentence is inane .
of course all happy families are n't alike . "
but as i began working on this project , i began changing my mind .
recent scholarship has allowed us , for the first time , to identify the building blocks that successful families have .
i 've mentioned just three here today : adapt all the time , empower the children , tell your story .
is it possible , all these years later , to say tolstoy was right ?
the answer , i believe , is yes .
when leo tolstoy was five years old , his brother nikolay came to him and said he had engraved the secret to universal happiness on a little green stick , which he had hidden in a ravine on the family 's estate in russia .
if the stick were ever found , all humankind would be happy .
tolstoy became consumed with that stick , but he never found it .
in fact , he asked to be buried in that ravine where he thought it was hidden .
he still lies there today , covered in a layer of green grass .
that story perfectly captures for me the final lesson that i learned : happiness is not something we find , it 's something we make .
almost anybody who 's looked at well-run organizations has come to pretty much the same conclusion .
greatness is not a matter of circumstance .
it 's a matter of choice .
you do n't need some grand plan . you do n't need a waterfall .
you just need to take small steps , accumulate small wins , keep reaching for that green stick .
in the end , this may be the greatest lesson of all .
what 's the secret to a happy family ? try .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thirteen trillion dollars in wealth has evaporated over the course of the last two years .
we 've questioned the future of capitalism .
we 've questioned the financial industry .
we 've looked at our government oversight .
we 've questioned where we 're going .
and yet , at the same time , this very well may be a seminal moment in american history , an opportunity for the consumer to actually take control and guide us to a new trajectory in america .
i 'm calling this the great unwind .
and the idea is a simple , simple idea , which is the fact that the consumer has moved from a state of anxiety to action .
consumers who represent 72 percent of the gdp of america have actually started , just like banks and just like businesses , to de-leverage , to unwind their leverage , in daily life , to remove themselves from the liability and risk that presents itself as we move forward .
so , to understand this - and i 'm going to stress this - it 's not about the consumer being in retreat .
the consumer is empowered .
in order to understand this , we 're going to step back and look a little bit at what 's happened over the course of the last year and a half .
so , if you 've been gone , this is the easy cliffsnotes on what 's happened in the economy . okay ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- unemployment up . housing values down . equity markets down .
commodity prices are like this .
if you 're a mom trying to manage a budget , and oil was 150 dollars a barrel last summer , and it 's somewhere between 50 and 70 , do you plan vacations ? how do you buy ?
what is your strategy in your household ?
will the bailout work ? we have national debt , detroit , currency valuations , healthcare , all these issues facing us .
you put them all together , you mix them up in a bouillabaisse , and you have consumer confidence that 's basically a ticking time-bomb .
in fact , let 's go back and look at what caused this crisis , because the consumer , all of us , in our daily lives , actually contributed a large part to the problem .
this is something i call the 50-20 paradox .
it took us 50 years to reach annual savings ratings of almost 10 percent . 50 years .
do you know what this was right here ?
this was world war ii . do you know why savings was so high ?
there was nothing to buy , unless you wanted to buy some rivets . right ?
so , what happened though , over the course of the last 20 years - we went from a 10 percent savings rate to a negative savings rate .
because we binged . we bought extra-large cars , supersized everything , we bought remedies for restless leg syndrome .
all these things together basically created a factor where the consumer sort of drove us headlong into the crisis that we face today .
the personal debt-to-income ratio basically went from 65 percent to 135 percent in the span of about 15 years .
so consumers got overleveraged .
and of course our banks did as well , as did our federal government .
this is an absolutely staggering chart .
it shows leverage , trended out from 1919 to 2009 .
and what you end up seeing is the whole phenomenon of the fact that we are actually stepping forth and basically leveraging future education , future children in our households .
so if you look at this in the context of visualizing the bailout , what you can see is if you stack up dollar bills , first of all , 360,000 dollars is about the size of a five-foot-four guy .
but if you stack it up , you just see this amazing , staggering amount of dollars that have been put into the system to fund and bail us out .
so this is the first 315 billion .
but i read this fact the other day , that one trillion seconds equals 32 thousand years , so if you think about that , the context , the casualness with which we talk about trillion-dollar bailout here , and trillion there , we are stacking ourselves up for long-term leverage .
however , consumers have moved .
they are taking responsibility .
what we 're seeing is an uptake in the savings rate .
in fact , 11 straight months of savings have happened since the beginning of the crisis .
we are working our way back up to that 10 percent .
also , remarkably , in the fourth quarter , spending dropped to its lowest level in 62 years , almost a 3.7 percent decline .
visa now reports that more people are using debit cards than they 're using credit cards .
so we 're starting to pay for things with money that we have .
and we 're starting to be much more careful about how we save and how we invest .
but that 's not really the whole story .
because this has also been a dramatic time of transformation .
and you 've got to admit , over the course of the last year and a half , consumers have been doing some pretty weird things .
it 's been pretty staggering , what we 've lived through .
if you take into account 80 percent of all americans were born after world war ii , this is essentially our depression .
and so , as a result , some crazy things have happened .
i 'll give you some examples . lets talk about dentists , vasectomies , guns and shark attacks . okay ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- dentists report molars , you know , people grinding their teeth , coming in and reporting the fact that they 've had stress .
and so there is an increase in people having to have their fillings replaced .
guns , gun sales , according to the fbi , who does background checks , are up almost 25 percent since january .
vasectomies are up 48 percent , according to the cornell institute .
and lastly , but a very good point , hopefully not related to the former point i just made , which is that shark attacks are at their lowest level from 2003 .
does anybody know why ?
no one is at the beach . so there is a bright side to everything .
but seriously , what we see happening , and the reason i want to stress that the consumer is not in retreat , is that this is a tremendous opportunity for the consumer who drove us into this recession to lead us right back out .
and what i mean by that is that we can move from mindless consumption to mindful consumption . right ?
if you think about the last three decades , the consumer has moved from savvy about marketing in the ' 90s , to gathering all these amazing social and search tools in this decade , but the one thing that has been holding them back is the ability to discriminate .
by restricting their demand , consumers can actually align their values with their spending , and drive capitalism and business to not just be about more , but be about better .
we 're going to explain that right now .
based on y & r 's brandasset valuator , proprietary tool of vml and young & rubicam , we set out to understand what 's been happening in the crisis with the consumer marketplace .
we found a couple of really interesting things .
we 're going to go through four value-shifts that we see driving new consumer behaviors , that offer new management principles .
the first cultural value shift that we see is this tendency toward something we call liquid life .
this is the movement from americans defining their success on having things to having liquidity , because the less excess that you have around you , the more nimble and fleet of foot you are .
as a result , déclassé consumption is in .
déclassé consumption is the whole idea that spending money frivolously makes you look a little bit anti-fashion .
the management principle is dollars and cents .
so let 's look at some examples of this déclassé consumption that falls out of this value .
first things is we see something must be happening when p. diddy vows to tone down his bling .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but seriously , we also have this phenomenon on madison avenue and in other places , where people are actually walking out of luxury boutiques with ordinary , sort of generic paper bags to hide the brand purchases .
we see high-end haggling in fashion today .
high-end haggling for luxury and real estate .
we also see just a relaxing of ego , and sort of a dismantling of artifice .
this is a story on the yacht club that 's all basically blue collar .
blue-collar yacht club , where you can join the yacht club , but you 've got to work in the boat yard , as sort of condition of membership .
we also see the trend toward tourism that 's a little bit more low key . right ?
agritourism , going to vineyards and going to farms .
and then we also see this movement forward from dollars and cents .
what businesses can do to connect with these new mindsets is really interesting .
a couple things that are kind of cool .
one is that frito-lay figured out this liquidity thing with their consumer .
they found their consumer had more money at the beginning of the month , less at the end of the month . so what they did is they started to change their packaging .
larger packs at the beginning of the month , smaller packaging at the end of the month .
really interestingly , too , was the san francisco giants .
they 've just instituted dynamic pricing .
so it takes into account everything from the pitcher match-ups , to the weather , to the team records , in setting prices for the consumer .
another quick example of these types of movements is the rise of zynga .
zynga has risen on the consumer 's desire to not want to be locked in to fixed-cost .
again , this theme is about variable cost , variable living .
so micropayments have become huge .
and lastly , some people are using hulu actually as a device to get rid of their cable bill .
so , really clever ideas there that are kind of being taken ahold and marketers are starting to understand .
the second of the four values is this movement toward ethics and fair play .
we see that play itself out with empathy and respect .
the consumer is demanding it .
and , as a result , businesses must provide not only value , but values .
increasingly , consumers are looking at the culture of the company , looking for their conduct in the marketplace .
so , what we see with empathy and respect , lots of really hopeful things that have come out of this recession .
and i 'll give you a few examples .
one is the rise toward communities and neighborhoods , and increased emphasis on your neighbors as your support system .
also a wonderful byproduct of sort of a really lousy thing , which has been unemployment , is a rise in volunteerism that 's been noted in our country .
we also see the phenomenon - some of you may have " boomerang kids " - these are " boomerang alumni , " where universities are actually reconnecting with alumni in helping them with jobs , sharing skills and retraining .
we also talked about character and professionalism .
we had this miracle on the hudson in new york city , you know , in january , and suddenly sully has become a key name on babycenter .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , from a value and values standpoint , what companies can do is connect in lots of different ways .
microsoft is doing something wonderful .
they are actually vowing to retrain two million americans with i.t. training , using their existing infrastructure to do something good .
also a really interesting company is gore-tex .
gore-tex is all about personal accountability of their management and their employees , to the point where they really kind of shun the idea of bosses .
but they also talk about the fact that their executives , all of their expense reports are put onto their company intranet for everyone to see .
complete transparency .
think twice before you have that bottle of wine .
the third of the four laws of post-crisis consumerism is about durable living .
we 're seeing on our data that consumers are realizing this is a marathon , not a sprint .
they are digging in . and they 're looking for ways to extract value out of every purchase that they make .
witness the fact that americans are holding on to their cars longer than ever before , 9.4 years on average , in march . a record .
we also see the fact that libraries have become a huge resource for america .
did you know that 68 percent of americans now carry a library card ?
the highest percentage ever in our nation 's history .
so what you see in this trend is also the accumulation of knowledge .
continuing education is up .
everything is focused on betterment , and training , and development and moving forward .
we also see a big diy movement .
i was fascinated to learn that 30 percent of all homes in america are actually built by owners .
that includes cottages and the like . but 30 percent .
so , people are getting their hands dirty . they are rolling up their sleeves .
they want these skills .
we see that with the phenomenon of raising backyard hens and chickens and ducks . and when you work out the math , they say it does n't work , but the principle is there that it 's about being sustainable and taking care of yourself .
and then we look at the high line in new york city , an excellent use of reimagining existing infrastructure for something good , which is a brand new park in new york city .
so , what brands can do , and companies , is pay dividends to consumers , be a brand that lasts , offer transparency , promise you 're going to be there beyond today 's sale .
perfect example of that is patagonia .
patagonia 's footprint chronicles basically goes through and tracks every product that they make , and gives you social responsibility , and helps you understand the ethics that are behind the product that they make .
another great example is fidelity .
rather than instant cash-back rewards on your credit or debit purchases , this is about 529 rewards for your student education .
or the interesting company sunrun .
i love this company . they 've created a consumer collective where they put solar panels on households and create a consumer-based utility , where the electricity that they generate is basically pumped back out into the marketplace .
so , it 's a consumer driven co-op .
so , the fourth sort of post-crisis consumerism that we see is this movement about return to the fold .
it 's incredibly important right now .
trust is not parceled out , as we all know .
it 's now about connecting to your communities , connecting to your social networks .
in my book i talked about the fact that 72 percent of people trust what other people say about a brand or a company , versus 15 percent on advertising .
so , in that respect , cooperative consumerism has really taken off .
this is about consumers working together to get what they want out of the marketplace .
let 's look at a couple of quick examples .
the artisanal movement is huge .
everything about locally derived products and services , supporting your local neighborhoods , whether it 's cheeses , wines and other products .
also this rise of local currencies .
realizing that it 's difficult to get loans in this environment , you 're doing business with people you trust , in your local markets .
so , this rise of this sort of local currency is another really interesting phenomenon .
and then they did a recent report i thought was fascinating .
they actually started , in certain communities in the united states , start to publish people 's electricity usage .
and what they found out is when that was available for public record , the people 's electricity usage in those communities dropped .
then we also look at the idea of cow-pooling , which is the whole phenomenon of consumers organizing together to buy meat from organic farms that they know is safe and controlled in the way that they want it to be controlled .
and then there is this other really interesting movement that 's happened in california , which is about carrot mobs .
the traditional thing would be to boycott right ?
have a stick ? well why not have a carrot ?
so these are consumers organizing , pooling their resources to incentify companies to do good .
and then we look at what companies can do .
this is all the opportunity about being a community organizer .
you have to realize that you ca n't fight and control this .
you actually need to organize it .
you need to harness it . you need to give it meaning .
and there is lots of really interesting examples here that we see .
first is just the rise of the fact that zagat 's has actually moved out of and diversified from rating restaurants , into actually rating healthcare .
so what credentials does zagat 's have ?
well , they have a lot , because it 's their network of people . right ?
so that becomes a very powerful force for them to make their brand more elastic .
then you look at the phenomenon of kogi .
this kogi does n't exist . it 's a moving truck . right ?
it 's a moving truck through l.a. , and the only way you can find it is through twitter .
or you look at johnson & johnson 's momversations .
a phenomenal blog that 's been built up .
where j & j basically is tapping into the power of mommy bloggers , allowing them to basically create a forum where they can communicate and they can connect .
and it 's also become a very , very valuable sort of advertising revenue for j & j as well .
this plus the fact that you 've got phenomenal work from ceos from ford to zappos , connecting on twitter , creating an open environment , allowing their employees to be part of the process , rather than hidden behind walls .
you see this rising force in sort of total transparency and openness that companies are starting to adopt , all because the consumer is demanding it .
so , when we look at this and we step back , what i believe is that the crisis that exists today is definitely real .
it 's been tremendously powerful for consumers .
but , at the same time , this is also a tremendous opportunity .
and the chinese character for crisis is actually the same side of the same coin .
crisis equals opportunity .
what we 're seeing with consumers right now is the ability for them to actually lead us forward out of this recession .
so , we believe that values-driven spending will force capitalism to be better .
it will drive innovation .
it will make longer-lasting products . it will create better , more intuitive customer service .
it will give us the opportunity to connect with companies that share the values that we share .
so , when we look back and step out at this and see the beginning of these trends that we 're seeing in our data , we see a very hopeful picture for the future of america .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- of the five senses , vision is the one that i appreciate the most , and it 's the one that i can least take for granted .
i think this is partially due to my father , who was blind .
it was a fact that he did n't make much of a fuss about , usually .
one time in nova scotia , when we went to see a total eclipse of the sun - yeah , same one as in the carly simon song , which may or may not refer to james taylor , warren beatty or mick jagger ; we 're not really sure .
they handed out these dark plastic viewers that allowed us to look directly at the sun without damaging our eyes .
but dad got really scared : he did n't want us doing that .
he wanted us instead to use these cheap cardboard viewers so that there was no chance at all that our eyes would be damaged .
i thought this was a little strange at the time .
what i did n't know at the time was that my father had actually been born with perfect eyesight .
when he and his sister martha were just very little , their mom took them out to see a total eclipse - or actually , a solar eclipse - and not long after that , both of them started losing their eyesight .
decades later , it turned out that the source of their blindness was most likely some sort of bacterial infection .
as near as we can tell , it had nothing whatsoever to do with that solar eclipse , but by then my grandmother had already gone to her grave thinking it was her fault .
so , dad graduated harvard in 1946 , married my mom , and bought a house in lexington , massachusetts , where the first shots were fired against the british in 1775 , although we did n't actually hit any of them until concord .
he got a job working for raytheon , designing guidance systems , which was part of the route 128 high-tech axis in those days - so the equivalent of silicone valley in the ' 70s .
dad was n't a real militaristic kind of guy ; he just really felt bad that he was n't able to fight in world war ii on account of his handicap , although they did let him get through the several-hour-long army physical exam before they got to the very last test , which was for vision .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , dad started racking up all of these patents and gaining a reputation as a blind genius , rocket scientist , inventor .
but to us he was just dad , and our home life was pretty normal .
as a kid , i watched a lot of television and had lots of nerdy hobbies like mineralogy and microbiology and the space program and a little bit of politics .
i played a lot of chess .
but at the age of 14 , a friend of mine got me interested in comic books , and i decided that was what i wanted to do for a living .
so , here 's my dad : he 's a scientist , he 's an engineer and he 's a military contractor .
so , he has four kids , right ?
one grows up to become a computer scientist , one grows up to join the navy , one grows up to become an engineer , and then there 's me : the comic book artist .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- which , incidentally , makes me the opposite of dean kamen , because i 'm a comic book artist , son of an inventor , and he 's an inventor , son of a comic book artist .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- right , it 's true .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the funny thing is , dad had a lot of faith in me .
he had faith in my abilities as a cartoonist , even though he had no direct evidence that i was any good whatsoever : everything he saw was just a blur .
now , this gives a real meaning to the term " blind faith , " which does n't have the same negative connotation for me that it does for other people .
now , faith in things which can not be seen , which can not be proved , is not the sort of faith that i 've ever really related to all that much .
i tend to like science , where what we see and can ascertain are the foundation of what we know .
but there 's a middle ground , too .
a middle ground tread by people like poor old charles babbage , and his steam-driven computers that were never built .
nobody really understood what it was that he had in mind , except for ada lovelace , and he went to his grave trying to pursue that dream .
vannevar bush with his memex - this idea of all of human knowledge at your fingertips - he had this vision .
and i think a lot of people in his day probably thought he was a bit of a kook .
and , yeah , we can look back in retrospect and say , yeah , ha-ha , you know - it 's all microfilm . but that 's - that 's not the point . he understood the shape of the future .
so did j.c.r. licklider and his notions for computer-human interaction .
same thing : he understood the shape of the future , even though it was something that would only be implemented by people much later .
or paul baran , and his vision for packet switching .
hardly anybody listened to him in his day .
or even the people who actually pulled it off , the people at bolt , beranek and newman in boston , who just would sketch out these structures of what would eventually become a worldwide network , and sketching things on the back of napkins and on note papers and arguing over dinner at howard johnson 's - on route 128 in lexington , massachusetts , just two miles from where i was studying the queen 's gambit deferred and listening to gladys knight & the pips singing " midnight train to georgia , " while - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - in my dad 's big easy chair , you know ?
so , three types of vision , right ?
vision based on what one can not see : the vision of that unseen and unknowable .
the vision of that which has already been proven or can be ascertained .
and this third kind of vision , of something which can be , which may be , based on knowledge , but is as yet unproven .
now , we 've seen a lot of examples of people who are pursuing that sort of vision in science , but i think it 's also true in the arts , it 's true in politics , it 's even true in personal endeavors .
what it comes down to , really , is four basic principles : learn from everyone , follow no one , watch for patterns , and work like hell .
i think these are the four principles that go into this .
and it 's that third one , especially , where visions of the future begin to manifest themselves .
what 's interesting is that this particular way of looking at the world , is , i think , only one of four different ways that manifest themselves in different fields of endeavor .
in comics , i know that it results in sort of a formalist attitude towards trying to understand how it works .
then there 's another , more classical , attitude which embraces beauty and craft .
another one which believes in the pure transparency of content .
and then another which emphasizes the authenticity of human experience - and honesty , and rawness .
these are four very different ways of looking at the world . i even gave them names .
the classicist , the animist , and formalist and iconoclast .
interestingly , it seemed to correspond more or less to jung 's four subdivisions of human thought .
and they reflect a dichotomy of art and delight on left and the right ; tradition and revolution on the top and the bottom .
and if you go on the diagonal , you get content and form - and then beauty and truth .
and it probably applies just as much to music and to movies and to fine art , which has nothing whatsoever to do with vision at all , or for that matter , nothing to do with our conference theme of " inspired by nature " - except to the extent of the fable of the frog who gives the ride to the scorpion on his back to get across the river because the scorpion promises not to sting him , but then the scorpion does sting him anyway and they both die , but not before the frog asks him why and the scorpion says , " because it 's my nature " -
in that sense , yes .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so - so this was my nature . the thing was , i saw that the route that i took to discovering this focus in my work and who i was , i saw it as just this road to discovery .
actually , it was just me embracing my nature , which means that i did n't actually fall that far from the tree after all .
so what does a " scientific mind " do in the arts ?
well , i started making comics , but i also started trying to understand them , almost immediately .
and one of the most important things about comics , i discovered , was that comics are a visual medium , but they try to embrace all of the senses within it .
so , the different elements of comics , like pictures and words , and the different symbols and everything in between that comics presents are all funneled through the single conduit of vision .
so you have things like resemblance , where something which resembles the physical world can be abstracted in a couple of different directions : abstracted from resemblance , but still retaining the complete meaning , or abstracted away from both resemblance and meaning towards the picture plan .
put all these three together , and you have a nice little map of the entire boundary of visual iconography which comics can embrace .
and if you move to the right you also get language , because that 's abstracting even further from resemblance , but still maintaining meaning .
vision is called upon to represent sound and to understand the common properties of those two and their common heritage , as well .
also , to try to represent the texture of sound to capture its essential character through visuals .
and there 's also a balance between the visible and the invisible in comics .
comics is a kind of call and response in which the artist gives you something to see within the panels , and then gives you something to imagine between the panels .
also , another sense which comics ' vision represents , and that 's time .
sequence is a very important aspect of comics .
comics presents a kind of temporal map .
and this temporal map was something that energizes modern comics , but i was wondering if perhaps it also energizes other sorts of forms , and i found some in history .
and you can see this same principle operating in these ancient versions of the same idea .
what 's happening is , the art form is colliding with the given technology , whether it 's paint on stone , like the tomb of the scribe in ancient egypt , or a bas-relief sculpture rising up a stone column , or a 200-foot-long embroidery , or painted deerskin and tree bark running across 88 accordion-folded pages .
what 's interesting is , once you hit print - and this is from 1450 , by the way - all of the artifacts of modern comics start to present themselves : rectilinear panel arrangements , simple line drawings without tone and a left-to-right reading sequence .
and within 100 years , you already start to see word balloons and captions , and it 's really just a hop , skip and a jump from here to here .
so i wrote a book about this in ' 93 , but as i was finishing the book , i had to do a little bit of typesetting , and i was tired of going to my local copy shop to do it , so i bought a computer .
and it was just a little thing - it was n't good for much except text entry - but my father had told me about moore 's law , about moore 's law back in the ' 70s , and i knew what was coming .
and so , i kept my eyes peeled to see if the sort of changes that happened when we went from pre-print comics to print comics would happen when we went beyond , to post-print comics .
so , one of the first things that were proposed was that we could mix the visuals of comics with the sound , motion and interactivity of the cd-roms that were being made in those days .
this was even before the web .
and one of the first things they did was , they tried to take the comics page as-is and transplant it to monitors , which was a classic mcluhanesque mistake of appropriating the shape of the previous technology as the content of the new technology .
and so , what they would do is , they 'd have these comic pages that resemble print comics pages , and they would introduce all this sound and motion .
the problem was , that if you go with this idea - this basic idea that space equals time in comics - what happens is that when you introduce sound and motion , which are temporal phenomena that can only be represented through time , then they break with that continuity of presentation .
interactivity was another thing .
there were hypertext comics .
but the thing about hypertext is that everything in hypertext is either here , not here or connected to here ; it 's profoundly non-spatial .
the distance from abraham lincoln to a lincoln penny , the penny marshall to the marshall plan to " plan 9 " to nine lives : it 's all the same .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and - but in comics , in comics , every aspect of the work , every element of the work has a spatial relationship to every other element at all times .
so the question was : was there any way to preserve that spatial relationship while still taking advantage of all of the things that digital had to offer us ?
and i found my personal answer for this in those ancient comics that i was showing you .
each of them has a single unbroken reading line , whether it 's going zigzag across the walls or spiraling up a column or just straight left to right , or even going in a backwards zigzag across those 88 accordion-folded pages .
the same thing is happening , and that is that the basic idea that as you move through space you move through time is being carried out without any compromise , but there were compromises when print hit .
adjacent spaces were no longer adjacent moments , so the basic idea of comics was being broken again and again and again and again .
and i thought , o.k. , well , if that 's true , is there any way , when we go beyond today 's print , to somehow bring that back ?
now , the monitor is just as limited as the page , technically , right ?
it 's a different shape , but other than that it 's the same basic limitation .
but that 's only if you look at the monitor as a page , but not if you look at the monitor as a window .
and that 's what i proposed : that perhaps we could create these comics on an infinite canvas : along the x axis and the y axis and staircases .
we could do circular narratives that were literally circular .
we could do a turn in a story that was literally a turn .
parallel narratives could be literally parallel .
x , y and also z.
so i had all these notions . this was back in the late ' 90s , and other people in my business thought i was pretty crazy , but a lot of people then went on and actually did it .
i 'm going to show you a couple now .
this was an early collage comic by a fellow named jason lex .
and notice what 's going on here .
what i 'm searching for is a durable mutation - that 's what all of us are searching for .
as media head into this new era , we are looking for mutations that are durable , that have some sort of staying power .
now , we 're taking this basic idea of presenting comics in a visual medium , and then we 're carrying it through all the way from beginning to end .
that 's that entire comic you just saw is up on the screen right now .
but even though we 're only experiencing it one piece at a time , that 's just where the technology is right now .
as the technology evolves , as you get full immersive displays and whatnot , this sort of thing will only grow .
it will adapt . it will adapt to its environment : it 's a durable mutation .
here 's another one i 'll show you . this is by drew weing ; this is called , " pup contemplates the heat death of the universe . "
see what 's going on here as we draw these stories on an infinite canvas is you 're creating a more pure expression of what this medium is all about .
we 'll go by this a little quickly - you get the idea .
i just want to get to the last panel .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- there we go .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- just one more .
talk about your infinite canvas .
it 's by a guy named daniel merlin goodbrey in britain .
why is this important ?
i think this is important because media , all media , provide us a window back into our world .
now , it could be that motion pictures - and eventually , virtual reality , or something equivalent to it - some sort of immersive display , is going to provide us with our most efficient escape from the world that we 're in .
that 's why most people turn to storytelling , is to escape .
but media provides us with a window back into the world that we live in .
and when media evolve so that the identity of the media becomes increasingly unique .
because what you 're looking at is , you 're looking at comics cubed : you 're looking at comics that are more comics-like than they 've ever been before .
when that happens , you provide people with multiple ways of re-entering the world through different windows , and when you do that , it allows them to triangulate the world that they live in and see its shape .
and that 's why i think this is important .
one of many reasons , but i 've got to go now .
thank you for having me .
when i was growing up in montana , i had two dreams .
i wanted to be a paleontologist , a dinosaur paleontologist , and i wanted to have a pet dinosaur .
and so that 's what i 've been striving for all of my life .
i was very fortunate early in my career .
i was fortunate in finding things .
i was n't very good at reading things .
in fact , i do n't read much of anything .
i am extremely dyslexic , and so reading is the hardest thing i do .
but instead , i go out and i find things .
then i just pick things up .
i basically practice for finding money on the street .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i wander about the hills , and i have found a few things .
and i have been fortunate enough to find things like the first eggs in the western hemisphere and the first baby dinosaurs in nests , the first dinosaur embryos and massive accumulations of bones .
and it happened to be at a time when people were just starting to begin to realize that dinosaurs were n't the big , stupid , green reptiles that people had thought for so many years .
people were starting to get an idea that dinosaurs were special .
and so , at that time , i was able to make some interesting hypotheses along with my colleagues .
we were able to actually say that dinosaurs - based on the evidence we had - that dinosaurs built nests and lived in colonies and cared for their young , brought food to their babies and traveled in gigantic herds .
so it was pretty interesting stuff .
i have gone on to find more things and discover that dinosaurs really were very social .
we have found a lot of evidence that dinosaurs changed from when they were juveniles to when they were adults .
the appearance of them would have been different - which it is in all social animals .
in social groups of animals , the juveniles always look different than the adults .
the adults can recognize the juveniles ; the juveniles can recognize the adults .
and so we 're making a better picture of what a dinosaur looks like .
and they did n't just all chase jeeps around .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but it is that social thing that i guess attracted michael crichton .
and in his book , he talked about the social animals .
and then steven spielberg , of course , depicts these dinosaurs as being very social creatures .
the theme of this story is building a dinosaur , and so we come to that part of " jurassic park . "
michael crichton really was one of the first people to talk about bringing dinosaurs back to life .
you all know the story , right .
i mean , i assume everyone here has seen " jurassic park . "
if you want to make a dinosaur , you go out , you find yourself a piece of petrified tree sap - otherwise known as amber - that has some blood-sucking insects in it , good ones , and you get your insect and you drill into it and you suck out some dna , because obviously all insects that sucked blood in those days sucked dinosaur dna out .
and you take your dna back to the laboratory and you clone it .
and i guess you inject it into maybe an ostrich egg , or something like that , and then you wait , and , lo and behold , out pops a little baby dinosaur .
and everybody 's happy about that .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and they 're happy over and over again .
they keep doing it ; they just keep making these things .
and then , then , then , and then ...
then the dinosaurs , being social , act out their socialness , and they get together , and they conspire .
and , of course , that 's what makes steven spielberg 's movie - conspiring dinosaurs chasing people around .
so i assume everybody knows that if you actually had a piece of amber and it had an insect in it , and you drilled into it , and you got something out of that insect , and you cloned it , and you did it over and over and over again , you 'd have a room full of mosquitos .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- and probably a whole bunch of trees as well .
now if you want dinosaur dna , i say go to the dinosaur .
so that 's what we 've done .
back in 1993 when the movie came out , we actually had a grant from the national science foundation to attempt to extract dna from a dinosaur , and we chose the dinosaur on the left , a tyrannosaurus rex , which was a very nice specimen .
and one of my former doctoral students , dr. mary schweitzer , actually had the background to do this sort of thing .
and so she looked into the bone of this t. rex , one of the thigh bones , and she actually found some very interesting structures in there .
they found these red circular-looking objects , and they looked , for all the world , like red blood cells .
and they 're in what appear to be the blood channels that go through the bone .
and so she thought , well , what the heck .
so she sampled some material out of it .
now it was n't dna ; she did n't find dna .
but she did find heme , which is the biological foundation of hemoglobin .
and that was really cool .
that was interesting .
that was - here we have 65-million-year-old heme .
well we tried and tried and we could n't really get anything else out of it .
so a few years went by , and then we started the hell creek project .
and the hell creek project was this massive undertaking to get as many dinosaurs as we could possibly find , and hopefully find some dinosaurs that had more material in them .
and out in eastern montana there 's a lot of space , a lot of badlands , and not very many people , and so you can go out there and find a lot of stuff .
and we did find a lot of stuff .
we found a lot of tyrannosaurs , but we found one special tyrannosaur , and we called it b-rex .
and b-rex was found under a thousand cubic yards of rock .
it was n't a very complete t. rex , and it was n't a very big t. rex , but it was a very special b-rex .
and i and my colleagues cut into it , and we were able to determine , by looking at lines of arrested growth , some lines in it , that b-rex had died at the age of 16 .
we do n't really know how long dinosaurs lived , because we have n't found the oldest one yet .
but this one died at the age of 16 .
we gave samples to mary schweitzer , and she was actually able to determine that b-rex was a female based on medullary tissue found on the inside of the bone .
medullary tissue is the calcium build-up , the calcium storage basically , when an animal is pregnant , when a bird is pregnant .
so here was the character that linked birds and dinosaurs .
but mary went further .
she took the bone , and she dumped it into acid .
now we all know that bones are fossilized , and so if you dump it into acid , there should n't be anything left .
but there was something left .
there were blood vessels left .
there were flexible , clear blood vessels .
and so here was the first soft tissue from a dinosaur .
it was extraordinary .
but she also found osteocytes , which are the cells that laid down the bones .
and try and try , we could not find dna , but she did find evidence of proteins .
but we thought maybe - well , we thought maybe that the material was breaking down after it was coming out of the ground .
we thought maybe it was deteriorating very fast .
and so we built a laboratory in the back of an 18-wheeler trailer , and actually took the laboratory to the field where we could get better samples .
and we did . we got better material .
the cells looked better .
the vessels looked better .
found the protein collagen .
i mean , it was wonderful stuff .
but it 's not dinosaur dna .
so we have discovered that dinosaur dna , and all dna , just breaks down too fast .
we 're just not going to be able to do what they did in " jurassic park . "
we 're not going to be able to make a dinosaur based on a dinosaur .
but birds are dinosaurs .
birds are living dinosaurs .
we actually classify them as dinosaurs .
we now call them non-avian dinosaurs and avian dinosaurs .
so the non-avian dinosaurs are the big clunky ones that went extinct .
avian dinosaurs are our modern birds .
so we do n't have to make a dinosaur because we already have them .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i know , you 're as bad as the sixth-graders .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the sixth-graders look at it and they say , " no . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " you can call it a dinosaur , but look at the velociraptor : the velociraptor is cool . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " the chicken is not . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so this is our problem , as you can imagine .
the chicken is a dinosaur .
i mean it really is .
you ca n't argue with it because we 're the classifiers and we 've classified it that way .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- but the sixth-graders demand it .
" fix the chicken . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so that 's what i 'm here to tell you about : how we are going to fix a chicken .
so we have a number of ways that we actually can fix the chicken .
because evolution works , we actually have some evolutionary tools .
we 'll call them biological modification tools .
we have selection .
and we know selection works .
we started out with a wolf-like creature and we ended up with a maltese .
i mean , that 's - that 's definitely genetic modification .
or any of the other funny-looking little dogs .
we also have transgenesis .
transgenesis is really cool too .
that 's where you take a gene out of one animal and stick it in another one .
that 's how people make glofish .
you take a glow gene out of a coral or a jellyfish and you stick it in a zebrafish , and , puff , they glow .
and that 's pretty cool .
and they obviously make a lot of money off of them .
and now they 're making glow-rabbits and glow-all-sorts-of-things .
i guess we could make a glow chicken .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but i do n't think that 'll satisfy the sixth-graders either .
but there 's another thing .
there 's what we call atavism activation .
and atavism activation is basically - an atavism is an ancestral characteristic .
you heard that occasionally children are born with tails , and it 's because it 's an ancestral characteristic .
and so there are a number of atavisms that can happen .
snakes are occasionally born with legs .
and here 's an example .
this is a chicken with teeth .
a fellow by the name of matthew harris at the university of wisconsin in madison actually figured out a way to stimulate the gene for teeth , and so was able to actually turn the tooth gene on and produce teeth in chickens .
now that 's a good characteristic .
we can save that one .
we know we can use that .
we can make a chicken with teeth .
that 's getting closer .
that 's better than a glowing chicken .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- a friend of mine , a colleague of mine , dr. hans larsson at mcgill university , is actually looking at atavisms .
and he 's looking at them by looking at the embryo genesis of birds and actually looking at how they develop , and he 's interested in how birds actually lost their tail .
he 's also interested in the transformation of the arm , the hand , to the wing .
he 's looking for those genes as well .
and i said , " well , if you can find those , i can just reverse them and make what i need to make for the sixth-graders . "
and so he agreed .
and so that 's what we 're looking into .
if you look at dinosaur hands , a velociraptor has that cool-looking hand with the claws on it .
archaeopteryx , which is a bird , a primitive bird , still has that very primitive hand .
but as you can see , the pigeon , or a chicken or anything else , another bird , has kind of a weird-looking hand , because the hand is a wing .
but the cool thing is that , if you look in the embryo , as the embryo is developing the hand actually looks pretty much like the archaeopteryx hand .
it has the three fingers , the three digits .
but a gene turns on that actually fuses those together .
and so what we 're looking for is that gene .
we want to stop that gene from turning on , fusing those hands together , so we can get a chicken that hatches out with a three-fingered hand , like the archaeopteryx .
and the same goes for the tails .
birds have basically rudimentary tails .
and so we know that in embryo , as the animal is developing , it actually has a relatively long tail .
but a gene turns on and resorbs the tail , gets rid of it .
so that 's the other gene we 're looking for .
we want to stop that tail from resorbing .
so what we 're trying to do really is take our chicken , modify it and make the chickenosaurus .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's a cooler-looking chicken .
but it 's just the very basics .
so that really is what we 're doing .
and people always say , " why do that ?
why make this thing ?
what good is it ? "
well , that 's a good question .
actually , i think it 's a great way to teach kids about evolutionary biology and developmental biology and all sorts of things .
and quite frankly , i think if colonel sanders was to be careful how he worded it , he could actually advertise an extra piece .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- anyway - when our dino-chicken hatches , it will be , obviously , the poster child , or what you might call a poster chick , for technology , entertainment and design .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- marco tempest : what i 'd like to show you today is something in the way of an experiment .
today 's its debut .
it 's a demonstration of augmented reality .
and the visuals you 're about to see are not prerecorded .
they are live and reacting to me in real time .
i like to think of it as a kind of technological magic .
so fingers crossed .
and keep your eyes on the big screen .
augmented reality is the melding of the real world with computer-generated imagery .
it seems the perfect medium to investigate magic and ask , why , in a technological age , we continue to have this magical sense of wonder .
magic is deception , but it is a deception we enjoy .
to enjoy being deceived , an audience must first suspend its disbelief .
it was the poet samuel taylor coleridge who first suggested this receptive state of mind .
samuel taylor coleridge : i try to convey a semblance of truth in my writing to produce for these shadows of the imagination a willing suspension of disbelief that , for a moment , constitutes poetic faith .
mt : this faith in the fictional is essential for any kind of theatrical experience .
without it , a script is just words .
augmented reality is just the latest technology .
is just an artful demonstration of dexterity .
we are all very good at suspending our disbelief .
we do it every day , while reading novels , watching television or going to the movies .
we willingly enter fictional worlds where we cheer our heroes and cry for friends we never had .
without this ability there is no magic .
it was jean robert-houdin , france 's greatest illusionist , who first recognized the role of the magician as a storyteller .
he said something that i 've posted on the wall of my studio .
jean robert-houdin : a conjurer is not a juggler .
he is an actor playing the part of a magician .
mt : which means magic is theater and every trick is a story .
follow the archetypes of narrative fiction .
there are tales of creation and loss , death and resurrection , and obstacles that must be overcome .
now many of them are intensely dramatic .
magicians play with fire and steel , defy the fury of the buzzsaw , dare to catch a bullet or attempt a deadly escape .
but audiences do n't come to see the magician die , they come to see him live .
because the best stories always have a happy ending .
the tricks of magic have one special element .
they are stories with a twist .
now edward de bono argued that our brains are pattern matching machines .
he said that magicians deliberately exploit the way their audiences think .
edward de bono : stage magic relies almost wholly on the momentum error .
the audience is led to make assumptions or elaborations that are perfectly reasonable , but do not , in fact , match what is being done in front of them .
mt : in that respect , magic tricks are like jokes .
jokes lead us down a path to an expected destination .
but when the scenario we have imagined suddenly flips into something entirely unexpected , we laugh .
the same thing happens when people watch magic tricks .
the finale defies logic , gives new insight into the problem , and audiences express their amazement with laughter .
it 's fun to be fooled .
one of the key qualities of all stories is that they 're made to be shared .
we feel compelled to tell them .
when i do a trick at a party - -lrb- laughter -rrb- that person will immediately pull their friend over and ask me to do it again .
they want to share the experience .
that makes my job more difficult , because , if i want to surprise them , i need to tell a story that starts the same , but ends differently - a trick with a twist on a twist .
it keeps me busy .
now experts believe that stories go beyond our capacity for keeping us entertained .
we think in narrative structures .
we connect events and emotions and instinctively transform them into a sequence that can be easily understood .
it 's a uniquely human achievement .
we all want to share our stories , whether it is the trick we saw at the party , the bad day at the office or the beautiful sunset we saw on vacation .
today , thanks to technology , we can share those stories as never before , by email , facebook , blogs , tweets , on ted.com.
the tools of social networking , these are the digital campfires around which the audience gathers to hear our story .
we turn facts into similes and metaphors , and even fantasies .
we polish the rough edges of our lives so that they feel whole .
our stories make us the people we are and , sometimes , the people we want to be .
they give us our identity and a sense of community .
and if the story is a good one , it might even make us smile .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- phyllis rodriguez : we are here today because of the fact that we have what most people consider an unusual friendship .
and it is .
and yet , it feels natural to us now .
i first learned that my son had been in the world trade center on the morning of september 11th , 2001 .
we did n't know if he had perished yet until 36 hours later .
at the time , we knew that it was political .
we were afraid of what our country was going to do in the name of our son - my husband , orlando , and i and our family .
and when i saw it - and yet , through the shock , the terrible shock , and the terrible explosion in our lives , literally , we were not vengeful .
and a couple of weeks later when zacarias moussaoui was indicted on six counts of conspiracy to commit terrorism , and the u.s. government called for a death penalty for him , if convicted , my husband and i spoke out in opposition to that , publicly .
through that and through human rights groups , we were brought together with several other victims ' families .
when i saw aicha in the media , coming over when her son was indicted , and i thought , " what a brave woman .
someday i want to meet that woman when i 'm stronger . "
i was still in deep grief ; i knew i did n't have the strength .
i knew i would find her someday , or we would find each other .
because , when people heard that my son was a victim , i got immediate sympathy .
but when people learned what her son was accused of , she did n't get that sympathy .
but her suffering is equal to mine .
so we met in november 2002 , and aicha will now tell you how that came about .
-lrb- translator -rrb- aicha el-wafi : good afternoon , ladies and gentlemen .
i am the mother of zacarias moussaoui .
and i asked the organization of human rights to put me in touch with the parents of the victims .
so they introduced me to five families .
and i saw phyllis , and i watched her .
she was the only mother in the group .
the others were brothers , sisters .
and i saw in her eyes that she was a mother , just like me .
i suffered a lot as a mother .
i was married when i was 14 .
i lost a child when i was 15 , a second child when i was 16 .
so the story with zacarias was too much really .
and i still suffer , because my son is like he 's buried alive .
i know she really cried for her son .
but she knows where he is .
my son , i do n't know where he is .
i do n't know if he 's alive . i do n't know if he 's tortured .
i do n't know what happened to him .
so that 's why i decided to tell my story , so that my suffering is something positive for other women .
for all the women , all the mothers that give life , you can give back , you can change .
it 's up to us women , because we are women , because we love our children .
we must be hand-in-hand and do something together .
it 's not against women , it 's for us , for us women , for our children .
i talk against violence , against terrorism .
i go to schools to talk to young , muslim girls so they do n't accept to be married against their will very young .
so if i can save one of the young girls , and avoid that they get married and suffer as much as i did , well this is something good .
this is why i 'm here in front of you .
pr : i would like to say that i have learned so much from aicha , starting with that day we had our very first meeting with other family members - which was a very private meeting with security , because it was november 2002 , and , frankly , we were afraid of the super-patriotism of that time in the country - those of us family members .
but we were all so nervous .
" why does she want to meet us ? "
and then she was nervous .
" why did we want to meet her ? "
what did we want from each other ?
before we knew each others ' names , or anything , we had embraced and wept .
then we sat in a circle with support , with help , from people experienced in this kind of reconciliation .
and aicha started , and she said , " i do n't know if my son is guilty or innocent , but i want to tell you how sorry i am for what happened to your families .
i know what it is to suffer , and i feel that if there is a crime , a person should be tried fairly and punished . "
but she reached out to us in that way , and it was , i 'd like to say , it was an ice-breaker .
and what happened then is we all told our stories , and we all connected as human beings .
by the end of the afternoon - it was about three hours after lunch - we 'd felt as if we 'd known each other forever .
now what i learned from her , is a woman , not only who could be so generous under these present circumstances and what it was then , and what was being done to her son , but the life she 's had .
i never had met someone with such a hard life , from such a totally different culture and environment from my own .
and i feel that we have a special connection , which i value very much .
and i think it 's all about being afraid of the other , but making that step and then realizing , " hey , this was n't so hard .
who else can i meet that i do n't know , or that i 'm so different from ? "
so , aicha , do you have a couple of words for conclusion ?
because our time is up .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- translator -rrb- aw : i wanted to say that we have to try to know other people , the other .
you have to be generous , and your hearts must be generous , your mind must be generous .
you must be tolerant .
you have to fight against violence .
and i hope that someday we 'll all live together in peace and respecting each other .
this is what i wanted to say .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm going to start with a little story .
so , i grew up in this neighborhood . when i was 15 years old , i went from being what i think was a strapping young athlete , over four months , slowly wasting away until i was basically a famine victim with an unquenchable thirst .
i had basically digested away my body .
and this all came to a head when i was on a backpacking trip , my first one ever actually , on old rag mountain in west virginia , and was putting my face into puddles of water and drinking like a dog .
that night , i was taken into the emergency room and diagnosed as a type 1 diabetic in full-blown ketoacidosis .
and i recovered , thanks to the miracles of modern medicine , insulin and other things , and gained all my weight back and more .
and something festered inside me after this happened .
what i thought about was , what caused the diabetes ?
you see , diabetes is an autoimmune disease where your body fights itself , and at the time people thought that somehow maybe exposure to a pathogen had triggered my immune system to fight the pathogen and then kill the cells that make insulin .
and this is what i thought for a long period of time , and that 's in fact what medicine and people have focused on quite a bit , the microbes that do bad things .
and that 's where i need my assistant here now .
you may recognize her .
so , i went yesterday , i apologize , i skipped a few of the talks , and i went over to the national academy of sciences building , and they sell toys , giant microbes .
and here we go !
so you have caught flesh-eating disease if you caught that one .
i gotta get back out my baseball ability here .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , unfortunately or not surprisingly , most of the microbes they sell at the national academy building are pathogens .
everybody focuses on the things that kill us , and that 's what i was focusing on .
and it turns out that we are covered in a cloud of microbes , and those microbes actually do us good much of the time , rather than killing us .
and so , we 've known about this for some period of time .
people have used microscopes to look at the microbes that cover us , i know you 're not paying attention to me , but ...
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the microbes that cover us .
and if you look at them in the microscope , you can see that we actually have 10 times as many cells of microbes on us as we have human cells .
there 's more mass in the microbes than the mass of our brain .
we are literally a teeming ecosystem of microorganisms .
and unfortunately , if you want to learn about the microorganisms , just looking at them in a microscope is not sufficient .
and so we just heard about the dna sequencing .
it turns out that one of the best ways to look at microbes and to understand them is to look at their dna .
and that 's what i 've been doing for 20 years , using dna sequencing , collecting samples from various places , including the human body , reading the dna sequence and then using that dna sequencing to tell us about the microbes that are in a particular place .
and what 's amazing , when you use this technology , for example , looking at humans , we 're not just covered in a sea of microbes .
there are thousands upon thousands of different kinds of microbes on us .
we have millions of genes of microbes in our human microbiome covering us .
and so this microbial diversity differs between people , and what people have been thinking about in the last 10 , maybe 15 years is , maybe these microbes , this microbial cloud in and on us , and the variation between us , may be responsible for some of the health and illness differences between us .
and that comes back to the diabetes story i was telling you .
it turns out that people now think that one of the triggers for type 1 diabetes is not fighting a pathogen , but is in fact trying to - miscommunicating with the microbes that live in and on you .
and somehow maybe the microbial community that 's in and on me got off , and then this triggered some sort of immune response and led to me killing the cells that make insulin in my body .
and so what i want to tell you about for a few minutes is , what people have learned using dna sequencing techniques in particular , to study the microbial cloud that lives in and on us .
and i want to tell you a story about a personal project .
my first personal experience with studying the microbes on the human body actually came from a talk that i gave , right around the corner from here at georgetown .
i gave a talk , and a family friend who happened to be the dean of georgetown medical school was at the talk , and came up to me afterwards saying , they were doing a study of ileal transplants in people .
and they wanted to look at the microbes after the transplants .
and so i started a collaboration with this person , michael zasloff and thomas fishbein , to look at the microbes that colonized these ilea after they were transplanted into a recipient .
and i can tell you all the details about the microbial study that we did there , but the reason i want to tell you this story is something really striking that they did at the beginning of this project .
they take the donor ileum , which is filled with microbes from a donor and they have a recipient who might have a problem with their microbial community , say crohn 's disease , and they sterilized the donor ileum .
cleaned out all the microbes , and then put it in the recipient .
they did this because this was common practice in medicine , even though it was obvious that this was not a good idea .
and fortunately , in the course of this project , the transplant surgeons and the other people decided , forget common practice . we have to switch .
so they actually switched to leaving some of the microbial community in the ileum . they leave the microbes with the donor , and theoretically that might help the people who are receiving this ileal transplant .
and so , people - this is a study that i did now .
in the last few years there 's been a great expansion in using dna technology to study the microbes in and on people .
there 's something called the human microbiome project that 's going on in the united states , and metahit going on in europe , and a lot of other projects .
and when people have done a variety of studies , they have learned things such as , when a baby is born , during vaginal delivery you get colonized by the microbes from your mother .
there are risk factors associated with cesarean sections , some of those risk factors may be due to mis-colonization when you carve a baby out of its mother rather than being delivered through the birth canal .
and a variety of other studies have shown that the microbial community that lives in and on us helps in development of the immune system , helps in fighting off pathogens , helps in our metabolism , and determining our metabolic rate , probably determines our odor , and may even shape our behavior in a variety of ways .
and so , these studies have documented or suggested out of a variety of important functions for the microbial community , this cloud , the non-pathogens that live in and on us .
and one area that i think is very interesting , which many of you may have now that we 've thrown microbes into the crowd , is something that i would call " germophobia . "
so people are really into cleanliness , right ?
we have antibiotics in our kitchen counters , people are washing every part of them all of the time , we pump antibiotics into our food , into our communities , we take antibiotics excessively .
and killing pathogens is a good thing if you 're sick , but we should understand that when we pump chemicals and antibiotics into our world , that we 're also killing the cloud of microbes that live in and on us .
and excessive use of antibiotics , in particular in children , has been shown to be associated with , again , risk factors for obesity , for autoimmune diseases , for a variety of problems that are probably due to disruption of the microbial community .
so the microbial community can go wrong whether we want it to or not , or we can kill it with antibiotics , but what can we do to restore it ?
i 'm sure many people here have heard about probiotics .
probiotics are one thing that you can try and do to restore the microbial community that is in and on you .
and they definitely have been shown to be effective in some cases .
there 's a project going on at uc davis where people are using probiotics to try and treat , prevent , necrotizing enterocolitis in premature infants .
premature infants have real problems with their microbial community .
and it may be that probiotics can help prevent the development of this horrible necrotizing enterocolitis in these premature infants .
but probiotics are sort of a very , very simple solution .
most of the pills that you can take or the yogurts that you can eat have one or two species in them , maybe five species in them , and the human community is thousands upon thousands of species .
so what can we do to restore our microbial community when we have thousands and thousands of species on us ?
well , one thing that animals seem to do is , they eat poo - coprophagia .
and it turns out that many veterinarians , old school veterinarians in particular , have been doing something called " poo tea , " not booty , but poo tea , to treat colic and other ailments in horses and cows and things like that , where you make tea from the poo from a healthy individual animal and you feed it to a sick animal .
although , unless you have a fistulated cow with a big hole in its side , and you can put your hand into its rumen , it 's hard to imagine that the delivery of microbes directly into the mouth and through the entire top of the digestive tract is the best delivery system , so you may have heard in people they are now doing fecal transplants , where rather than delivering a couple of probiotic microbes through the mouth , they are delivering a community of probiotics , a community of microbes from a healthy donor , through the other end .
and this has turned out to be very effective in fighting certain intransigent infectious diseases like clostridium difficile infections that can stay with people for years and years and years .
transplants of the feces , of the microbes from the feces , from a healthy donor has actually been shown to cure systemic c. dif infections in some people .
now what these transplants , these fecal transplants , or the poo tea suggest to me , and many other people have come up with this same idea , is that the microbial community in and on us , it 's an organ .
we should view it as a functioning organ , part of ourselves .
we should treat it carefully and with respect , and we do not want to mess with it , say by c-sections or by antibiotics or excessive cleanliness , without some real good justification .
and what the dna sequencing technologies are allowing people to do now is do detailed studies of , say , 100 patients who have crohn 's disease and 100 people who do n't have crohn 's disease .
or 100 people who took antibiotics when they were little , and 100 people who did not take antibiotics .
and we can now start to compare the community of microbes and their genes and see if there are differences .
and eventually we may be able to understand if they 're not just correlative differences , but causative .
studies in model systems like mouse and other animals are also helping do this , but people are now using these technologies because they 've gotten very cheap , to study the microbes in and on a variety of people .
so , in wrapping up , what i want to tell you about is , i did n't tell you a part of the story of coming down with diabetes .
it turns out that my father was an m.d. , actually studied hormones . i told him many times that i was tired , thirsty , not feeling very good .
and he shrugged it off , i think he either thought i was just complaining a lot , or it was the typical m.d. " nothing can be wrong with my children . "
we even went to the international society of endocrinology meeting as family in quebec .
and i was getting up every five minutes to pee , and drinking everybody 's water at the table , and i think they all thought i was a druggie .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but the reason i 'm telling you this is that the medical community , my father as an example , sometimes does n't see what 's right in front of their eyes .
the microbial cloud , it is right in front of us .
we ca n't see it most of the time . it 's invisible .
they 're microbes . they 're tiny .
but we can see them through their dna , we can see them through the effects that they have on people .
and what we need now is to start thinking about this microbial community in the context of everything in human medicine .
it does n't mean that it affects every part of us , but it might .
what we need is a full field guide to the microbes that live in and on people , so that we can understand what they 're doing to our lives .
we are them . they are us .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- okay , so 90 percent of my photographic process is , in fact , not photographic .
it involves a campaign of letter writing , research and phone calls to access my subjects , which can range from hamas leaders in gaza to a hibernating black bear in its cave in west virginia .
and oddly , the most notable letter of rejection i ever received came from walt disney world , a seemingly innocuous site .
and it read - i 'm just going to read a key sentence : " especially during these violent times , i personally believe that the magical spell cast upon guests who visit our theme parks is particularly important to protect and helps to provide them with an important fantasy they can escape to . "
photography threatens fantasy .
they did n't want to let my camera in because it confronts constructed realities , myths and beliefs , and provides what appears to be evidence of a truth .
but there are multiple truths attached to every image , depending on the creator 's intention , the viewer and the context in which it is presented .
over a five year period following september 11th , when the american media and government were seeking hidden and unknown sites beyond its borders , most notably weapons of mass destruction , i chose to look inward at that which was integral to america 's foundation , mythology and daily functioning .
i wanted to confront the boundaries of the citizen , self-imposed and real , and confront the divide between privileged and public access to knowledge .
it was a critical moment in american history and global history where one felt they did n't have access to accurate information .
and i wanted to see the center with my own eyes , but what i came away with is a photograph .
and it 's just another place from which to observe , and the understanding that there are no absolute , all-knowing insiders .
and the outsider can never really reach the core .
i 'm going to run through some of the photographs in this series .
it 's titled , " an american index of the hidden and unfamiliar , " and it 's comprised of nearly 70 images .
in this context i 'll just show you a few .
this is a nuclear waste storage and encapsulation facility at hanford site in washington state , where there are over 1,900 stainless steel capsules containing nuclear waste submerged in water .
a human standing in front of an unprotected capsule would die instantly .
and i found one section amongst all of these that actually resembled the outline of the united states of america , which you can see here .
and a big part of the work that is sort of absent in this context is text .
so i create these two poles .
every image is accompanied with a very detailed factual text .
and what i 'm most interested in is the invisible space between a text and its accompanying image , and how the image is transformed by the text and the text by the image .
so , at best , the image is meant to float away into abstraction and multiple truths and fantasy .
and then the text functions as this cruel anchor that kind of nails it to the ground .
but in this context i 'm just going to read an abridged version of those texts .
this is a cryopreservation unit , and it holds the bodies of the wife and mother of cryonics pioneer robert ettinger , who hoped to be awoken one day to extended life in good health , with advancements in science and technology , all for the cost of 35 thousand dollars , for forever .
this is a 21-year-old palestinian woman undergoing hymenoplasty .
hymenoplasty is a surgical procedure which restores the virginal state , allowing her to adhere to certain cultural expectations regarding virginity and marriage .
so it essentially reconstructs a ruptured hymen , allowing her to bleed upon having sexual intercourse , to simulate the loss of virginity .
this is a jury simulation deliberation room , and you can see beyond that two-way mirror jury advisers standing in a room behind the mirror .
and they observe deliberations after mock trial proceedings so that they can better advise their clients how to adjust their trial strategy to have the outcome that they 're hoping for .
this process costs 60,000 dollars .
this is a u.s. customs and border protection room , a contraband room , at john f. kennedy international airport .
on that table you can see 48 hours ' worth of seized goods from passengers entering in to the united states .
there is a pig 's head and african cane rats .
and part of my photographic work is i 'm not just documenting what 's there .
i do take certain liberties and intervene .
and in this i really wanted it to resemble an early still-life painting , so i spent some time with the smells and items .
this is the exhibited art on the walls of the cia in langley , virginia , their original headquarters building .
and the cia has had a long history with both covert and public cultural diplomacy efforts .
and it 's speculated that some of their interest in the arts was designed to counter soviet communism and promote what it considered to be pro-american thoughts and aesthetics .
and one of the art forms that elicited the interest of the agency , and had thus come under question , is abstract expressionism .
this is the forensic anthropology research facility , and on a six acre plot there are approximately 75 cadavers at any given time that are being studied by forensic anthropologists and researchers who are interested in monitoring a rate of corpse decomposition .
and in this particular photograph the body of a young boy has been used to reenact a crime scene .
this is the only federally funded site where it is legal to cultivate cannabis for scientific research in the united states .
it 's a research crop marijuana grow room .
and part of the work that i hope for is that there is a sort of disorienting entropy where you ca n't find any discernible formula in how these things - they sort of awkwardly jump from government to science to religion to security - and you ca n't completely understand how information is being distributed .
these are transatlantic submarine communication cables that travel across the floor of the atlantic ocean , connecting north america to europe .
they carry over 60 million simultaneous voice conversations , and in a lot of the government and technology sites there was just this very apparent vulnerability .
this one is almost humorous because it feels like i could just snip all of that conversation in one easy cut .
but stuff did feel like it could have been taken 30 or 40 years ago , like it was locked in the cold war era and had n't necessarily progressed .
this is a braille edition of playboy magazine .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and this is ... a division of the library of congress produces a free national library service for the blind and visually impaired , and the publications they choose to publish are based on reader popularity .
and playboy is always in the top few .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but you 'd be surprised , they do n't do the photographs . it 's just the text .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this is an avian quarantine facility where all imported birds coming into america are required to undergo a 30-day quarantine , where they are tested for diseases including exotic newcastle disease and avian influenza .
this film shows the testing of a new explosive fill on a warhead .
and the air armament center at eglin air force base in florida is responsible for the deployment and testing of all air-delivered weaponry coming from the united states .
and the film was shot on 72 millimeter , government-issue film .
and that red dot is a marking on the government-issue film .
all living white tigers in north america are the result of selective inbreeding - that would be mother to son , father to daughter , sister to brother - to allow for the genetic conditions that create a salable white tiger .
meaning white fur , ice blue eyes , a pink nose .
and the majority of these white tigers are not born in a salable state and are killed at birth .
it 's a very violent process that is little known .
and the white tiger is obviously celebrated in several forms of entertainment .
kenny was born . he actually made it to adulthood .
he has since passed away , but was mentally retarded and suffers from severe bone abnormalities .
this , on a lighter note , is at george lucas ' personal archive .
this is the death star .
and it 's shown here in its true orientation .
in the context of " star wars : return of the jedi , " its mirror image is presented .
they flip the negative .
and you can see the photoetched brass detailing , and the painted acrylic facade .
in the context of the film , this is a deep-space battle station of the galactic empire , capable of annihilating planets and civilizations , and in reality it measures about four feet by two feet .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this is at fort campbell in kentucky .
it 's a military operations on urbanized terrain site .
essentially they 've simulated a city for urban combat , and this is one of the structures that exists in that city .
it 's called the world church of god .
it 's supposed to be a generic site of worship .
and after i took this photograph , they constructed a wall around the world church of god to mimic the set-up of mosques in afghanistan or iraq .
and i worked with mehta vihar who creates virtual simulations for the army for tactical practice .
and we put that wall around the world church of god , and also used the characters and vehicles and explosions that are offered in the video games for the army .
and i put them into my photograph .
this is live hiv virus at harvard medical school , who is working with the u.s. government to develop sterilizing immunity .
and alhurra is a u.s. government- sponsored arabic language television network that distributes news and information to over 22 countries in the arab world .
it runs 24 hours a day , commercial free .
however , it 's illegal to broadcast alhurra within the united states .
and in 2004 , they developed a channel called alhurra iraq , which specifically deals with events occurring in iraq and is broadcast to iraq .
now i 'm going to move on to another project i did .
it 's titled " the innocents . "
and for the men in these photographs , photography had been used to create a fantasy .
contradicting its function as evidence of a truth , in these instances it furthered the fabrication of a lie .
i traveled across the united states photographing men and women who had been wrongfully convicted of crimes they did not commit , violent crimes .
i investigate photography 's ability to blur truth and fiction , and its influence on memory , which can lead to severe , even lethal consequences .
for the men in these photographs , the primary cause of their wrongful conviction was mistaken identification .
a victim or eyewitness identifies a suspected perpetrator through law enforcement 's use of images .
but through exposure to composite sketches , polaroids , mug shots and line-ups , eyewitness testimony can change .
i 'll give you an example from a case .
a woman was raped and presented with a series of photographs from which to identify her attacker .
she saw some similarities in one of the photographs , but could n't quite make a positive identification .
days later , she is presented with another photo array of all new photographs , except that one photograph that she had some draw to from the earlier array is repeated in the second array .
and a positive identification is made because the photograph replaced the memory , if there ever was an actual memory .
photography offered the criminal justice system a tool that transformed innocent citizens into criminals , and the criminal justice system failed to recognize the limitations of relying on photographic identifications .
frederick daye , who is photographed at his alibi location , where 13 witnesses placed him at the time of the crime .
he was convicted by an all-white jury of rape , kidnapping and vehicle theft .
and he served 10 years of a life sentence .
now dna exonerated frederick and it also implicated another man who was serving time in prison .
but the victim refused to press charges because she claimed that law enforcement had permanently altered her memory through the use of frederick 's photograph .
charles fain was convicted of kidnapping , rape and murder of a young girl walking to school .
he served 18 years of a death sentence .
i photographed him at the scene of the crime at the snake river in idaho .
and i photographed all of the wrongfully convicted at sites that came to particular significance in the history of their wrongful conviction .
the scene of arrest , the scene of misidentification , the alibi location .
and here , the scene of the crime , it 's this place to which he 's never been , but changed his life forever .
so photographing there , i was hoping to highlight the tenuous relationship between truth and fiction , in both his life and in photography .
calvin washington was convicted of capital murder .
he served 13 years of a life sentence in waco , texas .
larry mayes , i photographed at the scene of arrest , where he hid between two mattresses in gary , indiana , in this very room to hide from the police .
he ended up serving 18 and a half years of an 80 year sentence for rape and robbery .
the victim failed to identify larry in two live lineups and then made a positive identification , days later , from a photo array .
larry youngblood served eight years of a 10 and half year sentence in arizona for the abduction and repeated sodomizing of a 10 year old boy at a carnival .
he is photographed at his alibi location .
ron williamson . ron was convicted of the rape and murder of a barmaid at a club , and served 11 years of a death sentence .
i photographed ron at a baseball field because he had been drafted to the oakland a 's to play professional baseball just before his conviction .
and the state 's key witness in ron 's case was , in the end , the actual perpetrator .
ronald jones served eight years of a death sentence for rape and murder of a 28-year-old woman .
i photographed him at the scene of arrest in chicago .
william gregory was convicted of rape and burglary .
he served seven years of a 70 year sentence in kentucky .
timothy durham , who i photographed at his alibi location where 11 witnesses placed him at the time of the crime , was convicted of 3.5 years of a 3220 year sentence , for several charges of rape and robbery .
he had been misidentified by an 11-year-old victim .
troy webb is photographed here at the scene of the crime in virginia .
he was convicted of rape , kidnapping and robbery , and served seven years of a 47 year sentence .
troy 's picture was in a photo array that the victim tentatively had some draw toward , but said he looked too old .
the police went and found a photograph of troy webb from four years earlier , which they entered into a photo array days later , and he was positively identified .
now i 'm going to leave you with a self portrait .
and it reiterates that distortion is a constant , and our eyes are easily deceived .
that 's it . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- think about your day for a second .
you woke up , felt fresh air on your face as you walked out the door , encountered new colleagues and had great discussions , and felt in awe when you found something new .
but i bet there 's something you did n't think about today - something so close to home that you probably do n't think about it very often at all .
and that 's that all the sensations , feelings , decisions and actions are mediated by the computer in your head called the brain .
now the brain may not look like much from the outside - a couple pounds of pinkish-gray flesh , amorphous - but the last hundred years of neuroscience have allowed us to zoom in on the brain , and to see the intricacy of what lies within .
and they 've told us that this brain is an incredibly complicated circuit made out of hundreds of billions of cells called neurons .
now unlike a human-designed computer , where there 's a fairly small number of different parts - we know how they work , because we humans designed them - the brain is made out of thousands of different kinds of cells , maybe tens of thousands .
they come in different shapes ; they 're made out of different molecules .
and they project and connect to different brain regions , and they also change different ways in different disease states .
let 's make it concrete .
there 's a class of cells , a fairly small cell , an inhibitory cell , that quiets its neighbors .
it 's one of the cells that seems to be atrophied in disorders like schizophrenia .
it 's called the basket cell .
and this cell is one of the thousands of kinds of cell that we are learning about .
new ones are being discovered everyday .
as just a second example : these pyramidal cells , large cells , they can span a significant fraction of the brain .
they 're excitatory .
and these are some of the cells that might be overactive in disorders such as epilepsy .
every one of these cells is an incredible electrical device .
they receive input from thousands of upstream partners and compute their own electrical outputs , which then , if they pass a certain threshold , will go to thousands of downstream partners .
and this process , which takes just a millisecond or so , happens thousands of times a minute in every one of your 100 billion cells , as long as you live and think and feel .
so how are we going to figure out what this circuit does ?
ideally , we could go through the circuit and turn these different kinds of cell on and off and see whether we could figure out which ones contribute to certain functions and which ones go wrong in certain pathologies .
if we could activate cells , we could see what powers they can unleash , what they can initiate and sustain .
if we could turn them off , then we could try and figure out what they 're necessary for .
and that 's a story i 'm going to tell you about today .
and honestly , where we 've gone through over the last 11 years , through an attempt to find ways of turning circuits and cells and parts and pathways of the brain on and off , both to understand the science and also to confront some of the issues that face us all as humans .
now before i tell you about the technology , the bad news is that a significant fraction of us in this room , if we live long enough , will encounter , perhaps , a brain disorder .
already , a billion people have had some kind of brain disorder that incapacitates them , and the numbers do n't do it justice though .
these disorders - schizophrenia , alzheimer 's , depression , addiction - they not only steal our time to live , they change who we are .
they take our identity and change our emotions and change who we are as people .
now in the 20th century , there was some hope that was generated through the development of pharmaceuticals for treating brain disorders , and while many drugs have been developed that can alleviate symptoms of brain disorders , practically none of them can be considered to be cured .
and part of that 's because we 're bathing the brain in the chemical .
this elaborate circuit made out of thousands of different kinds of cell is being bathed in a substance .
that 's also why , perhaps , most of the drugs , and not all , on the market can present some kind of serious side effect too .
now some people have gotten some solace from electrical stimulators that are implanted in the brain .
and for parkinson 's disease , cochlear implants , these have indeed been able to bring some kind of remedy to people with certain kinds of disorder .
but electricity also will go in all directions - the path of least resistance , which is where that phrase , in part , comes from .
and it also will affect normal circuits as well as the abnormal ones that you want to fix .
so again , we 're sent back to the idea of ultra-precise control .
could we dial-in information precisely where we want it to go ?
so when i started in neuroscience 11 years ago , i had trained as an electrical engineer and a physicist , and the first thing i thought about was , if these neurons are electrical devices , all we need to do is to find some way of driving those electrical changes at a distance .
if we could turn on the electricity in one cell , but not its neighbors , that would give us the tool we need to activate and shut down these different cells , figure out what they do and how they contribute to the networks in which they 're embedded .
and also it would allow us to have the ultra-precise control we need in order to fix the circuit computations that have gone awry .
now how are we going to do that ?
well there are many molecules that exist in nature , which are able to convert light into electricity .
you can think of them as little proteins that are like solar cells .
if we can install these molecules in neurons somehow , then these neurons would become electrically drivable with light .
and their neighbors , which do n't have the molecule , would not .
there 's one other magic trick you need to make this all happen , and that 's the ability to get light into the brain .
and to do that - the brain does n't feel pain - you can put - taking advantage of all the effort that 's gone into the internet and communications and so on - optical fibers connected to lasers that you can use to activate , in animal models for example , in pre-clinical studies , these neurons and to see what they do .
so how do we do this ?
around 2004 , in collaboration with gerhard nagel and karl deisseroth , this vision came to fruition .
there 's a certain alga that swims in the wild , and it needs to navigate towards light in order to photosynthesize optimally .
and it senses light with a little eye-spot , which works not unlike how our eye works .
in its membrane , or its boundary , it contains little proteins that indeed can convert light into electricity .
so these molecules are called channelrhodopsins .
and each of these proteins acts just like that solar cell that i told you about .
when blue light hits it , it opens up a little hole and allows charged particles to enter the eye-spot , and that allows this eye-spot to have an electrical signal just like a solar cell charging up a battery .
so what we need to do is to take these molecules and somehow install them in neurons .
and because it 's a protein , it 's encoded for in the dna of this organism .
so all we 've got to do is take that dna , put it into a gene therapy vector , like a virus , and put it into neurons .
so it turned out that this was a very productive time in gene therapy , and lots of viruses were coming along .
so this turned out to be very simple to do .
and early in the morning one day in the summer of 2004 , we gave it a try , and it worked on the first try .
you take this dna and you put it into a neuron .
the neuron uses its natural protein-making machinery to fabricate these little light-sensitive proteins and install them all over the cell , like putting solar panels on a roof , and the next thing you know , you have a neuron which can be activated with light .
so this is very powerful .
one of the tricks you have to do is to figure out how to deliver these genes to the cells that you want and not all the other neighbors .
and you can do that ; you can tweak the viruses so they hit just some cells and not others .
and there 's other genetic tricks you can play in order to get light-activated cells .
this field has now come to be known as optogenetics .
and just as one example of the kind of thing you can do , you can take a complex network , use one of these viruses to deliver the gene just to one kind of cell in this dense network .
and then when you shine light on the entire network , just that cell type will be activated .
so for example , lets sort of consider that basket cell i told you about earlier - the one that 's atrophied in schizophrenia and the one that is inhibitory .
if we can deliver that gene to these cells - and they 're not going to be altered by the expression of the gene , of course - and then flash blue light over the entire brain network , just these cells are going to be driven .
and when the light turns off , these cells go back to normal , so they do n't seem to be averse against that .
not only can you use this to study what these cells do , what their power is in computing in the brain , but you can also use this to try to figure out - well maybe we could jazz up the activity of these cells , if indeed they 're atrophied .
now i want to tell you a couple of short stories about how we 're using this , both at the scientific , clinical and pre-clinical levels .
one of the questions we 've confronted is , what are the signals in the brain that mediate the sensation of reward ?
because if you could find those , those would be some of the signals that could drive learning .
the brain will do more of whatever got that reward .
and also these are signals that go awry in disorders such as addiction .
so if we could figure out what cells they are , we could maybe find new targets for which drugs could be designed or screened against , or maybe places where electrodes could be put in for people who have very severe disability .
so to do that , we came up with a very simple paradigm in collaboration with the fiorella group , where one side of this little box , if the animal goes there , the animal gets a pulse of light in order to make different cells in the brain sensitive to light .
so if these cells can mediate reward , the animal should go there more and more .
and so that 's what happens .
this animal 's going to go to the right-hand side and poke his nose there , and he gets a flash of blue light every time he does that .
and he 'll do that hundreds and hundreds of times .
these are the dopamine neurons , which some of you may have heard about , in some of the pleasure centers in the brain .
now we 've shown that a brief activation of these is enough , indeed , to drive learning .
now we can generalize the idea .
instead of one point in the brain , we can devise devices that span the brain , that can deliver light into three-dimensional patterns - arrays of optical fibers , each coupled to its own independent miniature light source .
and then we can try to do things in vivo that have only been done to-date in a dish - like high-throughput screening throughout the entire brain for the signals that can cause certain things to happen .
or that could be good clinical targets for treating brain disorders .
and one story i want to tell you about is how can we find targets for treating post-traumatic stress disorder - a form of uncontrolled anxiety and fear .
was to adopt a very classical model of fear .
this goes back to the pavlovian days .
it 's called pavlovian fear conditioning - where a tone ends with a brief shock .
the shock is n't painful , but it 's a little annoying .
and over time - in this case , a mouse , which is a good animal model , commonly used in such experiments - the animal learns to fear the tone .
the animal will react by freezing , sort of like a deer in the headlights .
now the question is , what targets in the brain can we find that allow us to overcome this fear ?
so what we do is we play that tone again after it 's been associated with fear .
but we activate targets in the brain , different ones , using that optical fiber array i told you about in the previous slide , in order to try and figure out which targets can cause the brain to overcome that memory of fear .
and so this brief video shows you one of these targets that we 're working on now .
this is an area in the prefrontal cortex , a region where we can use cognition to try to overcome aversive emotional states .
and the animal 's going to hear a tone - and a flash of light occurred there .
there 's no audio on this , but you can see the animal 's freezing .
this tone used to mean bad news .
and there 's a little clock in the lower left-hand corner , so you can see the animal is about two minutes into this .
and now this next clip is just eight minutes later .
and the same tone is going to play , and the light is going to flash again .
okay , there it goes . right now .
and now you can see , just 10 minutes into the experiment , that we 've equipped the brain by photoactivating this area to overcome the expression of this fear memory .
now over the last couple of years , we 've gone back to the tree of life because we wanted to find ways to turn circuits in the brain off .
if we could do that , this could be extremely powerful .
if you can delete cells just for a few milliseconds or seconds , you can figure out what necessary role they play in the circuits in which they 're embedded .
and we 've now surveyed organisms from all over the tree of life - every kingdom of life except for animals , we see slightly differently .
and we found all sorts of molecules , they 're called halorhodopsins or archaerhodopsins , that respond to green and yellow light .
and they do the opposite thing of the molecule i told you about before with the blue light activator channelrhodopsin .
let 's give an example of where we think this is going to go .
consider , for example , a condition like epilepsy , where the brain is overactive .
now if drugs fail in epileptic treatment , one of the strategies is to remove part of the brain .
but that 's obviously irreversible , and there could be side effects .
what if we could just turn off that brain for a brief amount of time , until the seizure dies away , and cause the brain to be restored to its initial state - sort of like a dynamical system that 's being coaxed down into a stable state .
so this animation just tries to explain this concept where we made these cells sensitive to being turned off with light , and we beam light in , and just for the time it takes to shut down a seizure , we 're hoping to be able to turn it off .
and so we do n't have data to show you on this front , but we 're very excited about this .
now i want to close on one story , which we think is another possibility - which is that maybe these molecules , if you can do ultra-precise control , can be used in the brain itself to make a new kind of prosthetic , an optical prosthetic .
i already told you that electrical stimulators are not uncommon .
seventy-five thousand people have parkinson 's deep-brain stimulators implanted .
maybe 100,000 people have cochlear implants , which allow them to hear .
there 's another thing , which is you 've got to get these genes into cells .
and new hope in gene therapy has been developed because viruses like the adeno-associated virus , which probably most of us around this room have , and it does n't have any symptoms , which have been used in hundreds of patients to deliver genes into the brain or the body .
and so far , there have not been serious adverse events associated with the virus .
there 's one last elephant in the room , the proteins themselves , which come from algae and bacteria and fungi , and all over the tree of life .
most of us do n't have fungi or algae in our brains , so what is our brain going to do if we put that in ?
are the cells going to tolerate it ? will the immune system react ?
in its early days - these have not been done on humans yet - but we 're working on a variety of studies to try and examine this , and so far we have n't seen overt reactions of any severity to these molecules or to the illumination of the brain with light .
so it 's early days , to be upfront , but we 're excited about it .
i wanted to close with one story , which we think could potentially be a clinical application .
now there are many forms of blindness where the photoreceptors , our light sensors that are in the back of our eye , are gone .
and the retina , of course , is a complex structure .
now let 's zoom in on it here , so we can see it in more detail .
the photoreceptor cells are shown here at the top , and then the signals that are detected by the photoreceptors are transformed by various computations until finally that layer of cells at the bottom , the ganglion cells , relay the information to the brain , where we see that as perception .
in many forms of blindness , like retinitis pigmentosa , or macular degeneration , the photoreceptor cells have atrophied or been destroyed .
now how could you repair this ?
it 's not even clear that a drug could cause this to be restored , because there 's nothing for the drug to bind to .
on the other hand , light can still get into the eye .
the eye is still transparent and you can get light in .
so what if we could just take these channelrhodopsins and other molecules and install them on some of these other spare cells and convert them into little cameras .
and because there 's so many of these cells in the eye , potentially , they could be very high-resolution cameras .
so this is some work that we 're doing .
it 's being led by one of our collaborators , alan horsager at usc , and being sought to be commercialized by a start-up company eos neuroscience , which is funded by the nih .
and what you see here is a mouse trying to solve a maze .
it 's a six-arm maze . and there 's a bit of water in the maze to motivate the mouse to move , or he 'll just sit there .
and the goal , of course , of this maze is to get out of the water and go to a little platform that 's under the lit top port .
now mice are smart , so this mouse solves the maze eventually , but he does a brute-force search .
he 's swimming down every avenue until he finally gets to the platform .
so he 's not using vision to do it .
these different mice are different mutations that recapitulate different kinds of blindness that affect humans .
and so we 're being careful in trying to look at these different models so we come up with a generalized approach .
so how are we going to solve this ?
we 're going to do exactly what we outlined in the previous slide .
we 're going to take these blue light photosensors and install them on a layer of cells in the middle of the retina in the back of the eye and convert them into a camera - just like installing solar cells all over those neurons to make them light sensitive .
light is converted to electricity on them .
so this mouse was blind a couple weeks before this experiment and received one dose of this photosensitive molecule in a virus .
and now you can see , the animal can indeed avoid walls and go to this little platform and make cognitive use of its eyes again .
and to point out the power of this : these animals are able to get to that platform just as fast as animals that have seen their entire lives .
so this pre-clinical study , i think , bodes hope for the kinds of things we 're hoping to do in the future .
to close , i want to point out that we 're also exploring new business models for this new field of neurotechnology .
we 're developing these tools , but we share them freely with hundreds of groups all over the world , so people can study and try to treat different disorders .
and our hope is that , by figuring out brain circuits at a level of abstraction that lets us repair them and engineer them , we can take some of these intractable disorders that i told you about earlier , practically none of which are cured , and in the 21st century make them history .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- juan enriquez : so some of the stuff is a little dense .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but the implications of being able to control seizures or epilepsy with light instead of drugs , and being able to target those specifically is a first step .
the second thing that i think i heard you say is you can now control the brain in two colors , like an on / off switch .
ed boyden : that 's right .
je : which makes every impulse going through the brain a binary code .
eb : right , yeah .
so with blue light , we can drive information , and it 's in the form of a one .
and by turning things off , it 's more or less a zero .
so our hope is to eventually build brain coprocessors that work with the brain so we can augment functions in people with disabilities .
je : and in theory , that means that , as a mouse feels , smells , hears , touches , you can model it out as a string of ones and zeros .
eb : sure , yeah . we 're hoping to use this as a way of testing what neural codes can drive certain behaviors and certain thoughts and certain feelings , and use that to understand more about the brain .
je : does that mean that some day you could download memories and maybe upload them ?
eb : well that 's something we 're starting to work on very hard .
we 're now working on some work where we 're trying to tile the brain with recording elements too .
so we can record information and then drive information back in - sort of computing what the brain needs in order to augment its information processing .
je : well , that might change a couple things . thank you . -lrb- eb : thank you . -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- i started with paragliding .
paragliding is taking off from mountains with a paraglider , with the possibility to fly cross-country , distance , just with the use of thermals to soar .
also different aerobatic maneuvers are possible with a paraglider .
from there i started with skydiving .
in this picture you can see there is a four-way skydive , four people flying together , and on the left hand side it 's the camera flier with the camera mounted to his helmet so he can film the whole jump , for the film itself and also for the judging .
from regular , relative skydiving i went on to freeflying .
freeflying is more the three-dimensional skydiving .
you can see the skydiver with the red suit , he 's in a stand-up position .
the one with the yellow-green suit , he 's flying head-down .
and that 's me in the background , carving around the whole formation in freefall also , with the helmet cam to film this jump .
from freeflying i went on to skysurfing .
skysurfing is skydiving with a board on the feet .
you can imagine with this big surface of a skysurfing board , there is a lot of force , a lot of power .
of course i can use this power for example for nice spinning - we call it " helicopter moves . "
from there i went on to wingsuit flying .
wingsuit flying is a suit , that i can make fly , just only with my body .
if i put some tension on my body , tension on my suit , i can make it fly . and as you see the fall rate is much much slower because of the bigger surface .
with a proper body position i 'm able to really move forward to gain quite some distance .
this is a jump i did in rio de janeiro .
you can see the copacabana on the left-hand side .
from there with all the skills and knowledge from paragliding and all the different disciplines in skydiving , i went on to base jumping .
base jumping is skydiving from fixed objects , like buildings , antennae , bridges and earth - meaning mountains , cliffs .
it 's for sure - for me - it 's the ultimate feeling of being in free fall , with all the visual references .
so my goal soon was to discover new places that nobody had jumped before .
so in summer 2000 i was the first to base jump the eiger north face in switzerland .
two years after this , i was the first to base jump from matterhorn , a very famous mountain that probably everybody knows in here .
2005 i did a base jump from the eiger , from the monk and from the jungfrau , three very famous mountains in switzerland .
the special thing on these three jumps were , i hiked them all and climbed them all in only one day .
in 2008 i jumped the eiffel tower in paris .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so with all this knowledge , i also wanted to get into stunts .
so with some friends we started to do different tricks , like for example this jump here , i jumped from a paraglider .
or here - everybody was freezing , pretty much , except me , because it was very cold in austria where we did this filming .
everybody sitting in a basket , and i was on top of the balloon , ready to slide down with my skysurf board .
or this jump , from a moving truck on the highway .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- extreme sports on top level like this is only possible if you practice step by step , if you really work hard on your skills and on your knowledge .
of course you need to be in physical , very good , condition , so i 'm training a lot .
you need to have the best possible equipment .
and probably the most important is you have to work on your mental skills , mental preparation .
and all this to come as close as possible to the human dream of being able to fly .
so for 2009 , i 'm training hard for my two new projects .
the first one , i want to set a world record in flying from a cliff with my wingsuit .
and i want to set a new record , with the longest distance ever flown .
for my second project , i have a sensational idea of a jump that never has been done before .
so now , on the following movie you will see that i 'm much better in flying a wingsuit than speaking in english .
enjoy , and thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- june cohen : i have some questions .
i think we all might have some questions .
question one : so does that actually feel the way the flying dream does ?
because it looks like it might .
ueli gegenschatz : pretty much . i believe this is probably the closest possibility to come to the dream of being able to fly .
jc : i know the answer to this , but how do you land ?
ue : parachute . we have to open a parachute just seconds before , i would say , impact .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's not possible to land a wingsuit yet .
jc : yet . but people are trying . are you among those - you 're not going to commit - are you among those trying to do it ?
ue : it 's a dream . it 's a dream . yeah .
we 're still working on it and we 're developing the wingsuits to get better performance , to get more knowledge .
and i believe soon .
jc : all right . well we will watch this space . but i have two more questions .
what is the - there was exhaust coming out of the back of the wingsuit . was that a propelled wingsuit that you were wearing ?
ue : nope . it 's just smoke .
jc : coming off of you ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ue : hopefully not .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- jc : that seems dangerous .
ue : no , smoke is for two reasons , you can see the speed , you can see the way where i was flying .
that 's reason number one . and reason number two : it 's much easier for the camera guy to film if i 'm using smoke .
jc : ah , i see . so the wingsuit is set up to deliberately release smoke so that you can be tracked . one more question .
what do you do to to cover your face ?
because i just keep thinking of going that fast and having your whole face smushed backwards .
are you in a helmet ? are you in goggles ?
ue : the purest and the best feeling would be with only goggles .
jc : and is that how you usually fly ?
ue : usually i 'm wearing a helmet . in the mountains i 'm always wearing a helmet because of landings - usually it 's difficult - it 's not like regular skydiving where you have like the big landings .
so you have to be prepared .
jc : right . now is there anything you do n't do ?
do people come to you with projects and say , " we want you to do this ! "
and do you ever say , " no , no i 'm not going to . "
ue : oh of course , of course . some people have crazy ideas and - -lrb- laughter -rrb- jc : ... a round of applause ...
-lrb- applause -rrb- ue : thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- what i want to do this afternoon is something a little different than what 's scheduled .
foreign policy , you can figure that out by watching , i do n't know , rachel maddow or somebody , but - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - i want to talk about young people and structure , young people and structure .
this was last wednesday afternoon at a school in brooklyn , new york , at cristo rey high school , run by the jesuits .
and i was talking to this group of students , and take a look at them .
they were around me in three directions .
you 'll noticed that almost all of them are minority .
you 'll notice that the building is rather austere .
it 's an old new york school building , nothing fancy .
they still have old blackboards and whatnot .
and there are about 300 kids in this school , and the school 's been going now for four years , and they 're about to graduate their first class .
twenty-two people are graduating , and all 22 are going to college .
they all come from homes where there is , for the most part , just one person in the home , usually the mother or the grandmother , and that 's it , and they come here for their education and for their structure .
now i had this picture taken , and it was put up on my facebook page last week , and somebody wrote in , " huh , why does he have him standing at attention like that ? "
and then they said , " but he looks good . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- he does look good , because kids need structure , and the trick i play in all of my school appearances is that when i get through with my little homily to the kids , i then invite them to ask questions , and when they raise their hands , i say , " come up , " and i make them come up and stand in front of me .
i make them stand at attention like a soldier .
put your arms straight down at your side , look up , open your eyes , stare straight ahead , and speak out your question loudly so everybody can hear .
no slouching , no pants hanging down , none of that stuff .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and this young man , his name is - his last name cruz - he loved it . that 's all over his facebook page and it 's gone viral .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so people think i 'm being unkind to this kid .
no , we 're having a little fun .
and the thing about it , i 've done this for years , the younger they are , the more fun it is .
when i get six- and seven-year-olds in a group , i have to figure out how to keep them quiet .
you know that they 'll always start yakking .
and so i play a little game with them before i make them stand at attention .
i say , " now listen . in the army , when we want you to pay attention , we have a command . it 's called ' at ease . ' it means everybody be quiet and pay attention . listen up .
do you understand ? "
" uh-huh , uh-huh , uh-huh . " " let 's practice . everybody start chatting . "
and i let them go for about 10 seconds , then i go , " at ease ! "
" huh ! " -lrb- laughter -rrb- " yes , general . yes , general . "
try it with your kids . see if it works . -lrb- laughter -rrb- i do n't think so .
but anyway , it 's a game i play , and it comes obviously from my military experience .
because for the majority of my adult life , i worked with young kids , teenagers with guns , i call them .
and we would bring them into the army , and the first thing we would do is to put them in an environment of structure , put them in ranks , make them all wear the same clothes , cut all their hair off so they look alike , make sure that they are standing in ranks .
we teach them how to go right face , left face , so they can obey instructions and know the consequences of not obeying instructions .
it gives them structure .
and then we introduce them to somebody who they come to hate immediately , the drill sergeant .
and they hate him .
and the drill sergeant starts screaming at them , and telling them to do all kinds of awful things .
but then the most amazing thing happens over time .
once that structure is developed , once they understand the reason for something , once they understand , " mama ai n't here , son .
i 'm your worst nightmare . i 'm your daddy and your mommy .
and that 's just the way it is . you got that , son ?
yeah , and then when i ask you a question , there are only three possible answers : yes , sir ; no , sir ; and no excuse , sir .
do n't start telling me why you did n't do something .
it 's yes , sir ; no , sir ; no excuse , sir . "
" you did n't shave . " " but sir - " " no , do n't tell me how often you scraped your face this morning .
i 'm telling you you did n't shave . "
" no excuse , sir . " " attaboy , you 're learning fast . "
but you 'd be amazed at what you can do with them once you put them in that structure .
in 18 weeks , they have a skill . they are mature .
and you know what , they come to admire the drill sergeant and they never forget the drill sergeant .
they come to respect him .
and so we need more of this kind of structure and respect in the lives of our children .
i spend a lot of time with youth groups , and i say to people , " when does the education process begin ? "
we 're always talking about , " let 's fix the schools .
let 's do more for our teachers . let 's put more computers in our schools .
let 's get it all online . "
that is n't the whole answer . it 's part of the answer .
but the real answer begins with bringing a child to the school with structure in that child 's heart and soul to begin with .
when does the learning process begin ? does it begin in first grade ?
no , no , it begins the first time a child in a mother 's arms looks up at the mother and says , " oh , this must be my mother .
she 's the one who feeds me .
oh yeah , when i do n't feel so good down there , she takes care of me .
it 's her language i will learn . "
and at that moment they shut out all the other languages that they could be learning at that age , but by three months , that 's her .
and if the person doing it , whether it 's the mother or grandmother , whoever 's doing it , that is when the education process begins .
that 's when language begins .
that 's when love begins . that 's when structure begins .
that 's when you start to imprint on the child that " you are special , you are different from every other child in the world .
and we 're going to read to you . "
a child who has not been read to is in danger when that child gets to school .
a child who does n't know his or her colors or does n't know how to tell time , does n't know how to tie shoes , does n't know how to do those things , and does n't know how to do something that goes by a word that was drilled into me as a kid : mind .
mind your manners ! mind your adults ! mind what you 're saying !
this is the way children are raised properly .
and i watched my own young grandchildren now come along and they 're , much to the distress of my children , they are acting just like we did . you know ? you imprint them .
and that 's what you have to do to prepare children for education and for school .
and i 'm working at all the energy i have to sort of communicate this message that we need preschool , we need head start , we need prenatal care .
the education process begins even before the child is born , and if you do n't do that , you 're going to have difficulty .
and we are having difficulties in so many of our communities and so many of our schools where kids are coming to first grade and their eyes are blazing , they 've got their little knapsack on and they 're ready to go , and then they realize they 're not like the other first graders who know books , have been read to , can do their alphabet .
and by the third grade , the kids who did n't have that structure and minding in the beginning start to realize they 're behind , and what do they do ?
they act it out . they act it out , and they 're on their way to jail or they 're on their way to being dropouts .
it 's predictable .
if you 're not at the right reading level at third grade , you are a candidate for jail at age 18 , and we have the highest incarceration rate because we 're not getting our kids the proper start in life .
the last chapter in my book is called " the gift of a good start . "
the gift of a good start . every child ought to have a good start in life .
i was privileged to have that kind of good start .
i was not a great student .
i was a public school kid in new york city , and i did n't do well at all .
i have my entire new york city board of education transcript from kindergarten through college .
i wanted it when i was writing my first book .
i wanted to see if my memory was correct , and , my god , it was . -lrb- laughter -rrb- straight c everywhere .
and i finally bounced through high school , got into the city college of new york with a 78.3 average , which i should n't have been allowed in with , and then i started out in engineering , and that only lasted six months . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and then i went into geology , " rocks for jocks . " this is easy .
and then i found rotc .
i found something that i did well and something that i loved doing , and i found a group of youngsters like me who felt the same way .
and so my whole life then was dedicated to rotc and the military .
and i say to young kids everywhere , as you 're growing up and as this structure is being developed inside of you , always be looking for that which you do well and that which you love doing , and when you find those two things together , man , you got it .
that 's what 's going on . and that 's what i found .
now the authorities at ccny were getting tired of me being there .
i 'd been there four and a half going on five years , and my grades were not doing particularly well , and i was in occasional difficulties with the administration .
and so they said , " but he does so well in rotc .
look , he gets straight a 's in that but not in anything else . "
and so they said , " look , let 's take his rotc grades and roll them into his overall gpa and see what happens . "
and they did , and it brought me up to 2.0 . -lrb- laughter -rrb- yep . -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- they said , " it 's good enough for government work .
give him to the army . we 'll never see him again . we 'll never see him again . "
so they shipped me off to the army , and lo and behold , many years later , i 'm considered one of the greatest sons the city college of new york has ever had . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so , i tell young people everywhere , it ai n't where you start in life , it 's what you do with life that determines where you end up in life , and you are blessed to be living in a country that , no matter where you start , you have opportunities so long as you believe in yourself , you believe in the society and the country , and you believe that you can self-improve and educate yourself as you go along .
and that 's the key to success .
but it begins with the gift of a good start .
if we do n't give that gift to each and every one of our kids , if we do n't invest at the earliest age , we 're going to be running into difficulties .
it 's why we have a dropout rate of roughly 25 percent overall and almost 50 percent of our minority population living in low-income areas , because they 're not getting the gift of a good start .
my gift of a good start was not only being in a nice family , a good family , but having a family that said to me , " now listen , we came to this country in banana boats in 1920 and 1924 .
we worked like dogs down in the garment industry every single day .
we 're not doing it so that you can stick something up your nose or get in trouble . and do n't even think about dropping out . "
if i had ever gone home and told those immigrant people that , " you know , i 'm tired of school and i 'm dropping out , " they 'd said , " we 're dropping you out . we 'll get another kid . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- they had expectations for all of the cousins and the extended family of immigrants that lived in the south bronx , but they had more than just expectations for us .
they stuck into our hearts like a dagger a sense of shame : " do n't you shame this family . "
sometimes i would get in trouble , and my parents were coming home , and i was in my room waiting for what 's going to happen , and i would sit there saying to myself , " okay , look , take the belt and hit me , but , god , do n't give me that ' shame the family ' bit again . "
it devastated me when my mother did that to me .
and i also had this extended network .
children need a network . children need to be part of a tribe , a family , a community .
in my case it was aunts who lived in all of these tenement buildings .
i do n't know how many of you are new yorkers , but there were these tenement buildings , and these women were always hanging out one of the windows , leaning on a pillow .
they never left . -lrb- laughter -rrb- i , so help me god , i grew up walking those streets , and they were always there .
they never went to the bathroom . they never cooked . -lrb- laughter -rrb- they never did anything .
but what they did was keep us in play .
they kept us in play .
and they did n't care whether you became a doctor or a lawyer or a general , and they never expected any generals in the family , as long as you got an education and then you got a job .
" do n't give us any of that self-actualization stuff .
you get a job and get out of the house .
we do n't have time to waste for that .
and then you can support us . that 's the role of you guys . "
and so , it 's so essential that we kind of put this culture back into our families , all families .
and it is so important that all of you here today who are successful people , and i 'm sure have wonderful families and children and grandchildren , it 's not enough . you 've got to reach out and back and find kids like mr. cruz who can make it if you give them the structure , if you reach back and help , if you mentor , if you invest in boys and girls clubs , if you work with your school system , make sure it 's the best school system , and not just your kid 's school , but the school uptown in harlem , not just downtown montessori on the west side .
all of us have to have a commitment to do that .
and we 're not just investing in the kids .
we 're investing in our future .
we 're going to be a minority-majority country in one more generation .
those that we call minorities now are going to be the majority .
and we have to make sure that they are ready to be the majority .
we have to make sure they 're ready to be the leaders of this great country of ours , a country that is like no other , a country that amazes me every single day , a country that 's fractious . we 're always arguing with each other .
that 's how the system 's supposed to work .
it 's a country of such contrasts , but it 's a nation of nations .
we touch every nation . every nation touches us .
we are a nation of immigrants .
that 's why we need sound immigration policy .
it 's ridiculous not to have a sound immigration policy to welcome those who want to come here and be part of this great nation , or we can send back home with an education to help their people rise up out of poverty .
one of the great stories i love to tell is about my love of going to my hometown of new york and walking up park avenue on a beautiful day and admiring everything and seeing all the people go by from all over the world .
but what i always have to do is stop at one of the corners and get a hot dog from the immigrant pushcart peddler .
gotta have a dirty water dog . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and no matter where i am or what i 'm doing , i 've got to do that .
i even did it when i was secretary of state .
i 'd come out of my suite at the waldorf astoria - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - be walking up the street , and i would hit around 55th street looking for the immigrant pushcart peddler .
in those days , i had five bodyguards around me and three new york city police cars would roll alongside to make sure nobody whacked me while i was going up park avenue . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and i would order the hot dog from the guy , and he 'd start to fix it , and then he 'd look around at the bodyguards and the police cars - " i 've got a green card ! i 've got a green card ! " -lrb- laughter -rrb- " it 's okay , it 's okay . "
but now i 'm alone . i 'm alone .
i 've got no bodyguards , i 've got no police cars . i 've got nothing .
but i gotta have my hot dog .
i did it just last week . it was on a tuesday evening down by columbus circle .
and the scene repeats itself so often .
i 'll go up and ask for my hot dog , and the guy will fix it , and as he 's finishing , he 'll say , " i know you . i see you on television .
you 're , well , you 're general powell . "
" yes , yes . " " oh ... " i hand him the money .
" no , general . you ca n't pay me . i 've been paid .
america has paid me . i never forget where i came from .
but now i 'm an american . sir , thank you . "
i accept the generosity , continue up the street , and it washes over me , my god , it 's the same country that greeted my parents this way 90 years ago .
so we are still that magnificent country , but we are fueled by young people coming up from every land in the world , and it is our obligation as contributing citizens to this wonderful country of ours to make sure that no child gets left behind .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the two most likely largest inventions of our generation are the internet and the mobile phone .
they 've changed the world .
however , largely to our surprise , they also turned out to be the perfect tools for the surveillance state .
it turned out that the capability to collect data , information and connections about basically any of us and all of us is exactly what we 've been hearing throughout of the summer through revelations and leaks about western intelligence agencies , mostly u.s. intelligence agencies , watching over the rest of the world .
we 've heard about these starting with the revelations from june 6 .
edward snowden started leaking information , top secret classified information , from the u.s. intelligence agencies , and we started learning about things like prism and xkeyscore and others .
and these are examples of the kinds of programs u.s. intelligence agencies are running right now , against the whole rest of the world .
and if you look back about the forecasts on surveillance by george orwell , well it turns out that george orwell was an optimist .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we are right now seeing a much larger scale of tracking of individual citizens than he could have ever imagined .
and this here is the infamous nsa data center in utah .
due to be opened very soon , it will be both a supercomputing center and a data storage center .
you could basically imagine it has a large hall filled with hard drives storing data they are collecting .
and it 's a pretty big building .
how big ? well , i can give you the numbers - 140,000 square meters - but that does n't really tell you very much .
maybe it 's better to imagine it as a comparison .
you think about the largest ikea store you 've ever been in .
this is five times larger .
how many hard drives can you fit in an ikea store ?
right ? it 's pretty big .
we estimate that just the electricity bill for running this data center is going to be in the tens of millions of dollars a year .
and this kind of wholesale surveillance means that they can collect our data and keep it basically forever , keep it for extended periods of time , keep it for years , keep it for decades .
and this opens up completely new kinds of risks to us all .
and what this is is that it is wholesale blanket surveillance on everyone .
well , not exactly everyone , because the u.s. intelligence only has a legal right to monitor foreigners .
they can monitor foreigners when foreigners ' data connections end up in the united states or pass through the united states .
and monitoring foreigners does n't sound too bad until you realize that i 'm a foreigner and you 're a foreigner .
in fact , 96 percent of the planet are foreigners .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- right ?
so it is wholesale blanket surveillance of all of us , all of us who use telecommunications and the internet .
but do n't get me wrong : there are actually types of surveillance that are okay .
i love freedom , but even i agree that some surveillance is fine .
if the law enforcement is trying to find a murderer , or they 're trying to catch a drug lord or trying to prevent a school shooting , and they have leads and they have suspects , then it 's perfectly fine for them to tap the suspect 's phone , and to intercept his internet communications .
i 'm not arguing that at all , but that 's not what programs like prism are about .
they are not about doing surveillance on people that they have reason to suspect of some wrongdoings .
they 're about doing surveillance on people they know are innocent .
so the four main arguments supporting surveillance like this , well , the first of all is that whenever you start discussing about these revelations , there will be naysayers trying to minimize the importance of these revelations , saying that we knew all this already , we knew it was happening , there 's nothing new here .
and that 's not true . do n't let anybody tell you that we knew this already , because we did not know this already .
our worst fears might have been something like this , but we did n't know this was happening .
now we know for a fact it 's happening .
we did n't know about this . we did n't know about prism .
we did n't know about xkeyscore . we did n't know about cybertrans .
we did n't know about doublearrow .
we did not know about skywriter - all these different programs run by u.s. intelligence agencies .
but now we do .
and we did not know that u.s. intelligence agencies go to extremes such as infiltrating standardization bodies to sabotage encryption algorithms on purpose .
and what that means is that you take something which is secure , an encryption algorithm which is so secure that if you use that algorithm to encrypt one file , nobody can decrypt that file .
even if they take every single computer on the planet just to decrypt that one file , it 's going to take millions of years .
so that 's basically perfectly safe , uncrackable .
you take something which is that good and then you weaken it on purpose , making all of us less secure as an end result .
a real-world equivalent would be that intelligence agencies would force some secret pin code into every single house alarm so they could get into every single house because , you know , bad people might have house alarms , but it will also make all of us less secure as an end result .
backdooring encryption algorithms just boggles the mind .
but of course , these intelligence agencies are doing their job .
this is what they have been told to do : do signals intelligence , monitor telecommunications , monitor internet traffic .
that 's what they 're trying to do , and since most , a very big part of the internet traffic today is encrypted , they 're trying to find ways around the encryption .
one way is to sabotage encryption algorithms , which is a great example about how u.s. intelligence agencies are running loose .
they are completely out of control , and they should be brought back under control .
so what do we actually know about the leaks ?
everything is based on the files leaked by mr. snowden .
the very first prism slides from the beginning of june detail a collection program where the data is collected from service providers , and they actually go and name the service providers they have access to .
they even have a specific date on when the collection of data began for each of the service providers .
so for example , they name the collection from microsoft started on september 11 , 2007 , for yahoo on the march 12 , 2008 , and then others : google , facebook , skype , apple and so on .
and every single one of these companies denies .
they all say that this simply is n't true , that they are not giving backdoor access to their data .
yet we have these files .
so is one of the parties lying , or is there some other alternative explanation ?
and one explanation would be that these parties , these service providers , are not cooperating .
instead , they 've been hacked .
that would explain it . they are n't cooperating . they 've been hacked .
in this case , they 've been hacked by their own government .
that might sound outlandish , but we already have cases where this has happened , for example , the case of the flame malware which we strongly believe was authored by the u.s. government , and which , to spread , subverted the security of the windows update network , meaning here , the company was hacked by their own government .
and there 's more evidence supporting this theory as well .
der spiegel , from germany , leaked more information about the operations run by the elite hacker units operating inside these intelligence agencies .
inside nsa , the unit is called tao , tailored access operations , and inside gchq , which is the u.k. equivalent , it 's called nac , network analysis centre .
and these recent leaks of these three slides detail an operation run by this gchq intelligence agency from the united kingdom targeting a telecom here in belgium .
and what this really means is that an e.u. country 's intelligence agency is breaching the security of a telecom of a fellow e.u. country on purpose , and they discuss it in their slides completely casually , business as usual .
here 's the primary target , here 's the secondary target , here 's the teaming .
they probably have a team building on thursday evening in a pub .
they even use cheesy powerpoint clip art like , you know , " success , " when they gain access to services like this .
what the hell ?
and then there 's the argument that okay , yes , this might be going on , but then again , other countries are doing it as well .
all countries spy .
and maybe that 's true .
many countries spy , not all of them , but let 's take an example .
let 's take , for example , sweden .
i 'm speaking of sweden because sweden has a little bit of a similar law to the united states .
when your data traffic goes through sweden , their intelligence agency has a legal right by the law to intercept that traffic .
all right , how many swedish decisionmakers and politicians and business leaders use , every day , u.s.-based services , like , you know , run windows or osx , or use facebook or linkedin , or store their data in clouds like icloud or skydrive or dropbox , or maybe use online services like amazon web services or sales support ?
and the answer is , every single swedish business leader does that every single day .
and then we turn it around .
how many american leaders use swedish webmails and cloud services ?
and the answer is zero .
so this is not balanced .
it 's not balanced by any means , not even close .
and when we do have the occasional european success story , even those , then , typically end up being sold to the united states .
like , skype used to be secure .
it used to be end-to-end encrypted .
then it was sold to the united states .
today , it no longer is secure .
so once again , we take something which is secure and then we make it less secure on purpose , making all of us less secure as an outcome .
and then the argument that the united states is only fighting terrorists .
it 's the war on terror .
you should n't worry about it .
well , it 's not the war on terror .
yes , part of it is war on terror , and yes , there are terrorists , and they do kill and maim , and we should fight them , but we know through these leaks that they have used the same techniques to listen to phone calls of european leaders , to tap the email of residents of mexico and brazil , to read email traffic inside the united nations headquarters and e.u. parliament , and i do n't think they are trying to find terrorists from inside the e.u. parliament , right ?
it 's not the war on terror .
part of it might be , and there are terrorists , but are we really thinking about terrorists as such an existential threat that we are willing to do anything at all to fight them ?
are the americans ready to throw away the constituion and throw it in the trash just because there are terrorists ?
and the same thing with the bill of rights and all the amendments and the universal declaration of human rights and the e.u. conventions on human rights and fundamental freedoms and the press freedom ?
do we really think terrorism is such an existential threat , we are ready to do anything at all ?
but people are scared about terrorists , and then they think that maybe that surveillance is okay because they have nothing to hide .
feel free to survey me if that helps .
and whoever tells you that they have nothing to hide simply has n't thought about this long enough .
-lrb- applause -rrb- because we have this thing called privacy , and if you really think that you have nothing to hide , please make sure that 's the first thing you tell me , because then i know that i should not trust you with any secrets , because obviously you ca n't keep a secret .
but people are brutally honest with the internet , and when these leaks started , many people were asking me about this .
and i have nothing to hide .
i 'm not doing anything bad or anything illegal .
yet , i have nothing that i would in particular like to share with an intelligence agency , especially a foreign intelligence agency .
and if we indeed need a big brother , i would much rather have a domestic big brother than a foreign big brother .
and when the leaks started , the very first thing i tweeted about this was a comment about how , when you 've been using search engines , you 've been potentially leaking all that to u.s. intelligence .
and two minutes later , i got a reply by somebody called kimberly from the united states challenging me , like , why am i worried about this ?
what am i sending to worry about this ? am i sending naked pictures or something ?
and my answer to kimberly was that what i 'm sending is none of your business , and it should be none of your government 's business either .
because that 's what it 's about . it 's about privacy .
privacy is nonnegotiable .
it should be built in to all the systems we use .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and one thing we should all understand is that we are brutally honest with search engines .
you show me your search history , and i 'll find something incriminating or something embarrassing there in five minutes .
we are more honest with search engines than we are with our families .
search engines know more about you than your family members know about you .
and this is all the kind of information we are giving away , we are giving away to the united states .
and surveillance changes history .
we know this through examples of corrupt presidents like nixon .
imagine if he would have had the kind of surveillance tools that are available today .
and let me actually quote the president of brazil , ms. dilma rousseff .
she was one of the targets of nsa surveillance .
her email was read , and she spoke at the united nations headquarters , and she said , " if there is no right to privacy , there can be no true freedom of expression and opinion , and therefore , there can be no effective democracy . "
that 's what it 's about .
privacy is the building block of our democracies .
and to quote a fellow security researcher , marcus ranum , he said that the united states is right now treating the internet as it would be treating one of its colonies .
so we are back to the age of colonization , and we , the foreign users of the internet , we should think about americans as our masters .
so mr. snowden , he 's been blamed for many things .
some are blaming him for causing problems for the u.s. cloud industry and software companies with these revelations - and blaming snowden for causing problems for the u.s. cloud industry would be the equivalent of blaming al gore for causing global warming .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so , what is there to be done ?
should we worry . no , we should n't worry .
we should be angry , because this is wrong , and it 's rude , and it should not be done .
but that 's not going to really change the situation .
what 's going to change the situation for the rest of the world is to try to steer away from systems built in the united states .
and that 's much easier said than done .
how do you do that ?
a single country , any single country in europe can not replace and build replacements for the u.s.-made operating systems and cloud services .
but maybe you do n't have to do it alone .
maybe you can do it together with other countries .
the solution is open source .
by building together open , free , secure systems , we can go around such surveillance , and then one country does n't have to solve the problem by itself .
it only has to solve one little problem .
and to quote a fellow security researcher , haroon meer , one country only has to make a small wave , but those small waves together become a tide , and the tide will lift all the boats up at the same time , and the tide we will build with secure , free , open-source systems , will become the tide that will lift all of us up and above the surveillance state .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the substance of things unseen .
cities , past and future .
in oxford , perhaps we can use lewis carroll and look in the looking glass that is new york city to try and see our true selves , or perhaps pass through to another world .
or , in the words of f. scott fitzgerald , " as the moon rose higher , the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually i became aware of the old island here that once flowered for dutch sailors ' eyes , a fresh green breast of the new world . "
my colleagues and i have been working for 10 years to rediscover this lost world in a project we call the mannahatta project .
we 're trying to discover what henry hudson would have seen on the afternoon of september 12th , 1609 , when he sailed into new york harbor .
and i 'd like to tell you the story in three acts , and if i have time still , an epilogue .
so , act i : a map found .
so , i did n't grow up in new york .
i grew up out west in the sierra nevada mountains , like you see here , in the red rock canyon .
and from these early experiences as a child i learned to love landscapes .
and so when it became time for me to do my graduate studies , i studied this emerging field of landscape ecology .
landscape ecology concerns itself with how the stream and the meadow and the forest and the cliffs make habitats for plants and animals .
this experience and this training lead me to get a wonderful job with the wildlife conservation society , which works to save wildlife and wild places all over the world .
and over the last decade , i traveled to over 40 countries to see jaguars and bears and elephants and tigers and rhinos .
but every time i would return from my trips i 'd return back to new york city .
and on my weekends i would go up , just like all the other tourists , to the top of the empire state building , and i 'd look down on this landscape , on these ecosystems , and i 'd wonder , " how does this landscape work to make habitat for plants and animals ?
how does it work to make habitat for animals like me ? "
i 'd go to times square and i 'd look at the amazing ladies on the wall , and wonder why nobody is looking at the historical figures just behind them .
i 'd go to central park and see the rolling topography of central park come up against the abrupt and sheer topography of midtown manhattan .
i started reading about the history and the geography in new york city .
i read that new york city was the first mega-city , a city of 10 million people or more , in 1950 .
i started seeing paintings like this .
for those of you who are from new york , this is 125th street under the west side highway .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it was once a beach . and this painting has john james audubon , the painter , sitting on the rock .
and it 's looking up on the wooded heights of washington heights to jeffrey 's hook , where the george washington bridge goes across today .
or this painting , from the 1740s , from greenwich village .
those are two students at king 's college - later columbia university - sitting on a hill , overlooking a valley .
and so i 'd go down to greenwich village and i 'd look for this hill , and i could n't find it . and i could n't find that palm tree .
what 's that palm tree doing there ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , it was in the course of these investigations that i ran into a map .
and it 's this map you see here .
it 's held in a geographic information system which allows me to zoom in .
this map is n't from hudson 's time , but from the american revolution , 170 years later , made by british military cartographers during the occupation of new york city .
and it 's a remarkable map . it 's in the national archives here in kew .
and it 's 10 feet long and three and a half feet wide .
and if i zoom in to lower manhattan you can see the extent of new york city as it was , right at the end of the american revolution .
here 's bowling green . and here 's broadway .
and this is city hall park .
so the city basically extended to city hall park .
and just beyond it you can see features that have vanished , things that have disappeared .
this is the collect pond , which was the fresh water source for new york city for its first 200 years , and for the native americans for thousands of years before that .
you can see the lispenard meadows draining down through here , through what is tribeca now , and the beaches that come up from the battery , all the way to 42nd st.
this map was made for military reasons .
they 're mapping the roads , the buildings , these fortifications that they built .
but they 're also mapping things of ecological interest , also military interest : the hills , the marshes , the streams .
this is richmond hill , and minetta water , which used to run its way through greenwich village .
or the swamp at gramercy park , right here .
or murray hill . and this is the murrays ' house on murray hill , 200 years ago .
here is times square , the two streams that came together to make a wetland in times square , as it was at the end of the american revolution .
so i saw this remarkable map in a book .
and i thought to myself , " you know , if i could georeference this map , if i could place this map in the grid of the city today , i could find these lost features of the city , in the block-by-block geography that people know , the geography of where people go to work , and where they go to live , and where they like to eat . "
so , after some work we were able to georeference it , which allows us to put the modern streets on the city , and the buildings , and the open spaces , so that we can zoom in to where the collect pond is .
we can digitize the collect pond and the streams , and see where they actually are in the geography of the city today .
so this is fun for finding where things are relative to the old topography .
but i had another idea about this map .
if we take away the streets , and if we take away the buildings , and if we take away the open spaces , then we could take this map .
if we pull off the 18th century features we could drive it back in time .
we could drive it back to its ecological fundamentals : to the hills , to the streams , to the basic hydrology and shoreline , to the beaches , the basic aspects that make the ecological landscape .
then , if we added maps like the geology , the bedrock geology , and the surface geology , what the glaciers leave , if we make the soil map , with the 17 soil classes , that are defined by the national conservation service , if we make a digital elevation model of the topography that tells us how high the hills were , then we can calculate the slopes .
we can calculate the aspect .
we can calculate the winter wind exposure - so , which way the winter winds blow across the landscape .
the white areas on this map are the places protected from the winter winds .
we compiled all the information about where the native americans were , the lenape .
and we built a probability map of where they might have been .
so , the red areas on this map indicate the places that are best for human sustainability on manhattan , places that are close to water , places that are near the harbor to fish , places protected from the winter winds .
we know that there was a lenape settlement down here by the collect pond .
and we knew that they planted a kind of horticulture , that they grew these beautiful gardens of corn , beans , and squash , the " three sisters " garden .
so , we built a model that explains where those fields might have been .
and the old fields , the successional fields that go .
and we might think of these as abandoned .
but , in fact , they 're grassland habitats for grassland birds and plants .
and they have become successional shrub lands , and these then mix in to a map of all the ecological communities .
and it turns out that manhattan had 55 different ecosystem types .
you can think of these as neighborhoods , as distinctive as tribeca and the upper east side and inwood - that these are the forest and the wetlands and the marine communities , the beaches .
and 55 is a lot . on a per-area basis , manhattan had more ecological communities per acre than yosemite does , than yellowstone , than amboseli .
it was really an extraordinary landscape that was capable of supporting an extraordinary biodiversity .
so , act ii : a home reconstructed .
so , we studied the fish and the frogs and the birds and the bees , the 85 different kinds of fish that were on manhattan , the heath hens , the species that are n't there anymore , the beavers on all the streams , the black bears , and the native americans , to study how they used and thought about their landscape .
we wanted to try and map these . and to do that what we did was we mapped their habitat needs .
where do they get their food ?
where do they get their water ? where do they get their shelter ?
where do they get their reproductive resources ?
to an ecologist , the intersection of these is habitat , but to most people , the intersection of these is their home .
so , we would read in field guides , the standard field guides that maybe you have on your shelves , you know , what beavers need is , " a slowly meandering stream with aspen trees and alders and willows , near the water . " that 's the best thing for a beaver .
so we just started making a list .
here is the beaver . and here is the stream , and the aspen and the alder and the willow .
as if these were the maps that we would need to predict where you would find the beaver .
or the bog turtle , needing wet meadows and insects and sunny places .
or the bobcat , needing rabbits and beavers and den sites .
and rapidly we started to realize that beavers can be something that a bobcat needs .
but a beaver also needs things . and that having it on either side means that we can link it together , that we can create the network of the habitat relationships for these species .
moreover , we realized that you can start out as being a beaver specialist , but you can look up what an aspen needs .
an aspen needs fire and dry soils .
and you can look at what a wet meadow needs .
and it need beavers to create the wetlands , and maybe some other things .
but you can also talk about sunny places .
so , what does a sunny place need ? not habitat per se .
but what are the conditions that make it possible ?
or fire . or dry soils .
and that you can put these on a grid that 's 1,000 columns long across the top and 1,000 rows down the other way .
and then we can visualize this data like a network , like a social network .
and this is the network of all the habitat relationships of all the plants and animals on manhattan , and everything they needed , going back to the geology , going back to time and space at the very core of the web .
we call this the muir web . and if you zoom in on it it looks like this .
each point is a different species or a different stream or a different soil type .
and those little gray lines are the connections that connect them together .
they are the connections that actually make nature resilient .
and the structure of this is what makes nature work , seen with all its parts .
we call these muir webs after the scottish-american naturalist john muir , who said , " when we try to pick out anything by itself , we find that it 's bound fast by a thousand invisible cords that can not be broken , to everything in the universe . "
so then we took the muir webs and we took them back to the maps .
so if we wanted to go between 85th and 86th , and lex and third , maybe there was a stream in that block .
and these would be the kind of trees that might have been there , and the flowers and the lichens and the mosses , the butterflies , the fish in the stream , the birds in the trees .
maybe a timber rattlesnake lived there .
and perhaps a black bear walked by . and maybe native americans were there .
and then we took this data .
you can see this for yourself on our website .
you can zoom into any block on manhattan , and see what might have been there 400 years ago .
and we used it to try and reveal a landscape here in act iii .
we used the tools they use in hollywood to make these fantastic landscapes that we all see in the movies .
and we tried to use it to visualize third avenue .
so we would take the landscape and we would build up the topography .
we 'd lay on top of that the soils and the waters , and illuminate the landscape .
we would lay on top of that the map of the ecological communities .
and feed into that the map of the species .
so that we would actually take a photograph , flying above times square , looking toward the hudson river , waiting for hudson to come .
using this technology , we can make these fantastic georeferenced views .
we can basically take a picture out of any window on manhattan and see what that landscape looked like 400 years ago .
this is the view from the east river , looking up murray hill at where the united nations is today .
this is the view looking down the hudson river , with manhattan on the left , and new jersey out on the right , looking out toward the atlantic ocean .
this is the view over times square , with the beaver pond there , looking out toward the east .
so we can see the collect pond , and lispenard marshes back behind .
we can see the fields that the native americans made .
and we can see this in the geography of the city today .
so when you 're watching " law and order , " and the lawyers walk up the steps they could have walked back down those steps of the new york court house , right into the collect pond , 400 years ago .
so these images are the work of my friend and colleague , mark boyer , who is here in the audience today .
and i 'd just like , if you would give him a hand , to call out for his fine work .
-lrb- applause -rrb- there is such power in bringing science and visualization together , that we can create images like this , perhaps looking on either side of a looking glass .
and even though i 've only had a brief time to speak , i hope you appreciate that mannahatta was a very special place .
the place that you see here on the left side was interconnected . it was based on this diversity .
it had this resilience that is what we need in our modern world .
but i would n't have you think that i do n't like the place on the right , which i quite do . i 've come to love the city and its kind of diversity , and its resilience , and its dependence on density and how we 're connected together .
in fact , that i see them as reflections of each other , much as lewis carroll did in " through the looking glass . "
we can compare these two and hold them in our minds at the same time , that they really are the same place , that there is no way that cities can escape from nature .
and i think this is what we 're learning about building cities in the future .
so if you 'll allow me a brief epilogue , not about the past , but about 400 years from now , what we 're realizing is that cities are habitats for people , and need to supply what people need : a sense of home , food , water , shelter , reproductive resources , and a sense of meaning .
this is the particular additional habitat requirement of humanity .
and so many of the talks here at ted are about meaning , about bringing meaning to our lives in all kinds of different ways , through technology , through art , through science , so much so that i think we focus so much on that side of our lives , that we have n't given enough attention to the food and the water and the shelter , and what we need to raise the kids .
so , how can we envision the city of the future ?
well , what if we go to madison square park , and we imagine it without all the cars , and bicycles instead and large forests , and streams instead of sewers and storm drains ?
what if we imagined the upper east side with green roofs , and streams winding through the city , and windmills supplying the power we need ?
or if we imagine the new york city metropolitan area , currently home to 12 million people , but 12 million people in the future , perhaps living at the density of manhattan , in only 36 percent of the area , with the areas in between covered by farmland , covered by wetlands , covered by the marshes we need .
this is the kind of future i think we need , is a future that has the same diversity and abundance and dynamism of manhattan , but that learns from the sustainability of the past , of the ecology , the original ecology , of nature with all its parts .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i started improv everywhere about 10 years ago when i moved to new york city with an interest in acting and comedy .
because i was new to the city , i did n't have access to a stage , so i decided to create my own in public places .
so the first project we 're going to take a look at is the very first no pants subway ride .
now this took place in january of 2002 .
and this woman is the star of the video .
she does n't know she 's being filmed .
she 's being filmed with a hidden camera .
this is on the 6 train in new york city .
and this is the first stop along the line .
these are two danish guys who come out and sit down next to the hidden camera .
and that 's me right there in a brown coat .
it 's about 30 degrees outside .
i 'm wearing a hat . i 'm wearing a scarf .
and the girl 's going to notice me right here .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and as you 'll see now , i 'm not wearing pants .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so at this point - at this point she 's noticed me , but in new york there 's weirdos on any given train car .
one person 's not that unusual .
she goes back to reading her book , which is unfortunately titled " rape . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so she 's noticed the unusual thing , but she 's gone back to her normal life .
now in the meantime , i have six friends who are waiting at the next six consecutive stops in their underwear as well .
they 're going to be entering this car one by one .
we 'll act as though we do n't know each other .
and we 'll act as if it 's just an unfortunate mistake we 've made , forgetting our pants on this cold january day .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so at this point , she decides to put the rape book away .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and she decides to be a little bit more aware of her surroundings .
now in the meantime , the two danish guys to the left of the camera , they 're cracking up .
they think this is the funniest thing they 've ever seen before .
and watch her make eye contact with them right about now .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i love that moment in this video , because before it became a shared experience , it was something that was maybe a little bit scary , or something that was at least confusing to her .
and then once it became a shared experience , it was funny and something that she could laugh at .
so the train is now pulling into the third stop along the 6 line .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so the video wo n't show everything .
this goes on for another four stops .
a total of seven guys enter anonymously in their underwear .
at the eighth stop , a girl came in with a giant duffel bag and announced she had pants for sale for a dollar - like you might sell batteries or candy on the train .
we all very matter of factly bought a pair of pants , put them on and said , " thank you . that 's exactly what i needed today , " and then exited without revealing what had happened and went in all different directions .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
so that 's a still from the video there .
and i love that girl 's reaction so much .
and watching that videotape later that day inspired me to keep doing what i do .
and really one of the points of improv everywhere is to cause a scene in a public place that is a positive experience for other people .
it 's a prank , but it 's a prank that gives somebody a great story to tell .
and her reaction inspired me to do a second annual no pants subway ride .
and we 've continued to do it every year .
this january , we did the 10th annual no pants subway ride where a diverse group of 3,500 people rode the train in their underwear in new york - almost every single train line in the city .
and also in 50 other cities around the world , people participated .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- as i started taking improv class at the upright citizens brigade theater and meeting other creative people and other performers and comedians , i started amassing a mailing list of people who wanted to do these types of projects .
so i could do more large-scale projects .
well one day i was walking through union square , and i saw this building , which had just been built in 2005 .
and there was a girl in one of the windows and she was dancing .
and it was very peculiar , because it was dark out , but she was back-lit with florescent lighting , and she was very much onstage , and i could n't figure out why she was doing it .
after about 15 seconds , her friend appeared - she had been hiding behind a display - and they laughed and hugged each other and ran away .
so it seemed like maybe she had been dared to do this .
so i got inspired by that .
looking at the entire facade - there were 70 total windows - and i knew what i had to do .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so this project is called look up more . we had 70 actors dress in black .
this was completely unauthorized .
we did n't let the stores know we were coming .
and i stood in the park giving signals .
the first signal was for everybody to hold up these four-foot tall letters that spelled out " look up more , " the name of the project .
the second signal was for everybody to do jumping jacks together .
you 'll see that start right here .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and then we had dancing . we had everyone dance .
and then we had dance solos where only one person would dance and everybody would point to them .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so then i gave a new hand signal , which signaled the next soloist down below in forever 21 , and he danced .
there were several other activities .
we had people jumping up and down , people dropping to the ground .
and i was standing just anonymously in a sweatshirt , putting my hand on and off of a trashcan to signal the advancement .
and because it was in union square park , right by a subway station , there were hundreds of people by the end who stopped and looked up and watched what we were doing .
there 's a better photo of it .
so that particular event was inspired by a moment that i happened to stumble upon .
the next project i want to show was given to me in an email from a stranger .
a high school kid in texas wrote me in 2006 and said , " you should get as many people as possible to put on blue polo shirts and khaki pants and go into a best buy and stand around . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so i wrote this high school kid back immediately , and i said , " yes , you are correct .
i think i 'll try to do that this weekend . thank you . "
so here 's the video .
so again , this is 2005 .
this is the best buy in new york city .
we had about 80 people show up to participate , entering one-by-one .
there was an eight year-old girl , a 10 year-old girl .
there was also a 65 year-old man who participated .
so a very diverse group of people .
and i told people , " do n't work . do n't actually do work .
but also , do n't shop .
just stand around and do n't face products . "
now you can see the regular employees by the ones that have the yellow tags on their shirt .
everybody else is one of our actors .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the lower level employees thought it was very funny .
and in fact , several of them went to go get their camera from the break room and took photos with us .
a lot of them made jokes about trying to get us to go to the back to get heavy television sets for customers .
the managers and the security guards , on the other hand , did not find it particularly funny .
you can see them in this footage .
they 're wearing either a yellow shirt or a black shirt .
and we were there probably 10 minutes before the managers decided to dial 911 .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so they started running around telling everybody the cops were coming , watch out , the cops were coming .
and you can see the cops in this footage right here .
that 's a cop wearing black right there , being filmed with a hidden camera .
ultimately , the police had to inform best buy management that it was not , in fact , illegal to wear a blue polo shirt and khaki pants .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so we had been there for 20 minutes ; we were happy to exit the store .
one thing the managers were trying to do was to track down our cameras .
and they caught a couple of my guys who had hidden cameras in duffel bags .
but the one camera guy they never caught was the guy that went in just with a blank tape and went over to the best buy camera department and just put his tape in one of their cameras and pretended to shop .
so i like that concept of using their own technology against them .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i think our best projects are ones that are site specific and happen at a particular place for a reason .
and one morning , i was riding the subway .
i had to make a transfer at the 53rd st. stop where there are these two giant escalators .
and it 's a very depressing place to be in the morning , it 's very crowded .
so i decided to try and stage something that could make it as happy as possible for one morning .
so this was in the winter of 2009 - 8:30 in the morning .
it 's morning rush hour .
it 's very cold outside .
people are coming in from queens , transferring from the e train to the 6 train .
and they 're going up these giant escalators on their way to their jobs .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
so there 's a photograph that illustrates it a little bit better .
he gave 2,000 high fives that day , and he washed his hands before and afterward and did not get sick .
and that was done also without permission , although no one seemed to care .
so i 'd say over the years , one of the most common criticisms i see of improv everywhere left anonymously on youtube comments is : " these people have too much time on their hands . "
and you know , not everybody 's going to like everything you do , and i 've certainly developed a thick skin thanks to internet comments , but that one 's always bothered me , because we do n't have too much time on our hands .
the participants at improv everywhere events have just as much leisure time as any other new yorkers , they just occasionally choose to spend it in an unusual way .
you know , every saturday and sunday , hundreds of thousands of people each fall gather in football stadiums to watch games .
and i 've never seen anybody comment , looking at a football game , saying , " all those people in the stands , they have too much time on their hands . "
and of course they do n't .
it 's a perfectly wonderful way to spent a weekend afternoon , watching a football game in a stadium .
but i think it 's also a perfectly valid way to spend an afternoon freezing in place with 200 people in the grand central terminal or dressing up like a ghostbuster and running through the new york public library .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- or listening to the same mp3 as 3,000 other people and dancing silently in a park , or bursting into song in a grocery store as part of a spontaneous musical , or diving into the ocean in coney island wearing formal attire .
you know , as kids , we 're taught to play .
and we 're never given a reason why we should play .
it 's just acceptable that play is a good thing .
and i think that 's sort of the point of improv everywhere .
it 's that there is no point and that there does n't have to be a point .
we do n't need a reason .
as long as it 's fun and it seems like it 's going to be a funny idea and it seems like the people who witness it will also have a fun time , then that 's enough for us .
and i think , as adults , we need to learn that there 's no right or wrong way to play .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- in my previous life , i was an artist .
i still paint . i love art .
i love the joy that color can give to our lives and to our communities , and i try to bring something of the artist in me in my politics , and i see part of my job today , the reason for being here , not just to campaign for my party , but for politics , and the role it can play for the better in our lives .
for 11 years , i was mayor of tirana , our capital .
we faced many challenges .
art was part of the answer , and my name , in the very beginning , was linked with two things : demolition of illegal constructions in order to get public space back , and use of colors in order to revive the hope that had been lost in my city .
but this use of colors was not just an artistic act .
rather , it was a form of political action in a context when the city budget i had available after being elected amounted to zero comma something .
when we painted the first building , by splashing a radiant orange on the somber gray of a facade , something unimaginable happened .
there was a traffic jam and a crowd of people gathered as if it were the location of some spectacular accident , or the sudden sighting of a visiting pop star .
the french e.u. official in charge of the funding rushed to block the painting .
he screeched that he would block the financing .
" but why ? " i asked him .
" because the colors you have ordered do not meet european standards , " he replied .
" well , " i told him , " the surroundings do not meet european standards , even though this is not what we want , but we will choose the colors ourselves , because this is exactly what we want .
and if you do not let us continue with our work , i will hold a press conference here , right now , right in this road , and we will tell people that you look to me just like the censors of the socialist realism era . "
then he was kind of troubled , and asked me for a compromise .
but i told him no , i 'm sorry , compromise in colors is gray , and we have enough gray to last us a lifetime .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so it 's time for change .
the rehabilitation of public spaces revived the feeling of belonging to a city that people lost .
the pride of people about their own place of living , and there were feelings that had been buried deep for years under the fury of the illegal , barbaric constructions that sprang up in the public space .
and when colors came out everywhere , a mood of change started transforming the spirit of people .
big noise raised up : " what is this ? what is happening ?
what are colors doing to us ? "
and we made a poll , the most fascinating poll i 've seen in my life .
we asked people , " do you want this action , and to have buildings painted like that ? "
and then the second question was , " do you want it to stop or do you want it to continue ? "
to the first question , 63 percent of people said yes , we like it .
thirty-seven said no , we do n't like it .
but to the second question , half of them that did n't like it , they wanted it to continue . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so we noticed change .
people started to drop less litter in the streets , for example , started to pay taxes , started to feel something they had forgotten , and beauty was acting as a guardsman where municipal police , or the state itself , were missing .
one day i remember walking along a street that had just been colored , and where we were in the process of planting trees , when i saw a shopkeeper and his wife putting a glass facade to their shop .
they had thrown the old shutter in the garbage collection place .
" why did you throw away the shutters ? " i asked him .
" well , because the street is safer now , " they answered .
" safer ? why ? they have posted more policemen here ? "
" come on , man ! what policemen ?
you can see it for yourself . there are colors , streetlights , new pavement with no potholes , trees . so it 's beautiful ; it 's safe . "
and indeed , it was beauty that was giving people this feeling of being protected .
and this was not a misplaced feeling .
crime did fall .
the freedom that was won in 1990 brought about a state of anarchy in the city , while the barbarism of the ' 90s brought about a loss of hope for the city .
the paint on the walls did not feed children , nor did it tend the sick or educate the ignorant , but it gave hope and light , and helped to make people see there could be a different way of doing things , a different spirit , a different feel to our lives , and that if we brought the same energy and hope to our politics , we could build a better life for each other and for our country .
we removed 123,000 tons of concrete only from the riverbanks .
we demolished more than 5,000 illegal buildings all over the city , up to eight stories high , the tallest of them .
we planted 55,000 trees and bushes in the streets .
we established a green tax , and then everybody accepted it and all businessmen paid it regularly .
by means of open competitions , we managed to recruit in our administration many young people , and we thus managed to build a de-politicized public institution where men and women were equally represented .
international organizations have invested a lot in albania during these 20 years , not all of it well spent .
when i told the world bank directors that i wanted them to finance a project to build a model reception hall for citizens precisely in order to fight endemic daily corruption , they did not understand me .
but people were waiting in long queues under sun and under rain in order to get a certificate or just a simple answer from two tiny windows of two metal kiosks .
they were paying in order to skip the queue , the long queue .
the reply to their requests was met by a voice coming from this dark hole , and , on the other hand , a mysterious hand coming out to take their documents while searching through old documents for the bribe .
we could change the invisible clerks within the kiosks , every week , but we could not change this corrupt practice .
" i 'm convinced , " i told a german official with the world bank , " that it would be impossible for them to be bribed if they worked in germany , in a german administration , just as i am convinced that if you put german officials from the german administration in those holes , they would be bribed just the same . "
-lrb- applause -rrb- it 's not about genes .
it 's not about some being with a high conscience and some others having not a conscience .
it 's about system , it 's about organization .
it 's also about environment and respect .
we removed the kiosks .
we built the bright new reception hall that made people , tirana citizens , think they had traveled abroad when they entered to make their requests .
we created an online system of control and so speeded up all the processes .
we put the citizen first , and not the clerks .
the corruption in the state administration of countries like albania - it 's not up to me to say also like greece - can be fought only by modernization .
reinventing the government by reinventing politics itself is the answer , and not reinventing people based on a ready-made formula that the developed world often tries in vain to impose to people like us .
-lrb- applause -rrb- things have come to this point because politicians in general , but especially in our countries , let 's face it , think people are stupid .
they take it for granted that , come what may , people have to follow them , while politics , more and more , fails to offer answers for their public concerns or the exigencies of the common people .
politics has come to resemble a cynical team game played by politicians , while the public has been pushed aside as if sitting on the seats of a stadium in which passion for politics is gradually making room for blindness and desperation .
seen from those stairs , all politicians today seem the same , and politics has come to resemble a sport that inspires more aggressiveness and pessimism than social cohesion and the desire for civic protaganism .
barack obama won - -lrb- applause -rrb- - because he mobilized people as never before through the use of social networks .
he did not know each and every one of them , but with an admirable ingenuity , he managed to transform them into activists by giving them all the possibility to hold in their hands the arguments and the instruments that each would need to campaign in his name by making his own campaign .
i tweet . i love it .
i love it because it lets me get the message out , but it also lets people get their messages to me .
this is politics , not from top down , but from the bottom up , and sideways , and allowing everybody 's voice to be heard is exactly what we need .
politics is not just about leaders .
it 's not just about politicians and laws .
it is about how people think , how they view the world around them , how they use their time and their energy .
when people say all politicians are the same , ask yourself if obama was the same as bush , if françois hollande is the same as sarkozy .
they are not . they are human beings with different views and different visions for the world .
when people say nothing can change , just stop and think what the world was like 10 , 20 , 50 , 100 years ago .
our world is defined by the pace of change .
we can all change the world .
i gave you a very small example of how one thing , the use of color , can make change happen .
i want to make more change as prime minister of my country , but every single one of you can make change happen if you want to .
president roosevelt , he said , " believe you can , and you are halfway there . "
efharisto and kalinihta .
-lrb- applause -rrb- for emotions , we should not move quickly to the desert .
so , first , a small housekeeping announcement : please switch off your proper english check programs installed in your brain .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so , welcome to the golden desert , indian desert .
it receives the least rainfall in the country , lowest rainfall .
if you are well-versed with inches , nine inches , centimeters , 16 -lsb- centimeters -rsb- .
the groundwater is 300 feet deep , 100 meters .
and in most parts it is saline , not fit for drinking .
so , you ca n't install hand pumps or dig wells , though there is no electricity in most of the villages .
but suppose you use the green technology , solar pumps - they are of no use in this area .
so , welcome to the golden desert .
clouds seldom visit this area .
but we find 40 different names of clouds in this dialect used here .
there are a number of techniques to harvest rain .
this is a new work , it 's a new program .
but for the desert society this is no program ; this is their life .
and they harvest rain in many ways .
so , this is the first device they use in harvesting rain .
it 's called kunds ; somewhere it is called -lsb- unclear -rsb- .
and you can notice they have created a kind of false catchment .
the desert is there , sand dunes , some small field .
and this is all big raised platform .
you can notice the small holes the water will fall on this catchment , and there is a slope .
sometimes our engineers and architects do not care about slopes in bathrooms , but here they will care properly .
and the water will go where it should go .
and then it is 40 feet deep .
the waterproofing is done perfectly , better than our city contractors , because not a single drop should go waste in this .
they collect 100 thousand liters in one season .
and this is pure drinking water .
below the surface there is hard saline water .
but now you can have this for year round .
it 's two houses .
we often use a term called bylaws .
because we are used to get written things .
but here it is unwritten by law .
and people made their house , and the water storage tanks .
these raised up platforms just like this stage .
in fact they go 15 feet deep , and collect rain water from roof , there is a small pipe , and from their courtyard .
it can also harvest something like 25,000 in a good monsoon .
another big one , this is of course out of the hardcore desert area .
this is near jaipur . this is called the jaigarh fort .
and it can collect six million gallons of rainwater in one season .
the age is 400 years .
so , since 400 years it has been giving you almost six million gallons of water per season .
you can calculate the price of that water .
it draws water from 15 kilometers of canals .
you can see a modern road , hardly 50 years old .
it can break sometimes .
but this 400 year old canal , which draws water , it is maintained for so many generations .
of course if you want to go inside , the two doors are locked .
but they can be opened for ted people .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and we request them .
you can see person coming up with two canisters of water .
and the water level - these are not empty canisters - water level is right up to this .
it can envy many municipalities , the color , the taste , the purity of this water .
and this is what they call zero b type of water , because it comes from the clouds , pure distilled water .
we stop for a quick commercial break , and then we come back to the traditional systems .
the government thought that this is a very backward area and we should bring a multi-million dollar project to bring water from the himalayas .
that 's why i said that this is a commercial break .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but we will come back , once again , to the traditional thing .
so , water from 300 , 400 kilometers away , soon it become like this .
in many portions , water hyacinth covered these big canals like anything .
of course there are some areas where water is reaching , i 'm not saying that it is not reaching at all .
but the tail end , the jaisalmer area , you will notice in bikaner things like this : where the water hyacinth could n't grow , the sand is flowing in these canals .
the bonus is that you can find wildlife around it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we had full-page advertisements , some 30 years , 25 years ago when this canal came .
they said that throw away your traditional systems , these new cement tanks will supply you piped water .
it 's a dream . and it became a dream also .
because soon the water was not able to reach these areas .
and people started renovating their own structures .
these are all traditional water structures , which we wo n't be able to explain in such a short time .
but you can see that no woman is standing on those .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and they are plaiting hair .
-lrb- applause -rrb- jaisalmer . this is heart of desert .
this town was established 800 years ago .
i 'm not sure by that time bombay was there , or delhi was there , or chennai was there , or bangalore was there .
so , this was the terminal point for silk route .
well connected , 800 years ago , through europe .
none of us were able to go to europe , but jaisalmer was well connected to it .
and this is the 16 centimeter area .
such a limited rainfall , and highest colorful life flourished in these areas .
you wo n't find water in this slide .
but it is invisible .
somewhere a stream or a rivulet is running through here .
or , if you want to paint , you can paint it blue throughout because every roof which you see in this picture collects rainwater drops and deposit in the rooms .
but apart from this system , they designed 52 beautiful water bodies around this town .
and what we call private public partnership you can add estate also .
so , estate , public and private entrepreneurs work together to build this beautiful water body .
and it 's a kind of water body for all seasons .
you will admire it . just behold the beauty throughout the year .
whether water level goes up or down , the beauty is there throughout .
another water body , dried up , of course , during the summer period , but you can see how the traditional society combines engineering with aesthetics , with the heart .
these statues , marvelous statues , gives you an idea of water table .
when this rain comes and the water starts filling this tank , it will submerge these beautiful statues in what we call in english today " mass communication . "
this was for mass communication .
everybody in the town will know that this elephant has drowned , so water will be there for seven months or nine months , or 12 months .
and then they will come and worship this pond , pay respect , their gratitude .
another small water body , called the -lsb- unclear -rsb- .
it is difficult to translate in english , especially in my english .
but the nearest would be " glory , " a reputation .
the reputation in desert of this small water body is that it never dries up .
in severe drought periods nobody has seen this water body getting dried up .
and perhaps they knew the future also .
it was designed some 150 years ago .
but perhaps they knew that on sixth , november , 2009 , there will be a ted green and blue session , so they painted it like this .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- dry water body . children are standing on a very difficult device to explain .
this is called kund . we have , in english , surface water and ground water .
but this is not ground water .
you can draw ground water from any well .
but this is no ordinary well .
it squeeze the moisture hidden in the sand .
and they have dubbed this water as the third one called -lsb- unclear -rsb- .
and there is a gypsum belt running below it .
and it was deposited by the great mother earth , some three million years ago .
and where we have this gypsum strip they can harvest this water .
this is the same dry water body .
now , you do n't find any kund ; they are all submerged .
but when the water goes down they will be able to draw water from those structures throughout the year .
this year they have received only six centimeters .
six centimeter of rainfall , and they can telephone you that if you find any water problem in your city , delhi , bombay , bangalore , mysore , please come to our area of six centimeters , we can give you water .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- how they maintain them ?
there are three things : concept , planning , making the actual thing , and also maintaining them .
it is a structure for maintain , for centuries , by generations , without any department , without any funding , so the secret is " -lsb- unclear -rsb- , " respect .
your own thing , not personal property , my property , every time .
so , these stone pillars will remind you that you are entering into a water body area .
do n't spit , do n't do anything wrong , so that the clean water can be collected .
another pillar , stone pillar on your right side .
if you climb these three , six steps you will find something very nice .
this was done in 11th century .
and you have to go further down .
they say that a picture is worth a thousand words , so we can say a thousand words right now , an another thousand words .
if the water table goes down , you will find new stairs .
if it comes up , some of them will be submerged .
so , throughout the year this beautiful system will give you some pleasure .
three sides , such steps , on the fourth side there is a four-story building where you can organize such ted conferences anytime .
-lrb- applause -rrb- excuse me , who built these structures ?
they are in front of you .
the best civil engineers we had , the best planners , the best architects .
we can say that because of them , because of their forefathers , india could get the first engineering college in 1847 .
there were no english medium schools at that time , even no hindi schools , -lsb- unclear -rsb- schools .
but such people , compelled to the east india company , which came here for business , a very dirty kind of business ...
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but not to create the engineering colleges .
but because of them , first engineering college was created in a small village , not in the town .
the last point , we all know in our primary schools that that camel is a ship of desert .
so , you can find through your jeep , a camel , and a cart .
this tire comes from the airplane .
so , look at the beauty from the desert society who can harvest rainwater , and also create something through a tire from a jet plane , and used in a camel cart .
last picture , it 's a tattoo , 2,000-years-old tattoo .
they were using it on their body .
tattoo was , at one time , a kind of a blacklisted or con thing , but now it is in thing .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- you can copy this tattoo . i have some posters of this .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the center of life is water .
these are the beautiful waves .
these are the beautiful stairs which we just saw in one of the slides .
these are the trees .
and these are the flowers which add fragrance to our lives .
so , this is the message of desert .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : so , first of all , i wish i had your eloquence , truly , in any language .
-lrb- applause -rrb- these artifacts and designs are inspiring .
do you believe that they can be used elsewhere , that the world can learn from this ?
or is this just right for this place ?
anupam mishra : no , the basic idea is to utilize water that falls on our area .
so , the ponds , the open bodies , are everywhere , right from sri lanka to kashmir , and in other parts also .
and these -lsb- unclear -rsb- , which stored water , there are two type of things .
one recharge , and one stores .
so , it depends on the terrain .
but kund , which uses the gypsum belt , for that you have to go back to your calendar , three million years ago .
if it is there it can be done right now .
otherwise , it ca n't be done .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- ca : thank you so much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- can i ask you to please recall a time when you really loved something - a movie , an album , a song or a book - and you recommended it wholeheartedly to someone you also really liked , and you anticipated that reaction , you waited for it , and it came back , and the person hated it ?
so , by way of introduction , that is the exact same state in which i spent every working day of the last six years . -lrb- laughter -rrb- i teach high school math .
i sell a product to a market that does n't want it , but is forced by law to buy it .
i mean , it 's just a losing proposition .
so there 's a useful stereotype about students that i see , a useful stereotype about you all .
i could give you guys an algebra-two final exam , and i would expect no higher than a 25 percent pass rate .
and both of these facts say less about you or my students than they do about what we call math education in the u.s. today .
to start with , i 'd like to break math down into two categories .
one is computation ; this is the stuff you 've forgotten .
for example , factoring quadratics with leading coefficients greater than one .
this stuff is also really easy to relearn , provided you have a really strong grounding in reasoning . math reasoning - we 'll call it the application of math processes to the world around us - this is hard to teach .
this is what we would love students to retain , even if they do n't go into mathematical fields .
this is also something that , the way we teach it in the u.s.
all but ensures they wo n't retain it .
so , i 'd like to talk about why that is , why that 's such a calamity for society , what we can do about it and , to close with , why this is an amazing time to be a math teacher .
so first , five symptoms that you 're doing math reasoning wrong in your classroom .
one is a lack of initiative ; your students do n't self-start .
you finish your lecture block and immediately you have five hands going up asking you to re-explain the entire thing at their desks .
students lack perseverance .
they lack retention ; you find yourself re-explaining concepts three months later , wholesale .
there 's an aversion to word problems , which describes 99 percent of my students .
and then the other one percent is eagerly looking for the formula to apply in that situation .
this is really destructive .
david milch , creator of " deadwood " and other amazing tv shows , has a really good description for this .
he swore off creating contemporary drama , shows set in the present day , because he saw that when people fill their mind with four hours a day of , for example , " two and a half men , " no disrespect , it shapes the neural pathways , he said , in such a way that they expect simple problems .
he called it , " an impatience with irresolution . "
you 're impatient with things that do n't resolve quickly .
you expect sitcom-sized problems that wrap up in 22 minutes , three commercial breaks and a laugh track .
and i 'll put it to all of you , what you already know , that no problem worth solving is that simple .
i am very concerned about this because i 'm going to retire in a world that my students will run .
i 'm doing bad things to my own future and well-being when i teach this way .
i 'm here to tell you that the way our textbooks - particularly mass-adopted textbooks - teach math reasoning and patient problem solving , it 's functionally equivalent to turning on " two and a half men " and calling it a day .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- in all seriousness . here 's an example from a physics textbook .
it applies equally to math .
notice , first of all here , that you have exactly three pieces of information there , each of which will figure into a formula somewhere , eventually , which the student will then compute .
i believe in real life .
and ask yourself , what problem have you solved , ever , that was worth solving where you knew all of the given information in advance ; where you did n't have a surplus of information and you had to filter it out , or you did n't have sufficient information and had to go find some .
i 'm sure we all agree that no problem worth solving is like that .
and the textbook , i think , knows how it 's hamstringing students because , watch this , this is the practice problem set .
when it comes time to do the actual problem set , we have problems like this right here where we 're just swapping out numbers and tweaking the context a little bit .
and if the student still does n't recognize the stamp this was molded from , it helpfully explains to you what sample problem you can return to to find the formula .
you could literally , i mean this , pass this particular unit without knowing any physics , just knowing how to decode a textbook . that 's a shame .
so i can diagnose the problem a little more specifically in math .
here 's a really cool problem . i like this .
it 's about defining steepness and slope using a ski lift .
but what you have here is actually four separate layers , and i 'm curious which of you can see the four separate layers and , particularly , how when they 're compressed together and presented to the student all at once , how that creates this impatient problem solving .
i 'll define them here : you have the visual .
you also have the mathematical structure , talking about grids , measurements , labels , points , axes , that sort of thing .
you have substeps , which all lead to what we really want to talk about : which section is the steepest .
so i hope you can see .
i really hope you can see how what we 're doing here is taking a compelling question , a compelling answer , but we 're paving a smooth , straight path from one to the other and congratulating our students for how well they can step over the small cracks in the way .
that 's all we 're doing here .
so i want to put to you that if we can separate these in a different way and build them up with students , we can have everything we 're looking for in terms of patient problem solving .
so right here i start with the visual , and i immediately ask the question : which section is the steepest ?
and this starts conversation because the visual is created in such a way where you can defend two answers .
so you get people arguing against each other , friend versus friend , in pairs , journaling , whatever .
and then eventually we realize it 's getting annoying to talk about the skier in the lower left-hand side of the screen or the skier just above the mid line .
and we realize how great would it be if we just had some a , b , c and d labels to talk about them more easily .
and then as we start to define what does steepness mean , we realize it would be nice to have some measurements to really narrow it down , specifically what that means .
and then and only then , we throw down that mathematical structure .
the math serves the conversation , the conversation does n't serve the math .
and at that point , i 'll put it to you that nine out of 10 classes are good to go on the whole slope , steepness thing .
but if you need to , your students can then develop those substeps together .
do you guys see how this , right here , compared to that - which one creates that patient problem solving , that math reasoning ?
it 's been obvious in my practice , to me .
and i 'll yield the floor here for a second to einstein , who , i believe , has paid his dues .
he talked about the formulation of a problem being so incredibly important , and yet in my practice , in the u.s. here , we just give problems to students ; we do n't involve them in the formulation of the problem .
so 90 percent of what i do with my five hours of prep time per week is to take fairly compelling elements of problems like this from my textbook and rebuild them in a way that supports math reasoning and patient problem solving .
and here 's how it works .
i like this question . it 's about a water tank .
the question is : how long will it take you to fill it up ?
first things first , we eliminate all the substeps .
students have to develop those , they have to formulate those .
and then notice that all the information written on there is stuff you 'll need .
none of it 's a distractor , so we lose that .
students need to decide , " all right , well , does the height matter ? does the side of it matter ?
does the color of the valve matter ? what matters here ? "
such an underrepresented question in math curriculum .
so now we have a water tank .
how long will it take you to fill it up ? and that 's it .
and because this is the 21st century and we would love to talk about the real world on its own terms , not in terms of line art or clip art that you so often see in textbooks , we go out and we take a picture of it .
so now we have the real deal .
how long will it take it to fill it up ?
and then even better is we take a video , a video of someone filling it up .
and it 's filling up slowly , agonizingly slowly .
it 's tedious .
students are looking at their watches , rolling their eyes , and they 're all wondering at some point or another , " man , how long is it going to take to fill up ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's how you know you 've baited the hook , right ?
and that question , off this right here , is really fun for me because , like the intro , i teach kids - because of my inexperience - i teach the kids that are the most remedial , all right ?
and i 've got kids who will not join a conversation about math because someone else has the formula ; someone else knows how to work the formula better than me , so i wo n't talk about it .
but here , every student is on a level playing field of intuition .
everyone 's filled something up with water before , so i get kids answering the question , " how long will it take ? "
i 've got kids who are mathematically and conversationally intimidated joining the conversation .
we put names on the board , attach them to guesses , and kids have bought in here .
and then we follow the process i 've described .
and the best part here , or one of the better parts is that we do n't get our answer from the answer key in the back of the teacher 's edition .
we , instead , just watch the end of the movie .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and that 's terrifying , because the theoretical models that always work out in the answer key in the back of a teacher 's edition , that 's great , but it 's scary to talk about sources of error when the theoretical does not match up with the practical .
but those conversations have been so valuable , among the most valuable .
so i 'm here to report some really fun games with students who come pre-installed with these viruses day one of the class .
these are the kids who now , one semester in , i can put something on the board , totally new , totally foreign , and they 'll have a conversation about it for three or four minutes more than they would have at the start of the year , which is just so fun .
we 're no longer averse to word problems , because we 've redefined what a word problem is .
we 're no longer intimidated by math , because we 're slowly redefining what math is .
this has been a lot of fun .
i encourage math teachers i talk to to use multimedia , because it brings the real world into your classroom in high resolution and full color ; to encourage student intuition for that level playing field ; to ask the shortest question you possibly can and let those more specific questions come out in conversation ; to let students build the problem , because einstein said so ; and to finally , in total , just be less helpful , because the textbook is helping you in all the wrong ways : it 's buying you out of your obligation , for patient problem solving and math reasoning , to be less helpful .
and why this is an amazing time to be a math teacher right now is because we have the tools to create this high-quality curriculum in our front pocket .
it 's ubiquitous and fairly cheap , and the tools to distribute it freely under open licenses has also never been cheaper or more ubiquitous .
i put a video series on my blog not so long ago and it got 6,000 views in two weeks .
i get emails still from teachers in countries i 've never visited saying , " wow , yeah . we had a good conversation about that .
oh , and by the way , here 's how i made your stuff better , " which , wow .
i put this problem on my blog recently : in a grocery store , which line do you get into , the one that has one cart and 19 items or the line with four carts and three , five , two and one items .
and the linear modeling involved in that was some good stuff for my classroom , but it eventually got me on " good morning america " a few weeks later , which is just bizarre , right ?
and from all of this , i can only conclude that people , not just students , are really hungry for this .
math makes sense of the world .
math is the vocabulary for your own intuition .
so i just really encourage you , whatever your stake is in education - whether you 're a student , parent , teacher , policy maker , whatever - insist on better math curriculum .
we need more patient problem solvers . thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- ♫ feminists do n't have a sense of humor . ♫ ♫ feminists just want to be alone - boo hoo , hoo , hoo . ♫ ♫ feminists spread vicious lies and rumors . ♫ ♫ they have a tumor on their funny bone . ♫ ♫ they say child molestation is n't funny - ha , ha , ha , ha . ♫ ♫ rape and degradation 's just a crime - lighten up , ladies . ♫ ♫ rampant prostitution 's sex for money - what 's wrong with that ? ♫ ♫ ca n't these chicks do anything but whine ? ♫ ♫ dance break ! da , da , da , da , da , da , da , da , da . ♫
♫ da , da , da , da , da , da , da , da , da . ♫ ♫ woo-hoo ! ♫ ♫ da , da , da , da , da , da , da , da - ♫ ♫ yeah , take it off . ♫ ♫ da , da , da , da , da , da , da , da , da , dum . ♫ ♫ they say cheap objectification is n't witty - it 's hot ! ♫ ♫ equal work and wages worth the fight - ♫ ♫ sing us a new one . ♫ ♫ on-demand abortion every city - ok , but no gun control . ♫ ♫ wo n't these women ever get a life ? ♫ ♫ feminists do n't have a sense of humor - poor hillary . ♫
♫ feminists and vegetarians - make mine a big mac . ♫ ♫ feminists spread vicious lies and rumors . ♫ ♫ they 're far too sensitive to ever be a ham , ♫ ♫ that 's why these feminists just need to find a man . ♫ ♫ da , da , da , da , da , da , da , da , da , da . ♫ i 'm dennis kucinich and i approved this message .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
i asked my mother , you know , should i say anything in support of anyone ?
and she said , " oh no ! just dis everybody , except ralph nader . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ♫ i could show the world how to smile , ♫ ♫ i could be glad all of the while . ♫ ♫ i could turn the gray skies to blue , if i had you . ♫ ♫ i could leave the old days behind , ♫ ♫ leave all my pals , i 'd never mind . ♫ ♫ i could start my life all anew , if i had you . ♫ ♫ i could climb the snow-capped mountains , ♫ ♫ sail the mighty ocean wide . ♫ ♫ i could cross the burning desert , if i had you by my side . ♫ ♫ i could be a king , dear , uncrowned , humble or poor , rich or renowned . ♫
♫ there is nothing i could n't do , if i had you . ♫ thank you . well , thank you so much .
there are more chinese restaurants in this country than mcdonald 's , burger king , kentucky fried chicken and wendy 's , combined - 40,000 , actually .
chinese restaurants have played an important role in american history , as a matter of fact .
the cuban missile crisis was resolved in a chinese restaurant called yenching palace in washington , d.c. , which unfortunately is closed now , and about to be turned into walgreen 's .
and the house that john wilkes booth planned the assassination of abraham lincoln is actually also now a chinese restaurant called wok ' n roll , on h street in washington .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and it 's not completely gratuitous , because wok and roll - chinese food and japanese foods , so it kind of works out .
and americans love their chinese food so much they 've actually brought it into space .
nasa , for example , serves thermal-stabilized sweet-and-sour pork on its shuttle menu for its astronauts .
so , let me present the question to you : if our benchmark for americanness is apple pie , you should ask yourself , how often do you eat apple pie , versus how often do you eat chinese food . right ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and if you think about it , a lot of the foods that you think of or we think of or americans think of as chinese food are barely recognizable to chinese , for example : beef with broccoli , egg rolls , general tso 's chicken , fortune cookies , chop suey , the take-out boxes .
for example , i took a whole bunch of fortune cookies back to china , gave them to chinese to see how they would react .
what is this ?
should i try it ?
try it !
what is it called ?
fortune cookie .
there 's a piece of paper inside !
-lrb- laughter -rrb- what is this ?
you 've won a prize !
what is this ?
it 's a fortune !
tasty !
so , where are they from ?
the short answer is , actually , they 're from japan .
and in kyoto , outside , there are still small family-run bakeries that make fortune cookies , as they did over 100 years ago , 30 years before fortune cookies were introduced in the united states .
if you see them side by side , there 's yellow and brown .
theirs are actually flavored with miso and sesame paste , so they 're not as sweet as our version .
so , how did they get to the united states ?
well , the short answer is , the japanese immigrants came over , and a bunch of the bakers introduced them - including at least one in los angeles , and one here in san francisco called benkyo-do , which is on the corner of sutter and buchanan .
they back then , actually , made fortune cookies using very much the similar kind of irons that we saw back in kyoto .
so , the interesting question is , how do you go from fortune cookies being something that is japanese to being something that is chinese ?
well , the short answer is , we locked up all the japanese during world war ii , including those that made fortune cookies , so that 's the time when the chinese moved in , kind of saw a market opportunity and took over .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , fortune cookies : invented by the japanese , popularized by the chinese , but ultimately consumed by americans .
they are more american than anything else .
another one of my favorite dishes : general tso 's chicken - which , by the way , in the us naval academy is called admiral tso 's chicken .
i love this dish .
the original name in my book was actually called the long march of general tso , and he has marched very far indeed , because he is sweet , he is fried , and he is chicken - all things that americans love .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- he has marched so far , actually , that the chef who originally invented the dish does n't recognize it ; he 's kind of horrified .
he 's in taiwan right now .
he 's retired , deaf and plays a lot of mahjong .
so , he - after this i showed him , he got up , and he 's like , " mominqimiao , " which means , " this is all nonsense , " and goes back to play his mahjong game during the afternoon .
so , another dish . one of my favorites . beef with broccoli .
broccoli is not a chinese vegetable ; in fact , it is originally an italian vegetable .
it was introduced into the united states in the 1800s , but became popularized in the 1920s and the 1930s .
in fact , the chinese had their own version of broccoli , which is called chinese broccoli , but right now , what - they 've now discovered american broccoli , and are importing it as a , sort of , exotic delicacy .
i guarantee you , general tso never saw a stalk of broccoli in his life - and indeed , that actually was a picture of general tso .
i went to his home town .
this is a billboard that says : " welcome to the birthplace of general tso . "
and i went looking for chicken .
finally found a cow - and did find chicken .
believe it or not , these guys were actually crossing the road .
and - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - i actually found a whole bunch of general tso 's relatives who are still in the little town .
this guy is now five generations removed from the general ; this guy is about seven .
showed them all the pictures of general tso chicken that i showed you , and they 're like , we do n't know this dish .
and then they 're like , is this chinese food ?
because it does n't look like chinese food to them .
but they were n't kind of surprised i traveled around the world to visit them , because in their eyes he is , after all , a famous qing dynasty military hero .
he played an important role in the taiping rebellion , which was a war started by a guy who thought he was the son of god and the baby brother of jesus christ .
and caused the war that killed 20 million people - still the deadliest civil war in the world to this day .
so , you know , i realized when i was there , general tso is kind of a lot like colonel sanders in america , in that he 's known for chicken and not war .
but in china , this guy 's actually known for war and not chicken .
but the granddaddy of all the chinese-american dishes we probably ought to talk about is chop suey , which was introduced around the turn of the 20th century .
and according to new york times , in 1904 , there was an outbreak of chinese restaurants all over town , and " the city has gone ' chop suey ' mad . "
so it took about 30 years before the americans realized that , whoa , chop suey is actually not known in china .
and as this article points out , " the average native of any city in china knows nothing of chop suey . "
you know , back then it was a way to show that you were sophisticated and cosmopolitan : if you were a guy and you wanted to impress a girl , you could take her out on a chop suey date .
i like to say chop suey 's the biggest culinary joke that one culture has ever played on another , because chop suey , if you translate into chinese , means tsap sui , which , if you translate back , means " odds and ends . "
so , these people are going around china asking for chop suey , which is sort of like a japanese guy coming here and saying , i understand you have a very popular dish in your country called " leftovers , " and it is particularly - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - right ?
and not only that : this dish is particularly popular after that holiday you call thanksgiving .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , why - why and where - did chop suey come from ?
let 's go back to mid-1800s when the chinese first came to america .
now back then , the americans were not clamoring to eat chinese food .
in fact , they saw this people who landed at their shores as alien .
these people were n't eating dogs - they were eating cats - and they were n't eating cats - they were eating rats .
in fact , the new york times , my esteemed employer , in 1883 ran an article that asked , " do chinese eat rats ? "
and not the most pc question to be asked today , but if you kind of look at the popular imagery of the time , not so outlandish .
this is actually a real advertisement for rat poison from the late 1800s , and if you see , under the word " clears " - very small - it says , " they must go , " which refers not only to the rats , but to the chinese in their midst , because the way that the food was perceived was that these people who ate foods different from us must be different from us .
and another way that you saw , sort of , this sort of , this antipathy towards the chinese is through documents like this .
this is actually in the library of congress ; it is a pamphlet published by samuel gompers , hero of our american labor movement , and it 's called , " some reason for chinese exclusion : meat versus rice : american manhood against asiatic coolieism : which shall survive ?
and it basically made the argument that chinese men who ate rice would necessarily bring down the standard of living for american men who ate meat .
and as a matter of fact , then , this is one of the reasons why we must exclude them from this country so , with sentiments like these , the chinese exclusion act was sort of passed between 1882 and 1902 , the only time in american history when a group was specifically excluded for its national origin or ethnicity .
so , in a way , because the chinese were attacked , chop suey was created as a defense mechanism .
now , who came up with the idea of chop suey ?
there 's a lot of different mysteries , a lot of different legends , but of the ones that i 've found that i thought was most interesting is this article from 1904 .
a chinese guy named lem sen shows up in chinatown , new york city , and says , i want you guys all to stop making chop suey , because i am the original creator and sole proprietor of the dish known as chop suey .
and the way that he tells it , there was a guy , there was a famous chinese diplomat that showed up , and he was told to make a dish that looked very popular and could , quote , " pass " as chinese .
and as he said - we would never print this today - but basically , the american man has become very rich .
lem sen , who 's this guy : i would have made this money , too , but i 've spent all this time looking for the american man who stole my recipe .
now i 've come and found him , and i want my recipe back and i want everyone to stop making chop suey , or pay me for the right to do the same .
so it was an early exercise of intellectual property rights .
so the thing is , this kind of idea of chinese-american food does n't exist only in america .
in fact , if you think about it , chinese food is the most pervasive food on the planet , served on all seven continents , even antarctica , because monday night is chinese food night at mcmurdo station , which is the main scientific station in antarctica .
so , you see different varieties of chinese food .
for example , there is french chinese food , where they serve salt and pepper frog legs .
there is italian chinese food , where they do n't have fortune cookies , so they serve fried gelato .
my downstairs neighbor , alessandra , was completely shocked when i told her , " dude , fried gelato is not chinese . "
she 's like , " it 's not ?
but they serve it in all the chinese restaurants in italy . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and even the brits have their own version .
this is a dish called crispy shredded beef , which has a lot of crisp , a lot of shred , and not a lot of beef .
there is west indian chinese food , there 's jamaican chinese food , there is middle eastern chinese food , there 's mauritian chinese food .
this is a dish called magic bowl that i discovered .
there 's indian chinese food , korean chinese food , japanese chinese food , where they take the bao , the little buns , and they make them into pizza versions , and they take - and they - like , totally randomly they 'll take chinese noodle dishes , and they 'll just ramen-ize them .
this is , like , this is something that in the chinese version has no soup .
so , there 's peruvian chinese food , which should not be mixed with mexican chinese food , where they basically take things and make it look like fajitas .
and then - one thing : they have things like risotto chop suey .
my personal favorite of all the restaurants i 've encountered around the world was this one in brazil , called " kung food . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , let 's take a step back , and kind of , understand what is to be appreciated in america .
mcdonald 's has , sort of , garnered a lot of attention , a lot of respect , for basically standardizing the menu , décor and dining experience in post-world war ii america .
but you know what ?
they actually did so through a centralized headquarters out of illinois , right ?
chinese restaurants have done largely the same thing , i would argue , with the menu and the décor - even the restaurant name - but without a centralized headquarters .
so , this actually became very clear to me with the march 30 , 2005 powerball drawing , where , you know , they expected , based on the number of ticket sales they had , to have three or four second-place winners - those are the people who match five or six powerball numbers .
instead , they had 110 , and they were completely shocked .
they looked all across the country , and discovered it could n't necessarily be fraud , because it happened , you know , in different states , across different computer systems .
so whatever it was , it caused people to sort of behave in a mass synchronized way .
so , like , ok , maybe it had to do with the patterns on the little pieces of paper - you know , like , it was a diamond , or , you know , diagonal .
it was n't that .
it was n't that , so they 're like , ok , let 's look at television , so they looked at an episode of " lost . "
now , i do n't have a tv , which makes me a freak , but very productive , and - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - and this episode of " lost , " i understand , where the overweight guy has a lucky number which was not a lucky number , which was how long they 'd been on the island , but they looked , and the numbers did not match .
so they looked at " the young and the restless , " and it was n't that , either .
so , it was n't until the first guy shows up the next day , and they ask him , " where did you get your number from ? "
he 's like , " oh , i got it from a fortune cookie . "
this actually is a slip that one of the winners had , because the tennessee lottery security officials were like , oh , no - like , this ca n't be true .
but it was true , and basically , of those 110 people , and 104 of them or so had gotten their number from the fortune cookie .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- yeah . so , i went and started looking .
i went across the country , looking for these restaurants where these people had gotten their fortune cookies from .
you know , there are a bunch of them , including lee 's china in omaha - which is actually run by koreans , but that 's another point - and a bunch of them named china buffet .
so , what 's interesting is that their stories were similar , but they were different .
it was lunch , it was take-out , it was sit-down , it was buffet , it was three weeks ago , it was three months ago .
but at some point , all these people had a very similar experience that converged at a fortune cookie and at a chinese restaurant , and all these chinese restaurants were serving fortune cookies , which , of course we know are n't even chinese to begin with .
so it 's kind of part of the phenomenon i called spontaneous self-organization , right , where , like in ant colonies , where little decisions made by - on the micro-level actually have a big impact on the macro-level .
so , a good sort of contrast is chicken mcnuggets .
mcdonald 's actually spent 10 years coming out with a chicken-like product .
they did chicken pot pie , they did fried chicken , and then they finally introduced chicken mcnuggets .
and the great innovation of chicken mcnuggets was not nuggetfying them , because that 's kind of an easy concept , but the trick behind chicken mcnuggets was , they were able to remove the chicken from the bone in a cost-effective manner , which is why it took so long for other people to copy them .
it took 10 years , and then within a couple of months , it was such a hit they just introduced it and rolled it across the entire system of mcdonald 's in the country .
in contrast , we have general tso 's chicken , which actually started in new york city in the early 1970s , as i was also starting in the university in new york city in the early 1970s , so ...
and this logo !
so me , general tso 's chicken and this logo are all karmacally related .
but that dish also took about 10 years to spread across america from a random restaurant in new york city .
someone 's like , oh , god - it 's sweet , it 's fried , it 's chicken : americans will love this .
so , what i like to say , you know , this being sort of bay area , silicon valley - is that we think of mcdonald 's as sort of the microsoft of the dining experiences .
we can think of chinese restaurants perhaps as linux : sort of an open source thing , right , where ideas from one person can be copied and propagated across the entire system , that there can be specialized versions of chinese food , you know , depending on the region .
for example , you know , in new orleans we have cajun chinese food , where they serve sichuan alligator and sweet and sour crawfish , right ?
and in philadelphia , you have philadelphia cheesesteak roll , which looks like an egg roll on the outside , but a cheesesteak on the inside .
i was really surprised to discover that , not only in philadelphia , but also in atlanta , because what had happened was that a chinese family had moved from atlanta to - sorry , from philadelphia to atlanta , and brought that with them .
so , the thing is , our historical lore , because of the way we like narratives , are full of vast characters such as , you know , howard schultz of starbucks and ray kroc with mcdonald 's and asa chandler with coca-cola .
but , you know , it 's very easy to overlook the smaller characters - oops - for example , like lem sen , who introduced chop suey , chef peng , who introduced general tso chicken , and all the japanese bakers who introduced fortune cookies .
so , the point of my presentation is to make you think twice , that those whose names are forgotten in history can often have had as much , if not more , impact on what we eat today .
so . thank you very much .
daffodil hudson : hello ?
yeah , this is she .
what ?
oh , yeah , yeah , yeah , yeah , of course i accept .
what are the dates again ?
pen . pen . pen .
march 17 through 21 .
okay , all right , great . thanks .
lab partner : who was that ?
dh : it was ted .
lp : who 's ted ?
dh : i 've got to prepare .
-lsb- " give your talk : a musical " -rsb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lsb- " my talk " -rsb- ♪ procrastination . ♪ what do you think ?
-lrb- doorbell -rrb- can i help you ?
-lrb- music -rrb- speaker coach 1 : ♪ let 's prepare for main stage . ♪ ♪ it 's your time to shine . ♪ ♪ if you want to succeed then ♪ ♪ you must be primed . ♪ speaker coach 2 : ♪ your slides are bad ♪ ♪ but your idea is good ♪ ♪ so you can bet before we 're through , ♪ ♪ speaker , we 'll make a ted talk out of you . ♪ speaker coach 3 : ♪ we know about climate change , ♪ ♪ but what can you say that 's new ? ♪ ♪ sc 1 : once you find your focus ♪ ♪ then the talk comes into view . ♪
sc 2 : ♪ do n't ever try to sell something ♪ ♪ from up on that stage ♪ ♪ or we wo n't post your talk online . ♪ all : ♪ somehow we 'll make a ted talk out of you . ♪ -lrb- music -rrb- sc 1 : ready to practice one more time ?
dh : right now ?
stagehand : break a leg .
dh : ♪ i 'll never remember all this . ♪ ♪ will the clicker work when i press it ? ♪ ♪ why must al gore go right before me ? ♪ ♪ oh man , i 'm scared to death . ♪ ♪ i hope i do n't pass out onstage ♪ ♪ and now i really wish i was n't wearing green . ♪ all : ♪ give your talk . ♪ sc 1 : ♪ you must be be sweet like brené brown . ♪ all : ♪ give your talk . ♪ sc 2 : ♪ you must be funny like ken robinson . ♪ all : ♪ give your talk . ♪ sc 3 : ♪ you must be cool like reggie watts ♪
all : ♪ and bring out a prop like jill bolte taylor . ♪ dh : ♪ my time is running over . the clock now says nil . ♪ ♪ i 'm saying my words faster . understand me still . ♪ ♪ i 'm too nervous to give this ted talk . ♪ all : ♪ do n't give up . rehearse . you 're good . ♪ ♪ we 'll edit out the mistakes that you make . ♪ ♪ give your talk . ♪ dh : ♪ i will be big like amy cuddy . ♪ all : ♪ give your talk . ♪ dh : ♪ i will inspire like liz gilbert . ♪ all : ♪ give your talk . ♪
dh : ♪ i will engage like hans rosling ♪ ♪ and release mosquitos ♪ ♪ like bill gates . ♪ sc 2 : ♪ i 'll make a ted talk out of you . ♪ ♪ i 'll make a ted talk out of you . ♪ ♪ i 'll make a ted talk out of you . ♪ ♪ i 'll make a ted talk out of you . ♪ ♪ i 'll make a ted talk out of you . ♪ -lrb- applause -rrb- -lsb- " brought to you by ted staff and friends " -rsb- -lrb- music -rrb- what is bioenergy ? bioenergy is not ethanol .
bioenergy is n't global warming . bioenergy is something which seems counterintuitive . bioenergy is oil . it 's gas . it 's coal . and part of building that bridge to the future , to the point where we can actually see the oceans in a rational way , or put up these geo-spatial orbits that will twirl or do microwaves or stuff , is going to depend on how we understand bioenergy and manage it . and to do that , you really have to look first at agriculture .
so we 've been planting stuff for 11,000 years . and in the measure that we plant stuff , what we learn from agriculture is you 've got to deal with pests , you 've got to deal with all types of awful things , you 've got to cultivate stuff . in the measure that you learn how to use water to cultivate , then you 're going to be able to spread beyond the nile .
you 're going to be able to power stuff , so irrigation makes a difference .
irrigation starts to make you be allowed to plant stuff where you want it , as opposed to where the rivers flood . you start getting this organic agriculture ; you start putting machinery onto this stuff . machinery , with a whole bunch of water , leads to very large-scale agriculture .
you put together machines and water , and you get landscapes that look like this . and then you get sales that look like this . it 's brute force . so what you 've been doing in agriculture is you start out with something that 's a reasonably natural system . you start taming that natural system . you put a lot of force behind that natural system . you put a whole bunch of pesticides and herbicides - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - behind that natural system , and you end up with systems that look like this .
and it 's all brute force . and that 's the way we 've been approaching energy . so the lesson in agriculture is that you can actually change the system that 's based on brute force as you start merging that system and learning that system and actually applying biology . and you move from a discipline of engineering , you move from a discipline of chemistry , into a discipline of biology . and probably one of the most important human beings on the planet is this guy behind me .
this is a guy called norman borlaug . he won the nobel prize . he 's got the congressional medal of honor . he deserves all of this stuff . and he deserves this stuff because he probably has fed more people than any other human being alive because he researched how to put biology behind seeds . he did this in mexico . the reason why india and china no longer have these massive famines is because norman borlaug taught them how to grow grains in a more efficient way and launched the green revolution . that is something that a lot of people have criticized . but of course , those are
people who do n't realize that china and india , instead of having huge amounts of starving people , are exporting grains .
and the irony of this particular system is the place where he did the research , which was mexico , did n't adopt this technology , ignored this technology , talked about why this technology should be thought about , but not really applied .
and mexico remains one of the largest grain importers on the planet because it does n't apply technology that was discovered in mexico . and in fact , has n't recognized this man , to the point where there are n't statues of this man all over mexico . there are in china and india . and the institute that this guy ran has now moved to india . that is the difference between adopting technologies and discussing technologies .
now , it 's not just that this guy fed a huge amount of people in the world . it 's that this is the net effect in terms of what technology does , if you understand biology .
what happened in agriculture ? well , if you take agriculture over a century , agriculture in about 1900 would have been recognizable to somebody planting a thousand years earlier . yeah , the plows look different . the machines were tractors or stuff instead of mules , but the farmer would have understood : this is what the guy 's doing , this is why he 's doing it , this is where he 's going . what really started to change in agriculture is when you started moving from this brute force engineering and chemistry into biology , and that 's where you get your productivity increases . and as you do that stuff , here 's what happens to
productivity .
basically , you go from 250 hours to produce 100 bushels , to 40 , to 15 , to five . agricultural labor productivity increased seven times , 1950 to 2000 , whereas the rest of the economy increased about 2.5 times . this is an absolutely massive increase in how much is produced per person .
the effect of this , of course , is it 's not just amber waves of grain , it is mountains of stuff .
and 50 percent of the eu budget is going to subsidize agriculture from mountains of stuff that people have overproduced .
this would be a good outcome for energy . and of course , by now , you 're probably saying to yourself , " self , i thought i came to a talk about energy and here 's this guy talking about biology . "
so where 's the link between these two things ?
one of the ironies of this whole system is we 're discussing what to do about a system that we do n't understand . we do n't even know what oil is . we do n't know where oil comes from . i mean , literally , it 's still a source of debate what this black river of stuff is and where it comes from . the best assumption , and one of the best guesses in this stuff , is that this stuff comes out of this stuff , that these things absorb sunlight , rot under pressure for millions of years , and you get these black rivers .
now , the interesting thing about that thesis - if that thesis turns out to be true - is that oil , and all hydrocarbons , turned out to be concentrated sunlight . and if you think of bioenergy , bioenergy is n't ethanol . bioenergy is taking the sun , concentrating it in amoebas , concentrating it in plants , and maybe that 's why you get these rainbows .
and as you 're looking at this system , if hydrocarbons are concentrated sunlight , then bioenergy works in a different way . and we 've got to start thinking of oil and other hydrocarbons as part of these solar panels .
maybe that 's one of the reasons why if you fly over west texas , the types of wells that you 're beginning to see do n't look unlike those pictures of kansas and those irrigated plots .
this is how you farm oil . and as you think of farming oil and how oil has evolved , we started with this brute force approach . and then what did we learn ? then we learned we had to go bigger . and then what 'd we learn ? then we have to go even bigger . and we are getting really destructive as we 're going out and farming this bioenergy .
these are the athabasca tar sands , and there 's an enormous amount - first of mining , the largest trucks in the world are working here , and then you 've got to pull out this black sludge , which is basically oil that does n't flow . it 's tied to the sand . and then you 've got to use a lot of steam to separate it , which only works at today 's oil prices .
coal . coal turns out to be virtually the same stuff . it is probably plants , except that these have been burned and crushed under pressure .
so you take something like this , you burn it , you put it under pressure , and likely as not , you get this . although , again , i stress : we do n't know .
which is curious as we debate all this stuff . but as you think of coal , this is what burned wheat kernels look like . not entirely unlike coal .
and of course , coalmines are very dangerous places because in some of these coalmines , you get gas . when that gas blows up , people die . so you 're producing a biogas out of coal in some mines , but not in others .
any place you see a differential , there 're some interesting questions . there 's some questions as to what you should be doing with this stuff . but again , coal . maybe the same stuff , maybe the same system , maybe bioenergy , and you 're applying exactly the same technology .
here 's your brute force approach . once you get through your brute force approach , then you just rip off whole mountaintops . and you end up with the single largest source of carbon emissions , which are coal-fired gas plants . that is probably not the best use of bioenergy .
as you think of what are the alternatives to this system - it 's important to find alternatives because it turns out that the u.s. is dwindling in its coal reserves , nor is china . there are huge coal reserves that are sitting out there , and we 've got to start thinking of them as biological energy , because if we keep treating them as chemical energy , or engineering energy , we 're going to be in deep doo-doo .
gas is a similar issue . gas is also a biological product . and as you think of gas , well , you 're familiar with gas . and here 's a different way of mining coal .
this is called coal bed methane . why is this picture interesting ? because if coal turns out to be concentrated plant life , the reason why you may get a differential in gas output between one mine and another - the reason why one mine may blow up and another one may not blow up - may be because there 's stuff eating that stuff and producing gas .
this is a well-known phenomenon . -lrb- laughter -rrb- you eat certain things , you produce a lot of gas . it may turn out that biological processes in coalmines have the same process . if that is true , then one of the ways of getting the energy out of coal may not be to rip whole mountaintops off , and it may not be to burn coal . it may be to have stuff process that coal in a biological fashion as you did in agriculture .
that is what bioenergy is . it is not ethanol . it is not subsidies to a few companies . it is not importing corn into iowa because you 've built so many of these ethanol plants . it is beginning to understand the transition that occurred in agriculture , from brute force into biological force . and in the measure that you can do that , you can clean some stuff , and you can clean it pretty quickly .
we already have some indicators of productivity on this stuff . ok , if you put steam into coal fields or petroleum fields that have been running for decades , you can get a really substantial increase , like an eight-fold increase , in your output . this is just the beginning stages of this stuff .
and as you think of biomaterials , this guy - who did part of the sequencing of the human genome , who just doubled the databases of genes and proteins known on earth by sailing around the world - has been thinking about how you structure this . and there 's a series of smart people thinking about this . and they 've been putting together companies like synthetic genomics , like , a cambria , like codon , and what those companies are trying to do is to think of , how do you apply biological principles to avoid brute force ?
think of it in the following terms . think of it as beginning to program stuff for specific purposes .
think of the cell as a hardware . think of the genes as a software . and in the measure that you begin to think of life as code that is interchangeable , that can become energy , that can become food , that can become fiber , that can become human beings , that can become a whole series of things , then you 've got to shift your approach as to how you 're going to structure and deal and think about energy in a very different way .
what are the first principles of this stuff and where are we heading ? this is one of the gentle giants on the planet . he 's one of the nicest human beings you 've ever met . his name is hamilton smith . he won the nobel for figuring out how to cut genes - something called restriction enzymes .
he was at hopkins when he did this , and he 's such a modest guy that the day he won , his mother called him and said , " i did n't realize there was another ham smith at hopkins . do you know he just won the nobel ? " -lrb- laughter -rrb- i mean , that was mom , but anyway , this guy is just a class act . you find him at the bench every single day , working on a pipette and building stuff . and one of the things this guy just built are these things .
what is this ? this is the first transplant of naked dna , where you take an entire dna operating system out of one cell , insert it into a different cell , and have that cell boot up as a separate species . that 's one month old . you will see stuff in the next month that will be just as important as this stuff .
and as you think about this stuff and what the implications of this are , we 're going to start not just converting ethanol from corn with very high subsidies . we 're going to start thinking about biology entering energy . it is very expensive to process this stuff , both in economic terms and in energy terms .
this is what accumulates in the tar sands of alberta . these are sulfur blocks . because as you separate that petroleum from the sand , and use an enormous amount of energy inside that vapor - steam to separate this stuff - you also have to separate out the sulfur . the difference between light crude and heavy crude - well , it 's about 14 bucks a barrel . that 's why you 're building these pyramids of sulfur blocks . and by the way , the scale on these things is pretty large .
now , if you can take part of the energy content out of doing this , you reduce the system , and you really do start applying biological principles to energy . this has to be a bridge to the point where nuclear - and hopefully you wo n't build the next nuclear plant on a beautiful seashore next to an earthquake fault . -lrb- laughter -rrb- just a thought .
but in the meantime , for the next decade at least , the name of the game is hydrocarbons . and be that oil , be that gas , be that coal , this is what we 're dealing with . and before i make this talk too long , here 's what 's happening in the current energy system .
86 percent of the energy we consume are hydrocarbons . that means 86 percent of the stuff we 're consuming are probably processed plants and amoebas and the rest of the stuff . and there 's a role in here for conservation . there 's a role in here for alternative stuff , but we 've also got to get that other portion right .
how we deal with that other portion is our bridge to the future . and as we think of this bridge to the future , one of the things you should ponder is : we are leaving about two-thirds of the oil today inside those wells . so we 're spending an enormous amount of money and leaving most of the energy down there . which , of course , requires more energy to go out and get energy . the ratios become idiotic by the time you get to ethanol . it may even be a one-to-one ratio on the energy input and the energy output . that is a stupid way of
managing this system .
last point , last graph . one of the things that we 've got to do is to stabilize oil prices . this is what oil prices look like , ok ?
this is a very bad system because what happens is your hurdle rate gets set very low . people come up with really smart ideas for solar panels , or for wind , or for something else , and then guess what ?
the oil price goes through the floor . that company goes out of business , and then you can bring the oil price back up .
so if i had one closing and modest suggestion , let 's set a stable oil price in europe and the united states . how do you do that ? well , let 's put a tax on oil that is a non-revenue tax , and it basically says for the next 20 years , the price of oil will be - whatever you want , 35 bucks , 40 bucks . if the opec price falls below that , we tax it . if the opec price goes above that , the tax goes away .
what does that do for entrepreneurs ? what does it do for companies ? it tells people , if you can produce energy for less than 35 bucks a barrel , or less than 40 bucks a barrel , or less than 50 bucks a barrel - let 's debate it - you will have a business . but let 's not put people through this cycle where it does n't pay to research because your company will go out of business as opec drives alternatives and keeps bioenergy from happening . thank you .
who are we ?
that is the big question .
and essentially we are just an upright-walking , big-brained , super-intelligent ape .
this could be us .
we belong to the family called the hominidae .
we are the species called homo sapiens sapiens , and it 's important to remember that , in terms of our place in the world today and our future on planet earth .
we are one species of about five and a half thousand mammalian species that exist on planet earth today .
and that 's just a tiny fraction of all species that have ever lived on the planet in past times .
we 're one species out of approximately , or let 's say , at least 16 upright-walking apes that have existed over the past six to eight million years .
but as far as we know , we 're the only upright-walking ape that exists on planet earth today , except for the bonobos .
and it 's important to remember that , because the bonobos are so human , and they share 99 percent of their genes with us .
and we share our origins with a handful of the living great apes .
it 's important to remember that we evolved .
now , i know that 's a dirty word for some people , but we evolved from common ancestors with the gorillas , the chimpanzee and also the bonobos .
we have a common past , and we have a common future .
and it is important to remember that all of these great apes have come on as long and as interesting evolutionary journey as we ourselves have today .
and it 's this journey that is of such interest to humanity , and it 's this journey that has been the focus of the past three generations of my family , as we 've been in east africa looking for the fossil remains of our ancestors to try and piece together our evolutionary past .
and this is how we look for them .
a group of dedicated young men and women walk very slowly out across vast areas of africa , looking for small fragments of bone , fossil bone , that may be on the surface .
and that 's an example of what we may do as we walk across the landscape in northern kenya , looking for fossils .
i doubt many of you in the audience can see the fossil that 's in this picture , but if you look very carefully , there is a jaw , a lower jaw , of a 4.1-million-year-old upright-walking ape as it was found at lake turkana on the west side .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's extremely time-consuming , labor-intensive and it is something that is going to involve a lot more people , to begin to piece together our past .
we still really have n't got a very complete picture of it .
when we find a fossil , we mark it .
today , we 've got great technology : we have gps .
we mark it with a gps fix , and we also take a digital photograph of the specimen , so we could essentially put it back on the surface , exactly where we found it .
and we can bring all this information into big gis packages , today .
when we then find something very important , like the bones of a human ancestor , we begin to excavate it extremely carefully and slowly , using dental picks and fine paintbrushes .
and all the sediment is then put through these screens , and where we go again through it very carefully , looking for small bone fragments , and it 's then washed .
and these things are so exciting . they are so often the only , or the very first time that anybody has ever seen the remains .
and here 's a very special moment , when my mother and myself were digging up some remains of human ancestors .
and it is one of the most special things to ever do with your mother .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- not many people can say that .
but now , let me take you back to africa , two million years ago .
i 'd just like to point out , if you look at the map of africa , it does actually look like a hominid skull in its shape .
now we 're going to go to the east african and the rift valley .
it essentially runs up from the gulf of aden , or runs down to lake malawi .
and the rift valley is a depression .
it 's a basin , and rivers flow down from the highlands into the basin , carrying sediment , preserving the bones of animals that lived there .
if you want to become a fossil , you actually need to die somewhere where your bones will be rapidly buried .
you then hope that the earth moves in such a way as to bring the bones back up to the surface .
and then you hope that one of us lot will walk around and find small pieces of you .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ok , so it is absolutely surprising that we know as much as we do know today about our ancestors , because it 's incredibly difficult , a , for these things to become - to be - preserved , and secondly , for them to have been brought back up to the surface .
and we really have only spent 50 years looking for these remains , and begin to actually piece together our evolutionary story .
so , let 's go to lake turkana , which is one such lake basin in the very north of our country , kenya .
and if you look north here , there 's a big river that flows into the lake that 's been carrying sediment and preserving the remains of the animals that lived there .
fossil sites run up and down both lengths of that lake basin , which represents some 20,000 square miles .
that 's a huge job that we 've got on our hands .
two million years ago at lake turkana , homo erectus , one of our human ancestors , actually lived in this region .
you can see some of the major fossil sites that we 've been working in the north . but , essentially , two million years ago , homo erectus , up in the far right corner , lived alongside three other species of human ancestor .
and here is a skull of a homo erectus , which i just pulled off the shelf there .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but it is not to say that being a single species on planet earth is the norm .
in fact , if you go back in time , it is the norm that there are multiple species of hominids or of human ancestors that coexist at any one time .
where did these things come from ?
that 's what we 're still trying to find answers to , and it is important to realize that there is diversity in all different species , and our ancestors are no exception .
here 's some reconstructions of some of the fossils that have been found from lake turkana .
but i was very lucky to have been brought up in kenya , essentially accompanying my parents to lake turkana in search of human remains .
and we were able to dig up , when we got old enough , fossils such as this , a slender-snouted crocodile .
and we dug up giant tortoises , and elephants and things like that .
but when i was 12 , as i was in this picture , a very exciting expedition was in place on the west side , when they found essentially the skeleton of this homo erectus .
i could relate to this homo erectus skeleton very well , because i was the same age that he was when he died .
and i imagined him to be tall , dark-skinned .
his brothers certainly were able to run long distances chasing prey , probably sweating heavily as they did so .
he was very able to use stones effectively as tools .
and this individual himself , this one that i 'm holding up here , actually had a bad back . he 'd probably had an injury as a child .
he had a scoliosis and therefore must have been looked after quite carefully by other female , and probably much smaller , members of his family group , to have got to where he did in life , age 12 .
unfortunately for him , he fell into a swamp and could n't get out .
essentially , his bones were rapidly buried and beautifully preserved .
and he remained there until 1.6 million years later , when this very famous fossil hunter , kamoya kimeu , walked along a small hillside and found that small piece of his skull lying on the surface amongst the pebbles , recognized it as being hominid .
it 's actually this little piece up here on the top .
well , an excavation was begun immediately , and more and more little bits of skull started to be extracted from the sediment .
and what was so fun about it was this : the skull pieces got closer and closer to the roots of the tree , and fairly recently the tree had grown up , but it had found that the skull had captured nice water in the hillside , and so it had decided to grow its roots in and around this , holding it in place and preventing it from washing away down the slope .
we began to find limb bones ; we found finger bones , the bones of the pelvis , vertebrae , ribs , the collar bones , things that had never , ever been seen before in homo erectus .
it was truly exciting .
he had a body very similar to our own , and he was on the threshold of becoming human .
well , shortly afterwards , members of his species started to move northwards out of africa , and you start to see fossils of homo erectus in georgia , china and also in parts of indonesia .
so , homo erectus was the first human ancestor to leave africa and begin its spread across the globe .
some exciting finds , again , as i mentioned , from dmanisi , in the republic of georgia .
but also , surprising finds recently announced from the island of flores in indonesia , where a group of these human ancestors have been isolated , and have become dwarfed , and they 're only about a meter in height .
but they lived only 18,000 years ago , and that is truly extraordinary to think about .
just to put this in terms of generations , because people do find it hard to think of time , homo erectus left africa 90,000 generations ago .
we evolved essentially from an african stock .
again , at about 200,000 years as a fully-fledged us .
and we only left africa about 70,000 years ago .
and until 30,000 years ago , at least three upright-walking apes shared the planet earth .
the question now is , well , who are we ?
we 're certainly a polluting , wasteful , aggressive species , with a few nice things thrown in , perhaps .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- for the most part , we 're not particularly pleasant at all .
we have a much larger brain than our ape ancestors .
is this a good evolutionary adaptation , or is it going to lead us to being the shortest-lived hominid species on planet earth ?
and what is it that really makes us us ?
i think it 's our collective intelligence .
it 's our ability to write things down , our language and our consciousness .
from very primitive beginnings , with a very crude tool kit of stones , we now have a very advanced tool kit , and our tool use has really reached unprecedented levels : we 've got buggies to mars ; we 've mapped the human genome ; and recently even created synthetic life , thanks to craig venter .
and we 've also managed to communicate with people all over the world , from extraordinary places .
even from within an excavation in northern kenya , we can talk to people about what we 're doing .
as al gore so clearly has reminded us , we have reached extraordinary numbers of people on this planet .
human ancestors really only survive on planet earth , if you look at the fossil record , for about , on average , a million years at a time .
we 've only been around for the past 200,000 years as a species , yet we 've reached a population of more than six and a half billion people .
and last year , our population grew by 80 million .
i mean , these are extraordinary numbers .
you can see here , again , taken from al gore 's book .
but what 's happened is our technology has removed the checks and balances on our population growth .
we have to control our numbers , and i think this is as important as anything else that 's being done in the world today .
but we have to control our numbers , because we ca n't really hold it together as a species .
my father so appropriately put it , that " we are certainly the only animal that makes conscious choices that are bad for our survival as a species . "
can we hold it together ?
it 's important to remember that we all evolved in africa .
we all have an african origin .
we have a common past and we share a common future .
evolutionarily speaking , we 're just a blip .
we 're sitting on the edge of a precipice , and we have the tools and the technology at our hands to communicate what needs to be done to hold it together today .
we could tell every single human being out there , if we really wanted to .
but will we do that , or will we just let nature take its course ?
well , to end on a very positive note , i think evolutionarily speaking , this is probably a fairly good thing , in the end .
i 'll leave it at that , thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- it is said that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence , and i believe this is true , especially when i hear president obama often talk about the korean education system as a benchmark of success .
well , i can tell you that , in the rigid structure and highly competitive nature of the korean school system , also known as pressure cooker , not everyone can do well in that environment .
while many people responded in different ways about our education system , my response to the high-pressure environment was making bows with pieces of wood found near my apartment building .
why bows ?
i 'm not quite sure .
perhaps , in the face of constant pressure , my caveman instinct of survival has connected with the bows .
if you think about it , the bow has really helped drive human survival since prehistoric times .
the area within three kilometers of my home used to be a mulberry forest during the joseon dynasty , where silkworms were fed with mulberry leaves .
in order to raise the historical awareness of this fact , the government has planted mulberry trees .
the seeds from these trees also have spread by birds here and there nearby the soundproof walls of the city expressway that has been built around the 1988 olympics .
the area near these walls , which nobody bothers to pay attention to , had been left free from major intervention , and this is where i first found my treasures .
as i fell deeper into bow making , i began to search far and beyond my neighborhood .
family vacations , or simply on my way home from extracurricular classes , i wandered around wooded areas and gathered tree branches with the tools that i sneaked inside my school bag .
and they would be somethings like saws , knives , sickles and axes that i covered up with a piece of towel .
i would bring the branches home , riding buses and subways , barely holding them in my hands .
and i did not bring the tools here to long beach .
airport security .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- in the privacy of my room , covered in sawdust , i would saw , trim and polish wood all night long until a bow took shape .
one day , i was changing the shape of a bamboo piece and ended up setting the place on fire .
where ? the rooftop of my apartment building , a place where 96 families call home .
a customer from a department store across from my building called 911 , and i ran downstairs to tell my mom with half of my hair burned .
i want to take this opportunity to tell my mom , in the audience today : mom , i was really sorry , and i will be more careful with open fire from now on .
my mother had to do a lot of explaining , telling people that her son did not commit a premeditated arson .
i also researched extensively on bows around the world .
in that process , i tried to combine the different bows from across time and places to create the most effective bow .
i also worked with many different types of wood , such as maple , yew and mulberry , and did many shooting experiments in the wooded area near the urban expressway that i mentioned before .
the most effective bow for me would be like this .
one : curved tips can maximize the springiness when you draw and shoot the arrow .
two : belly is drawn inward for higher draw weight , which means more power .
three : sinew used in the outer layer of the limb for maximum tension storage .
and four : horn used to store energy in compression .
after fixing , breaking , redesigning , mending , bending and amending , my ideal bow began to take shape , and when it was finally done , it looked like this .
i was so proud of myself for inventing a perfect bow on my own .
this is a picture of korean traditional bows taken from a museum , and see how my bow resembles them .
thanks to my ancestors for robbing me of my invention . -lrb- laughter -rrb- through bowmaking , i came in contact with part of my heritage .
learning the information that has accumulated over time and reading the message left by my ancestors were better than any consolation therapy or piece of advice any living adults could give me .
you see , i searched far and wide , but never bothered to look close and near .
from this realization , i began to take interest in korean history , which had never inspired me before .
in the end , the grass is often greener on my side of the fence , although we do n't realize it .
now , i am going to show you how my bow works .
and let 's see how this one works .
this is a bamboo bow , with 45-pound draw weights .
-lrb- applause -rrb- a bow may function in a simple mechanism , but in order to make a good bow , a great amount of sensitivity is required .
you need to console and communicate each fiber in the wood has its own reason and function for being , and only through cooperation and harmony among them comes a great bow .
i may be an -lsb- odd -rsb- student with unconventional interests , but i hope i am making a contribution by sharing my story with all of you .
my ideal world is a place where no one is left behind , where everyone is needed exactly where they are , like the fibers and the tendons in a bow , a place where the strong is flexible and the vulnerable is resilient .
the bow resembles me , and i resemble the bow .
now , i am shooting a part of myself to you .
no , better yet , a part of my mind has just been shot over to your mind .
did it strike you ?
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- now , have any of y 'all ever looked up this word ?
you know , in a dictionary ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- yeah , that 's what i thought .
how about this word ?
here , i 'll show it to you .
lexicography : the practice of compiling dictionaries .
notice - we 're very specific - that word " compile . "
the dictionary is not carved out of a piece of granite , out of a lump of rock . it 's made up of lots of little bits .
it 's little discrete - that 's spelled d-i-s-c-r-e-t-e - bits .
and those bits are words .
now one of the perks of being a lexicographer - besides getting to come to ted - is that you get to say really fun words , like lexicographical .
lexicographical has this great pattern : it 's called a double dactyl . and just by saying double dactyl , i 've sent the geek needle all the way into the red . -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- but " lexicographical " is the same pattern as " higgledy-piggledy . "
right ? it 's a fun word to say , and i get to say it a lot .
now , one of the non-perks of being a lexicographer is that people do n't usually have a kind of warm , fuzzy , snuggly image of the dictionary .
right ? nobody hugs their dictionaries .
but what people really often think about the dictionary is , they think more like this .
just to let you know , i do not have a lexicographical whistle .
but people think that my job is to let the good words make that difficult left-hand turn into the dictionary , and keep the bad words out .
but the thing is , i do n't want to be a traffic cop .
for one thing , i just do not do uniforms .
and for another , deciding what words are good and what words are bad is actually not very easy .
and it 's not very fun . and when parts of your job are not easy or fun , you kind of look for an excuse not to do them .
so if i had to think of some kind of occupation as a metaphor for my work , i would much rather be a fisherman .
i want to throw my big net into the deep , blue ocean of english and see what marvelous creatures i can drag up from the bottom .
but why do people want me to direct traffic , when i would much rather go fishing ?
well , i blame the queen .
why do i blame the queen ?
well , first of all , i blame the queen because it 's funny .
but secondly , i blame the queen because dictionaries have really not changed .
our idea of what a dictionary is has not changed since her reign .
the only thing that queen victoria would not be amused by in modern dictionaries is our inclusion of the f-word , which has happened in american dictionaries since 1965 .
so , there 's this guy , right ? victorian era .
james murray , first editor of the oxford english dictionary .
i do not have that hat . i wish i had that hat .
so he 's really responsible for a lot of what we consider modern in dictionaries today .
when a guy who looks like that , in that hat , is the face of modernity , you have a problem .
and so , james murray could get a job on any dictionary today .
there 'd be virtually no learning curve .
and of course , a few of us are saying : okay , computers !
computers ! what about computers ?
the thing about computers is , i love computers .
i mean , i 'm a huge geek , i love computers .
i would go on a hunger strike before i let them take away google book search from me .
but computers do n't do much else other than speed up the process of compiling dictionaries .
they do n't change the end result .
because what a dictionary is , is it 's victorian design merged with a little bit of modern propulsion .
it 's steampunk . what we have is an electric velocipede .
you know , we have victorian design with an engine on it . that 's all !
the design has not changed .
and ok , what about online dictionaries , right ?
online dictionaries must be different .
this is the oxford english dictionary online , one of the best online dictionaries .
this is my favorite word , by the way .
erinaceous : pertaining to the hedgehog family ; of the nature of a hedgehog .
very useful word . so , look at that .
online dictionaries right now are paper thrown up on a screen .
this is flat . look how many links there are in the actual entry : two !
right ? those little buttons , i had them all expanded except for the date chart .
so there 's not very much going on here .
there 's not a lot of clickiness .
and in fact , online dictionaries replicate almost all the problems of print , except for searchability .
and when you improve searchability , you actually take away the one advantage of print , which is serendipity .
serendipity is when you find things you were n't looking for , because finding what you are looking for is so damned difficult .
so - -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- - now , when you think about this , what we have here is a ham butt problem .
does everyone know the ham butt problem ?
woman 's making a ham for a big , family dinner .
she goes to cut the butt off the ham and throw it away , and she looks at this piece of ham and she 's like , " this is a perfectly good piece of ham . why am i throwing this away ? "
she thought , " well , my mom always did this . "
so she calls up mom , and she says , " mom , why 'd you cut the butt off the ham , when you 're making a ham ? "
she says , " i do n't know , my mom always did it ! "
so they call grandma , and grandma says , " my pan was too small ! " -lrb- laughter -rrb- so , it 's not that we have good words and bad words .
we have a pan that 's too small !
you know , that ham butt is delicious ! there 's no reason to throw it away .
the bad words - see , when people think about a place and they do n't find a place on the map , they think , " this map sucks ! "
when they find a nightspot or a bar , and it 's not in the guidebook , they 're like , " ooh , this place must be cool ! it 's not in the guidebook . "
when they find a word that 's not in the dictionary , they think , " this must be a bad word . " why ? it 's more likely to be a bad dictionary .
why are you blaming the ham for being too big for the pan ?
so , you ca n't get a smaller ham .
the english language is as big as it is .
so , if you have a ham butt problem , and you 're thinking about the ham butt problem , the conclusion that it leads you to is inexorable and counterintuitive : paper is the enemy of words .
how can this be ? i mean , i love books . i really love books .
some of my best friends are books .
but the book is not the best shape for the dictionary .
now they 're going to think " oh , boy .
people are going to take away my beautiful , paper dictionaries ? "
no . there will still be paper dictionaries .
when we had cars - when cars became the dominant mode of transportation , we did n't round up all the horses and shoot them .
you know , there 're still going to be paper dictionaries , but it 's not going to be the dominant dictionary .
the book-shaped dictionary is not going to be the only shape dictionaries come in . and it 's not going to be the prototype for the shapes dictionaries come in .
so , think about it this way : if you 've got an artificial constraint , artificial constraints lead to arbitrary distinctions and a skewed worldview .
what if biologists could only study animals that made people go , " aww . " right ?
what if we made aesthetic judgments about animals , and only the ones we thought were cute were the ones that we could study ?
we 'd know a whole lot about charismatic megafauna , and not very much about much else .
and i think this is a problem .
i think we should study all the words , because when you think about words , you can make beautiful expressions from very humble parts .
lexicography is really more about material science .
we are studying the tolerances of the materials that you use to build the structure of your expression : your speeches and your writing . and then , often people say to me , " well , ok , how do i know that this word is real ? "
they think , " ok , if we think words are the tools that we use to build the expressions of our thoughts , how can you say that screwdrivers are better than hammers ?
how can you say that a sledgehammer is better than a ball-peen hammer ? "
they 're just the right tools for the job .
and so people say to me , " how do i know if a word is real ? "
you know , anybody who 's read a children 's book knows that love makes things real .
if you love a word , use it . that makes it real .
being in the dictionary is an artificial distinction .
it does n't make a word any more real than any other way .
if you love a word , it becomes real .
so if we 're not worrying about directing traffic , if we 've transcended paper , if we are worrying less about control and more about description , then we can think of the english language as being this beautiful mobile .
and any time one of those little parts of the mobile changes , is touched , any time you touch a word , you use it in a new context , you give it a new connotation , you verb it , you make the mobile move .
you did n't break it . it 's just in a new position , and that new position can be just as beautiful .
now , if you 're no longer a traffic cop - the problem with being a traffic cop is there can only be so many traffic cops in any one intersection , or the cars get confused . right ?
but if your goal is no longer to direct the traffic , but maybe to count the cars that go by , then more eyeballs are better .
you can ask for help !
if you ask for help , you get more done . and we really need help .
library of congress : 17 million books , of which half are in english .
if only one out of every 10 of those books had a word that 's not in the dictionary in it , that would be equivalent to more than two unabridged dictionaries .
and i find an un-dictionaried word - a word like " un-dictionaried , " for example - in almost every book i read . what about newspapers ?
newspaper archive goes back to 1759 , 58.1 million newspaper pages . if only one in 100 of those pages had an un-dictionaried word on it , it would be an entire other oed .
that 's 500,000 more words . so that 's a lot .
and i 'm not even talking about magazines . i 'm not talking about blogs - and i find more new words on boingboing in a given week than i do newsweek or time .
there 's a lot going on there .
and i 'm not even talking about polysemy , which is the greedy habit some words have of taking more than one meaning for themselves .
so if you think of the word " set , " a set can be a badger 's burrow , a set can be one of the pleats in an elizabethan ruff , and there 's one numbered definition in the oed .
the oed has 33 different numbered definitions for set .
tiny , little word , 33 numbered definitions .
one of them is just labeled " miscellaneous technical senses . "
do you know what that says to me ?
that says to me , it was friday afternoon and somebody wanted to go down the pub . -lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's a lexicographical cop out , to say , " miscellaneous technical senses . "
so , we have all these words , and we really need help !
and the thing is , we could ask for help - asking for help 's not that hard .
i mean , lexicography is not rocket science .
see , i just gave you a lot of words and a lot of numbers , and this is more of a visual explanation .
if we think of the dictionary as being the map of the english language , these bright spots are what we know about , and the dark spots are where we are in the dark .
if that was the map of all the words in american english , we do n't know very much .
and we do n't even know the shape of the language .
if this was the dictionary - if this was the map of american english - look , we have a kind of lumpy idea of florida , but there 's no california !
we 're missing california from american english .
we just do n't know enough , and we do n't even know that we 're missing california .
we do n't even see that there 's a gap on the map .
so again , lexicography is not rocket science .
but even if it were , rocket science is being done by dedicated amateurs these days . you know ?
it ca n't be that hard to find some words !
so , enough scientists in other disciplines are really asking people to help , and they 're doing a good job of it .
for instance , there 's ebird , where amateur birdwatchers can upload information about their bird sightings .
and then , ornithologists can go and help track populations , migrations , etc .
and there 's this guy , mike oates . mike oates lives in the u.k.
he 's a director of an electroplating company .
he 's found more than 140 comets .
he 's found so many comets , they named a comet after him .
it 's kind of out past mars . it 's a hike .
i do n't think he 's getting his picture taken there anytime soon .
but he found 140 comets without a telescope .
he downloaded data from the nasa soho satellite , and that 's how he found them .
if we can find comets without a telescope , should n't we be able to find words ?
now , y 'all know where i 'm going with this .
because i 'm going to the internet , which is where everybody goes .
and the internet is great for collecting words , because the internet 's full of collectors .
and this is a little-known technological fact about the internet , but the internet is actually made up of words and enthusiasm .
and words and enthusiasm actually happen to be the recipe for lexicography . is n't that great ?
so there are a lot of really good word-collecting sites out there right now , but the problem with some of them is that they 're not scientific enough .
they show the word , but they do n't show any context .
where did it come from ? who said it ?
what newspaper was it in ? what book ?
because a word is like an archaeological artifact .
if you do n't know the provenance or the source of the artifact , it 's not science , it 's a pretty thing to look at .
so a word without its source is like a cut flower .
you know , it 's pretty to look at for a while , but then it dies .
it dies too fast .
so , this whole time i 've been saying , " the dictionary , the dictionary , the dictionary , the dictionary . "
not " a dictionary , " or " dictionaries . " and that 's because , well , people use the dictionary to stand for the whole language .
they use it synecdochically .
and one of the problems of knowing a word like " synecdochically " is that you really want an excuse to say " synecdochically . "
this whole talk has just been an excuse to get me to the point where i could say " synecdochically " to all of you .
so i 'm really sorry . but when you use a part of something - like the dictionary is a part of the language , or a flag stands for the united states , it 's a symbol of the country - then you 're using it synecdochically .
but the thing is , we could make the dictionary the whole language .
if we get a bigger pan , then we can put all the words in .
we can put in all the meanings .
does n't everyone want more meaning in their lives ?
and we can make the dictionary not just be a symbol of the language - we can make it be the whole language .
you see , what i 'm really hoping for is that my son , who turns seven this month - i want him to barely remember that this is the form factor that dictionaries used to come in .
this is what dictionaries used to look like .
i want him to think of this kind of dictionary as an eight-track tape .
it 's a format that died because it was n't useful enough .
it was n't really what people needed .
and the thing is , if we can put in all the words , no longer have that artificial distinction between good and bad , we can really describe the language like scientists .
we can leave the aesthetic judgments to the writers and the speakers .
if we can do that , then i can spend all my time fishing , and i do n't have to be a traffic cop anymore .
thank you very much for your kind attention .
i thought i would talk a little bit about how nature makes materials .
i brought along with me an abalone shell .
this abalone shell is a biocomposite material that 's 98 percent by mass calcium carbonate and two percent by mass protein .
yet , it 's 3,000 times tougher than its geological counterpart .
and a lot of people might use structures like abalone shells , like chalk .
i 've been fascinated by how nature makes materials , and there 's a lot of sequence to how they do such an exquisite job .
part of it is that these materials are macroscopic in structure , but they 're formed at the nanoscale .
they 're formed at the nanoscale , and they use proteins that are coded by the genetic level that allow them to build these really exquisite structures .
so something i think is very fascinating is what if you could give life to non-living structures , like batteries and like solar cells ?
what if they had some of the same capabilities that an abalone shell did , in terms of being able to build really exquisite structures at room temperature and room pressure , using non-toxic chemicals and adding no toxic materials back into the environment ?
so that 's the vision that i 've been thinking about .
and so what if you could grow a battery in a petri dish ?
or , what if you could give genetic information to a battery so that it could actually become better as a function of time , and do so in an environmentally friendly way ?
and so , going back to this abalone shell , besides being nano-structured , one thing that 's fascinating , is when a male and a female abalone get together , they pass on the genetic information that says , " this is how to build an exquisite material .
here 's how to do it at room temperature and pressure , using non-toxic materials . "
same with diatoms , which are shown right here , which are glasseous structures .
every time the diatoms replicate , they give the genetic information that says , " here 's how to build glass in the ocean that 's perfectly nano-structured .
and you can do it the same , over and over again . "
so what if you could do the same thing with a solar cell or a battery ?
i like to say my favorite biomaterial is my four year-old .
but anyone who 's ever had , or knows , small children knows they 're incredibly complex organisms .
and so if you wanted to convince them to do something they do n't want to do , it 's very difficult .
so when we think about future technologies , we actually think of using bacteria and virus , simple organisms .
can you convince them to work with a new toolbox , so that they can build a structure that will be important to me ?
also , when we think about future technologies , we start with the beginning of earth .
basically , it took a billion years to have life on earth .
and very rapidly , they became multi-cellular , they could replicate , they could use photosynthesis as a way of getting their energy source .
but it was n't until about 500 million years ago - during the cambrian geologic time period - that organisms in the ocean started making hard materials .
before that , they were all soft , fluffy structures .
and it was during this time that there was increased calcium and iron and silicon in the environment , and organisms learned how to make hard materials .
and so that 's what i would like be able to do - convince biology to work with the rest of the periodic table .
now if you look at biology , there 's many structures like dna and antibodies and proteins and ribosomes that you 've heard about that are already nano-structured .
so nature already gives us really exquisite structures on the nanoscale .
what if we could harness them and convince them to not be an antibody that does something like hiv ?
but what if we could convince them to build a solar cell for us ?
so here are some examples : these are some natural shells .
there are natural biological materials .
the abalone shell here - and if you fracture it , you can look at the fact that it 's nano-structured .
there 's diatoms made out of sio2 , and they 're magnetotactic bacteria that make small , single-domain magnets used for navigation .
what all these have in common is these materials are structured at the nanoscale , and they have a dna sequence that codes for a protein sequence that gives them the blueprint to be able to build these really wonderful structures .
now , going back to the abalone shell , the abalone makes this shell by having these proteins .
these proteins are very negatively charged .
and they can pull calcium out of the environment , put down a layer of calcium and then carbonate , calcium and carbonate .
it has the chemical sequences of amino acids , which says , " this is how to build the structure .
here 's the dna sequence , here 's the protein sequence in order to do it . "
and so an interesting idea is , what if you could take any material that you wanted , or any element on the periodic table , and find its corresponding dna sequence , then code it for a corresponding protein sequence to build a structure , but not build an abalone shell - build something that , through nature , it has never had the opportunity to work with yet .
and so here 's the periodic table .
and i absolutely love the periodic table .
every year for the incoming freshman class at mit , i have a periodic table made that says , " welcome to mit . now you 're in your element . "
and you flip it over , and it 's the amino acids with the ph at which they have different charges .
and so i give this out to thousands of people .
and i know it says mit , and this is caltech , but i have a couple extra if people want it .
and i was really fortunate to have president obama visit my lab this year on his visit to mit , and i really wanted to give him a periodic table .
so i stayed up at night , and i talked to my husband , " how do i give president obama a periodic table ?
what if he says , ' oh , i already have one , ' or , ' i 've already memorized it ' ? " -lrb- laughter -rrb- and so he came to visit my lab and looked around - it was a great visit .
and then afterward , i said , " sir , i want to give you the periodic table in case you 're ever in a bind and need to calculate molecular weight . "
and i thought molecular weight sounded much less nerdy than molar mass .
and so he looked at it , and he said , " thank you . i 'll look at it periodically . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- and later in a lecture that he gave on clean energy , he pulled it out and said , " and people at mit , they give out periodic tables . "
so basically what i did n't tell you is that about 500 million years ago , organisms starter making materials , but it took them about 50 million years to get good at it .
it took them about 50 million years to learn how to perfect how to make that abalone shell .
and that 's a hard sell to a graduate student . -lrb- laughter -rrb- " i have this great project - 50 million years . "
and so we had to develop a way of trying to do this more rapidly .
and so we use a virus that 's a non-toxic virus called m13 bacteriophage that 's job is to infect bacteria .
well it has a simple dna structure that you can go in and cut and paste additional dna sequences into it .
and by doing that , it allows the virus to express random protein sequences .
and this is pretty easy biotechnology .
and you could basically do this a billion times .
and so you can go in and have a billion different viruses that are all genetically identical , but they differ from each other based on their tips , on one sequence that codes for one protein .
now if you take all billion viruses , and you can put them in one drop of liquid , you can force them to interact with anything you want on the periodic table .
and through a process of selection evolution , you can pull one out of a billion that does something that you 'd like it to do , like grow a battery or grow a solar cell .
so basically , viruses ca n't replicate themselves ; they need a host .
once you find that one out of a billion , you infect it into a bacteria , and you make millions and billions of copies of that particular sequence .
and so the other thing that 's beautiful about biology is that biology gives you really exquisite structures with nice link scales .
and these viruses are long and skinny , and we can get them to express the ability to grow something like semiconductors or materials for batteries .
now this is a high-powered battery that we grew in my lab .
we engineered a virus to pick up carbon nanotubes .
so one part of the virus grabs a carbon nanotube .
the other part of the virus has a sequence that can grow an electrode material for a battery .
and then it wires itself to the current collector .
and so through a process of selection evolution , we went from being able to have a virus that made a crummy battery to a virus that made a good battery to a virus that made a record-breaking , high-powered battery that 's all made at room temperature , basically at the bench top .
and that battery went to the white house for a press conference .
i brought it here .
you can see it in this case - that 's lighting this led .
now if we could scale this , you could actually use it to run your prius , which is my dream - to be able to drive a virus-powered car .
but it 's basically - you can pull one out of a billion .
you can make lots of amplifications to it .
basically , you make an amplification in the lab , and then you get it to self-assemble into a structure like a battery .
we 're able to do this also with catalysis .
this is the example of photocatalytic splitting of water .
and what we 've been able to do is engineer a virus to basically take dye-absorbing molecules and line them up on the surface of the virus so it acts as an antenna , and you get an energy transfer across the virus .
and then we give it a second gene to grow an inorganic material that can be used to split water into oxygen and hydrogen that can be used for clean fuels .
and i brought an example with me of that today .
my students promised me it would work .
these are virus-assembled nanowires .
when you shine light on them , you can see them bubbling .
in this case , you 're seeing oxygen bubbles come out .
and basically , by controlling the genes , you can control multiple materials to improve your device performance .
the last example are solar cells .
you can also do this with solar cells .
we 've been able to engineer viruses to pick up carbon nanotubes and then grow titanium dioxide around them - and use as a way of getting electrons through the device .
and what we 've found is through genetic engineering , we can actually increase the efficiencies of these solar cells to record numbers for these types of dye-sensitized systems .
and i brought one of those as well that you can play around with outside afterward .
so this is a virus-based solar cell .
through evolution and selection , we took it from an eight percent efficiency solar cell to an 11 percent efficiency solar cell .
so i hope that i 've convinced you that there 's a lot of great , interesting things to be learned about how nature makes materials - and taking it the next step to see if you can force , or whether you can take advantage of how nature makes materials , to make things that nature has n't yet dreamed of making .
thank you .
about 15 years ago , i went to visit a friend in hong kong .
and at the time i was very superstitious .
so , upon landing - this was still at the old hong kong airport that 's kai tak , when it was smack in the middle of the city - i thought , " if i see something good , i 'm going to have a great time here in my two weeks . and if i see something negative , i 'm going to be miserable , indeed . "
so the plane landed in between the buildings and got to a full stop in front of this little billboard .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i actually went to see some of the design companies in hong kong in my stay there .
and it turned out that - i just went to see , you know , what they are doing in hong kong .
but i actually walked away with a great job offer .
and i flew back to austria , packed my bags , and , another week later , i was again on my way to hong kong still superstitions and thinking , " well , if that ' winner ' billboard is still up , i 'm going to have a good time working here .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but if it 's gone , it 's going to be really miserable and stressful . "
so it turned out that not only was the billboard still up but they had put this one right next to it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- on the other hand , it also taught me where superstition gets me because i really had a terrible time in hong kong .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- however , i did have a number of real moments of happiness in my life - of , you know , i think what the conference brochure refers to as " moments that take your breath away . "
and since i 'm a big list maker , i actually listed them all .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , you do n't have to go through the trouble of reading them and i wo n't read them for you .
i know that it 's incredibly boring to hear about other people 's happinesses .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- what i did do , though is , i actually looked at them from a design standpoint and just eliminated all the ones that had nothing to do with design .
and , very surprisingly , over half of them had , actually , something to do with design .
so there are , of course , two different possibilities .
there 's one from a consumer 's point of view - where i was happy while experiencing design .
and i 'll just give you one example . i had gotten my first walkman .
this is 1983 .
my brother had this great yamaha motorcycle that he was willing to borrow to me freely .
and the police 's " synchronicity " cassette had just been released and there was no helmet law in my hometown of bregenz .
so you could drive up into the mountains freely blasting the police on the new sony walkman .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i remember it as a true moment of happiness .
you know , of course , they are related to this combination of at least two of them being , you know , design objects .
and , you know , there 's a scale of happiness when you talk about in design but the motorcycle incident would definitely be , you know , situated somewhere here - right in there between delight and bliss .
now , there is the other part , from a designer 's standpoint - if you 're happy while actually doing it .
and one way to see how happy designers are when they 're designing could be to look at the authors ' photos on the back of their monographs ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , according to this , the australians and the japanese as well as the mexicans are very happy .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- while , somewhat , the spaniards ...
and , i think , particularly , the swiss -lrb- laughter -rrb- , do n't seem to be doing all that well .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- last november , a museum opened in tokyo called the mori museum , in a skyscraper , up on the 56th floor .
and their inaugural exhibit was called " happiness . "
and i went , very eagerly , to see it , because - well , also , with an eye on this conference .
and they interestingly sectioned the exhibit off into four different areas .
under " arcadia , " they showed things like this , from the edo period - a hundred ways to write " happiness " in different forms .
or they had this apple by yoko ono - that , of course , later on was , you know , made into the label for the beatles .
under " nirvana " they showed this constable painting .
and there was a little - an interesting theory about abstraction .
this is a blue field - it 's actually an yves klein painting .
and the theory was that if you abstract an image , you really , you know open as much room for the un-representable - and , therefore , you know , are able to involve the viewer more .
then , under " desire , " they showed these shunsho paintings - also from the edo period - ink on silk .
and , lastly , under " harmony , " they had this 13th-century mandala from tibet .
now , what i took away from the exhibit was that maybe with the exception of the mandala most of the pieces in there were actually about the visualization of happiness and not about happiness .
and i felt a little bit cheated , because the visualization - that 's a really easy thing to do .
and , you know , my studio - we 've done it all the time .
this is , you know , a book .
a happy dog - and you take it out , it 's an aggressive dog .
it 's a happy david byrne and an angry david byrne .
or a jazz poster with a happy face and a more aggressive face .
you know , that 's not a big deal to accomplish .
it has gotten to the point where , you know , within advertising or within the movie industry , " happy " has gotten such a bad reputation that if you actually want to do something with the subject and still appear authentic , you almost would have to , you know , do it from a cynical point of view .
this is , you know , the movie poster .
or we , a couple of weeks ago , designed a box set for the talking heads where the happiness visualized on the cover definitely has , very much , a dark side to it .
much , much more difficult is this , where the designs actually can evoke happiness - and i 'm going to just show you three that actually did this for me .
this is a campaign done by a young artist in new york , who calls himself " true . "
everybody who has ridden the new york subway system will be familiar with these signs ?
true printed his own version of these signs .
met every wednesday at a subway stop with 20 of his friends .
they divided up the different subway lines and added their own version .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so this is one .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , the way this works in the system is that nobody ever looks at these signs .
so you 're -lrb- laughter -rrb- you 're really bored in the subway , and you kind of stare at something .
and it takes you a while until it actually - you realize that this says something different than what it normally says .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i mean , that 's , at least , how it made me happy .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , true is a real humanitarian .
he did n't want any of his friends to be arrested , so he supplied everybody with this fake volunteer card .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and also gave this fake letter from the mta to everybody - sort of like pretending that it 's an art project financed by the metropolitan transit authority .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- another new york project .
this is at p.s. 1 - a sculpture that 's basically a square room by james turrell , that has a retractable ceiling .
opens up at dusk and dawn every day .
you do n't see the horizon .
you 're just in there , watching the incredible , subtle changes of color in the sky .
and the room is truly something to be seen .
people 's demeanor changes when they go in there .
and , for sure , i have n't looked at the sky in the same way after spending an hour in there .
there are , of course , more than those three projects that i 'm showing here .
i would definitely say that observing vik muniz ' " cloud " a couple of years ago in manhattan for sure made me happy , as well .
but my last project is , again , from a young designer in new york .
he 's from korea originally .
and he took it upon himself to print 55,000 speech bubbles - empty speech bubbles stickers , large ones and small ones .
and he goes around new york and just puts them , empty as they are , on posters .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and other people go and fill them in .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this one says , " please let me die in peace . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i think that was - the most surprising to myself was that the writing was actually so good .
this is on a musician poster , that says : " i am concerned that my cd will not sell more than 200,000 units and that , as a result , my recoupable advance from my label will be taken from me , after which , my contract will be cancelled , and i 'll be back doing journey covers on bleecker street . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i think the reason this works so well is because everybody involved wins .
jee gets to have his project ; the public gets a sweeter environment ; and different public gets a place to express itself ; and the advertisers finally get somebody to look at their ads .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- well , there was a question , of course , that was on my mind for a while : you know , can i do more of the things that i like doing in design and less of the ones that i do n't like to be doing ?
which brought me back to my list making - you know , just to see what i actually like about my job .
you know , one is : just working without pressure .
then : working concentrated , without being frazzled .
or , as nancy said before , like really immerse oneself into it .
try not to get stuck doing the same thing - or try not get stuck behind the computer all day .
this is , you know , related to it : getting out of the studio .
then , of course , trying to , you know , work on things where the content is actually important for me .
and being able to enjoy the end results .
and then i found another list in one of my diaries that actually contained all the things that i thought i learned in my life so far .
and , just about at that time , an austrian magazine called and asked if we would want to do six spreads - design six spreads that work like dividing pages between the different chapters in the magazine ?
and the whole thing just fell together .
so i just picked one of the things that i thought i learned - in this case , " everything i do always comes back to me " - and we made these spreads right out of this .
so it was : " everything i do always comes back to me . "
a couple of weeks ago , a -lrb- laughter -rrb- french company asked us to design five billboards for them .
again , we could supply the content for it .
so i just picked another one .
and this was two weeks ago .
we flew to arizona - the designer who works with me , and myself - and photographed this one .
so it 's : " trying to look good limits my life . "
and then we did one more of these .
this is , again , for a magazine , dividing pages .
this is : " having " - this is the same thing ; it 's just , you know , photographed from the side .
this is from the front .
then it 's : " guts . "
again , it 's the same thing - " guts " is just the same room , reworked .
then it 's : " always works out . "
then it 's " for , " with the light on .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and it 's " me . "
thank you so much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so , people want a lot of things out of life , but i think , more than anything else , they want happiness .
aristotle called happiness " the chief good , " the end towards which all other things aim .
according to this view , the reason we want a big house or a nice car or a good job is n't that these things are intrinsically valuable .
it 's that we expect them to bring us happiness .
now in the last 50 years , we americans have gotten a lot of the things that we want . we 're richer .
we live longer . we have access to technology that would have seemed like science fiction just a few years ago .
the paradox of happiness is that even though the objective conditions of our lives have improved dramatically , we have n't actually gotten any happier .
maybe because these conventional notions of progress have n't delivered big benefits in terms of happiness , there 's been an increased interest in recent years in happiness itself .
people have been debating the causes of happiness for a really long time , in fact for thousands of years , but it seems like many of those debates remain unresolved .
well , as with many other domains in life , i think the scientific method has the potential to answer this question .
in fact , in the last few years , there 's been an explosion in research on happiness . for example , we 've learned a lot about its demographics , how things like income and education , gender and marriage relate to it .
but one of the puzzles this has revealed is that factors like these do n't seem to have a particularly strong effect .
yes , it 's better to make more money rather than less , or to graduate from college instead of dropping out , but the differences in happiness tend to be small .
which leaves the question , what are the big causes of happiness ?
i think that 's a question we have n't really answered yet , but i think something that has the potential to be an answer is that maybe happiness has an awful lot to do with the contents of our moment-to-moment experiences .
it certainly seems that we 're going about our lives , that what we 're doing , who we 're with , what we 're thinking about , have a big influence on our happiness , and yet these are the very factors that have been very difficult , in fact almost impossible , for scientists to study .
a few years ago , i came up with a way to study people 's happiness moment to moment as they 're going about their daily lives on a massive scale all over the world , something we 'd never been able to do before . called trackyourhappiness.org , it uses the iphone to monitor people 's happiness in real time .
how does this work ? basically , i send people signals at random points throughout the day , and then i ask them a bunch of questions about their moment-to-moment experience at the instant just before the signal .
the idea is that , if we can watch how people 's happiness goes up and down over the course of the day , minute to minute in some cases , and try to understand how what people are doing , who they 're with , what they 're thinking about , and all the other factors that describe our day , how those might relate to those changes in happiness , we might be able to discover some of the things that really have a big influence on happiness .
we 've been fortunate with this project to collect quite a lot of data , a lot more data of this kind than i think has ever been collected before , over 650,000 real-time reports from over 15,000 people .
and it 's not just a lot of people , it 's a really diverse group , people from a wide range of ages , from 18 to late 80s , a wide range of incomes , education levels , people who are married , divorced , widowed , etc .
they collectively represent every one of 86 occupational categories and hail from over 80 countries .
what i 'd like to do with the rest of my time with you today is talk a little bit about one of the areas that we 've been investigating , and that 's mind-wandering .
as human beings , we have this unique ability to have our minds stray away from the present .
this guy is sitting here working on his computer , and yet he could be thinking about the vacation he had last month , wondering what he 's going to have for dinner .
maybe he 's worried that he 's going bald . -lrb- laughter -rrb- this ability to focus our attention on something other than the present is really amazing . it allows us to learn and plan and reason in ways that no other species of animal can .
and yet it 's not clear what the relationship is between our use of this ability and our happiness .
you 've probably heard people suggest that you should stay focused on the present . " be here now , " you 've probably heard a hundred times .
maybe , to really be happy , we need to stay completely immersed and focused on our experience in the moment .
maybe these people are right . maybe mind-wandering is a bad thing .
on the other hand , when our minds wander , they 're unconstrained . we ca n't change the physical reality in front of us , but we can go anywhere in our minds .
since we know people want to be happy , maybe when our minds wander , they 're going to someplace happier than the place that they 're leaving . it would make a lot of sense .
in other words , maybe the pleasures of the mind allow us to increase our happiness with mind-wandering .
well , since i 'm a scientist , i 'd like to try to resolve this debate with some data , and in particular i 'd like to present some data to you from three questions that i ask with track your happiness . remember , this is from sort of moment-to-moment experience in people 's real lives .
there are three questions . the first one is a happiness question : how do you feel , on a scale ranging from very bad to very good ? second , an activity question : what are you doing , on a list of 22 different activities including things like eating and working and watching tv ?
and finally a mind-wandering question : are you thinking about something other than what you 're currently doing ?
people could say no - in other words , i 'm focused only on my task - or yes - i am thinking about something else - and the topic of those thoughts are pleasant , neutral or unpleasant .
any of those yes responses are what we called mind-wandering .
so what did we find ?
this graph shows happiness on the vertical axis , and you can see that bar there representing how happy people are when they 're focused on the present , when they 're not mind-wandering .
as it turns out , people are substantially less happy when their minds are wandering than when they 're not .
now you might look at this result and say , okay , sure , on average people are less happy when they 're mind-wandering , but surely when their minds are straying away from something that was n't very enjoyable to begin with , at least then mind-wandering should be doing something good for us .
people are less happy when they 're mind-wandering no matter what they 're doing . for example , people do n't really like commuting to work very much .
it 's one of their least enjoyable activities , and yet they are substantially happier when they 're focused only on their commute than when their mind is going off to something else .
it 's amazing .
so how could this be happening ? i think part of the reason , a big part of the reason , is that when our minds wander , we often think about unpleasant things , and they are enormously less happy when they do that , our worries , our anxieties , our regrets , and yet even when people are thinking about something neutral , they 're still considerably less happy than when they 're not mind-wandering at all .
even when they 're thinking about something they would describe as pleasant , they 're actually just slightly less happy than when they are n't mind-wandering .
if mind-wandering were a slot machine , it would be like having the chance to lose 50 dollars , 20 dollars or one dollar . right ? you 'd never want to play . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so i 've been talking about this , suggesting , perhaps , that mind-wandering causes unhappiness , but all i 've really shown you is that these two things are correlated .
it 's possible that 's the case , but it might also be the case that when people are unhappy , then they mind-wander .
maybe that 's what 's really going on . how could we ever disentangle these two possibilites ?
well , one fact that we can take advantage of , i think a fact you 'll all agree is true , is that time goes forward , not backward . right ? the cause has to come before the effect .
we 're lucky in this data we have many responses from each person , and so we can look and see , does mind-wandering tend to precede unhappiness , or does unhappiness tend to precede mind-wandering , to get some insight into the causal direction .
as it turns out , there is a strong relationship between mind-wandering now and being unhappy a short time later , consistent with the idea that mind-wandering is causing people to be unhappy .
in contrast , there 's no relationship between being unhappy now and mind-wandering a short time later .
in other words , mind-wandering very likely seems to be an actual cause , and not merely a consequence , of unhappiness .
a few minutes ago , i likened mind-wandering to a slot machine you 'd never want to play .
well , how often do people 's minds wander ?
forty-seven percent of the time , people are thinking about something other than what they 're currently doing .
how does that depend on what people are doing ?
this shows the rate of mind-wandering across 22 activities ranging from a high of 65 percent - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - when people are taking a shower , brushing their teeth , to 50 percent when they 're working , to 40 percent when they 're exercising , all the way down to this one short bar on the right that i think some of you are probably laughing at .
ten percent of the time people 's minds are wandering when they 're having sex . -lrb- laughter -rrb- but there 's something i think that 's quite interesting in this graph , and that is , basically with one exception , no matter what people are doing , they 're mind-wandering at least 30 percent of the time , which suggests , i think , that mind-wandering is n't just frequent , it 's ubiquitous .
it pervades basically everything that we do .
in my talk today , i 've told you a little bit about mind-wandering , a variable that i think turns out to be fairly important in the equation for happiness .
my hope is that over time , by tracking people 's moment-to-moment happiness and their experiences and then in the end , a scientific understanding of happiness will help us create a future that 's not only richer and healthier , but happier as well .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm going to tell you about one of the world 's largest problems and how it can be solved .
i 'd like to start with a little experiment .
could you put your hand up if you wear glasses or contact lenses , or you 've had laser refractive surgery ?
now , unfortunately , there are too many of you for me to do the statistics properly .
but it looks like - i 'm guessing - that it 'll be about 60 percent of the room because that 's roughly the fraction of developed world population that have some sort of vision correction .
the world health organization estimates - well , they make various estimates of the number of people who need glasses - the lowest estimate is 150 million people .
they also have an estimate of around a billion .
but in fact , i would argue that we 've just done an experiment here and now , which shows us that the global need for corrective eyewear is around half of any population .
and the problem of poor vision , is actually not just a health problem , it 's also an educational problem , and it 's an economic problem , and it 's a quality of life problem .
glasses are not very expensive . they 're quite plentiful .
the problem is , there are n't enough eye care professionals in the world to use the model of the delivery of corrective eyewear that we have in the developed world .
there are just way too few eye care professionals .
so this little slide here shows you an optometrist and the little blue person represents about 10,000 people and that 's the ratio in the u.k.
this is the ratio of optometrists to people in sub-saharan africa .
in fact , there are some countries in sub-saharan africa where there 's one optometrist for eight million of the population .
how do you do this ? how do you solve this problem ?
i came up with a solution to this problem , and i came up with a solution based on adaptive optics for this .
and the idea is you make eye glasses , and you adjust them yourself and that solves the problem .
what i want to do is to show you that one can make a pair of glasses .
i shall just show you how you make a pair of glasses . i shall pop this in my pocket .
i 'm short sighted . i look at the signs at the end , i can hardly see them .
so - okay , i can now see that man running out there , and i can see that guy running out there .
i 've now made prescription eyewear to my prescription .
next step in my process .
so , i 've now made eye glasses to my prescription .
okay , so i 've made these glasses and ...
okay , i 've made the glasses to my prescription and ...
... i 've just ...
and i 've now made some glasses . that 's it .
-lrb- applause -rrb- now , these are n't the only pair in the world .
in fact , this technology 's been evolving .
i started working on it in 1985 , and it 's been evolving very slowly .
there are about 30,000 in use now .
and they 're in fifteen countries . they 're spread around the world .
and i have a vision , which i 'll share with you .
i have a global vision for vision .
and that vision is to try to get a billion people wearing the glasses they need by the year 2020 .
to do that - this is an early example of the technology .
the technology is being further developed - the cost has to be brought down .
this pair , in fact , these currently cost about 19 dollars .
but the cost has to be brought right down .
it has to be brought down because we 're trying to serve populations who live on a dollar a day .
how do you solve this problem ?
you start to get into detail .
and on this slide , i 'm basically explaining all the problems you have .
how do you distribute ? how do you work out how to fit the thing ?
how do you have people realizing that they have a vision problem ?
how do you deal with the industry ?
and the answer to that is research .
what we 've done is to set up the center for vision in the developing world here in the university .
if you want to know more , just come have a look at our website . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm a filmmaker .
for the last 8 years , i have dedicated my life to documenting the work of israelis and palestinians who are trying to end the conflict using peaceful means .
when i travel with my work across europe and the united states , one question always comes up : where is the palestinian gandhi ?
why are n't palestinians using nonviolent resistance ?
the challenge i face when i hear this question is that often i have just returned from the middle east where i spent my time filming dozens of palestinians who are using nonviolence to defend their lands and water resources from israeli soldiers and settlers .
these leaders are trying to forge a massive national nonviolent movement to end the occupation and build peace in the region .
yet , most of you have probably never heard about them .
this divide between what 's happening on the ground and perceptions abroad is one of the key reasons why we do n't have yet a palestinian peaceful resistance movement that has been successful .
so i 'm here today to talk about the power of attention , the power of your attention , and the emergence and development of nonviolent movements in the west bank , gaza and elsewhere - but today , my case study is going to be palestine .
i believe that what 's mostly missing for nonviolence to grow is not for palestinians to start adopting nonviolence , but for us to start paying attention to those who already are .
allow me to illustrate this point by taking you to this village called budrus .
about seven years ago , they faced extinction , because israel announced it would build a separation barrier , and part of this barrier would be built on top of the village .
they would lose 40 percent of their land and be surrounded , so they would lose free access to the rest of the west bank .
through inspired local leadership , they launched a peaceful resistance campaign to stop that from happening .
let me show you some brief clips , so you have a sense for what that actually looked like on the ground .
-lrb- music -rrb- palestinian woman : we were told the wall would separate palestine from israel .
here in budrus , we realized the wall would steal our land .
israeli man : the fence has , in fact , created a solution to terror .
man : today you 're invited to a peaceful march .
you are joined by dozens of your israeli brothers and sisters .
israeli activist : nothing scares the army more than nonviolent opposition .
woman : we saw the men trying to push the soldiers , but none of them could do that .
but i think the girls could do it .
fatah party member : we must empty our minds of traditional thinking .
hamas party member : we were in complete harmony , and we wanted to spread it to all of palestine .
chanting : one united nation .
fatah , hamas and the popular front !
news anchor : the clashes over the fence continue .
reporter : israeli border police were sent to disperse the crowd .
they were allowed to use any force necessary .
-lrb- gunshots -rrb- man : these are live bullets .
it 's like fallujah . shooting everywhere .
israeli activist : i was sure we were all going to die .
but there were others around me who were n't even cowering .
israeli soldier : a nonviolent protest is not going to stop the -lsb- unclear -rsb- .
protester : this is a peaceful march .
there is no need to use violence .
chanting : we can do it ! we can do it !
we can do it !
julia bacha : when i first heard about the story of budrus , i was surprised that the international media had failed to cover the extraordinary set of events that happened seven years ago , in 2003 .
what was even more surprising was the fact that budrus was successful .
the residents , after 10 months of peaceful resistance , convinced the israeli government to move the route of the barrier off their lands and to the green line , which is the internationally recognized boundary between israel and the palestinian territories .
the resistance in budrus has since spread to villages across the west bank and to palestinian neighborhoods in jerusalem .
yet the media remains mostly silent on these stories .
this silence carries profound consequences for the likelihood that nonviolence can grow , or even survive , in palestine .
violent resistance and nonviolent resistance share one very important thing in common ; they are both a form of theater seeking an audience to their cause .
if violent actors are the only ones constantly getting front-page covers and attracting international attention to the palestinian issue , it becomes very hard for nonviolent leaders to make the case to their communities that civil disobedience is a viable option in addressing their plight .
the power of attention is probably going to come as no surprise to the parents in the room .
the surest way to make your child throw increasingly louder tantrums is by giving him attention the first time he throws a fit .
the tantrum will become what childhood psychologists call a functional behavior , since the child has learned that he can get parental attention out of it .
parents can incentivize or disincentivize behavior simply by giving or withdrawing attention to their children .
but that 's true for adults too .
in fact , the behavior of entire communities and countries can be influenced , depending on where the international community chooses to focus its attention .
i believe that at the core of ending the conflict in the middle east and bringing peace is for us to transform nonviolence into a functional behavior by giving a lot more attention to the nonviolent leaders on the ground today .
in the course of taking my film to villages in the west bank , in gaza and in east jerusalem , i have seen the impact that even one documentary film can have in influencing the transformation .
in a village called wallajeh , which sits very close to jerusalem , the community was facing a very similar plight to budrus .
they were going to be surrounded , lose a lot of their lands and not have freedom of access , either to the west bank or jerusalem .
they had been using nonviolence for about two years but had grown disenchanted since nobody was paying attention .
so we organized a screening .
a week later , they held the most well-attended and disciplined demonstration to date .
the organizers say that the villagers , upon seeing the story of budrus documented in a film , felt that there were indeed people following what they were doing , that people cared .
so they kept on going .
on the israeli side , there is a new peace movement called solidariot , which means solidarity in hebrew .
the leaders of this movement have been using budrus as one of their primary recruiting tools .
they report that israelis who had never been active before , upon seeing the film , understand the power of nonviolence and start joining their activities .
the examples of wallajeh and the solidariot movement show that even a small-budget independent film can play a role in transforming nonviolence into a functional behavior .
now imagine the power that big media players could have if they started covering the weekly nonviolent demonstrations happening in villages like bil 'in , ni 'lin , wallajeh , in jerusalem neighborhoods like sheikh jarrah and silwan - the nonviolent leaders would become more visible , valued and effective in their work .
i believe that the most important thing is to understand that if we do n't pay attention to these efforts , they are invisible , and it 's as if they never happened .
but i have seen first hand that if we do , they will multiply .
if they multiply , their influence will grow in the overall israeli-palestinian conflict .
and theirs is the kind of influence that can finally unblock the situation .
these leaders have proven that nonviolence works in places like budrus .
let 's give them attention so they can prove it works everywhere .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- as a culture , we tell ourselves lots of stories about the future , and where we might move forward from this point .
some of those stories are that somebody is just going to sort everything out for us .
other stories are that everything is on the verge of unraveling .
but i want to tell you a different story here today .
like all stories , it has a beginning .
my work , for a long time , has been involved in education , in teaching people practical skills for sustainability , teaching people how to take responsibility for growing some of their own food , how to build buildings using local materials , how to generate their own energy , and so on .
i lived in ireland , built the first straw-bale houses in ireland , and some cob buildings and all this kind of thing .
but all my work for many years was focused around the idea that sustainability means basically looking at the globalized economic growth model , and moderating what comes in at one end , and moderating the outputs at the other end .
and then i came into contact with a way of looking at things which actually changed that profoundly .
and in order to introduce you to that , i 've got something here that i 'm going to unveil , which is one of the great marvels of the modern age .
and it 's something so astounding and so astonishing that i think maybe as i remove this cloth a suitable gasp of amazement might be appropriate .
if you could help me with that it would be fantastic .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this is a liter of oil .
this bottle of oil , distilled over a hundred million years of geological time , ancient sunlight , contains the energy equivalent of about five weeks hard human manual labor - equivalent to about 35 strong people coming round and working for you .
we can turn it into a dazzling array of materials , medicine , modern clothing , laptops , a whole range of different things .
it gives us an energy return that 's unimaginable , historically .
we 've based the design of our settlements , our business models , our transport plans , even the idea of economic growth , some would argue , on the assumption that we will have this in perpetuity .
yet , when we take a step back , and look over the span of history , at what we might call the petroleum interval , it 's a short period in history where we 've discovered this extraordinary material , and then based a whole way of life around it .
but as we straddle the top of this energy mountain , at this stage , we move from a time where our economic success , our sense of individual prowess and well-being is directly linked to how much of this we consume , to a time when actually our degree of oil dependency is our degree of vulnerability .
and it 's increasingly clear that we are n't going to be able to rely on the fact that we 're going to have this at our disposal forever .
for every four barrels of oil that we consume , we only discover one .
and that gap continues to widen .
there is also the fact that the amount of energy that we get back from the oil that we discover is falling .
in the 1930s we got 100 units of energy back for every one that we put in to extract it .
completely unprecedented , historically .
already that 's fallen to about 11 .
and that 's why , now , the new breakthroughs , the new frontiers in terms of oil extraction are scrambling about in alberta , or at the bottom of the oceans .
there are 98 oil-producing nations in the world .
but of those , 65 have already passed their peak .
the moment when the world on average passes this peak , people wonder when that 's going to happen .
and there is an emerging case that maybe that was what happened last july when the oil prices were so high .
but are we to assume that the same brilliance and creativity and adaptability that got us up to the top of that energy mountain in the first place is somehow mysteriously going to evaporate when we have to design a creative way back down the other side ?
no . but the thinking that we have to come up with has to be based on a realistic assessment of where we are .
there is also the issue of climate change , is the other thing that underpins this transition approach .
but the thing that i notice , as i talk to climate scientists , is the increasingly terrified look they have in their eyes , as the data that 's coming in , which is far ahead of what the ipcc are talking about .
so the ipcc said that we might see significant breakup of the arctic ice in 2100 , in their worst case scenario .
actually , if current trends continue , it could all be gone in five or 10 years ' time .
if just three percent of the carbon locked up in the arctic permafrost is released as the world warms , it would offset all the savings that we need to make , in carbon , over the next 40 years to avoid runaway climate change .
we have no choice other than deep and urgent decarbonization .
but i 'm always very interested to think about what might the stories be that the generations further down the slope from us are going to tell about us .
" the generation that lived at the top of the mountain , that partied so hard , and so abused its inheritance . "
and one of the ways i like to do that is to look back at the stories people used to tell before we had cheap oil , before we had fossil fuels , and people relied on their own muscle , animal muscle energy , or a little bit of wind , little bit of water energy .
we had stories like " the seven-league boots " : the giant who had these boots , where , once you put them on , with every stride you could cover seven leagues , or 21 miles , a kind of travel completely unimaginable to people without that kind of energy at their disposal .
stories like the magic porridge pot , where you had a pot where if you knew the magic words , this pot would just make as much food as you liked , without you having to do any work , provided you could remember the other magic word to stop it making porridge .
otherwise you 'd flood your entire town with warm porridge .
there is the story of " the elves and the shoemaker . "
the people who make shoes go to sleep , wake up in the morning , and all the shoes are magically made for them .
it 's something that was unimaginable to people then .
now we have the seven-league boots in the form of ryanair and easyjet .
we have the magic porridge pot in the form of walmart and tesco .
and we have the elves in the form of china .
but we do n't appreciate what an astonishing thing that has been .
and what are the stories that we tell ourselves now , as we look forward about where we 're going to go .
and i would argue that there are four . there is the idea of business as usual , that the future will be like the present , just more of it .
but as we 've seen over the last year , i think that 's an idea that is increasingly coming into question .
and in terms of climate change , is something that is not actually feasible .
there is the idea of hitting the wall , that actually somehow everything is so fragile that it might just all unravel and collapse .
this is a popular story in some places .
the third story is the idea that technology can solve everything , that technology can somehow get us through this completely .
and it 's an idea that i think is very prevalent at these ted talks , the idea that we can invent our way out of a profound economic and energy crisis , that a move to a knowledge economy can somehow neatly sidestep those energy constraints , the idea that we 'll discover some fabulous new source of energy that will mean we can sweep all concerns about energy security to one side , the idea that we can step off neatly onto a completely renewable world .
but the world is n't second life .
we ca n't create new land and new energy systems at the click of a mouse .
and as we sit , exchanging free ideas with each other , there are still people mining coal in order to power the servers , extracting the minerals to make all of those things .
the breakfast that we eat as we sit down to check our email in the morning is still transported at great distances , usually at the expense of the local , more resilient food systems that would have supplied that in the past , which we 've so effectively devalued and dismantled .
we can be astonishingly inventive and creative .
but we also live in a world with very real constraints and demands .
energy and technology are not the same thing .
what i 'm involved with is the transition response .
and this is really about looking the challenges of peak oil and climate change square in the face , and responding with a creativity and an adaptability and an imagination that we really need .
it 's something which has spread incredibly fast .
and it is something which has several characteristics .
it 's viral . it seems to spread under the radar very , very quickly .
it 's open source . it 's something which everybody who 's involved with it develops and passes on as they work with it .
it 's self-organizing . there is no great central organization that pushes this ; people just pick up an idea and they run with it , and they implement it where they are .
it 's solutions-focused . it 's very much looking at what people can do where they are , to respond to this .
it 's sensitive to place and to scale .
transitional is completely different .
transition groups in chile , transition groups in the u.s. , transition groups here , what they 're doing looks very different in every place that you go to .
it learns very much from its mistakes .
and it feels historic . it tries to create a sense that this is a historic opportunity to do something really extraordinary .
and it 's a process which is really joyful .
people have a huge amount of fun doing this , reconnecting with other people as they do it .
one of the things that underpins it is this idea of resilience .
and i think , in many ways , the idea of resilience is a more useful concept than the idea of sustainability .
the idea of resilience comes from the study of ecology .
and it 's really about how systems , settlements , withstand shock from the outside .
when they encounter shock from the outside that they do n't just unravel and fall to pieces .
and i think it 's a more useful concept than sustainability , as i said .
when our supermarkets have only two or three days ' worth of food in them at any one time , often sustainability tends to focus on the energy efficiency of the freezers and on the packaging that the lettuces are wrapped up in .
looking through the lens of resilience , we really question how we 've let ourselves get into a situation that 's so vulnerable .
resilience runs much deeper : it 's about building modularity into what we do , building surge breakers into how we organize the basic things that support us .
this is a photograph of the bristol and district market gardeners association , in 1897 .
this is at a time when the city of bristol , which is quite close to here , was surrounded by commercial market gardens , which provided a significant amount of the food that was consumed in the town , and created a lot of employment for people , as well .
there was a degree of resilience , if you like , at that time , which we can now only look back on with envy .
so how does this transition idea work ?
so basically , you have a group of people who are excited by the idea .
they pick up some of the tools that we 've developed .
they start to run an awareness-raising program looking at how this might actually work in the town .
they show films , they give talks , and so on .
it 's a process which is playful and creative and informative .
then they start to form working groups , looking at different aspects of this , and then from that , there emerge a whole lot of projects which then the transition project itself starts to support and enable .
so it started out with some work i was involved in in ireland , where i was teaching , and has since spread .
there are now over 200 formal transition projects .
and there are thousands of others who are at what we call the mulling stage .
they are mulling whether they 're going to take it further .
and actually a lot of them are doing huge amounts of stuff .
but what do they actually do ? you know , it 's a kind of nice idea , but what do they actually do on the ground ?
well , i think it 's really important to make the point that actually you know , this is n't something which is going to do everything on its own .
we need international legislation from copenhagen and so on .
we need national responses . we need local government responses .
but all of those things are going to be much easier if we have communities that are vibrant and coming up with ideas and leading from the front , making unelectable policies electable , over the next 5 to 10 years .
some of the things that emerge from it are local food projects , like community-supported agriculture schemes , urban food production , creating local food directories , and so on .
a lot of places now are starting to set up their own energy companies , community-owned energy companies , where the community can invest money into itself , to start putting in place the kind of renewable energy infrastructure that we need .
a lot of places are working with their local schools .
newent in the forest of dean : big polytunnel they built for the school ; the kids are learning how to grow food .
promoting recycling , things like garden-share , that matches up people who do n't have a garden who would like to grow food , with people who have gardens they are n't using anymore .
planting productive trees throughout urban spaces .
and also starting to play around with the idea of alternative currencies .
this is lewes in sussex , who have recently launched the lewes pound , a currency that you can only spend within the town , as a way of starting to cycle money within the local economy .
you take it anywhere else , it 's not worth anything .
but actually within the town you start to create these economic cycles much more effectively .
another thing that they do is what we call an energy descent plan , which is basically to develop a plan b for the town .
most of our local authorities , when they sit down to plan for the next five , 10 , 15 , 20 years of a community , still start by assuming that there will be more energy , more cars , more housing , more jobs , more growth , and so on .
what does it look like if that 's not the case ? and how can we embrace that and actually come up with something that was actually more likely to sustain everybody ?
as a friend of mine says , " life is a series of things you 're not quite ready for . "
and that 's certainly been my experience with transition .
from three years ago , it just being an idea , this has become something that has virally swept around the world .
we 're getting a lot of interest from government . ed miliband , the energy minister of this country , was invited to come to our recent conference as a keynote listener .
which he did - -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- - and has since become a great advocate of the whole idea .
there are now two local authorities in this country who have declared themselves transitional local authorities , leicestershire and somerset . and in stroud , the transition group there , in effect , wrote the local government 's food plan .
and the head of the council said , " if we did n't have transition stroud , we would have to invent all of that community infrastructure for the first time . "
as we see the spread of it , we see national hubs emerging .
in scotland , the scottish government 's climate change fund has funded transition scotland as a national organization supporting the spread of this .
and we see it all over the place as well now .
but the key to transition is thinking not that we have to change everything now , but that things are already inevitably changing , and what we need to do is to work creatively with that , based on asking the right questions .
i think i 'd like to just return at the end to the idea of stories .
because i think stories are vital here .
and actually the stories that we tell ourselves , we have a huge dearth of stories about how to move forward creatively from here .
and one of the key things that transition does is to pull those stories out of what people are doing .
stories about the community that 's produced its own 21 pound note , for example , the school that 's turned its car park into a food garden , the community that 's founded its own energy company .
and for me , one of the great stories recently was the obamas digging up the south lawn of the white house to create a vegetable garden . because the last time that was done , when eleanor roosevelt did it , it led to the creation of 20 million vegetable gardens across the united states .
so the question i 'd like to leave you with , really , is - for all aspects of the things that your community needs in order to thrive , how can it be done in such a way that drastically reduces its carbon emissions , while also building resilience ?
personally , i feel enormously grateful to have lived through the age of cheap oil .
i 've been astonishingly lucky , we 've been astonishingly lucky .
but let us honor what it has bought us , and move forward from this point .
because if we cling to it , and continue to assume that it can underpin our choices , the future that it presents to us is one which is really unmanageable .
and by loving and leaving all that oil has done for us , and that the oil age has done for us , we are able to then begin the creation of a world which is more resilient , more nourishing , and in which , we find ourselves fitter , more skilled and more connected to each other .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- " people do stupid things .
that 's what spreads hiv . "
this was a headline in a u.k. newspaper , the guardian , not that long ago .
i 'm curious , show of hands , who agrees with it ?
well , one or two brave souls .
this is actually a direct quote from an epidemiologist who 's been in field of hiv for 15 years , worked on four continents , and you 're looking at her .
and i am now going to argue that this is only half true .
people do get hiv because they do stupid things , but most of them are doing stupid things for perfectly rational reasons .
now , " rational " is the dominant paradigm in public health , and if you put your public health nerd glasses on , you 'll see that if we give people the information that they need about what 's good for them and what 's bad for them , if you give them the services that they can use to act on that information , and a little bit of motivation , people will make rational decisions and live long and healthy lives .
wonderful .
that 's slightly problematic for me because i work in hiv , and although i 'm sure you all know that hiv is about poverty and gender inequality , and if you were at ted ' 07 it 's about coffee prices ...
actually , hiv 's about sex and drugs , and if there are two things that make human beings a little bit irrational , they are erections and addiction .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , let 's start with what 's rational for an addict .
now , i remember speaking to an indonesian friend of mine , frankie .
we were having lunch and he was telling me about when he was in jail in bali for a drug injection .
it was someone 's birthday , and they had very kindly smuggled some heroin into jail , and he was very generously sharing it out with all of his colleagues .
and so everyone lined up , all the smackheads in a row , and the guy whose birthday it was filled up the fit , and he went down and started injecting people .
so he injects the first guy , and then he 's wiping the needle on his shirt , and he injects the next guy .
and frankie says , " i 'm number 22 in line , and i can see the needle coming down towards me , and there is blood all over the place .
it 's getting blunter and blunter .
and a small part of my brain is thinking , ' that is so gross and really dangerous , ' but most of my brain is thinking , ' please let there be some smack left by the time it gets to me .
please let there be some left . " ' and then , telling me this story , frankie said , " you know ... god , drugs really make you stupid . "
and , you know , you ca n't fault him for accuracy .
but , actually , frankie , at that time , was a heroin addict and he was in jail .
so his choice was either to accept that dirty needle or not to get high .
and if there 's one place you really want to get high , it 's when you 're in jail .
but i 'm a scientist and i do n't like to make data out of anecdotes , so let 's look at some data .
we talked to 600 drug addicts in three cities in indonesia , and we said , " well , do you know how you get hiv ? "
" oh yeah , by sharing needles . "
i mean , nearly 100 percent . yeah , by sharing needles .
and , " do you know where you can get a clean needle at a price you can afford to avoid that ? "
" oh yeah . " hundred percent .
" we 're smackheads ; we know where to get clean needles . "
" so are you carrying a needle ? "
we 're actually interviewing people on the street , in the places where they 're hanging out and taking drugs .
" are you carrying clean needles ? "
one in four , maximum .
so no surprises then that the proportion that actually used clean needles every time they injected in the last week is just about one in 10 , and the other nine in 10 are sharing .
so you 've got this massive mismatch ; everyone knows that if they share they 're going to get hiv , but they 're all sharing anyway .
so what 's that about ? is it like you get a better high if you share or something ?
we asked that to a junkie and they 're like , " are you nuts ? "
you do n't want to share a needle anymore than you want to share a toothbrush even with someone you 're sleeping with .
there 's just kind of an ick factor there .
" no , no . we share needles because we do n't want to go to jail . "
so , in indonesia at this time , if you were carrying a needle and the cops rounded you up , they could put you into jail .
and that changes the equation slightly , does n't it ?
because your choice now is either i use my own needle now , or i could share a needle now and get a disease that 's going to possibly kill me 10 years from now , or i could use my own needle now and go to jail tomorrow .
and while junkies think that it 's a really bad idea to expose themselves to hiv , they think it 's a much worse idea to spend the next year in jail where they 'll probably end up in frankie 's situation and expose themselves to hiv anyway .
so , suddenly it becomes perfectly rational to share needles .
now , let 's look at it from a policy maker 's point of view .
this is a really easy problem .
for once , your incentives are aligned .
we 've got what 's rational for public health .
you want people to use clean needles - and junkies want to use clean needles .
so we could make this problem go away simply by making clean needles universally available and taking away the fear of arrest .
now , the first person to figure that out and do something about it on a national scale was that well-known , bleeding heart liberal margaret thatcher .
and she put in the world 's first national needle exchange program , and other countries followed suit : australia , the netherlands and few others .
and in all of those countries , you can see , not more than four percent of injectors ever became infected with hiv .
now , places that did n't do this - new york city for example , moscow , jakarta - we 're talking , at its peak , one in two injectors infected with this fatal disease .
now , margaret thatcher did n't do this because she has any great love for junkies .
she did it because she ran a country that had a national health service .
so , if she did n't invest in effective prevention , she was going to have pick up the costs of treatment later on , and obviously those are much higher .
so she was making a politically rational decision .
now , if i take out my public health nerd glasses here and look at these data , it seems like a no-brainer , does n't it ?
but in this country , where the government apparently does not feel compelled to provide health care for citizens , -lrb- laughter -rrb- we 've taken a very different approach .
so what we 've been doing in the united states is reviewing the data - endlessly reviewing the data .
so , these are reviews of hundreds of studies by all the big muckety-mucks of the scientific pantheon in the united states , and these are the studies that show needle programs are effective - quite a lot of them .
now , the ones that show that needle programs are n't effective - you think that 's one of these annoying dynamic slides and i 'm going to press my dongle and the rest of it 's going to come up , but no - that 's the whole slide .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- there is nothing on the other side .
so , completely irrational , you would think .
except that , wait a minute , politicians are rational , too , and they 're responding to what they think the voters want .
so what we see is that voters respond very well to things like this and not quite so well to things like this .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so it becomes quite rational to deny services to injectors .
now let 's talk about sex .
are we any more rational about sex ?
well , i 'm not even going to address the clearly irrational positions of people like the catholic church , who think somehow that if you give out condoms , everyone 's going to run out and have sex .
i do n't know if pope benedict watches tedtalks online , but if you do , i 've got news for you benedict - i carry condoms all the time and i never get laid .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- it 's not that easy !
here , maybe you 'll have better luck .
-lrb- applause -rrb- okay , seriously , hiv is actually not that easy to transmit sexually .
so , it depends on how much virus there is in your blood and in your body fluids .
and what we 've got is a very , very high level of virus right at the beginning when you 're first infected , then you start making antibodies , and then it bumps along at quite low levels for a long time - 10 or 12 years - you have spikes if you get another sexually transmitted infection .
but basically , nothing much is going on until you start to get symptomatic aids , and by that stage , you 're not looking great , you 're not feeling great , you 're not having that much sex .
so the sexual transmission of hiv is essentially determined by how many partners you have in these very short spaces of time when you have peak viremia .
now , this makes people crazy because it means that you have to talk about some groups having more sexual partners in shorter spaces of time than other groups , and that 's considered stigmatizing .
i 've always been a bit curious about that because i think stigma is a bad thing , whereas lots of sex is quite a good thing , but we 'll leave that be .
the truth is that 20 years of very good research have shown us that there are groups that are more likely to turnover large numbers of partners in a short space of time .
and those groups are , globally , people who sell sex and their more regular partners .
they are gay men on the party scene who have , on average , three times more partners than straight people on the party scene .
and they are heterosexuals who come from countries that have traditions of polygamy and relatively high levels of female autonomy , and almost all of those countries are in east or southern africa .
and that is reflected in the epidemic that we have today .
you can see these horrifying figures from africa .
these are all countries in southern africa where between one in seven , and one in three of all adults , are infected with hiv .
now , in the rest of the world , we 've got basically nothing going on in the general population - very , very low levels - but we have extraordinarily high levels of hiv in these other populations who are at highest risk : drug injectors , sex workers and gay men .
and you 'll note , that 's the local data from los angeles : 25 percent prevalence among gay men .
of course , you ca n't get hiv just by having unprotected sex .
you can only hiv by having unprotected sex with a positive person .
in most of the world , these few prevention failures notwithstanding , we are actually doing quite well these days in commercial sex : condom use rates are between 80 and 100 percent in commercial sex in most countries .
and , again , it 's because of an alignment of the incentives .
what 's rational for public health is also rational for individual sex workers because it 's really bad for business to have another sti .
no one wants it .
and , actually , clients do n't want to go home with a drip either .
so essentially , you 're able to achieve quite high rates of condom use in commercial sex .
but in " intimate " relations it 's much more difficult because , with your wife or your boyfriend or someone that you hope might turn into one of those things , we have this illusion of romance and trust and intimacy , and nothing is quite so unromantic as the , " my condom or yours , darling ? " question .
so in the face of that , you really need quite a strong incentive to use condoms .
this , for example , this gentleman is called joseph .
he 's from haiti and he has aids .
and he 's probably not having a lot of sex right now , but he is a reminder in the population , of why you might want to be using condoms .
this is also in haiti and is a reminder of why you might want to be having sex , perhaps .
now , funnily enough , this is also joseph after six months on antiretroviral treatment .
not for nothing do we call it the lazarus effect .
but it is changing the equation of what 's rational in sexual decision-making .
so , what we 've got - some people say , " oh , it does n't matter very much because , actually , treatment is effective prevention because it lowers your viral load and therefore makes it more difficult to transmit hiv . "
so , if you look at the viremia thing again , if you do start treatment when you 're sick , well , what happens ? your viral load comes down .
but compared to what ? what happens if you 're not on treatment ?
well , you die , so your viral load goes to zero .
and all of this green stuff here , including the spikes - which are because you could n't get to the pharmacy , or you ran out of drugs , or you went on a three day party binge and forgot to take your drugs , or because you 've started to get resistance , or whatever - all of that is virus that would n't be out there , except for treatment .
now , am i saying , " oh , well , great prevention strategy .
let 's just stop treating people . "
of course not , of course not .
we need to expand antiretroviral treatment as much as we can .
but what i am doing is calling into question those people who say that more treatment is all the prevention we need .
that 's simply not necessarily true , and i think we can learn a lot from the experience of gay men in rich countries where treatment has been widely available for going on 15 years now .
and what we 've seen is that , actually , condom use rates , which were very , very high - the gay community responded very rapidly to hiv , with extremely little help from public health nerds , i would say - that condom use rate has come down dramatically since treatment for two reasons really : one is the assumption of , " oh well , if he 's infected , he 's probably on meds , and his viral load 's going to be low , so i 'm pretty safe . "
and the other thing is that people are simply not as scared of hiv as they were of aids , and rightly so .
aids was a disfiguring disease that killed you , and hiv is an invisible virus that makes you take a pill every day .
and that 's boring , but is it as boring as having to use a condom every time you have sex , no matter how drunk you are , no matter how many poppers you 've taken , whatever ?
if we look at the data , we can see that the answer to that question is , mmm .
so these are data from scotland .
you see the peak in drug injectors before they started the national needle exchange program .
then it came way down .
and both in heterosexuals - mostly in commercial sex - and in drug users , you 've really got nothing much going on after treatment begins , and that 's because of that alignment of incentives that i talked about earlier .
but in gay men , you 've got quite a dramatic rise starting three or four years after treatment became widely available .
this is of new infections .
what does that mean ?
it means that the combined effect of being less worried and having more virus out there in the population - more people living longer , healthier lives , more likely to be getting laid with hiv - is outweighing the effects of lower viral load , and that 's a very worrisome thing .
what does it mean ?
it means we need to be doing more prevention the more treatment we have .
is that what 's happening ?
no , and i call it the " compassion conundrum . "
we 've talked a lot about compassion the last couple of days , and what 's happening really is that people are unable quite to bring themselves to put in good sexual and reproductive health services for sex workers , unable quite to be giving out needles to junkies .
but once they 've gone from being transgressive people whose behaviors we do n't want to condone to being aids victims , we come over all compassionate and buy them incredibly expensive drugs for the rest of their lives .
it does n't make any sense from a public health point of view .
i want to give what 's very nearly the last word to ines .
ines is a a transgender hooker on the streets of jakarta ; she 's a chick with a dick .
why does she do that job ?
well , of course , because she 's forced into it because she does n't have any better option , etc . , etc .
and if we could just teach her to sew and get her a nice job in a factory , all would be well .
this is what factory workers earn in an hour in indonesia : on average , 20 cents .
it varies a bit province to province .
i do speak to sex workers , 15,000 of them for this particular slide , and this is what sex workers say they earn in an hour .
so it 's not a great job , but for a lot of people it really is quite a rational choice .
okay , ines .
we 've got the tools , the knowledge and the cash , and commitment to preventing hiv too .
ines : so why is prevalence still rising ?
it 's all politics .
when you get to politics , nothing makes sense .
elizabeth pisani : " when you get to politics , nothing makes sense . "
so , from the point of view of a sex worker , politicians are making no sense .
from the point of view of a public health nerd , junkies are doing dumb things .
the truth is that everyone has a different rationale .
there are as many different ways of being rational as there are human beings on the planet , and that 's one of the glories of human existence .
but those ways of being rational are not independent of one another , so it 's rational for a drug injector to share needles because of a stupid decision that 's made by a politician , and it 's rational for a politician to make that stupid decision because they 're responding to what they think the voters want .
but here 's the thing : we are the voters .
we 're not all of them , of course , but ted is a community of opinion leaders .
and everyone who 's in this room , and everyone who 's watching this out there on the web , i think , has a duty to demand of their politicians that we make policy based on scientific evidence and on common sense .
it 's going to be really hard for us to individually affect what 's rational for every frankie and every ines out there , but you can at least use your vote to stop politicians doing stupid things that spread hiv .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- in the last 50 years , we 've been building the suburbs with a lot of unintended consequences .
and i 'm going to talk about some of those consequences and just present a whole bunch of really interesting projects that i think give us tremendous reasons to be really optimistic that the big design and development project of the next 50 years is going to be retrofitting suburbia .
so whether it 's redeveloping dying malls or re-inhabiting dead big-box stores or reconstructing wetlands out of parking lots , i think the fact is the growing number of empty and under-performing , especially retail , sites throughout suburbia gives us actually a tremendous opportunity to take our least-sustainable landscapes right now and convert them into more sustainable places .
and in the process , what that allows us to do is to redirect a lot more of our growth back into existing communities that could use a boost , and have the infrastructure in place , instead of continuing to tear down trees and to tear up the green space out at the edges .
so why is this important ?
i think there are any number of reasons , and i 'm just going to not get into detail but mention a few .
just from the perspective of climate change , the average urban dweller in the u.s.
has about one-third the carbon footprint of the average suburban dweller , mostly because suburbanites drive a lot more , and living in detached buildings , you have that much more exterior surface to leak energy out of .
so strictly from a climate change perspective , the cities are already relatively green .
the big opportunity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is actually in urbanizing the suburbs .
all that driving that we 've been doing out in the suburbs , we have doubled the amount of miles we drive .
it 's increased our dependence on foreign oil despite the gains in fuel efficiency .
we 're just driving so much more ; we have n't been able to keep up technologically .
public health is another reason to consider retrofitting .
researchers at the cdc and other places have increasingly been linking suburban development patterns with sedentary lifestyles .
and those have been linked then with the rather alarming , growing rates of obesity , shown in these maps here , and that obesity has also been triggering great increases in heart disease and diabetes to the point where a child born today has a one-in-three chance of developing diabetes .
and that rate has been escalating at the same rate as children not walking to school anymore , again , because of our development patterns .
and then there 's finally - there 's the affordability question .
i mean , how affordable is it to continue to live in suburbia with rising gas prices ?
suburban expansion to cheap land , for the last 50 years - you know the cheap land out on the edge - has helped generations of families enjoy the american dream .
but increasingly , the savings promised by drive-till-you-qualify affordability - which is basically our model - those savings are wiped out when you consider the transportation costs .
for instance , here in atlanta , about half of households make between $ 20,000 and $ 50,000 a year , and they are spending 29 percent of their income on housing and 32 percent on transportation .
i mean , that 's 2005 figures .
that 's before we got up to the four bucks a gallon .
you know , none of us really tend to do the math on our transportation costs , and they 're not going down any time soon .
whether you love suburbia 's leafy privacy or you hate its soulless commercial strips , there are reasons why it 's important to retrofit .
but is it practical ?
i think it is .
june williamson and i have been researching this topic for over a decade , and we 've found over 80 varied projects .
but that they 're really all market driven , and what 's driving the market in particular - number one - is major demographic shifts .
we all tend to think of suburbia as this very family-focused place , but that 's really not the case anymore .
since 2000 , already two-thirds of households in suburbia we just have n't caught up with the actual realities of this .
the reasons for this have a lot to with the dominance of the two big demographic groups right now : the baby boomers retiring - and then there 's a gap , generation x , which is a small generation .
they 're still having kids - but generation y has n't even started hitting child-rearing age .
they 're the other big generation .
so as a result of that , demographers predict that through 2025 , 75 to 85 percent of new households will not have kids in them .
and the market research , consumer research , asking the boomers and gen y what it is they would like , what they would like to live in , tells us there is going to be a huge demand - and we 're already seeing it - for more urban lifestyles within suburbia .
that basically , the boomers want to be able to age in place , and gen y would like to live an urban lifestyle , but most of their jobs will continue to be out in suburbia .
the other big dynamic of change is the sheer performance of underperforming asphalt .
now i keep thinking this would be a great name for an indie rock band , but developers generally use it to refer to underused parking lots - and suburbia is full of them .
when the postwar suburbs were first built out on the cheap land away from downtown , it made sense to just build surface parking lots .
but those sites have now been leapfrogged and leapfrogged again , as we 've just continued to sprawl , and they now have a relatively central location .
it no longer just makes sense .
that land is more valuable than just surface parking lots .
it now makes sense to go back in , build a deck and build up on those sites .
so what do you do with a dead mall , dead office park ?
it turns out , all sorts of things .
in a slow economy like ours , re-inhabitation is one of the more popular strategies .
so this happens to be a dead mall in st. louis that 's been re-inhabited as art-space .
it 's now home to artist studios , theater groups , dance troupes .
it 's not pulling in as much tax revenue as it once was , but it 's serving its community .
it 's keeping the lights on .
it 's becoming , i think , a really great institution .
other malls have been re-inhabited as nursing homes , as universities , and as all variety of office space .
we also found a lot of examples of dead big-box stores that have been converted into all sorts of community-serving uses as well - lots of schools , lots of churches and lots of libraries like this one .
this was a little grocery store , a food lion grocery store , that is now a public library .
in addition to , i think , doing a beautiful adaptive reuse , they tore up some of the parking spaces , put in bioswales to collect and clean the runoff , put in a lot more sidewalks to connect to the neighborhoods .
and they 've made this , what was just a store along a commercial strip , into a community gathering space .
this one is a little l-shaped strip shopping center in phoenix , arizona .
really all they did was they gave it a fresh coat of bright paint , a gourmet grocery , and they put up a restaurant in the old post office .
never underestimate the power of food to turn a place around and make it a destination .
it 's been so successful , they 've now taken over the strip across the street .
the real estate ads in the neighborhood all very proudly proclaim , " walking distance to le grande orange , " because it provided its neighborhood with what sociologists like to call " a third place . "
if home is the first place and work is the second place , the third place is where you go to hang out and build community .
and especially as suburbia is becoming less centered on the family , the family households , there 's a real hunger for more third places .
so the most dramatic retrofits are really those in the next category , the next strategy : redevelopment .
now , during the boom , there were several really dramatic redevelopment projects where the original building was scraped to the ground and then the whole site was rebuilt at significantly greater density , a sort of compact , walkable urban neighborhoods .
but some of them have been much more incremental .
this is mashpee commons , the oldest retrofit that we 've found .
and it 's just incrementally , over the last 20 years , built urbanism on top of its parking lots .
so the black and white photo shows the simple 60 's strip shopping center .
and then the maps above that show its gradual transformation into a compact , mixed-use new england village , and it has plans now that have been approved for it to connect to new residential neighborhoods across the arterials and over to the other side .
so , you know , sometimes it 's incremental .
sometimes , it 's all at once .
this is another infill project on the parking lots , this one of an office park outside of washington d.c.
when metrorail expanded transit into the suburbs and opened a station nearby to this site , the owners decided to build a new parking deck and then insert on top of their surface lots a new main street , several apartments and condo buildings , while keeping the existing office buildings .
here is the site in 1940 : it was just a little farm in the village of hyattsville .
by 1980 , it had been subdivided into a big mall on one side and the office park on the other and then some buffer sites for a library and a church to the far right .
today , the transit , the main street and the new housing have all been built .
eventually , i expect that the streets will probably extend through a redevelopment of the mall .
plans have already been announced for a lot of those garden apartments above the mall to be redeveloped .
transit is a big driver of retrofits .
so here 's what it looks like .
you can sort of see the funky new condo buildings in between the office buildings and the public space and the new main street .
this one is one of my favorites , belmar .
i think they really built an attractive place here and have just employed all-green construction .
there 's massive p.v. arrays on the roofs as well as wind turbines .
this was a very large mall on a hundred-acre superblock .
it 's now 22 walkable urban blocks with public streets , two public parks , eight bus lines and a range of housing types , and so it 's really given lakewood , colorado the downtown that this particular suburb never had .
here was the mall in its heyday .
they had their prom in the mall . they loved their mall .
so here 's the site in 1975 with the mall .
by 1995 , the mall has died .
the department store has been kept - and we found this was true in many cases .
the department stores are multistory ; they 're better built .
they 're easy to be re-adapted .
but the one story stuff ...
that 's really history .
so here it is at projected build-out .
this project , i think , has great connectivity to the existing neighborhoods .
it 's providing 1,500 households with the option of a more urban lifestyle .
it 's about two-thirds built out right now .
here 's what the new main street looks like .
it 's very successful , and it 's helped to prompt - eight of the 13 regional malls in denver have now , or have announced plans to be , retrofitted .
but it 's important to note that all of this retrofitting is not occurring - just bulldozers are coming and just plowing down the whole city .
no , it 's pockets of walkability on the sites of under-performing properties .
and so it 's giving people more choices , but it 's not taking away choices .
but it 's also not really enough to just create pockets of walkability .
you want to also try to get more systemic transformation .
we need to also retrofit the corridors themselves .
so this is one that has been retrofitted in california .
they took the commercial strip shown on the black-and-white images below , and they built a boulevard that has become the main street for their town .
and it 's transformed from being an ugly , unsafe , undesirable address , to becoming a beautiful , attractive , dignified sort of good address .
i mean now we 're hoping we start to see it ; they 've already built city hall , attracted two hotels .
i could imagine beautiful housing going up along there without tearing down another tree .
so there 's a lot of great things , but i 'd love to see more corridors getting retrofitting .
but densification is not going to work everywhere .
sometimes re-greening is really the better answer .
there 's a lot to learn from successful landbanking programs in cities like flint , michigan .
there 's also a burgeoning suburban farming movement - sort of victory gardens meets the internet .
but perhaps one of the most important re-greening aspects is the opportunity to restore the local ecology , as in this example outside of minneapolis .
when the shopping center died , the city restored the site 's original wetlands , creating lakefront property , which then attracted private investment , the first private investment to this very low-income neighborhood in over 40 years .
so they 've managed to both restore the local ecology and the local economy at the same time .
this is another re-greening example .
it also makes sense in very strong markets .
this one in seattle is on the site of a mall parking lot adjacent to a new transit stop .
and the wavy line is a path alongside a creek that has now been daylit .
the creek had been culverted under the parking lot .
but daylighting our creeks really improves their water quality and contributions to habitat .
so i 've shown you some of the first generation of retrofits .
what 's next ?
i think we have three challenges for the future .
the first is to plan retrofitting much more systemically at the metropolitan scale .
we need to be able to target which areas really should be re-greened .
where should we be redeveloping ?
and where should we be encouraging re-inhabitation ?
these slides just show two images from a larger project that looked at trying to do that for atlanta .
i led a team that was asked to imagine atlanta 100 years from now .
and we chose to try to reverse sprawl through three simple moves - expensive , but simple .
one , in a hundred years , transit on all major rail and road corridors .
two , in a hundred years , thousand foot buffers on all stream corridors .
it 's a little extreme , but we 've got a little water problem .
in a hundred years , subdivisions that simply end up too close to water or too far from transit wo n't be viable .
and so we 've created the eco-acre transfer-to-transfer development rights to the transit corridors and allow the re-greening of those former subdivisions for food and energy production .
so the second challenge is to improve the architectural design quality of the retrofits .
and i close with this image of democracy in action : this is a protest that 's happening on a retrofit in silver spring , maryland on an astroturf town green .
now , retrofits are often accused of being examples of faux downtowns and instant urbanism , and not without reason ; you do n't get much more phony than an astroturf town green .
i have to say , these are very hybrid places .
they are new but trying to look old .
they have urban streetscapes , but suburban parking ratios .
their populations are more diverse than typical suburbia , but they 're less diverse than cities .
and they are public places , but that are managed by private companies .
and just the surface appearance are often - like the astroturf here - they make me wince .
so , you know , i mean i 'm glad that the urbanism is doing its job .
the fact that a protest is happening really does mean that the layout of the blocks , the streets and blocks , the putting in of public space , compromised as it may be , is still a really great thing .
but we 've got to get the architecture better .
the final challenge is for all of you .
i want you to join the protest and start demanding more sustainable suburban places - more sustainable places , period .
but culturally , we tend to think that downtowns should be dynamic , and we expect that .
but we seem to have an expectation that the suburbs should forever remain frozen in whatever adolescent form they were first given birth to .
it 's time to let them grow up , so i want you to all support the zoning changes , the road diets , the infrastructure improvements and the retrofits that are coming soon to a neighborhood near you .
thank you .
i want you to take a trip with me .
picture yourself driving down a small road in africa , and as you drive along , you look off to the side , and this is what you see : and you stop , and you get out of your car and you take a picture .
and you go into the town , and you inquire , " what 's going on here ? "
and people are initially reluctant to tell you .
and then someone says , " these are the recent aids deaths in our community . "
hiv is n't like other medical conditions ; it 's stigmatizing .
people are reluctant to talk about it - there 's a fear associated with it .
and i 'm going to talk about hiv today , about the deaths , about the stigma .
it 's a medical story , but more than that , it 's a social story .
this map depicts the global distribution of hiv .
and as you can see , africa has a disproportionate share of the infection .
there are 33 million people living with hiv in the world today .
of these , two-thirds , 22 million are living in sub-saharan africa .
there are 1.4 million pregnant women in low- and middle-income countries living with hiv and of these , 90 percent are in sub-saharan africa .
we talk about things in relative terms .
and i 'm going to talk about annual pregnancies and hiv-positive mothers .
the united states - a large country - each year , 7,000 mothers with hiv who give birth to a child .
but you go to rwanda - a very small country - 8,000 mothers with hiv who are pregnant .
and then you go to baragwanath hospital , outside of johannesburg in south africa , and 8,000 hiv-positive pregnant women giving birth - a hospital the same as a country .
and to realize that this is just the tip of an iceberg that when you compare everything here to south africa , it just pales , because in south africa , each year 300,000 mothers with hiv give birth to children .
so we talk about pmtct , and we refer to pmtct , prevention of mother to child transmission .
i think there 's an assumption amongst most people in the public that if a mother is hiv-positive , she 's going to infect her child .
the reality is really , very different .
in resource-rich countries , with all the tests and treatment we currently have , less than two percent of babies are born hiv-positive - 98 percent of babies are born hiv-negative .
and yet , the reality in resource-poor countries , in the absence of tests and treatment , 40 percent - 40 percent of children are infected - 40 percent versus two percent - an enormous difference .
so these programs - and i 'm going to refer to pmtct though my talk - these prevention programs , simply , they 're the tests and the drugs that we give to mothers to prevent them from infecting their babies , and also the medicines we give to mothers to keep them healthy and alive to raise their children .
so it 's the test a mother gets when she comes in .
it 's the drugs she receives to protect the baby that 's inside the uterus and during delivery .
it 's the guidance she gets around infant feeding and safer sex .
it 's an entire package of services , and it works .
so in the united states , since the advent of treatment in the middle of the 1990s , there 's been an 80-percent decline in the number of hiv-infected children .
less than 100 babies are born with hiv each year in the united states and yet , still , over 400,000 children are born every year in the world today with hiv .
what does that mean ?
it means 1,100 children infected each day - 1,100 children each day , infected with hiv .
and where do they come from ?
well , less than one comes from the united states .
one , on average , comes from europe .
100 come from asia and the pacific .
and each day , a thousand babies - a thousand babies are born each day with hiv in africa .
so again , i look at the globe here and the disproportionate share of hiv in africa .
and let 's look at another map .
and here , again , we see africa has a disproportionate share of the numbers of doctors .
that thin sliver you see here , that 's africa .
and it 's the same with nurses .
the truth is sub-saharan africa has 24 percent of the global disease burden and yet only three percent of the world 's health care workers .
that means doctors and nurses simply do n't have the time to take care of patients .
a nurse in a busy clinic will see 50 to 100 patients in a day , which leaves her just minutes per patient - minutes per patient .
and so when we look at these pmtct programs , what does it mean ?
well , back in 2001 , when there was just a simple test and a single dose of a drug , a nurse , in the course of her few minutes with a patient , would have to counsel for the hiv test , perform the hiv test , explain the results , dispense a single dose of the drug , nevirapine , explain how to take it , discuss infant feeding options , reinforce infant feeding , and test the baby - in minutes .
well , fortunately since 2001 , we 've got new treatments , new tests , and we 're far more successful , but we do n't have any more nurses .
and so these are the tests a nurse now has to do in those same few minutes .
it 's not possible - it does n't work .
and so we need to find better ways of providing care .
this is a picture of a maternal health clinic in africa - mothers coming , pregnant and with their babies .
these women are here for care , but we know that just doing a test , just giving someone a drug , it 's not enough .
meds do n't equal medical care .
doctors and nurses , frankly , do n't have the time or skills to tell people what to do in ways they understand .
i 'm a doctor - i tell people things to do , and i expect them to follow my guidance - because i 'm a doctor ; i went to harvard - but the reality is , if i tell a patient , " you should have safer sex .
you should always use a condom , " and yet , in her relationship , she 's not empowered - what 's going to happen ?
if i tell her to take her medicines every day and yet , no one in the household knows about her illness , so it 's just not going to work .
and so we need to do more , we need to do it differently , we need to do it in ways that are affordable and accessible and can be taken to scale , which means it can be done everywhere .
so , i want to tell you a story - i want to take you on a little trip .
imagine yourself , if you can , you 're a young woman in africa , you 're going to the hospital or clinic .
you go in for a test and you find out that you 're pregnant , and you 're delighted .
and then they give you another test and they tell you you 're hiv-positive , and you 're devastated .
and the nurse takes you into a room , and she tells you about the tests and hiv and the medicines you can take and how to take care of yourself and your baby , and you hear none of it .
all you 're hearing is , " i 'm going to die , and my baby is going to die . "
and then you 're out on the street , and you do n't know where to go .
and you do n't know who you can talk to , because the truth is , hiv is so stigmatizing that if you partner , your family , anyone in your home , you 're likely to be thrown out without any means of support .
and this - this is the face and story of hiv in africa today .
but we 're here to talk about possible solutions and some good news .
and i want to change the story a little bit .
take the same mother , and the nurse , after she gives her her test , takes her to a room .
the door opens and there 's a room full of mothers , mothers with babies , and they 're sitting , and they 're talking , they 're listening .
they 're drinking tea , they 're having sandwiches .
and she goes inside , and woman comes up to her and says , " welcome to mothers2mothers .
have a seat . you 're safe here .
we 're all hiv-positive .
you 're going to be okay . you 're going to live .
your baby is going to be hiv-negative . "
we view mothers as a community 's single greatest resource .
mothers take care of the children , take care of the home .
so often the men are gone .
they 're working , or they 're not part of the household .
our organization , mothers2mothers , enlists women with hiv as care providers .
we bring mothers who have hiv , who 've been through these pmtct programs in the very facilities , to come back and work side by side with doctors and nurses as part of the health care team .
these mothers , we call them mentor mothers , are able to engage women who , just like themselves , pregnant with babies , have found out about being hiv-positive , who need support and education .
and they support them around the diagnosis and educate them about how to take their medicines , how to take care of themselves , how to take care of their babies .
consider : if you needed surgery , you would want the best possible technical surgeon , right ?
but if you wanted to understand what that surgery would do to your life , you 'd like to engage someone , someone who 's had the procedure .
patients are experts on their own experience , and they can share that experience with others .
this is the medical care that goes beyond just medicines .
so the mothers who work for us , they come from the communities in which they work .
they 're hired - they 're paid as professional members of the health care teams , just like doctors and nurses .
and we open bank accounts for them and they 're paid directly into the accounts , because their money 's protected ; the men ca n't take it away from them .
they go through two to three weeks of rigorous curriculum-based education , training .
now , doctors and nurses - they too get trained .
but so often , they only get trained once , so they 're not aware of new medicines , new guidelines as they come out .
our mentor mothers get trained every single year and retrained .
and so doctors and nurses - they look up to them as experts .
imagine that : a woman , a former patient , being able to educate her doctor for the first time and educate the other patients that she 's taking care of .
our organization has three goals .
the first , to prevent mother-to-child transmission .
the second : keep mothers healthy , keep mothers alive , keep the children alive - no more orphans .
and the third , and maybe the most grand , is to find ways to empower women , enable them to fight the stigma and to live positive and productive lives with hiv .
so how do we do it ?
well , maybe the most important engagement is the one-to-one , seeing patients one-to-one , educating them , supporting them , explaining how they can take care of themselves .
we go beyond that ; we try to bring in the husbands , the partners .
in africa , it 's very , very hard to engage men .
men are not frequently part of pregnancy care .
but in rwanda , in one country , they 've got a policy that a woman ca n't come for care unless she brings the father of the baby with her - that 's the rule .
and so the father and the mother , together , go through the counseling and the testing .
the father and the mother , together , they get the results .
and this is so important in breaking through the stigma .
disclosure is so central to prevention .
how do you have safer sex , how do you use a condom regularly if there has n't been disclosure ?
disclosure is so important to treatment , because again , people need the support of family members and friends to take their medicines regularly .
we also work in groups .
now the groups , it 's not like me lecturing , but what happens is women , they come together - under the support and guidance of our mentor mothers - they come together , and they share their personal experiences .
and it 's through the sharing that people get tactics of how to take care of themselves , how to disclose how to take medicines .
and then there 's the community outreach , engaging women in their communities .
if we can change the way households believe and think , we can change the way communities believe and think .
and if we can change enough communities , we can change national attitudes .
we can change national attitudes to women and national attitudes to hiv .
the hardest barrier really is around stigma reduction .
we have the medicines , we have the tests , but how do you reduce the stigma ?
and it 's important about disclosure .
so , a couple years ago , one of the mentor mothers came back , and she told me a story .
she had been asked by one of the clients to go to the home of the client , because the client wanted to tell the mother and her brothers and sisters about her hiv status , and she was afraid to go by herself .
and so the mentor mother went along with .
and the patient walked into the house and said to her mother and siblings , " i have something to tell you . i 'm hiv-positive . "
and everybody was quiet .
and then her oldest brother stood up and said , " i too have something to tell you .
i 'm hiv-positive .
i 've been afraid to tell everybody . "
and then this older sister stood up and said , " i too am living with the virus , and i 've been ashamed . "
and then her younger brother stood up and said , " i 'm also positive .
i thought you were going to throw me out of the family . "
and you see where this is going .
the last sister stood up and said , " i 'm also positive .
i thought you were going to hate me . "
and there they were , all of them together for the first time being able to share this experience for the first time and to support each other for the first time .
-lrb- video -rrb- female narrator : women come to us , and they are crying and scared .
i tell them my story , that i am hiv-positive , but my child is hiv-negative .
i tell them , " you are going to make it , and you will raise a healthy baby . "
i am proof that there is hope .
mitchell besser : remember the images i showed you of how few doctors and nurses there are in africa .
and it is a crisis in health care systems .
even as we have more tests and more drugs , we ca n't reach people ; we do n't have enough providers .
so we talk in terms of what we call task-shifting .
task-shifting is traditionally when you take health care services from one provider and have another provider do it .
typically , it 's a doctor giving a job to a nurse .
and the issue in africa is that there are fewer nurses , really than doctors , and so we need to find new paradigm for health care .
how do you build a better health care system ?
we 've chosen to redefine the health care system as a doctor , a nurse and a mentor mother .
and so what nurses do is that they ask the mentor mothers to explain how to take the drugs , the side effects .
they delegate education about infant feeding , family planning , safer sex , actions that nurses simple just do n't have time for .
so we go back to the prevention of mother to child transmission .
the world is increasingly seeing these programs as the bridge to comprehensive maternal and child health .
and our organization helps women across that bridge .
the care does n't stop when the baby 's born - we deal with the ongoing health of the mother and baby , ensuring that they live healthy , successful lives .
our organization works on three levels .
the first , at the patient level - mothers and babies keeping babies from getting hiv , keeping mothers healthy to raise them .
the second , communities - empowering women .
they become leaders within their communities .
they change the way communities think - we need to change attitudes to hiv .
we need to change attitudes to women in africa .
we have to do that .
and then rework the level of the health care systems , building stronger health care systems .
our health care systems are broken .
they 're not going to work the way they 're currently designed .
and so doctors and nurses who need to try to change people 's behaviors do n't have the skills , do n't have the time - our mentor mothers do .
and so in redefining the health care teams by bringing the mentor mothers in , we can do that .
i started the program in capetown , south africa back in 2001 .
it was at that point , just the spark of an idea .
referencing steven johnson 's very lovely speech yesterday on where ideas come from , i was in the shower at the time - i was alone .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the program is now working in nine countries , we have 670 program sites , we 're seeing about 230,000 women every month , we 're employing 1,600 mentor mothers , and last year , they enrolled 300,000 hiv-positive pregnant women and mothers .
that is 20 percent of the global hiv-positive pregnant women - 20 percent of the world .
what 's extraordinary is how simple the premise is .
mothers with hiv caring for mothers with hiv .
past patients taking care of present patients .
and empowerment through employment - reducing stigma .
-lrb- video -rrb- female narrator : there is hope , hope that one day we shall win this fight against hiv and aids .
each person must know their hiv status .
those who are hiv-negative must know how to stay negative .
those who are hiv-infected must know how to take care of themselves .
hiv-positive pregnant women must get pmtct services in order to have hiv-negative babies .
all of this is possible , if we each contribute to this fight .
mb : simple solutions to complex problems .
mothers caring for mothers .
it 's transformational .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the job of uncovering the global food waste scandal started for me when i was 15 years old .
i bought some pigs . i was living in sussex .
and i started to feed them in the most traditional and environmentally friendly way .
i went to my school kitchen , and i said , " give me the scraps that my school friends have turned their noses up at . "
i went to the local baker and took their stale bread .
i went to the local greengrocer , and i went to a farmer who was throwing away potatoes because they were the wrong shape or size for supermarkets .
this was great . my pigs turned that food waste into delicious pork . i sold that pork to my school friends ' parents , and i made a good pocket money addition to my teenage allowance .
but i noticed that most of the food that i was giving my pigs was in fact fit for human consumption , and that i was only scratching the surface , and that right the way up the food supply chain , in supermarkets , greengrocers , bakers , in our homes , in factories and farms , we were hemorrhaging out food .
supermarkets did n't even want to talk to me about how much food they were wasting .
i 'd been round the back . i 'd seen bins full of food being locked and then trucked off to landfill sites , and i thought , surely there is something more sensible to do with food than waste it .
one morning , when i was feeding my pigs , i noticed a particularly tasty-looking sun-dried tomato loaf that used to crop up from time to time .
i grabbed hold of it , sat down , and ate my breakfast with my pigs . -lrb- laughter -rrb- that was the first act of what i later learned to call freeganism , really an exhibition of the injustice of food waste , and the provision of the solution to food waste , which is simply to sit down and eat food , rather than throwing it away .
that became , as it were , a way of confronting large businesses in the business of wasting food , and exposing , most importantly , to the public , that when we 're talking about food being thrown away , stuff that 's beyond the pale .
we 're talking about good , fresh food that is being wasted on a colossal scale .
eventually , i set about writing my book , really to demonstrate the extent of this problem on a global scale . what this shows is a nation-by-nation breakdown of the likely level of food waste in each country in the world .
unfortunately , empirical data , good , hard stats , do n't exist , and therefore to prove my point , i first of all had to find some proxy way of uncovering how much food was being wasted .
so i took the food supply of every single country and i compared it to what was actually likely to be being consumed in each country .
that 's based on diet intake surveys , it 's based on levels of obesity , it 's based on a range of factors that gives you an approximate guess as to how much food is actually going into people 's mouths .
that black line in the middle of that table is the likely level of consumption with an allowance for certain levels of inevitable waste .
there will always be waste . i 'm not that unrealistic that i think we can live in a waste-free world .
but that black line shows what a food supply should be in a country if they allow for a good , stable , secure , nutritional diet for every person in that country .
any dot above that line , and you 'll quickly notice that that includes most countries in the world , represents unnecessary surplus , and is likely to reflect levels of waste in each country .
as a country gets richer , it invests more and more in getting more and more surplus into its shops and restaurants , and as you can see , most european and north american countries fall between 150 and 200 percent of the nutritional requirements of their populations .
so a country like america has twice as much food on its shop shelves and in its restaurants than is actually required to feed the american people .
but the thing that really struck me , when i plotted all this data , and it was a lot of numbers , was that you can see how it levels off .
countries rapidly shoot towards that 150 mark , and then they level off , and they do n't really go on rising as you might expect .
so i decided to unpack that data a little bit further to see if that was true or false .
and that 's what i came up with .
if you include not just the food that ends up in shops and restaurants , but also the food that people feed to livestock , the maize , the soy , the wheat , that humans could eat but choose to fatten livestock instead to produce increasing amounts of meat and dairy products , what you find is that most rich countries have between three and four times the amount of food that their population needs to feed itself .
a country like america has four times the amount of food that it needs .
when people talk about the need to increase global food production to feed those nine billion people that are expected on the planet by 2050 , i always think of these graphs .
the fact is , we have an enormous buffer in rich countries between ourselves and hunger .
we 've never had such gargantuan surpluses before .
in many ways , this is a great success story of human civilization , of the agricultural surpluses that we set out to achieve 12,000 years ago .
it is a success story . it has been a success story .
but what we have to recognize now is that we are reaching the ecological limits that our planet can bear , and when we chop down forests , as we are every day , to grow more and more food , when we extract water from depleting water reserves , when we emit fossil fuel emissions in the quest to grow more and more food , and then we throw away so much of it , we have to think about what we can start saving .
and yesterday , i went to one of the local supermarkets that i often visit to inspect , if you like , what they 're throwing away .
i found quite a few packets of biscuits amongst all the fruit and vegetables and everything else that was in there .
and i thought , well this could serve as a symbol for today .
so i want you to imagine that these nine biscuits that i found in the bin represent the global food supply , okay ? we start out with nine .
that 's what 's in fields around the world every single year .
the first biscuit we 're going to lose before we even leave the farm .
that 's a problem primarily associated with developing work agriculture , whether it 's a lack of infrastructure , refrigeration , pasteurization , grain stores , even basic fruit crates , which means that food goes to waste before it even leaves the fields .
the next three biscuits are the foods that we decide to feed to livestock , the maize , the wheat and the soya .
unfortunately , our beasts are inefficient animals , and they turn two-thirds of that into feces and heat , so we 've lost those two , and we 've only kept this one in meat and dairy products .
two more we 're going to throw away directly into bins .
this is what most of us think of when we think of food waste , what ends up in the garbage , what ends up in supermarket bins , what ends up in restaurant bins . we 've lost another two , and we 've left ourselves with just four biscuits to feed on .
that is not a superlatively efficient use of global resources , especially when you think of the billion hungry people that exist already in the world .
having gone through the data , i then needed to demonstrate where that food ends up .
where does it end up ? we 're used to seeing the stuff on our plates , but what about all the stuff that goes missing in between ?
supermarkets are an easy place to start .
this is the result of my hobby , which is unofficial bin inspections . -lrb- laughter -rrb- strange you might think , but if we could rely on corporations to tell us what they were doing in the back of their stores , we would n't need to go sneaking around the back , opening up bins and having a look at what 's inside .
but this is what you can see more or less on every street corner in britain , in europe , in north america .
it represents a colossal waste of food , but what i discovered whilst i was writing my book was that this very evident abundance of waste was actually the tip of the iceberg .
when you start going up the supply chain , you find where the real food waste is happening on a gargantuan scale .
can i have a show of hands if you have a loaf of sliced bread in your house ?
who lives in a household where that crust - that slice at the first and last end of each loaf - okay , most people , not everyone , but most people , and this is , i 'm glad to say , what i see across the world , and yet has anyone seen a supermarket or sandwich shop anywhere in the world that serves sandwiches with crusts on it ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- i certainly have n't .
so i kept on thinking , where do those crusts go ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- this is the answer , unfortunately : 13,000 slices of fresh bread coming out of this one single factory every single day , day-fresh bread .
in the same year that i visited this factory , i went to pakistan , where people in 2008 were going hungry as a result of a squeeze on global food supplies .
we contribute to that squeeze by depositing food in bins here in britain and elsewhere in the world . we take food off the market shelves that hungry people depend on .
go one step up , and you get to farmers , who throw away sometimes a third or even more of their harvest because of cosmetic standards .
this farmer , for example , has invested 16,000 pounds in growing spinach , not one leaf of which he harvested , potatoes that are cosmetically imperfect , all going for pigs .
parsnips that are too small for supermarket specifications , tomatoes in tenerife , oranges in florida , bananas in ecuador , where i visited last year , all being discarded . this is one day 's waste from one banana plantation in ecuador .
all being discarded , perfectly edible , because they 're the wrong shape or size .
if we do that to fruit and vegetables , you bet we can do it to animals too .
liver , lungs , heads , tails , kidneys , testicles , delicious and nutritious parts of our gastronomy go to waste . offal consumption has halved in britain and america in the last 30 years .
as a result , this stuff gets fed to dogs at best , or is incinerated .
this man , in kashgar , xinjiang province , in western china , is serving up his national dish .
it 's called sheep 's organs .
it 's delicious , it 's nutritious , and as i learned when i went to kashgar , it symbolizes their taboo against food waste .
i was sitting in a roadside cafe .
a chef came to talk to me , i finished my bowl , and halfway through the conversation , he stopped talking and he started frowning into my bowl .
i thought , " my goodness , what taboo have i broken ?
how have i insulted my host ? "
he pointed at three grains of rice at the bottom of my bowl , and he said , " clean . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- i thought , " my god , you know , i go around the world telling people to stop wasting food .
this guy has thrashed me at my own game . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- but it gave me faith . it gave me faith that we , the people , do have the power to stop this tragic waste of resources if we regard it as socially unacceptable to waste food on a colossal scale , if we make noise about it , tell corporations about it , tell governments we want to see an end to food waste , we do have the power to bring about that change .
fish , 40 to 60 percent of european fish are discarded at sea , they do n't even get landed .
in our homes , we 've lost touch with food .
this is an experiment i did on three lettuces .
who keeps lettuces in their fridge ?
most people . the one on the left was kept in a fridge for 10 days .
the one in the middle , on my kitchen table . not much difference .
the one on the right i treated like cut flowers .
it 's a living organism , cut the slice off , stuck it in a vase of water , it was all right for another two weeks after this .
some food waste , as i said at the beginning , will inevitably arise , so the question is , what is the best thing to do with it ?
i answered that question when i was 15 .
in fact , humans answered that question 6,000 years ago : we domesticated pigs to turn food waste back into food .
and yet , in europe , that practice has become illegal since 2001 as a result of the foot-and-mouth outbreak .
it 's unscientific . it 's unnecessary .
if you cook food for pigs , just as if you cook food for humans , it is rendered safe .
it 's also a massive saving of resources .
at the moment , europe depends on importing millions of tons of soy from south america , where its production contributes to global warming , to deforestation , to biodiversity loss , to feed livestock here in europe .
at the same time we throw away millions of tons of food waste which we could and should be feeding them .
if we did that , and fed it to pigs , we would save that amount of carbon .
if we feed our food waste which is the current government favorite way of getting rid of food waste , to anaerobic digestion , which turns food waste into gas to produce electricity , you save a paltry 448 kilograms of carbon dioxide per ton of food waste . it 's much better to feed it to pigs .
we knew that during the war . -lrb- laughter -rrb- a silver lining : it has kicked off globally , the quest to tackle food waste .
feeding the 5,000 is an event i first organized in 2009 .
we fed 5,000 people all on food that otherwise would have been wasted .
since then , it 's happened again in london , it 's happening internationally , and across the country .
it 's a way of organizations coming together to celebrate food , to say the best thing to do with food is to eat and enjoy it , and to stop wasting it .
for the sake of the planet we live on , for the sake of our children , for the sake of all the other organisms that share our planet with us , we are a terrestrial animal , and we depend on our land for food . at the moment , we are trashing our land to grow food that no one eats .
stop wasting food . thank you very much . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- " even in purely non-religious terms , homosexuality represents a misuse of the sexual faculty .
it is a pathetic little second-rate substitute for reality - a pitiable flight from life .
as such , it deserves no compassion , it deserves no treatment as minority martyrdom , and it deserves not to be deemed anything but a pernicious sickness . "
that 's from time magazine in 1966 , when i was three years old .
and last year , the president of the united states came out in favor of gay marriage .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and my question is , how did we get from there to here ?
how did an illness become an identity ?
when i was perhaps six years old , i went to a shoe store with my mother and my brother .
and at the end of buying our shoes , the salesman said to us that we could each have a balloon to take home .
my brother wanted a red balloon , and i wanted a pink balloon .
my mother said that she thought i 'd really rather have a blue balloon .
but i said that i definitely wanted the pink one .
and she reminded me that my favorite color was blue .
the fact that my favorite color now is blue , but i 'm still gay - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - is evidence of both my mother 's influence and its limits .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- when i was little , my mother used to say , " the love you have for your children is like no other feeling in the world .
and until you have children , you do n't know what it 's like . "
and when i was little , i took it as the greatest compliment in the world that she would say that about parenting my brother and me .
and when i was an adolescent , i thought that i 'm gay , and so i probably ca n't have a family .
and when she said it , it made me anxious .
and after i came out of the closet , when she continued to say it , it made me furious .
i said , " i 'm gay . that 's not the direction that i 'm headed in .
and i want you to stop saying that . "
about 20 years ago , i was asked by my editors at the new york times magazine to write a piece about deaf culture .
and i was rather taken aback .
i had thought of deafness entirely as an illness .
those poor people , they could n't hear .
they lacked hearing , and what could we do for them ?
and then i went out into the deaf world .
i went to deaf clubs .
i saw performances of deaf theater and of deaf poetry .
i even went to the miss deaf america contest in nashville , tennessee where people complained about that slurry southern signing .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and as i plunged deeper and deeper into the deaf world , i become convinced that deafness was a culture and that the people in the deaf world who said , " we do n't lack hearing , we have membership in a culture , " were saying something that was viable .
it was n't my culture , and i did n't particularly want to rush off and join it , but i appreciated that it was a culture and that for the people who were members of it , it felt as valuable as latino culture or gay culture or jewish culture .
it felt as valid perhaps even as american culture .
then a friend of a friend of mine had a daughter who was a dwarf .
and when her daughter was born , she suddenly found herself confronting questions that now began to seem quite resonant to me .
she was facing the question of what to do with this child .
should she say , " you 're just like everyone else but a little bit shorter ? "
or should she try to construct some kind of dwarf identity , get involved in the little people of america , become aware of what was happening for dwarfs ?
and i suddenly thought , most deaf children are born to hearing parents .
those hearing parents tend to try to cure them .
those deaf people discover community somehow in adolescence .
most gay people are born to straight parents .
those straight parents often want them to function in what they think of as the mainstream world , and those gay people have to discover identity later on .
and here was this friend of mine looking at these questions of identity with her dwarf daughter .
and i thought , there it is again : a family that perceives itself to be normal with a child who seems to be extraordinary .
and i hatched the idea that there are really two kinds of identity .
there are vertical identities , which are passed down generationally from parent to child .
those are things like ethnicity , frequently nationality , language , often religion .
those are things you have in common with your parents and with your children .
and while some of them can be difficult , there 's no attempt to cure them .
you can argue that it 's harder in the united states - our current presidency notwithstanding - to be a person of color .
and yet , we have nobody who is trying to ensure that the next generation of children born to african-americans and asians come out with creamy skin and yellow hair .
there are these other identities which you have to learn from a peer group .
and i call them horizontal identities , because the peer group is the horizontal experience .
these are identities that are alien to your parents and that you have to discover when you get to see them in peers .
and those identities , those horizontal identities , people have almost always tried to cure .
and i wanted to look at what the process is through which people who have those identities come to a good relationship with them .
and it seemed to me that there were three levels of acceptance that needed to take place .
there 's self-acceptance , there 's family acceptance , and there 's social acceptance .
and they do n't always coincide .
and a lot of the time , people who have these conditions are very angry because they feel as though their parents do n't love them , when what actually has happened is that their parents do n't accept them .
love is something that ideally is there unconditionally throughout the relationship between a parent and a child .
but acceptance is something that takes time .
it always takes time .
one of the dwarfs i got to know was a guy named clinton brown .
when he was born , he was diagnosed with diastrophic dwarfism , a very disabling condition , and his parents were told that he would never walk , he would never talk , he would have no intellectual capacity , and he would probably not even recognize them .
and it was suggested to them that they leave him at the hospital so that he could die there quietly .
and his mother said she was n't going to do it .
and she took her son home .
and even though she did n't have a lot of educational or financial advantages , she found the best doctor in the country for dealing with diastrophic dwarfism , and she got clinton enrolled with him .
and in the course of his childhood , he had 30 major surgical procedures .
and he spent all this time stuck in the hospital while he was having those procedures , as a result of which he now can walk .
and while he was there , they sent tutors around to help him with his school work .
and he worked very hard because there was nothing else to do .
and he ended up achieving at a level that had never before been contemplated by any member of his family .
he was the first one in his family , in fact , to go to college , where he lived on campus and drove a specially-fitted car that accommodated his unusual body .
and his mother told me this story of coming home one day - and he went to college nearby - and she said , " i saw that car , which you can always recognize , in the parking lot of a bar , " she said . -lrb- laughter -rrb- " and i thought to myself , they 're six feet tall , he 's three feet tall .
two beers for them is four beers for him . "
she said , " i knew i could n't go in there and interrupt him , but i went home , and i left him eight messages on his cell phone . "
she said , " and then i thought , if someone had said to me when he was born that my future worry would be that he 'd go drinking and driving with his college buddies - " -lrb- applause -rrb- and i said to her , " what do you think you did that helped him to emerge as this charming , accomplished , wonderful person ? "
and she said , " what did i do ? i loved him , that 's all .
clinton just always had that light in him .
and his father and i were lucky enough to be the first to see it there . "
i 'm going to quote from another magazine of the ' 60s .
this one is from 1968 - the atlantic monthly , voice of liberal america - written by an important bioethicist .
he said , " there is no reason to feel guilty about putting a down syndrome child away , whether it is put away in the sense of hidden in a sanitarium or in a more responsible , lethal sense .
it is sad , yes - dreadful . but it carries no guilt .
true guilt arises only from an offense against a person , and a down 's is not a person . "
there 's been a lot of ink given to the enormous progress that we 've made in the treatment of gay people .
the fact that our attitude has changed is in the headlines every day .
but we forget how we used to see people who had other differences , how we used to see people who were disabled , how inhuman we held people to be .
and the change that 's been accomplished there , which is almost equally radical , is one that we pay not very much attention to .
one of the families i interviewed , tom and karen robards , were taken aback when , as young and successful new yorkers , their first child was diagnosed with down syndrome .
they thought the educational opportunities for him were not what they should be , and so they decided they would build a little center - two classrooms that they started with a few other parents - to educate kids with d.s.
and over the years , that center grew into something called the cooke center , where there are now thousands upon thousands of children with intellectual disabilities who are being taught .
in the time since that atlantic monthly story ran , the life expectancy for people with down syndrome has tripled .
the experience of down syndrome people includes those who are actors , those who are writers , some who are able to live fully independently in adulthood .
the robards had a lot to do with that .
and i said , " do you regret it ?
do you wish your child did n't have down syndrome ?
do you wish you 'd never heard of it ? "
and interestingly his father said , " well , for david , our son , i regret it , because for david , it 's a difficult way to be in the world , and i 'd like to give david an easier life .
but i think if we lost everyone with down syndrome , it would be a catastrophic loss . "
and karen robards said to me , " i 'm with tom .
for david , i would cure it in an instant to give him an easier life .
but speaking for myself - well , i would never have believed 23 years ago when he was born that i could come to such a point - speaking for myself , it 's made me so much better and so much kinder and so much more purposeful in my whole life , that speaking for myself , i would n't give it up for anything in the world . "
we live at a point when social acceptance for these and many other conditions is on the up and up .
and yet we also live at the moment when our ability to eliminate those conditions has reached a height we never imagined before .
most deaf infants born in the united states now will receive cochlear implants , which are put into the brain and connected to a receiver , and which allow them to acquire a facsimile of hearing and to use oral speech .
a compound that has been tested in mice , bmn-111 , is useful in preventing the action of the achondroplasia gene .
achondroplasia is the most common form of dwarfism , and mice who have been given that substance and who have the achondroplasia gene , grow to full size .
testing in humans is around the corner .
there are blood tests which are making progress that would pick up down syndrome more clearly and earlier in pregnancies than ever before , making it easier and easier for people to eliminate those pregnancies , or to terminate them .
and so we have both social progress and medical progress .
and i believe in both of them .
i believe the social progress is fantastic and meaningful and wonderful , and i think the same thing about the medical progress .
but i think it 's a tragedy when one of them does n't see the other .
and when i see the way they 're intersecting in conditions like the three i 've just described , i sometimes think it 's like those moments in grand opera when the hero realizes he loves the heroine at the exact moment that she lies expiring on a divan .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we have to think about how we feel about cures altogether .
and a lot of the time the question of parenthood is , what do we validate in our children , and what do we cure in them ?
jim sinclair , a prominent autism activist , said , " when parents say ' i wish my child did not have autism , ' what they 're really saying is ' i wish the child i have did not exist and i had a different , non-autistic child instead . ' read that again . this is what we hear when you mourn over our existence .
this is what we hear when you pray for a cure - that your fondest wish for us is that someday we will cease to be and strangers you can love will move in behind our faces . "
it 's a very extreme point of view , but it points to the reality that people engage with the life they have and they do n't want to be cured or changed or eliminated .
they want to be whoever it is that they 've come to be .
one of the families i interviewed for this project was the family of dylan klebold who was one of the perpetrators of the columbine massacre .
it took a long time to persuade them to talk to me , and once they agreed , they were so full of their story that they could n't stop telling it .
and the first weekend i spent with them - the first of many - i recorded more than 20 hours of conversation .
and on sunday night , we were all exhausted .
we were sitting in the kitchen . sue klebold was fixing dinner .
and i said , " if dylan were here now , do you have a sense of what you 'd want to ask him ? "
and his father said , " i sure do .
i 'd want to ask him what the hell he thought he was doing . "
and sue looked at the floor , and she thought for a minute .
and then she looked back up and said , " i would ask him to forgive me for being his mother and never knowing what was going on inside his head . "
when i had dinner with her a couple of years later - one of many dinners that we had together - she said , " you know , when it first happened , i used to wish that i had never married , that i had never had children .
if i had n't gone to ohio state and crossed paths with tom , this child would n't have existed and this terrible thing would n't have happened .
but i 've come to feel that i love the children i had so much that i do n't want to imagine a life without them .
i recognize the pain they caused to others , for which there can be no forgiveness , but the pain they caused to me , there is , " she said .
" so while i recognize that it would have been better for the world if dylan had never been born , i 've decided that it would not have been better for me . "
i thought it was surprising how all of these families had all of these children with all of these problems , problems that they mostly would have done anything to avoid , and that they had all found so much meaning in that experience of parenting .
and then i thought , all of us who have children love the children we have , with their flaws .
if some glorious angel suddenly descended through my living room ceiling and offered to take away the children i have and give me other , better children - more polite , funnier , nicer , smarter - i would cling to the children i have and pray away that atrocious spectacle .
and ultimately i feel that in the same way that we test flame-retardant pajamas in an inferno to ensure they wo n't catch fire when our child reaches across the stove , so these stories of families negotiating these extreme differences reflect on the universal experience of parenting , which is always that sometimes you look at your child and you think , where did you come from ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it turns out that while each of these individual differences is siloed - there are only so many families dealing with schizophrenia , there are only so many families of children who are transgender , there are only so many families of prodigies - who also face similar challenges in many ways - there are only so many families in each of those categories - but if you start to think that the experience of negotiating difference within your family is what people are addressing , then you discover that it 's a nearly universal phenomenon .
ironically , it turns out , that it 's our differences , and our negotiation of difference , that unite us .
i decided to have children while i was working on this project .
and many people were astonished and said , " but how can you decide to have children in the midst of studying everything that can go wrong ? "
and i said , " i 'm not studying everything that can go wrong .
what i 'm studying is how much love there can be , even when everything appears to be going wrong . "
i thought a lot about the mother of one disabled child i had seen , a severely disabled child who died through caregiver neglect .
and when his ashes were interred , his mother said , " i pray here for forgiveness for having been twice robbed , once of the child i wanted and once of the son i loved . "
and i figured it was possible then for anyone to love any child if they had the effective will to do so .
so my husband is the biological father of two children with some lesbian friends in minneapolis .
i had a close friend from college who 'd gone through a divorce and wanted to have children .
and so she and i have a daughter , and mother and daughter live in texas .
and my husband and i have a son who lives with us all the time of whom i am the biological father , and our surrogate for the pregnancy was laura , the lesbian mother of oliver and lucy in minneapolis .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so the shorthand is five parents of four children in three states .
and there are people who think that the existence of my family somehow undermines or weakens or damages their family .
and there are people who think that families like mine should n't be allowed to exist .
and i do n't accept subtractive models of love , only additive ones .
and i believe that in the same way that we need species diversity to ensure that the planet can go on , so we need this diversity of affection and diversity of family in order to strengthen the ecosphere of kindness .
the day after our son was born , the pediatrician came into the hospital room and said she was concerned .
he was n't extending his legs appropriately .
she said that might mean that he had brain damage .
in so far as he was extending them , he was doing so asymmetrically , which she thought could mean that there was a tumor of some kind in action .
and he had a very large head , which she thought might indicate hydrocephalus .
and as she told me all of these things , i felt the very center of my being pouring out onto the floor .
and i thought , here i had been working for years on a book about how much meaning people had found in the experience of parenting children who are disabled , and i did n't want to join their number .
because what i was encountering was an idea of illness .
and like all parents since the dawn of time , i wanted to protect my child from illness .
and i wanted also to protect myself from illness .
and yet , i knew from the work i had done that if he had any of the things we were about to start testing for , that those would ultimately be his identity , and if they were his identity they would become my identity , that that illness was going to take a very different shape as it unfolded .
we took him to the mri machine , we took him to the cat scanner , we took this day-old child and gave him over for an arterial blood draw .
we felt helpless .
and at the end of five hours , they said that his brain was completely clear and that he was by then extending his legs correctly .
and when i asked the pediatrician what had been going on , she said she thought in the morning he had probably had a cramp .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but i thought how my mother was right .
i thought , the love you have for your children is unlike any other feeling in the world , and until you have children , you do n't know what it feels like .
i think children had ensnared me the moment i connected fatherhood with loss .
but i 'm not sure i would have noticed that if i had n't been so in the thick of this research project of mine .
i 'd encountered so much strange love , and i fell very naturally into its bewitching patterns .
and i saw how splendor can illuminate even the most abject vulnerabilities .
during these 10 years , i had witnessed and learned the terrifying joy of unbearable responsibility , and i had come to see how it conquers everything else .
and while i had sometimes thought the parents i was interviewing were fools , enslaving themselves to a lifetime 's journey with their thankless children and trying to breed identity out of misery , i realized that day that my research had built me a plank and that i was ready to join them on their ship .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- compassion : what does it look like ?
come with me to 915 south bloodworth street in raleigh , north carolina , where i grew up .
if you come in you will see us : evening time , at table - set for ten but not always all seats filled - at the point when dinner is ready to be served .
since mom had eight kids , sometimes she said she could n't tell who was who and where they were .
before we could eat , she would ask , " are all the children in ? "
and if someone happened to be missing , we would have to , we say , " fix a plate " for that person , put it in the oven , then we could say grace , and we could eat .
also , while we were at the table , there was a ritual in our family : when something significant had happened for any one of us - whether mom had just been elected as the president of the pta , or whether dad had gotten an assignment at the college of our denomination , or whether someone had won the jabberwocky contest for talent - the ritual at the family was , once the announcement is made , we must take five , ten minutes to do what we call " make over " that person - that is , to make a fuss over the one who had been honored in some way .
for when one is honored , all are honored .
also , we had to make a report on our extended " visited " members , that is , extended members of the family , sick and elderly , shut in .
my task was , at least once a week , to visit mother lassiter who lived on east street , mother williamson who lived on bledsoe avenue , and mother lathers who lived on oberlin road .
why ? because they were old and infirm , and we needed to go by to see if they needed anything .
for mom said , " to be family , is to care and share and to look out for one another .
they are our family . "
and , of course , sometimes there was a bonus for going .
they would offer sweets or money .
mom says , " if they ask you what it costs to either go shopping for them , you must always say , ' nothing . ' and if they insist , say , ' whatever you mind to give me . " ' this was the nature of being at that table .
in fact , she indicated that if we would do that , not only would we have the joy of receiving the gratitude from the members of the extended family , but she said , " even god will smile , and when god smiles , there is peace , and justice , and joy . "
so , at the table at 915 , i learned something about compassion .
of course , it was a minister 's family , so we had to add god into it .
and so , i came to think that mama eternal , mama eternal , is always wondering : are all the children in ?
and if we had been faithful in caring and sharing , we had the sense that justice and peace would have a chance in the world .
now , it was not always wonderful at that table .
let me explain a point at which we did not rise to the occasion .
it was christmas , and at our family , oh , what a morning .
christmas morning , where we open up our gifts , where we have special prayers , and where we get to the old upright piano and we would sing carols . it was a very intimate moment .
in fact , you could come down to the tree to get your gifts and get ready to sing , and then get ready for breakfast without even taking a bath or getting dressed , except that daddy messed it up .
there was a member of his staff who did not have any place on that particular christmas to celebrate .
and daddy brought elder revels to the christmas family celebration .
we thought he must be out of his mind .
this is our time . this is intimate time .
this is when we can just be who we are , and now we have this stuffy brother with his shirt and tie on , while we are still in our pjs .
why would daddy bring elder revels ?
any other time , but not to the christmas celebration .
and mom overheard us and said , " well , you know what ? if you really understand the nature of this celebration , it is that this is a time where you extend the circle of love .
that 's what the celebration is all about .
it 's time to make space , to share the enjoyment of life in a beloved community . "
so , we sucked up .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but growing up at 915 , compassion was not a word to be debated ; it was a sensibility to how we are together .
we are sisters and brothers united together .
and , like chief seattle said , " we did not spin the web of life .
we 're all strands in it .
and whatever we do to the web , we do to ourselves . "
now that 's compassion .
so , let me tell you , i kind of look at the world this way .
i see pictures , and something says , " now , that 's compassion . "
a harvested field of grain , with some grain in the corners , reminding me of the hebrew tradition that you may indeed harvest , but you must always leave some on the edges , just in case there 's someone who has not had the share necessary for good nurture .
talk about a picture of compassion .
i see - always , it stirs my heart - a picture of dr. martin luther king , jr .
walking arm in arm with andy young and rabbi heschel and maybe thich nhat hanh and some of the other saints assembled , walking across the bridge and going into selma .
just a photograph .
arm in arm for struggle .
suffering together in a common hope that we can be brothers and sisters without the accidents of our birth or our ethnicity robbing us of a sense of unity of being .
so , there 's another picture . here , this one . i really do like this picture .
when dr. martin luther king , jr. was assassinated , that day , everybody in my community was upset .
you heard about riots all across the land .
bobby kennedy was scheduled to bring an inner city message in indianapolis .
this is the picture . they said , " it 's going to be too volatile for you to go . "
he insisted , " i must go . "
so , sitting on a flatbed truck , the elders of the community are there , and bobby stands up and says to the people , " i have bad news for you .
some of you may not have heard that dr. king has been assassinated .
i know that you are angry , and i know that you would almost wish to have the opportunity to enter now into activities of revenge . but , " he said , " what i really want you to know is that i know how you feel .
because i had someone dear to me snatched away .
i know how you feel . "
and he said , " i hope that you will have the strength to do what i did .
i allowed my anger , my bitterness , my grief to simmer a while , and then i made up my mind that i was going to make a different world , and we can do that together . "
that 's a picture . compassion ? i think i see it .
i saw it when the dalai lama came to the riverside church while i was a pastor , and he invited representatives of faith traditions from all around the world .
he asked them to give a message , and they each read in their own language a central affirmation , and that was some version of the golden rule : " as you would that others would do unto you , do also unto them . "
twelve in their ecclesiastical or cultural or tribal attire affirming one message .
we are so connected that we must treat each other as if an action toward you is an action toward myself .
one more picture while i 'm stinking and thinking about the riverside church : 9/11 . last night at chagrin fall , a newspaperman and a television guy said , " that evening , when a service was held at the riverside church , we carried it on our station in this city .
it was , " he said , " one of the most powerful moments of life together .
we were all suffering .
but you invited representatives of all of the traditions to come , and you invited them .
' find out what it is in your tradition that tells us what to do when we have been humiliated , when we have been despised and rejected . ' and they all spoke out of their own traditions , a word about the healing power of solidarity , one with the other . "
i developed a sense of compassion sort of as second nature , but i became a preacher .
now , as a preacher , i got a job . i got to preach the stuff , but i got to do it too .
or , as father divine in harlem used to say to folks , " some people preach the gospel .
i have to tangibilitate the gospel . "
so , the real issue is : how do you tangibilitate compassion ?
how do you make it real ?
my faith has constantly lifted up the ideal , and challenged me when i fell beneath it .
in my tradition , there is a gift that we have made to other traditions - to everybody around the world who knows the story of the " good samaritan . "
many people think of it primarily in terms of charity , random acts of kindness .
but for those who really study that text a little more thoroughly , you will discover that a question has been raised that leads to this parable .
the question was : " what is the greatest commandment ? "
and , according to jesus , the word comes forth , " you must love yourself , you must love the lord your god with all your heart , mind and soul , and your neighbor as yourself . "
and then the person asked , " well , what do you mean , ' neighbor ? " ' and he answered it by telling the story of the man who fell among thieves , and how religious authorities went the other way , and how their supporters in the congregation went the other way ; but an unsuspecting , despised person came along , saw the man in need , provided oil and wine for his wounds , put him on his own transportation , and took him to the inn and asked the innkeeper , " take care of him . "
and he said , " here , this is the initial investment , but if needs continue , make sure that you provide them .
and whatever else is needed , i will provide it and pay for it when i return . "
this always seemed to me to be a deepening of the sense of what it means to be a good samaritan .
a good samaritan is not simply one whose heart is touched in an immediate act of care and charity , but one who provides a system of sustained care - i like that , ' a system of sustained care ' - in the inn , take care .
i think maybe it 's one time when the bible talks about a healthcare system and a commitment to do whatever is necessary - that all god 's children would have their needs cared for , so that we could answer when mommy eternal asks , " in regards to health , are all the children in ? " and we could say yes .
oh , what a joy it has been to be a person seeking to tangibilitate compassion .
i recall that my work as a pastor has always involved caring for their spiritual needs ; being concerned for housing , for healthcare , for the prisoners , for the infirm , for children - even the foster care children for whom no one can even keep a record where they started off , where they are going .
to be a pastor is to care for these individual needs .
but now , to be a good samaritan - and i always say , and to be a good american - for me , is not simply to congratulate myself for the individual acts of care .
compassion takes on a corporate dynamic .
i believe that whatever we did around that table at bloodworth street must be done around tables and rituals of faith until we become that family , that family together that understands the nature of our unity .
we are one people together .
so , let me explain to you what i mean when i think about compassion , and why i think it is so important that right at this point in history .
we would decide to establish this charter of compassion .
the reason it 's important is because this is a very special time in history .
it is the time that , biblically , we would speak of as the day , or the year , of god 's favor .
this is a season of grace .
unusual things are beginning to happen .
please pardon me , as a black man , for celebrating that the election of obama was an unusual sign of the fact that it is a year of favor .
and yet , there is so much more that needs to be done .
we need to bring health and food and education and respect for all god 's citizens , all god 's children , remembering mama eternal .
now , let me close my comments by telling you that whenever i feel something very deeply , it usually takes the form of verse .
and so i want to close with a little song .
i close with this song - it 's a children 's song - because we are all children at the table of mama eternal .
and if mama eternal has taught us correctly , this song will make sense , not only to those of us who are a part of this gathering , but to all who sign the charter for compassion .
and this is why we do it .
the song says , ♫ " i made heaven so happy today , ♫ ♫ receiving god 's love and giving it away ♫ ♫ when i looked up , heaven smiled at me ♫ ♫ now , i 'm so happy . ca n't you see ? ♫ ♫ i 'm happy . look at me . i 'm happy . ca n't you see ? ♫ ♫ sharing makes me happy , makes heaven happy too ♫ ♫ i 'm happy . look at me . i 'm happy . ca n't you see ? ♫ ♫ let me share my happy loving smile with you . ♫ that 's compassion . -lrb- applause -rrb- every year in the united states alone ,
2,077,000 couples make a legal and spiritual decision to spend the rest of their lives together ...
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and not to have sex with anyone else , ever .
he buys a ring , she buys a dress .
they go shopping for all sorts of things .
she takes him to arthur murray for ballroom dancing lessons .
and the big day comes .
and they 'll stand before god and family and some guy her dad once did business with , and they 'll vow that nothing , not abject poverty , not life-threatening illness , not complete and utter misery will ever put the tiniest damper on their eternal love and devotion .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- these optimistic young bastards promise to honor and cherish each other through hot flashes and mid-life crises and a cumulative 50-lb. weight gain , until that far-off day when one of them is finally able to rest in peace .
you know , because they ca n't hear the snoring anymore .
and then they 'll get stupid drunk and smash cake in each others ' faces and do the " macarena , " and we 'll be there showering them with towels and toasters and drinking their free booze and throwing birdseed at them every single time - even though we know , statistically , half of them will be divorced within a decade .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- of course , the other half wo n't , right ?
they 'll keep forgetting anniversaries and arguing about where to spend holidays and debating which way the toilet paper should come off of the roll .
and some of them will even still be enjoying each others ' company when neither of them can chew solid food anymore .
and researchers want to know why .
i mean , look , it does n't take a double-blind , placebo-controlled study to figure out what makes a marriage not work .
disrespect , boredom , too much time on facebook , having sex with other people .
but you can have the exact opposite of all of those things - respect , excitement , a broken internet connection , mind-numbing monogamy - and the thing still can go to hell in a hand basket .
so what 's going on when it does n't ?
what do the folks who make it all the way to side-by-side burial plots have in common ?
what are they doing right ?
what can we learn from them ?
and if you 're still happily sleeping solo , why should you stop what you 're doing and make it your life 's work to find that one special person that you can annoy for the rest of your life ?
well researchers spend billions of your tax dollars trying to figure that out .
they stalk blissful couples and they study their every move and mannerism .
and they try to pinpoint what it is that sets them apart from their miserable neighbors and friends .
and it turns out , the success stories share a few similarities , actually , beyond they do n't have sex with other people .
for instance , in the happiest marriages , the wife is thinner and better looking than the husband .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- obvious , right .
it 's obvious that this leads to marital bliss because , women , we care a great deal about being thin and good looking , whereas men mostly care about sex ...
ideally with women who are thinner and better looking than they are .
the beauty of this research though is that no one is suggesting that women have to be thin to be happy ; we just have to be thinner than our partners .
so instead of all that laborious dieting and exercising , we just need to wait for them to get fat , maybe bake a few pies .
this is good information to have , and it 's not that complicated .
research also suggests that the happiest couples are the ones that focus on the positives .
for example , the happy wife .
instead of pointing out her husband 's growing gut or suggesting he go for a run , she might say , " wow , honey , thank you for going out of your way to make me relatively thinner . "
these are couples who can find good in any situation .
" yeah , it was devastating when we lost everything in that fire , but it 's kind of nice sleeping out here under the stars , and it 's a good thing you 've got all that body fat to keep us warm . "
one of my favorite studies found that the more willing a husband is to do house work , the more attractive his wife will find him .
because we needed a study to tell us this .
but here 's what 's going on here .
the more attractive she finds him , the more sex they have ; the more sex they have , the nicer he is to her ; the nicer he is to her , the less she nags him about leaving wet towels on the bed - and ultimately , they live happily ever after .
in other words , men , you might want to pick it up a notch in the domestic department .
here 's an interesting one .
one study found that people who smile in childhood photographs are less likely to get a divorce .
this is an actual study , and let me clarify .
the researchers were not looking at documented self-reports of childhood happiness or even studying old journals .
the data were based entirely on whether people looked happy in these early pictures .
now i do n't know how old all of you are , but when i was a kid , your parents took pictures with a special kind of camera that held something called film , and , by god , film was expensive .
they did n't take 300 shots of you in that rapid-fire digital video mode and then pick out the nicest , smileyest one for the christmas card .
oh no .
they dressed you up , they lined you up , and you smiled for the fucking camera like they told you to or you could kiss your birthday party goodbye .
but still , i have a huge pile of fake happy childhood pictures and i 'm glad they make me less likely than some people to get a divorce .
so what else can you do do not win an oscar for best actress .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'm serious .
bettie davis , joan crawford , hallie berry , hillary swank , sandra bullock , reese witherspoon , all of them single soon after taking home that statue .
they actually call it the oscar curse .
it is the marriage kiss of death and something that should be avoided .
and it 's not just successfully starring in films that 's dangerous .
it turns out , merely watching a romantic comedy causes relationship satisfaction to plummet .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- apparently , the bitter realization that maybe it could happen to us , but it obviously has n't and it probably never will , makes our lives seem unbearably grim in comparison .
and theoretically , i suppose if we opt for a film where someone gets brutally murdered or dies in a fiery car crash , we are more likely to walk out of that theater feeling like we 've got it pretty good .
drinking alcohol , it seems , is bad for your marriage .
yeah .
i ca n't tell you anymore about that one because i stopped reading it at the headline .
but here 's a scary one : divorce is contagious .
that 's right - when you have a close couple friend split up , it increases your chances of getting a divorce by 75 percent .
now i have to say , i do n't get this one at all .
my husband and i have watched quite a few friends divide their assets and then struggle with being our age and single in an age of sexting and viagra and eharmony .
and i 'm thinking they 've done more for my marriage than a lifetime of therapy ever could .
so now you may be wondering , why does anyone get married ever ?
well the u.s. federal government counts more than a thousand legal benefits to being someone 's spouse - a list that includes visitation rights in jail , but hopefully you 'll never need that one .
but beyond the profound federal perks , married people make more money .
we 're healthier , physically and emotionally .
we produce happier , more stable and more successful kids .
we have more sex than our supposedly swinging single friends - believe it or not .
we even live longer , which is a pretty compelling argument for marrying someone you like a lot in the first place .
now if you 're not currently experiencing the joy of the joint tax return , i ca n't tell you how to find a chore-loving person of the approximately ideal size and attractiveness who prefers horror movies and does n't have a lot of friends hovering on the brink of divorce , but i can only encourage you to try , because the benefits , as i 've pointed out , are significant .
the bottom line is , whether you 're in it or you 're searching for it , i believe marriage is an institution worth pursuing and protecting .
so i hope you 'll use the information i 've given you today to weigh your personal strengths against your own risk factors .
for instance , in my marriage , i 'd say i 'm doing okay .
one the one hand , and incredibly handsome .
so i 'm obviously going to need fatten him up .
and like i said , we have those divorced friends who may secretly or subconsciously be trying to break us up .
so we have to keep an eye on that .
and we do like a cocktail or two .
on the other hand , i have the fake happy picture thing .
and also , my husband does a lot around the house , and would happily never see another romantic comedy as long as he lives .
so i 've got all those things going for me .
but just in case , i plan to work extra hard to not win an oscar anytime soon .
and for the good of your relationships , i would encourage you to do the same .
i 'll see you at the bar .
-lrb- applause -rrb- my name is emiliano salinas and i 'm going to talk about the role we members of society play in the violent atmosphere this country is living in right now .
i was born in 1976 .
i grew up in a traditional mexican family .
as a child , i had a pretty normal life : i would go to school , play with my friends and cousins .
but then my father became president of mexico and my life changed .
what i 'm about to say , at least some of what i 'm about to say , will cause controversy .
firstly , because i 'm the one who 's going to say it .
and secondly , because what i 'm going to say is true , and it will make a lot of people nervous because it 's something we do n't want to hear .
but it 's imperative that we listen because it 's undeniable and definitive .
it will also make members of criminal organizations nervous for the same reasons .
i 'm going to talk about the role we members of society play in this phenomenon , and about four different response levels we citizens have against violence .
i know many will find it difficult to separate the fact that i 'm carlos salinas de gortari 's son from the fact that i 'm a citizen concerned about the country 's current situation .
do n't worry .
it 's not necessary for understanding the importance of what i 'm going to say .
i think we have a problem in mexico .
we have a big problem .
i think there 's consensus on this .
no one argues - we all agree there 's a problem .
what we do n't agree on is what the problem actually is .
is it the zetas ? the drug traffickers ? the government ?
corruption ? poverty ? or is it something else ?
i think none of these is the problem .
i do n't mean they do n't deserve attention .
but we wo n't be able to take care of any of those things if we do n't solve the real problem we have in mexico first .
the real problem we have is most of us mexicans , we believe we are victims of our circumstances .
we are a country of victims .
historically , we 've always acted as victims of something or somebody .
we were victims of the spaniards .
then we were victims of the french .
then we were victims of don porfirio .
then we were victims of the pri .
even of salinas .
and of el peje .
and now of the zetas and the traffickers and the criminals and the kidnappers ...
hold on ! wait a minute !
what if none of these things is the problem ?
the problem is not the things we feel victims of .
the problem is that we play the role of victims .
we need to open our eyes and see that we are not victims .
if only we stopped feeling like victims , if we stopped acting as victims , our country would change so much !
i 'm going to talk about how to go from a society that acts as a victim of circumstances to a responsible , involved society that takes the future of its country in its own hands .
i 'm going to talk about four different levels of civil response against violence , from weakest to strongest .
the first level , the weakest level of civil response against violence , is denial and apathy .
today , much of mexican society is in denial of the situation we 're going through .
we want to go on with our daily life even though we are not living under normal circumstances .
daily life in our country is , to say the least , under extraordinary , exceptional circumstances .
it 's like someone who has a serious illness and pretends it 's the flu and it will just go away .
we want to pretend that mexico has the flu .
but it does n't .
mexico has cancer .
and if we do n't do something about it , the cancer will end up killing it .
we need to move mexican society from denial and apathy to the next level of citizen response , which is , effectively , recognition .
and that recognition will sow fear - recognizing the seriousness of the situation .
but , fear is better than apathy because fear makes us do something .
many people in mexico are afraid today .
we 're very afraid .
and we 're acting out of that fear .
and let me tell you what the problem is with acting out of fear - and this is the second level of civil response : fear .
let 's think about mexican streets : they 're unsafe because of violence , so people stay at home .
does that make streets more or less safe ?
less safe !
so streets become more desolate and unsafe , so we stay home more - which makes streets even more desolate and unsafe , and we stay home even more .
this vicious circle ends up with the whole population stuck inside their houses , scared to death - even more afraid than when we were out on the streets .
we need to confront this fear .
we need to move mexican society , the members of society who are at this level , to the next level , which is action .
we need to face our fears and take back our streets , our cities , our neighborhoods .
for many people , acting involves courage .
we go from fear to courage .
they say , " i ca n't take it anymore .
let 's do something about it . "
recently - this is a sensitive figure - 35 public lynchings have been recorded so far in 2010 in mexico .
usually it 's one or two a year .
now we 're experiencing one every week .
this shows that society is desperate and it 's taking the law into its own hands .
unfortunately , violent action - though action is better than no action - but taking part in it only disguises violence .
if i 'm violent with you and you respond with violence , you become part of the violence and you just disguise my violence .
so civil action is vital , but it 's also vital to take people who are at the level of courage and violent action to the next level , which is non-violent action .
it 's pacific , coordinated civil action , which does n't mean passive action .
it means it 's determined and effective , but not violent .
there are examples of this kind of action in mexico .
two years ago , in galena city , chihuahua , a member of the community was kidnapped , eric le barón .
his brothers , benjamín and julián , got together with the rest of the community to think of the best course of action : to pay the ransom , to take up arms and go after the kidnappers or to ask the government for help .
in the end , benjamín and julián decided the best thing they could do was to organize the community and act together .
so what did they do ?
they mobilized the whole community of le barón to go to chihuahua , where they organized a sit-in in the central park of the city .
they sent a message to the kidnappers : " if you want your ransom come and get it .
we 'll be waiting for you right here . "
they stayed there .
seven days later , eric was set free and was able to return home .
this is an example of what an organized society can do , a society that acts .
of course , criminals can respond .
and in this case , they did .
on july 7th , 2009 , benjamín le barón was murdered .
but julián le barón keeps working and he has been mobilizing communities in chihuahua for over a year .
and for over a year he has known that a price has been put on his head .
but he keeps fighting .
he keeps organizing .
he keeps mobilizing .
these heroic acts are present all over the country .
with a thousand juliáns working together , mexico would be a very different country .
and they 're out there !
they just have to raise their hands .
i was born in mexico , i grew up in mexico and along the way , i learned to love mexico .
i think anyone who has stepped foot on this land - not to mention all mexican people - will agree that it 's not difficult to love mexico .
i 've traveled a lot and nowhere else have i found the passion mexicans have .
that devotion we feel for the national football team .
that devotion we show in helping victims of disasters , such as the earthquake in 1985 or this year 's floods .
the passion with which we 've been singing the national anthem since we were kids .
when we thought masiosare was the strange enemy , and we sang , with a childlike heart , " a soldier in each son . "
i think the biggest insult , the worst way you can offend a mexican is to insult their mother .
a mother is the most sacred thing in life .
mexico is our mother and today she cries out for her children .
we are going through the darkest moment in our recent history .
our mother , mexico , is being violated before our very eyes .
what are we going to do ?
masiosare , the strange enemy , is here .
where is the soldier in each son ?
mahatma gandhi , one of the greatest civil fighters of all time , said , " be the change you wish to see in the world . "
today in mexico we 're asking for gandhis .
we need gandhis .
we need men and women who love mexico and who are willing to take action .
this is a call for every true mexican to join this initiative .
this is a call so that every single thing we love about mexico - the festivals , the markets , the restaurants , the cantinas , the tequila , the mariachis , the serenades , the posadas , el grito , the day of the dead , san miguel , the joy , the passion for life , the fight and everything it means to be mexican - does n't disappear from this world .
we 're facing a very powerful opponent .
but we are many more .
they can take a man 's life .
anyone can kill me , or you , or you .
but no one can kill the spirit of true mexicans .
the battle is won , but we still have to fight it .
2000 years ago , the roman poet juvenal said something that today echoes in the heart of every true mexican .
he said , " count it the greatest sin to prefer life to honor , and for the sake of living to lose what makes life worth living . "
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- today i 'm going to talk about unexpected discoveries .
now i work in the solar technology industry .
and my small startup is looking to force ourselves into the environment by paying attention to ...
... paying attention to crowd-sourcing .
it 's just a quick video of what we do .
huh . hang on a moment .
it might take a moment to load .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we 'll just - we can just skip - i 'll just skip through the video instead ...
-lrb- laughter -rrb- no .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- this is not ...
-lrb- laughter -rrb- okay .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- solar technology is ...
oh , that 's all my time ?
okay . thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm not quite sure whether i really want to see a snare drum at nine o 'clock or so in the morning .
but anyway , it 's just great to see such a full theater , and really i must thank herbie hancock and his colleagues for such a great presentation . -lrb- applause -rrb- one of the interesting things , of course , is the combination of that raw hand on the instrument and technology , and of course what he said about listening to our young people .
of course , my job is all about listening , and my aim , really , is to teach the world to listen .
that 's my only real aim in life .
and it sounds quite simple , but actually it 's quite a big , big job .
because you know , when you look at a piece of music - for example , if i just open my little motorbike bag - we have here , hopefully , a piece of music that is full of little black dots on the page .
and , you know , we open it up and i read the music .
so technically , i can actually read this .
i will follow the instructions , the tempo markings , the dynamics .
i will do exactly as i 'm told .
and so therefore , because time is short , if i just play you literally the first maybe two lines or so . it 's very straightforward .
there 's nothing too difficult about the piece .
but here i 'm being told that the piece of music is very quick .
i 'm being told where to play on the drum .
i 'm being told which part of the stick to use .
and i 'm being told the dynamic .
and i 'm also being told that the drum is without snares .
snares on , snares off .
so therefore , if i translate this piece of music , we have this idea . -lrb- music -rrb- and so on . my career would probably last about five years .
however , what i have to do as a musician is do everything that is not on the music .
everything that there is n't time to learn from a teacher , or to talk about , even , from a teacher .
but it 's the things that you notice when you 're not actually with your instrument that in fact become so interesting , and that you want to explore through this tiny , tiny surface of a drum .
so there , we experience the translation . now we 'll experience the interpretation . -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- now my career may last a little longer !
but in a way , you know , it 's the same if i look at you and i see a nice bright young lady with a pink top on .
i see that you 're clutching a teddy bear , etc . , etc .
so i get a basic idea as to what you might be about , what you might like , what you might do as a profession , etc . , etc .
however , that 's just , you know , the initial idea i may have that we all get when we actually look , and we try to interpret , but actually it 's so unbelievably shallow .
in the same way , i look at the music ; i get a basic idea ; i wonder what technically might be hard , or , you know , what i want to do .
just the basic feeling .
however , that is simply not enough .
and i think what herbie said - please listen , listen .
we have to listen to ourselves , first of all .
if i play , for example , holding the stick - where literally i do not let go of the stick - you 'll experience quite a lot of shock coming up through the arm .
and you feel really quite - believe it or not - detached from the instrument and from the stick , even though i 'm actually holding the stick quite tightly .
by holding it tightly , i feel strangely more detached .
if i just simply let go and allow my hand , my arm , to be more of a support system , suddenly i have more dynamic with less effort . much more .
and i just feel , at last , one with the stick and one with the drum .
and i 'm doing far , far less .
so in the same way that i need time with this instrument , i need time with people in order to interpret them .
not just translate them , but interpret them .
if , for example , i play just a few bars of a piece of music for which i think of myself as a technician - that is , someone who is basically a percussion player ... -lrb- music -rrb- and so on . if i think of myself as a musician ... -lrb- music -rrb- and so on . there is a little bit of a difference there that is worth just - -lrb- applause -rrb- - thinking about .
and i remember when i was 12 years old , and i started playing tympani and percussion , and my teacher said , " well , how are we going to do this ? you know , music is about listening . "
and i said , " yes , i agree with that . so what 's the problem ? "
and he said , " well , how are you going to hear this ? how are you going to hear that ? "
and i said , " well , how do you hear it ? "
he said , " well , i think i hear it through here . "
and i said , " well , i think i do too - but i also hear it through my hands , through my arms , cheekbones , my scalp , my tummy , my chest , my legs and so on . "
and so we began our lessons every single time tuning drums - in particular , the kettle drums , or tympani - to such a narrow pitch interval , so something like ...
that of a difference . then gradually ... and gradually ...
and it 's amazing that when you do open your body up , and open your hand up to allow the vibration to come through , that in fact the tiny , tiny difference ...
can be felt with just the tiniest part of your finger , there .
and so what we would do is that i would put my hands on the wall of the music room , and together we would " listen " to the sounds of the instruments , and really try to connect with those sounds far , far more broadly than simply depending on the ear .
because of course , the ear is , i mean , subject to all sorts of things .
the room we happen to be in , the amplification , the quality of the instrument , the type of sticks ... etc . , etc .
they 're all different .
same amount of weight , but different sound colors .
and that 's basically what we are . we 're just human beings , but we all have our own little sound colors , as it were , that make up these extraordinary personalities and characters and interests and things .
and as i grew older , i then auditioned for the royal academy of music in london , and they said , " well , no , we wo n't accept you , because we have n't a clue , you know , of the future of a so-called ' deaf ' musician . "
and i just could n't quite accept that .
and so therefore , i said to them , " well , look , if you refuse - if you refuse me through those reasons , as opposed to the ability to perform and to understand and love the art of creating sound - then we have to think very , very hard about the people you do actually accept . "
and as a result - once we got over a little hurdle , and having to audition twice - they accepted me . and not only that - what had happened was that it changed the whole role of the music institutions throughout the united kingdom .
under no circumstances were they to refuse any application whatsoever on the basis of whether someone had no arms , no legs - they could still perhaps play a wind instrument if it was supported on a stand .
no circumstances at all were used to refuse any entry .
and every single entry had to be listened to , experienced and then based on the musical ability - then that person could either enter or not .
so therefore , this in turn meant that there was an extremely interesting bunch of students who arrived in these various music institutions .
and i have to say , many of them now in the professional orchestras throughout the world .
the interesting thing about this as well , though - -lrb- applause -rrb- - is quite simply that not only were people connected with sound - which is basically all of us , and we well know that music really is our daily medicine .
i say " music , " but actually i mean " sound . "
because you know , some of the extraordinary things i 've experienced as a musician , when you may have a 15-year-old lad who has got the most incredible challenges , who may not be able to control his movements , who may be deaf , who may be blind , etc . , etc . - suddenly , if that young lad sits close to this instrument , and perhaps even lies underneath the marimba , and you play something that 's so incredibly organ-like , almost - i do n't really have the right sticks , perhaps - but something like this . let me change . -lrb- music -rrb- something that 's so unbelievably simple - but he would be experiencing something that i would n't be ,
because i 'm on top of the sound .
i have the sound coming this way .
he would have the sound coming through the resonators .
if there were no resonators on here , we would have ... -lrb- music -rrb- so he would have a fullness of sound that those of you in the front few rows would n't experience , those of you in the back few rows would n't experience either .
every single one of us , depending on where we 're sitting , will experience this sound quite , quite differently .
and of course , being the participator of the sound , and that is starting from the idea of what type of sound i want to produce - for example , this sound .
can you hear anything ?
exactly . because i 'm not even touching it .
but yet , we get the sensation of something happening .
in the same way that when i see tree moves , then i imagine that tree making a rustling sound .
do you see what i mean ?
whatever the eye sees , then there 's always sound happening .
so there 's always , always that huge - i mean , just this kaleidoscope of things to draw from .
so all of my performances are based on entirely what i experience , and not by learning a piece of music , putting on someone else 's interpretation of it , buying all the cds possible of that particular piece of music , and so on and so forth .
because that is n't giving me enough of something that is so raw and so basic , and something that i can fully experience the journey of .
so it may be that , in certain halls , this dynamic may well work . -lrb- music -rrb- it may be that in other halls , they 're simply not going to experience that at all and so therefore , my level of soft , gentle playing may have to be ... -lrb- music -rrb- do you see what i mean ? so , because of this explosion in access to sound , especially through the deaf community , this has not only affected how music institutions , how schools for the deaf treat sound - and not just as a means of therapy - although of course , being a participator of music , that definitely is the case as well .
but it 's meant that acousticians have had to really think about the types of halls they put together . there are so few halls in this world that actually have very good acoustics , dare i say . but by that i mean where you can absolutely do anything you imagine .
the tiniest , softest , softest sound to something that is so broad , so huge , so incredible ! there 's always something - it may sound good up there , may not be so good there .
may be great there , but terrible up there .
maybe terrible over there , but not too bad there , etc . , etc .
so to find an actual hall is incredible - for which you can play exactly what you imagine , without it being cosmetically enhanced .
and so therefore , acousticians are actually in conversation with people who are hearing impaired , and who are participators of sound .
and this is quite interesting .
i can not , you know , give you any detail as far as what is actually happening with those halls , but it 's just the fact that they are going to a group of people for whom so many years we 've been saying , " well , how on earth can they experience music ? you know , they 're deaf . "
we just - we go like that , and we imagine that that 's what deafness is about .
or we go like that , and we imagine that 's what blindness is about .
if we see someone in a wheelchair , we assume they can not walk .
it may be that they can walk three , four , five steps . that , to them , means they can walk .
in a year 's time , it could be two extra steps .
in another year 's time , three extra steps .
those are hugely important aspects to think about .
so when we do listen to each other , it 's unbelievably important for us to really test our listening skills , to really use our bodies as a resonating chamber , to stop the judgment .
for me , as a musician who deals with 99 percent of new music , it 's very easy for me to say , " oh yes , i like that piece .
oh no , i do n't like that piece . " and so on .
and you know , i just find that i have to give those pieces of music real time .
it may be that the chemistry is n't quite right between myself and that particular piece of music , but that does n't mean i have the right to say it 's a bad piece of music .
and you know , it 's just one of the great things about being a musician , is that it is so unbelievably fluid .
so there are no rules , no right , no wrong , this way , that way .
if i asked you to clap - maybe i can do this .
if i can just say , " please clap and create the sound of thunder . "
i 'm assuming we 've all experienced thunder .
now , i do n't mean just the sound ; i mean really listen to that thunder within yourselves .
and please try to create that through your clapping . try . just - please try .
-lrb- applause -rrb- very good ! snow . snow . have you ever heard snow ?
audience : no .
evelyn glennie : well then , stop clapping . -lrb- laughter -rrb- try again .
try again . snow .
see , you 're awake .
rain . not bad . not bad .
you know , the interesting thing here , though , is that i asked a group of kids not so long ago exactly the same question .
now - great imagination , thank you very much .
however , not one of you got out of your seats to think , " right ! how can i clap ? ok , maybe ... -lrb- claps -rrb- maybe i can use my jewelry to create extra sounds .
maybe i can use the other parts of my body to create extra sounds . "
not a single one of you thought about clapping in a slightly different way other than sitting in your seats there and using two hands .
in the same way that when we listen to music , we assume that it 's all being fed through here .
this is how we experience music . of course it 's not .
we experience thunder - thunder , thunder . think , think , think .
listen , listen , listen . now - what can we do with thunder ?
i remember my teacher . when i first started , my very first lesson , i was all prepared with sticks , ready to go .
and instead of him saying , " ok , evelyn , please , feet slightly apart , arms at a more-or-less 90 degree angle , sticks in a more-or-less v shape , keep this amount of space here , etc .
please keep your back straight , etc . , etc . , etc . " - where i was probably just going to end up absolutely rigid , frozen , and i would not be able to strike the drum , because i was thinking of so many other things - he said , " evelyn , take this drum away for seven days , and i 'll see you next week . "
so , heavens ! what was i to do ? i no longer required the sticks ; i was n't allowed to have these sticks .
i had to basically look at this particular drum , see how it was made , what these little lugs did , what the snares did .
turned it upside down , experimented with the shell , experimented with the head .
experimented with my body , experimented with jewelry , experimented with all sorts of things .
and of course , i returned with all sorts of bruises and things like that - but nevertheless , it was such an unbelievable experience , because then , where on earth are you going to experience that in a piece of music ?
where on earth are you going to experience that in a study book ?
so we never , ever dealt with actual study books .
so for example , one of the things that we learn when we are dealing with being a percussion player , as opposed to a musician , is basically straightforward single stroke rolls .
like that . and then we get a little faster and a little faster and a little faster .
and so on and so forth . what does this piece require ?
single stroke rolls . so why ca n't i then do that whilst learning a piece of music ?
and that 's exactly what he did .
and interestingly , the older i became , and when i became a full-time student at a so called " music institution , " all of that went out of the window .
we had to study from study books .
and constantly , the question , " well , why ? why ? what is this relating to ?
i need to play a piece of music . " " oh , well , this will help your control ! "
" well , how ? why do i need to learn that ? i need to relate it to a piece of music .
you know . i need to say something .
" why am i practicing paradiddles ?
is it just literally for control , for hand-stick control ? why am i doing that ?
i need to have the reason , and the reason has to be by saying something through the music . "
and by saying something through music , which basically is sound , we then can reach all sorts of things to all sorts of people .
but i do n't want to take responsibility of your emotional baggage .
that 's up to you , when you walk through a hall .
because that then determines what and how we listen to certain things .
i may feel sorrowful , or happy , or exhilarated , or angry when i play certain pieces of music , but i 'm not necessarily wanting you to feel exactly the same thing .
so please , the next time you go to a concert , just allow your body to open up , allow your body to be this resonating chamber .
be aware that you 're not going to experience the same thing as the performer is .
the performer is in the worst possible position for the actual sound , because they 're hearing the contact of the stick on the drum , or the mallet on the bit of wood , or the bow on the string , etc . , or the breath that 's creating the sound from wind and brass .
they 're experiencing that rawness there .
but yet they 're experiencing something so unbelievably pure , which is before the sound is actually happening .
please take note of the life of the sound after the actual initial strike , or breath , is being pulled . just experience the whole journey of that sound in the same way that i wished i 'd experienced the whole journey of this particular conference , rather than just arriving last night .
but i hope maybe we can share one or two things as the day progresses .
but thank you very much for having me !
-lrb- applause -rrb- hi there .
i 'm going to be talking a little bit about music , machines and life .
or , more specifically , what we learned from the creation of a very large and complicated machine for a music video .
some of you may recognize this image .
this is the opening frame of the video that we created .
we 'll be showing the video at the end , but before we do , i want to talk a little bit about what it is that they wanted .
now , when we first started talking to ok go - the name of the song is " this too shall pass " - we were really excited because they expressed interest in building a machine that they could dance with .
and we were very excited about this because , of course , they have a history of dancing with machines .
they 're responsible for this video , " here it goes again . "
50-million-plus views on youtube .
four guys dancing on treadmills , no cuts , just a static camera .
a fantastically viral and wonderful video .
so we were really excited about working with them .
and we sort of started talking about what it is that they wanted .
and they explained that they wanted kind of a rube goldberg machine .
now , for those of you who do n't know , a rube goldberg machine is a complicated contraption , an incredibly over-engineered piece of machinery that accomplishes a relatively simple task .
so we were excited by this idea , and we started talking about exactly what it would look like .
and we came up with some parameters , because , you know , building a rube goldberg machine has limitations , but it also is pretty wide open .
and we wanted to make sure that we did something that would work for a music video .
so we came up with a list of requirements , the " 10 commandments , " and they were , in order of ascending difficulty : the first is " no magic . "
everything that happened on screen had to be very easily understood by a typical viewer .
the rule of thumb was that , if my mother could n't understand it , then we could n't use it in the video .
they wanted band integration , that is , the machine acting upon the band members , specifically not the other way around .
they wanted the machine action to follow the song feeling .
so as the song picks up emotion , so should the machine get grander in its process .
they wanted us to make use of the space .
so we have this 10,000-square-foot warehouse we were using , divided between two floors .
it included an exterior loading dock .
we used all of that , including a giant hole in the floor that we actually descended the camera and cameraman through .
they wanted it messy , and we were happy to oblige .
the machine itself would start the music .
so the machine would get started , it would travel some distance , reacting along the way , hit play on an ipod or a tape deck or something that would start playback .
and the machine would maintain synchronization throughout .
and speaking of synchronization , they wanted it to sync to the rhythm and to hit specific beats along the way .
okay . -lrb- laughter -rrb- they wanted it to end precisely on time .
okay , so now the start to finish timing has to be perfect .
and they wanted the music to drop out at a certain point in the video and actual live audio from the machine to play part of the song .
and as if that was n't enough , all of these incredibly complicating things , right , they wanted it in one shot .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- okay .
so , just some statistics about what we went through in the process .
the machine itself has 89 distinct interactions .
it took us 85 takes to get it on film to our satisfaction .
of those 85 takes , only three actually successfully completed their run .
we destroyed two pianos and 10 televisions in the process .
we went to home depot well over a hundred times .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and we lost one high-heeled shoe when one of our engineers , heather knight , left her high-heeled shoe - after a nice dinner , and returned back to the build - and left it in a pile of stuff .
and another engineer thought , " well , that would be a really good thing to use " and ended up using it as a really nice trigger .
and it 's actually in the machine .
so what did we learn from all of this ?
well , having completed this , we have the opportunity to step back and reflect on some of the things .
and we learned that small stuff stinks .
little balls in wooden tracks are really susceptible to humidity and temperature and a little bit of dust , and they fall out of the tracks , the exact angles makes it hard to get right .
and yet , a bowling ball will always follow the same path .
it does n't matter what temperature it is , does n't matter what 's in its way ; it will pretty much get where it needs to go .
but as much as the small stuff stinks , we needed somewhere to start , so that we would have somewhere to go .
and so you have to start with it . you have to focus on it .
small stuff stinks , but , of course , it 's essential , right ?
what else ? planning is incredibly important .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you know , we spent a lot of time ideating and even building some of these things .
it 's been said that , " no battle plan survives contact with the enemy . "
i think our enemy was physics - -lrb- laughter -rrb- and she 's a cruel mistress .
often , we had to pull things out as a result because of timing or aesthetics or whatever .
and so while planning is important , so is flexibility .
these are all things that ended up not making it into the final machine .
so also , put reliable stuff last , the stuff that 's going to run every time .
again , small to large is relevant here .
the little lego car in the beginning of the video references the big , real car near the end of the video .
the big , real car works every time ; there 's no problem about it .
the little one had a tendency to try to run off the track and that 's a problem .
but you do n't want to have to reset the whole machine because the lego car at the end does n't work , right .
so you put that up front so that , if it fails , at least you know you do n't have to reset the whole thing .
life can be messy .
there were incredibly difficult moments in the building of this thing .
months were spent in this tiny , cold warehouse .
and the wonderful elation that we had when we finally completed it .
so it 's important to remember that whether it 's good or it 's bad , " this too shall pass . "
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and now to introduce their music video , we have ok go .
ok go : an introduction . hello tedxusc .
we are ok go .
what are we doing ? oh , just hanging out with our grammy . what what !
it think we can do better than this . hello tedxusc .
we are ok go . have you read the " natural curiosity cabinet ? "
i mean , " curiosity " - excuse me .
let me start again .
we need some more ridiculous things besides " the cabinet of natural curiosities . "
tim 's sundial hat .
have you seen the new work they 've done to the waltz towers ?
sorry , start again .
-lrb- barking -rrb- dogs .
hello , tedxusc . we are ok go , and this our new video , " this too shall pass . "
-lsb- unclear -rsb- kay , we can still do one better i think , yeah .
that one 's pretty good . it 's getting better .
-lrb- music -rrb- ♫ you know you ca n't keep letting it get you down ♫ ♫ and you ca n't keep dragging that dead weight around ♫ ♫ if there ai n't all that much to lug around ♫ ♫ better run like hell when you hit the ground ♫ ♫ when the morning comes ♫ ♫ when the morning comes ♫ ♫ you ca n't stop these kids from dancing ♫ ♫ why would you want to ? ♫ ♫ especially when you 're already getting yours ♫ ♫ cuz if your mind do n't move and your knees do n't bend ♫ ♫ well do n't go blaming the kids again ♫
♫ when the morning comes ♫ ♫ when the morning comes ♫ ♫ when the morning comes ♫ ♫ when the morning comes ♫ ♫ when the morning comes ♫ ♫ when the morning comes ♫ ♫ let it go ♫ ♫ this too shall pass ♫ ♫ let it go ♫ ♫ this too shall pass ♫ ♫ you know you ca n't keep letting it get you down ♫ ♫ no , you ca n't keep letting it get you down ♫ ♫ let it go ♫ ♫ this too shall pass ♫ ♫ when the morning comes ♫ ♫ when the morning comes ♫
♫ when the morning comes ♫ ♫ when the morning comes ♫ -lrb- cheering -rrb- what do i know that would cause me , a reticent , midwestern scientist , to get myself arrested in front of the white house protesting ?
and what would you do if you knew what i know ?
let 's start with how i got to this point .
i was lucky to grow up at a time when it was not difficult for the child of a tenant farmer to make his way to the state university .
and i was really lucky to go to the university of iowa where i could study under professor james van allen who built instruments for the first u.s. satellites .
professor van allen told me about observations of venus , that there was intense microwave radiation .
did it mean that venus had an ionosphere ?
or was venus extremely hot ?
the right answer , confirmed by the soviet venera spacecraft , was that venus was very hot - 900 degrees fahrenheit .
and it was kept hot by a thick carbon dioxide atmosphere .
i was fortunate to join nasa and successfully propose an experiment to fly to venus .
our instrument took this image of the veil of venus , which turned out to be a smog of sulfuric acid .
but while our instrument was being built , i became involved in calculations of the greenhouse effect here on earth , because we realized that our atmospheric composition was changing .
eventually , i resigned as principal investigator on our venus experiment because a planet changing before our eyes is more interesting and important .
its changes will affect all of humanity .
the greenhouse effect had been well understood for more than a century .
british physicist john tyndall , in the 1850 's , made laboratory measurements of the infrared radiation , which is heat .
and he showed that gasses such as co2 absorb heat , thus acting like a blanket warming earth 's surface .
i worked with other scientists to analyze earth climate observations .
in 1981 , we published an article in science magazine concluding that observed warming of 0.4 degrees celsius in the prior century was consistent with the greenhouse effect of increasing co2 .
that earth would likely warm in the 1980 's , and warming would exceed the noise level of random weather by the end of the century .
we also said that the 21st century would see shifting climate zones , creation of drought-prone regions in north america and asia , erosion of ice sheets , rising sea levels and opening of the fabled northwest passage .
all of these impacts have since either happened or are now well under way .
that paper was reported on the front page of the new york times and led to me testifying to congress in the 1980 's , testimony in which i emphasized that global warming increases both extremes of the earth 's water cycle .
heatwaves and droughts on one hand , directly from the warming , but also , because a warmer atmosphere holds more water vapor with its latent energy , rainfall will become in more extreme events .
there will be stronger storms and greater flooding .
global warming hoopla became time-consuming and distracted me from doing science - partly because i had complained that the white house altered my testimony .
so i decided to go back to strictly doing science and leave the communication to others .
by 15 years later , evidence of global warming was much stronger .
most of the things mentioned in our 1981 paper were facts .
i had the privilege to speak twice to the president 's climate task force .
but energy policies continued to focus on finding more fossil fuels .
by then we had two grandchildren , sophie and connor .
i decided that i did not want them in the future to say , " opa understood what was happening , but he did n't make it clear . "
so i decided to give a public talk criticizing the lack of an appropriate energy policy .
i gave the talk at the university of iowa in 2004 and at the 2005 meeting of the american geophysical union .
this led to calls from the white house to nasa headquarters and i was told that i could not give any talks or speak with the media without prior explicit approval by nasa headquarters .
after i informed the new york times about these restrictions , nasa was forced to end the censorship .
but there were consequences .
i had been using the first line of the nasa mission statement , " to understand and protect the home planet , " to justify my talks .
soon the first line of the mission statement was deleted , never to appear again .
over the next few years i was drawn more and more into trying to communicate the urgency of a change in energy policies , while still researching the physics of climate change .
let me describe the most important conclusion from the physics - first , from earth 's energy balance and , second , from earth 's climate history .
adding co2 to the air is like throwing another blanket on the bed .
it reduces earth 's heat radiation to space , so there 's a temporary energy imbalance .
more energy is coming in than going out , until earth warms up enough to again radiate to space as much energy as it absorbs from the sun .
so the key quantity is earth 's energy imbalance .
is there more energy coming in than going out ?
if so , more warming is in the pipeline .
it will occur without adding any more greenhouse gasses .
now finally , we can measure earth 's energy imbalance precisely by measuring the heat content in earth 's heat reservoirs .
the biggest reservoir , the ocean , was the least well measured , until more than 3,000 argo floats were distributed around the world 's ocean .
these floats reveal that the upper half of the ocean is gaining heat at a substantial rate .
the deep ocean is also gaining heat at a smaller rate , and energy is going into the net melting of ice all around the planet .
and the land , to depths of tens of meters , is also warming .
the total energy imbalance now is about six-tenths of a watt per square meter .
that may not sound like much , but when added up over the whole world , it 's enormous .
it 's about 20 times greater than the rate of energy use by all of humanity .
it 's equivalent to exploding 400,000 hiroshima atomic bombs per day 365 days per year .
that 's how much extra energy earth is gaining each day .
this imbalance , if we want to stabilize climate , means that we must reduce co2 from 391 ppm , parts per million , back to 350 ppm .
that is the change needed to restore energy balance and prevent further warming .
climate change deniers argue that the sun is the main cause of climate change .
but the measured energy imbalance occurred during the deepest solar minimum in the record , when the sun 's energy reaching earth was least .
yet , there was more energy coming in than going out .
this shows that the effect of the sun 's variations on climate is overwhelmed by the increasing greenhouse gasses , mainly from burning fossil fuels .
now consider earth 's climate history .
these curves for global temperature , atmospheric co2 and sea level were derived from ocean cores and antarctic ice cores , from ocean sediments and snowflakes that piled up year after year over 800,000 years forming a two-mile thick ice sheet .
as you see , there 's a high correlation between temperature , co2 and sea level .
careful examination shows that the temperature changes slightly lead the co2 changes by a few centuries .
climate change deniers like to use this fact to confuse and trick the public by saying , " look , the temperature causes co2 to change , not vice versa . "
but that lag is exactly what is expected .
small changes in earth 's orbit that occur over tens to hundreds of thousands of years alter the distribution of sunlight on earth .
when there is more sunlight at high latitudes in summer , ice sheets melt .
shrinking ice sheets make the planet darker , so it absorbs more sunlight and becomes warmer .
a warmer ocean releases co2 , just as a warm coca-cola does .
and more co2 causes more warming .
so co2 , methane , and ice sheets were feedbacks that amplified global temperature change causing these ancient climate oscillations to be huge , even though the climate change was initiated by a very weak forcing .
the important point is that these same amplifying feedbacks will occur today .
the physics does not change .
as earth warms , now because of extra co2 we put in the atmosphere , ice will melt , and co2 and methane will be released by warming ocean and melting permafrost .
while we ca n't say exactly how fast these amplifying feedbacks will occur , it is certain they will occur , unless we stop the warming .
there is evidence that feedbacks are already beginning .
precise measurements by grace , the gravity satellite , reveal that both greenland and antarctica are now losing mass , several hundred cubic kilometers per year .
and the rate has accelerated since the measurements began nine years ago .
methane is also beginning to escape from the permafrost .
what sea level rise can we look forward to ?
the last time co2 was 390 ppm , today 's value , sea level was higher by at least 15 meters , 50 feet .
where you are sitting now would be under water .
most estimates are that , this century , we will get at least one meter .
i think it will be more if we keep burning fossil fuels , perhaps even five meters , which is 18 feet , this century or shortly thereafter .
the important point is that we will have started a process that is out of humanity 's control .
ice sheets would continue to disintegrate for centuries .
there would be no stable shoreline .
the economic consequences are almost unthinkable .
hundreds of new orleans-like devastations around the world .
what may be more reprehensible , if climate denial continues , is extermination of species .
the monarch butterfly could be one of the 20 to 50 percent of all species that the intergovernmental panel on climate change estimates will be ticketed for extinction by the end of the century if we stay on business-as-usual fossil fuel use .
global warming is already affecting people .
the texas , oklahoma , mexico heatwave and drought last year , moscow the year before and europe in 2003 , were all exceptional events , more than three standard deviations outside the norm .
fifty years ago , such anomalies covered only two- to three-tenths of one percent of the land area .
in recent years , because of global warming , they now cover about 10 percent - an increase by a factor of 25 to 50 .
so we can say with a high degree of confidence that the severe texas and moscow heatwaves were not natural ; they were caused by global warming .
an important impact , if global warming continues , will be on the breadbasket of our nation and the world , the midwest and great plains , which are expected to become prone to extreme droughts , worse than the dust bowl , within just a few decades , if we let global warming continue .
how did i get dragged deeper and deeper into an attempt to communicate , giving talks in 10 countries , getting arrested , burning up the vacation time that i had accumulated over 30 years ?
more grandchildren helped me along .
jake is a super-positive , enthusiastic boy .
here at age two and a half years , he thinks he can protect his two and a half-day-old little sister .
it would be immoral to leave these young people with a climate system spiraling out of control .
now the tragedy about climate change is that we can solve it with a simple , honest approach of a gradually rising carbon fee collected from fossil fuel companies and distributed 100 percent electronically every month to all legal residents on a per capita basis , with the government not keeping one dime .
most people would get more in the monthly dividend than they 'd pay in increased prices .
this fee and dividend would stimulate the economy and innovations , creating millions of jobs .
it is the principal requirement for moving us rapidly to a clean energy future .
several top economists are coauthors on this proposition .
jim dipeso of republicans for environmental protection describes it thusly : " transparent . market-based .
does not enlarge government .
leaves energy decisions to individual choices .
sounds like a conservative climate plan . "
but instead of placing a rising fee on carbon emissions to make fossil fuels pay their true cost to society , our governments are forcing the public to subsidize fossil fuels by 400 to 500 billion dollars per year worldwide , thus encouraging extraction of every fossil fuel - mountaintop removal , longwall mining , fracking , tar sands , tar shale , deep ocean arctic drilling .
this path , if continued , guarantees that we will pass tipping points leading to ice sheet disintegration that will accelerate out of control of future generations .
a large fraction of species will be committed to extinction .
and increasing intensity of droughts and floods will severely impact breadbaskets of the world , causing massive famines and economic decline .
imagine a giant asteroid on a direct collision course with earth .
that is the equivalent of what we face now .
yet , we dither , taking no action to divert the asteroid , even though the longer we wait , the more difficult and expensive it becomes .
if we had started in 2005 , it would have required emission reductions of three percent per year to restore planetary energy balance and stabilize climate this century .
if we start next year , it is six percent per year .
if we wait 10 years , it is 15 percent per year - extremely difficult and expensive , perhaps impossible .
but we are n't even starting .
so now you know what i know that is moving me to sound this alarm .
clearly , i have n't gotten this message across .
the science is clear .
i need your help to communicate the gravity and the urgency of this situation and its solutions more effectively .
we owe it to our children and grandchildren .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'd like you to come back with me for a moment to the 19th century , specifically to june 24 , 1833 .
the british association for the advancement of science is holding its third meeting at the university of cambridge .
it 's the first night of the meeting , and a confrontation is about to take place that will change science forever .
an elderly , white-haired man stands up .
the members of the association are shocked to realize that it 's the poet samuel taylor coleridge , who had n't even left his house in years until that day .
they 're even more shocked by what he says .
" you must stop calling yourselves natural philosophers . "
coleridge felt that true philosophers like himself pondered the cosmos from their armchairs .
they were not mucking around in the fossil pits or conducting messy experiments with electrical piles like the members of the british association .
the crowd grew angry and began to complain loudly .
a young cambridge scholar named william whewell stood up and quieted the audience .
he politely agreed that an appropriate name for the members of the association did not exist .
" if ' philosophers ' is taken to be too wide and lofty a term , " he said , " then , by analogy with ' artist , ' we may form ' scientist . " ' this was the first time the word scientist was uttered in public , only 179 years ago .
i first found out about this confrontation when i was in graduate school , and it kind of blew me away .
i mean , how could the word scientist not have existed until 1833 ?
what were scientists called before ?
what had changed to make a new name necessary precisely at that moment ?
prior to this meeting , those who studied the natural world were talented amateurs .
think of the country clergyman or squire collecting his beetles or fossils , like charles darwin , for example , or , the hired help of a nobleman , like joseph priestley , who was the literary companion to the marquis of lansdowne when he discovered oxygen .
after this , they were scientists , professionals with a particular scientific method , goals , societies and funding .
much of this revolution can be traced to four men who met at cambridge university in 1812 : charles babbage , john herschel , richard jones and william whewell .
these were brilliant , driven men who accomplished amazing things .
charles babbage , i think known to most tedsters , invented the first mechanical calculator and the first prototype of a modern computer .
john herschel mapped the stars of the southern hemisphere , and , in his spare time , co-invented photography .
i 'm sure we could all be that productive without facebook or twitter to take up our time .
richard jones became an important economist who later influenced karl marx .
and whewell not only coined the term scientist , as well as the words anode , cathode and ion , but spearheaded international big science with his global research on the tides .
in the cambridge winter of 1812 and 1813 , the four met for what they called philosophical breakfasts .
they talked about science and the need for a new scientific revolution .
they felt science had stagnated since the days of the scientific revolution that had happened in the 17th century .
it was time for a new revolution , which they pledged to bring about , and what 's so amazing about these guys is , not only did they have these grandiose undergraduate dreams , but they actually carried them out , even beyond their wildest dreams .
and i 'm going to tell you today about four major changes to science these men made .
about 200 years before , francis bacon and then , later , isaac newton , had proposed an inductive scientific method .
now that 's a method that starts from observations and experiments and moves to generalizations about nature called natural laws , which are always subject to revision or rejection should new evidence arise .
however , in 1809 , david ricardo muddied the waters by arguing that the science of economics should use a different , deductive method .
the problem was that an influential group at oxford began arguing that because it worked so well in economics , this deductive method ought to be applied to the natural sciences too .
the members of the philosophical breakfast club disagreed .
they wrote books and articles promoting inductive method in all the sciences that were widely read by natural philosophers , university students and members of the public .
reading one of herschel 's books was such a watershed moment for charles darwin that he would later say , " scarcely anything in my life made so deep an impression on me .
it made me wish to add my might to the accumulated store of natural knowledge . "
it also shaped darwin 's scientific method , as well as that used by his peers .
-lsb- science for the public good -rsb- previously , it was believed that scientific knowledge ought to be used for the good of the king or queen , or for one 's own personal gain .
for example , ship captains needed to know information about the tides in order to safely dock at ports .
harbormasters would gather this knowledge and sell it to the ship captains .
the philosophical breakfast club changed that , working together .
whewell 's worldwide study of the tides resulted in public tide tables and tidal maps that freely provided the harbormasters ' knowledge to all ship captains .
herschel helped by making tidal observations off the coast of south africa , and , as he complained to whewell , he was knocked off the docks during a violent high tide for his trouble .
the four men really helped each other in every way .
they also relentlessly lobbied the british government for the money to build babbage 's engines because they believed these engines would have a huge practical impact on society .
in the days before pocket calculators , the numbers that most professionals needed - bankers , insurance agents , ship captains , engineers - were to be found in lookup books like this , filled with tables of figures .
these tables were calculated using a fixed procedure over and over by part-time workers known as - and this is amazing - computers , but these calculations were really difficult .
i mean , this nautical almanac published the lunar differences for every month of the year .
each month required 1,365 calculations , so these tables were filled with mistakes .
babbage 's difference engine was the first mechanical calculator devised to accurately compute any of these tables .
two models of his engine were built in the last 20 years by a team from the science museum of london using his own plans .
this is the one now at the computer history museum in california , and it calculates accurately . it actually works .
later , babbage 's analytical engine was the first mechanical computer in the modern sense .
it had a separate memory and central processor .
it was capable of iteration , conditional branching and parallel processing , and it was programmable using punched cards , an idea babbage took from jacquard 's loom .
tragically , babbage 's engines never were built in his day because most people thought that non-human computers would have no usefulness for the public .
-lsb- new scientific institutions -rsb- founded in bacon 's time , the royal society of london was the foremost scientific society in england and even in the rest of the world .
by the 19th century , it had become a kind of gentleman 's club populated mainly by antiquarians , literary men and the nobility .
the members of the philosophical breakfast club helped form a number of new scientific societies , including the british association .
these new societies required that members be active researchers publishing their results .
they reinstated the tradition of the q & a after scientific papers were read , which had been discontinued by the royal society as being ungentlemanly .
and for the first time , they gave women a foot in the door of science .
members were encouraged to bring their wives , daughters and sisters to the meetings of the british association , and while the women were expected to attend only the public lectures and the social events like this one , they began to infiltrate the scientific sessions as well .
the british association would later be the first of the major national science organizations in the world to admit women as full members .
-lsb- external funding for science -rsb- up to the 19th century , natural philosophers were expected to pay for their own equipment and supplies .
occasionally , there were prizes , such as that given to john harrison in the 18th century , for solving the so-called longitude problem , but prizes were only given after the fact , when they were given at all .
on the advice of the philosophical breakfast club , the british association began to use the extra money generated by its meetings to give grants for research in astronomy , the tides , fossil fish , shipbuilding , and many other areas .
these grants not only allowed less wealthy men to conduct research , but they also encouraged thinking outside the box , rather than just trying to solve one pre-set question .
eventually , the royal society and the scientific societies of other countries followed suit , and this has become - fortunately it 's become - a major part of the scientific landscape today .
so the philosophical breakfast club helped invent the modern scientist .
that 's the heroic part of their story .
there 's a flip side as well .
they did not foresee at least one consequence of their revolution .
they would have been deeply dismayed by today 's disjunction between science and the rest of culture .
it 's shocking to realize that only 28 percent of american adults have even a very basic level of science literacy , and this was tested by asking simple questions like , " did humans and dinosaurs inhabit the earth at the same time ? "
and " what proportion of the earth is covered in water ? "
once scientists became members of a professional group , they were slowly walled off from the rest of us .
this is the unintended consequence of the revolution that started with our four friends .
charles darwin said , " i sometimes think that general and popular treatises are almost as important for the progress of science as original work . "
in fact , " origin of species " was written for a general and popular audience , and was widely read when it first appeared .
darwin knew what we seem to have forgotten , that science is not only for scientists .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- zach kaplan : keith and i lead a research team .
we investigate materials and technologies that have unexpected properties . over the last three years , we found over 200 of these things , and so we looked back into our library and selected six we thought would be most surprising for ted .
of these six , the first one that we 're going to talk about is in the black envelope you 're holding .
it comes from a company in japan called geltech . now go ahead and open it up .
keith schacht : now be sure and take the two pieces apart .
what 's unexpected about this is that it 's soft , but it 's also a strong magnet .
zach and i have always been fascinated observing unexpected things like this .
we spent a long time thinking about why this is , and it 's just recently that we realized : it 's when we see something unexpected , it changes our understanding of the way things work .
as you 're seeing this gel magnet for the first time , if you assume that all magnets had to be hard , then seeing this surprised you and it changed your understanding of the way magnets could work .
zk : now , it 's important to understand what the unexpected properties are .
but to really think about the implications of what this makes possible , we found that it helps to think about how it could be applied in the world .
so , a first idea is to use it on cabinet doors .
if you line the sides of the cabinets using the gel material - if a cabinet slams shut it would n't make a loud noise , and in addition the magnets would draw the cabinets closed .
imagine taking the same material , but putting it on the bottom of a sneaker .
you know , this way you could go to the container store and buy one of those metal sheets that they hang on the back of your door , in your closet , and you could literally stick your shoes up instead of using a shelf .
for me , i really love this idea .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- if you come to my apartment and see my closet , i 'm sure you 'd figure out why : it 's a mess .
ks : seeing the unexpected properties and then seeing a couple of applications - it helps you see why this is significant , what the potential is .
but we 've found that the way we present our ideas it makes a big difference .
zk : it was like six months ago that keith and i were out in l.a. , and we were at starbucks having coffee with roman coppola .
he works on mostly music videos and commercials with his company , the directors bureau .
as we were talking , roman told us that he 's kind of an inventor on the side .
and we were showing him the same gel magnet that you 're holding in your hand - and you know , we shared the same ideas . and you could see it in his face : roman starts to get really excited and he whips out this manila folder ; he opens it up and keith and i look in , and he starts showing us concepts that he 's been working on .
these things just get him really excited . and so we 're looking at these concepts , and we were just like , whoa , this guy 's good .
because the way that he presented the concept - his approach was totally different than ours . he sold it to you as if it was for sale right now .
when we were going in the car back to the airport , we were thinking : why was this so powerful ?
and as we thought about it more , we realized that it let you fill in all the details about the experience , just as if you saw it on tv . so , for ted we decided to take our favorite idea for the gel magnet and work with roman and his team at the directors bureau to create a commercial for a product from the future .
narrator : do you have a need for speed ?
inventables water adventures dares you to launch yourself on a magnetically-levitating board down a waterslide so fast , so tall , that when you hit the bottom , it uses brakes to stop .
aqua rocket : coming this summer .
ks : now , we showed the concept to a few people before this , and they asked us , when 's it coming out ?
so i just wanted to let you know , it 's not actually coming out , just the concept is .
zk : so now , when we dream up these concepts , it 's important for us to make sure that they work from a technical standpoint .
so i just want to quickly explain how this would work .
this is the magnetically-levitating board that they mentioned in the commercial .
the gel that you 're holding would be lining the bottom of the board .
now this is important for two reasons .
one : the soft properties of the magnet that make it so that , if it were to hit the rider in the head , it would n't injure him .
in addition , you can see from the diagram on the right , the underpart of the slide would be an electromagnet .
so this would actually repel the rider a little bit as you 're going down .
the force of the water rushing down , in addition to that repulsion force , would make this slide go faster than any slide on the market .
it 's because of this that you need the magnetic braking system .
when you get to the very bottom of the slide - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - the rider passes through an aluminum tube .
and i 'm going to kick it to keith to explain why that 's important from a technical standpoint .
ks : so i 'm sure all you engineers know that even though aluminum is a metal , it 's not a magnetic material . but something unexpected happens when you drop a magnet down an aluminum tube .
so we set up a quick experiment here to show that to you .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , you see the magnet fell really slowly .
now , i 'm not going to get into the physics of it , but all you need to know is that the faster the magnet 's falling , the greater the stopping force .
zk : now , our next technology is actually a 10-foot pole , and i have it right here in my pocket .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- there 're a few different versions of it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ks : some of them automatically unroll like this one .
they can be made to automatically roll up , or they can be made stable , like zach 's , to hold any position in between .
zk : as we were talking to the vendor - to try to learn about how you could apply these , or how they 're being applied currently - he was telling us that , in the military they use this one so soldiers can keep it on their chests - very concealed - and then , when they 're out on the field , erect it as an antenna to clearly send signals back to the base .
in our brainstorms , we came up with the idea you could use it for a soccer goal : so at the end of the game , you just roll up the goal and put it in your gym bag .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ks : now , the interesting thing about this is , you do n't have to be an engineer to appreciate why a 10-foot pole that can fit in your pocket is so interesting .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so we decided to go out onto the streets of chicago and ask a few people on the streets what they thought you could do with this .
man : i clean my ceiling fans with that and i get the spider webs off my house - i do it that way .
woman : i 'd make my very own walking stick .
woman : i would create a ladder to use to get up on top of the tree .
woman : an olive server .
man : some type of extension pole - like what the painters use .
woman : i would make a spear that , when you went deep sea diving , you could catch the fish really fast , and then roll it back up , and you could swim easier ... yeah .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- zk : now , for our next technology we 're going to do a little demonstration , and so we need a volunteer from the audience .
you sir , come on up .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- come on up . tell everybody your name .
steve jurvetson : steve .
zk : it 's steve . all right steve , now , follow me .
we need you to stand right in front of the ted sign .
right there . that 's great .
and hold onto this . good luck to you .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ks : no , not yet .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- zk : i 'd just like to let you all know that this presentation has been brought to you by target .
ks : little bit - that 's perfect , just perfect .
now , zach , we 're going to demonstrate a water gun fight from the future .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so here , come on up to the front . all right , so now if you 'll see here - no , no , it 's ok .
so , describe to the audience the temperature of your shirt . go ahead .
sj : it 's cold .
ks : now the reason it 's cold is that 's it 's not actually water loaded into these squirt guns - it 's a dry liquid developed by 3m .
it 's perfectly clear , it 's odorless , it 's colorless .
it 's so safe you could drink this stuff .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and the reason it feels cold is because it evaporates 25 times faster than water .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- all right , well thanks for coming up .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- zk : wait , wait , steven - before you go we filled this with the dry liquid so during the break you can shoot your friends .
sj : excellent , thank you .
ks : thanks for coming up . let 's give him a big round of applause .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so what 's the significance of this dry liquid ?
early versions of the fluid were actually used on a cray supercomputer .
now , the unexpected thing about this is that zach could stand up on stage and drench a perfectly innocent member of the audience without any concern that we 'd damage the electronics , that we 'd get him wet , that we 'd hurt the books or the computers . it works because it 's non-conductive .
so you can see here , you can immerse a whole circuit board in this and it would n't cause any damage .
you can circulate it to draw the heat away .
but today it 's most widely used in office buildings - in the sprinkler system - as a fire-suppression fluid .
again , it 's perfectly safe for people . it puts out the fires , does n't hurt anything .
but our favorite idea for this was using it in a basketball game . so during halftime , it could rain down on the players , cool everyone down , and in a matter of minutes it would dry . would n't hurt the court .
zk : our next technology comes to us from a company in japan called sekisui chemical . one of their r & d engineers was working on a way to make plastic stiffer .
while he was doing this , he noticed an unexpected thing .
we have a video to show you .
ks : so you see there , it did n't bounce back . now , this was an unintended side effect of some experiments they were doing .
it 's technically called , " shape-retaining property . "
now , think about your interactions with aluminum foil .
shape-retaining is common in metal : you bend a piece of aluminum foil , and it holds its place . contrast that with a plastic garbage can - and you can push in the sides and it always bounces back .
zk : for example , you could make a watch that wraps around your wrist , but does n't use a buckle .
taking it a little further , if you wove those strips together - kind of like a little basket - you could make a shape-retaining sheet , and then you could embed it in a cloth : so you could make a picnic sheet that wraps around the table , so that way on a windy day it would n't blow away .
for our next technology , it 's hard to observe the unexpected property by itself , because it 's an ink .
so , we 've prepared a video to show it applied to paper .
ks : as this paper is bending , the resistance of the ink changes .
so with simple electronics , you can detect how much the page is being bent .
now , to think about the potential for this , think of all the places ink is supplied : on business cards , on the back of cereal boxes , board games . any place you use ink , you could change the way you interact with it .
zk : so my favorite idea for this is to apply the ink to a book .
this could totally change the way that you interface with paper .
you see the dark line on the side and the top . as you turn the pages of the book , the book can actually detect what page you 're on , based on the curvature of the pages .
in addition , if you were to fold in one of the corners , then you could program the book to actually email you the text on the page for your notes .
ks : for our last technology , we worked again with roman and his team at the directors bureau to develop a commercial from the future to explain how it works .
old milk carton : oh yeah , it smells good .
who are you ?
new milk carton : i 'm new milk .
omc : i used to smell like you .
narrator : fresh watch , from inventables dairy farms .
packaging that changes color when your milk 's gone off .
do n't let milk spoil your morning .
zk : now , this technology was developed by these two guys : professor ken suslick and neil rakow , of the university of illinois .
ks : now the way it works : there 's a matrix of color dyes .
and these dyes change color in response to odors .
so the smell of vanilla , that might change the four on the left to brown and the one on the right to yellow . this matrix can produce thousands of different color combinations to represent thousands of different smells .
but like in the milk commercial , if you know what odor you want to detect , then they can formulate a specific dye to detect just that odor .
zk : right . it was that that started a conversation with professor suslick and myself , and he was explaining to me the things that this is making possible , beyond just detecting spoiled food . it 's really where the significance of it lies .
his company actually did a survey of firemen all across the country to try to learn , how are they currently testing the air when they respond to an emergency scene ?
and he kind of comically explained that time after time , what the firemen would say is : they would rush to the scene of the crime ; they would look around ; if there were no dead policemen , it was ok to go .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i mean , this is a true story . they 're using policemen as canaries .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but more seriously , they determined that you could develop a device that can smell better than the humans , and say if it 's safe for the firemen .
in addition , he 's spun off a company from the university called chemsensing , where they 're working on medical equipment .
so , a patient can come in and actually blow into their device .
by detecting the odor of particular bacteria , or viruses , or even lung cancer , the dots will change and they can use software to analyze the results .
this can radically improve the way that doctors diagnose patients .
currently , they 're using a method of trial and error , but this could tell you precisely what disease you have .
ks : so that was the six we had for you today , but i hope you 're starting to see why we find these things so fascinating .
because every one of these six changed our understanding of what was possible in the world . prior to seeing this , we would have assumed : a 10-foot pole could n't fit in your pocket ; something as inexpensive as ink could n't sense the way paper is being bent ; every one of these things - and we 're constantly trying to find more .
zk : this is something that keith and i really enjoy doing .
i 'm sure it 's obvious to you now , but it was actually yesterday that i was reminded of why . i was having a conversation with steve jurvetson , over downstairs by the escalators , and he was telling me that when chris sent out that little box , one of the items in it was the hydrophobic sand - the sand that does n't get wet . he said that he was playing with it with his son .
and you know , his son was mesmerized , because he would dunk it in the water , he would take it out and it was bone dry . a few weeks later , he said that his son was playing with a lock of his mother 's hair , and he noticed that there were some drops of water on the hair .
and he took the thing and he looked up to steve and he said , " look , hydrophobic string . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i mean , after hearing that story - that really summed it up for me .
thank you very much .
ks : thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- let 's talk dirty .
a few years ago , oddly enough , i needed the bathroom , and i found one , a public bathroom , and i went into the stall , and i prepared to do what i 'd done most of my life : use the toilet , flush the toilet , forget about the toilet .
and for some reason that day , instead , i asked myself a question , and it was , where does this stuff go ?
and with that question , i found myself plunged into the world of sanitation - there 's more coming - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - sanitation , toilets and poop , and i have yet to emerge .
and that 's because it 's such an enraging , yet engaging place to be .
to go back to that toilet , it was n't a particularly fancy toilet , it was n't as nice as this one from the world toilet organization .
that 's the other wto . -lrb- laughter -rrb- but it had a lockable door , it had privacy , it had water , it had soap so i could wash my hands , and i did because i 'm a woman , and we do that .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- but that day , when i asked that question , i learned something , and that was that i 'd grown up thinking that a toilet like that was my right , when in fact it 's a privilege .
2.5 billion people worldwide have no adequate toilet .
they do n't have a bucket or a box .
forty percent of the world with no adequate toilet .
and they have to do what this little boy is doing by the side of the mumbai airport expressway , which is called open defecation , or poo-pooing in the open .
and he does that every day , and every day , probably , that guy in the picture walks on by , because he sees that little boy , but he does n't see him .
but he should , because the problem with all that poop lying around is that poop carries passengers .
fifty communicable diseases like to travel in human shit .
all those things , the eggs , the cysts , the bacteria , the viruses , all those can travel in one gram of human feces .
how ? well , that little boy will not have washed his hands .
he 's barefoot . he 'll run back into his house , and he will contaminate his drinking water and his food and his environment with whatever diseases he may be carrying by fecal particles that are on his fingers and feet .
in what i call the flushed-and-plumbed world that most of us in this room are lucky to live in , the most common symptoms associated with those diseases , diarrhea , is now a bit of a joke .
it 's the runs , the hershey squirts , the squits .
where i come from , we call it delhi belly , as a legacy of empire .
but if you search for a stock photo of diarrhea in a leading photo image agency , this is the picture that you come up with .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- still not sure about the bikini .
and here 's another image of diarrhea .
this is marie saylee , nine months old .
you ca n't see her , because she 's buried under that green grass in a little village in liberia , because she died in three days from diarrhea - the hershey squirts , the runs , a joke .
and that 's her dad .
but she was n't alone that day , because 4,000 other children died of diarrhea , and they do every day .
diarrhea is the second biggest killer of children worldwide , and you 've probably been asked to care about things like hiv / aids or t.b. or measles , but diarrhea kills more children than all those three things put together .
it 's a very potent weapon of mass destruction .
and the cost to the world is immense : 260 billion dollars lost every year on the losses to poor sanitation .
these are cholera beds in haiti .
you 'll have heard of cholera , but we do n't hear about diarrhea .
it gets a fraction of the attention and funding given to any of those other diseases .
but we know how to fix this .
we know , because in the mid-19th century , wonderful victorian engineers installed systems of sewers and wastewater treatment and the flush toilet , and disease dropped dramatically .
child mortality dropped by the most it had ever dropped in history .
the flush toilet was voted the best medical advance of the last 200 years by the readers of the british medical journal , and they were choosing over the pill , anesthesia , and surgery .
it 's a wonderful waste disposal device .
but i think that it 's so good - it does n't smell , we can put it in our house , we can lock it behind a door - and i think we 've locked it out of conversation too .
we do n't have a neutral word for it .
poop 's not particularly adequate .
shit offends people . feces is too medical .
because i ca n't explain otherwise , when i look at the figures , what 's going on .
we know how to solve diarrhea and sanitation , but if you look at the budgets of countries , developing and developed , you 'll think there 's something wrong with the math , because you 'll expect absurdities like pakistan spending 47 times more on its military than it does on water and sanitation , even though 150,000 children die of diarrhea in pakistan every year .
but then you look at that already minuscule water and sanitation budget , and 75 to 90 percent of it will go on clean water supply , which is great ; we all need water .
no one 's going to refuse clean water .
but the humble latrine , or flush toilet , reduces disease by twice as much as just putting in clean water .
think about it . that little boy who 's running back into his house , he may have a nice , clean fresh water supply , but he 's got dirty hands that he 's going to contaminate his water supply with .
and i think that the real waste of human waste is that we are wasting it as a resource and as an incredible trigger for development , because these are a few things that toilets and poop itself can do for us .
so a toilet can put a girl back in school .
twenty-five percent of girls in india drop out of school because they have no adequate sanitation .
they 've been used to sitting through lessons for years and years holding it in .
we 've all done that , but they do it every day , and when they hit puberty and they start menstruating , it just gets too much .
and i understand that . who can blame them ?
so if you met an educationalist and said , " i can improve education attendance rates by 25 percent with just one simple thing , " you 'd make a lot of friends in education .
that 's not the only thing it can do for you .
poop can cook your dinner .
it 's got nutrients in it .
we ingest nutrients . we excrete nutrients as well .
we do n't keep them all .
in rwanda , they are now getting 75 percent of their cooking fuel in their prison system from the contents of prisoners ' bowels .
so these are a bunch of inmates in a prison in butare .
they 're genocidal inmates , most of them , and they 're stirring the contents of their own latrines , because if you put poop in a sealed environment , in a tank , pretty much like a stomach , then , pretty much like a stomach , it gives off gas , and you can cook with it .
and you might think it 's just good karma to see these guys stirring shit , but it 's also good economic sense , because they 're saving a million dollars a year .
they 're cutting down on deforestation , and they 've found a fuel supply that is inexhaustible , infinite and free at the point of production .
it 's not just in the poor world that poop can save lives .
here 's a woman who 's about to get a dose of the brown stuff in those syringes , which is what you think it is , except not quite , because it 's actually donated .
there is now a new career path called stool donor .
it 's like the new sperm donor .
because she has been suffering from a superbug called c. diff , and it 's resistant to antibiotics in many cases .
she 's been suffering for years .
she gets a dose of healthy human feces , and the cure rate for this procedure is 94 percent .
it 's astonishing , but hardly anyone is still doing it .
maybe it 's the ick factor .
that 's okay , because there 's a team of research scientists in canada who have now created a stool sample , a fake stool sample which is called repoopulate .
so you 'd be thinking by now , okay , the solution 's simple , we give everyone a toilet .
and this is where it gets really interesting , because it 's not that simple , because we are not simple .
so the really interesting , exciting work - this is the engaging bit - in sanitation is that we need to understand human psychology .
we need to understand software as well as just giving someone hardware .
they 've found in many developing countries that governments have gone in and given out free latrines and gone back a few years later and found that they 've got lots of new goat sheds or temples or spare rooms with their owners happily walking past them and going over to the open defecating ground .
so the idea is to manipulate human emotion .
it 's been done for decades . the soap companies did it in the early 20th century .
they tried selling soap as healthy . no one bought it .
they tried selling it as sexy . everyone bought it .
in india now there 's a campaign which persuades young brides not to marry into families that do n't have a toilet .
it 's called " no loo , no i do . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and in case you think that poster 's just propaganda , here 's priyanka , 23 years old .
i met her last october in india , and she grew up in a conservative environment .
she grew up in a rural village in a poor area of india , and she was engaged at 14 , and then at 21 or so , she moved into her in-law 's house .
and she was horrified to get there and find that they did n't have a toilet .
she 'd grown up with a latrine .
it was no big deal , but it was a latrine .
and the first night she was there , she was told that at 4 o 'clock in the morning - her mother-in-law got her up , told her to go outside and go and do it in the dark in the open .
and she was scared . she was scared of drunks hanging around .
she was scared of snakes . she was scared of rape .
after three days , she did an unthinkable thing .
she left .
and if you know anything about rural india , you 'll know that 's an unspeakably courageous thing to do .
but not just that .
she got her toilet , and now she goes around all the other villages in india persuading other women to do the same thing .
it 's what i call social contagion , and it 's really powerful and really exciting .
another version of this , another village in india near where priyanka lives is this village , called lakara , and about a year ago , it had no toilets whatsoever .
kids were dying of diarrhea and cholera .
some visitors came , using various behavioral change tricks like putting out a plate of food and a plate of shit and watching the flies go one to the other .
somehow , people who 'd been thinking that what they were doing was not disgusting at all suddenly thought , " oops . "
not only that , but they were ingesting their neighbors ' shit .
that 's what really made them change their behavior .
so this woman , this boy 's mother installed this latrine in a few hours .
her entire life , she 'd been using the banana field behind , but she installed the latrine in a few hours .
it cost nothing . it 's going to save that boy 's life .
so when i get despondent about the state of sanitation , even though these are pretty exciting times because we 've got the bill and melinda gates foundation reinventing the toilet , which is great , we 've got matt damon going on bathroom strike , which is great for humanity , very bad for his colon .
but there are things to worry about .
it 's the most off-track millennium development goal .
it 's about 50 or so years off track .
we 're not going to meet targets , providing people with sanitation at this rate .
so when i get sad about sanitation , i think of japan , because japan 70 years ago was a nation of people who used pit latrines and wiped with sticks , and now it 's a nation of what are called woshurettos , washlet toilets .
they have in-built bidet nozzles for a lovely , hands-free cleaning experience , and they have various other features like a heated seat and an automatic lid-raising device which is known as the " marriage-saver . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but most importantly , what they have done in japan , which i find so inspirational , is they 've brought the toilet out from behind the locked door .
they 've made it conversational .
people go out and upgrade their toilet .
they talk about it . they 've sanitized it .
i hope that we can do that . it 's not a difficult thing to do .
all we really need to do is look at this issue as the urgent , shameful issue that it is .
and do n't think that it 's just in the poor world that things are wrong .
our sewers are crumbling .
things are going wrong here too .
the solution to all of this is pretty easy .
i 'm going to make your lives easy this afternoon and just ask you to do one thing , and that 's to go out , protest , speak about the unspeakable , and talk shit .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm going to go right into the slides .
and all i 'm going to try and prove to you with these slides is that i do just very straight stuff .
and my ideas are - in my head , anyway - they 're very logical and relate to what 's going on and problem solving for clients .
i either convince clients at the end that i solve their problems , or i really do solve their problems , because usually they seem to like it .
let me go right into the slides .
can you turn off the light ? down .
i like to be in the dark .
i do n't want you to see what i 'm doing up here .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- anyway , i did this house in santa monica , and it got a lot of notoriety .
in fact , it appeared in a porno comic book , which is the slide on the right .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this is in venice .
i just show it because i want you to know i 'm concerned about context .
on the left-hand side , i had the context of those little houses , and i tried to build a building that fit into that context .
when people take pictures of these buildings out of that context they look really weird , and my premise is that they make a lot more sense when they 're photographed or seen in that space .
and then , once i deal with the context , i then try to make a place that 's comfortable and private and fairly serene , as i hope you 'll find that slide on the right .
and then i did a law school for loyola in downtown l.a.
i was concerned about making a place for the study of law .
and we continue to work with this client .
the building on the right at the top is now under construction .
the garage on the right - the gray structure - will be torn down , finally , and several small classrooms will be placed along this avenue that we 've created , this campus .
and it all related to the clients and the students from the very first meeting saying they felt denied a place .
they wanted a sense of place .
and so the whole idea here was to create that kind of space in downtown , in a neighborhood that was difficult to fit into .
and it was my theory , or my point of view , that one did n't upstage the neighborhood - one made accommodations .
i tried to be inclusive , to include the buildings in the neighborhood , whether they were buildings i liked or not .
in the ' 60s i started working with paper furniture and made a bunch of stuff that was very successful in bloomingdale 's .
we even made flooring , walls and everything , out of cardboard .
and the success of it threw me for a loop .
i could n't deal with the success of furniture - i was n't secure enough as an architect - and so i closed it all up and made furniture that nobody would like .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , nobody would like this .
and it was in this , preliminary to these pieces of furniture , that ricky and i worked on furniture by the slice .
and after we failed , i just kept failing .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the piece on the left - and that ultimately led to the piece on the right - happened when the kid that was working on this took one of those long strings of stuff and folded it up to put it in the wastebasket .
and i put a piece of tape around it , as you see there , and realized you could sit on it , and it had a lot of resilience and strength and so on .
so , it was an accidental discovery .
i got into fish .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i mean , the story i tell is that i got mad at postmodernism - at po-mo - and said that fish were 500 million years earlier than man , and if you 're going to go back , we might as well go back to the beginning .
and so i started making these funny things .
and they started to have a life of their own and got bigger - as the one glass at the walker .
and then , i sliced off the head and the tail and everything and tried to translate what i was learning about the form of the fish and the movement .
and a lot of my architectural ideas that came from it - accidental , again - it was an intuitive kind of thing , and i just kept going with it , and made this proposal for a building , which was only a proposal .
i did this building in japan .
i was taken out to dinner after the contract for this little restaurant was signed .
and i love sake and kobe and all that stuff .
and after i got - i was really drunk - i was asked to do some sketches on napkins .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i made some sketches on napkins - little boxes and morandi-like things that i used to do .
and the client said , " why no fish ? "
and so i made a drawing with a fish , and i left japan .
three weeks later , i received a complete set of drawings saying we 'd won the competition .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , it 's hard to do . it 's hard to translate a fish form , because they 're so beautiful - perfect - into a building or object like this .
and oldenburg , who i work with a little once in a while , told me i could n't do it , and so that made it even more exciting .
but he was right - i could n't do the tail .
i started to get the head ok , but the tail i could n't do .
it was pretty hard .
the thing on the right is a snake form , a ziggurat .
and i put them together , and you walk between them .
it was a dialog with the context again .
now , if you saw a picture of this as it was published in architectural record - they did n't show the context , so you would think , " god , what a pushy guy this is . "
but a friend of mine spent four hours wandering around here looking for this restaurant .
could n't find it .
so ...
-lrb- laughter -rrb- as for craft and technology and all those things that you 've all been talking about , i was thrown for a complete loop .
this was built in six months .
the way we sent drawings to japan : we used the magic computer in michigan that does carved models , and we used to make foam models , which that thing scanned .
we made the drawings of the fish and the scales .
and when i got there , everything was perfect - except the tail .
so , i decided to cut off the head and the tail .
and i made the object on the left for my show at the walker .
and it 's one of the nicest pieces i 've ever made , i think .
and then jay chiat , a friend and client , asked me to do his headquarters building in l.a.
for reasons we do n't want to talk about , it got delayed .
toxic waste , i guess , is the key clue to that one .
and so we built a temporary building - i 'm getting good at temporary - and we put a conference room in that 's a fish .
and , finally , jay dragged me to my hometown , toronto , canada .
and there is a story - it 's a real story - about my grandmother buying a carp on thursday , bringing it home , putting it in the bathtub when i was a kid .
i played with it in the evening .
when i went to sleep , the next day it was n't there .
and the next night , we had gefilte fish .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and so i set up this interior for jay 's offices and i made a pedestal for a sculpture .
and he did n't buy a sculpture , so i made one .
i went around toronto and found a bathtub like my grandmother 's , and i put the fish in .
it was a joke .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i play with funny people like -lsb- claes -rsb- oldenburg .
we 've been friends for a long time .
and we 've started to work on things .
a few years ago , we did a performance piece in venice , italy , called " il corso del coltello " - the swiss army knife .
and most of the imagery is - -lrb- laughter -rrb- claes ' , but those two little boys are my sons , and they were claes ' assistants in the play .
he was the swiss army knife .
he was a souvenir salesman who always wanted to be a painter , and i was frankie p. toronto .
p for palladio .
dressed up like the at & t building by claes - -lrb- laughter -rrb- with a fish hat .
the highlight of the performance was at the end .
this beautiful object , the swiss army knife , which i get credit for participating in .
and i can tell you - it 's totally an oldenburg .
i had nothing to do with it .
the only thing i did was , i made it possible for them to turn those blades so you could sail this thing in the canal , because i love sailing .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we made it into a sailing craft .
i 've been known to mess with things like chain link fencing .
i do it because it 's a curious thing in the culture , when things are made in such great quantities , absorbed in such great quantities , and there 's so much denial about them .
people hate it .
and i 'm fascinated with that , which , like the paper furniture - it 's one of those materials .
and i 'm always drawn to that .
and so i did a lot of dirty things with chain link , which nobody will forgive me for .
but claes made homage to it in the loyola law school .
and that chain link is really expensive .
it 's in perspective and everything .
and then we did a camp together for children with cancer .
and you can see , we started making a building together .
of course , the milk can is his .
but we were trying to collide our ideas , to put objects next to each other .
like a morandi - like the little bottles - composing them like a still life .
and it seemed to work as a way to put he and i together .
then jay chiat asked me to do this building on this funny lot in venice , and i started with this three-piece thing , and you entered in the middle .
and jay asked me what i was going to do with the piece in the middle .
and he pushed that .
and one day i had a - oh , well , the other way .
i had the binoculars from claes , and i put them there , and i could never get rid of them after that .
oldenburg made the binoculars incredible when he sent me the first model of the real proposal .
it made my building look sick .
and it was this interaction between that kind of , up-the-ante stuff that became pretty interesting .
it led to the building on the left .
and i still think the time magazine picture will be of the binoculars , you know , leaving out the - what the hell .
i use a lot of metal in my work , and i have a hard time connecting with the craft .
the whole thing about my house , the whole use of rough carpentry and everything , was the frustration with the crafts available .
i said , " if i ca n't get the craft that i want , i 'll use the craft i can get . "
there were plenty of models for that , in rauschenberg and jasper johns , and many artists who were making beautiful art and sculpture with junk materials .
i went into the metal because it was a way of building a building that was a sculpture .
and it was all of one material , and the metal could go on the roof as well as the walls .
the metalworkers , for the most part , do ducts behind the ceilings and stuff .
i was given an opportunity to design an exhibit for the metalworkers ' unions of america and canada in washington , and i did it on the condition that they become my partners in the future and help me with all future metal buildings , etc. etc .
and it 's working very well to have these people , these craftsmen , interested in it .
i just tell the stories .
it 's a way of connecting , at least , with some of those people that are so important to the realization of architecture .
the metal continued into a building - herman miller , in sacramento .
and it 's just a complex of factory buildings .
and herman miller has this philosophy of having a place - a people place .
i mean , it 's kind of a trite thing to say , but it is real that they wanted to have a central place where the cafeteria would be , where the people would come and where the people working would interact .
so it 's out in the middle of nowhere , and you approach it .
it 's copper and galvanize .
i used the galvanize and copper in a very light gauge , so it would buckle .
i spent a lot of time undoing richard meier 's aesthetic .
everybody 's trying to get the panels perfect , and i always try to get them sloppy and fuzzy .
and they end up looking like stone .
this is the central area .
there 's a ramp .
and that little dome in there is a building by stanley tigerman .
stanley was instrumental in my getting this job .
and when i was awarded the contract i , at the very beginning , asked the client if they would let stanley do a cameo piece with me .
because these were ideas that we were talking about , building things next to each other , making - it 's all about -lsb- a -rsb- metaphor for a city , maybe .
and so stanley did the little dome thing .
and we did it over the phone and by fax .
he would send me a fax and show me something .
he 'd made a building with a dome and he had a little tower .
i told him , " no , no , that 's too ongepotchket .
i do n't want the tower . "
so he came back with a simpler building , but he put some funny details on it , and he moved it closer to my building .
and so i decided to put him in a depression .
i put him in a hole and made a kind of a hole that he sits in .
and so then he put two bridges - this all happened on the fax , going back and forth over a couple of weeks ' period .
and he put these two bridges with pink guardrails on it .
and so then i put this big billboard behind it .
and i call it , " david and goliath . "
and that 's my cafeteria .
in boston , we had that old building on the left .
it was a very prominent building off the freeway , and we added a floor and cleaned it up and fixed it up and used the kind of - i thought - the language of the neighborhood , which had these cornices , projecting cornices .
mine got a little exuberant , but i used lead copper , which is a beautiful material , and it turns green in 100 years .
instead of , like , copper in 10 or 15 .
we redid the side of the building and re-proportioned the windows so it sort of fit into the space .
and it surprised both boston and myself that we got it approved , because they have very strict kind of design guideline , and they would n't normally think i would fit them .
the detailing was very careful with the lead copper and making panels and fitting it tightly into the fabric of the existing building .
in barcelona , on las ramblas for some film festival , i did the hollywood sign going and coming , made a building out of it , and they built it .
i flew in one night and took this picture .
but they made it a third smaller than my model without telling me .
and then more metal and some chain link in santa monica - a little shopping center .
and this is a laser laboratory at the university of iowa , in which the fish comes back as an abstraction in the back .
it 's the support labs , which , by some coincidence , required no windows .
and the shape fit perfectly .
i just joined the points .
in the curved part there 's all the mechanical equipment .
that solid wall behind it is a pipe chase - a pipe canyon - and so it was an opportunity that i seized , because i did n't have to have any protruding ducts or vents or things in this form .
it gave me an opportunity to make a sculpture out of it .
this is a small house somewhere .
they 've been building it so long i do n't remember where it is .
it 's in the west valley .
and we started with the stream and built the house along the stream - dammed it up to make a lake .
these are the models .
the reality , with the lake - the workmanship is pretty bad .
and it reminded me why i play defensively in things like my house .
when you have to do something really cheaply , it 's hard to get perfect corners and stuff .
that big metal thing is a passage , and in it is - you go downstairs into the living room and then down into the bedroom , which is on the right .
it 's kind of like a whole built town .
i was asked to do a hospital for schizophrenic adolescents at yale .
i thought it was fitting for me to be doing that .
this is a house next to a philip johnson house in minnesota .
the owners had a dilemma - they asked philip to do it .
he was too busy .
he did n't recommend me , by the way .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we ended up having to make it a sculpture , because the dilemma was , how do you build a building that does n't look like the language ?
is it going to look like this beautiful estate is sub-divided ?
etc. etc .
you 've got the idea .
and so we finally ended up making it .
these people are art collectors .
and we finally made it so it appears very sculptural from the main house and all the windows are on the other side .
and the building is very sculptural as you walk around it .
it 's made of metal and the brown stuff is fin-ply - it 's that formed lumber from finland .
we used it at loyola on the chapel , and it did n't work .
i keep trying to make it work .
in this case we learned how to detail it .
in cleveland , there 's burnham mall , on the left .
it 's never been finished .
going out to the lake , you can see all those new buildings we built .
and we had the opportunity to build a building on this site .
there 's a railroad track .
this is the city hall over here somewhere , and the courthouse .
and the centerline of the mall goes out .
burnham had designed a railroad station that was never built , and so we followed .
sohio is on the axis here , and we followed the axis , and they 're two kind of goalposts .
and this is our building , which is a corporate headquarters for an insurance company .
we collaborated with oldenburg and put the newspaper on top , folded .
the health club is fastened to the garage with a c-clamp , for cleveland .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you drive down .
so it 's about a 10-story c-clamp .
and all this stuff at the bottom is a museum , and an idea for a very fancy automobile entry .
this owner has a pet peeve about bad automobile entries .
and this would be a hotel .
so , the centerline of this thing - we 'd preserve it , and it would start to work with the scale of the new buildings by pelli and kohn pederson fox , etc . , that are underway .
it 's hard to do high-rise .
i feel much more comfortable down here .
this is a piece of property in brentwood .
and a long time ago , about ' 82 or something , after my house - i designed a house for myself that would be a village of several pavilions around a courtyard - and the owner of this lot worked for me and built that actual model on the left .
and she came back , i guess wealthier or something - something happened - and asked me to design a house for her on this site .
and following that basic idea of the village , we changed it as we got into it .
i locked the house into the site by cutting the back end - here you see on the photographs of the site - slicing into it and putting all the bathrooms and dressing rooms like a retaining wall , creating a lower level zone for the master bedroom , which i designed like a kind of a barge , looking like a boat .
and that 's it , built .
the dome was a request from the client .
she wanted a dome somewhere in the house .
she did n't care where .
when you sleep in this bedroom , i hope - i mean , i have n't slept in it yet .
i 've offered to marry her so i could sleep there , but she said i did n't have to do that .
but when you 're in that room , you feel like you 're on a kind of barge on some kind of lake .
and it 's very private .
the landscape is being built around to create a private garden .
and then up above there 's a garden on this side of the living room , and one on the other side .
these are n't focused very well .
i do n't know how to do it from here .
focus the one on the right .
it 's up there .
left - it 's my right .
anyway , you enter into a garden with a beautiful grove of trees .
that 's the living room .
servants ' quarters .
a guest bedroom , which has this dome with marble on it .
and then you enter into the living room and then so on .
this is the bedroom .
you come down from this level along the stairway , and you enter the bedroom here , going into the lake .
and the bed is back in this space , with windows looking out onto the lake .
these stonehenge things were designed to give foreground and to create a greater depth in this shallow lot .
the material is lead copper , like in the building in boston .
and so it was an intent to make this small piece of land - it 's 100 by 250 - into a kind of an estate by separating these areas and making the living room and dining room into this pavilion with a high space in it .
and this happened by accident that i got this right on axis with the dining room table .
it looks like i got a baldessari painting for free .
but the idea is , the windows are all placed so you see pieces of the house outside .
eventually this will be screened - these trees will come up - and it will be very private .
and you feel like you 're in your own kind of village .
this is for michael eisner - disney .
we 're doing some work for him .
and this is in anaheim , california , and it 's a freeway building .
you go under this bridge at about 65 miles an hour , and there 's another bridge here .
and you 're through this room in a split second , and the building will sort of reflect that .
on the backside , it 's much more humane - entrance , dining hall , etc .
and then this thing here - i 'm hoping as you drive by you 'll hear the picket fence effect of the sound hitting it .
kind of a fun thing to do .
i 'm doing a building in switzerland , basel , which is an office building for a furniture company .
and we struggled with the image .
these are the early studies , but they have to sell furniture to normal people , so if i did the building and it was too fancy , then people might say , " well , the furniture looks ok in his thing , but no , it ai n't going to look good in my normal building . "
so we 've made a kind of pragmatic slab in the second phase here , and we 've taken the conference facilities and made a villa out of them so that the communal space is very sculptural and separate .
and you 're looking at it from the offices and you create a kind of interaction between these pieces .
this is in paris , along the seine .
palais des sports , the gare de lyon over here .
the minister of finance - the guy that moved from the louvre - goes in here .
there 's a new library across the river .
and back in here , in this already treed park , we 're doing a very dense building called the american center , which has a theater , apartments , dance school , an art museum , restaurants and all kinds of - it 's a very dense program - bookstores , etc .
in a very tight , small - this is the ground level .
and the french have this extraordinary way of screwing things up by taking a beautiful site and cutting the corner off .
they call it the plan coupe .
and i struggled with that thing - how to get around the corner .
these are the models for it .
i showed you the other model , the one - this is the way i organized myself so i could make the drawing - so i understood the problem .
i was trying to get around this plan coupe - how do you do it ?
apartments , etc .
and these are the kind of study models we did .
and the one on the left is pretty awful .
you can see why i was ready to commit suicide when this one was built .
but out of it came finally this resolution , where the elevator piece worked frontally to this , parallel to this street , and also parallel to here .
and then this kind of twist , with this balcony and the skirt , kind of like a ballerina lifting her skirt to let you into the foyer .
the restaurants here - the apartments and the theater , etc .
so it would all be built in stone , in french limestone , except for this metal piece .
and it faces into a park .
and the idea was to make this express the energy of this .
on the side facing the street it 's much more normal , except i slipped a few mansards down , so that coming on the point , these housing units made a gesture to the corner .
and this will be some kind of high-tech billboard .
if any of you guys have any ideas for it , please contact me .
i do n't know what to do .
jay chiat is a glutton for punishment , and he hired me to do a house for him in the hamptons .
and it 's got a fish .
and i keep thinking , " this is going to be the last fish . "
it 's like a drug addict .
i say , " i 'm not going to do it anymore - i do n't want to do it anymore - i 'm not going to do it . "
and then i do it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- there it is .
but it 's the living room .
and this piece here is - i do n't know what it is .
i just added it so that we 'd have enough money in the budget so we could take something out .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this is euro disney , and i 've worked with all of the guys that presented to you earlier .
we 've had a lot of fun working together .
i think i 'm from mars for them , and they are for me , but somehow we all manage to work together , and i think , productively .
so far .
this is a shopping thing .
you come into the magic kingdom and the hotel that tony baxter 's group is doing out here .
and then this is a kind of a shopping mall , with a rodeo and restaurants .
and another restaurant .
what i did - because of the paris skies being quite dull , i made a light grid that 's perpendicular to the train station , to the route of the train .
it looks like it 's kind of been there , and then crashed all these simpler forms into it .
the light grid will have a light , be lit up at night and give a kind of light ceiling .
in switzerland - germany , actually - on the rhine across from basel , we did a furniture factory and a furniture museum .
and i tried to - there 's a nick grimshaw building over here , there 's an oldenburg sculpture over here - i tried to make a relationship urbanistically .
and i do n't gave good slides to show - it 's just been completed - but this piece here is this building , and these pieces here and here .
and as you pass by it 's always part - you see it as all of these pieces accrue and become part of an overall neighborhood .
it 's plaster and just zinc .
and you wonder , if this is a museum , what it 's going to be like inside ?
if it 's going to be so busy and crazy that you would n't show anything , and just wait .
i 'm so cunning and clever - i made it quiet and wonderful .
but on the outside it does scream out at you a bit .
it 's actually basically three square rooms with a couple of skylights and stuff .
and from the building in the back , you see it as an iceberg floating by in the hills .
i know i 'm over time .
see , that skylight goes down and becomes that one .
so it 's pretty quiet inside .
this is the disney hall - the concert hall .
it 's a complicated project .
it has a chamber hall .
it 's related to an existing chandler pavilion that was built with a lot of love and tears and caring .
and it 's not a great building , but i approached it optimistically , that we would make a compositional relationship between us that would strengthen both of us .
and the plan of this - it 's a concert hall .
this is the foyer , which is kind of a garden structure .
there 's commercial at the ground floor .
these are offices , which , really , in the competition , we did n't have to design .
but finally , there 's a hotel there .
these were the kind of relationships made to the chandler , composing these elevations together and relating them to the buildings that existed - to moca , etc .
the acoustician in the competition gave us criteria , which led to this compartmentalized scheme , which we found out after the competition would not work at all .
but everybody liked these forms and liked the space , and so that 's one of the problems of a competition .
you have to then try and get that back in some way .
and we studied many models .
this was our original model .
these were the three buildings that were the ideal - the concertgebouw , boston and berlin .
everybody liked the surround .
actually , this is the smallest hall in size , and it has more seats than any of these because it has double balconies .
our client does n't want balconies , so - and when we met our new acoustician , he told us this was the right shape or this was the right shape .
and we tried many shapes , trying to get the energy of the original design within an acoustical , acceptable format .
we finally settled on a shape that was the proportion of the concertgebouw with the sloping outside walls , which the acoustician said were crucial to this and later decided they were n't , but now we have them .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and our idea is to make the seating carriage very sculptural and out of wood and like a big boat sitting in this plaster room .
that 's the idea .
and the corners would have skylights and these columns would be structural .
and the nice thing about introducing columns is they give you a kind of sense of proscenium from wherever you sit , and create intimacy .
now , this is not a final design - these are just on the way to being - and so i would n't take it literally , except the feeling of the space .
we studied the acoustics with laser stuff , and they bounce them off this and see where it all works .
but you get the sense of the hall in section .
most halls come straight down into a proscenium .
in this case we 're opening it back up and getting skylights in the four corners .
and so it will be quite a different shape .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the original building , because it was frog-like , fit nicely on the site and cranked itself well .
when you get into a box , it 's harder to do it - and here we are , struggling with how to put the hotel in .
and this is a teapot i designed for alessi .
i just stuck it on there .
but this is how i do work . i do take pieces and bits and look at it and struggle with it and cut it away .
and of course it 's not going to look like that , but it is the crazy way i tend to work .
and then finally , in l.a. i was asked to do a sculpture at the foot of interstate bank tower , the highest building in l.a.
larry halprin is doing the stairs .
and i was asked to do a fish , and so i did a snake .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's a public space , and i made it kind of a garden structure , and you can go in it .
it 's a kiva , and larry 's putting some water in there , and it works much better than a fish .
in barcelona i was asked to do a fish , and we 're working on that , at the foot of a ritz-carlton tower being done by skidmore , owings and merrill .
and the ritz-carlton tower is being designed with exposed steel , non-fire proof , much like those old gas tanks .
and so we took the language of this exposed steel and used it , perverted it , into the form of the fish , and created a kind of a 19th-century contraption that looks like , that will sit - this is the beach and the harbor out in front , and this is really a shopping center with department stores .
and we split these bridges .
originally , this was all solid with a hole in it .
we cut them loose and made several bridges and created a kind of a foreground for this hotel .
we showed this to the hotel people the other day , and they were terrified and said that nobody would come to the ritz-carlton anymore , because of this fish .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and finally , i just threw these in - lou danziger .
i did n't expect lou danziger to be here , but this is a building i did for him in 1964 , i think .
a little studio - and it 's sadly for sale .
time goes on .
and this is my son working with me on a small fast-food thing .
he designed the robot as the cashier , and the head moves , and i did the rest of it .
and the food was n't as good as the stuff , and so it failed .
it should have been the other way around - the food should have been good first .
it did n't work .
thank you very much .
i want to talk about the election .
for the first time in the united states , a predominantly white group of voters voted for an african-american candidate for president .
and in fact barack obama did quite well .
he won 375 electoral votes .
and he won about 70 million popular votes more than any other presidential candidate - of any race , of any party - in history .
if you compare how obama did against how john kerry had done four years earlier - democrats really like seeing this transition here , where almost every state becomes bluer , becomes more democratic - even states obama lost , like out west , those states became more blue .
in the south , in the northeast , almost everywhere but with a couple of exceptions here and there .
one exception is in massachusetts .
that was john kerry 's home state .
no big surprise , obama could n't do better than kerry there .
or in arizona , which is john mccain 's home , obama did n't have much improvement .
but there is also this part of the country , kind of in the middle region here .
this kind of arkansas , tennessee , oklahoma , west virginia region .
now if you look at ' 96 , bill clinton - the last democrat to actually win - how he did in ' 96 , you see real big differences in this part of the country right here , the kind of appalachians , ozarks , highlands region , as i call it : 20 or 30 point swings from how bill clinton did in ' 96 to how obama did in 2008 .
yes bill clinton was from arkansas , but these are very , very profound differences .
so , when we think about parts of the country like arkansas , you know .
there is a book written called , " what 's the matter with kansas ? "
but really the question here - obama did relatively well in kansas .
he lost badly but every democrat does .
he lost no worse than most people do .
but yeah , what 's the matter with arkansas ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and when we think of arkansas we tend to have pretty negative connotations .
we think of a bunch of rednecks , quote , unquote , with guns .
and we think people like this probably do n't want to vote for people who look like this and are named barack obama .
we think it 's a matter of race . and is this fair ?
are we kind of stigmatizing people from arkansas , and this part of the country ?
and the answer is : it is at least partially fair .
we know that race was a factor , and the reason why we know that is because we asked those people .
actually we did n't ask them , but when they conducted exit polls in every state , in 37 states , out of the 50 , they asked a question , that was pretty direct , about race .
they asked this question .
in deciding your vote for president today , was the race we 're looking for people that said , " yes , race was a factor ; moreover it was an important factor , in my decision , " and people who voted for john mccain as a result of that factor , maybe in combination with other factors , and maybe alone .
we 're looking for this behavior among white voters or , really , non-black voters .
so you see big differences in different parts of the country on this question .
in louisiana , about one in five white voters said , " yes , one of the big reasons why i voted against barack obama is because he was an african-american . "
if those people had voted for obama , even half of them , obama would have won louisiana safely .
same is true with , i think , all of these states you see on the top of the list .
meanwhile , california , new york , we can say , " oh we 're enlightened " but you know , certainly a much lower incidence of this admitted , i suppose , manifestation of racially-based voting .
here is the same data on a map .
you kind of see the relationship between the redder states of where more people responded and said , " yes , barack obama 's race was a problem for me . "
you see , comparing the map to ' 96 , you see an overlap here .
this really seems to explain why barack obama did worse in this one part of the country .
so we have to ask why .
is racism predictable in some way ?
is there something driving this ?
is it just about some weird stuff that goes on in arkansas that we do n't understand , and kentucky ?
or are there more systematic factors at work ?
and so we can look at a bunch of different variables .
these are things that economists and political scientists look at all the time - things like income , and religion , education .
which of these seem to drive this manifestation of racism in this big national experiment we had on november 4th ?
and there are a couple of these that have strong predictive relationships , one of which is education , where you see the states with the fewest years of schooling per adult are in red , and you see this part of the country , the kind of appalachians region , is less educated . it 's just a fact .
and you see the relationship there with the racially-based voting patterns .
the other variable that 's important is the type of neighborhood that you live in .
states that are more rural - even to some extent of the states like new hampshire and maine - they exhibit a little bit of this racially-based voting against barack obama .
so it 's the combination of these two things : it 's education and the type of neighbors that you have , which we 'll talk about more in a moment .
and the thing about states like arkansas and tennessee is that they 're both very rural , and they are educationally impoverished .
so yes , racism is predictable .
these things , among maybe other variables , but these things seem to predict it .
we 're going to drill down a little bit more now , into something called the general social survey .
this is conducted by the university of chicago every other year .
and they ask a series of really interesting questions .
in 2000 they had particularly interesting questions about racial attitudes .
one simple question they asked is , " does anyone of the opposite race live in your neighborhood ? "
we can see in different types of communities that the results are quite different .
in cites , about 80 percent of people have someone whom they consider a neighbor of another race , but in rural communities , only about 30 percent .
probably because if you live on a farm , you might not have a lot of neighbors , period .
but nevertheless , you 're not having a lot of interaction with people who are unlike you .
so what we 're going to do now is take the white people in the survey and split them between those who have black neighbors - or , really , some neighbor of another race - and people who have only white neighbors .
and we see in some variables in terms of political attitudes , not a lot of difference .
this was eight years ago , some people were more republican back then .
but you see democrats versus republican , not a big difference based on who your neighbors are .
and even some questions about race - for example affirmative action , which is kind of a political question , a policy question about race , if you will - not much difference here .
affirmative action is not very popular frankly , with white voters , period .
but people with black neighbors and people with mono-racial neighborhoods feel no differently about it really .
but if you probe a bit deeper and get a bit more personal if you will , " do you favor a law banning interracial marriage ? "
there is a big difference .
people who do n't have neighbors of a different race are about twice as likely to oppose interracial marriage as people who do .
just based on who lives in your immediate neighborhood around you .
and likewise they asked , not in 2000 , but in the same survey in 1996 , " would you not vote for a qualified black president ? "
you see people without neighbors who are african-american who were much more likely to say , " that would give me a problem . "
so it 's really not even about urban versus rural .
it 's about who you live with .
racism is predictable . and it 's predicted by interaction or lack thereof with people unlike you , people of other races .
so if you want to address it , the goal is to facilitate interaction with people of other races .
i have a couple of very obvious , i suppose , ideas for maybe how to do that .
i 'm a big fan of cities .
especially if we have cites that are diverse and sustainable , and can support people of different ethnicities and different income groups .
i think cities facilitate more of the kind of networking , the kind of casual interaction than you might have on a daily basis .
but also not everyone wants to live in a city , certainly not a city like new york .
so we can think more about things like street grids .
this is the neighborhood where i grew up in east lansing , michigan .
it 's a traditional midwestern community , which means you have real grid .
you have real neighborhoods and real trees , and real streets you can walk on .
and you interact a lot with your neighbors - people you like , people you might not know .
and as a result it 's a very tolerant community , which is different , i think , than something like this , which is in schaumburg , illinois , where every little set of houses has their own cul-de-sac and drive-through starbucks and stuff like that .
i think that actually this type of urban design , which became more prevalent in the 1970s and 1980s - i think there is a relationship between that and the country becoming more conservative under ronald reagan .
but also here is another idea we have - is an intercollegiate exchange program where you have students going from new york abroad .
but frankly there are enough differences within the country now where maybe you can take a bunch of kids from nyu , have them go study for a semester at the university of arkansas , and vice versa . do it at the high school level .
literally there are people who might be in school in arkansas or tennessee and might never interact in a positive affirmative way with someone from another part of the country , or of another racial group .
i think part of the education variable we talked about before is the networking experience you get when you go to college where you do get a mix of people that you might not interact with otherwise .
but the point is , this is all good news , because when something is predictable , it is what i call designable .
you can start thinking about solutions to solving that problem , even if the problem is pernicious and as intractable as racism .
if we understand the root causes of the behavior and where it manifests itself and where it does n't , we can start to design solutions to it .
so that 's all i have to say . thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- delighted to be here and to talk to you about a subject dear to my heart , which is beauty .
i do the philosophy of art , aesthetics , actually , for a living .
i try to figure out intellectually , philosophically , psychologically , what the experience of beauty is , what sensibly can be said about it and how people go off the rails in trying to understand it .
now this is an extremely complicated subject , in part because the things that we call beautiful are so different .
i mean just think of the sheer variety - a baby 's face , berlioz 's " harold in italy , " movies like " the wizard of oz " or the plays of chekhov , a central california landscape , a hokusai view of mt . fuji , " der rosenkavalier , " a stunning match-winning goal in a world cup soccer match , van gogh 's " starry night , " a jane austen novel , fred astaire dancing across the screen .
this brief list includes human beings , natural landforms , works of art and skilled human actions .
an account that explains the presence of beauty in everything on this list is not going to be easy .
i can , however , give you at least a taste of what i regard as the most powerful theory of beauty we yet have .
and we get it not from a philosopher of art , not from a postmodern art theorist or a bigwig art critic .
no , this theory comes from an expert on barnacles and worms and pigeon breeding , and you know who i mean : charles darwin .
of course , a lot of people think they already know the proper answer to the question , " what is beauty ? "
it 's in the eye of the beholder .
it 's whatever moves you personally .
or , as some people , especially academics prefer , beauty is in the culturally conditioned eye of the beholder .
people agree that paintings or movies or music are beautiful because their cultures determine a uniformity of aesthetic taste .
taste for both natural beauty and for the arts travel across cultures with great ease .
beethoven is adored in japan .
peruvians love japanese woodblock prints .
inca sculptures are regarded as treasures in british museums , while shakespeare is translated into every major language of the earth .
or just think about american jazz or american movies - they go everywhere .
there are many differences among the arts , but there are also universal , cross-cultural aesthetic pleasures and values .
how can we explain this universality ?
the best answer lies in trying to reconstruct a darwinian evolutionary history of our artistic and aesthetic tastes .
we need to reverse-engineer our present artistic tastes and preferences and explain how they came to be engraved in our minds by the actions of both our prehistoric , largely pleistocene environments , where we became fully human , but also by the social situations in which we evolved .
this reverse engineering can also enlist help from the human record preserved in prehistory .
i mean fossils , cave paintings and so forth .
and it should take into account what we know of the aesthetic interests of isolated hunter-gatherer bands that survived into the 19th and the 20th centuries .
now , i personally have no doubt whatsoever that the experience of beauty , with its emotional intensity and pleasure , belongs to our evolved human psychology .
the experience of beauty is one component in a whole series of darwinian adaptations .
beauty is an adaptive effect , which we extend and intensify in the creation and enjoyment of works of art and entertainment .
as many of you will know , evolution operates by two main primary mechanisms .
the first of these is natural selection - that 's random mutation and selective retention - along with our basic anatomy and physiology - the evolution of the pancreas or the eye or the fingernails .
natural selection also explains many basic revulsions , such as the horrid smell of rotting meat , or fears , such as the fear of snakes or standing close to the edge of a cliff .
natural selection also explains pleasures - sexual pleasure , our liking for sweet , fat and proteins , which in turn explains a lot of popular foods , from ripe fruits through chocolate malts and barbecued ribs .
the other great principle of evolution is sexual selection , and it operates very differently .
the peacock 's magnificent tail is the most famous example of this .
it did not evolve for natural survival .
in fact , it goes against natural survival .
no , the peacock 's tail results from the mating choices made by peahens .
it 's quite a familiar story .
it 's women who actually push history forward .
darwin himself , by the way , had no doubts that the peacock 's tail was beautiful in the eyes of the peahen .
he actually used that word .
now , keeping these ideas firmly in mind , we can say that the experience of beauty is one of the ways that evolution has of arousing and sustaining interest or fascination , even obsession , in order to encourage us toward making the most adaptive decisions for survival and reproduction .
beauty is nature 's way of acting at a distance , so to speak .
i mean , you ca n't expect to eat an adaptively beneficial landscape .
it would hardly do to eat your baby or your lover .
so evolution 's trick is to make them beautiful , to have them exert a kind of magnetism to give you the pleasure of simply looking at them .
consider briefly an important source of aesthetic pleasure , the magnetic pull of beautiful landscapes .
people in very different cultures all over the world tend to like a particular kind of landscape , a landscape that just happens to be similar to the pleistocene savannas where we evolved .
this landscape shows up today on calendars , on postcards , in the design of golf courses and public parks and in gold-framed pictures that hang in living rooms from new york to new zealand .
it 's a kind of hudson river school landscape featuring open spaces of low grasses interspersed with copses of trees .
the trees , by the way , are often preferred if they fork near the ground , that is to say , if they 're trees you could scramble up if you were in a tight fix .
the landscape shows the presence of water directly in view , or evidence of water in a bluish distance , indications of animal or bird life as well as diverse greenery and finally - get this - a path or a road , perhaps a riverbank or a shoreline , that extends into the distance , almost inviting you to follow it .
this landscape type is regarded as beautiful , even by people in countries that do n't have it .
the ideal savanna landscape is one of the clearest examples where human beings everywhere find beauty in similar visual experience .
but , someone might argue , that 's natural beauty .
how about artistic beauty ?
is n't that exhaustively cultural ?
no , i do n't think it is .
and once again , i 'd like to look back to prehistory to say something about it .
it is widely assumed that the earliest human artworks are the stupendously skillful cave paintings that we all know from lascaux and chauvet .
chauvet caves are about 32,000 years old , along with a few small , realistic sculptures of women and animals from the same period .
but artistic and decorative skills are actually much older than that .
beautiful shell necklaces that look like something you 'd see at an arts and crafts fair , as well as ochre body paint , have been found from around 100,000 years ago .
but the most intriguing prehistoric artifacts are older even than this .
i have in mind the so-called acheulian hand axes .
the oldest stone tools are choppers from the olduvai gorge in east africa .
they go back about two-and-a-half-million years .
these crude tools were around for thousands of centuries , until around 1.4 million years ago when homo erectus started shaping single , thin stone blades , sometimes rounded ovals , but often in what are to our eyes an arresting , symmetrical pointed leaf or teardrop form .
these acheulian hand axes - they 're named after st. acheul in france , where finds were made in 19th century - have been unearthed in their thousands , scattered across asia , europe and africa , almost everywhere homo erectus and homo ergaster roamed .
now , the sheer numbers of these hand axes shows that they ca n't have been made for butchering animals .
and the plot really thickens when you realize that , unlike other pleistocene tools , the hand axes often exhibit no evidence of wear on their delicate blade edges .
and some , in any event , are too big to use for butchery .
their symmetry , their attractive materials and , above all , their meticulous workmanship are simply quite beautiful to our eyes , even today .
so what were these ancient - i mean , they 're ancient , they 're foreign , but they 're at the same time somehow familiar .
what were these artifacts for ?
the best available answer is that they were literally the earliest known works of art , practical tools transformed into captivating aesthetic objects , contemplated both for their elegant shape and their virtuoso craftsmanship .
hand axes mark an evolutionary advance in human history - tools fashioned to function as what darwinians call " fitness signals " - that is to say , displays that are performances like the peacock 's tail , except that , unlike hair and feathers , the hand axes are consciously cleverly crafted .
competently made hand axes indicated desirable personal qualities - intelligence , fine motor control , planning ability , conscientiousness and sometimes access to rare materials .
over tens of thousands of generations , such skills increased the status of those who displayed them and gained a reproductive advantage over the less capable .
you know , it 's an old line , but it has been shown to work - " why do n't you come up to my cave , so i can show you my hand axes ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- except , of course , what 's interesting about this is that we ca n't be sure how that idea was conveyed , because the homo erectus that made these objects did not have language .
it 's hard to grasp , but it 's an incredible fact .
this object was made by a hominid ancestor , homo erectus or homo ergaster , between 50,000 and 100,000 years before language .
stretching over a million years , the hand axe tradition is the longest artistic tradition in human and proto-human history .
by the end of the hand axe epic , homo sapiens - as they were then called , finally - were doubtless finding new ways to amuse and amaze each other by , who knows , telling jokes , storytelling , dancing , or hairstyling .
yes , hairstyling - i insist on that .
for us moderns , virtuoso technique is used to create imaginary worlds in fiction and in movies , to express intense emotions with music , painting and dance .
but still , one fundamental trait of the ancestral personality persists in our aesthetic cravings : the beauty we find in skilled performances .
from lascaux to the louvre to carnegie hall , human beings have a permanent innate taste for virtuoso displays in the arts .
we find beauty in something done well .
so the next time you pass a jewelry shop window displaying a beautifully cut teardrop-shaped stone , do n't be so sure it 's just your culture telling you that that sparkling jewel is beautiful .
your distant ancestors loved that shape and found beauty in the skill needed to make it , even before they could put their love into words .
is beauty in the eye of the beholder ?
no , it 's deep in our minds .
it 's a gift handed down from the intelligent skills and rich emotional lives of our most ancient ancestors .
our powerful reaction to images , to the expression of emotion in art , to the beauty of music , to the night sky , will be with us and our descendants for as long as the human race exists .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- once upon a time , there was a place called lesterland .
now lesterland looks a lot like the united states .
like the united states , it has about 311 million people , and of that 311 million people , it turns out 144,000 are called lester .
if matt 's in the audience , i just borrowed that , i 'll return it in a second , this character from your series .
so 144,000 are called lester , which means about .05 percent is named lester .
now , lesters in lesterland have this extraordinary power .
there are two elections every election cycle in lesterland .
one is called the general election .
the other is called the lester election .
and in the general election , it 's the citizens who get to vote , but in the lester election , it 's the lesters who get to vote .
and here 's the trick .
in order to run in the general election , you must do extremely well in the lester election .
you do n't necessarily have to win , but you must do extremely well .
now , what can we say about democracy in lesterland ?
what we can say , number one , as the supreme court said in citizens united , that people have the ultimate influence over elected officials , because , after all , there is a general election , but only after the lesters have had their way with the candidates who wish to run in the general election .
and number two , obviously , this dependence upon the lesters is going to produce a subtle , understated , we could say camouflaged , bending to keep the lesters happy .
okay , so we have a democracy , no doubt , but it 's dependent upon the lesters and dependent upon the people .
it has competing dependencies , we could say conflicting dependencies , depending upon who the lesters are .
okay . that 's lesterland .
now there are three things i want you to see now that i 've described lesterland .
number one , the united states is lesterland .
the united states is lesterland .
the united states also looks like this , also has two elections , one we called the general election , the second we should call the money election .
in the general election , it 's the citizens who get to vote , if you 're over 18 , in some states if you have an id .
in the money election , it 's the funders who get to vote , the funders who get to vote , and just like in lesterland , the trick is , to run in the general election , you must do extremely well in the money election .
you do n't necessarily have to win . there is jerry brown .
but you must do extremely well .
and here 's the key : there are just as few relevant funders in usa-land as there are lesters in lesterland .
now you say , really ?
really .05 percent ?
well , here are the numbers from 2010 : .26 percent of america gave 200 dollars or more to any federal candidate , .05 percent gave the maximum amount to any federal candidate , .01 percent - the one percent of the one percent - gave 10,000 dollars or more to federal candidates , and in this election cycle , my favorite statistic is .000042 percent - for those of you doing the numbers , you know that 's 132 americans - gave 60 percent of the super pac money spent in the cycle we have just seen ending .
so i 'm just a lawyer , i look at this range of numbers , and i say it 's fair for me to say it 's .05 percent who are our relevant funders in america .
in this sense , the funders are our lesters .
now , what can we say about this democracy in usa-land ?
well , as the supreme court said in citizens united , we could say , of course the people have the ultimate influence over the elected officials . we have a general election , but only after the funders have had their way with the candidates who wish to run in that general election .
and number two , obviously , this dependence upon the funders produces a subtle , understated , camouflaged bending to keep the funders happy .
candidates for congress and members of congress spend between 30 and 70 percent of their time raising money to get back to congress or to get their party back into power , and the question we need to ask is , what does it do to them , these humans , as they spend their time behind the telephone , calling people they 've never met , but calling the tiniest slice of the one percent ?
as anyone would , as they do this , they develop a sixth sense , a constant awareness about how what they do might affect their ability to raise money .
they become , in the words of " the x-files , " shape-shifters , as they constantly adjust their views in light of what they know will help them to raise money , not on issues one to 10 , but on issues 11 to 1,000 .
leslie byrne , a democrat from virginia , describes that when she went to congress , she was told by a colleague , " always lean to the green . "
then to clarify , she went on , " he was not an environmentalist . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- so here too we have a democracy , a democracy dependent upon the funders and dependent upon the people , competing dependencies , possibly conflicting dependencies depending upon who the funders are .
okay , the united states is lesterland , point number one .
the united states is worse than lesterland , worse than lesterland because you can imagine in lesterland if we lesters got a letter from the government that said , " hey , you get to pick who gets to run in the general election , " we would think maybe of a kind of aristocracy of lesters .
you know , there are lesters from every part of social society .
there are rich lesters , poor lesters , black lesters , white lesters , not many women lesters , but put that to the side for one second .
we have lesters from everywhere . we could think , " what could we do to make lesterland better ? "
it 's at least possible the lesters would act for the good of lesterland .
but in our land , in this land , in usa-land , there are certainly some sweet lesters out there , many of them in this room here today , but the vast majority of lesters act for the lesters , because the shifting coalitions that are comprising the .05 percent are not comprising it for the public interest .
it 's for their private interest . in this sense , the usa is worse than lesterland .
and finally , point number three : whatever one wants to say about lesterland , against the background of its history , its traditions , in our land , in usa-land , lesterland is a corruption , a corruption .
now , by corruption i do n't mean brown paper bag cash secreted among members of congress .
i do n't mean rod blagojevich sense of corruption .
i do n't mean any criminal act .
the corruption i 'm talking about is perfectly legal .
it 's a corruption relative to the framers ' baseline for this republic .
the framers gave us what they called a republic , but by a republic they meant a representative democracy , and by a representative democracy , they meant a government , as madison put it in federalist 52 , that would have a branch that would be dependent upon the people alone .
they have the people and the government with this exclusive dependency , but the problem here is that congress has evolved a different dependence , no longer a dependence upon the people alone , increasingly a dependence upon the funders .
now this is a dependence too , but it 's different and conflicting from a dependence upon the people alone so long as the funders are not the people .
this is a corruption .
now , there 's good news and bad news about this corruption .
one bit of good news is that it 's bipartisan , equal-opportunity corruption .
it blocks the left on a whole range of issues that we on the left really care about .
it blocks the right too , as it makes principled arguments of the right increasingly impossible .
so the right wants smaller government .
when al gore was vice president , his team had an idea for deregulating a significant portion of the telecommunications industry .
the chief policy man took this idea to capitol hill , and as he reported back to me , the response was , " hell no !
if we deregulate these guys , how are we going to raise money from them ? "
this is a system that 's designed to save the status quo , including the status quo of big and invasive government .
it works against the left and the right , and that , you might say , is good news .
but here 's the bad news .
it 's a pathological , democracy-destroying corruption , because in any system where the members are dependent upon the tiniest fraction of us for their election , that means the tiniest number of us , the tiniest , tiniest number of us , can block reform .
i know that should have been , like , a rock or something .
i can only find cheese . i 'm sorry . so there it is .
block reform .
because there is an economy here , an economy of influence , an economy with lobbyists at the center which feeds on polarization .
it feeds on dysfunction .
the worse that it is for us , the better that it is for this fundraising .
henry david thoreau : " there are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root . "
this is the root .
okay , now , every single one of you knows this .
you could n't be here if you did n't know this , yet you ignore it .
you ignore it . this is an impossible problem .
you focus on the possible problems , like eradicating polio from the world , or taking an image of every single street across the globe , or building the first real universal translator , or building a fusion factory in your garage .
these are the manageable problems , so you ignore - -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- - so you ignore this corruption .
but we can not ignore this corruption anymore .
-lrb- applause -rrb- we need a government that works .
and not works for the left or the right , but works for the left and the right , the citizens of the left and right , because there is no sensible reform possible until we end this corruption .
so i want you to take hold , to grab the issue you care the most about .
climate change is mine , but it might be financial reform or a simpler tax system or inequality .
grab that issue , sit it down in front of you , look straight in its eyes , and tell it there is no christmas this year .
there will never be a christmas .
we will never get your issue solved until we fix this issue first .
so it 's not that mine is the most important issue . it 's not .
yours is the most important issue , but mine is the first issue , the issue we have to solve before we get to fix the issues you care about .
no sensible reform , and we can not afford a world , a future , with no sensible reform .
okay . so how do we do it ?
turns out , the analytics here are easy , simple .
if the problem is members spending an extraordinary amount of time fundraising from the tiniest slice of america , the solution is to have them spend less time fundraising but fundraise from a wider slice of americans , to spread it out , to spread the funder influence so that we restore the idea of dependence upon the people alone .
and to do this does not require a constitutional amendment , changing the first amendment .
to do this would require a single statute , a statute establishing what we think of as small dollar funded elections , a statute of citizen-funded campaigns , and there 's any number of these proposals out there : fair elections now act , the american anti-corruption act , an idea in my book that i call the grant and franklin project to give vouchers to people to fund elections , an idea of john sarbanes called the grassroots democracy act .
each of these would fix this corruption by spreading out the influence of funders to all of us .
the analytics are easy here .
it 's the politics that 's hard , indeed impossibly hard , because this reform would shrink k street , and capitol hill , as congressman jim cooper , a democrat from tennessee , put it , has become a farm league for k street , a farm league for k street .
members and staffers and bureaucrats have an increasingly common business model in their head , a business model focused on their life after government , their life as lobbyists .
fifty percent of the senate between 1998 and 2004 left to become lobbyists , 42 percent of the house .
those numbers have only gone up , and as united republic calculated last april , the average increase in salary for those who they tracked was 1,452 percent .
so it 's fair to ask , how is it possible for them to change this ?
now i get this skepticism .
i get this cynicism . i get this sense of impossibility .
but i do n't buy it .
this is a solvable issue .
if you think about the issues our parents tried to solve in the 20th century , issues like racism , or sexism , or the issue that we 've been fighting in this century , homophobia , those are hard issues .
you do n't wake up one day no longer a racist .
it takes generations to tear that intuition , that dna , out of the soul of a people .
but this is a problem of just incentives , just incentives .
change the incentives , and the behavior changes , and the states that have adopted small dollar funded systems have seen overnight a change in the practice .
when connecticut adopted this system , in the very first year , 78 percent of elected representatives gave up large contributions and took small contributions only .
it 's solvable , not by being a democrat , not by being a republican .
it 's solvable by being citizens , by being citizens , by being tedizens .
because if you want to kickstart reform , look , i could kickstart reform at half the price of fixing energy policy , i could give you back a republic .
okay . but even if you 're not yet with me , even if you believe this is impossible , what the five years since i spoke at ted has taught me as i 've spoken about this issue again and again is , even if you think it 's impossible , that is irrelevant .
irrelevant .
i spoke at dartmouth once , and a woman stood up after i spoke , i write in my book , and she said to me , " professor , you 've convinced me this is hopeless . hopeless .
there 's nothing we can do . "
when she said that , i scrambled .
i tried to think , " how do i respond to that hopelessness ?
what is that sense of hopelessness ? "
and what hit me was an image of my six-year-old son .
and i imagined a doctor coming to me and saying , " your son has terminal brain cancer , and there 's nothing you can do .
nothing you can do . "
so would i do nothing ?
would i just sit there ? accept it ? okay , nothing i can do ?
i 'm going off to build google glass .
of course not . i would do everything i could , and i would do everything i could because this is what love means , that the odds are irrelevant and that you do whatever the hell you can , the odds be damned .
and then i saw the obvious link , because even we liberals love this country .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and so when the pundits and the politicians say that change is impossible , what this love of country says back is , " that 's just irrelevant . "
we lose something dear , something everyone in this room loves and cherishes , if we lose this republic , and so we act with everything we can to prove these pundits wrong .
so here 's my question : do you have that love ?
do you have that love ?
because if you do , then what the hell are you , what are the hell are we doing ?
when ben franklin was carried from the constitutional convention in september of 1787 , he was stopped in the street by a woman who said , " mr. franklin , what have you wrought ? "
franklin said , " a republic , madam , if you can keep it . "
a republic . a representative democracy .
a government dependent upon the people alone .
we have lost that republic .
all of us have to act to get it back .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you . thank you . thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- if you take 10,000 people at random , 9,999 have something in common : their interests in business lie on or near the earth 's surface .
the odd one out is an astronomer , and i am one of that strange breed .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- my talk will be in two parts . i 'll talk first as an astronomer , and then as a worried member of the human race .
but let 's start off by remembering that darwin showed how we 're the outcome of four billion years of evolution .
and what we try to do in astronomy and cosmology is to go back before darwin 's simple beginning , to set our earth in a cosmic context .
and let me just run through a few slides .
this was the impact that happened last week on a comet .
if they 'd sent a nuke , it would have been rather more spectacular than what actually happened last monday .
so that 's another project for nasa .
that 's mars from the european mars express , and at new year .
this artist 's impression turned into reality when a parachute landed on titan , saturn 's giant moon .
it landed on the surface . this is pictures taken on the way down .
that looks like a coastline .
it is indeed , but the ocean is liquid methane - the temperature minus 170 degrees centigrade .
if we go beyond our solar system , we 've learned that the stars are n't twinkly points of light .
each one is like a sun with a retinue of planets orbiting around it .
and we can see places where stars are forming , like the eagle nebula . we see stars dying .
in six billion years , the sun will look like that .
and some stars die spectacularly in a supernova explosion , leaving remnants like that .
on a still bigger scale , we see entire galaxies of stars .
we see entire ecosystems where gas is being recycled .
and to the cosmologist , these galaxies are just the atoms , as it were , of the large-scale universe .
this picture shows a patch of sky so small that it would take about 100 patches like it to cover the full moon in the sky .
through a small telescope , this would look quite blank , but you see here hundreds of little , faint smudges .
each is a galaxy , fully like ours or andromeda , which looks so small and faint because its light has taken 10 billion light-years to get to us .
the stars in those galaxies probably do n't have planets around them .
there 's scant chance of life there - that 's because there 's been no time for the nuclear fusion in stars to make silicon and carbon and iron , the building blocks of planets and of life .
we believe that all of this emerged from a big bang - a hot , dense state . so how did that amorphous big bang turn into our complex cosmos ?
i 'm going to show you a movie simulation 16 powers of 10 faster than real time , which shows a patch of the universe where the expansions have subtracted out .
but you see , as time goes on in gigayears at the bottom , you will see structures evolve as gravity feeds on small , dense irregularities , and structures develop .
and we 'll end up after 13 billion years with something looking rather like our own universe .
and we compare simulated universes like that - i 'll show you a better simulation at the end of my talk - with what we actually see in the sky .
well , we can trace things back to the earlier stages of the big bang , but we still do n't know what banged and why it banged .
that 's a challenge for 21st-century science .
if my research group had a logo , it would be this picture here : an ouroboros , where you see the micro-world on the left - the world of the quantum - and on the right the large-scale universe of planets , stars and galaxies .
we know our universes are united though - links between left and right .
the everyday world is determined by atoms , how they stick together to make molecules .
stars are fueled by how the nuclei in those atoms react together .
and , as we 've learned in the last few years , galaxies are held together by the gravitational pull of so-called dark matter : particles in huge swarms , far smaller even than atomic nuclei .
but we 'd like to know the synthesis symbolized at the very top .
the micro-world of the quantum is understood .
on the right hand side , gravity holds sway . einstein explained that .
but the unfinished business for 21st-century science is to link together cosmos and micro-world with a unified theory - symbolized , as it were , gastronomically at the top of that picture . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and until we have that synthesis , we wo n't be able to understand the very beginning of our universe because when our universe was itself the size of an atom , quantum effects could shake everything .
and so we need a theory that unifies the very large and the very small , which we do n't yet have .
one idea , incidentally - and i had this hazard sign to say i 'm going to speculate from now on - is that our big bang was not the only one .
one idea is that our three-dimensional universe may be embedded in a high-dimensional space , just as you can imagine on these sheets of paper .
you can imagine ants on one of them thinking it 's a two-dimensional universe , not being aware of another population of ants on the other .
so there could be another universe just a millimeter away from ours , but we 're not aware of it because that millimeter is measured in some fourth spatial dimension , and we 're imprisoned in our three .
and so we believe that there may be a lot more to physical reality than what we 've normally called our universe - the aftermath of our big bang . and here 's another picture .
bottom right depicts our universe , which on the horizon is not beyond that , but even that is just one bubble , as it were , in some vaster reality .
many people suspect that just as we 've gone from believing in one solar system to zillions of solar systems , one galaxy to many galaxies , we have to go to many big bangs from one big bang , perhaps these many big bangs displaying an immense variety of properties .
well , let 's go back to this picture .
there 's one challenge symbolized at the top , but there 's another challenge to science symbolized at the bottom .
you want to not only synthesize the very large and the very small , but we want to understand the very complex .
and the most complex things are ourselves , midway between atoms and stars .
we depend on stars to make the atoms we 're made of .
we depend on chemistry to determine our complex structure .
we clearly have to be large , compared to atoms , to have layer upon layer of complex structure .
we clearly have to be small , compared to stars and planets - otherwise we 'd be crushed by gravity . and in fact , we are midway .
it would take as many human bodies to make up the sun as there are atoms in each of us .
the geometric mean of the mass of a proton and the mass of the sun is 50 kilograms , within a factor of two of the mass of each person here .
well , most of you anyway .
the science of complexity is probably the greatest challenge of all , greater than that of the very small on the left and the very large on the right .
and it 's this science , which is not only enlightening our understanding of the biological world , but also transforming our world faster than ever .
and more than that , it 's engendering new kinds of change .
and i now move on to the second part of my talk , and the book " our final century " was mentioned .
if i was not a self-effacing brit , i would mention the book myself , and i would add that it 's available in paperback .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and in america it was called " our final hour " because americans like instant gratification .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but my theme is that in this century , not only has science changed the world faster than ever , but in new and different ways .
targeted drugs , genetic modification , artificial intelligence , perhaps even implants into our brains , may change human beings themselves . and human beings , their physique and character , has not changed for thousands of years .
it may change this century .
it 's new in our history .
and the human impact on the global environment - greenhouse warming , mass extinctions and so forth - is unprecedented , too .
and so , this makes this coming century a challenge .
bio- and cybertechnologies are environmentally benign in that they offer marvelous prospects , while , nonetheless , reducing pressure on energy and resources .
but they will have a dark side .
in our interconnected world , novel technology could empower just one fanatic , or some weirdo with a mindset of those who now design computer viruses , to trigger some kind on disaster .
indeed , catastrophe could arise simply from technical misadventure - error rather than terror .
and even a tiny probability of catastrophe is unacceptable when the downside could be of global consequence .
in fact , some years ago , bill joy wrote an article expressing tremendous concern about robots taking us over , etc .
i do n't go along with all that , but it 's interesting that he had a simple solution .
it was what he called " fine-grained relinquishment . "
he wanted to give up the dangerous kind of science and keep the good bits . now , that 's absurdly naive for two reasons .
first , any scientific discovery has benign consequences as well as dangerous ones .
and also , when a scientist makes a discovery , he or she normally has no clue what the applications are going to be .
and so what this means is that we have to accept the risks if we are going to enjoy the benefits of science .
we have to accept that there will be hazards .
and i think we have to go back to what happened in the post-war era , post-world war ii , when the nuclear scientists who 'd been involved in making the atomic bomb , in many cases were concerned that they should do all they could to alert the world to the dangers .
and they were inspired not by the young einstein , who did the great work in relativity , but by the old einstein , the icon of poster and t-shirt , who failed in his scientific efforts to unify the physical laws .
he was premature . but he was a moral compass - an inspiration to scientists who were concerned with arms control .
and perhaps the greatest living person is someone i 'm privileged to know , joe rothblatt .
equally untidy office there , as you can see .
he 's 96 years old , and he founded the pugwash movement .
he persuaded einstein , as his last act , to sign the famous memorandum of bertrand russell .
and he sets an example of the concerned scientist .
and i think to harness science optimally , to choose which doors to open and which to leave closed , we need latter-day counterparts of people like joseph rothblatt .
we need not just campaigning physicists , but we need biologists , computer experts and environmentalists as well .
and i think academics and independent entrepreneurs have a special obligation because they have more freedom than those in government service , or company employees subject to commercial pressure .
i wrote my book , " our final century , " as a scientist , just a general scientist . but there 's one respect , i think , in which being a cosmologist offered a special perspective , and that 's that it offers an awareness of the immense future .
the stupendous time spans of the evolutionary past are now part of common culture - outside the american bible belt , anyway - -lrb- laughter -rrb- but most people , even those who are familiar with evolution , are n't mindful that even more time lies ahead .
the sun has been shining for four and a half billion years , but it 'll be another six billion years before its fuel runs out .
on that schematic picture , a sort of time-lapse picture , we 're halfway .
and it 'll be another six billion before that happens , and any remaining life on earth is vaporized .
there 's an unthinking tendency to imagine that humans will be there , experiencing the sun 's demise , but any life and intelligence that exists then will be as different from us as we are from bacteria .
the unfolding of intelligence and complexity still has immensely far to go , here on earth and probably far beyond .
so we are still at the beginning of the emergence of complexity in our earth and beyond .
if you represent the earth 's lifetime by a single year , say from january when it was made to december , the 21st-century would be a quarter of a second in june - a tiny fraction of the year .
but even in this concertinaed cosmic perspective , our century is very , very special , the first when humans can change themselves and their home planet .
as i should have shown this earlier , it will not be humans who witness the end point of the sun ; it will be creatures as different from us as we are from bacteria .
when einstein died in 1955 , one striking tribute to his global status was this cartoon by herblock in the washington post .
the plaque reads , " albert einstein lived here . "
and i 'd like to end with a vignette , as it were , inspired by this image .
we 've been familiar for 40 years with this image : the fragile beauty of land , ocean and clouds , contrasted with the sterile moonscape on which the astronauts left their footprints .
but let 's suppose some aliens had been watching our pale blue dot in the cosmos from afar , not just for 40 years , but for the entire 4.5 billion-year history of our earth .
what would they have seen ?
over nearly all that immense time , earth 's appearance would have changed very gradually .
the only abrupt worldwide change would have been major asteroid impacts or volcanic super-eruptions .
apart from those brief traumas , nothing happens suddenly .
the continental landmasses drifted around .
ice cover waxed and waned .
successions of new species emerged , evolved and became extinct .
but in just a tiny sliver of the earth 's history , the last one-millionth part , a few thousand years , the patterns of vegetation altered much faster than before .
this signaled the start of agriculture .
change has accelerated as human populations rose .
then other things happened even more abruptly .
within just 50 years - that 's one hundredth of one millionth of the earth 's age - the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere started to rise , and ominously fast .
the planet became an intense emitter of radio waves - the total output from all tv and cell phones and radar transmissions . and something else happened .
metallic objects - albeit very small ones , a few tons at most - escaped into orbit around the earth .
some journeyed to the moons and planets .
a race of advanced extraterrestrials watching our solar system from afar could confidently predict earth 's final doom in another six billion years .
but could they have predicted this unprecedented spike less than halfway through the earth 's life ?
these human-induced alterations occupying overall less than a millionth of the elapsed lifetime and seemingly occurring with runaway speed ?
if they continued their vigil , what might these hypothetical aliens witness will some spasm foreclose earth 's future ?
or will the biosphere stabilize ?
or will some of the metallic objects launched from the earth spawn new oases , a post-human life elsewhere ?
the science done by the young einstein will continue as long as our civilization , but for civilization to survive , we 'll need the wisdom of the old einstein - humane , global and farseeing .
and whatever happens in this uniquely crucial century will resonate into the remote future and perhaps far beyond the earth , far beyond the earth as depicted here .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so i want to talk a little bit about seeing the world from a totally unique point of view , and this world i 'm going to talk about is the micro world .
i 've found , after doing this for many , many years , that there 's a magical world behind reality .
and that can be seen directly through a microscope , and i 'm going to show you some of this today .
so let 's start off looking at something rather not-so-small , something that we can see with our naked eye , and that 's a bee . so when you look at this bee , it 's about this size here , it 's about a centimeter .
but to really see the details of the bee , and really appreciate what it is , you have to look a little bit closer .
so that 's just the eye of the bee with a microscope , and now all of a sudden you can see that the bee has thousands of individual eyes called ommatidia , and they actually have sensory hairs in their eyes so they know when they 're right up close to something , because they ca n't see in stereo .
as we go smaller , here is a human hair .
a human hair is about the smallest thing that the eye can see .
it 's about a tenth of a millimeter .
and as we go smaller again , about ten times smaller than that , is a cell .
so you could fit 10 human cells across the diameter of a human hair .
so when we would look at cells , this is how i really got involved in biology and science is by looking at living cells in the microscope .
when i first saw living cells in a microscope , i was absolutely enthralled and amazed at what they looked like .
so if you look at the cell like that from the immune system , they 're actually moving all over the place .
this cell is looking for foreign objects , bacteria , things that it can find .
and it 's looking around , and when it finds something , and recognizes it being foreign , it will actually engulf it and eat it .
so if you look right there , it finds that little bacterium , and it engulfs it and eats it .
if you take some heart cells from an animal , and put it in a dish , they 'll just sit there and beat .
that 's their job . every cell has a mission in life , and these cells , the mission is to move blood around our body .
these next cells are nerve cells , and right now , as we see and understand what we 're looking at , our brains and our nerve cells are actually doing this right now . they 're not just static . they 're moving around making new connections , and that 's what happens when we learn .
as you go farther down this scale here , that 's a micron , or a micrometer , and we go all the way down to here to a nanometer and an angstrom . now , an angstrom is the size of the diameter of a hydrogen atom .
that 's how small that is .
and microscopes that we have today can actually see individual atoms . so these are some pictures of individual atoms . each bump here is an individual atom .
this is a ring of cobalt atoms .
so this whole world , the nano world , this area in here is called the nano world , and the nano world , the whole micro world that we see , there 's a nano world that is wrapped up within that , and the whole - and that is the world of molecules and atoms .
but i want to talk about this larger world , the world of the micro world .
so if you were a little tiny bug living in a flower , what would that flower look like , if the flower was this big ?
it would n't look or feel like anything that we see when we look at a flower . so if you look at this flower here , and you 're a little bug , if you 're on that surface of that flower , that 's what the terrain would look like .
the petal of that flower looks like that , so the ant is kind of crawling over these objects , and if you look a little bit closer at this stigma and the stamen here , this is the style of that flower , and you notice that it 's got these little - these are like little jelly-like things that are what are called spurs . these are nectar spurs .
so this little ant that 's crawling here , it 's like it 's in a little willy wonka land .
it 's like a little disneyland for them . it 's not like what we see .
these are little bits of individual grain of pollen there and there , and here is a - what you see as one little yellow dot of pollen , when you look in a microscope , it 's actually made of thousands of little grains of pollen .
so this , for example , when you see bees flying around these little plants , and they 're collecting pollen , those pollen grains that they 're collecting , they pack into their legs and they take it back to the hive , and that 's what makes the beehive , the wax in the beehive . and they 're also collecting nectar , and that 's what makes the honey that we eat .
here 's a close-up picture , or this is actually a regular picture of a water hyacinth , and if you had really , really good vision , with your naked eye , you 'd see it about that well .
there 's the stamen and the pistil . but look what the stamen and the pistil look like in a microscope . that 's the stamen .
so that 's thousands of little grains of pollen there , and there 's the pistil there , and these are the little things called trichomes . and that 's what makes the flower give a fragrance , and plants actually communicate with one another through their fragrances .
i want to talk about something really ordinary , just ordinary sand .
i became interested in sand about 10 years ago , when i first saw sand from maui , and in fact , this is a little bit of sand from maui .
so sand is about a tenth of a millimeter in size .
each sand grain is about a tenth of a millimeter in size .
but when you look closer at this , look at what 's there .
it 's really quite amazing . you have microshells there .
you have things like coral .
you have fragments of other shells . you have olivine .
you have bits of a volcano . there 's a little bit of a volcano there . you have tube worms .
an amazing array of incredible things exist in sand .
and the reason that is , is because in a place like this island , a lot of the sand is made of biological material because the reefs provide a place where all these microscopic animals or macroscopic animals grow , and when they die , their shells and their teeth and their bones break up and they make grains of sand , things like coral and so forth .
so here 's , for example , a picture of sand from maui .
this is from lahaina , and when we 're walking along a beach , we 're actually walking along millions of years of biological and geological history .
we do n't realize it , but it 's actually a record of that entire ecology .
so here we see , for example , a sponge spicule , two bits of coral here , that 's a sea urchin spine . really some amazing stuff .
so when i first looked at this , i was - i thought , gee , this is like a little treasure trove here .
i could n't believe it , and i 'd go around dissecting the little bits out and making photographs of them .
here 's what most of the sand in our world looks like .
these are quartz crystals and feldspar , so most sand in the world on the mainland is made of quartz crystal and feldspar . it 's the erosion of granite rock .
so mountains are built up , and they erode away by water and rain and ice and so forth , and they become grains of sand .
there 's some sand that 's really much more colorful .
these are sand from near the great lakes , and you can see that it 's filled with minerals like pink garnet and green epidote , all kinds of amazing stuff , and if you look at different sands from different places , every single beach , every single place you look at sand , it 's different . here 's from big sur , like they 're little jewels .
there are places in africa where they do the mining of jewels , and you go to the sand where the rivers have the sand go down to the ocean , and it 's like literally looking at tiny jewels through the microscope .
so every grain of sand is unique . every beach is different .
every single grain is different . there are no two grains of sand alike in the world .
every grain of sand is coming somewhere and going somewhere .
they 're like a snapshot in time .
now sand is not only on earth , but sand is ubiquitous throughout the universe . in fact , outer space is filled with sand , and that sand comes together to make our planets and the moon .
and you can see those in micrometeorites .
this is some micrometeorites that the army gave me , and they get these out of the drinking wells in the south pole .
and they 're quite amazing-looking , and these are the tiny constituents that make up the world that we live in - the planets and the moon .
so nasa wanted me to take some pictures of moon sand , so they sent me sand from all the different landings of the apollo missions that happened 40 years ago .
and i started taking pictures with my three-dimensional microscopes .
this was the first picture i took . it was kind of amazing .
i thought it looked kind of a little bit like the moon , which is sort of interesting .
now , the way my microscopes work is , normally in a microscope you can see very little at one time , so what you have to do is you have to refocus the microscope , keep taking pictures , and then i have a computer program that puts all those pictures together into one picture so you can see actually what it looks like , and i do that in 3d . so there , you can see , is a left-eye view . there 's a right-eye view .
so sort of left-eye view , right-eye view .
now something 's interesting here . this looks very different than any sand on earth that i 've ever seen , and i 've seen a lot of sand on earth , believe me . -lrb- laughter -rrb- look at this hole in the middle . that hole was caused by a micrometeorite hitting the moon .
now , the moon has no atmosphere , so micrometeorites come in continuously , and the whole surface of the moon is covered with powder now , because for four billion years it 's been bombarded by micrometeorites , and when micrometeorites come in at about 20 to 60,000 miles an hour , they vaporize on contact .
and you can see here that that is - that 's sort of vaporized , and that material is holding this little clump of little sand grains together .
this is a very small grain of sand , this whole thing .
and that 's called a ring agglutinate .
and many of the grains of sand on the moon look like that , and you 'd never find that on earth .
most of the sand on the moon , especially - and you know when you look at the moon , there 's the dark areas and the light areas . the dark areas are lava flows . they 're basaltic lava flows , and that 's what this sand looks like , very similar to the sand that you would see in haleakala .
other sands , when these micrometeorites come in , they vaporize and they make these fountains , these microscopic fountains that go up into the - i was going to say " up into the air , " but there is no air - goes sort of up , and these microscopic glass beads are formed instantly , and they harden , and by the time they fall down back to the surface of the moon , they have these beautiful colored glass spherules .
and these are actually microscopic ; you need a microscope to see these .
now here 's a grain of sand that is from the moon , and you can see that the entire crystal structure is still there .
this grain of sand is probably about three and a half or four billion years old , and it 's never eroded away like the way we have sand on earth erodes away because of water and tumbling , air , and so forth . all you can see is a little bit of erosion down here by the sun , has these solar storms , and that 's erosion by solar radiation .
so what i 've been trying to tell you today is things even as ordinary as a grain of sand can be truly extraordinary if you look closely and if you look from a different and a new point of view .
i think that this was best put by william blake when he said , " to see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower , hold infinity in the palm of your hand , and eternity in an hour . "
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- so i want to take you on a trip to an alien world .
and it 's not a trip that requires light-years of travel , but it 's to a place where it 's defined by light .
so it 's a little-appreciated fact that most of the animals in our ocean make light .
i 've spent most of my career studying this phenomenon called bioluminescence .
i study it because i think understanding it is critical to understanding life in the ocean where most bioluminescence occurs .
i also use it as a tool for visualizing and tracking pollution .
but mostly i 'm entranced by it .
since my my first dive in a deep-diving submersible , when i went down and turned out the lights and saw the fireworks displays , i 've been a bioluminescence junky .
but i would come back from those dives and try to share the experience with words , and they were totally inadequate to the task .
i needed some way to share the experience directly .
and the first time i figured out that way was in this little single-person submersible called deep rover .
this next video clip , you 're going to see how we stimulated the bioluminescence .
and the first thing you 're going to see is a transect screen that is about a meter across .
-lrb- video -rrb- narrator : in front of the sub , a mess screen will come into contact with the sub 's lights switched off , it is possible to see their bioluminescence - the light produced when they collide with the mesh .
this is the first time it has ever been recorded .
edith widder : so i recorded that with an intensified video camera that has about the sensitivity of the fully dark-adapted human eye .
which means that really is what you would see if you took a dive in a submersible .
but just to try to prove that fact to you , i 've brought along some bioluminescent plankton in what is undoubtedly a foolhardy attempt at a live demonstration .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , if we could have the lights down and have it as dark in here as possible , i have a flask that has bioluminescent plankton in it .
and you 'll note there 's no light coming from them right now , either because they 're dead - -lrb- laughter -rrb- or because i need to stir them up in some way for you to see what bioluminescence really looks like .
-lrb- gasps -rrb- oops . sorry .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i spend most of my time working in the dark ; i 'm used to that .
okay .
so that light was made by a bioluminescent dinoflagellate , a single-celled alga .
so why would a single-celled alga need to be able to produce light ?
well , it uses it to defend itself from its predators .
the flash is like a scream for help .
it 's what 's known as a bioluminescent burglar alarm , and just like the alarm on your car or your house , it 's meant to cast unwanted attention onto the intruder , thereby either leading to his capture or scaring him away .
there 's a lot of animals that use this trick , for example this black dragonfish .
it 's got a light organ under its eye .
it 's got a chin barbel .
it 's got a lot of other light organs you ca n't see , but you 'll see in here in a minute .
so we had to chase this in the submersible for quite sometime , because the top speed of this fish is one knot , which was the top speed of the submersible .
but it was worth it , because we caught it in a special capture device , brought it up into the lab on the ship , and then everything on this fish lights up .
it 's unbelievable .
the light organs under the eyes are flashing .
that chin barbel is flashing .
it 's got light organs on its belly that are flashing , fin lights .
it 's a scream for help ; it 's meant to attract attention .
it 's phenomenal .
and you normally do n't get to see this because we 've exhausted the luminescence when we bring them up in nets .
there 's other ways you can defend yourself with light .
for example , this shrimp releases its bioluminescent chemicals into the water just the way a squid or an octopus would release an ink cloud .
this blinds or distracts the predator .
this little squid is called the fire shooter now it may look like a tasty morsel , or a pig 's head with wings - -lrb- laughter -rrb- but if it 's attacked , it puts out a barrage of light - in fact , a barrage of photon torpedoes .
i just barely got the lights out in time for you to be able to see those gobs of light hitting the transect screen and then just glowing .
it 's phenomenal .
so there 's a lot of animals in the open ocean - most of them that make light .
and we have a pretty good idea , for most of them , why .
they use it for finding food , for attracting mates , for defending against predators .
but when you get down to the bottom of the ocean , that 's where things get really strange .
and some of these animals are probably inspiration for the things you saw in " avatar , " but you do n't have to travel to pandora to see them .
they 're things like this .
this is a golden coral , a bush .
it grows very slowly .
in fact , it 's thought that some of these are as much as 3,000 years old , which is one reason that bottom trawling should not be allowed .
the other reason is this amazing bush glows .
so if you brush up against it , any place you brushed against it , you get this twinkling blue-green light that 's just breathtaking .
and you see things like this .
this looks like something out of a dr. seuss book - just all manner of creatures all over this thing .
and these are flytrap anemones .
now if you poke it , it pulls in its tentacles .
but if you keep poking it , it starts to produce light .
and it actually ends up looking like a galaxy .
it produces these strings of light , presumably as some form of defense .
there are starfish that can make light .
and there are brittle stars that produce bands of light that dance along their arms .
this looks like a plant , but it 's actually an animal .
and it anchors itself in the sand by blowing up a balloon on the end of its stock .
so it can actually hold itself in very strong currents , as you see here .
but if we collect it very gently , and we bring it up into the lab and just squeeze it at the base of the stock , it produces this light that propagates from stem to the plume , changing color as it goes , from green to blue .
colorization and sound effects added for you viewing pleasure .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but we have no idea why it does that .
here 's another one . this is also a sea pen .
it 's got a brittle star hitching a ride .
it 's a green saber of light .
and like the one you just saw , it can produce these as bands of light .
so if i squeeze the base , the bands go from base to tip .
if i squeeze the tip , they go from tip to base .
so what do you think happens if you squeeze it in the middle ?
-lrb- gasps -rrb- i 'd be very interested in your theories about what that 's about .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so there 's a language of light in the deep ocean , and we 're just beginning to understand it , and one way we 're going about that is we 're imitating a lot of these displays .
this is an optical lure that i 've used .
we call it the electronic jellyfish .
it 's just 16 blue leds that we can program to do different types of displays .
and we view it with a camera system i developed called eye-in-the-sea that uses far red light that 's invisible to most animals , so it 's unobtrusive .
so i just want to show you some of the responses we 've elicited from animals in the deep sea .
so the camera 's black and white .
it 's not high-resolution .
and what you 're seeing here is a bait box with a bunch of - like the cockroaches of the ocean - there are isopods all over it .
and right in the front is the electronic jellyfish .
and when it starts flashing , it 's just going to be one of the leds that 's flashing very fast .
but as soon as it starts to flash - and it 's going to look big , because it blooms on the camera - i want you to look right here .
there 's something small there that responds .
we 're talking to something .
it looks like a little of string pearls basically - in fact , three strings of pearls .
and this was very consistent .
this was in the bahamas at about 2,000 feet .
we basically have a chat room going on here , because once it gets started , everybody 's talking .
and i think this is actually a shrimp that 's releasing its bioluminescent chemicals into the water .
but the cool thing is , we 're talking to it .
we do n't know what we 're saying .
personally , i think it 's something sexy .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and then finally , i want to show you some responses that we recorded with the world 's first deep-sea webcam , which we had installed in monterey canyon last year .
we 've only just begun to analyze all of this data .
this is going to be a glowing source first , which is like bioluminescent bacteria .
and it is an optical cue that there 's carrion on the bottom of the ocean .
so this scavenger comes in , which is a giant sixgill shark .
and i ca n't claim for sure that the optical source brought it in , because there 's bait right there .
but if it had been following the odor plume , it would have come in from the other direction .
and it does actually seem to be trying to eat the electronic jellyfish .
that 's a 12-foot-long giant sixgill shark .
okay , so this next one is from the webcam , and it 's going to be this pinwheel display .
and this is a burglar alarm .
and that was a humboldt squid , a juvenile humboldt squid , about three feet long .
this is at 3,000 feet in monterey canyon .
but if it 's a burglar alarm , you would n't expect it to attack the jellyfish directly .
it 's supposed to be attacking what 's attacking the jellyfish .
but we did see a bunch of responses like this .
this guy is a little more contemplative .
" hey , wait a minute .
there 's supposed to be something else there . "
he 's thinking about it .
but he 's persistent .
he keeps coming back .
and then he goes away for a few seconds to think about it some more , and thinks , " maybe if i come in from a different angle . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- nope .
so we are starting to get a handle on this , but only just the beginnings .
we need more eyes on the process .
so if any of you ever get a chance to take a dive in a submersible , by all means , climb in and take the plunge .
this is something that should be on everybody 's bucket list , because we live on an ocean planet .
more than 90 percent , 99 percent , of the living space on our planet is ocean .
it 's a magical place filled with breathtaking light shows and bizarre and wondrous creatures , alien life forms that you do n't have to travel to another planet to see .
but if you do take the plunge , please remember to turn out the lights .
but i warn you , it 's addictive .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i want to talk today about - i 've been asked to take the long view , and i 'm going to tell you what i think are the three biggest problems for humanity from this long point of view .
some of these have already been touched upon by other speakers , which is encouraging .
it seems that there 's not just one person who thinks that these problems are important .
the first is - death is a big problem .
if you look at the statistics , the odds are not very favorable to us .
so far , most people who have lived have also died .
roughly 90 percent of everybody who has been alive has died by now .
so the annual death rate adds up to 150,000 - sorry , the daily death rate - 150,000 people per day , which is a huge number by any standard .
the annual death rate , then , becomes 56 million .
if we just look at the single , biggest cause of death - aging - it accounts for roughly two-thirds of all human people who die .
that adds up to an annual death toll of greater than the population of canada .
sometimes , we do n't see a problem because either it 's too familiar or it 's too big .
ca n't see it because it 's too big .
i think death might be both too familiar and too big for most people to see it as a problem .
once you think about it , you see this is not statistical points ; these are - let 's see , how far have i talked ?
i 've talked for three minutes .
so that would be , roughly , 324 people have died since i 've begun speaking .
people like - it 's roughly the population in this room has just died .
now , the human cost of that is obvious , once you start to think about it - the suffering , the loss - it 's also , economically , enormously wasteful .
i just look at the information , and knowledge , and experience that is lost due to natural causes of death in general , and aging , in particular .
suppose we approximated one person with one book ?
now , of course , this is an underestimation .
a person 's lifetime of learning and experience is a lot more than you could put into a single book .
but let 's suppose we did this .
52 million people die of natural causes each year corresponds , then , to 52 million volumes destroyed .
library of congress holds 18 million volumes .
we are upset about the burning of the library of alexandria .
it 's one of the great cultural tragedies that we remember , even today .
but this is the equivalent of three libraries of congress - burnt down , forever lost - each year .
so that 's the first big problem .
and i wish godspeed to aubrey de grey , and other people like him , to try to do something about this as soon as possible .
existential risk - the second big problem .
existential risk is a threat to human survival , or to the long-term potential of our species .
now , why do i say that this is a big problem ?
well , let 's first look at the probability - and this is very , very difficult to estimate - but there have been only four studies on this in recent years , which is surprising .
you would think that it would be of some interest to try to find out more about this given that the stakes are so big , but it 's a very neglected area .
but there have been four studies - one by john lesley , wrote a book on this .
he estimated a probability that we will fail to survive the current century : 50 percent .
similarly , the astronomer royal , whom we heard speak yesterday , also has a 50 percent probability estimate .
another author does n't give any numerical estimate , but says the probability is significant that it will fail .
i wrote a long paper on this .
i said assigning a less than 20 percent probability would be a mistake in light of the current evidence we have .
now , the exact figures here , we should take with a big grain of salt , but there seems to be a consensus that the risk is substantial .
everybody who has looked at this and studied it agrees .
now , if we think about what just reducing the probability of human extinction by just one percentage point - not very much - so that 's equivalent to 60 million lives saved , if we just count the currently living people , the current generation .
now one percent of six billion people is equivalent to 60 million .
so that 's a large number .
if we were to take into account future generations that will never come into existence if we blow ourselves up , then the figure becomes astronomical .
if we could eventually colonize a chunk of the universe - the virgo supercluster - maybe it will take us 100 million years to get there , but if we go extinct we never will .
then , even a one percentage point reduction in the extinction risk could be equivalent to this astronomical number - 10 to the power of 32 .
so if you take into account future generations as much as our own , every other moral imperative of philanthropic cost just becomes irrelevant .
the only thing you should focus on would be to reduce existential risk because even the tiniest decrease in existential risk would just overwhelm any other benefit you could hope to achieve .
and even if you just look at the current people , and ignore the potential that would be lost if we went extinct , it should still have a high priority .
now , let me spend the rest of my time on the third big problem , because it 's more subtle and perhaps difficult to grasp .
think about some time in your life - some people might never have experienced it - but some people , there are just those moments that you have experienced where life was fantastic .
it might have been at the moment of some great , creative inspiration you might have had when you just entered this flow stage .
or when you understood something you had never done before .
or perhaps in the ecstasy of romantic love .
or an aesthetic experience - a sunset or a great piece of art .
every once in a while we have these moments , and we realize just how good life can be when it 's at its best .
and you wonder , why ca n't it be like that all the time ?
you just want to cling onto this .
and then , of course , it drifts back into ordinary life and the memory fades .
and it 's really difficult to recall , in a normal frame of mind , just how good life can be at its best .
or how bad it can be at its worst .
the third big problem is that life is n't usually as wonderful as it could be .
i think that 's a big , big problem .
it 's easy to say what we do n't want .
here are a number of things that we do n't want - illness , involuntary death , unnecessary suffering , cruelty , stunted growth , memory loss , ignorance , absence of creativity .
suppose we fixed these things - we did something about all of these .
we were very successful .
we got rid of all of these things .
we might end up with something like this , which is - i mean , it 's a heck of a lot better than that .
but is this really the best we can dream of ?
is this the best we can do ?
or is it possible to find something a little bit more inspiring to work towards ?
and if we think about this , i think it 's very clear that there are ways in which we could change things , not just by eliminating negatives , but adding positives .
on my wish list , at least , would be : much longer , healthier lives , greater subjective well-being , enhanced cognitive capacities , more knowledge and understanding , unlimited opportunity for personal growth beyond our current biological limits , better relationships , an unbounded potential for spiritual , moral and intellectual development .
if we want to achieve this , what , in the world , would have to change ?
and this is the answer - we would have to change .
not just the world around us , but we , ourselves .
not just the way we think about the world , but the way we are - our very biology .
human nature would have to change .
now , when we think about changing human nature , the first thing that comes to mind are these human modification technologies - growth hormone therapy , cosmetic surgery , stimulants like ritalin , adderall , anti-depressants , anabolic steroids , artificial hearts .
it 's a pretty pathetic list .
they do great things for a few people who suffer from some specific condition , but for most people , they do n't really transform what it is to be human .
and they also all seem a little bit - most people have this instinct that , well , sure , there needs to be anti-depressants for the really depressed people .
but there 's a kind of queasiness that these are unnatural in some way .
it 's worth recalling that there are a lot of other modification technologies and enhancement technologies that we use .
we have skin enhancements , clothing .
as far as i can see , all of you are users of this enhancement technology in this room , so that 's a great thing .
mood modifiers have been used from time immemorial - caffeine , alcohol , nicotine , immune system enhancement , vision enhancement , anesthetics - we take that very much for granted , but just think about how great progress that is - like , having an operation before anesthetics was not fun .
contraceptives , cosmetics and brain reprogramming techniques - that sounds ominous , but the distinction between what is a technology - a gadget would be the archetype - and other ways of changing and rewriting human nature is quite subtle .
so if you think about what it means to learn arithmetic or to learn to read , you 're actually , literally rewriting your own brain .
you 're changing the microstructure of your brain as you go along .
so in a broad sense , we do n't need to think about technology as only little gadgets , like these things here , but even institutions and techniques , psychological methods and so forth .
forms of organization can have a profound impact on human nature .
looking ahead , there is a range of technologies that are almost certain to be developed sooner or later .
we are very ignorant about what the time scale for these things are , but they all are consistent with everything we know about physical laws , laws of chemistry , etc .
it 's possible to assume , setting aside a possibility of catastrophe , that sooner or later we will develop all of these .
and even just a couple of these would be enough to transform the human condition .
so let 's look at some of the dimensions of human nature that seem to leave room for improvement .
health span is a big and urgent thing , because if you 're not alive , then all the other things will be to little avail .
intellectual capacity - let 's take that box , which falls into a lot of different sub-categories : memory , concentration , mental energy , intelligence , empathy .
these are really great things .
part of the reason why we value these traits is that they make us better at competing with other people - they 're positional goods .
but part of the reason - and that 's the reason why we have ethical ground for pursuing these - is that they 're also intrinsically valuable .
it 's just better to be able to understand more of the world around you and the people that you are communicating with , and to remember what you have learned .
modalities and special faculties .
now , the human mind is not a single unitary information processor , but it has a lot of different , special , evolved modules that do specific things for us .
if you think about what we normally take as giving life a lot of its meaning - music , humor , eroticism , spirituality , aesthetics , nurturing and caring , gossip , chatting with people - all of these , very likely , are enabled by a special circuitry that we humans have , but that you could have another intelligent life form that lacks these .
we 're just lucky that we have the requisite neural machinery to process music and to appreciate it and enjoy it .
all of these would enable , in principle - be amenable to enhancement .
some people have a better musical ability and ability to appreciate music than others have .
it 's also interesting to think about what other things are - so if these all enabled great values , why should we think that evolution has happened to provide us with all the modalities we would need to engage with other values that there might be ?
imagine a species that just did n't have this neural machinery for processing music .
and they would just stare at us with bafflement when we spend time listening to a beautiful performance , like the one we just heard - because of people making stupid movements , and they would be really irritated and would n't see what we were up to .
but maybe they have another faculty , something else that would seem equally irrational to us , but they actually tap into some great possible value there .
but we are just literally deaf to that kind of value .
so we could think of adding on different , new sensory capacities and mental faculties .
bodily functionality and morphology and affective self-control .
greater subjective well-being .
be able to switch between relaxation and activity - being able to go slow when you need to do that , and to speed up .
able to switch back and forth more easily would be a neat thing to be able to do - easier to achieve the flow state , when you 're totally immersed in something you are doing .
conscientiousness and sympathy .
the ability to - it 's another interesting application that would have large social ramification , perhaps .
if you could actually choose to preserve your romantic attachments to one person , undiminished through time , so that would n't have to - love would never have to fade if you did n't want it to .
that 's probably not all that difficult .
it might just be a simple hormone or something that could do this .
it 's been done in voles .
you can engineer a prairie vole to become monogamous when it 's naturally polygamous .
it 's just a single gene .
might be more complicated in humans , but perhaps not that much .
this is the last picture that i want to - now we 've got to use the laser pointer .
a possible mode of being here would be a way of life - a way of being , experiencing , thinking , seeing , interacting with the world .
down here in this little corner , here , we have the little sub-space of this larger space that is accessible to human beings - beings with our biological capacities .
it 's a part of the space that 's accessible to animals ; since we are animals , we are a subset of that .
and then you can imagine some enhancements of human capacities .
there would be different modes of being you could experience if you were able to stay alive for , say , 200 years .
then you could live sorts of lives and accumulate wisdoms that are just not possible for humans as we currently are .
so then , you move off to this larger sphere of " human + , " and you could continue that process and eventually explore a lot of this larger space of possible modes of being .
now , why is that a good thing to do ?
well , we know already that in this little human circle there , there are these enormously wonderful and worthwhile modes of being - human life at its best is wonderful .
we have no reason to believe that within this much , much larger space there would not also be extremely worthwhile modes of being , perhaps ones that would be way beyond our wildest ability even to imagine or dream about .
and so , to fix this third problem , i think we need - slowly , carefully , with ethical wisdom and constraint - develop the means that enable us to go out in this larger space and explore it and find the great values that might hide there .
thanks .
i 'd like to dedicate this one to all the women in south africa - those women who refused to dwindle in the midst of apartheid .
and , of course , i 'm dedicating it also to my grandmother , whom i think really played quite a lot of important roles , especially for me when i was an activist , and being harassed by the police .
you will recall that in 1976 , june 16 , the students of south africa boycotted the language of afrikaans as the medium of the oppressor , as they were sort of like really told that they must do everything in afrikaans - biology , mathematics - and what about our languages ?
and the students wanted to speak to the government , and police answered with bullets .
so every year , june 16 , we will commemorate all those comrades or students who died .
and i was very young then . i think i was 11 years , and i started asking questions , and that 's when my political education started .
and i joined , later on , the youth organization under the african national congress .
so as part of organizing this and whatever , this commemoration , the police will round us up as they call us leaders .
and i used to run away from home , when i know that maybe the police might be coming around the ninth or 10th of june or so .
and my grandmother one time said , " no , look , you 're not going to run away .
this is your place , you stay here . "
and indeed , the police came - because they 'll just arrest us and put us in jail and release us whenever they feel like , after the 20th or so .
so it was on the 10th of june , and they came , and they surrounded the house , and my grandmother switched off all the lights in the house , and opened the kitchen door .
and she said to them , " vusi 's here , and you 're not going to take him tonight .
i 'm tired of you having to come here , harassing us , while your children are sleeping peacefully in your homes .
he is here , and you 're not going to take him .
i 've got a bowl full of boiling water - the first one who comes in here , gets it . "
and they left .
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- ♫ thula mama , thula mama , thula mama , thula mama . ♫ ♫ through the mist of the tears in your eyes on my childhood memory , ♫ ♫ i know the truth in your smile , ♫ ♫ i know the truth in your smile , ♫ ♫ piercing through the gloom of my ignorance . ♫ ♫ oh , there is a mama lying down sleeping ♫ ♫ you 're very ill and your heart crying . ♫ ♫ wondering , wondering , wondering , wondering where is this world coming to . ♫ ♫ is it right the children have to fend for themselves ? no , no , no , no , no. no . ♫
♫ is it right heaping trouble on an old lady 's head ? ♫ ♫ so unlucky faceless people . ♫ ♫ thula mama mama , thula mama . thula mama mama . ♫ ♫ thula mama , thula mama , thula mama mama , thula mama ♫ ♫ tomorrow it 's going to be better . ♫ ♫ tomorrow it 's going to be better to climb , mama . ♫ ♫ thula mama , thula mama . ♫ ♫ am i to break into the song like the blues man or troubadour . ♫ ♫ and then from long distance in no blues club am i to sing , ♫ ♫ baby , baby , baby , baby , baby , baby , baby , baby , baby , baby , baby , baby . ♫
♫ should i now stop singing of love , ♫ ♫ now that my memory 's surrounded by blood ? ♫ ♫ sister , why oh why do we at times mistake a pimple for a cancer ? ♫ ♫ so who are they who says , no more love poems now ? ♫ ♫ i want to sing a song of love ♫ ♫ for that woman who jumped the fences pregnant ♫ ♫ and still gave birth to a healthy child . ♫ ♫ softly i walk into the sun rays of the smile ♫ ♫ that will ignite my love song , my song of life , ♫
♫ my song of love , my song of life , my song of love , ♫ ♫ my song of life , my song of love , my song of life . ♫ ♫ ooh , i 've not tried to run away from song , ♫ ♫ i hear a persistent voice , more powerful than the enemy bombs . ♫ ♫ the song that washed our lives and the rains of our blood . ♫ ♫ my song of love and my song of life , my song of love , ♫ ♫ my song of life , my song of love , ♫ ♫ my song of life , my song of love - i want everybody to sing with me - ♫
♫ my song of life , my song of love , my song of life - everybody sing with me - ♫ ♫ my song of life , my song of love - i ca n't hear you - ♫ ♫ my song of love , my song of life - you can do better - ♫ ♫ my song of life , my song of love - keep singing , keep singing - ♫ ♫ my song of love , my song of life , yes , my song of love - ♫ ♫ you can do better than that - ♫ ♫ my song of life , yes , my song of love , my song of life , my song of love - ♫
♫ keep singing , keep singing , keep singing - my song of love . ♫ ♫ oh yeah . my song of - a love song , my song of life . sing . a love song , my song of life . sing . ♫ ♫ love song , my song of life . sing . love song , my song of life . sing . ♫ ♫ love song , my song of life . sing . love song , my song of life . ♫ ♫ love song , my song of life . ♫ -lrb- applause -rrb- i got my start in writing and research as a surgical trainee , as someone who was a long ways away from becoming any kind of an expert at anything .
so the natural question you ask then at that point is , how do i get good at what i 'm trying to do ?
and it became a question of , how do we all get good at what we 're trying to do ?
it 's hard enough to learn to get the skills , try to learn all the material you have to absorb at any task you 're taking on .
i had to think about how i sew and how i cut , but then also how i pick the right person to come to an operating room .
and then in the midst of all this came this new context for thinking about what it meant to be good .
in the last few years we realized we were in the deepest crisis of medicine 's existence due to something you do n't normally think about when you 're a doctor concerned with how you do good for people , which is the cost of health care .
there 's not a country in the world that now is not asking whether we can afford what doctors do .
the political fight that we 've developed has become one around whether it 's the government that 's the problem or is it insurance companies that are the problem .
and the answer is yes and no ; it 's deeper than all of that .
the cause of our troubles is actually the complexity that science has given us .
and in order to understand this , i 'm going to take you back a couple of generations .
i want to take you back to a time when lewis thomas was writing in his book , " the youngest science . "
lewis thomas was a physician-writer , one of my favorite writers .
and he wrote this book to explain , among other things , what it was like to be a medical intern at the boston city hospital in the pre-penicillin year of 1937 .
it was a time when medicine was cheap and very ineffective .
if you were in a hospital , he said , it was going to do you good only because it offered you some warmth , some food , shelter , and maybe the caring attention of a nurse .
doctors and medicine made no difference at all .
that did n't seem to prevent the doctors from being frantically busy in their days , as he explained .
what they were trying to do was figure out whether you might have one of the diagnoses for which they could do something .
and there were a few .
you might have a lobar pneumonia , for example , and they could give you an antiserum , an injection of rabid antibodies to the bacterium streptococcus , if the intern sub-typed it correctly .
if you had an acute congestive heart failure , they could bleed a pint of blood from you by opening up an arm vein , giving you a crude leaf preparation of digitalis and then giving you oxygen by tent .
if you had early signs of paralysis and you were really good at asking personal questions , you might figure out that this paralysis someone has is from syphilis , in which case you could give this nice concoction of mercury and arsenic - as long as you did n't overdose them and kill them .
beyond these sorts of things , a medical doctor did n't have a lot that they could do .
this was when the core structure of medicine was created - what it meant to be good at what we did and how we wanted to build medicine to be .
it was at a time when what was known you could know , you could hold it all in your head , and you could do it all .
if you had a prescription pad , if you had a nurse , if you had a hospital that would give you a place to convalesce , maybe some basic tools , you really could do it all .
you set the fracture , you drew the blood , you spun the blood , looked at it under the microscope , you plated the culture , you injected the antiserum .
this was a life as a craftsman .
as a result , we built it around a culture and set of values that said what you were good at was being daring , at being courageous , at being independent and self-sufficient .
autonomy was our highest value .
go a couple generations forward to where we are , though , and it looks like a completely different world .
we have now found treatments for nearly all of the tens of thousands of conditions that a human being can have .
we ca n't cure it all .
we ca n't guarantee that everybody will live a long and healthy life .
but we can make it possible for most .
but what does it take ?
well , we 've now discovered 4,000 medical and surgical procedures .
we 've discovered 6,000 drugs that i 'm now licensed to prescribe .
and we 're trying to deploy this capability , town by town , to every person alive - in our own country , let alone around the world .
and we 've reached the point where we 've realized , as doctors , we ca n't know it all .
we ca n't do it all by ourselves .
there was a study where they looked at how many clinicians it took to take care of you if you came into a hospital , as it changed over time .
and in the year 1970 , it took just over two full-time equivalents of clinicians .
that is to say , it took basically the nursing time and then just a little bit of time for a doctor who more or less checked in on you once a day .
by the end of the 20th century , it had become more than 15 clinicians for the same typical hospital patient - specialists , physical therapists , the nurses .
we 're all specialists now , even the primary care physicians .
everyone just has a piece of the care .
but holding onto that structure we built around the daring , independence , self-sufficiency of each of those people has become a disaster .
we have trained , hired and rewarded people to be cowboys .
but it 's pit crews that we need , pit crews for patients .
there 's evidence all around us : 40 percent of our coronary artery disease patients in our communities receive incomplete or inappropriate care .
60 percent of our asthma , stroke patients receive incomplete or inappropriate care .
two million people come into hospitals and pick up an infection they did n't have because someone failed to follow the basic practices of hygiene .
our experience as people who get sick , need help from other people , is that we have amazing clinicians that we can turn to - hardworking , incredibly well-trained and very smart - that we have access to incredible technologies that give us great hope , but little sense that it consistently all comes together for you from start to finish in a successful way .
there 's another sign that we need pit crews , and that 's the unmanageable cost of our care .
now we in medicine , i think , are baffled by this question of cost .
we want to say , " this is just the way it is .
this is just what medicine requires . "
when you go from a world where you treated arthritis with aspirin , that mostly did n't do the job , to one where , if it gets bad enough , we can do a hip replacement , a knee replacement that gives you years , maybe decades , without disability , a dramatic change , well is it any surprise that that $ 40,000 hip replacement replacing the 10-cent aspirin is more expensive ?
it 's just the way it is .
but i think we 're ignoring certain facts that tell us something about what we can do .
as we 've looked at the data about the results that have come as the complexity has increased , we found that the most expensive care is not necessarily the best care .
and vice versa , the best care often turns out to be the least expensive - has fewer complications , the people get more efficient at what they do .
and what that means is there 's hope .
because -lsb- if -rsb- to have the best results , you really needed the most expensive care in the country , or in the world , well then we really would be talking about rationing who we 're going to cut off from medicare .
that would be really our only choice .
but when we look at the positive deviants - the ones who are getting the best results at the lowest costs - we find the ones that look the most like systems are the most successful .
that is to say , they found ways all of the different components , to come together into a whole .
having great components is not enough , and yet we 've been obsessed in medicine with components .
we want the best drugs , the best technologies , the best specialists , but we do n't think too much about how it all comes together .
it 's a terrible design strategy actually .
there 's a famous thought experiment that touches exactly on this that said , what if you built a car from the very best car parts ?
well it would lead you to put in porsche brakes , a ferrari engine , a volvo body , a bmw chassis .
and you put it all together and what do you get ?
a very expensive pile of junk that does not go anywhere .
and that is what medicine can feel like sometimes .
it 's not a system .
now a system , however , when things start to come together , you realize it has certain skills for acting and looking that way .
skill number one is the ability to recognize success and the ability to recognize failure .
when you are a specialist , you ca n't see the end result very well .
you have to become really interested in data , unsexy as that sounds .
one of my colleagues is a surgeon in cedar rapids , iowa , and he got interested in the question of , well how many ct scans did they do for their community in cedar rapids ?
he got interested in this because there had been government reports , newspaper reports , journal articles saying that there had been too many ct scans done .
he did n't see it in his own patients .
and so he asked the question , " how many did we do ? "
and he wanted to get the data .
it took him three months .
no one had asked this question in his community before .
and what he found was that , for the 300,000 people in their community , in the previous year they had done 52,000 ct scans .
they had found a problem .
which brings us to skill number two a system has .
skill one , find where your failures are .
skill two is devise solutions .
i got interested in this when the world health organization came to my team asking if we could help with a project to reduce deaths in surgery .
the volume of surgery had spread around the world , but the safety of surgery had not .
now our usual tactics for tackling problems like these are to do more training , give people more specialization or bring in more technology .
well in surgery , you could n't have people who are more specialized and you could n't have people who are better trained .
and yet we see unconscionable levels of death , disability that could be avoided .
and so we looked at what other high-risk industries do .
we looked at skyscraper construction , we looked at the aviation world , and we found that they have technology , they have training , and then they have one other thing : they have checklists .
i did not expect to be spending a significant part of my time as a harvard surgeon worrying about checklists .
and yet , what we found were that these were tools to help make experts better .
we got the lead safety engineer for boeing to help us .
could we design a checklist for surgery ?
not for the lowest people on the totem pole , but for the folks who were all the way around the chain , the entire team including the surgeons .
and what they taught us was that designing a checklist to help people handle complexity actually involves more difficulty than i had understood .
you have to think about things like pause points .
you need to identify the moments in a process when you can actually catch a problem before it 's a danger and do something about it .
you have to identify that this is a before-takeoff checklist .
and then you need to focus on the killer items .
an aviation checklist , like this one for a single-engine plane , is n't a recipe for how to fly a plane , it 's a reminder of the key things that get forgotten or missed if they 're not checked .
so we did this .
we created a 19-item two-minute checklist for surgical teams .
we had the pause points immediately before anesthesia is given , immediately before the knife hits the skin , immediately before the patient leaves the room .
and we had a mix of dumb stuff on there - making sure an antibiotic is given in the right time frame because that cuts the infection rate by half - and then interesting stuff , because you ca n't make a recipe for something as complicated as surgery .
instead , you can make a recipe for how to have a team that 's prepared for the unexpected .
and we had items like making sure everyone in the room had introduced themselves by name at the start of the day , because you get half a dozen people or more who are sometimes coming together as a team for the very first time that day that you 're coming in .
we implemented this checklist in eight hospitals around the world , deliberately in places from rural tanzania to the university of washington in seattle .
we found that after they adopted it the complication rates fell 35 percent .
it fell in every hospital it went into .
the death rates fell 47 percent .
this was bigger than a drug .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and that brings us to skill number three , the ability to implement this , to get colleagues across the entire chain to actually do these things .
and it 's been slow to spread .
this is not yet our norm in surgery - let alone making checklists to go onto childbirth and other areas .
there 's a deep resistance because using these tools forces us to confront that we 're not a system , forces us to behave with a different set of values .
just using a checklist requires you to embrace different values from the ones we 've had , like humility , discipline , teamwork .
this is the opposite of what we were built on : independence , self-sufficiency , autonomy .
i met an actual cowboy , by the way .
i asked him , what was it like to actually herd a thousand cattle across hundreds of miles ?
how did you do that ?
and he said , " we have the cowboys stationed at distinct places all around . "
they communicate electronically constantly , and they have protocols and checklists for how they handle everything - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - from bad weather to emergencies or inoculations for the cattle .
even the cowboys are pit crews now .
and it seemed like time that we become that way ourselves .
making systems work is the great task of my generation of physicians and scientists .
but i would go further and say that making systems work , whether in health care , education , climate change , making a pathway out of poverty , is the great task of our generation as a whole .
in every field , knowledge has exploded , but it has brought complexity , it has brought specialization .
and we 've come to a place where we have no choice but to recognize , as individualistic as we want to be , complexity requires group success .
we all need to be pit crews now .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so , people argue vigorously about the definition of life .
they ask if it should have reproduction in it , or metabolism , or evolution .
and i do n't know the answer to that , so i 'm not going to tell you .
i will say that life involves computation .
so this is a computer program .
booted up in a cell , the program would execute , and it could result in this person ; or with a small change , it could result in this person ; or another small change , this person ; or with a larger change , this dog , or this tree , or this whale .
so now , if you take this metaphor -lsb- of -rsb- genome as program seriously , you have to consider that chris anderson is a computer-fabricated artifact , as is jim watson , craig venter , as are all of us .
and in convincing yourself that this metaphor is true , there are lots of similarities between genetic programs and computer programs that could help to convince you .
but one , to me , that 's most compelling is the peculiar sensitivity to small changes that can make large changes in biological development - the output .
a small mutation can take a two-wing fly and make it a four-wing fly .
or it could take a fly and put legs where its antennae should be .
or if you 're familiar with " the princess bride , " it could create a six-fingered man .
now , a hallmark of computer programs is just this kind of sensitivity to small changes .
if your bank account 's one dollar , and you flip a single bit , you could end up with a thousand dollars .
so these small changes are things that i think that - they indicate to us that a complicated computation in development is underlying these amplified , large changes .
so now , all of this indicates that there are molecular programs underlying biology , and it shows the power of molecular programs - biology does .
and what i want to do is write molecular programs , potentially to build technology .
and there are a lot of people doing this , a lot of synthetic biologists doing this , like craig venter .
and they concentrate on using cells .
they 're cell-oriented .
so my friends , molecular programmers , and i have a sort of biomolecule-centric approach .
we 're interested in using dna , rna and protein , and building new languages for building things from the bottom up , using biomolecules , potentially having nothing to do with biology .
so , these are all the machines in a cell .
there 's a camera .
there 's the solar panels of the cell , some switches that turn your genes on and off , the girders of the cell , motors that move your muscles .
my little group of molecular programmers are trying to refashion all of these parts from dna .
we 're not dna zealots , but dna is the cheapest , easiest to understand and easy to program material to do this .
and as other things become easier to use - maybe protein - we 'll work with those .
if we succeed , what will molecular programming look like ?
you 're going to sit in front of your computer .
you 're going to design something like a cell phone , and in a high-level language , you 'll describe that cell phone .
then you 're going to have a compiler that 's going to take that description and it 's going to turn it into actual molecules that can be sent to a synthesizer and that synthesizer will pack those molecules into a seed .
and what happens if you water and feed that seed appropriately , is it will do a developmental computation , a molecular computation , and it 'll build an electronic computer .
and if i have n't revealed my prejudices already , i think that life has been about molecular computers building electrochemical computers , building electronic computers , which together with electrochemical computers will build new molecular computers , which will build new electronic computers , and so forth .
and if you buy all of this , and you think life is about computation , as i do , then you look at big questions through the eyes of a computer scientist .
so one big question is , how does a baby know when to stop growing ?
and for molecular programming , the question is how does your cell phone know when to stop growing ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- or how does a computer program know when to stop running ?
or more to the point , how do you know if a program will ever stop ?
there are other questions like this , too .
one of them is craig venter 's question .
turns out i think he 's actually a computer scientist .
he asked , how big is the minimal genome that will give me a functioning microorganism ?
how few genes can i use ?
this is exactly analogous to the question , what 's the smallest program i can write that will act exactly like microsoft word ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and just as he 's writing , you know , bacteria that will be smaller , he 's writing genomes that will work , we could write smaller programs that would do what microsoft word does .
but for molecular programming , our question is , how many molecules do we need to put in that seed to get a cell phone ?
what 's the smallest number we can get away with ?
now , these are big questions in computer science .
these are all complexity questions , and computer science tells us that these are very hard questions .
almost - many of them are impossible .
but for some tasks , we can start to answer them .
so , i 'm going to start asking those questions for the dna structures i 'm going to talk about next .
so , this is normal dna , what you think of as normal dna .
it 's double-stranded , it 's a double helix , has the as , ts , cs and gs that pair to hold the strands together .
and i 'm going to draw it like this sometimes , just so i do n't scare you .
we want to look at individual strands and not think about the double helix .
when we synthesize it , it comes single-stranded , so we can take the blue strand in one tube and make an orange strand in the other tube , and they 're floppy when they 're single-stranded .
you mix them together and they make a rigid double helix .
now for the last 25 years , ned seeman and a bunch of his descendants have worked very hard and made beautiful three-dimensional structures using this kind of reaction of dna strands coming together .
but a lot of their approaches , though elegant , take a long time .
they can take a couple of years , or it can be difficult to design .
so i came up with a new method a couple of years ago i call dna origami that 's so easy you could do it at home in your kitchen and design the stuff on a laptop .
but to do it , you need a long , single strand of dna , which is technically very difficult to get .
so , you can go to a natural source .
you can look in this computer-fabricated artifact , and he 's got a double-stranded genome - that 's no good .
you look in his intestines . there are billions of bacteria .
they 're no good either .
double strand again , but inside them , they 're infected with a virus that has a nice , long , single-stranded genome that we can fold like a piece of paper .
and here 's how we do it .
this is part of that genome .
we add a bunch of short , synthetic dnas that i call staples .
each one has a left half that binds the long strand in one place , and a right half that binds it in a different place , and brings the long strand together like this .
the net action of many of these on that long strand is to fold it into something like a rectangle .
now , we ca n't actually take a movie of this process , but shawn douglas at harvard has made a nice visualization for us that begins with a long strand and has some short strands in it .
and what happens is that we mix these strands together .
we heat them up , we add a little bit of salt , we heat them up to almost boiling and cool them down , and as we cool them down , the short strands bind the long strands and start to form structure .
and you can see a little bit of double helix forming there .
when you look at dna origami , you can see that what it really is , even though you think it 's complicated , is a bunch of double helices that are parallel to each other , and they 're held together by places where short strands go along one helix and then jump to another one .
so there 's a strand that goes like this , goes along one helix and binds - it jumps to another helix and comes back .
that holds the long strand like this .
now , to show that we could make any shape or pattern that we wanted , i tried to make this shape .
i wanted to fold dna into something that goes up over the eye , down the nose , up the nose , around the forehead , back down and end in a little loop like this .
and so , i thought , if this could work , anything could work .
so i had the computer program design the short staples to do this .
i ordered them ; they came by fedex .
i mixed them up , heated them , cooled them down , and i got 50 billion little smiley faces floating around in a single drop of water .
and each one of these is just one-thousandth the width of a human hair , ok ?
so , they 're all floating around in solution , and to look at them , you have to get them on a surface where they stick .
so , you pour them out onto a surface and they start to stick to that surface , and we take a picture using an atomic-force microscope .
it 's got a needle , like a record needle , that goes back and forth over the surface , bumps up and down , and feels the height of the first surface .
it feels the dna origami .
there 's the atomic-force microscope working and you can see that the landing 's a little rough .
when you zoom in , they 've got , you know , weak jaws that flip over their heads and some of their noses get punched out , but it 's pretty good .
you can zoom in and even see the extra little loop , this little nano-goatee .
now , what 's great about this is anybody can do this .
and so , i got this in the mail about a year after i did this , unsolicited .
anyone know what this is ? what is it ?
it 's china , right ?
so , what happened is , a graduate student in china , lulu qian , did a great job .
she wrote all her own software to design and built this dna origami , a beautiful rendition of china , which even has taiwan , and you can see it 's sort of on the world 's shortest leash , right ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , this works really well and you can make patterns as well as shapes , ok ?
and you can make a map of the americas and spell dna with dna .
and what 's really neat about it - well , actually , this all looks like nano-artwork , but it turns out that nano-artwork is just what you need to make nano-circuits .
so , you can put circuit components on the staples , like a light bulb and a light switch .
let the thing assemble , and you 'll get some kind of a circuit .
and then you can maybe wash the dna away and have the circuit left over .
so , this is what some colleagues of mine at caltech did .
they took a dna origami , organized some carbon nano-tubes , made a little switch , you see here , wired it up , tested it and showed that it is indeed a switch .
now , this is just a single switch and you need half a billion for a computer , so we have a long way to go .
but this is very promising because the origami can organize parts just one-tenth the size of those in a normal computer .
so it 's very promising for making small computers .
now , i want to get back to that compiler .
the dna origami is a proof that that compiler actually works .
so , you start with something in the computer .
you get a high-level description of the computer program , a high-level description of the origami .
you can compile it to molecules , send it to a synthesizer , and it actually works .
and it turns out that a company has made a nice program that 's much better than my code , which was kind of ugly , and will allow us to do this in a nice , visual , computer-aided design way .
so , now you can say , all right , why is n't dna origami the end of the story ?
you have your molecular compiler , you can do whatever you want .
the fact is that it does not scale .
so if you want to build a human from dna origami , the problem is , you need a long strand that 's 10 trillion trillion bases long .
that 's three light years ' worth of dna , so we 're not going to do this .
we 're going to turn to another technology , called algorithmic self-assembly of tiles .
it was started by erik winfree , and what it does , it has tiles that are a hundredth the size of a dna origami .
you zoom in , there are just four dna strands and they have little single-stranded bits on them that can bind to other tiles , if they match .
and we like to draw these tiles as little squares .
and if you look at their sticky ends , these little dna bits , you can see that they actually form a checkerboard pattern .
so , these tiles would make a complicated , self-assembling checkerboard .
and the point of this , if you did n't catch that , is that tiles are a kind of molecular program and they can output patterns .
and a really amazing part of this is that any computer program can be translated into one of these tile programs - specifically , counting .
so , you can come up with a set of tiles that when they come together , form a little binary counter rather than a checkerboard .
so you can read off binary numbers five , six and seven .
and in order to get these kinds of computations started right , you need some kind of input , a kind of seed .
you can use dna origami for that .
you can encode the number 32 in the right-hand side of a dna origami , and when you add those tiles that count , they will start to count - they will read that 32 and they 'll stop at 32 .
so , what we 've done is we 've figured out a way to have a molecular program know when to stop going .
it knows when to stop growing because it can count .
it knows how big it is .
so , that answers that sort of first question i was talking about .
it does n't tell us how babies do it , however .
so now , we can use this counting to try and get at much bigger things than dna origami could otherwise .
here 's the dna origami , and what we can do is we can write 32 on both edges of the dna origami , and we can now use our watering can and water with tiles , and we can start growing tiles off of that and create a square .
the counter serves as a template to fill in a square in the middle of this thing .
so , what we 've done is we 've succeeded in making something much bigger than a dna origami by combining dna origami with tiles .
and the neat thing about it is , is that it 's also reprogrammable .
you can just change a couple of the dna strands in this binary representation and you 'll get 96 rather than 32 .
and if you do that , the origami 's the same size , but the resulting square that you get is three times bigger .
so , this sort of recapitulates what i was telling you about development .
you have a very sensitive computer program where small changes - single , tiny , little mutations - can take something that made one size square and make something very much bigger .
now , this - using counting to compute and build these kinds of things by this kind of developmental process is something that also has bearing on craig venter 's question .
so , you can ask , how many dna strands are required to build a square of a given size ?
if we wanted to make a square of size 10 , 100 or 1,000 , if we used dna origami alone , we would require a number of dna strands that 's the square of the size of that square ; so we 'd need 100 , 10,000 or a million dna strands .
that 's really not affordable .
but if we use a little computation - we use origami , plus some tiles that count - then we can get away with using 100 , 200 or 300 dna strands .
and so we can exponentially reduce the number of dna strands we use , if we use counting , if we use a little bit of computation .
and so computation is some very powerful way to reduce the number of molecules you need to build something , to reduce the size of the genome that you 're building .
and finally , i 'm going to get back to that sort of crazy idea about computers building computers .
if you look at the square that you build with the origami and some counters growing off it , the pattern that it has is exactly the pattern that you need to make a memory .
so if you affix some wires and switches to those tiles - rather than to the staple strands , you affix them to the tiles - then they 'll self-assemble the somewhat complicated circuits , the demultiplexer circuits , that you need to address this memory .
so you can actually make a complicated circuit using a little bit of computation .
it 's a molecular computer building an electronic computer .
now , you ask me , how far have we gotten down this path ?
experimentally , this is what we 've done in the last year .
here is a dna origami rectangle , and here are some tiles growing from it .
and you can see how they count .
one , two , three , four , five , six , nine , 10 , 11 , 12 , 17 .
so it 's got some errors , but at least it counts up .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , it turns out we actually had this idea nine years ago , and that 's about the time constant for how long it takes to do these kinds of things , so i think we made a lot of progress .
we 've got ideas about how to fix these errors .
and i think in the next five or 10 years , we 'll make the kind of squares that i described and maybe even get to some of those self-assembled circuits .
so now , what do i want you to take away from this talk ?
i want you to remember that to create life 's very diverse and complex forms , life uses computation to do that .
and the computations that it uses , they 're molecular computations , and in order to understand this and get a better handle on it , as feynman said , you know , we need to build something to understand it .
and so we are going to use molecules and refashion this thing , rebuild everything from the bottom up , using dna in ways that nature never intended , using dna origami , and dna origami to seed this algorithmic self-assembly .
you know , so this is all very cool , but what i 'd like you to take from the talk , hopefully from some of those big questions , is that this molecular programming is n't just about making gadgets .
it 's not just making about - it 's making self-assembled cell phones and circuits .
what it 's really about is taking computer science and looking at big questions in a new light , asking new versions of those big questions and trying to understand how biology can make such amazing things . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- what i am always thinking about is what this session is about , which is called simplicity .
and almost , i would almost call it being simple-minded , but in the best sense of the word .
i 'm trying to figure out two very simple things : how to live and how to die , period .
that 's all i 'm trying to do , all day long .
and i 'm also trying to have some meals , and have some snacks , and , you know , and yell at my children , and do all the normal things that keep you grounded .
so , i was fortunate enough to be born a very dreamy child .
my older sister was busy torturing my parents , and they were busy torturing her .
i was lucky enough to be completely ignored , which is a fabulous thing , actually , i want to tell you .
so , i was able to completely daydream my way through my life .
and i finally daydreamed my way into nyu , at a very good time , in 1967 , where i met a man who was trying to blow up the math building of nyu .
and i was writing terrible poetry and knitting sweaters for him .
and feminists hated us , and the whole thing was wretched from beginning to end .
but i kept writing bad poetry , and he did n't blow up the math building , but he went to cuba .
but i gave him the money , because i was from riverdale so i had more money than he did .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and that was a good thing to help , you know , the cause .
but , then he came back , and things happened , and i decided i really hated my writing , that it was awful , awful , purple prose .
and i decided that i wanted to tell - but i still wanted to tell a narrative story and i still wanted to tell my stories .
so i decided that i would start to draw . how hard could that be ?
and so what happened was that i started just becoming an editorial illustrator through , you know , sheer whatever , sheer ignorance .
and we started a studio .
well , tibor really started the studio , called m & co .
and the premise of m & co was , we do n't know anything , but that 's all right , we 're going to do it anyway .
and as a matter of fact , it 's better not to know anything , because if you know too much , you 're stymied .
so , the premise in the studio was , there are no boundaries , there is no fear .
and i - and my full-time job , i landed the best job on earth , was to daydream , and to actually come up with absurd ideas that - fortunately , there were enough people there , and it was a team , it was a collective , it was not just me coming up with crazy ideas .
but the point was that i was there as myself , as a dreamer .
and so some of the things - i mean , it was a long history of m & co , and clearly we also needed to make some money , so we decided we would create a series of products .
and some of the watches there , attempting to be beautiful and humorous - maybe not attempting , hopefully succeeding .
that to be able to talk about content , to break apart what you normally expect , to use humor and surprise , elegance and humanity in your work was really important to us .
it was a very high , it was a very impersonal time in design and we wanted to say , the content is what 's important , not the package , not the wrapping .
you really have to be journalists , you have to be inventors , you have to use your imagination more importantly than anything .
so , the good news is that i have a dog and , though i do n't know if i believe in luck - i do n't know what i believe in , it 's a very complicated question , but i do know that before i go away , i crank his tail seven times .
so , whenever he sees a suitcase in the house , because everybody 's always , you know , leaving , they 're always cranking this wonderful dog 's tail , and he runs to the other room .
but i am able to make the transition from working for children and - from working for adults to children , and back and forth , because , you know , i can say that i 'm immature , and in a way , that 's true .
i do n't really - i mean , i could tell you that i did n't understand , i 'm not proud of it , but i did n't understand let 's say 95 percent of the talks at this conference .
but i have been taking beautiful notes of drawings and i have a gorgeous onion from murray gell-mann 's talk .
and i have a beautiful page of doodles from jonathan woodham 's talk .
so , good things come out of , you know , incomprehension - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - which i will do a painting of , and then it will end up in my work .
so , i 'm open to the possibilities of not knowing and finding out something new .
so , in writing for children , it seems simple , and it is .
you have to condense a story into 32 pages , usually .
and what you have to do is , you really have to edit down to what you want to say .
and hopefully , you 're not talking down to kids and you 're not talking in such a way that you , you know , could n't stand reading it after one time .
so , i hopefully am writing , you know , books that are good for children and for adults .
but the painting reflects - i do n't think differently for children than i do for adults .
i try to use the same kind of imagination , the same kind of whimsy , the same kind of love of language .
so , you know , and i have lots of wonderful-looking friends .
this is andrew gatz , and he walked in through the door and i said , " you ! sit down there . " you know , i take lots of photos .
and the bertoia chair in the background is my favorite chair .
so , i get to put in all of the things that i love .
hopefully , a dialog between adults and children will happen on many different levels , and hopefully different kinds of humor will evolve .
and the books are really journals of my life .
i never - i do n't like plots .
i do n't know what a plot means .
i ca n't stand the idea of anything that starts in the beginning , you know , beginning , middle and end . it really scares me , because my life is too random and too confused , and i enjoy it that way .
but anyway , so we were in venice , and this is our room . and i had this dream that i was wearing this fantastic green gown , and i was looking out the window , and it was really a beautiful thing .
and so , i was able to put that into this story , which is an alphabet , and hopefully go on to something else .
the letter c had other things in it .
i was fortunate also , to meet the man who 's sitting on the bed , though i gave him hair over here and he does n't have hair .
well , he has some hair but - well , he used to have hair .
and with him , i was able to do a project that was really fantastic .
i work for the new yorker , and i do covers , and 9/11 happened and it was , you know , a complete and utter end of the world as we knew it .
and rick and i were on our way to a party in the bronx , and somebody said bronxistan , and somebody said ferreristan , and we came up with this new yorker cover , which we were able to - we did n't know what we were doing .
we were n't trying to be funny , we were n't trying to be - well , we were trying to be funny actually , that 's not true .
we hoped we 'd be funny , but we did n't know it would be a cover , and we did n't know that that image , at the moment that it happened , would be something that would be so wonderful for a lot of people .
and it really became the - i do n't know , you know , it was one of those moments people started laughing at what was going on .
and from , you know , fattushis , to taxistan to , you know , for the fashtoonks , botoxia , pashmina , khlintunisia , you know , we were able to take the city and make fun of this completely foreign , who are - what 's going on over here ?
who are these people ? what are these tribes ?
and david remnick , who was really wonderful about it , had one problem . he did n't like al zheimers , because he thought it would insult people with alzheimer 's .
but you know , we said , " david , who 's going to know ?
they 're not . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so it stayed in , and it was , and , you know , it was a good thing .
you know , in the course of my life , i never know what 's going to happen and that 's kind of the beauty part .
and we were on cape cod , a place , obviously , of great inspiration , and i picked up this book , " the elements of style , " at a yard sale .
and i did n't - and i 'd never used it in school , because i was too busy writing poems , and flunking out , and i do n't know what , sitting in cafes .
but i picked it up and i started reading it and i thought , this book is amazing .
i said , people should know about this book .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i decided it needed a few - it needed a lift , it needed a few illustrations .
and basically , i called the , you know , i convinced the white estate , and what an intersection of like , you know , polish jew , you know , main wasp family . here i am , saying , i 'd like to do something to this book .
and they said yes , and they left me completely alone , which was a gorgeous , wonderful thing .
and i took the examples that they gave , and just did 56 paintings , basically .
so , this is , i do n't know if you can read this .
" well , susan , this is a fine mess you are in . "
and when you 're dealing with grammar , which is , you know , incredibly dry , e.b. white wrote such wonderful , whimsical - and actually , strunk - and then you come to the rules and , you know , there are lots of grammar things . " do you mind me asking a question ?
do you mind my asking a question ? "
" would , could , should , or would , should , could . "
and " would " is coco chanel 's lover , " should " is edith sitwell , and " could " is an august sander subject .
and , " he noticed a large stain in the center of the rug . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , there 's a kind of british understatement , murder-mystery theme that i really love very much .
and then , " be obscure clearly ! be wild of tongue in a way we can understand . "
e.b. white wrote us a number of rules , which can either paralyze you and make you loathe him for the rest of time , or you can ignore them , which i do , or you can , i do n't know what , you know , eat a sandwich .
so , what i did when i was painting was i started singing , because i really adore singing , and i think that music is the highest form of all art .
so , i commissioned a wonderful composer , nico muhly , who wrote nine songs using the text , and we performed this fantastic evening of - he wrote music for both amateurs and professionals .
i played the clattering teacup and the slinky in the main reading room of the new york public library , where you 're supposed to be very , very quiet , and it was a phenomenally wonderful event , which we hopefully will do some more .
who knows ? the new york timesselect , the op-ed page , asked me to do a column , and they said , you can do whatever you want .
so , once a month for the last year , i 've been doing a column called " the principles of uncertainty , " which , you know , i do n't know who heisenberg is , but i know i can throw that around now . you know , it 's the principles of uncertainty , so , you know .
i 'm going to read quickly - and probably i 'm going to edit some , because i do n't have that much time left - a few of the columns .
and basically , i was so , you know , it was so amusing , because i said , " well , how much space do i have ? "
and they said , " well , you know , it 's the internet . "
and i said , " yes , but how much space do i have ? "
and they said , " it 's unlimited , it 's unlimited . "
ok . so , the first one i was very timid , and i 'll begin .
" how can i tell you everything that is in my heart ?
impossible to begin . enough . no . begin with the hapless dodo . "
and i talk about the dodo , and how the dodo became extinct , and then i talk about spinoza .
" as the last dodo was dying , spinoza was looking for a rational explanation for everything , called eudaemonia .
and then he breathed his last , with loved ones around him , and i know that he had chicken soup also , as his last meal . "
i happen to know it for a fact .
and then he died , and there was no more spinoza . extinct .
and then , we do n't have a stuffed spinoza , but we do have a stuffed pavlov 's dog , and i visited him in the museum of hygiene in st. petersburg , in russia .
and there he is , with this horrible electrical box on his rump in this fantastic , decrepit palace .
" and i think it must have been a very , very dark day when the bolsheviks arrived .
maybe amongst themselves they had a few good laughs , but stalin was a paranoid man , even more than my father . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you do n't even know .
" and decided his top people had to be extinctified . "
which i think i made up , which is a good thing .
and so , this is a chart of , you know , just a small chart , because the chart would go on forever of all the people that he killed .
so , shot dead , smacked over the head , you know , thrown away .
" nabokov 's family fled russia . how could the young nabokov , sitting innocently and elegantly in a red chair , leafing through a book and butterflies , imagine such displacement , such loss ? "
and then i want to tell you that this is a map .
so , " my beautiful mother 's family fled russia as well .
too many pogroms .
leaving the shack , the wild blueberry woods , the geese , the river sluch , they went to palestine and then america . "
and my mother drew this map for me of the united states of america , and that is my dna over here , because that person who i grew up with had no use for facts whatsoever .
facts were actually banished from our home .
and so , if you see that texas - you know , texas and california are under canada , and that south carolina is on top of north carolina , this is the home that i grew up in , ok ?
so , it 's a miracle that i 'm here today .
but actually , it 's not . it 's actually a wonderful thing .
but then she says tel aviv and lenin , which is the town they came from , and , " sorry , the rest unknown , thank you . "
but in her lexicon , " sorry , the rest unknown , thank you " is " sorry , the rest unknown , go to hell , " because she could n't care less .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " the impossibility of february " is that february 's a really wretched month in new york and the images for me conjure up these really awful things .
well , not so awful .
i received a box in the mail and it was wrapped with newspaper and there was the picture of the man on the newspaper and he was dead .
and i say , " i hope he 's not really dead , just enjoying a refreshing lie-down in the snow , but the caption says he is dead . "
and actually , he was . i think he 's dead , though i do n't know , maybe he 's not dead .
" and this woman leans over in anguish , not about that man , but about all sad things . it happens quite often in february . "
there 's consoling .
this man is angry because somebody threw onions all over the staircase , and basically - you know , i guess onions are a theme here .
and he says , " it is impossible not to lie .
it is february and not lying is impossible . "
and i really spend a lot of time wondering , how much truth do we tell ?
what is it that we 're actually - what story are we actually telling ?
how do we know when we are ourselves ?
how do we actually know that these sentences coming out of our mouths are real stories , you know , are real sentences ?
or are they fake sentences that we think we ought to be saying ?
i 'm going to quickly go through this .
a quote by bertrand russell , " all the labor of all the ages , all the devotion , all the inspiration , all the noonday brightness of human genius are destined to extinction .
so now , my friends , if that is true , and it is true , what is the point ? "
a complicated question .
and so , you know , i talk to my friends and i go to plays where they 're singing russian songs .
oh my god , you know what ?
could we have - no , we do n't have time .
i taped my aunt . i taped my aunt singing a song in russian from the - you know , could we have it for a second ?
do you have that ?
-lrb- music -rrb- ok . i taped my - my aunt used to swim in the ocean every day of the year until she was about 85 .
so - and that 's a song about how everybody 's miserable because , you know , we 're from russia .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i went to visit kitty carlisle hart , and she is 96 , and when i brought her a copy of " the elements of style , " she said she would treasure it .
and then i said - oh , and she was talking about moss hart , and i said , " when you met him , you knew it was him . "
and she said , " i knew it was he . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , i was the one who should have kept the book , but it was a really wonderful moment .
and she dated george gershwin , so , you know , get out .
gershwin died at the age of 38 .
he 's buried in the same cemetery as my husband .
i do n't want to talk about that now .
i do want to talk - the absolute icing on this cemetery cake is the barricini family mausoleum nearby .
i think the barricini family should open a store there and sell chocolate .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i would like to run it for them .
and i went to visit louise bourgeoise , who 's also still working , and i looked at her sink , which is really amazing , and left .
and then i photograph and do a painting of a sofa on the street .
and a woman who lives on our street , lolita .
and then i go and have some tea .
and then my aunt frances dies , and before she died , she tried to pay with sweet 'n low packets for her bagel .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i wonder what the point is and then i know , and i see that hy meyerowitz , rick meyerowitz 's father , a dry-cleaning supply salesman from the bronx , won the charlie chaplin look-alike contest in 1931 .
that 's actually hy .
and i look at a beautiful bowl of fruit , and i look at a dress that i sewed for friends of mine .
and it says , " ich habe genug , " which is a bach cantata , which i once thought meant " i 've had it , i ca n't take it anymore , give me a break , " but i was wrong .
it means " i have enough . " and that is utterly true .
i happen to be alive , end of discussion . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so i 'm going to speak about a problem that i have and that 's that i 'm a philosopher .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- when i go to a party and people ask me what do i do and i say , " i 'm a professor , " their eyes glaze over .
when i go to an academic cocktail party and there are all the professors around , they ask me what field i 'm in and i say , " philosophy " - their eyes glaze over .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- when i go to a philosopher 's party -lrb- laughter -rrb- and they ask me what i work on and i say , " consciousness , " their eyes do n't glaze over - their lips curl into a snarl .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i get hoots of derision and cackles and growls because they think , " that 's impossible ! you ca n't explain consciousness . "
the very chutzpah of somebody thinking that you could explain consciousness is just out of the question .
my late , lamented friend bob nozick , a fine philosopher , in one of his books , " philosophical explanations , " is commenting on the ethos of philosophy - the way philosophers go about their business .
and he says , you know , " philosophers love rational argument . "
and he says , " it seems as if the ideal argument for most philosophers is you give your audience the premises and then you give them the inferences and the conclusion , and if they do n't accept the conclusion , they die .
their heads explode . " the idea is to have an argument that is so powerful that it knocks out your opponents .
but in fact that does n't change people 's minds at all .
it 's very hard to change people 's minds about something like consciousness , and i finally figured out the reason for that .
the reason for that is that everybody 's an expert on consciousness .
we heard the other day that everybody 's got a strong opinion about video games .
they all have an idea for a video game , even if they 're not experts .
but they do n't consider themselves experts on video games ; they 've just got strong opinions .
i 'm sure that people here who work on , say , climate change and global warming , or on the future of the internet , encounter people who have very strong opinions about what 's going to happen next .
but they probably do n't think of these opinions as expertise .
they 're just strongly held opinions .
but with regard to consciousness , people seem to think , each of us seems to think , " i am an expert .
simply by being conscious , i know all about this . "
and so , you tell them your theory and they say , " no , no , that 's not the way consciousness is !
no , you 've got it all wrong . "
and they say this with an amazing confidence .
and so what i 'm going to try to do today is to shake your confidence . because i know the feeling - i can feel it myself .
i want to shake your confidence that you know your own innermost minds - that you are , yourselves , authoritative about your own consciousness .
that 's the order of the day here .
now , this nice picture shows a thought-balloon , a thought-bubble .
i think everybody understands what that means .
that 's supposed to exhibit the stream of consciousness .
this is my favorite picture of consciousness that 's ever been done .
it 's a saul steinberg of course - it was a new yorker cover .
and this fellow here is looking at the painting by braque .
that reminds him of the word baroque , barrack , bark , poodle , suzanne r. - he 's off to the races .
there 's a wonderful stream of consciousness here and if you follow it along , you learn a lot about this man .
what i particularly like about this picture , too , is that steinberg has rendered the guy in this sort of pointillist style .
which reminds us , as rod brooks was saying yesterday : what we are , what each of us is - what you are , what i am - is approximately 100 trillion little cellular robots .
that 's what we 're made of .
no other ingredients at all . we 're just made of cells , about 100 trillion of them .
not a single one of those cells is conscious ; not a single one of those cells knows who you are , or cares .
somehow , we have to explain how when you put together teams , armies , battalions of hundreds of millions of little robotic unconscious cells - not so different really from a bacterium , each one of them - the result is this . i mean , just look at it .
the content - there 's color , there 's ideas , there 's memories , there 's history . and somehow all that content of consciousness is accomplished by the busy activity of those hoards of neurons .
how is that possible ? many people just think it is n't possible at all .
they think , " no , there ca n't be any sort of naturalistic explanation of consciousness . "
this is a lovely book by a friend of mine named lee siegel , who 's a professor of religion , actually , at the university of hawaii , and he 's an expert magician , and an expert on the street magic of india , which is what this book is about , " net of magic . "
and there 's a passage in it which i would love to share with you .
it speaks so eloquently to the problem .
" ' i 'm writing a book on magic , ' i explain , and i 'm asked , ' real magic ? ' by ' real magic , ' people mean miracles , thaumaturgical acts , and supernatural powers .
' no , ' i answer . ' conjuring tricks , not real magic . ' ' real magic , ' in other words , refers to the magic that is not real ; while the magic that is real , that can actually be done , is not real magic . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , that 's the way a lot of people feel about consciousness .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- real consciousness is not a bag of tricks .
if you 're going to explain this as a bag of tricks , then it 's not real consciousness , whatever it is .
and , as marvin said , and as other people have said , " consciousness is a bag of tricks . "
this means that a lot of people are just left completely dissatisfied and incredulous when i attempt to explain consciousness .
so this is the problem . so i have to do a little bit of the sort of work that a lot of you wo n't like , for the same reason that you do n't like to see a magic trick explained to you .
how many of you here , if somebody - some smart aleck - starts telling you how a particular magic trick is done , you sort of want to block your ears and say , " no , no , i do n't want to know !
do n't take the thrill of it away . i 'd rather be mystified .
do n't tell me the answer . "
a lot of people feel that way about consciousness , i 've discovered .
and i 'm sorry if i impose some clarity , some understanding on you .
you 'd better leave now if you do n't want to know some of these tricks .
but i 'm not going to explain it all to you .
i 'm going to do what philosophers do .
here 's how a philosopher explains the sawing-the-lady-in-half trick .
you know the sawing-the-lady-in-half trick ?
the philosopher says , " i 'm going to explain to you how that 's done .
you see , the magician does n't really saw the lady in half . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " he merely makes you think that he does . "
and you say , " yes , and how does he do that ? "
he says , " oh , that 's not my department , i 'm sorry . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so now i 'm going to illustrate how philosophers explain consciousness .
but i 'm going to try to also show you that consciousness is n't quite as marvelous - your own consciousness is n't quite as wonderful - as you may have thought it is .
this is something , by the way , that lee siegel talks about in his book .
he marvels at how he 'll do a magic show , and afterwards people will swear they saw him do x , y , and z. he never did those things .
he did n't even try to do those things .
people 's memories inflate what they think they saw .
and the same is true of consciousness .
now , let 's see if this will work . all right . let 's just watch this .
watch it carefully .
i 'm working with a young computer-animator documentarian named nick deamer , and this is a little demo that he 's done for me , part of a larger project some of you may be interested in .
we 're looking for a backer .
it 's a feature-length documentary on consciousness .
ok , now , you all saw what changed , right ?
how many of you noticed that every one of those squares changed color ?
every one . i 'll just show you by running it again .
even when you know that they 're all going to change color , it 's very hard to notice . you have to really concentrate to pick up any of the changes at all .
now , this is an example - one of many - of a phenomenon that 's now being studied quite a bit .
it 's one that i predicted in the last page or two of my 1991 book , " consciousness explained , " where i said if you did experiments of this sort , you 'd find that people were unable to pick up really large changes .
if there 's time at the end , i 'll show you the much more dramatic case .
now , how can it be that there are all those changes going on , and that we 're not aware of them ?
well , earlier today , jeff hawkins mentioned the way your eye saccades , the way your eye moves around three or four times a second .
he did n't mention the speed . your eye is constantly in motion , moving around , looking at eyes , noses , elbows , looking at interesting things in the world .
and where your eye is n't looking , you 're remarkably impoverished in your vision .
that 's because the foveal part of your eye , which is the high-resolution part , is only about the size of your thumbnail held at arms length .
that 's the detail part .
it does n't seem that way , does it ?
it does n't seem that way , but that 's the way it is .
you 're getting in a lot less information than you think .
here 's a completely different effect . this is a painting by bellotto .
it 's in the museum in north carolina .
bellotto was a student of canaletto 's .
and i love paintings like that - the painting is actually about as big as it is right here .
and i love canalettos , because canaletto has this fantastic detail , and you can get right up and see all the details on the painting .
and i started across the hall in north carolina , because i thought it was probably a canaletto , and would have all that in detail .
and i noticed that on the bridge there , there 's a lot of people - you can just barely see them walking across the bridge .
and i thought as i got closer i would be able to see all the detail of most people , see their clothes , and so forth .
and as i got closer and closer , i actually screamed .
i yelled out because when i got closer , i found the detail was n't there at all .
there were just little artfully placed blobs of paint .
and as i walked towards the picture , i was expecting detail that was n't there .
the artist had very cleverly suggested people and clothes and wagons and all sorts of things , and my brain had taken the suggestion .
you 're familiar with a more recent technology , which is - there , you can get a better view of the blobs .
see , when you get close they 're really just blobs of paint .
you will have seen something like this - this is the reverse effect .
i 'll just give that to you one more time .
now , what does your brain do when it takes the suggestion ?
when an artful blob of paint or two , by an artist , suggests a person - say , one of marvin minsky 's little society of mind - do they send little painters out to fill in all the details in your brain somewhere ?
i do n't think so . not a chance . but then , how on earth is it done ?
well , remember the philosopher 's explanation of the lady ?
it 's the same thing .
the brain just makes you think that it 's got the detail there .
you think the detail 's there , but it is n't there .
the brain is n't actually putting the detail in your head at all .
it 's just making you expect the detail .
let 's just do this experiment very quickly .
is the shape on the left the same as the shape on the right , rotated ?
yes .
how many of you did it by rotating the one on the left in your mind 's eye , to see if it matched up with the one on the right ?
how many of you rotated the one on the right ? ok .
how do you know that 's what you did ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- there 's in fact been a very interesting debate raging for over 20 years in cognitive science - various experiments started by roger shepherd , who measured the angular velocity of rotation of mental images .
yes , it 's possible to do that .
but the details of the process are still in significant controversy .
and if you read that literature , one of the things that you really have to come to terms with is even when you 're the subject in the experiment , you do n't know .
you do n't know how you do it .
you just know that you have certain beliefs .
and they come in a certain order , at a certain time .
and what explains the fact that that 's what you think ?
well , that 's where you have to go backstage and ask the magician .
this is a figure that i love : bradley , petrie , and dumais .
you may think that i 've cheated , that i 've put a little whiter-than-white boundary there .
how many of you see that sort of boundary , with the necker cube floating in front of the circles ?
can you see it ?
well , you know , in effect , the boundary 's really there , in a certain sense .
your brain is actually computing that boundary , the boundary that goes right there .
but now , notice there are two ways of seeing the cube , right ?
it 's a necker cube .
everybody can see the two ways of seeing the cube ? ok .
can you see the four ways of seeing the cube ?
because there 's another way of seeing it .
if you 're seeing it as a cube floating in front of some circles , some black circles , there 's another way of seeing it .
as a cube , on a black background , as seen through a piece of swiss cheese .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- can you get it ? how many of you ca n't get it ? that 'll help .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now you can get it . these are two very different phenomena .
when you see the cube one way , behind the screen , those boundaries go away .
but there 's still a sort of filling in , as we can tell if we look at this .
we do n't have any trouble seeing the cube , but where does the color change ?
does your brain have to send little painters in there ?
the purple-painters and the green-painters fight over who 's going to paint that bit behind the curtain ? no .
your brain just lets it go . the brain does n't need to fill that in .
when i first started talking about the bradley , petrie , dumais example that you just saw - i 'll go back to it , this one - i said that there was no filling-in behind there .
and i supposed that that was just a flat truth , always true .
but rob van lier has recently shown that it is n't .
now , if you think you see some pale yellow - i 'll run this a few more times .
look in the gray areas , and see if you seem to see something sort of shadowy moving in there - yeah , it 's amazing . there 's nothing there . it 's no trick .
-lsb- " failure to detect changes in scenes " slide -rsb- this is ron rensink 's work , which was in some degree inspired by that suggestion right at the end of the book .
let me just pause this for a second if i can .
this is change-blindness .
what you 're going to see is two pictures , one of which is slightly different from the other .
you see here the red roof and the gray roof , and in between them there will be a mask , which is just a blank screen , for about a quarter of a second .
so you 'll see the first picture , then a mask , then the second picture , then a mask .
and this will just continue , and your job as the subject is to press the button when you see the change .
so , show the original picture for 240 milliseconds . blank .
show the next picture for 240 milliseconds . blank .
and keep going , until the subject presses the button , saying , " i see the change . "
so now we 're going to be subjects in the experiment .
we 're going to start easy . some examples .
no trouble there .
can everybody see ? all right .
indeed , rensink 's subjects took only a little bit more than a second to press the button .
can you see that one ?
2.9 seconds .
how many do n't see it still ?
what 's on the roof of that barn ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's easy .
is it a bridge or a dock ?
there are a few more really dramatic ones , and then i 'll close .
i want you to see a few that are particularly striking .
this one because it 's so large and yet it 's pretty hard to see .
can you see it ?
audience : yes .
dan dennett : see the shadows going back and forth ? pretty big .
so 15.5 seconds is the median time for subjects in his experiment there .
i love this one . i 'll end with this one , just because it 's such an obvious and important thing .
how many still do n't see it ? how many still do n't see it ?
how many engines on the wing of that boeing ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- right in the middle of the picture !
thanks very much for your attention .
what i wanted to show you is that scientists , using their from-the-outside , third-person methods , can tell you things about your own consciousness that you would never dream of , and that , in fact , you 're not the authority on your own consciousness that you think you are .
and we 're really making a lot of progress on coming up with a theory of mind .
jeff hawkins , this morning , was describing his attempt to get theory , and a good , big theory , into the neuroscience .
and he 's right . this is a problem .
harvard medical school once - i was at a talk - director of the lab said , " in our lab , we have a saying .
if you work on one neuron , that 's neuroscience .
if you work on two neurons , that 's psychology . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we have to have more theory , and it can come as much from the top down .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so , this book that i have in my hand is a directory of everybody who had an email address in 1982 . -lrb- laughter -rrb- actually , it 's deceptively large .
there 's actually only about 20 people on each page , because we have the name , address and telephone number of every single person .
and , in fact , everybody 's listed twice , because it 's sorted once by name and once by email address .
obviously a very small community .
there were only two other dannys on the internet then .
i knew them both .
we did n't all know each other , but we all kind of trusted each other , and that basic feeling of trust permeated the whole network , and there was a real sense that we could depend on each other to do things .
so just to give you an idea of the level of trust in this community , let me tell you what it was like to register a domain name in the early days .
now , it just so happened that i got to register the third domain name on the internet .
so i could have anything i wanted other than bbn.com and symbolics.com.
so i picked think.com , but then i thought , you know , there 's a lot of really interesting names out there .
maybe i should register a few extras just in case .
and then i thought , " nah , that would n't be very nice . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that attitude of only taking what you need was really what everybody had on the network in those days , and in fact , it was n't just the people on the network , but it was actually kind of built into the protocols of the internet itself .
so the basic idea of i.p. , or internet protocol , and the way that the - the routing algorithm that used it , were fundamentally " from each according to their ability , to each according to their need . "
and so , if you had some extra bandwidth , you 'd deliver a message for someone .
if they had some extra bandwidth , they would deliver a message for you .
you 'd kind of depend on people to do that , and that was the building block .
it was actually interesting that such a communist principle was the basis of a system developed during the cold war by the defense department , but it obviously worked really well , and we all saw what happened with the internet .
it was incredibly successful .
in fact , it was so successful that there 's no way that these days you could make a book like this .
my rough calculation is it would be about 25 miles thick .
but , of course , you could n't do it , because we do n't know the names of all the people with internet or email addresses , and even if we did know their names , i 'm pretty sure that they would not want their name , address and telephone number published to everyone .
so the fact is that there 's a lot of bad guys on the internet these days , and so we dealt with that by making walled communities , secure subnetworks , vpns , little things that are n't really the internet but are made out of the same building blocks , but we 're still basically building it out of those same building blocks with those same assumptions of trust .
and that means that it 's vulnerable to certain kinds of mistakes that can happen , or certain kinds of deliberate attacks , but even the mistakes can be bad .
so , for instance , in all of asia recently , it was impossible to get youtube for a little while because pakistan made some mistakes in how it was censoring youtube in its internal network .
they did n't intend to screw up asia , but they did because of the way that the protocols work .
another example that may have affected many of you in this audience is , you may remember a couple of years ago , all the planes west of the mississippi were grounded because a single routing card in salt lake city had a bug in it .
now , you do n't really think that our airplane system depends on the internet , and in some sense it does n't .
i 'll come back to that later .
but the fact is that people could n't take off because something was going wrong on the internet , and the router card was down .
and so , there are many of those things that start to happen .
now , there was an interesting thing that happened last april .
all of a sudden , a very large percentage of the traffic on the whole internet , including a lot of the traffic between u.s. military installations , started getting re-routed through china .
so for a few hours , it all passed through china .
now , china telecom says it was just an honest mistake , and it is actually possible that it was , the way things work , but certainly somebody could make a dishonest mistake of that sort if they wanted to , and it shows you how vulnerable the system is even to mistakes .
imagine how vulnerable the system is to deliberate attacks .
so if somebody really wanted to attack the united states or western civilization these days , they 're not going to do it with tanks .
that will not succeed .
what they 'll probably do is something very much like the attack that happened on the iranian nuclear facility .
nobody has claimed credit for that .
there was basically a factory of industrial machines .
it did n't think of itself as being on the internet .
it thought of itself as being disconnected from the internet , but it was possible for somebody to smuggle a usb drive in there , or something like that , and software got in there that causes the centrifuges , in that case , to actually destroy themselves .
now that same kind of software could destroy an oil refinery or a pharmaceutical factory or a semiconductor plant .
and so there 's a lot of - i 'm sure you 've read a lot in papers , about worries about cyberattacks and defenses against those .
but the fact is , people are mostly focused on defending the computers on the internet , and there 's been surprisingly little attention to defending the internet itself as a communications medium .
and i think we probably do need to pay some more attention to that , because it 's actually kind of fragile .
back when it was the arpanet , there were actually times - there was a particular time it failed completely because one single message processor actually got a bug in it .
and the way the internet works is the routers are basically exchanging information about how they can get messages to places , and this one processor , because of a broken card , decided it could actually get a message to some place in negative time .
so , in other words , it claimed it could deliver a message before you sent it .
so of course , the fastest way to get a message anywhere was to send it to this guy , who would send it back in time and get it there super early , so every message in the internet started getting switched through this one node , and of course that clogged everything up .
everything started breaking .
the interesting thing was , though , that the sysadmins were able to fix it , but they had to basically turn every single thing on the internet off .
now , of course you could n't do that today .
i mean , everything off , it 's like the service call you get from the cable company , except for the whole world .
now , in fact , they could n't do it for a lot of reasons today .
one of the reasons is a lot of their telephones use ip protocol and use things like skype and so on that go through the internet right now , and so in fact we 're becoming dependent on it for more and more different things , like when you take off from lax , you 're really not thinking you 're using the internet .
when you pump gas , you really do n't think you 're using the internet .
what 's happening increasingly , though , is these systems are beginning to use the internet .
most of them are n't based on the internet yet , but they 're starting to use the internet for service functions , for administrative functions , and so if you take something like the cell phone system , which is still relatively independent of the internet for the most part , internet pieces are beginning to sneak into it in terms of some of the control and administrative functions , and it 's so tempting to use these same building blocks because they work so well , they 're cheap , they 're repeated , and so on .
so all of our systems , more and more , and starting to depend on this technology .
and so even a modern rocket ship these days actually uses internet protocol to talk from one end of the rocket ship to the other .
that 's crazy . it was never designed to do things like that .
so we 've built this system where we understand all the parts of it , but we 're using it in a very , very different way than we expected to use it , and it 's gotten a very , very different scale than it was designed for .
and in fact , nobody really exactly understands all the things it 's being used for right now .
it 's turning into one of these big emergent systems like the financial system , where we 've designed all the parts but nobody really exactly understands how it operates and all the little details of it and what kinds of emergent behaviors it can have .
and so if you hear an expert talking about the internet and saying it can do this , or it does do this , or it will do that , you should treat it with the same skepticism that you might treat the comments of an economist about the economy or a weatherman about the weather , or something like that .
they have an informed opinion , but it 's changing so quickly that even the experts do n't know exactly what 's going on .
so if you see one of these maps of the internet , it 's just somebody 's guess .
nobody really knows what the internet is right now because it 's different than it was an hour ago .
it 's constantly changing . it 's constantly reconfiguring .
and the problem with it is , i think we are setting ourselves up for a kind of disaster like the disaster we had in the financial system , where we take a system that 's basically built on trust , was basically built for a smaller-scale system , and we 've kind of expanded it way beyond the limits of how it was meant to operate .
and so right now , i think it 's literally true that we do n't know what the consequences on the internet would be , and whatever it would be is going to be worse next year , and worse next year , and so on .
but so what we need is a plan b.
there is no plan b right now .
there 's no clear backup system that we 've very carefully kept to be independent of the internet , made out of completely different sets of building blocks .
so what we need is something that does n't necessarily have to have the performance of the internet , but the police department has to be able to call up the fire department even without the internet , or the hospitals have to order fuel oil .
this does n't need to be a multi-billion-dollar government project .
it 's actually relatively simple to do , technically , because it can use existing fibers that are in the ground , existing wireless infrastructure .
it 's basically a matter of deciding to do it .
but people wo n't decide to do it until they recognize the need for it , and that 's the problem that we have right now .
so there 's been plenty of people , plenty of us have been quietly arguing that we should have this independent system for years , but it 's very hard to get people focused on plan b when plan a seems to be working so well .
so i think that , if people understand how much we 're starting to depend on the internet , and how vulnerable it is , we could get focused on just wanting this other system to exist , and i think if enough people say , " yeah , i would like to use it , i 'd like to have such a system , " then it will get built .
it 's not that hard a problem .
it could definitely be done by people in this room .
and so i think that this is actually , of all the problems you 're going to hear about at the conference , this is probably one of the very easiest to fix .
so i 'm happy to get a chance to tell you about it .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- here 's a question we need to rethink together : what should be the role of money and markets in our societies ?
today , there are very few things that money ca n't buy .
if you 're sentenced to a jail term in santa barbara , california , you should know that if you do n't like the standard accommodations , you can buy a prison cell upgrade .
it 's true . for how much , do you think ?
what would you guess ?
five hundred dollars ?
it 's not the ritz-carlton . it 's a jail !
eighty-two dollars a night .
eighty-two dollars a night .
if you go to an amusement park and do n't want to stand in the long lines for the popular rides , there is now a solution .
in many theme parks , you can pay extra to jump to the head of the line .
they call them fast track or vip tickets .
and this is n't only happening in amusement parks .
in washington , d.c. , long lines , queues sometimes form for important congressional hearings .
now some people do n't like to wait in long queues , maybe overnight , even in the rain .
so now , for lobbyists and others who are very keen to attend these hearings but do n't like to wait , there are companies , line-standing companies , and you can go to them .
you can pay them a certain amount of money , they hire homeless people and others who need a job to stand waiting in the line for as long as it takes , and the lobbyist , just before the hearing begins , can take his or her place at the head of the line and a seat in the front of the room .
paid line standing .
it 's happening , the recourse to market mechanisms and market thinking and market solutions , in bigger arenas .
take the way we fight our wars .
did you know that , in iraq and afghanistan , there were more private military contractors on the ground than there were u.s. military troops ?
now this is n't because we had a public debate about whether we wanted to outsource war to private companies , but this is what has happened .
over the past three decades , we have lived through a quiet revolution .
we 've drifted almost without realizing it from having a market economy to becoming market societies .
the difference is this : a market economy is a tool , a valuable and effective tool , for organizing productive activity , but a market society is a place where almost everything is up for sale .
it 's a way of life , in which market thinking and market values begin to dominate every aspect of life : personal relations , family life , health , education , politics , law , civic life .
now , why worry ? why worry about our becoming market societies ?
for two reasons , i think .
one of them has to do with inequality .
the more things money can buy , the more affluence , or the lack of it , matters .
if the only thing that money determined was access to yachts or fancy vacations or bmws , then inequality would n't matter very much .
but when money comes increasingly to govern access to the essentials of the good life - decent health care , access to the best education , political voice and influence in campaigns - when money comes to govern all of those things , inequality matters a great deal .
and so the marketization of everything sharpens the sting of inequality and its social and civic consequence .
that 's one reason to worry .
there 's a second reason apart from the worry about inequality , and it 's this : with some social goods and practices , when market thinking and market values enter , they may change the meaning of those practices and crowd out attitudes and norms worth caring about .
i 'd like to take an example of a controversial use of a market mechanism , a cash incentive , and see what you think about it .
many schools struggle with the challenge of motivating kids , especially kids from disadvantaged backgrounds , to study hard , to do well in school , to apply themselves .
some economists have proposed a market solution : offer cash incentives to kids for getting good grades or high test scores or for reading books .
they 've tried this , actually .
they 've done some experiments in some major american cities .
in new york , in chicago , in washington , d.c. , they 've tried this , offering 50 dollars for an a , 35 dollars for a b.
in dallas , texas , they have a program that offers eight-year-olds two dollars for each book they read .
so let 's see what - some people are in favor , some people are opposed to this cash incentive to motivate achievement .
let 's see what people here think about it .
imagine that you are the head of a major school system , and someone comes to you with this proposal .
and let 's say it 's a foundation . they will provide the funds .
you do n't have to take it out of your budget .
how many would be in favor and how many would be opposed to giving it a try ?
let 's see by a show of hands .
first , how many think it might at least be worth a try to see if it would work ? raise your hand .
and how many would be opposed ? how many would - so the majority here are opposed , but a sizable minority are in favor .
let 's have a discussion .
let 's start with those of you who object , who would rule it out even before trying .
what would be your reason ?
who will get our discussion started ? yes ?
heike moses : hello everyone , i 'm heike , and i think it just kills the intrinsic motivation , so in the respect that children , if they would like to read , you just take this incentive away in just paying them , so it just changes behavior .
michael sandel : takes the intrinsic incentive away .
what is , or should be , the intrinsic motivation ?
hm : well , the intrinsic motivation should be to learn .
ms : to learn . hm : to get to know the world .
and then , if you stop paying them , what happens then ?
then they stop reading ?
ms : now , let 's see if there 's someone who favors , who thinks it 's worth trying this .
elizabeth loftus : i 'm elizabeth loftus , and you said worth a try , so why not try it and do the experiment and measure things ?
ms : and measure . and what would you measure ?
you 'd measure how many - el : how many books they read and how many books they continued to read after you stopped paying them .
ms : oh , after you stopped paying .
all right , what about that ?
hm : to be frank , i just think this is , not to offend anyone , a very american way .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- ms : all right . what 's emerged from this discussion is the following question : will the cash incentive drive out or corrupt or crowd out the higher motivation , the intrinsic lesson that we hope to convey , which is to learn to love to learn and to read for their own sakes ?
and people disagree about what the effect will be , but that seems to be the question , that somehow a market mechanism or a cash incentive teaches the wrong lesson , and if it does , what will become of these children later ?
i should tell you what 's happened with these experiments .
the cash for good grades has had very mixed results , for the most part has not resulted in higher grades .
the two dollars for each book did lead those kids to read more books .
it also led them to read shorter books .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but the real question is , what will become of these kids later ?
will they have learned that reading is a chore , a form of piecework to be done for pay , that 's the worry , or may it lead them to read maybe for the wrong reason initially but then lead them to fall in love with reading for its own sake ?
now , what this , even this brief debate , brings out is something that many economists overlook .
economists often assume that markets are inert , that they do not touch or taint the goods they exchange .
market exchange , they assume , does n't change the meaning or value of the goods being exchanged .
this may be true enough if we 're talking about material goods .
if you sell me a flat screen television or give me one as a gift , it will be the same good .
it will work the same either way .
but the same may not be true if we 're talking about nonmaterial goods and social practices such as teaching and learning or engaging together in civic life .
in those domains , bringing market mechanisms and cash incentives may undermine or crowd out nonmarket values and attitudes worth caring about .
once we see that markets and commerce , when extended beyond the material domain , can change the character of the goods themselves , can change the meaning of the social practices , as in the example of teaching and learning , we have to ask where markets belong and where they do n't , where they may actually undermine values and attitudes worth caring about .
but to have this debate , we have to do something we 're not very good at , and that is to reason together in public about the value and the meaning of the social practices we prize , from our bodies to family life to personal relations to health to teaching and learning to civic life .
now these are controversial questions , and so we tend to shrink from them .
in fact , during the past three decades , when market reasoning and market thinking have gathered force and gained prestige , our public discourse during this time empty of larger moral meaning .
for fear of disagreement , we shrink from these questions .
but once we see that markets change the character of goods , we have to debate among ourselves these bigger questions about how to value goods .
one of the most corrosive effects of putting a price on everything is on commonality , the sense that we are all in it together .
against the background of rising inequality , marketizing every aspect of life leads to a condition where those who are affluent and those who are of modest means increasingly live separate lives .
we live and work and shop and play in different places .
our children go to different schools .
this is n't good for democracy , nor is it a satisfying way to live , even for those of us who can afford to buy our way to the head of the line .
here 's why .
democracy does not require perfect equality , but what it does require is that citizens share in a common life .
what matters is that people of different social backgrounds and different walks of life encounter one another , bump up against one another in the ordinary course of life , because this is what teaches us to negotiate and to abide our differences .
and this is how we come to care for the common good .
and so , in the end , the question of markets is not mainly an economic question .
it 's really a question of how we want to live together .
do we want a society where everything is up for sale , or are there certain moral and civic goods that markets do not honor and money can not buy ?
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- let me tell you , it has been a fantastic month for deception .
and i 'm not even talking about the american presidential race . -lrb- laughter -rrb- we have a high-profile journalist caught for plagiarism , a young superstar writer whose book involves so many made up quotes that they 've pulled it from the shelves ; a new york times exposé on fake book reviews .
it 's been fantastic .
now , of course , not all deception hits the news .
much of the deception is everyday . in fact , a lot of research shows that we all lie once or twice a day , as dave suggested .
so it 's about 6:30 now , suggests that most of us should have lied .
let 's take a look at winnipeg . how many of you , in the last 24 hours - think back - have told a little fib , or a big one ? how many have told a little lie out there ?
all right , good . these are all the liars .
make sure you pay attention to them . -lrb- laughter -rrb- no , that looked good , it was about two thirds of you .
the other third did n't lie , or perhaps forgot , or you 're lying to me about your lying , which is very , very devious . -lrb- laughter -rrb- this fits with a lot of the research , which suggests that lying is very pervasive .
it 's this pervasiveness , combined with the centrality to what it means to be a human , the fact that we can tell the truth or make something up , that has fascinated people throughout history .
here we have diogenes with his lantern .
does anybody know what he was looking for ?
a single honest man , and he died without finding one back in greece . and we have confucius in the east who was really concerned with sincerity , not only that you walked the walk or talked the talk , but that you believed in what you were doing .
you believed in your principles .
now my first professional encounter with deception is a little bit later than these guys , a couple thousand years .
i was a customs officer for canada back in the mid- ' 90s .
yeah . i was defending canada 's borders .
you may think that 's a weapon right there . in fact , that 's a stamp . i used a stamp to defend canada 's borders . -lrb- laughter -rrb- very canadian of me . i learned a lot about deception while doing my duty here in customs , one of which was that most of what i thought i knew about deception was wrong , and i 'll tell you about some of that tonight .
but even since just 1995 , ' 96 , the way we communicate has been completely transformed . we email , we text , we skype , we facebook . it 's insane .
almost every aspect of human communication 's been changed , and of course that 's had an impact on deception .
let me tell you a little bit about a couple of new deceptions we 've been tracking and documenting .
they 're called the butler , the sock puppet and the chinese water army .
it sounds a little bit like a weird book , but actually they 're all new types of lies .
let 's start with the butlers . here 's an example of one : " on my way . " anybody ever written , " on my way ? "
then you 've also lied . -lrb- laughter -rrb- we 're never on our way . we 're thinking about going on our way .
here 's another one : " sorry i did n't respond to you earlier .
my battery was dead . " your battery was n't dead .
you were n't in a dead zone .
you just did n't want to respond to that person that time .
here 's the last one : you 're talking to somebody , and you say , " sorry , got work , gotta go . "
but really , you 're just bored . you want to talk to somebody else .
each of these is about a relationship , and this is a 24/7 connected world . once you get my cell phone number , you can literally be in touch with me 24 hours a day .
and so these lies are being used by people to create a buffer , like the butler used to do , between us and the connections to everybody else .
but they 're very special . they use ambiguity that comes from using technology . you do n't know where i am or what i 'm doing or who i 'm with .
and they 're aimed at protecting the relationships .
these are n't just people being jerks . these are people that are saying , look , i do n't want to talk to you now , or i did n't want to talk to you then , but i still care about you .
our relationship is still important .
now , the sock puppet , on the other hand , is a totally different animal . the sock puppet is n't about ambiguity , per se . it 's about identity .
let me give you a very recent example , as in , like , last week .
here 's r.j. ellory , best-seller author in britain .
here 's one of his bestselling books .
here 's a reviewer online , on amazon .
my favorite , by nicodemus jones , is , " whatever else it might do , it will touch your soul . "
and of course , you might suspect that nicodemus jones is r.j. ellory .
he wrote very , very positive reviews about himself . surprise , surprise .
now this sock puppet stuff is n't actually that new .
walt whitman also did this back in the day , before there was internet technology . sock puppet becomes interesting when we get to scale , which is the domain of the chinese water army .
chinese water army refers to thousands of people in china that are paid small amounts of money to produce content . it could be reviews . it could be propaganda . the government hires these people , companies hire them , all over the place .
in north america , we call this astroturfing , and astroturfing is very common now . there 's a lot of concerns about it .
we see this especially with product reviews , book reviews , everything from hotels to whether that toaster is a good toaster or not .
now , looking at these three reviews , or these three types of deception , you might think , wow , the internet is really making us a deceptive species , especially when you think about the astroturfing , where we can see deception brought up to scale .
but actually , what i 've been finding is very different from that .
now , let 's put aside the online anonymous sex chatrooms , which i 'm sure none of you have been in .
i can assure you there 's deception there .
and let 's put aside the nigerian prince who 's emailed you about getting the 43 million out of the country . -lrb- laughter -rrb- let 's forget about that guy , too .
let 's focus on the conversations between our friends and our family and our coworkers and our loved ones .
those are the conversations that really matter .
what does technology do to deception with those folks ?
here 's a couple of studies . one of the studies we do are called diary studies , in which we ask people to record all of their conversations and all of their lies for seven days , and what we can do then is calculate how many lies took place per conversation within a medium , and the finding that we get that surprises people the most is that email is the most honest of those three media .
and it really throws people for a loop because we think , well , there 's no nonverbal cues , so why do n't you lie more ?
the phone , in contrast , the most lies .
again and again and again we see the phone is the device that people lie on the most , and perhaps because of the butler lie ambiguities i was telling you about .
this tends to be very different from what people expect .
what about résumés ? we did a study in which we had people apply for a job , and they could apply for a job either with a traditional paper résumé , or on linkedin , which is a social networking site like facebook , but for professionals - involves the same information as a résumé .
and what we found , to many people 's surprise , was that those linkedin résumés were more honest on the things that mattered to employers , like your responsibilities or your skills at your previous job .
how about facebook itself ?
you know , we always think that hey , there are these idealized versions , people are just showing the best things that happened in their lives . i 've thought that many times .
my friends , no way they can be that cool and have good of a life .
well , one study tested this by examining people 's personalities .
they had four good friends of a person judge their personality .
then they had strangers , many strangers , judge the person 's personality just from facebook , and what they found was those judgments of the personality were pretty much identical , highly correlated , meaning that facebook profiles really do reflect our actual personality .
all right , well , what about online dating ?
i mean , that 's a pretty deceptive space .
i 'm sure you all have " friends " that have used online dating . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and they would tell you about that guy that had no hair when he came , or the woman that did n't look at all like her photo .
well , we were really interested in it , and so what we did is we brought people , online daters , into the lab , and then we measured them . we got their height up against the wall , we put them on a scale , got their weight - ladies loved that - and then we actually got their driver 's license to get their age .
and what we found was very , very interesting .
here 's an example of the men and the height .
along the bottom is how tall they said they were in their profile .
along the y-axis , the vertical axis , is how tall they actually were .
that diagonal line is the truth line . if their dot 's on it , they were telling exactly the truth .
now , as you see , most of the little dots are below the line .
what it means is all the guys were lying about their height .
in fact , they lied about their height about nine tenths of an inch , what we say in the lab as " strong rounding up . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- you get to 5 ' 8 " and one tenth , and boom ! 5 ' 9 . "
but what 's really important here is , look at all those dots .
they are clustering pretty close to the truth . what we found was 80 percent of our participants did indeed lie on one of those dimensions , but they always lied by a little bit .
one of the reasons is pretty simple . if you go to a date , a coffee date , and you 're completely different than what you said , game over . right ? so people lied frequently , but they lied subtly , not too much . they were constrained .
well , what explains all these studies ? what explains the fact that despite our intuitions , mine included , a lot of online communication , technologically-mediated communication , is more honest than face to face ?
that really is strange . how do we explain this ?
well , to do that , one thing is we can look at the deception-detection literature .
it 's a very old literature by now , it 's coming up on 50 years .
it 's been reviewed many times . there 's been thousands of trials , hundreds of studies , and there 's some really compelling findings .
the first is , we 're really bad at detecting deception , really bad . fifty-four percent accuracy on average when you have to tell if somebody that just said a statement is lying or not .
that 's really bad . why is it so bad ?
well it has to do with pinocchio 's nose .
if i were to ask you guys , what do you rely on when you 're looking at somebody and you want to find out if they 're lying ? what cue do you pay attention to ?
most of you would say that one of the cues you look at is the eyes . the eyes are the window to the soul .
and you 're not alone . around the world , almost every culture , one of the top cues is eyes . but the research over the last 50 years says there 's actually no reliable cue to deception , which blew me away , and it 's one of the hard lessons that i learned when i was customs officer .
the eyes do not tell us whether somebody 's lying or not .
some situations , yes - high stakes , maybe their pupils dilate , their pitch goes up , their body movements change a little bit , but not all the time , not for everybody , it 's not reliable .
strange . the other thing is that just because you ca n't see me does n't mean i 'm going to lie . it 's common sense , but one important finding is that we lie for a reason .
we lie to protect ourselves or for our own gain or for somebody else 's gain .
so there are some pathological liars , but they make up a tiny portion of the population . we lie for a reason .
just because people ca n't see us does n't mean we 're going to necessarily lie .
but i think there 's actually something much more interesting and fundamental going on here . the next big thing for me , the next big idea , we can find by going way back in history to the origins of language .
most linguists agree that we started speaking somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago . that 's a long time ago .
a lot of humans have lived since then .
we 've been talking , i guess , about fires and caves and saber-toothed tigers . i do n't know what they talked about , but they were doing a lot of talking , and like i said , there 's a lot of humans evolving speaking , about 100 billion people in fact .
what 's important though is that writing only emerged about 5,000 years ago . so what that means is that all the people before there was any writing , every word that they ever said , every utterance disappeared . no trace . evanescent . gone .
so we 've been evolving to talk in a way in which there is no record . in fact , even the next big change to writing was only 500 years ago now , with the printing press , which is very recent in our past , and literacy rates remained incredibly low right up until world war ii , so even the people of the last two millennia , most of the words they ever said - poof ! - disappeared .
let 's turn to now , the networked age .
how many of you have recorded something today ?
anybody do any writing today ? did anybody write a word ?
it looks like almost every single person here recorded something .
in this room , right now , we 've probably recorded more than almost all of human pre-ancient history .
that is crazy . we 're entering this amazing period of flux in human evolution where we 've evolved to speak in a way in which our words disappear , but we 're in an environment where we 're recording everything .
in fact , i think in the very near future , it 's not just what we write that will be recorded , everything we do will be recorded .
what does that mean ? what 's the next big idea from that ?
well , as a social scientist , this is the most amazing thing i have ever even dreamed of . now , i can look at all those words that used to , for millennia , disappear .
i can look at lies that before were said and then gone .
you remember those astroturfing reviews that we were talking about before ? well , when they write a fake review , they have to post it somewhere , and it 's left behind for us .
so one thing that we did , and i 'll give you an example of looking at the language , is we paid people to write some fake reviews . one of these reviews is fake .
the person never was at the james hotel .
the other review is real . the person stayed there .
now , your task now is to decide which review is fake ?
i 'll give you a moment to read through them .
but i want everybody to raise their hand at some point .
remember , i study deception . i can tell if you do n't raise your hand .
all right , how many of you believe that a is the fake ?
all right . very good . about half .
and how many of you think that b is ?
all right . slightly more for b.
excellent . here 's the answer .
b is a fake . well done second group . you dominated the first group . -lrb- laughter -rrb- you 're actually a little bit unusual . every time we demonstrate this , it 's usually about a 50-50 split , which fits with the research , 54 percent . maybe people here in winnipeg are more suspicious and better at figuring it out .
those cold , hard winters , i love it .
all right , so why do i care about this ?
well , what i can do now with my colleagues in computer science is we can create computer algorithms that can analyze the linguistic traces of deception .
let me highlight a couple of things here in the fake review . the first is that liars tend to think about narrative . they make up a story : who ? and what happened ? and that 's what happened here .
our fake reviewers talked about who they were with and what they were doing . they also used the first person singular , i , way more than the people that actually stayed there .
they were inserting themselves into the hotel review , kind of trying to convince you they were there .
in contrast , the people that wrote the reviews that were actually there , their bodies actually entered the physical space , they talked a lot more about spatial information .
they said how big the bathroom was , or they said , you know , here 's how far shopping is from the hotel .
now , you guys did pretty well . most people perform at chance at this task .
our computer algorithm is very accurate , much more accurate than humans can be , and it 's not going to be accurate all the time .
this is n't a deception-detection machine to tell if your girlfriend 's lying to you on text messaging .
we believe that every lie now , every type of lie - fake hotel reviews , fake shoe reviews , your girlfriend cheating on you with text messaging - those are all different lies . they 're going to have different patterns of language . but because everything 's recorded now , we can look at all of those kinds of lies .
now , as i said , as a social scientist , this is wonderful .
it 's transformational . we 're going to be able to learn so much more about human thought and expression , about everything from love to attitudes , because everything is being recorded now , but what does it mean for the average citizen ?
what does it mean for us in our lives ?
well , let 's forget deception for a bit . one of the big ideas , i believe , is that we 're leaving these huge traces behind .
my outbox for email is massive , and i never look at it . i write all the time , but i never look at my record , at my trace .
and i think we 're going to see a lot more of that , where we can reflect on who we are by looking at what we wrote , what we said , what we did .
now , if we bring it back to deception , there 's a couple of take-away things here .
first , lying online can be very dangerous , right ?
not only are you leaving a record for yourself on your machine , but you 're leaving a record on the person that you were lying to , and you 're also leaving them around for me to analyze with some computer algorithms .
so by all means , go ahead and do that , that 's good .
but when it comes to lying and what we want to do with our lives , i think we can go back to diogenes and confucius . and they were less concerned about whether to lie or not to lie , and more concerned about being true to the self , and i think this is really important .
now , when you are about to say or do something , we can think , do i want this to be part of my legacy , part of my personal record ?
because in the digital age we live in now , in the networked age , we are all leaving a record .
thank you so much for your time , and good luck with your record . -lrb- applause -rrb- we live in difficult and challenging economic times , of course .
and one of the first victims of difficult economic times , i think , is public spending of any kind , but certainly in the firing line at the moment is public spending for science , and particularly curiosity-led science and exploration .
so i want to try and convince you in about 15 minutes that that 's a ridiculous and ludicrous thing to do .
but i think to set the scene , i want to show - the next slide is not my attempt to show the worst ted slide in the history of ted , but it is a bit of a mess .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but actually , it 's not my fault ; it 's from the guardian newspaper .
and it 's actually a beautiful demonstration of how much science costs .
because , if i 'm going to make the case for continuing to spend on curiosity-driven science and exploration , i should tell you how much it costs .
so this is a game called " spot the science budgets . "
this is the u.k. government spend .
you see there , it 's about 620 billion a year .
the science budget is actually - if you look to your left , there 's a purple set of blobs and then yellow set of blobs .
and it 's one of the yellow set of blobs around the big yellow blob .
it 's about 3.3 billion pounds per year out of 620 billion .
that funds everything in the u.k.
from medical research , space exploration , where i work , at cern in geneva , particle physics , engineering , even arts and humanities , funded from the science budget , which is that 3.3 billion , that little , tiny yellow blob around the orange blob at the top left of the screen .
so that 's what we 're arguing about .
that percentage , by the way , is about the same in the u.s. and germany and france .
r & d in total in the economy , publicly funded , is about 0.6 percent of gdp .
so that 's what we 're arguing about .
the first thing i want to say , and this is straight from " wonders of the solar system , " is that our exploration of the solar system and the universe has shown us that it is indescribably beautiful .
this is a picture that actually was sent back by the cassini space probe around saturn , after we 'd finished filming " wonders of the solar system . "
so it is n't in the series .
it 's of the moon enceladus .
so that big sweeping , white sphere in the corner is saturn , which is actually in the background of the picture .
and that crescent there is the moon enceladus , which is about as big as the british isles .
it 's about 500 kilometers in diameter .
so , tiny moon .
what 's fascinating and beautiful ...
this an unprocessed picture , by the way , i should say , it 's black and white , straight from saturnian orbit .
what 's beautiful is , you can probably see on the limb there some faint , sort of , wisps of almost smoke rising up from the limb .
this is how we visualize that in " wonders of the solar system . "
it 's a beautiful graphic .
what we found out were that those faint wisps are actually fountains of ice rising up from the surface of this tiny moon .
that 's fascinating and beautiful in itself , but we think that the mechanism for powering those fountains requires there to be lakes of liquid water beneath the surface of this moon .
and what 's important about that is that , on our planet , on earth , wherever we find liquid water , we find life .
so , to find strong evidence of liquid , pools of liquid , beneath the surface of a moon 750 million miles away from the earth is really quite astounding .
so what we 're saying , essentially , is maybe that 's a habitat for life in the solar system .
well , let me just say , that was a graphic . i just want to show this picture .
that 's one more picture of enceladus .
this is when cassini flew beneath enceladus .
so it made a very low pass , just a few hundred kilometers above the surface .
and so this , again , a real picture of the ice fountains rising up into space , absolutely beautiful .
but that 's not the prime candidate for life in the solar system .
that 's probably this place , which is a moon of jupiter , europa .
and again , we had to fly to the jovian system to get any sense that this moon , as most moons , was anything other than a dead ball of rock .
it 's actually an ice moon .
so what you 're looking at is the surface of the moon europa , which is a thick sheet of ice , probably a hundred kilometers thick .
but by measuring the way that europa interacts with the magnetic field of jupiter , and looking at how those cracks in the ice that you can see there on that graphic move around , we 've inferred very strongly that there 's an ocean of liquid surrounding the entire surface of europa .
so below the ice , there 's an ocean of liquid around the whole moon .
it could be hundreds of kilometers deep , we think .
we think it 's saltwater , and that would mean that there 's more water on that moon of jupiter than there is in all the oceans of the earth combined .
so that place , a little moon around jupiter , is probably the prime candidate for finding life on a moon or a body outside the earth , that we know of .
tremendous and beautiful discovery .
our exploration of the solar system has taught us that the solar system is beautiful .
it may also have pointed the way to answering one of the most profound questions that you can possibly ask , which is : " are we alone in the universe ? "
is there any other use to exploration and science , other than just a sense of wonder ?
well , there is .
this is a very famous picture taken , actually , on my first christmas eve , december 24th , 1968 , when i was about eight months old .
it was taken by apollo 8 as it went around the back of the moon .
earthrise from apollo 8 .
a famous picture ; many people have said that it 's the picture that saved 1968 , which was a turbulent year - the student riots in paris , the height of the vietnam war .
the reason many people think that about this picture , and al gore has said it many times , actually , on the stage at ted , is that this picture , arguably , was the beginning of the environmental movement .
because , for the first time , we saw our world , not as a solid , immovable , kind of indestructible place , but as a very small , fragile-looking world just hanging against the blackness of space .
what 's also not often said about the space exploration , about the apollo program , is the economic contribution it made .
i mean while you can make arguments that it was wonderful and a tremendous achievement and delivered pictures like this , it cost a lot , did n't it ?
well , actually , many studies have been done about the economic effectiveness , the economic impact of apollo .
the biggest one was in 1975 by chase econometrics .
and it showed that for every $ 1 spent on apollo , 14 came back into the u.s. economy .
so the apollo program paid for itself in inspiration , in engineering , achievement and , i think , in inspiring young scientists and engineers 14 times over .
so exploration can pay for itself .
what about scientific discovery ?
what about driving innovation ?
well , this looks like a picture of virtually nothing .
what it is , is a picture of the spectrum of hydrogen .
see , back in the 1880s , 1890s , many scientists , many observers , looked at the light given off from atoms .
and they saw strange pictures like this .
what you 're seeing when you put it through a prism is that you heat hydrogen up and it does n't just glow like a white light , it just emits light at particular colors , a red one , a light blue one , some dark blue ones .
now that led to an understanding of atomic structure because the way that 's explained is atoms are a single nucleus with electrons going around them .
and the electrons can only be in particular places .
and when they jump up to the next place they can be , and fall back down again , they emit light at particular colors .
and so the fact that atoms , when you heat them up , only emit light at very specific colors , was one of the key drivers that led to the development of the quantum theory , the theory of the structure of atoms .
i just wanted to show this picture because this is remarkable .
this is actually a picture of the spectrum of the sun .
and now , this is a picture of atoms in the sun 's atmosphere absorbing light .
and again , they only absorb light at particular colors when electrons jump up and fall down , jump up and fall down .
but look at the number of black lines in that spectrum .
and the element helium was discovered just by staring at the light from the sun because some of those black lines were found that corresponded to no known element .
and that 's why helium 's called helium .
it 's called " helios " - helios from the sun .
now , that sounds esoteric , and indeed it was an esoteric pursuit , but the quantum theory quickly led to an understanding of the behaviors of electrons in materials like silicon , for example .
the way that silicon behaves , the fact that you can build transistors , is a purely quantum phenomenon .
so without that curiosity-driven understanding of the structure of atoms , which led to this rather esoteric theory , quantum mechanics , then we would n't have transistors , we would n't have silicon chips , we would n't have pretty much the basis of our modern economy .
there 's one more , i think , wonderful twist to that tale .
in " wonders of the solar system , " we kept emphasizing the laws of physics are universal .
it 's one of the most incredible things about the physics and the understanding of nature that you get on earth , is you can transport it , not only to the planets , but to the most distant stars and galaxies .
and one of the astonishing predictions of quantum mechanics , just by looking at the structure of atoms - the same theory that describes transistors - is that there can be no stars in the universe that have reached the end of their life that are bigger than , quite specifically , 1.4 times the mass of the sun .
that 's a limit imposed on the mass of stars .
you can work it out on a piece of paper in a laboratory , get a telescope , swing it to the sky , and you find that there are no dead stars bigger than 1.4 times the mass of the sun .
that 's quite an incredible prediction .
what happens when you have a star that 's right on the edge of that mass ?
well , this is a picture of it .
this is the picture of a galaxy , a common " our garden " galaxy with , what , 100 billion stars like our sun in it .
it 's just one of billions of galaxies in the universe .
there are a billion stars in the galactic core , which is why it 's shining out so brightly .
this is about 50 million light years away , so one of our neighboring galaxies .
but that bright star there is actually one of the stars in the galaxy .
so that star is also 50 million light years away .
it 's part of that galaxy , and it 's shining as brightly as the center of the galaxy with a billion suns in it .
that 's a type ia supernova explosion .
now that 's an incredible phenomena , because it 's a star that sits there .
it 's called a carbon-oxygen dwarf .
it sits there about , say , 1.3 times the mass of the sun .
and it has a binary companion that goes around it , so a big star , a big ball of gas .
and what it does is it sucks gas off its companion star , until it gets to this limit called the chandrasekhar limit , and then it explodes .
and it explodes , and it shines as brightly as a billion suns for about two weeks , and releases , not only energy , but a huge amount of chemical elements into the universe .
in fact , that one is a carbon-oxygen dwarf .
now , there was no carbon and oxygen in the universe at the big bang .
and there was no carbon and oxygen in the universe throughout the first generation of stars .
it was made in stars like that , locked away and then returned to the universe in explosions like that in order to recondense into planets , stars , new solar systems and , indeed , people like us .
i think that 's a remarkable demonstration of the power and beauty and universality of the laws of physics , because we understand that process , because we understand the structure of atoms here on earth .
this is a beautiful quote that i found - we 're talking about serendipity there - from alexander fleming : " when i woke up just after dawn on september 28 , 1928 , i certainly did n't plan to revolutionize all medicine by discovering the world 's first antibiotic . "
now , the explorers of the world of the atom did not intend to invent the transistor .
and they certainly did n't intend to describe the mechanics of supernova explosions , which eventually told us where the building blocks of life were synthesized in the universe .
so , i think science can be - serendipity is important .
it can be beautiful . it can reveal quite astonishing things .
it can also , i think , finally reveal the most profound ideas to us about our place in the universe and really the value of our home planet .
this is a spectacular picture of our home planet .
now , it does n't look like our home planet .
it looks like saturn because , of course , it is .
it was taken by the cassini space probe .
but it 's a famous picture , not because of the beauty and majesty of saturn 's rings , but actually because of a tiny , faint blob just hanging underneath one of the rings .
and if i blow it up there , you see it .
it looks like a moon , but in fact , it 's a picture of earth .
it was a picture of earth captured in that frame of saturn .
that 's our planet from 750 million miles away .
i think the earth has got a strange property that the farther away you get from it , the more beautiful it seems .
but that is not the most distant or most famous picture of our planet .
it was taken by this thing , which is called the voyager spacecraft .
and that 's a picture of me in front of it for scale .
the voyager is a tiny machine .
it 's currently 10 billion miles away from earth , transmitting with that dish , with the power of 20 watts , and we 're still in contact with it .
but it visited jupiter , saturn , uranus and neptune .
and after it visited all four of those planets , carl sagan , who 's one of my great heroes , had the wonderful idea of turning voyager around and taking a picture of every planet it had visited .
and it took this picture of earth .
now it 's very hard to see the earth there , it 's called the " pale blue dot " picture , but earth is suspended in that red shaft of light .
that 's earth from four billion miles away .
and i 'd like to read you what sagan wrote about it , just to finish , because i can not say words as beautiful as this to describe what he saw in that picture that he had taken .
he said , " consider again that dot .
that 's here . that 's home . that 's us .
on it , everyone you love , everyone you know , everyone you 've ever heard of , every human being who ever was lived out their lives .
the aggregates of joy and suffering thousands of confident religions , ideologies and economic doctrines , every hunter and forager , every hero and coward , every creator and destroyer of civilization , every king and peasant , every young couple in love , every mother and father , hopeful child , inventor and explorer , every teacher of morals , every corrupt politician , every superstar , every supreme leader , every saint and sinner in the history of our species , lived there , on a mote of dust , suspended in a sunbeam .
it 's been said that astronomy 's a humbling and character-building experience .
there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world .
to me , it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot , the only home we 've ever known . "
beautiful words about the power of science and exploration .
the argument has always been made , and it will always be made , that we know enough about the universe .
you could have made it in the 1920s ; you would n't have had penicillin .
you could have made it in the 1890s ; you would n't have the transistor .
and it 's made today in these difficult economic times .
surely , we know enough .
we do n't need to discover anything else about our universe .
let me leave the last words to someone who 's rapidly becoming a hero of mine , humphrey davy , who did his science at the turn of the 19th century .
he was clearly under assault all the time .
" we know enough at the turn of the 19th century .
just exploit it ; just build things . "
he said this , he said , " nothing is more fatal to the progress of the human mind than to presume that our views of science are ultimate , that our triumphs are complete , that there are no mysteries in nature , and that there are no new worlds to conquer . "
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- as an artist , connection is very important to me .
through my work i 'm trying to articulate that humans are not separate from nature and that everything is interconnected .
i first went to antarctica almost 10 years ago , where i saw my first icebergs .
i was in awe .
my heart beat fast , my head was dizzy , trying to comprehend what it was that stood in front of me .
the icebergs around me were almost 200 feet out of the water , and i could only help but wonder that this was one snowflake on top of another snowflake , year after year .
icebergs are born when they calve off of glaciers or break off of ice shelves .
each iceberg has its own individual personality .
they have a distinct way of interacting with their environment and their experiences .
some refuse to give up and hold on to the bitter end , while others ca n't take it anymore and crumble in a fit of dramatic passion .
it 's easy to think , when you look at an iceberg , that they 're isolated , that they 're separate and alone , much like we as humans sometimes view ourselves .
but the reality is far from it .
as an iceberg melts , i am breathing in its ancient atmosphere .
as the iceberg melts , it is releasing mineral-rich fresh water that nourishes many forms of life .
i approach photographing these icebergs as if i 'm making portraits of my ancestors , knowing that in these individual moments they exist in that way and will never exist that way again .
it is not a death when they melt ; it is not an end , but a continuation of their path through the cycle of life .
some of the ice in the icebergs that i photograph is very young - a couple thousand years old .
and some of the ice is over 100,000 years old .
the last pictures i 'd like to show you are of an iceberg that i photographed in qeqetarsuaq , greenland .
it 's a very rare occasion that you get to actually witness an iceberg rolling .
so here it is .
you can see on the left side a small boat .
that 's about a 15-foot boat .
and i 'd like you to pay attention to the shape of the iceberg and where it is at the waterline .
you can see here , it begins to roll , and the boat has moved to the other side , and the man is standing there .
this is an average-size greenlandic iceberg .
it 's about 120 feet above the water , or 40 meters .
and this video is real time .
-lrb- music -rrb- and just like that , the iceberg shows you a different side of its personality .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm here to give you your recommended dietary allowance of poetry .
and the way i 'm going to do that is present to you five animations of five of my poems .
and let me just tell you a little bit of how that came about .
because the mixing of those two media is a sort of unnatural or unnecessary act .
but when i was united states poet laureate - and i love saying that .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's a great way to start sentences .
when i was him back then , i was approached by j. walter thompson , the ad company , and they were hired sort of by the sundance channel .
and the idea was to have me record some of my poems and then they would find animators to animate them .
and i was initially resistant , because i always think poetry can stand alone by itself .
attempts to put my poems to music have had disastrous results , in all cases .
and the poem , if it 's written with the ear , already has been set to its own verbal music as it was composed .
and surely , if you 're reading a poem that mentions a cow , you do n't need on the facing page a drawing of a cow .
i mean , let 's let the reader do a little work .
but i relented because it seemed like an interesting possibility , and also i 'm like a total cartoon junkie since childhood .
i think more influential than emily dickinson or coleridge or wordsworth on my imagination were warner brothers , merrie melodies and loony tunes cartoons .
bugs bunny is my muse .
and this way poetry could find its way onto television of all places .
and i 'm pretty much all for poetry in public places - poetry on buses , poetry on subways , on billboards , on cereal boxes .
when i was poet laureate , there i go again - i ca n't help it , it 's true - -lrb- laughter -rrb- i created a poetry channel on delta airlines that lasted for a couple of years .
so you could tune into poetry as you were flying .
and my sense is , it 's a good thing to get poetry off the shelves and more into public life .
start a meeting with a poem . that would be an idea you might take with you .
when you get a poem on a billboard or on the radio or on a cereal box or whatever , it happens to you so suddenly that you do n't have time to deploy your anti-poetry deflector shields that were installed in high school .
so let us start with the first one .
it 's a little poem called " budapest , " and in it i reveal , or pretend to reveal , the secrets of the creative process .
-lrb- video -rrb- narration : " budapest . "
my pen moves along the page like the snout of a strange animal shaped like a human arm and dressed in the sleeve of a loose green sweater .
i watch it sniffing the paper ceaselessly , intent as any forager that has nothing on its mind but the grubs and insects that will allow it to live another day .
it wants only to be here tomorrow , dressed perhaps in the sleeve of a plaid shirt , nose pressed against the page , writing a few more dutiful lines while i gaze out the window and imagine budapest or some other city where i have never been .
bc : so that makes it seem a little easier .
-lrb- applause -rrb- writing is not actually as easy as that for me .
but i like to pretend that it comes with ease .
one of my students came up after class , an introductory class , and she said , " you know , poetry is harder than writing , " which i found both erroneous and profound .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i like to at least pretend it just flows out .
a friend of mine has a slogan ; he 's another poet .
he says that , " if at first you do n't succeed , hide all evidence you ever tried . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the next poem is also rather short .
poetry just says a few things in different ways .
and i think you could boil this poem down to saying , " some days you eat the bear , other days the bear eats you . "
and it uses the imagery of dollhouse furniture .
-lrb- video -rrb- narration : " some days . "
some days i put the people in their places at the table , bend their legs at the knees , if they come with that feature , and fix them into the tiny wooden chairs .
all afternoon they face one another , the man in the brown suit , the woman in the blue dress - perfectly motionless , perfectly behaved .
but other days i am the one who is lifted up by the ribs then lowered into the dining room of a dollhouse to sit with the others at the long table .
very funny .
but how would you like it if you never knew from one day to the next striding around like a vivid god , your shoulders in the clouds , or sitting down there amidst the wallpaper staring straight ahead with your little plastic face ?
-lrb- applause -rrb- bc : there 's a horror movie in there somewhere .
the next poem is called forgetfulness , and it 's really just a kind of poetic essay on the subject of mental slippage .
and the poem begins with a certain species of forgetfulness that someone called literary amnesia , in other words , forgetting the things that you have read .
-lrb- video -rrb- narration : " forgetfulness . "
the name of the author is the first to go , followed obediently by the title , the plot , the heartbreaking conclusion , the entire novel , which suddenly becomes one you have never read , never even heard of .
it is as if , one by one , the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain to a little fishing village where there are no phones .
long ago , you kissed the names of the nine muses good-bye and you watched the quadratic equation pack its bag .
and even now , as you memorize the order of the planets , something else is slipping away , a state flower perhaps , the address of an uncle , the capital of paraguay .
whatever it is you are struggling to remember , it is not poised on the tip of your tongue , not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen .
it has floated away down a dark mythological river whose name begins with an l as far as you can recall , well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those who have forgotten even how to swim and how to ride a bicycle .
no wonder you rise in the middle of the night to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war .
no wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted out of a love poem that you used to know by heart .
-lrb- applause -rrb- bc : the next poem is called " the country " and it 's based on , when i was in college i met a classmate who remains to be a friend of mine .
he lived , and still does , in rural vermont .
i lived in new york city .
and we would visit each other .
and when i would go up to the country , he would teach me things like deer hunting , which meant getting lost with a gun basically - -lrb- laughter -rrb- and trout fishing and stuff like that .
and then he 'd come down to new york city and i 'd teach him what i knew , which was largely smoking and drinking .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and in that way we traded lore with each other .
the poem that 's coming up is based on him trying to tell me a little something about a domestic point of etiquette in country living that i had a very hard time , at first , processing .
it 's called " the country . "
-lrb- video -rrb- narration : " the country . "
i wondered about you when you told me never to leave a box of wooden strike-anywhere matches just lying around the house , because the mice might get into them and start a fire .
but your face was absolutely straight when you twisted the lid down on the round tin where the matches , you said , are always stowed .
who could sleep that night ?
who could whisk away the thought of the one unlikely mouse padding along a cold water pipe behind the floral wallpaper , gripping a single wooden match between the needles of his teeth ?
who could not see him rounding a corner , the blue tip scratching against rough-hewn beam , the sudden flare and the creature , for one bright , shining moment , suddenly thrust ahead of his time - now a fire-starter , now a torch-bearer in a forgotten ritual , little brown druid illuminating some ancient night ?
and who could fail to notice , lit up in the blazing insulation , the tiny looks of wonderment on the faces of his fellow mice - one-time inhabitants of what once was your house in the country ?
-lrb- applause -rrb- bc : thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you . and the last poem is called " the dead . "
i wrote this after a friend 's funeral , but not so much about the friend as something the eulogist kept saying , as all eulogists tend to do , which is how happy the deceased would be to look down and see all of us assembled .
and that to me was a bad start to the afterlife , having to witness your own funeral and feel gratified .
so the little poem is called " the dead . "
-lrb- video -rrb- narration : " the dead . "
the dead are always looking down on us , they say .
while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich , they are looking down through the glass-bottom boats of heaven as they row themselves slowly through eternity .
they watch the tops of our heads moving below on earth .
and when we lie down in a field or on a couch , drugged perhaps by the hum of a warm afternoon , they think we are looking back at them , which makes them lift their oars and fall silent and wait like parents for us to close our eyes .
-lrb- applause -rrb- bc : i 'm not sure if other poems will be animated .
it took a long time - i mean , it 's rather uncommon to have this marriage - a long time to put those two together .
but then again , it took us a long time to put the wheel and the suitcase together .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i mean , we had the wheel for some time .
and schlepping is an ancient and honorable art .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i just have time to read a more recent poem to you .
if it has a subject , the subject is adolescence .
and it 's addressed to a certain person .
it 's called " to my favorite 17-year-old high school girl . "
" do you realize that if you had started building the parthenon on the day you were born , you would be all done in only one more year ?
of course , you could n't have done that all alone .
so never mind ; you 're fine just being yourself .
you 're loved for just being you .
but did you know that at your age judy garland was pulling down 150,000 dollars a picture , joan of arc was leading the french army to victory and blaise pascal had cleaned up his room - no wait , i mean he had invented the calculator ?
of course , there will be time for all that later in your life , after you come out of your room and begin to blossom , or at least pick up all your socks .
for some reason i keep remembering that lady jane grey was queen of england when she was only 15 .
but then she was beheaded , so never mind her as a role model .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- a few centuries later , when he was your age , franz schubert was doing the dishes for his family , but that did not keep him from composing two symphonies , four operas and two complete masses as a youngster .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but of course , that was in austria at the height of romantic lyricism , not here in the suburbs of cleveland .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- frankly , who cares if annie oakley was a crack shot at 15 or if maria callas debuted as tosca at 17 ?
we think you 're special just being you - playing with your food and staring into space .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- by the way , i lied about schubert doing the dishes , but that does n't mean he never helped out around the house . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thanks .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i want to ask you all to consider for a second the very simple fact that , by far , most of what we know about the universe comes to us from light .
we can stand on the earth and look up at the night sky and see stars with our bare eyes .
the sun burns our peripheral vision .
we see light reflected off the moon .
and in the time since galileo pointed that rudimentary telescope at the celestial bodies , the known universe has come to us through light , across vast eras in cosmic history .
and with all of our modern telescopes , we 've been able to collect this stunning silent movie of the universe - these series of snapshots that go all the way back to the big bang .
and yet , the universe is not a silent movie because the universe is n't silent .
i 'd like to convince you that the universe has a soundtrack and that soundtrack is played on space itself , because space can wobble like a drum .
it can ring out a kind of recording throughout the universe of some of the most dramatic events as they unfold .
now we 'd like to be able to add to a kind of glorious visual composition that we have of the universe - a sonic composition .
and while we 've never heard the sounds from space , we really should , in the next few years , start to turn up the volume on what 's going on out there .
so in this ambition to capture songs from the universe , we turn our focus to black holes and the promise they have , because black holes can bang on space-time like mallets on a drum and have a very characteristic song , which i 'd like to play for you - some of our predictions for what that song will be like .
now black holes are dark against a dark sky .
we ca n't see them directly .
they 're not brought to us with light , at least not directly .
we can see them indirectly , because black holes wreak havoc on their environment .
they destroy stars around them .
they churn up debris in their surroundings .
but they wo n't come to us directly through light .
we might one day see a shadow a black hole can cast on a very bright background , but we have n't yet .
and yet black holes may be heard even if they 're not seen , and that 's because they bang on space-time like a drum .
now we owe the idea that space can ring like a drum to albert einstein - to whom we owe so much .
einstein realized that if space were empty , if the universe were empty , it would be like this picture , except for maybe without the helpful grid drawn on it .
but if we were freely falling through the space , even without this helpful grid , we might be able to paint it ourselves , because we would notice that we traveled along straight lines , undeflected straight paths through the universe .
einstein also realized - and this is the real meat of the matter - that if you put energy or mass in the universe , it would curve space , and a freely falling object would pass by , let 's say , the sun and it would be deflected along the natural curves in the space .
it was einstein 's great general theory of relativity .
now even light will be bent by those paths .
and you can be bent so much that you 're caught in orbit around the sun , as the earth is , or the moon around the earth .
these are the natural curves in space .
what einstein did not realize was that , if you took our sun and you crushed it down to six kilometers - so you took a million times the mass of the earth and you crushed it to six kilometers across , you would make a black hole , an object so dense that if light veered too close , it would never escape - a dark shadow against the universe .
it was n't einstein who realized this , it was karl schwarzschild who was a german jew in world war i - joined the german army already an accomplished scientist , working on the russian front .
i like to imagine schwarzschild in the war in the trenches calculating ballistic trajectories for cannon fire , and then , in between , calculating einstein 's equations - as you do in the trenches .
and he was reading einstein 's recently published general theory of relativity , and he was thrilled by this theory .
and he quickly surmised an exact mathematical solution that described something very extraordinary : curves so strong that space would rain down into them , space itself would curve like a waterfall flowing down the throat of a hole .
and even light could not escape this current .
light would be dragged down the hole as everything else would be , and all that would be left would be a shadow .
now he wrote to einstein , and he said , " as you will see , the war has been kind to me enough .
despite the heavy gunfire , i 've been able to get away from it all and walk through the land of your ideas . "
and einstein was very impressed with his exact solution , and i should hope also the dedication of the scientist .
this is the hardworking scientist under harsh conditions .
and he took schwarzschild 's idea to the prussian academy of sciences the next week .
but einstein always thought black holes were a mathematical oddity .
he did not believe they existed in nature .
he thought nature would protect us from their formation .
it was decades before the term " black hole " was coined and people realized that black holes are real astrophysical objects - in fact they 're the death state of very massive stars that collapse catastrophically at the end of their lifetime .
now our sun will not collapse to a black hole .
it 's actually not massive enough .
but if we did a little thought experiment - as einstein was very fond of doing - we could imagine putting the sun crushed down to six kilometers , and putting a tiny little earth around it in orbit , maybe 30 kilometers outside of the black-hole sun .
and it would be self-illuminated , because now the sun 's gone , we have no other source of light - so let 's make our little earth self-illuminated .
and you would realize you could put the earth in a happy orbit even 30 km outside of this crushed black hole .
this crushed black hole actually would fit inside manhattan , more or less .
it might spill off into the hudson a little bit before it destroyed the earth .
but basically that 's what we 're talking about .
we 're talking about an object that you could crush down to half the square area of manhattan .
so we move this earth very close - 30 kilometers outside - and we notice it 's perfectly fine orbiting around the black hole .
there 's a sort of myth that black holes devour everything in the universe , but you actually have to get very close to fall in .
but what 's very impressive is that , from our vantage point , we can always see the earth .
it can not hide behind the black hole .
the light from the earth , some of it falls in , but some of it gets lensed around and brought back to us .
so you ca n't hide anything behind a black hole .
if this were battlestar galactica and you 're fighting the cylons , do n't hide behind the black hole .
they can see you .
now , our sun will not collapse to a black hole - it 's not massive enough - but there are tens of thousands of black holes in our galaxy .
and if one were to eclipse the milky way , this is what it would look like .
we would see a shadow of that black hole against the hundred billion stars in the milky way galaxy and its luminous dust lanes .
and if we were to fall towards this black hole , we would see all of that light lensed around it , and we could even start to cross into that shadow and really not notice that anything dramatic had happened .
it would be bad if we tried to fire our rockets and get out of there because we could n't , anymore than light can escape .
but even though the black hole is dark from the outside , it 's not dark on the inside , because all of the light from the galaxy can fall in behind us .
and even though , due to a relativistic effect known as time dilation , our clocks would seem to slow down relative to galactic time , it would look as though the evolution of the galaxy had been sped up and shot at us , right before we were crushed to death by the black hole .
it would be like a near-death experience where you see the light at the end of the tunnel , but it 's a total death experience .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and there 's no way of telling anybody about the light at the end of the tunnel .
now we 've never seen a shadow like this of a black hole , but black holes can be heard , even if they 're not seen .
imagine now taking an astrophysically realistic situation - imagine two black holes that have lived a long life together .
maybe they started as stars and collapsed to two black holes - each one 10 times the mass of the sun .
so now we 're going to crush them down to 60 kilometers across .
they can be spinning hundreds of times a second .
at the end of their lives , they 're going around each other very near the speed of light .
so they 're crossing thousands of kilometers in a fraction of a second , and as they do so , they not only curve space , but they leave behind in their wake a ringing of space , an actual wave on space-time .
space squeezes and stretches as it emanates out from these black holes banging on the universe .
and they travel out into the cosmos at the speed of light .
this computer simulation is due to a relativity group at nasa goddard .
it took almost 30 years for anyone in the world to crack this problem .
this was one of the groups .
it shows two black holes in orbit around each other , again , with these helpfully painted curves .
and if you can see - it 's kind of faint - but if you can see the red waves emanating out , those are the gravitational waves .
they 're literally the sounds of space ringing , and they will travel out from these black holes at the speed of light as they ring down and coalesce to one spinning , quiet black hole at the end of the day .
if you were standing near enough , your ear would resonate with the squeezing and stretching of space .
you would literally hear the sound .
now of course , your head would be squeezed and stretched unhelpfully , so you might have trouble understanding what 's going on .
but i 'd like to play for you the sound that we predict .
this is from my group - a slightly less glamorous computer modeling .
imagine a lighter black hole falling into a very heavy black hole .
the sound you 're hearing is the light black hole banging on space each time it gets close .
if it gets far away , it 's a little too quiet .
but it comes in like a mallet , and it literally cracks space , wobbling it like a drum .
and we can predict what the sound will be .
we know that , as it falls in , it gets faster and it gets louder .
and eventually , we 're going to hear the little guy just fall into the bigger guy .
-lrb- thumping -rrb- then it 's gone .
now i 've never heard it that loud - it 's actually more dramatic .
at home it sounds kind of anticlimactic .
it 's sort of like ding , ding , ding .
this is another sound from my group .
no , i 'm not showing you any images , because black holes do n't leave behind helpful trails of ink , and space is not painted , showing you the curves .
but if you were to float by in space on a space holiday and you heard this , you want to get moving .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- want to get away from the sound .
both black holes are moving .
both black holes are getting closer together .
in this case , they 're both wobbling quite a lot .
and then they 're going to merge .
-lrb- thumping -rrb- now it 's gone .
now that chirp is very characteristic of black holes merging - that it chirps up at the end .
now that 's our prediction for what we 'll see .
luckily we 're at this safe distance in long beach , california .
and surely , somewhere in the universe two black holes have merged .
and surely , the space around us is ringing after traveling maybe a million light years , or a million years , at the speed of light to get to us .
but the sound is too quiet for any of us to ever hear .
there are very industrious experiments being built on earth - one called ligo - which will detect deviations in the squeezing and stretching of space at less than the fraction of a nucleus of an atom over four kilometers .
it 's a remarkably ambitious experiment , and it 's going to be at advanced sensitivity within the next few years - to pick this up .
there 's also a mission proposed for space , which hopefully will launch in the next ten years , called lisa .
and lisa will be able to see super-massive black holes - black holes millions or billions of times the mass of the sun .
in this hubble image , we see two galaxies .
they look like they 're frozen in some embrace .
and each one probably harbors a super-massive black hole at its core .
but they 're not frozen ; they 're actually merging .
these two black holes are colliding , and they will merge over a billion-year time scale .
it 's beyond our human perception to pick up a song of that duration .
but lisa could see the final stages of two super-massive black holes earlier in the universe 's history , the last 15 minutes before they fall together .
and it 's not just black holes , but it 's also any big disturbance in the universe - and the biggest of them all is the big bang .
when that expression was coined , it was derisive - like , " oh , who would believe in a big bang ? "
but now it actually might be more technically accurate because it might bang .
it might make a sound .
this animation from my friends at proton studios shows looking at the big bang from the outside .
we do n't ever want to do that actually . we want to be inside the universe because there 's no such thing as standing outside the universe .
so imagine you 're inside the big bang .
it 's everywhere , it 's all around you , and the space is wobbling chaotically .
fourteen billion years pass and this song is still ringing all around us .
galaxies form , and generations of stars form in those galaxies , and around one star , at least one star , is a habitable planet .
and here we are frantically building these experiments , doing these calculations , writing these computer codes .
imagine a billion years ago , two black holes collided .
that song has been ringing through space for all that time .
we were n't even here .
it gets closer and closer - 40,000 years ago , we 're still doing cave paintings .
it 's like hurry , build your instruments .
it 's getting closer and closer , and in 20 ...
whatever year it will be when our detectors are finally at advanced sensitivity - we 'll build them , we 'll turn on the machines and , bang , we 'll catch it - the first song from space .
if it was the big bang we were going to pick up , it would sound like this .
-lrb- static -rrb- it 's a terrible sound .
it 's literally the definition of noise .
it 's white noise ; it 's such a chaotic ringing .
but it 's around us everywhere , presumably , if it has n't been wiped out by some other process in the universe .
and if we pick it up , it will be music to our ears because it will be the quiet echo of that moment of our creation , of our observable universe .
so within the next few years , we 'll be able to turn up the soundtrack a little bit , render the universe in audio .
but if we detect those earliest moments , it 'll bring us that much closer to an understanding of the big bang , which brings us that much closer to asking some of the hardest , most elusive , questions .
if we run the movie of our universe backwards , we know that there was a big bang in our past , and we might even hear the cacophonous sound of it , but was our big bang the only big bang ?
i mean we have to ask , has it happened before ?
will it happen again ?
i mean , in the spirit of rising to ted 's challenge to reignite wonder , we can ask questions , at least for this last minute , that honestly might evade us forever .
but we have to ask : is it possible that our universe is just a plume off of some greater history ?
or , is it possible that we 're just a branch off of a multiverse - each branch with its own big bang in its past - maybe some of them with black holes playing drums , maybe some without - maybe some with sentient life , and maybe some without - not in our past , not in our future , but somehow fundamentally connected to us ?
so we have to wonder , if there is a multiverse , in some other patch of that multiverse , are there creatures ?
here 's my multiverse creatures .
are there other creatures in the multiverse , wondering about us and wondering about their own origins ?
and if they are , i can imagine them as we are , calculating , writing computer code , building instruments , trying to detect that faintest sound of their origins and wondering who else is out there .
thank you . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : you guys were amazing .
that 's amazing .
-lrb- applause -rrb- you just do n't hear that every day .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- usman , the official story is that you learned to play the guitar by watching jimmy page on youtube .
usman riaz : yes , that was the first one . and then i - that was the first thing i learned , and then i started progressing to other things .
and i started watching kaki king a lot , and she would always cite preston reed as a big influence , so then i started watching his videos , and it 's very surreal right now to be - -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- ca : was that piece just now , that was one of his songs that you learned , or how did that happen ?
ur : i 'd never learned it before , but he told me that we would be playing that on stage , so i was familiar with it , so that 's why i had so much more fun learning it .
and it finally happened , so ...
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ca : preston , from your point of view , i mean , you invented this like 20 years ago , right ?
how does it feel to see someone like this come along taking your art and doing so much with it ?
preston reed : it 's mind-blowing , and i feel really proud , really honored .
and he 's a wonderful musician , so it 's cool .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ca : i guess , i do n't think there is like a one-minute other piece you guys can do ?
can you ? do you jam ? do you have anything else ?
pr : we have n't prepared anything .
ca : there is n't . i 'll tell you what .
if you have another 30 or 40 seconds , and you have another 30 or 40 seconds , and we just see that , i just think - i can feel it . we want to hear a little more .
and if it goes horribly wrong , no worries .
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- good evening .
we are in this wonderful open-air amphitheater and we are enjoying ourselves in that mild evening temperature tonight , but when qatar will host the football world cup 10 years from now , 2022 , we already heard it will be in the hot , very hot and sunny summer months of june and july .
and when qatar has been assigned to the world cup all , many people around the world have been wondering , how would it be possible that football players show spectacular football , run around in this desert climate ? how would it be possible that spectators sit , enjoy themselves in open-air stadia in this hot environment ?
together with the architects of albert speer & partner , our engineers from transsolar have been supporting , have been developing open-air stadia based on 100 percent solar power , on 100 percent solar cooling .
let me tell you about that , but let me start with comfort .
let me start with the aspect of comfort , because many people are confusing ambient temperature with thermal comfort .
we are used to looking at charts like that , and you see this red line showing the air temperature in june and july , and yes , that 's right , it 's picking up to 45 degrees c.
it 's actually very hot .
but air temperature is not the full set of climatic parameters which define comfort .
let me show you analysis a colleague of mine did looking on different football , world cups , olympic games around the world , looking on the comfort and analyzing the comfort people have perceived at these different sport activities , and let me start with mexico .
mexico temperature has been , air temperature has been something between 15 , up to 30 degrees c , and people enjoyed themselves .
it was a very comfortable game in mexico city . have a look .
orlando , same kind of stadium , open-air stadium . people have been sitting in the strong sun , in the very high humidity in the afternoon , and they did not enjoy . it was not comfortable .
the air temperature was not too high , but it was not comfortable during these games .
what about seoul ? seoul , because of broadcast rights , all the games have been in the late afternoon . sun has already been set , so the games have been perceived as comfortable .
what about athens ? mediterranean climate , but in the sun it was not comfortable . they did n't perceive comfort .
and we know that from spain , we know that " sol y sombra . "
if you have a ticket , and you get a ticket for the shade , you pay more , because you 're in a more comfortable environment .
what about beijing ?
it 's again , sun in the day and high humidity , and it was not comfortable .
so if i overlay , and if you overlay all these comfort envelopes , what we see is , in all these places , air temperature has been ranging something from 25 to 35 , and if you go on the line , 30 , of 30 degrees c go along that line you see there has been all kind of comfort , all kinds of perceived outdoor comfort , ranging from very comfortable to very uncomfortable .
so why is that ?
this is because there are more parameters influencing our thermal comfort , which is the sun , the direct sun , the diffuse sun , which is wind , strong wind , mild wind , which is the radiant temperature of the surroundings where we are in .
and this is air temperature .
all these parameters go into the comfort feeling of our have developed a parameter , which is the perceived temperature , where all these parameters go in and help designers to understand which is the driving parameter that i feel comfort or that i do n't feel comfort .
which is the driving parameter which gives me a perceived temperature ? and these parameters , these climatic parameters are related to the human metabolism .
because of our metabolism , we as human beings , we produce heat .
i 'm excited , i 'm talking to you , i 'm probably producing 150 watts at the moment . you are sitting , you are relaxed , you 're looking at me . it 's probably 100 watts each person is producing , and we need to get rid of that energy . i need , with my body , to get rid of the energy , and the harder it is for myself , for my body , to get rid of the energy , the less comfort i feel .
that 's it . and if i do n't get rid of the energy , i will die .
if we overlay what happens during the football world cup , what will happen in june , july , we will see , yes , air temperature will be much higher , but because the games and the plays will be in the afternoon , it 's probably the same comfort rating we 've found in other places which has perceived as non-comfortable .
so we sat together with a team which prepared the bid book , or goal , that we said , let 's aim for perceived temperature , for outdoor comfort in this range , which is perceived with a temperature of 32 degrees celsius perceived temperature , which is extremely comfortable .
people would feel really fine in an open outdoor environment .
but what does it mean ?
if we just look on what happens , we see , temperature 's too high .
if we apply the best architectural design , climate engineering design , we wo n't get much better .
so we need to do something active .
we need , for instance , to bring in radiant cooling technology , and we need to combine this with so-called soft conditioning .
and how does it look like in a stadium ?
so the stadium has a few elements which create that outdoor comfort . first of all , it 's shading . it needs to protect where the people are sitting against strong and warm wind .
but that 's not all what we need to do . we need to use active systems .
instead of blowing a hurricane of chilled air through the stadium , we can use radiant cooling technologies , like a floor heating system where water pipes are embedded in the floor .
and just by using cold water going through the water pipes , you can release the heat which is absorbed during the day in the stadium , so you can create that comfort , and then by adding dry air instead of down-chilled air , the spectators and the football players can adjust to their individual comfort needs , to their individual energy balance .
they can adjust and find their comfort they need to find .
there are 12 stadia probably to come , but there are 32 training pitches where all the individual countries are going to train .
we applied the same concept : shading of the training pitch , using a shelter against wind , then using the grass .
natural-watered lawn is a very good cooling source stabilizing temperature , and using dehumidified air to create comfort .
but even the best passive design would n't help .
we need active system .
and how do we do that ?
our idea for the bid was 100 percent solar cooling , based on the idea that we use the roof of the stadia , we cover the roofs of the stadia with pv systems .
we do n't borrow any energy from history .
we are not using fossil energies .
we are not borrowing energy from our neighbors .
we 're using energy we can harvest on our roofs , and also on the training pitches , which will be covered with large , flexible membranes , and we will see in the next years an industry coming up with flexible photovoltaics , giving the possibilities of shading against strong sun and producing electric energy in the same time .
and this energy now is harvested throughout the year , sent into the grid , is replacing fossils in the grid , and when i need it for the cooling , i take it back from the grid and i use the solar energy which i have brought to the grid back when i need it for the solar cooling .
and i can do that in the first year and i can balance that in the next 10 , and the next 20 years , this energy , which is necessary to condition a world cup in qatar , the next 20 years , this energy goes into the grid of qatar .
so this - -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you very much . -lrb- applause -rrb- this is not only useful for stadia . we can use that also in open-air places and streets , and we 've been working on the city of the future in masdar , which is in the united emirates , abu dhabi .
and i had the pleasure to work on the central plaza .
and the same idea to use there , to create outdoor conditions which are perceived as comfortable . people enjoy going there instead of going into a shopping mall , which is chilled down and which is cooled . we wanted to create an outdoor space which is so comfortable that people can go there in the early afternoon , even in these sunny and hot summer months , and they can enjoy and meet there with their families . -lrb- applause -rrb- and the same concept : shade against the sun , shade against the wind , and use , use and take advantage of the sun you can harvest on your footprint .
and these beautiful umbrellas .
so i 'd like to encourage you to pay attention to your thermal comfort , to your thermal environment , tonight and tomorrow , and if you 'd like to learn more about that , i invite you to go to our website .
we uploaded a very simple perceived temperature calculator where you can check out about your outdoor comfort .
and i also hope that you share the idea that if engineers and designers can use all these different climatic parameters , it will be possible to create really good and comfortable outdoor conditions , to change our thermal perception that we feel comfortable in an outdoor environment , and we can do that with the best passive design , but also using the energy source of the site in qatar which is the sun .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you very much . -lrb- applause -rrb- shukran . -lrb- applause -rrb- a great way to start , i think , with my view of simplicity is to take a look at ted . here you are , understanding why we 're here , what 's going on with no difficulty at all .
the best a.i. in the planet would find it complex and confusing , and my little dog watson would find it simple and understandable but would miss the point .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- he would have a great time .
and of course , if you 're a speaker here , like hans rosling , a speaker finds this complex , tricky . but in hans rosling 's case , he had a secret weapon yesterday , literally , in his sword swallowing act .
and i must say , i thought of quite a few objects that i might try to swallow today and finally gave up on , but he just did it and that was a wonderful thing .
so puck meant not only are we fools in the pejorative sense , but that we 're easily fooled . in fact , what shakespeare was pointing out is we go to the theater in order to be fooled , so we 're actually looking forward to it .
we go to magic shows in order to be fooled .
and this makes many things fun , but it makes it difficult to actually get any kind of picture on the world we live in or on ourselves .
and our friend , betty edwards , the " drawing on the right side of the brain " lady , shows these two tables to her drawing class and says , " the problem you have with learning to draw is not that you ca n't move your hand , but that the way your brain perceives images is faulty .
it 's trying to perceive images into objects rather than seeing what 's there . "
and to prove it , she says , " the exact size and shape of these tabletops is the same , and i 'm going to prove it to you . "
she does this with cardboard , but since i have an expensive computer here i 'll just rotate this little guy around and ...
now having seen that - and i 've seen it hundreds of times , because i use this in every talk i give - i still ca n't see that they 're the same size and shape , and i doubt that you can either .
so what do artists do ? well , what artists do is to measure .
they measure very , very carefully .
and if you measure very , very carefully with a stiff arm and a straight edge , you 'll see that those two shapes are exactly the same size .
and the talmud saw this a long time ago , saying , " we see things not as they are , but as we are . "
i certainly would like to know what happened to the person who had that insight back then , if they actually followed it to its ultimate conclusion .
so if the world is not as it seems and we see things as we are , then what we call reality is a kind of hallucination happening inside here . it 's a waking dream , and understanding that that is what we actually exist in is one of the biggest epistemological barriers in human history .
and what that means : " simple and understandable " might not be actually simple or understandable , and things we think are " complex " might be made simple and understandable .
somehow we have to understand ourselves to get around our flaws .
we can think of ourselves as kind of a noisy channel .
the way i think of it is , we ca n't learn to see until we admit we 're blind .
once you start down at this very humble level , then you can start finding ways to see things .
and what 's happened , over the last 400 years in particular , is that human beings have invented " brainlets " - little additional parts for our brain - made out of powerful ideas that help us see the world in different ways .
and these are in the form of sensory apparatus - telescopes , microscopes - reasoning apparatus - various ways of thinking - and , most importantly , in the ability to change perspective on things .
i 'll talk about that a little bit .
it 's this change in perspective on what it is we think we 're perceiving that has helped us make more progress in the last 400 years than we have in the rest of human history .
and yet , it is not taught in any k through 12 curriculum in america that i 'm aware of .
so one of the things that goes from simple to complex is when we do more . we like more .
if we do more in a kind of a stupid way , the simplicity gets complex and , in fact , we can keep on doing it for a very long time .
but murray gell-mann yesterday talked about emergent properties ; another name for them could be " architecture " as a metaphor for taking the same old material and thinking about non-obvious , non-simple ways of combining it .
and in fact , what murray was talking about yesterday in the fractal beauty of nature - of having the descriptions at various levels be rather similar - all goes down to the idea that the elementary particles are both sticky and standoffish , and they 're in violent motion .
those three things give rise to all the different levels of what seem to be complexity in our world .
but how simple ?
so , when i saw roslings ' gapminder stuff a few years ago , i just thought it was the greatest thing i 'd seen in conveying complex ideas simply .
but then i had a thought of , " boy , maybe it 's too simple . "
and i put some effort in to try and check to see how well these simple portrayals of trends over time actually matched up with some ideas and investigations from the side , and i found that they matched up very well .
so the roslings have been able to do simplicity without removing what 's important about the data .
whereas the film yesterday that we saw of the simulation of the inside of a cell , as a former molecular biologist , i did n't like that at all .
not because it was n't beautiful or anything , but because it misses the thing that most students fail to understand about molecular biology , and that is : why is there any probability at all of two complex shapes finding each other just the right way so they combine together and be catalyzed ?
and what we saw yesterday was every reaction was fortuitous ; they just swooped in the air and bound , and something happened .
but in fact , those molecules are spinning at the rate of about a million revolutions per second ; they 're agitating back and forth their size every two nanoseconds ; they 're completely crowded together , they 're jammed , they 're bashing up against each other .
and if you do n't understand that in your mental model of this stuff , what happens inside of a cell seems completely mysterious and fortuitous , and i think that 's exactly the wrong image for when you 're trying to teach science .
so , another thing that we do is to confuse adult sophistication with the actual understanding of some principle .
so a kid who 's 14 in high school gets this version of the pythagorean theorem , which is a truly subtle and interesting proof , but in fact it 's not a good way to start learning about mathematics .
so a more direct one , one that gives you more of the feeling of math , is something closer to pythagoras ' own proof , which goes like this : so here we have this triangle , and if we surround that c square with three more triangles and we copy that , notice that we can move those triangles down like this .
and that leaves two open areas that are kind of suspicious ...
and bingo . that is all you have to do .
and this kind of proof is the kind of proof that you need to learn when you 're learning mathematics in order to get an idea of what it means before you look into the , literally , 1,200 or 1,500 proofs of pythagoras ' theorem that have been discovered .
now let 's go to young children .
this is a very unusual teacher who was a kindergarten and first-grade teacher , but was a natural mathematician .
so she was like that jazz musician friend you have who never studied music but is a terrific musician ; she just had a feeling for math .
and here are her six-year-olds , and she 's got them making shapes out of a shape .
so they pick a shape they like - like a diamond , or a square , or a triangle , or a trapezoid - and then they try and make the next larger shape of that same shape , and the next larger shape .
you can see the trapezoids are a little challenging there .
and what this teacher did on every project was to have the children act like first it was a creative arts project , and then something like science .
so they had created these artifacts .
now she had them look at them and do this ... laborious , which i thought for a long time , until she explained to me was to slow them down so they 'll think .
so they 're cutting out the little pieces of cardboard here and pasting them up .
but the whole point of this thing is for them to look at this chart and fill it out .
" what have you noticed about what you did ? "
and so six-year-old lauren there noticed that the first one took one , and the second one took three more and the total was four on that one , the third one took five more and the total was nine on that one , and then the next one .
she saw right away that the additional tiles that you had to add around the edges was always going to grow by two , so she was very confident about how she made those numbers there .
and she could see that these were the square numbers up until about six , where she was n't sure what six times six was and what seven times seven was , but then she was confident again .
so that 's what lauren did .
and then the teacher , gillian ishijima , had the kids bring all of their projects up to the front of the room and put them on the floor , and everybody went batshit : " holy shit ! they 're the same ! "
no matter what the shapes were , the growth law is the same .
and the mathematicians and scientists in the crowd will recognize these two progressions as a first-order discrete differential equation and a second-order discrete differential equation , derived by six-year-olds .
well , that 's pretty amazing .
that is n't what we usually try to teach six-year-olds .
so , let 's take a look now at how we might use the computer for some of this .
and so the first idea here is just to show you the kind of things that children do .
i 'm using the software that we 're putting on the $ 100 laptop .
so i 'd like to draw a little car here - i 'll just do this very quickly - and put a big tire on him .
and i get a little object here and i can look inside this object , i 'll call it a car . and here 's a little behavior : car forward .
each time i click it , car turn .
if i want to make a little script to do this over and over again , i just drag these guys out and set them going .
and i can try steering the car here by ...
see the car turn by five here ?
so what if i click this down to zero ?
it goes straight . that 's a big revelation for nine-year-olds .
make it go in the other direction .
but of course , that 's a little bit like kissing your sister as far as driving a car , so the kids want to do a steering wheel ; so they draw a steering wheel .
and we 'll call this a wheel .
see this wheel 's heading here ?
if i turn this wheel , you can see that number over there going minus and positive .
that 's kind of an invitation to pick up this name of those numbers coming out there and to just drop it into the script here , and now i can steer the car with the steering wheel .
and it 's interesting .
you know how much trouble the children have with variables , but by learning it this way , in a situated fashion , they never forget from this single trial what a variable is and how to use it .
and we can reflect here the way gillian ishijima did .
so if you look at the little script here , the speed is always going to be 30 .
we 're going to move the car according to that over and over again .
and i 'm dropping a little dot for each one of these things ; they 're evenly spaced because they 're 30 apart .
and what if i do this progression that the six-year-olds did of saying , " ok , i 'm going to increase the speed by two each time , and then i 'm going to increase the distance by the speed each time ?
what do i get there ? "
we get a visual pattern of what these nine-year-olds called acceleration .
so how do the children do science ?
-lrb- video -rrb- teacher : -lsb- choose -rsb- objects that you think will fall to the earth at the same time .
student 1 : ooh , this is nice .
teacher : do not pay any attention to what anybody else is doing .
who 's got the apple ?
alan kay : they 've got little stopwatches .
student 2 : what did you get ? what did you get ?
ak : stopwatches are n't accurate enough .
student 3:0.99 seconds .
teacher : so put " sponge ball " ...
student 4l : -lsb- i decided to -rsb- do the shot put and the sponge ball because they 're two totally different weights , and if you drop them at the same time , maybe they 'll drop at the same speed .
teacher : drop . class : whoa !
ak : so obviously , aristotle never asked a child about this particular point because , of course , he did n't bother doing the experiment , and neither did st. thomas aquinas .
and it was not until galileo actually did it that an adult thought like a child , only 400 years ago .
we get one child like that about every classroom of 30 kids who will actually cut straight to the chase .
now , what if we want to look at this more closely ?
we can take a movie of what 's going on , but even if we single stepped this movie , it 's tricky to see what 's going on .
and so what we can do is we can lay out the frames side by side or stack them up .
so when the children see this , they say , " ah ! acceleration , " remembering back four months when they did their cars sideways , and they start measuring to find out what kind of acceleration it is .
so what i 'm doing is measuring from the bottom of one image to the bottom of the next image , about a fifth of a second later , like that . and they 're getting faster and faster each time , and if i stack these guys up , then we see the differences ; the increase in the speed is constant .
and they say , " oh , yeah . constant acceleration .
we 've done that already . "
and how shall we look and verify that we actually have it ?
so you ca n't tell much from just making the ball drop there , but if we drop the ball and run the movie at the same time , we can see that we have come up with an accurate physical model .
galileo , by the way , did this very cleverly by running a ball backwards down the strings of his lute .
i pulled out those apples to remind myself to tell you that this is actually probably a newton and the apple type story , but it 's a great story .
and i thought i would do just one thing on the $ 100 laptop here just to prove that this stuff works here .
so once you have gravity , here 's this - increase the speed by something , increase the ship 's speed .
if i start the little game here that the kids have done , it 'll crash the space ship .
but if i oppose gravity , here we go ... oops !
-lrb- laughter -rrb- one more .
yeah , there we go . yeah , ok ?
i guess the best way to end this is with two quotes : marshall mcluhan said , " children are the messages that we send to the future , " but in fact , if you think of it , children are the future we send to the future .
forget about messages ; children are the future , and children in the first and second world and , most especially , in the third world need mentors .
and this summer , we 're going to build five million of these $ 100 laptops , and maybe 50 million next year .
but we could n't create 1,000 new teachers this summer to save our life .
that means that we , once again , have a thing where we can put technology out , but the mentoring that is required to go from a simple new ichat instant messaging system to something with depth is missing .
i believe this has to be done with a new kind of user interface , and this new kind of user interface could be done with an expenditure of about 100 million dollars .
it sounds like a lot , but it is literally 18 minutes of what we 're spending in iraq - we 're spending 8 billion dollars a month ; 18 minutes is 100 million dollars - so this is actually cheap .
and einstein said , " things should be as simple as possible , but not simpler . "
thank you .
what i want you all to do right now is to think of this mammal that i 'm going to describe to you .
the first thing i 'm going to tell you about this mammal is that it is essential for our ecosystems to function correctly .
if we remove this mammal from our ecosystems , they simply will not work .
that 's the first thing .
the second thing is that due to the unique sensory abilities of this mammal , if we study this mammal , we 're going to get great insight into our diseases of the senses , such as blindness and deafness .
and the third really intriguing aspect of this mammal is that i fully believe that the secret of everlasting youth lies deep within its dna .
so are you all thinking ?
so , magnificent creature , is n't it ?
who here thought of a bat ?
ah , i can see half the audience agrees with me , and i have a lot of work to do to convince the rest of you .
so i have had the good fortune for the past 20 years to study these fascinating and beautiful mammals .
one fifth of all living mammals is a bat , and they have very unique attributes .
bats as we know them have been around on this planet for about 64 million years .
one of the most unique things that bats do as a mammal is that they fly .
now flight is an inherently difficult thing .
flight within vertebrates has only evolved three times : once in the bats , once in the birds , and once in the pterodactyls .
and so with flight , it 's very metabolically costly .
bats have learned and evolved how to deal with this .
but one other extremely unique thing about bats is that they are able to use sound to perceive their environment . they use echolocation .
now , what i mean by echolocation - they emit a sound from their larynx out through their mouth or through their nose . this sound wave comes out and it reflects and echoes back off objects in their environment , and the bats then hear these echoes and they turn this information into an acoustic image .
and this enables them to orient in complete darkness .
indeed , they do look very strange . we 're humans .
we 're a visual species . when scientists first realized that bats were actually using sound to be able to fly and orient and move at night , we did n't believe it .
for a hundred years , despite evidence to show that this is what they were doing , we did n't believe it .
now , if you look at this bat , it looks a little bit alien .
indeed , the very famous philosopher thomas nagel once said , " to truly experience an alien life form on this planet , you should lock yourself inside a room with a flying , echolocating bat in complete darkness . "
and if you look at the actual physical characteristics on the face of this beautiful horseshoe bat , you see a lot of these characteristics are dedicated to be able to make sound and perceive it .
very big ears , strange nose leaves , but teeny-tiny eyes .
so again , if you just look at this bat , you realize sound is very important for its survival .
most bats look like the previous one .
however , there are a group that do not use echolocation .
they do not perceive their environment using sound , and these are the flying foxes .
if anybody has ever been lucky enough to be in australia , you 've seen them coming out of the botanic gardens in sydney , and if you just look at their face , you can see they have much , much larger eyes and much smaller ears .
so among and within bats is a huge variation in their ability to use sensory perception .
now this is going to be important for what i 'm going to tell you later during the talk .
now , if the idea of bats in your belfry terrifies you , and i know some people probably are feeling a little sick looking at very large images of bats , that 's probably not that surprising , because here in western culture , bats have been demonized .
really , of course the famous book " dracula , " written by a fellow northside dubliner bram stoker , probably is mainly responsible for this .
however , i also think it 's got to do with the fact that bats come out at night , and we do n't really understand them . we 're a little frightened by things that can perceive the world slightly differently than us .
bats are usually synonymous with some type of evil events .
they are the perpetrators in horror movies , such as this famous " nightwing . "
also , if you think about it , demons always have bat wings , whereas birds , they typically - or angels have bird wings .
now , this is western society , and what i hope to do tonight is to convince you of the chinese traditional culture , that they perceive bats as creatures that bring good luck , and indeed , if you walk into a chinese home , you may see an image such as this .
this is considered the five blessings .
the chinese word for " bat " sounds like the chinese word for " happiness , " and they believe that bats bring wealth , health , longevity , virtue and serenity .
and indeed , in this image , you have a picture of longevity surrounded by five bats .
and what i want to do tonight is to talk to you and to show you that at least three of these blessings are definitely represented by a bat , and that if we study bats we will get nearer to getting each of these blessings .
so , wealth - how can a bat possibly bring us wealth ?
now as i said before , bats are essential for our ecosystems to function correctly . and why is this ?
bats in the tropics are major pollinators of many plants .
they also feed on fruit , and they disperse the seeds of these fruits . bats are responsible for pollinating the tequila plant , and this is a multi-million dollar industry in mexico . so indeed , we need them for our ecosystems to function properly .
without them , it 's going to be a problem .
but most bats are voracious insect predators .
it 's been estimated in the u.s. , in a tiny colony of big brown bats , that they will feed on over a million insects a year , and in the united states of america , right now bats are being threatened by a disease known as white-nose syndrome .
it 's working its way slowly across the u.s. and wiping out populations of bats , and scientists have estimated that 1,300 metric tons of insects a year are now remaining in the ecosystems due to the loss of bats .
bats are also threatened in the u.s.
by their attraction to wind farms . again , right now bats are looking at a little bit of a problem .
they 're going to - they are very threatened in the united states of america alone .
now how can this help us ?
well , it has been calculated that if we were to remove bats from the equation , we 're going to have to then use insecticides to remove all those pest insects that feed on our agricultural crops .
and for one year in the u.s. alone , it 's estimated that it 's going to cost 22 billion u.s. dollars , if we remove bats . so indeed , bats then do bring us wealth .
they maintain the health of our ecosystems , and also they save us money .
so again , that 's the first blessing . bats are important for our ecosystems .
and what about the second ? what about health ?
inside every cell in your body lies your genome .
your genome is made up of your dna , your dna codes for proteins that enable you to function and interact and be as you are .
now since the new advancements in modern molecular technologies , it is now possible for us to sequence our own genome in a very rapid time and at a very , very reduced cost .
now when we 've been doing this , we 've realized that there 's variations within our genome .
so i want you to look at the person beside you .
just have a quick look . and what we need to realize is that every 300 base pairs in your dna , you 're a little bit different .
and one of the grand challenges right now in modern molecular medicine is to work out whether this variation makes you more susceptible to diseases , or does this variation just make you different ?
again , what does it mean here ? what does this variation actually mean ? so if we are to capitalize on all of this new molecular data and personalized genomic information that is coming online that we will be able to have in the next few years , we have to be able to differentiate between the two . so how do we do this ?
well , i believe we just look at nature 's experiments .
so through natural selection , over time , mutations , variations that disrupt the function of a protein will not be tolerated over time .
evolution acts as a sieve . it sieves out the bad variation .
and so therefore , if you look at the same region of a genome in many mammals that have been evolutionarily distant from each other and are also ecologically divergent , you will get a better understanding of what the evolutionary prior of that site is , i.e. , if it is important for the mammal to function , for its survival , it will be the same in all of those different lineages , species , taxa .
so therefore , if we were to do this , what we 'd need to do is sequence that region in all these different mammals and ascertain if it 's the same or if it 's different . so if it is the same , this indicates that that site is important for a function , so a disease mutation should fall within that site .
so in this case here , if all the mammals that we look at have a yellow-type genome at that site , it probably suggests that purple is bad .
this could be even more powerful if you look at mammals that are doing things slightly differently .
so say , for example , the region of the genome that i was looking at was a region that 's important for vision .
if we look at that region in mammals that do n't see so well , such as bats , and we find that bats that do n't see so well have the purple type , we know that this is probably what 's causing this disease .
so in my lab , we 've been using bats to look at two different types of diseases of the senses .
we 're looking at blindness . now why would you do this ?
three hundred and fourteen million people are visually impaired , and 45 million of these are blind . so blindness is a big problem , and a lot of these blind disorders come from inherited diseases , so we want to try and better understand which mutations in the gene cause the disease .
also we look at deafness . one in every 1,000 newborn babies are deaf , and when we reach 80 , over half of us will also have a hearing problem .
again , there 's many underlying genetic causes for this .
so what we 've been doing in my lab is looking at these unique sensory specialists , the bats , and we have looked at genes that cause blindness genes that cause deafness when there 's a defect in them , and now we can predict which sites are most likely to cause disease .
so bats are also important for our health , to enable us to better understand how our genome functions .
so this is where we are right now , but what about the future ?
what about longevity ?
this is where we 're going to go , and as i said before , i really believe that the secret of everlasting youth lies within the bat genome .
so why should we be interested in aging at all ?
well , really , this is a picture drawn from the 1500s of the fountain of youth . aging is considered one of the most familiar , yet the least well-understood , aspects of all of biology , and really , since the dawn of civilization , mankind has sought to avoid it .
but we are going to have to understand it a bit better .
in europe alone , by 2050 , there is going to be a 70 percent increase of individuals over 65 , and 170 percent increase in individuals over 80 .
as we age , we deteriorate , and this deterioration causes problems for our society , so we have to address it .
so how could the secret of everlasting youth actually lie within the bat genome ? does anybody want to hazard a guess over how long this bat could live for ?
who - put up your hands - who says two years ?
nobody ? one ? how about 10 years ?
some ? how about 30 ?
how about 40 ? okay , it 's a whole varied response .
this bat is myotis brandtii . it 's the longest-living bat .
it lived for up to 42 years , and this bat 's still alive in the wild today .
but what would be so amazing about this ?
well , typically , in mammals there is a relationship between body size , metabolic rate , and how long you can live for , and you can predict how long a mammal can live for given its body size .
so typically , small mammals live fast , die young .
think of a mouse . but bats are very different .
as you can see here on this graph , in blue , these are all other mammals , but bats can live up to nine times longer than expected despite having a really , really high metabolic rate , and the question is , how can they do that ?
there are 19 species of mammal that live longer than expected , given their body size , than man , and 18 of those are bats .
so therefore , they must have something within their dna that ables them to deal with the metabolic stresses , particularly of flight . they expend three times more energy than a mammal of the same size , but do n't seem to suffer the consequences or the effects .
so right now , in my lab , we 're combining state-of-the-art bat field biology , going out and catching the long-lived bats , with the most up-to-date , modern molecular technology to understand better what it is that they do to stop aging as we do .
and hopefully in the next five years , i 'll be giving you a tedtalk on that .
aging is a big problem for humanity , and i believe that by studying bats , we can uncover the molecular mechanisms that enable mammals to achieve extraordinary longevity . if we find out what they 're doing , perhaps through gene therapy , we can enable us to do the same thing .
potentially , this means that we could halt aging or maybe even reverse it .
just imagine what that would be like .
so really , i do n't think we should be thinking of them as flying demons of the night , but more as our superheroes .
and the reality is that bats can bring us so much benefit if we just look in the right place . they 're good for our ecosystem , they allow us to understand how our genome functions , and they potentially hold the secret to everlasting youth .
so tonight , when you walk out of here and you look up in the night skies , and you see this beautiful flying mammal , i want you to smile . thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- when my brother called me in december of 1998 , he said , " the news does not look good . "
this is him on the screen .
he 'd just been diagnosed with als , which is a disease that the average lifespan is three years .
it paralyzes you . it starts by killing the motor neurons in your spinal cord .
and you go from being a healthy , robust 29-year-old male to someone that can not breathe , can not move , can not speak .
this has actually been , to me , a gift , because we began a journey to learn a new way of thinking about life .
and even though steven passed away three years ago we had an amazing journey as a family .
we did not even - i think adversity is not even the right word .
we looked at this and we said , " we 're going to do something with this in an incredibly positive way . "
and i want to talk today about one of the things that we decided to do , which was to think about a new way of approaching healthcare .
because , as we all know here today , it does n't work very well .
i want to talk about it in the context of a story .
this is the story of my brother .
but it 's just a story . and i want to go beyond the story , and go to something more .
" given my status , what is the best outcome i can hope to achieve , and how do i get there ? "
is what we are here to do in medicine , is what everyone should do .
and those questions all have variables to them .
all of our statuses are different .
all of our hopes and dreams , what we want to accomplish , is different , and our paths will be different , they are all stories .
but it 's a story until we convert it to data and so what we do , this concept we had , was to take steven 's status , " what is my status ? "
and go from this concept of walking , breathing , and then his hands , speak , and ultimately happiness and function .
so , the first set of pathologies , they end up in the stick man on his icon , but the rest of them are really what 's important here .
because steven , despite the fact that he was paralyzed , as he was in that pool , he could not walk , he could not use his arms - that 's why he had the little floaty things on them , did you see those ? - he was happy . we were at the beach , he was raising his son , and he was productive .
and we took this , and we converted it into data .
but it 's not a data point at that one moment in time .
it is a data point of steven in a context .
here he is in the pool . but here he is healthy , as a builder : taller , stronger , got all the women , amazing guy .
here he is walking down the aisle , but he can barely walk now , so it 's impaired .
and he could still hold his wife 's hand , but he could n't do buttons on his clothes , ca n't feed himself .
and here he is , paralyzed completely , unable to breathe and move , over this time journey .
these stories of his life , converted to data .
he renovated my carriage house when he was completely paralyzed , and unable to speak , and unable to breathe , and he won an award for a historic restoration .
so , here 's steven alone , sharing this story in the world .
and this is the insight , the thing that we are excited about , because we have gone away from the community that we are , the fact that we really do love each other and want to care for each other .
we need to give to others to be successful .
so , steven is sharing this story , but he is not alone .
there are so many other people sharing their stories .
not stories in words , but stories in data and words .
and we convert that information into this structure , this understanding , this ability to convert those stories into something that is computable , to which we can begin to change the way medicine is done and delivered .
we did this for als . we can do this for depression , parkinson 's disease , hiv .
these are not simple , they are not internet scalable ; they require thought and processes to find the meaningful information about the disease .
so , this is what it looks like when you go to the website .
and i 'm going to show you what patients like me , the company that myself , my youngest brother and a good friend from mit started .
here are the actual patients , there are 45,000 of them now , sharing their stories as data .
here is an m.s. patient .
his name is mike , and he is uniformly impaired on cognition , vision , walking , sensation .
those are things that are different for each m.s. patient .
each of them can have a different characteristic .
you can see fibromyalgia , hiv , als , depression .
look at this hiv patient down here , zinny .
it 's two years of this disease . all of the symptoms are not there .
but he is working to keep his cd4 count high and his viral level low so he can make his life better .
but you can aggregate this and you can discover things about treatments .
look at this , 2,000 people almost , on copaxone .
these are patients currently on drugs , sharing data .
i love some of these , physical exercise , prayer .
anyone want to run a comparative effectiveness study on prayer against something ? let 's look at prayer .
what i love about this , just sort of interesting design problems .
these are why people pray .
here is the schedule of how frequently they - it 's a dose .
so , anyone want to see the 32 patients that pray for 60 minutes a day , and see if they 're doing better , they probably are .
here they are . it 's an open network , everybody is sharing . we can see it all .
or , i want to look at anxiety , because people are praying for anxiety .
and here is data on 15,000 people 's current anxiety , right now .
how they treat it , the drugs , the components of it , their side effects , all of it in a rich environment , and you can drill down and see the individuals .
this amazing data allows us to drill down and see what this drug is for - 1,500 people on this drug , i think . yes .
i want to talk to the 58 patients down here who are taking four milligrams a day .
and i want to talk to the ones of those that have been doing it for more than two years .
so , you can see the duration .
all open , all available .
i 'm going to log in .
and this is my brother 's profile .
and this is a new version of our platform we 're launching right now .
this is the second generation . it 's going to be in flash .
and you can see here , as this animates over , steven 's actual data against the background of all other patients , against this information .
the blue band is the 50th percentile . steven is the 75th percentile , that he has non-genetic als .
you scroll down in this profile and you can see all of his prescription drugs , but more than that , in the new version , i can look at this interactively .
wait , poor spinal capacity .
does n't this remind you of a great stock program ?
would n't it be great if the technology we used to take care of ourselves was as good as the technology we use to make money ?
detrol . in the side effects for his drug , integrated into that , the stem cell transplant that he had , the first in the world , shared openly for anyone who wants to see it .
i love here - the cyberkinetics implant , which was , again , the only patient 's data that was online and available .
you can adjust the time scale . you can adjust the symptoms .
you can look at the interaction between how i treat my als .
so , you click down on the als tab there .
i 'm taking three drugs to manage it . some of them are experimental .
i can look at my constipation , how to manage it .
i can see magnesium citrate , and the side effects from that drug all integrated in the time in which they 're meaningful .
but i want more .
i do n't want to just look at this cool device , i want to take this data and make something even better .
i want my brother 's center of the universe and his symptoms and his drugs , and all of the things that interact among those , the side effects , to be in this beautiful data galaxy that we can look at in any way we want to understand it , so that we can take this information and go beyond just this simple model i do n't even know what a medical record is .
i want to solve a problem . i want an application .
so , can i take this data - rearrange yourself , put the symptoms in the left , the drugs across the top , tell me everything we know about steven and everyone else , and what interacts .
years after he 's had these drugs , i learned that everything he did to manage his excess saliva , including some positive side effects that came from other drugs , were making his constipation worse .
and if anyone 's ever had severe constipation , and you do n't understand how much of an impact that has on your life - yes , that was a pun .
you 're trying to manage these , and this grid is available here , and we want to understand it .
no one 's ever had this kind of information .
so , patients have this . we 're for patients .
this is all about patient health care , there was no doctors on our network .
this is about the patients .
so , how can we take this and bring them a tool that they can go back and they can engage the medical system ?
and we worked hard , and we thought about it and we said , " what 's something we can use all the time , that we can use in the medical care system , that everyone will understand ? "
so , the patients print it out , because hospitals usually block us because they believe we are a social network .
it 's actually the most used feature on the website .
doctors actually love this sheet , and they 're actually really engaged .
so , we went from this story of steven and his history to data , and then back to paper , where we went back and engaged the medical care system .
and here 's another paper .
this is a journal , pnas - i think it 's the proceedings of the national academy of science of the united states of america .
you 've seen multiple of these today , when everyone 's bragging about the amazing things they 've done .
this is a report about a drug called lithium .
lithium , that is a drug used to treat bipolar disorder , that a group in italy found slowed als down in 16 patients , and published it .
now , we 'll skip the critiques of the paper .
but the short story is : if you 're a patient , you want to be on the blue line .
you do n't want to be on the red line , you want to be on the blue line .
because the blue line is a better line . the red line is way downhill , the blue line is a good line .
so , you know we said - we looked at this , and what i love also is that people always accuse these internet sites of promoting bad medicine and having people do things irresponsibly .
so , this is what happened when pnas published this .
ten percent of the people in our system took lithium .
ten percent of the patients started taking lithium based on 16 patients of data in a bad publication .
and they call the internet irresponsible .
here 's the implication of what happens .
there 's this one guy , named humberto , from brazil , who unfortunately passed away nine months ago , who said , " hey , listen . can you help us answer this question ?
because i do n't want to wait for the next trial , it 's going to be years .
i want to know now . can you help us ? "
so , we launched some tools , we let them track their blood levels .
we let them share the data and exchange it .
you know , a data network .
and they said , you know , " jamie , plm , can you guys tell us whether this works or not ? "
and we went around and we talked to people , and they said , " you ca n't run a clinical trial like this . you know ?
you do n't have the blinding , you do n't have data , it does n't follow the scientific method .
it 's never going to work . you ca n't do it . "
so , i said , " okay well we ca n't do that . then we can do something harder . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i ca n't say whether lithium works in all als patients , but i can say whether it works in humberto .
i bought a mac about two years ago , i converted over , and i was so excited about this new feature of the time machine that came in leopard . and we said - because it 's really cool , you can go back and you can look at the entire history of your computer , and find everything you 've lost , and i loved it .
and i said , " what if we built a time machine for patients , except instead of going backwards , we go forwards .
can we find out what 's going to happen to you , so that you can maybe change it ? "
so , we did . we took all the patients like humberto , that 's the apple background , we stole that because we did n't have time to build our own . this is a real app by the way .
this is not just graphics .
and you take those data , and we find the patients like him , and we bring their data together . and we bring their histories into it .
and then we say , " well how do we line them all up ? "
so , we line them all up so they go together around the meaningful points , integrated across everything we know about the patient .
full information , the entire course of their disease .
and that 's what is going to happen to humberto , unless he does something .
and he took lithium , and he went down the line .
and it works almost every time .
now , the ones that it does n't work are interesting .
but almost all the time it works .
it 's actually scary . it 's beautiful .
so , we could n't run a clinical trial , we could n't figure it out .
but we could see whether it was going to work for humberto .
and yeah , all the clinicians in the audience will talk about power and all the standard deviation . we 'll do that later .
but here is the answer of the mean of the patients that actually decided to take lithium .
these are all the patients that started lithium .
it 's the intent to treat curve .
you can see here , the blue dots on the top , the light ones , those are the people in the study in pnas that you wanted to be on . and the red ones are the ones , the pink ones on the bottom are the ones you did n't want to be .
and the ones in the middle are all of our patients from the start of lithium at time zero , going forward , and then going backward .
so , you can see we matched them perfectly , perfectly .
terrifyingly accurate matching .
and going forward , you actually do n't want to be a lithium patient this time .
you 're actually doing slightly worse - not significantly , but slightly worse . you do n't want to be a lithium patient this time .
but you know , a lot of people dropped out , the trial , there is too much drop out .
can we do the even harder thing ? can we go to the patients that actually decided to stay on lithium , because they were so convinced they were getting better ?
we asked our control algorithm , are those 69 patients - by the way , you 'll notice that 's four times the number of patients in the clinical trial - can we look at those patients and say , " can we match them with our time machine to the other patients that are just like them , and what happens ? "
even the ones that believed they were getting better matched the controls exactly . exactly .
those little lines ? that 's the power .
so , we - i ca n't tell you lithium does n't work . i ca n't tell you that if you did it at a higher dose or if you run the study proper - i can tell you that for those 69 people that took lithium , they did n't do any better than the people that were just like them , just like me , and that we had the power to detect that at about a quarter of the strengths reported in the initial study .
we did that one year ahead of the time when the first clinical trial funded by the nih for millions of dollars failed for futility last week , and announced it .
so , remember i told you about my brother 's stem cell transplant .
i never really knew whether it worked .
and i put 100 million cells in his cisterna magna , in his lumbar cord , and filled out the irbs and did all this work , and i never really knew .
how did i not know ?
i mean , i did n't know what was going to happen to him .
i actually asked tim , who is the quant in our group - we actually searched for about a year to find someone who could do the sort of math and statistics and modeling in healthcare , could n't find anybody . so , we went to the finance industry .
and there are these guys who used to model the future of interest rates , and all that kind of stuff .
and some of them were available . so , we hired one .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we hired them , set them up , assisting at lab .
i i.m. him things . that 's the way i communicate with him , is like a little guy in a box . i i.m.ed tim . i said , " tim can you tell me whether my brother 's stem cell transplant worked or not ? "
and he sent me this two days ago .
it was that little outliers there . you see that guy that lived a long time ?
we have to go talk to him . because i 'd like to know what happened .
because something went different .
but my brother did n't . my brother went straight down the line .
it only works about 12 months .
it 's the first version of the time machine .
first time we ever tried it . we 'll try to get it better later but 12 months so far .
and , you know , i look at this , and i get really emotional .
you look at the patients , you can drill in all the controls , you can look at them , you can ask them .
and i found a woman that had - we found her , she was odd because she had data after she died .
and her husband had come in and entered her last functional scores , because he knew how much she cared .
and i am thankful .
i ca n't believe that these people , years after my brother had died , helped me answer the question about whether an operation i did , and spent millions of dollars on years ago , worked or not .
i wished it had been there when i 'd done it the first time , and i 'm really excited that it 's here now , because the lab that i founded has some data on a drug that might work , and i 'd like to show it .
i 'd like to show it in real time , now , and i want to do that for all of the diseases that we can do that for .
i 've got to thank the 45,000 people that are doing this social experiment with us .
there is an amazing journey we are going on to become human again , to be part of community again , to share of ourselves , to be vulnerable , and it 's very exciting . so , thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- we 're going to begin in 1964 .
bob dylan is 23 years old , and his career is just reaching its pinnacle .
he 's been christened the voice of a generation , and he 's churning out classic songs at a seemingly impossible rate , but there 's a small minority of dissenters , and they claim that bob dylan is stealing other people 's songs .
2004 . brian burton , aka danger mouse , takes the beatles ' " white album , " combines it with jay-z 's " the black album " to create " the grey album . "
" the grey album " becomes an immediate sensation online , and the beatles ' record company sends out countless cease-and-desist letters for " unfair competition and dilution of our valuable property . "
now , " the grey album " is a remix .
it is new media created from old media .
it was made using these three techniques : copy , transform and combine .
it 's how you remix . you take existing songs , you chop them up , you transform the pieces , you combine them back together again , and you 've got a new song , but that new song is clearly comprised of old songs .
but i think these are n't just the components of remixing .
i think these are the basic elements of all creativity .
i think everything is a remix , and i think this is a better way to conceive of creativity .
all right , let 's head back to 1964 , and let 's hear where some of dylan 's early songs came from .
we 'll do some side-by-side comparisons here .
all right , this first song you 're going to hear is " nottamun town . " it 's a traditional folk tune .
after that , you 'll hear dylan 's " masters of war . "
jean ritchie : ♫ in nottamun town , not a soul would look out , ♫ ♫ not a soul would look up , not a soul would look down . ♫ bob dylan : ♫ come you masters of war , ♫ ♫ you that build the big guns , you that build the death planes , ♫ ♫ you that build all the bombs . ♫ kirby ferguson : okay , so that 's the same basic melody and overall structure . this next one is " the patriot game , " by dominic behan . alongside that , you 're going to hear " with god on our side , " by dylan .
dominic behan : ♫ come all ye young rebels , ♫ ♫ and list while i sing , ♫ ♫ for the love of one 's land is a terrible thing . ♫ bd : ♫ oh my name it is nothin ' , ♫ ♫ my age it means less , ♫ ♫ the country i come from is called the midwest . ♫ kf : okay , so in this case , dylan admits he must have heard " the patriot game , " he forgot about it , then when the song kind of bubbled back up in his brain , he just thought it was his song .
last one , this is " who 's going to buy you ribbons , " another traditional folk tune .
alongside that is " do n't think twice , it 's all right . "
this one 's more about the lyric .
paul clayton : ♫ it ai n't no use to sit and sigh now , ♫ ♫ darlin ' , and it ai n't no use to sit and cry now . ♫ bd : ♫ it ai n't no use to sit and wonder why , babe , ♫ ♫ if you do n't know by now , ♫ ♫ and it ai n't no use to sit and wonder why , babe , ♫ ♫ it 'll never do somehow . ♫ kf : okay , now , there 's a lot of these .
it 's been estimated that two thirds of the melodies dylan used in his early songs were borrowed .
this is pretty typical among folk singers .
here 's the advice of dylan 's idol , woody guthrie .
" the worlds are the important thing .
do n't worry about tunes . take a tune , sing high when they sing low , sing fast when they sing slow , and you 've got a new tune . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- and that 's , that 's what guthrie did right here , and i 'm sure you all recognize the results .
-lrb- music -rrb- we know this tune , right ? we know it ?
actually you do n't .
that is " when the world 's on fire , " a very old melody , in this case performed by the carter family .
guthrie adapted it into " this land is your land . "
so , bob dylan , like all folk singers , he copied melodies , he transformed them , he combined them with new lyrics which were frequently their own concoction of previous stuff .
now , american copyright and patent laws run counter to this notion that we build on the work of others .
instead , these laws and laws around the world use the rather awkward analogy of property .
now , creative works may indeed be kind of like property , but it 's property that we 're all building on , and creations can only take root and grow once that ground has been prepared .
henry ford once said , " i invented nothing new .
i simply assembled the discoveries of other men behind whom were centuries of work .
progress happens when all the factors that make for it are ready and then it is inevitable . "
2007 . the iphone makes it debut .
apple undoubtedly brings this innovation to us early , but its time was approaching because its core technology had been evolving for decades .
that 's multi-touch , controlling a device by touching its display .
here is steve jobs introducing multi-touch and making a rather foreboding joke .
steve jobs : and we have invented a new technology called multi-touch .
you can do multi-fingered gestures on it , and boy have we patented it . -lrb- laughter -rrb- kf : yes . and yet , here is multi-touch in action .
this is at ted , actually , about a year earlier .
this is jeff han , and , i mean , that 's multi-touch .
it 's the same animal , at least .
let 's hear what jeff han has to say about this newfangled technology .
jeff han : multi-touch sensing is n't anything - is n't completely new . i mean , people like bill buxton have been playing around with it in the ' 80s .
the technology , you know , is n't the most exciting thing here right now other than probably its newfound accessibility .
kf : so he 's pretty frank about it not being new .
so it 's not multi-touch as a whole that 's patented .
it 's the small parts of it that are , and it 's in these small details where we can clearly see patent law contradicting its intent : to promote the progress of useful arts .
here is the first ever slide-to-unlock .
that is all there is to it . apple has patented this .
it 's a 28-page software patent , but i will summarize what it covers . spoiler alert : unlocking your phone by sliding an icon with your finger . -lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'm only exaggerating a little bit . it 's a broad patent .
now , can someone own this idea ?
now , back in the ' 80s , there were no software patents , and it was xerox that pioneered the graphical user interface .
what if they had patented pop-up menus , scrollbars , the desktop with icons that look like folders and sheets of paper ?
would a young and inexperienced apple have survived the legal assault from a much larger and more mature company like xerox ?
now , this idea that everything is a remix might sound like common sense until you 're the one getting remixed .
for example ...
sj : i mean , picasso had a saying .
he said , " good artists copy . great artists steal . "
and we have , you know , always been shameless about stealing great ideas .
kf : okay , so that 's in ' 96 . here 's in 2010 .
" i 'm going to destroy android because it 's a stolen product . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " i 'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- okay , so in other words , great artists steal , but not from me .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , behavioral economists might refer to this sort of thing as loss aversion we have a strong predisposition towards protecting what we feel is ours .
we have no such aversion towards copying what other people have , because we do that nonstop .
so here 's the sort of equation we 're looking at .
we 've got laws that fundamentally treat creative works as property , plus massive rewards or settlements in infringement cases , plus huge legal fees to protect yourself in court , plus cognitive biases against perceived loss .
and the sum looks like this .
that is the last four years of lawsuits in the realm of smartphones .
is this promoting the progress of useful arts ?
1983 . bob dylan is 42 years old , and his time in the cultural spotlight is long since past .
he records a song called " blind willie mctell , " named after the blues singer , and the song is a voyage through the past , through a much darker time , but a simpler one , a time when musicians like willie mctell had few illusions about what they did .
" i jump ' em from other writers but i arrange ' em my own way . "
i think this is mostly what we do .
our creativity comes from without , not from within .
we are not self-made . we are dependent on one another , and admitting this to ourselves is n't an embrace of mediocrity and derivativeness .
it 's a liberation from our misconceptions , and it 's an incentive to not expect so much from ourselves and to simply begin .
thank you so much . it was an honor to be here .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you . thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- i got up this morning at 6:10 a.m.
after going to sleep at 12:45 a.m.
i was awakened once during the night .
my heart rate was 61 beats per minute - my blood pressure , 127 over 74 .
i had zero minutes of exercise yesterday , so my maximum heart rate during exercise was n't calculated .
i had about 600 milligrams of caffeine , zero of alcohol .
and my score on the narcissism personality index , or the npi-16 , is a reassuring 0.31 .
we know that numbers are useful for us when we advertise , manage , govern , search .
i 'm going to talk about how they 're useful when we reflect , learn , remember and want to improve .
a few years ago , kevin kelly , my partner , and i noticed that people were subjecting themselves to regimes of quantitative measurement and self-tracking that went far beyond the ordinary , familiar habits such as stepping on a scale every day .
people were tracking their food via twitter , their kids ' diapers on their iphone .
they were making detailed journals of their spending , their mood , their symptoms , their treatments .
now , we know some of the technological facts that are driving this change in our lifestyle - the uptake and diffusion of mobile devices , the exponential improvement in data storage and data processing , and the remarkable improvement in human biometric sensors .
this little black dot there is a 3d accelerometer .
it tracks your movement through space .
it is , as you can see , very small and also very cheap .
they 're now down to well under a dollar a piece , and they 're going into all kinds of devices .
but what 's interesting is the incredible detailed information that you can get from just one sensor like this .
this kind of sensor is in the hit biometric device - among early adopters at the moment - the fitbit .
this tracks your activity and also your sleep .
it has just that sensor in it .
you 're probably familiar with the nike + system .
i just put it up because that little blue dot is the sensor .
it 's really just a pressure sensor like the kind that 's in a doorbell .
and nike knows how to get your pace and distance from just that sensor .
this is the strap that people use to transmit heart-rate data to their nike + system .
this is a beautiful , new device that gives you detailed sleep tracking data , not just whether you 're asleep or awake , but also your phase of sleep - deep sleep , light sleep , rem sleep .
the sensor is just a little strip of metal in that headband there .
the rest of it is the bedside console ; just for reference , this is a sleep tracking system from just a few years ago - i mean , really until now .
and this is the sleep tracking system of today .
this just was presented at a health care conference in d.c.
most of what you see there is an asthma inhaler , but the top is a very small gps transceiver , which gives you the date and location of an asthma incident , giving you a new awareness of your vulnerability in relation to time and environmental factors .
now , we know that new tools are changing our sense of self in the world - these tiny sensors that gather data in nature , the ubiquitous computing that allows that data to be understood and used , and of course the social networks that allow people to collaborate and contribute .
but we think of these tools as pointing outward , as windows and i 'd just like to invite you to think of them as also turning inward and becoming mirrors .
so that when we think about using them to get some systematic improvement , we also think about how they can be useful for self-improvement , for self-discovery , self-awareness , self-knowledge .
here 's a biometric device : a pair of apple earbuds .
last year , apple filed some patents to get blood oxygenation , heart rate and body temperature via the earbuds .
what is this for ?
what should it be for ?
some people will say it 's for biometric security .
some people will say it 's for public health research .
some people will say it 's for avant-garde marketing research .
i 'd like to tell you that it 's also for self-knowledge .
and the self is n't the only thing ; it 's not even most things .
the self is just our operation center , our consciousness , our moral compass .
so , if we want to act more effectively in the world , we have to get to know ourselves better .
thank you .
two weeks ago i was in my studio in paris , and the phone rang and i heard , " hey , jr , you won the ted prize 2011 .
you have to make a wish to save the world . "
i was lost .
i mean , i ca n't save the world . nobody can .
the world is fucked up .
come on , you have dictators ruling the world , population is growing by millions , there 's no more fish in the sea , the north pole is melting and as the last ted prize winner said , we 're all becoming fat .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- except maybe french people .
whatever .
so i called back and i told her , " look , amy , tell the ted guys i just wo n't show up .
i ca n't do anything to save the world . "
she said , " hey , jr , your wish is not to save the world , but to change the world . "
" oh , all right . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " that 's cool . "
i mean , technology , politics , business do change the world - not always in a good way , but they do .
what about art ?
could art change the world ?
i started when i was 15 years old .
and at that time , i was not thinking about changing the world .
i was doing graffiti - writing my name everywhere , using the city as a canvas .
i was going in the tunnels of paris , on the rooftops with my friends .
each trip was an excursion , was an adventure .
it was like leaving our mark on society , to say , " i was here , " on the top of a building .
so when i found a cheap camera on the subway , i started documenting those adventures with my friends and gave them back as photocopies - really small photos just that size .
that 's how , at 17 years old , i started pasting them .
and i did my first " expo de rue , " which means sidewalk gallery .
and i framed it with color so you would not confuse it with advertising .
i mean , the city 's the best gallery i could imagine .
i would never have to make a book and then present it to a gallery and let them decide if my work was nice enough to show it to people .
i would control it directly with the public in the streets .
so that 's paris .
i would change - depending on the places i would go - the title of the exhibition .
that 's on the champs-elysees .
i was quite proud of that one .
because i was just 18 and i was just up there on the top of the champs-elysees .
then when the photo left , the frame was still there .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- november 2005 : the streets are burning .
a large wave of riots had broken into the first projects of paris .
everyone was glued to the tv , watching disturbing , frightening images taken from the edge of the neighborhood .
i mean , these kids , without control , throwing molotov cocktails , attacking the cops and the firemen , looting everything they could in the shops .
these were criminals , thugs , dangerous , destroying their own environment .
and then i saw it - could it be possible ? - my photo on a wall revealed by a burning car - a pasting i 'd done a year earlier - an illegal one - still there .
i mean , these were the faces of my friends .
i know those guys .
all of them are not angels , but they 're not monsters either .
so it was kind of weird to see those images and those eyes stare back at me through a television .
so i went back there with a 28 mm lens .
it was the only one i had at that time .
but with that lens , you have to be as close as 10 inches from the person .
so you can do it only with their trust .
so i took full portraits of people from le bosquet .
they were making scary faces to play the caricature of themselves .
and then i pasted huge posters everywhere in the bourgeois area of paris with the name , age , even building number of these guys .
a year later , the exhibition was displayed in front of the city hall of paris .
and we go from thug images , who 've been stolen and distorted by the media , who 's now proudly taking over his own image .
that 's where i realized the power of paper and glue .
so could art change the world ?
a year later , i was listening to all the noise about the middle east conflict .
i mean , at that time , trust me , they were only referring to the israeli and palestinian conflict .
so with my friend marco , we decided to go there and see who are the real palestinians and who are the real israelis .
are they so different ?
when we got there , we just went in the street , started talking with people everywhere , and we realized that things were a bit different from the rhetoric we heard in the media .
so we decided to take portraits of palestinians and israelis doing the same jobs - taxi-driver , lawyer , cooks .
asked them to make a face as a sign of commitment .
not a smile - that really does n't tell about who you are and what you feel .
they all accepted to be pasted next to the other .
i decided to paste in eight israeli and palestinian cities and on both sides of the wall .
we launched the biggest illegal art exhibition ever .
we called the project face 2 face .
the experts said , " no way .
the people will not accept .
the army will shoot you , and hamas will kidnap you . "
we said , " okay , let 's try and push as far as we can . "
i love the way that people will ask me , " how big will my photo be ? "
" it will be as big as your house . "
when we did the wall , we did the palestinian side .
so we arrived with just our ladders and we realized that they were not high enough .
and so palestinians guys say , " calm down . no wait . i 'm going to find you a solution . "
so he went to the church of nativity and brought back an old ladder that was so old that it could have seen jesus being born .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we did face 2 face with only six friends , two ladders , two brushes , a rented car , a camera and 20,000 square feet of paper .
we had all sorts of help from all walks of life .
okay , for example , that 's palestine .
we 're in ramallah right now .
we 're pasting portraits - so both portraits in the streets in a crowded market .
people come around us and start asking , " what are you doing here ? "
" oh , we 're actually doing an art project and we are pasting an israeli and a palestinian doing the same job .
and those ones are actually two taxi-drivers . "
and then there was always a silence .
" you mean you 're pasting an israeli face - doing a face - right here ? "
" well , yeah , yeah , that 's part of the project . "
and i would always leave that moment , and we would ask them , " so can you tell me who is who ? "
and most of them could n't say .
-lrb- applause -rrb- we even pasted on israeli military towers , and nothing happened .
when you paste an image , it 's just paper and glue .
people can tear it , tag on it , or even pee on it - some are a bit high for that , i agree - but the people in the street , they are the curator .
the rain and the wind will take them off anyway .
they are not meant to stay .
but exactly four years after , the photos , most of them are still there .
face 2 face demonstrated that what we thought impossible was possible - and , you know what , even easy .
we did n't push the limit ; we just showed that they were further than anyone thought .
in the middle east , i experienced my work in places without -lsb- many -rsb- museums .
so the reactions in the street were kind of interesting .
so i decided to go further in this direction and go in places where there were zero museums .
when you go in these developing societies , women are the pillars of their community , but the men are still the ones holding the streets .
so we were inspired to create a project where men will pay tribute to women by posting their photos .
i called that project women are heroes .
when i listened to all the stories everywhere i went on the continents , i could n't always understand the complicated circumstances of their conflict .
i just observed .
sometimes there was no words , no sentence , just tears .
i just took their pictures and pasted them .
women are heroes took me around the world .
most of the places i went to , i decided to go there because i 've heard about it through the media .
so for example , in june 2008 , i was watching tv in paris , and then i heard about this terrible thing that happened in rio de janeiro - the first favela of brazil named providencia .
three kids - that was three students - were -lsb- detained -rsb- by the army because they were not carrying their papers .
and the army took them , and instead of bringing them to the police station , they brought them to an enemy favela where they get chopped into pieces .
i was shocked .
all brazil was shocked .
i heard it was one of the most violent favelas , because the largest drug cartel controls it .
so i decided to go there .
when i arrived - i mean , i did n't have any contact with any ngo .
there was none in place - no association , no ngos , nothing - no eyewitnesses .
so we just walked around , and we met a woman , and i showed her my book .
and she said , " you know what ?
we 're hungry for culture .
we need culture out there . "
so i went out and i started with the kids .
i just took a few photos of the kids , and the next day i came with the posters and we pasted them .
the day after , i came back and they were already scratched .
but that 's okay .
i wanted them to feel that this art belongs to them .
then the next day , i held a meeting on the main square and some women came .
they were all linked to the three kids that got killed .
there was the mother , the grandmother , the best friend - they all wanted to shout the story .
after that day , everyone in the favela gave me the green light .
i took more photos , and we started the project .
the drug lords were kind of worried about us filming in the place , so i told them , " you know what ?
i 'm not interested in filming the violence and the weapons .
you see that enough in the media .
what i want to show is the incredible life and energy .
i 've been seeing it around me the last few days . "
so that 's a really symbolic pasting , because that 's the first one we did that you could n't see from the city .
and that 's where the three kids got arrested , and that 's the grandmother of one of them .
and on that stairs , that 's where the traffickers always stand and there 's a lot of exchange of fire .
everyone there understood the project .
and then we pasted everywhere - the whole hill .
-lrb- applause -rrb- what was interesting is that the media could n't get in .
i mean , you should see that .
they would have to film us from a really long distance by helicopter and then have a really long lens , and we would see ourselves , on tv , pasting .
and they would put a number : " please call this number if you know what 's going on in providencia . "
we just did a project and then left so the media would n't know .
so how can we know about the project ?
so they had to go and find the women and get an explanation from them .
so you create a bridge between the media and the anonymous women .
we kept traveling .
we went to africa , sudan , sierra leone , liberia , kenya .
in war-torn places like monrovia , people come straight to you .
i mean , they want to know what you 're up to .
they kept asking me , " what is the purpose of your project ?
are you an ngo ? are you the media ? "
art . just doing art .
some people question , " why is it in black and white ?
do n't you have color in france ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- or they tell you , " are these people all dead ? "
some who understood the project would explain it to others .
and to a man who did not understand , i heard someone say , " you know , you 've been here for a few hours trying to understand , discussing with your fellows .
during that time , you have n't thought about what you 're going to eat tomorrow .
this is art . "
i think it 's people 's curiosity that motivates them to come into the projects .
and then it becomes more .
it becomes a desire , a need , an armor .
on this bridge that 's in monrovia , ex-rebel soldiers helped us pasting a portrait of a woman that might have been raped during the war .
women are always the first ones targeted during conflict .
this is kibera , kenya , one of the largest slums of africa .
you might have seen images about the post-election violence that happened there in 2008 .
this time we covered the roofs of the houses , but we did n't use paper , because paper does n't prevent the rain from leaking inside the house - vinyl does .
then art becomes useful .
so the people kept it .
you know what i love is , for example , when you see the biggest eye there , there are so -lsb- many -rsb- houses inside .
and i went there a few months ago - photos are still there - and it was missing a piece of the eye .
so i asked the people what happened .
" oh , that guy just moved . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- when the roofs were covered , a woman said as a joke , " now god can see me . "
when you look at kibera now , they look back .
okay , india .
before i start that , just so you know , each time we go to a place , we do n't have authorization , so we set up like commandos - we 're a group of friends who arrive there , and we try to paste on the walls .
but there are places where you just ca n't paste on a wall .
in india it was just impossible to paste .
i heard culturally and because of the law , they would just arrest us at the first pasting .
so we decided to paste white , white on the walls .
so imagine white guys pasting white papers .
so people would come to us and ask us , " hey , what are you up to ? "
" oh , you know , we 're just doing art . " " art ? "
of course , they were confused .
but you know how india has a lot of dust in the streets , and the more dust you would have going up in the air , on the white paper you can almost see , but there is this sticky part like when you reverse a sticker .
so the more dust you have , the more it will reveal the photo .
so we could just walk in the street during the next days and the photos would get revealed by themselves .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
so we did n't get caught this time .
each project - that 's a film from women are heroes .
-lrb- music -rrb- okay .
for each project we do a film .
and most of what you see - that 's a trailer from " women are heroes " - its images , photography , taken one after the other .
and the photos kept traveling even without us .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- hopefully , you 'll see the film , and you 'll understand the scope of the project and what the people felt when they saw those photos .
because that 's a big part of it . there 's layers behind each photo .
behind each image is a story .
women are heroes created a new dynamic in each of the communities , and the women kept that dynamic after we left .
for example , we did books - not for sale - that all the community would get .
but to get it , they would have to -lsb- get -rsb- it signed by one of the women .
we did that in most of the places .
we go back regularly .
and so in providencia , for example , in the favela , we have a cultural center running there .
in kibera , each year we cover more roofs .
because of course , when we left , the people who were just at the edge of the project said , " hey , what about my roof ? "
so we decided to come the year after and keep doing the project .
a really important point for me is that i do n't use any brand or corporate sponsors .
so i have no responsibility to anyone but myself and the subjects .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and that is for me one of the more important things in the work .
i think , today , as important as the result is the way you do things .
and that has always been a central part of the work .
and what 's interesting is that fine line that i have with images and advertising .
we just did some pasting in los angeles on another project in the last weeks .
and i was even invited to cover the moca museum .
but yesterday the city called them and said , " look , you 're going to have to tear it down .
because this can be taken for advertising , and because of the law , it has to be taken down . "
but tell me , advertising for what ?
the people i photograph were proud to participate in the project and to have their photo in the community .
but they asked me for a promise basically .
they asked me , " please , make our story travel with you . "
so i did . that 's paris .
that 's rio .
in each place , we built exhibitions with a story , and the story traveled .
you understand the full scope of the project .
that 's london .
new york .
and today , they are with you in long beach .
all right , recently i started a public art project where i do n't use my artwork anymore .
i use man ray , helen levitt , giacomelli , other people 's artwork .
it does n't matter today if it 's your photo or not .
the importance is what you do with the images , the statement it makes where it 's pasted .
so for example , i pasted the photo of the minaret in switzerland a few weeks after they voted the law forbidding minarets in the country .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this image of three men wearing gas masks was taken in chernobyl originally , and i pasted it in southern italy , where the mafia sometimes bury the garbage under the ground .
in some ways , art can change the world .
art is not supposed to change the world , to change practical things , but to change perceptions .
art can change the way we see the world .
art can create an analogy .
actually the fact that art can not change things makes it a neutral place for exchanges and discussions , and then enables you to change the world .
when i do my work , i have two kinds of reactions .
people say , " oh , why do n't you go in iraq or afghanistan .
they would be really useful . "
or , " how can we help ? "
i presume that you belong to the second category , and that 's good , because for that project , i 'm going to ask you to take the photos and paste them .
so now my wish is : -lrb- mock drum roll -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- i wish for you to stand up for what you care about by participating in a global art project , and together we 'll turn the world inside out .
and this starts right now .
yes , everyone in the room .
everyone watching .
i wanted that wish to actually start now .
so a subject you 're passionate about , a person who you want to tell their story or even your own photos - tell me what you stand for .
take the photos , the portraits , upload it - i 'll give you all the details - and i 'll send you back your poster . join by groups and reveal things to the world .
the full data is on the website - insideoutproject.net - that is launching today .
what we see changes who we are .
when we act together , the whole thing is much more than the sum of the parts .
so i hope that , together , we 'll create something that the world will remember .
and this starts right now and depends on you .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so as a fashion designer , i 've always tended to think of materials something like this , or this , or maybe this .
but then i met a biologist , and now i think of materials like this - green tea , sugar , a few microbes and a little time .
i 'm essentially using a kombucha recipe , which is a symbiotic mix of bacteria , yeasts and other micro-organisms , which spin cellulose in a fermentation process .
over time , these tiny threads form in the liquid into layers and produce a mat on the surface .
so we start by brewing the tea .
i brew up to about 30 liters of tea at a time , and then while it 's still hot , add a couple of kilos of sugar .
we stir this in until it 's completely dissolved and then pour it into a growth bath .
we need to check that the temperature has cooled to below 30 degrees c.
and then we 're ready to add the living organism .
and along with that , some acetic acid .
and once you get this process going , you can actually recycle your previous fermented liquid .
we need to maintain an optimum temperature for the growth .
and i use a heat mat to sit the bath on and a thermostat to regulate it .
and actually , in hot weather , i can just grow it outside .
so this is my mini fabric farm .
after about three days , the bubbles will appear on the surface of the liquid .
so this is telling us that the fermentation is in full swing .
and the bacteria are feeding on the sugar nutrients in the liquid .
so they 're spinning these tiny nano fibers of pure cellulose .
and they 're sticking together , forming layers and giving us a sheet on the surface .
after about two to three weeks , we 're looking at something which is about an inch in thickness .
so the bath on the left is after five days , and on the right , after 10 .
and this is a static culture .
you do n't have to do anything to it ; you just literally watch it grow .
it does n't need light .
and when it 's ready to harvest , you take it out of the bath and you wash it in cold , soapy water .
at this point , it 's really heavy .
it 's over 90 percent water , so we need to let that evaporate .
so i spread it out onto a wooden sheet .
again , you can do that outside and just let it dry in the air .
and as it 's drying , it 's compressing , so what you 're left with , depending on the recipe , is something that 's either like a really light-weight , transparent paper , or something which is much more like a flexible vegetable leather .
and then you can either cut that out and sew it conventionally , or you can use the wet material to form it around a three-dimensional shape .
and as it evaporates , it will knit itself together , forming seams .
so the color in this jacket is coming purely from green tea .
i guess it also looks a little bit like human skin , which intrigues me .
since it 's organic , i 'm really keen to try and minimize the addition of any chemicals .
i can make it change color without using dye by a process of iron oxidation .
using fruit and vegetable staining , create organic patterning .
and using indigo , make it anti-microbial .
and in fact , cotton would take up to 18 dips in indigo to achieve a color this dark .
and because of the super-absorbency of this kind of cellulose , it just takes one , and a really short one at that .
what i ca n't yet do is make it water-resistant .
so if i was to walk outside in the rain wearing this dress today , i would immediately start to absorb huge amounts of water .
the dress would get really heavy , and eventually the seams would probably fall apart - leaving me feeling rather naked .
possibly a good performance piece , but definitely not ideal for everyday wear .
what i 'm looking for is a way to give the material the qualities that i need .
so what i want to do is say to a future bug , " spin me a thread .
align it in this direction .
make it hydrophobic .
and while you 're at it , just form it around this 3d shape . "
bacterial cellulose is actually already being used for wound healing , and possibly in the future for biocompatible blood vessels , possibly even replacement bone tissue .
but with synthetic biology , we can actually imagine engineering this bacterium to produce something that gives us the quality , quantity and shape of material that we desire .
obviously , as a designer , that 's really exciting because then i start to think , wow , we could actually imagine growing consumable products .
what excites me about using microbes is their efficiency .
so we only grow what we need .
there 's no waste .
and in fact , we could make it from a waste stream - so for example , a waste sugar stream from a food processing plant .
finally , at the end of use , we could biodegrade it naturally along with your vegetable peelings .
what i 'm not suggesting is that microbial cellulose is going to be a replacement for cotton , leather or other textile materials .
but i do think it could be quite a smart and sustainable addition to our increasingly precious natural resources .
ultimately , maybe it wo n't even be fashion where we see these microbes have their impact .
we could , for example , imagine growing a lamp , a chair , a car or maybe even a house .
so i guess what my question to you is : in the future , what would you choose to grow ?
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- bruno giussani : suzanne , just a curiosity , what you 're wearing is not random . -lrb- suzanne lee : no . -rrb- this is one of the jackets you grew ?
sl : yes , it is .
it 's probably - part of the project 's still in process because this one is actually biodegrading in front of your eyes .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's absorbing my sweat , and it 's feeding on it .
bg : okay , so we 'll let you go and save it , and rescue it .
suzanne lee . -lrb- sl : thank you . -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- it 's a simple idea about nature .
i want to say a word for nature because we have n't talked that much about it the last couple days .
i want to say a word for the soil and the bees and the plants and the animals , and tell you about a tool , a very simple tool that i have found .
although it 's really nothing more than a literary conceit ; it 's not a technology .
it 's very powerful for , i think , changing our relationship to the natural world and to the other species on whom we depend .
and that tool is very simply , as chris suggested , looking at us and the world from the plants ' or the animals ' point of view .
it 's not my idea , other people have hit on it , but i 've tried to take it to some new places .
let me tell you where i got it .
like a lot of my ideas , like a lot of the tools i use , i found it in the garden ; i 'm a very devoted gardener .
and there was a day about seven years ago : i was planting potatoes , it was the first week of may - this is new england , when the apple trees are just vibrating with bloom ; they 're just white clouds above .
i was here , planting my chunks , cutting up potatoes and planting it , and the bees were working on this tree ; bumblebees , just making this thing vibrate .
and one of the things i really like about gardening is that it does n't take all your concentration , you really ca n't get hurt - it 's not like woodworking - and you have plenty of kind of mental space for speculation .
and the question i asked myself that afternoon in the garden , working alongside that bumblebee , was : what did i and that bumblebee have in common ?
how was our role in this garden similar and different ?
and i realized we actually had quite a bit in common : both of us were disseminating the genes of one species and not another , and both of us - probably , if i can imagine the bee 's point of view - thought we were calling the shots .
i had decided what kind of potato i wanted to plant - i had picked my yukon gold or yellow finn , or whatever it was - and i had summoned those genes from a seed catalog across the country , brought it , and i was planting it .
and that bee , no doubt , assumed that it had decided , " i 'm going for that apple tree , i 'm going for that blossom , i 'm going to get the nectar and i 'm going to leave . "
we have a grammar that suggests that 's who we are ; that we are sovereign subjects in nature , the bee as well as me .
i plant the potatoes , i weed the garden , i domesticate the species .
but that day , it occurred to me : what if that grammar is nothing more than a self-serving conceit ?
because , of course , the bee thinks he 's in charge or she 's in charge , but we know better .
we know that what 's going on between the bee and that flower is that bee has been cleverly manipulated by that flower .
and when i say manipulated , i 'm talking about in a darwinian sense , right ?
i mean it has evolved a very specific set of traits - color , scent , flavor , pattern - that has lured that bee in .
and the bee has been cleverly fooled into taking the nectar , and also picking up some powder on its leg , and going off to the next blossom .
the bee is not calling the shots .
and i realized then , i was n't either .
i had been seduced by that potato and not another into planting its - into spreading its genes , giving it a little bit more habitat .
and that 's when i got the idea , which was , " well , what would happen if we kind of looked at us from this point of view of these other species who are working on us ? "
and agriculture suddenly appeared to me not as an invention , not as a human technology , but as a co-evolutionary development in which a group of very clever species , mostly edible grasses , had exploited us , figured out how to get us to basically deforest the world .
the competition of grasses , right ?
and suddenly everything looked different .
and suddenly mowing the lawn that day was a completely different experience .
i had thought always - and in fact , had written this in my first book ; this was a book about gardening - that lawns were nature under culture 's boot , that they were totalitarian landscapes , and that when we mowed them we were cruelly suppressing the species and never letting it set seed or die or have sex .
and that 's what the lawn was .
but then i realized , " no , this is exactly what the grasses want us to do .
i 'm a dupe . i 'm a dupe of the lawns , whose goal in life is to outcompete the trees , who they compete with for sunlight . "
and so by getting us to mow the lawn , we keep the trees from coming back , which in new england happens very , very quickly .
so i started looking at things this way and wrote a whole book about it called " the botany of desire . "
and i realized that in the same way you can look at a flower and deduce all sorts of interesting things about the taste and the desires of bees - that they like sweetness , that they like this color and not that color , that they like symmetry - what could we find out about ourselves by doing the same thing ?
that a certain kind of potato , a certain kind of drug , a sativa-indica cannabis cross has something to say about us .
and that , would n't this be kind of an interesting way to look at the world ?
now , the test of any idea - i said it was a literary conceit - is what does it get us ?
and when you 're talking about nature , which is really my subject as a writer , how does it meet the aldo leopold test ?
which is , does it make us better citizens of the biotic community ?
get us to do things that leads to the support and perpetuation of the biota , rather than its destruction ?
and i would submit that this idea does this .
so , let me go through what you gain when you look at the world this way , besides some entertaining insights about human desire .
as an intellectual matter , looking at the world from other species ' points of view helps us deal with this weird anomaly , which is - and this is in the realm of intellectual history - which is that we have this darwinian revolution 150 years ago ...
ugh . mini-me . -lrb- laughter -rrb- we have this intellectual , this darwinian revolution in which , thanks to darwin , we figured out we are just one species among many ; evolution is working on us the same way it 's working on all the others ; we are acted upon as well as acting ; we are really in the fiber , the fabric of life .
but the weird thing is , we have not absorbed this lesson 150 years later ; none of us really believes this .
we are still cartesians - the children of descartes - who believe that subjectivity , consciousness , sets us apart ; that the world is divided into subjects and objects ; that there is nature on one side , culture on another .
as soon as you start seeing things from the plant 's point of view or the animal 's point of view , you realize that the real literary conceit is that - is the idea that nature is opposed to culture , the idea that consciousness is everything - and that 's another very important thing it does .
looking at the world from other species ' points of view is a cure for the disease of human self-importance .
you suddenly realize that consciousness - which we value and we consider the crowning achievement of nature , human consciousness - is really just another set of tools for getting along in the world .
and it 's kind of natural that we would think it was the best tool .
but , you know , there 's a comedian who said , " well , who 's telling me that consciousness is so good and so important ?
well , consciousness . "
so when you look at the plants , you realize that there are other tools and they 're just as interesting .
i 'll give you two examples , also from the garden : lima beans . you know what a lima bean does when it 's attacked by spider mites ?
it releases this volatile chemical that goes out into the world and summons another species of mite that comes in and attacks the spider mite , defending the lima bean .
so what plants have - while we have consciousness , tool making , language , they have biochemistry .
and they have perfected that to a degree far beyond what we can imagine .
their complexity , their sophistication , is something to really marvel at , and i think it 's really the scandal of the human genome project .
you know , we went into it thinking , 40,000 or 50,000 human genes and we came out with only 23,000 .
just to give you grounds for comparison , rice : 35,000 genes .
so who 's the more sophisticated species ?
well , we 're all equally sophisticated .
we 've been evolving just as long , just along different paths .
so , cure for self-importance , way to sort of make us feel the darwinian idea .
and that 's really what i do as a writer , as a storyteller , is try to make people feel what we know and tell stories that actually help us think ecologically .
now , the other use of this is practical .
and i 'm going to take you to a farm right now , because i used this idea to develop my understanding of the food system and what i learned , in fact , is that we are all , now , being manipulated by corn .
and the talk you heard about ethanol earlier today , to me , is the final triumph of corn over good sense . -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- it is part of corn 's scheme for world domination .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and you will see , the amount of corn planted this year will be up dramatically from last year and there will be that much more habitat because we 've decided ethanol is going to help us .
so it helped me understand industrial agriculture , which of course is a cartesian system .
it 's based on this idea that we bend other species to our will and that we are in charge , and that we create these factories and we have these technological inputs and we get the food out of it or the fuel or whatever we want .
let me take you to a very different kind of farm .
this is a farm in the shenandoah valley of virginia .
i went looking for a farm where these ideas about looking at things from the species ' point of view are actually implemented , and i found it in a man . the farmer 's name is joel salatin .
and i spent a week as an apprentice on his farm , and i took away from this some of the most hopeful news about our relationship to nature that i 've ever come across in 25 years of writing about nature .
and that is this : the farm is called polyface , which means ...
the idea is he 's got six different species of animals , as well as some plants , growing in this very elaborate symbiotic arrangement .
it 's permaculture , those of you who know a little bit about this , such that the cows and the pigs and the sheep and the turkeys and the ...
what else does he have ?
all the six different species - rabbits , actually - are all performing ecological services for one another , such that the manure of one is the lunch for the other and they take care of pests for one another .
it 's a very elaborate and beautiful dance , but i 'm going to just give you a close-up on one piece of it , and that is the relationship between his cattle and his chickens , his laying hens .
and i 'll show you , if you take this approach , what you get , ok ?
and this is a lot more than growing food , as you 'll see ; this is a different way to think about nature and a way to get away from the zero-sum notion , the cartesian idea that either nature 's winning or we 're winning , and that for us to get what we want , nature is diminished .
so , one day , cattle in a pen .
the only technology involved here is this cheap electric fencing : relatively new , hooked to a car battery ; even i could carry a quarter-acre paddock , set it up in 15 minutes .
cows graze one day . they move , ok ?
they graze everything down , intensive grazing .
he waits three days , and then we towed in something called the eggmobile .
the eggmobile is a very rickety contraption - it looks like a prairie schooner made out of boards - but it houses 350 chickens .
he tows this into the paddock three days later and opens the gangplank , turns them down , and 350 hens come streaming down the gangplank - clucking , gossiping as chickens will - and they make a beeline for the cow patties .
and what they 're doing is very interesting : they 're digging through the cow patties for the maggots , the grubs , the larvae of flies .
and the reason he 's waited three days is because he knows that on the fourth day or the fifth day , those larvae will hatch and he 'll have a huge fly problem .
but he waits that long to grow them as big and juicy and tasty as he can because they are the chickens ' favorite form of protein .
so the chickens do their kind of little breakdance and they 're pushing around the manure to get at the grubs , and in the process they 're spreading the manure out .
very useful second ecosystem service .
and third , while they 're in this paddock they are , of course , defecating madly and their very nitrogenous manure is fertilizing this field .
they then move out to the next one , and in the course of just a few weeks , the grass just enters this blaze of growth .
and within four or five weeks , he can do it again .
he can graze again , he can cut , he can bring in another species , like the lambs , or he can make hay for the winter .
now , i want you to just look really close up onto what 's happened there .
so , it 's a very productive system .
and what i need to tell you is that on 100 acres he gets 40,000 pounds of beef ; 30,000 pounds of pork ; 25,000 dozen eggs ; 20,000 broilers ; 1,000 turkeys ; 1,000 rabbits - an immense amount of food .
you know , you hear , " can organic feed the world ? "
well , look how much food you can produce on 100 acres if you do this kind of ...
again , give each species what it wants , let it realize its desires , its physiological distinctiveness .
put that in play .
but look at it from the point of view of the grass , now .
what happens to the grass when you do this ?
when a ruminant grazes grass , the grass is cut from this height to this height , and it immediately does something very interesting .
any one of you who gardens knows that there is something called the root-shoot ratio , and plants need to keep the root mass in some rough balance with the leaf mass to be happy .
so when they lose a lot of leaf mass , they shed roots ; they kind of cauterize them and the roots die .
and the species in the soil go to work basically chewing through those roots , decomposing them - the earthworms , the fungi , the bacteria - and the result is new soil .
this is how soil is created .
it 's created from the bottom up .
this is how the prairies were built , the relationship between bison and grasses .
and what i realized when i understood this - and if you ask joel salatin what he is , he 'll tell you he 's not a chicken farmer , he 's not a sheep farmer , he 's not a cattle rancher ; he 's a grass farmer , because grass is really the keystone species of such a system - is that , if you think about it , this completely contradicts the tragic idea of nature we hold in our heads , which is that for us to get what we want , nature is diminished .
more for us , less for nature .
here , all this food comes off this farm , and at the end of the season there is actually more soil , more fertility and more biodiversity .
it 's a remarkably hopeful thing to do .
there are a lot of farmers doing this today .
this is well beyond organic agriculture , which is still a cartesian system , more or less .
and what it tells you is that if you begin to take account of other species , take account of the soil , that even with nothing more than this perspectival idea - because there is no technology involved here except for those fences , which are so cheap they could be all over africa in no time - that we can take the food we need from the earth and actually heal the earth in the process .
this is a way to reanimate the world , and that 's what 's so exciting about this perspective .
when we really begin to feel darwin 's insights in our bones , the things we can do with nothing more than these ideas are something to be very hopeful about .
thank you very much .
i 've spent my life working on sustainability .
i set up a climate change ngo called the climate group .
i worked on forestry issues in wwf .
i worked on development and agriculture issues in the u.n. system .
about 25 years in total , and then three years ago , i found myself talking to ikea 's ceo about joining his team .
like many people here , well , i want to maximize my personal impact in the world , so i 'm going to explain why i joined the team there .
but first , let 's just take three numbers .
the first number is three : three billion people .
this is the number of people joining the global middle class by 2030 , coming out of poverty .
it 's fantastic for them and their families , but we 've got two billion people in the global middle class today , and this swells that number to five , a big challenge when we already have resource scarcity .
the second number is six : this is six degrees centigrade , what we 're heading towards in terms of global warming .
we 're not heading towards one degree or three degrees or four degrees , we 're heading toward six degrees .
and if you think about it , all of the weird weather we 've been having the last few years , much of that is due to just one degree warming , and we need co2 emissions to peak by the end of this decade globally and then come down .
it 's not inevitable , but we need to act decisively .
the third number is 12 : that 's the number of cities in the world that had a million or more people when my grandmother was born .
you can see my grandmother there .
that was in the beginning of the last century .
so just 12 cities . she was born in manchester , england , the ninth largest city in the world .
now there are 500 cities , nearly , with a million people or more in them .
and if you look at the century from 1950 to 2050 , that 's the century when we build all the world 's cities , the century that we 're in the middle of right now .
every other century was kind of practice , and this lays down a blueprint for how we live .
so think about it .
we 're building cities like never before , bringing people out of poverty like never before , and changing the climate like never before .
sustainability has gone from a nice-to-do to a must-do .
it 's about what we do right here , right now , and for the rest of our working lives .
so i 'm going to talk a little bit about what business can do and what a business like ikea can do , and we have a sustainability strategy called " people and planet positive " to help guide our business to have a positive impact on the world .
why would we not want to have a positive impact on the world as a business ?
other companies have sustainability strategies .
i 'm going to refer to some of those as well , and i 'm just going to mention a few of the commitments as illustrations that we 've got .
but first , let 's think of customers .
we know from asking people from china to the u.s.
that the vast majority of people care about sustainability after the day-to-day issues , the day-to-day issues of , how do i get my kids to school ?
can i pay the bills at the end of the month ?
then they care about big issues like climate change .
but they want it to be easy , affordable and attractive , and they expect business to help , and they 're a little bit disappointed today .
so take your mind back and think of the first sustainable products .
we had detergents that could wash your whites grayer .
we had the early energy-efficient light bulbs that took five minutes to warm up and then you were left looking a kind of sickly color .
and we had the rough , recycled toilet paper .
so every time you pulled on a t-shirt , or switched the light on , or went to the bathroom , or sometimes all three together , you were reminded sustainability was about compromise .
it was n't a great start .
today we have choices .
we can make products that are beautiful or ugly , sustainable or unsustainable , affordable or expensive , functional or useless .
so let 's make beautiful , functional , affordable , sustainable products .
let 's take the led .
the led is the next best thing to daylight .
the old-fashioned lightbulbs , the incandescent bulbs - i 'm not going to ask for a show of hands of how many of you still have them in your homes , wasting energy every time you switch them on - change them after this - or whether we have them on the stage here at ted or not - but those old incandescent light bulbs really should have been sold as heaters .
they were mis-sold for more than a hundred years .
they produced heat and a little bit of light on the side .
now we have lights that produce light and a little bit of heat on the side .
you save 85 percent of the electricity with an led that you would have done in an old incandescent .
and the best thing is , they 'll also last for more than 20 years .
so think about that .
you 'll change your smartphone seven or eight times , probably more if you 're in this audience .
you 'll change your car , if you have one , three or four times .
your kids could go to school , go to college , go away and have kids of their own , come back , bring the grandkids , you 'll have the same lightbulb saving you energy .
so leds are fantastic .
what we decided to do was not to sell leds on the side marked up high and continue to push all the old bulbs , the halogens and the cfls .
we decided , over the next two years , we will ban the halogens and the cfls ourselves .
we will go all in .
and this is what business needs to do : go all-in , go 100 percent , because then you stop investing in the old stuff , you invest in the new stuff , you lower costs , you use your supply chain and your creativity and you get the prices down so everybody can afford the best lights so they can save energy .
-lrb- applause -rrb- it 's not just about products in people 's homes .
we 've got to think about the raw materials that produce our products .
obviously there 's fantastic opportunities with recycled materials , and we can and will go zero waste .
and there 's opportunities in a circular economy .
but we 're still dependent on natural , raw materials .
let 's take cotton .
cotton 's brilliant . probably many people are wearing cotton right now .
it 's a brilliant textile in use .
it 's really dirty in production .
it uses lots of pesticides , lots of fertilizer , lots of water .
so we 've worked with others , with other businesses and ngos , on the better cotton initiative , working right back down to the farm , and there you can halve the amount of water and halve the chemical inputs , the yields increase , and 60 percent of the costs of running many of these farms with farmers with low incomes can be chemical imports .
yields increase , and you halve the input costs .
farmers are coming out of poverty . they love it .
already hundreds of thousands of farmers have been reached , and now we 've got 60 percent better cotton in our business .
again , we 're going all-in .
by 2015 , we 'll be 100 percent better cotton .
take the topic of 100 percent targets , actually .
people sometimes think that 100 percent 's going to be hard , and we 've had the conversation in the business .
actually , we found 100 percent is easier to do than 90 percent or 50 percent .
if you have a 90 percent target , everyone in the business finds a reason to be in the 10 percent .
when it 's 100 percent , it 's kind of clear , and businesspeople like clarity , because then you just get the job done .
so , wood . we know with forestry , it 's a choice .
you 've got illegal logging and deforestation still on a very large scale , or you can have fantastic , responsible forestry that we can be proud of .
it 's a simple choice , so we 've worked for many years with the forest stewardship council , with literally hundreds of other organizations , and there 's a point here about collaboration .
so hundreds of others , of ngos , of forest workers ' unions , and of businesses , have helped create the forest stewardship council , which sets standards for forestry and then checks the forestry 's good on the ground .
now together , through our supply chain , with partners , we 've managed to certify 35 million hectares of forestry .
that 's about the size of germany .
and we 've decided in the next three years , we will double the volume of certified material we put through our business .
so be decisive on these issues .
use your supply chain to drive good .
but then it comes to your operations .
some things are certain , i think .
we know we 'll use electricity in 20 or 30 years ' time .
we know the sun will be shining somewhere , and the wind will still be blowing in 20 or 30 years ' time .
so why not make our energy out of the sun and the wind ?
and why not take control of it ourselves ?
so we 're going 100 percent renewable .
by 2020 , we 'll produce more renewable energy than the energy we consume as a business .
for all of our stores , our own factories , our distribution centers , we 've installed 300,000 solar panels so far , and we 've got 14 wind farms we own and operate in six countries , and we 're not done yet .
but think of a solar panel .
a solar panel pays for itself in seven or eight years .
the electricity is free .
every time the sun comes out after that , the electricity is free .
so this is a good thing for the cfo , not just the sustainability guy .
every business can do things like this .
but then we 've got to look beyond our operations , and i think everybody would agree that now business has to take full responsibility for the impacts of your supply chain .
many businesses now , fortunately , have codes of conduct and audit their supply chains , but not every business . far from it .
and this came in ikea actually in the ' 90s .
we found there was a risk of child labor in the supply chain , and people in the business were shocked .
and it was clearly totally unacceptable , so then you have to act .
so a code of conduct was developed , and now we have 80 auditors out in the world every day making sure all our factories secure good working conditions and protect human rights and make sure there is no child labor .
but it 's not just as simple as making sure there 's no child labor .
you 've got to say that 's not enough today .
i think we 'd all agree that children are the most important people in the world and the most vulnerable .
so what can a business do today to actually use your total value chain to support a better quality of life and protect child rights ?
we 've worked with unicef and save the children on developing some new business principles with children 's rights .
increasing numbers of businesses are signing up to these , but actually in a survey , many business leaders said they thought their business had nothing to do with children .
so what we decided to do was , we will look and ask ourselves the tough questions with partners who know more than us , what can we do to go beyond our business to help improve the lives of children ?
we also have a foundation that 's committed to work through partners and help improve the lives and protect the rights of 100 million children by 2015 .
you know the phrase , you can manage what you measure ?
well , you should measure what you care about .
if you 're not measuring things , you do n't care and you do n't know .
so let 's take an example , measure the things that are important in your business .
is n't it about time that businesses were led equally by men and women ?
-lrb- applause -rrb- so we know for our 17,000 managers across ikea that 47 percent are women today , but it 's not enough , and we want to close the gap and follow it all the way through to senior management .
and we do not want to wait another hundred years .
so we 've launched a women 's open network this week in ikea , and we 'll do whatever it takes to lead the change .
so the message here is , measure what you care about and lead the change , and do n't wait a hundred years .
so we 've gone from sustainability being a nice-to-do to a must-do . it 's a must-do .
it 's still nice to do , but it 's a must-do .
and everybody can do something on this as an individual .
be a discerning consumer .
vote with your wallets .
search out the companies that are acting on this .
but also , there are other businesses already acting .
i mentioned renewable energy .
you go to google or lego , they 're going 100 percent renewable too , in the same way that we are .
on having really good sustainability strategies , there are companies like nike , patagonia , timberland , marks & spencer .
but i do n't think any of those businesses would say they 're perfect . we certainly would n't .
we 'll make mistakes going forward , but it 's about setting a clear direction , being transparent , having a dialogue with the right partners , and choosing to lead on the issues that really count .
so if you 're a business leader , if you 're not already weaving sustainability right into the heart of your business model , i 'd urge you to do so .
and together , we can help create a sustainable world , and , if we get it right , we can make sustainability affordable for the many people , not a luxury for the few .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- as a kid , i was fascinated with all things air and space .
i would watch nova on pbs .
our school would show bill nye the science guy .
when i was in elementary school , my next door neighbor , he gave me a book for my birthday .
it was an astronomy book , and i poured over that thing for hours on end , and it was a combination of all these things that inspired me to pursue space exploration as my own personal dream , and part of that dream was , i always wanted to just fly around the solar system and visit different planets and visit moons and spacecraft .
well , a number of years later , i graduated from ucla and i found myself at nasa , working for the jet propulsion laboratory , and there our team was challenged to create a 3d visualization of the solar system , and today i want to show you what we 've done so far .
now , the kicker is , everything i 'm about to do here you can do at home , because we built this for the public for you guys to use .
so what you 're looking at right now is the earth .
you can see the united states and california and san diego , and you can use the mouse or the keyboard to spin things around .
now , this is n't new . anyone who 's used google earth has seen this before , but one thing we like to say in our group is , we do the opposite of google earth .
google earth goes from this view down to your backyard .
we go from this view out to the stars .
so the earth is cool , but what we really want to show are the spacecraft , so i 'm going to bring the interface back up , and now you 're looking at a number of satellites orbiting the earth .
these are a number of our science space earth orbiters .
we have n't included military satellites and weather satellites and communication satellites and reconnaissance satellites .
if we did , it would be a complete mess , because there 's a lot of stuff out there .
and the cool thing is , we actually created 3d models for a number of these spacecraft , so if you want to visit any of these , all you need to do is double-click on them .
so i 'm going to find the international space station , double-click , and it will take us all the way down to the iss .
and now you 're riding along with the iss where it is right now .
and the other cool thing is , not only can we move the camera around , we can also control time , so i can slide this jog dial here to shuttle time forward , and now we can see what a sunset on the iss would look like , and they get one every 90 minutes . -lrb- laughter -rrb- all right , so what about the rest of it ?
well , i can click on this home button over here , and that will take us up to the inner solar system , and now we 're looking at the rest of the solar system .
you can see , there 's saturn , there 's jupiter , and while we 're here , i want to point out something .
it 's actually pretty busy .
here we have the mars science laboratory on its way to mars , just launched last weekend .
here we have juno on its cruise to jupiter , there .
we have dawn orbiting vesta , and we have over here new horizons on a straight shot to pluto .
and i mention this because there 's this strange public perception that nasa 's dead , that the space shuttles stopped flying and all of the sudden there 's no more spacecraft out there .
well , a lot of what nasa does is robotic exploration , and we have a lot of spacecraft out there .
granted , we 're not sending humans up at the moment , well at least with our own launch vehicles , but nasa is far from dead , and one of the reasons why we write a program like this is so that people realize that there 's so many other things that we 're doing .
anyway , while we 're here , again , if you want to visit anything , all you need to do is double-click .
so i 'm just going to double-click on vesta , and here we have dawn orbiting vesta , and this is happening right now .
i 'm going to double-click on uranus , and we can see uranus rotating on its side along with its moons .
you can see how it 's tilted at about 89 degrees .
and just being able to visit different places and go through different times , we have data from 1950 to 2050 .
granted , we do n't have everything in between , because some of the data is hard to get .
just being able to visit places in different times , you can explore this for hours , literally hours on end , but i want to show you one thing in particular , so i 'm going to open up the destination tab , spacecraft outer planet missions , voyager 1 , and i 'm going to bring up the titan flyby .
so now we 've gone back in time .
we 're now riding along with voyager 1 .
the date here is november 11 , 1980 .
now , there 's a funny thing going on here .
it does n't look like anything 's going on .
it looks like i 've paused the program .
it 's actually running at real rate right now , one second per second , and in fact , voyager 1 here is flying by titan at i think it 's 38,000 miles per hour .
it only looks like nothing 's moving because , well , saturn here is 700,000 miles away , and titan here is 4,000 to 5,000 miles away .
it 's just the vastness of space makes it look like nothing 's happening .
but to make it more interesting , i 'm going to speed up time , and we can watch as voyager 1 flies by titan , which is a hazy moon of saturn .
it actually has a very thick atmosphere .
and i 'm going to recenter the camera on saturn , here .
i 'm going to pull out , and i want to show you voyager 1 as it flies by saturn .
there 's a point to be made here .
with a 3d visualization like this , we can not only just say voyager 1 flew by saturn .
there 's a whole story to tell here .
and even better , because it 's an interactive application , you can tell the story for yourself .
if you want to pause it , you can pause it .
if you want to keep going , if you want to change the camera angle , you can do that , and because of that , i can show you that voyager 1 does n't just fly by saturn .
it actually flies underneath saturn .
now , what happens is , as it flies underneath saturn , saturn grabs it gravitationally and flings it up and out of the solar system , so if i just keep letting this go , you can see voyager 1 fly up like that .
and , in fact , i 'm going to go back to the solar system .
i 'm going to go back to today , now , and i want to show you where voyager 1 is .
right there , above , way above the solar system , way beyond our solar system .
and here 's the thing . now you know how it got there .
now you know why , and to me , that 's the point of this program .
you can manipulate it yourself .
you can fly around yourself and you can learn for yourself .
you know , the theme today is " the world in your grasp . "
well , we 're trying to give you the solar system in your grasp - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - and we hope once it 's there , you 'll be able to learn for yourself what we 've done out there , and what we 're about to do .
and my personal dream is for kids to take this and explore and see the wonders out there and be inspired , as i was as a kid , to pursue stem education and to pursue a dream in space exploration .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- we live in in a remarkable time , the age of genomics .
your genome is the entire sequence of your dna .
your sequence and mine are slightly different .
that 's why we look different .
i 've got brown eyes ; you might have blue or gray .
but it 's not just skin-deep .
the headlines tell us that genes can give us scary diseases , maybe even shape our personality , or give us mental disorders .
our genes seem to have awesome power over our destinies .
and yet , i would like to think that i am more than my genes .
what do you guys think ?
are you more than your genes ?
-lrb- audience : yes . -rrb- yes ?
i think some people agree with me .
i think we should make a statement .
i think we should say it all together .
all right : " i 'm more than my genes " - all together .
everybody : i am more than my genes .
-lrb- cheering -rrb- sebastian seung : what am i ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i am my connectome .
now , since you guys are really great , maybe you can humor me and say this all together too .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- right . all together now .
everybody : i am my connectome .
ss : that sounded great .
you know , you guys are so great , you do n't even know what a connectome is , and you 're willing to play along with me .
i could just go home now .
well , so far only one connectome is known , that of this tiny worm .
its modest nervous system consists of just 300 neurons .
and in the 1970s and ' 80s , a team of scientists mapped all 7,000 connections between the neurons .
in this diagram , every node is a neuron , and every line is a connection .
this is the connectome of the worm c. elegans .
your connectome is far more complex than this because your brain contains 100 billion neurons and 10,000 times as many connections .
there 's a diagram like this for your brain , but there 's no way it would fit on this slide .
your connectome contains one million times more connections than your genome has letters .
that 's a lot of information .
what 's in that information ?
we do n't know for sure , but there are theories .
since the 19th century , neuroscientists have speculated that maybe your memories - the information that makes you , you - maybe your memories are stored in the connections between your brain 's neurons .
and perhaps other aspects of your personal identity - maybe your personality and your intellect - maybe they 're also encoded in the connections between your neurons .
and so now you can see why i proposed this hypothesis : i am my connectome .
i did n't ask you to chant it because it 's true ; i just want you to remember it .
and in fact , we do n't know if this hypothesis is correct , because we have never had technologies powerful enough to test it .
finding that worm connectome took over a dozen years of tedious labor .
and to find the connectomes of brains more like our own , we need more sophisticated technologies , that are automated , that will speed up the process of finding connectomes .
and in the next few minutes , i 'll tell you about some of these technologies , which are currently under development in my lab and the labs of my collaborators .
now you 've probably seen pictures of neurons before .
you can recognize them instantly by their fantastic shapes .
they extend long and delicate branches , and in short , they look like trees .
but this is just a single neuron .
in order to find connectomes , we have to see all the neurons at the same time .
so let 's meet bobby kasthuri , who works in the laboratory of jeff lichtman at harvard university .
bobby is holding fantastically thin slices of a mouse brain .
and we 're zooming in by a factor of 100,000 times to obtain the resolution , so that we can see the branches of neurons all at the same time .
except , you still may not really recognize them , and that 's because we have to work in three dimensions .
if we take many images of many slices of the brain and stack them up , we get a three-dimensional image .
and still , you may not see the branches .
so we start at the top , and we color in the cross-section of one branch in red , and we do that for the next slice and for the next slice .
and we keep on doing that , slice after slice .
if we continue through the entire stack , we can reconstruct the three-dimensional shape of a small fragment of a branch of a neuron .
and we can do that for another neuron in green .
and you can see that the green neuron touches the red neuron at two locations , and these are what are called synapses .
let 's zoom in on one synapse , and keep your eyes on the interior of the green neuron .
you should see small circles - these are called vesicles .
they contain a molecule know as a neurotransmitter .
and so when the green neuron wants to communicate , it wants to send a message to the red neuron , it spits out neurotransmitter .
at the synapse , the two neurons are said to be connected like two friends talking on the telephone .
so you see how to find a synapse .
how can we find an entire connectome ?
well , we take this three-dimensional stack of images and treat it as a gigantic three-dimensional coloring book .
we color every neuron in , in a different color , and then we look through all of the images , find the synapses and note the colors of the two neurons involved in each synapse .
if we can do that throughout all the images , we could find a connectome .
now , at this point , you 've learned the basics of neurons and synapses .
and so i think we 're ready to tackle one of the most important questions in neuroscience : how are the brains of men and women different ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- according to this self-help book , guys brains are like waffles ; they keep their lives compartmentalized in boxes .
girls ' brains are like spaghetti ; everything in their life is connected to everything else .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you guys are laughing , but you know , this book changed my life .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but seriously , what 's wrong with this ?
you already know enough to tell me - what 's wrong with this statement ?
it does n't matter whether you 're a guy or girl , everyone 's brains are like spaghetti .
or maybe really , really fine capellini with branches .
just as one strand of spaghetti contacts many other strands on your plate , one neuron touches many other neurons through their entangled branches .
one neuron can be connected to so many other neurons , because there can be synapses at these points of contact .
by now , you might have sort of lost perspective on how large this cube of brain tissue actually is .
and so let 's do a series of comparisons to show you .
i assure you , this is very tiny . it 's just six microns on a side .
so , here 's how it stacks up against an entire neuron .
and you can tell that , really , only the smallest fragments of branches are contained inside this cube .
and a neuron , well , that 's smaller than brain .
and that 's just a mouse brain - it 's a lot smaller than a human brain .
so when show my friends this , sometimes they 've told me , " you know , sebastian , you should just give up .
neuroscience is hopeless . "
because if you look at a brain with your naked eye , you do n't really see how complex it is , but when you use a microscope , finally the hidden complexity is revealed .
in the 17th century , the mathematician and philosopher , blaise pascal , wrote of his dread of the infinite , his feeling of insignificance at contemplating the vast reaches of outer space .
and , as a scientist , i 'm not supposed to talk about my feelings - too much information , professor .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but may i ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- i feel curiosity , and i feel wonder , but at times i have also felt despair .
why did i choose to study this organ that is so awesome in its complexity that it might well be infinite ?
it 's absurd .
how could we even dare to think that we might ever understand this ?
and yet , i persist in this quixotic endeavor .
and indeed , these days i harbor new hopes .
someday , a fleet of microscopes will capture every neuron and every synapse in a vast database of images .
and some day , artificially intelligent supercomputers will analyze the images without human assistance to summarize them in a connectome .
i do not know , but i hope that i will live to see that day , because finding an entire human connectome is one of the greatest technological challenges of all time .
it will take the work of generations to succeed .
at the present time , my collaborators and i , what we 're aiming for is much more modest - just to find partial connectomes of tiny chunks of mouse and human brain .
but even that will be enough for the first tests of this hypothesis that i am my connectome .
for now , let me try to convince you of the plausibility of this hypothesis , that it 's actually worth taking seriously .
as you grow during childhood and age during adulthood , your personal identity changes slowly .
likewise , every connectome changes over time .
what kinds of changes happen ?
well , neurons , like trees , can grow new branches , and they can lose old ones .
synapses can be created , and they can be eliminated .
and synapses can grow larger , and they can grow smaller .
second question : what causes these changes ?
well , it 's true .
to some extent , they are programmed by your genes .
but that 's not the whole story , because there are signals , electrical signals , that travel along the branches of neurons and chemical signals that jump across from branch to branch .
these signals are called neural activity .
and there 's a lot of evidence that neural activity is encoding our thoughts , feelings and perceptions , our mental experiences .
and there 's a lot of evidence that neural activity can cause your connections to change .
and if you put those two facts together , it means that your experiences can change your connectome .
and that 's why every connectome is unique , even those of genetically identical twins .
the connectome is where nature meets nurture .
and it might true that just the mere act of thinking can change your connectome - an idea that you may find empowering .
what 's in this picture ?
a cool and refreshing stream of water , you say .
what else is in this picture ?
do not forget that groove in the earth called the stream bed .
without it , the water would not know in which direction to flow .
and with the stream , i would like to propose a metaphor for the relationship between neural activity and connectivity .
neural activity is constantly changing .
it 's like the water of the stream ; it never sits still .
the connections of the brain 's neural network determines the pathways along which neural activity flows .
and so the connectome is like bed of the stream ; but the metaphor is richer than that , because it 's true that the stream bed guides the flow of the water , but over long timescales , the water also reshapes the bed of the stream .
and as i told you just now , neural activity can change the connectome .
and if you 'll allow me to ascend to metaphorical heights , i will remind you that neural activity is the physical basis - or so neuroscientists think - of thoughts , feelings and perceptions .
and so we might even speak of the stream of consciousness .
neural activity is its water , and the connectome is its bed .
so let 's return from the heights of metaphor and return to science .
suppose our technologies for finding connectomes actually work .
how will we go about testing the hypothesis " i am my connectome ? "
well , i propose a direct test .
let us attempt to read out memories from connectomes .
consider the memory of long temporal sequences of movements , like a pianist playing a beethoven sonata .
according to a theory that dates back to the 19th century , such memories are stored as chains of synaptic connections inside your brain .
because , if the first neurons in the chain are activated , through their synapses they send messages to the second neurons , which are activated , and so on down the line , like a chain of falling dominoes .
and this sequence of neural activation is hypothesized to be the neural basis of those sequence of movements .
so one way of trying to test the theory is to look for such chains inside connectomes .
but it wo n't be easy , because they 're not going to look like this .
they 're going to be scrambled up .
so we 'll have to use our computers to try to unscramble the chain .
and if we can do that , the sequence of the neurons we recover from that unscrambling will be a prediction of the pattern of neural activity that is replayed in the brain during memory recall .
and if that were successful , that would be the first example of reading a memory from a connectome .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- what a mess - have you ever tried to wire up a system as complex as this ?
i hope not .
but if you have , you know it 's very easy to make a mistake .
the branches of neurons are like the wires of the brain .
can anyone guess : what 's the total length of wires in your brain ?
i 'll give you a hint . it 's a big number .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i estimate , millions of miles , all packed in your skull .
and if you appreciate that number , you can easily see there is huge potential for mis-wiring of the brain .
and indeed , the popular press loves headlines like , " anorexic brains are wired differently , " or " autistic brains are wired differently . "
these are plausible claims , but in truth , we ca n't see the brain 's wiring clearly enough to tell if these are really true .
and so the technologies for seeing connectomes will allow us to finally read mis-wiring of the brain , to see mental disorders in connectomes .
sometimes the best way to test a hypothesis is to consider its most extreme implication .
philosophers know this game very well .
if you believe that i am my connectome , i think you must also accept the idea that death is the destruction of your connectome .
i mention this because there are prophets today who claim that technology will fundamentally alter the human condition and perhaps even transform the human species .
one of their most cherished dreams is to cheat death by that practice known as cryonics .
if you pay 100,000 dollars , you can arrange to have your body frozen after death and stored in liquid nitrogen in one of these tanks in an arizona warehouse , awaiting a future civilization that is advanced to resurrect you .
should we ridicule the modern seekers of immortality , calling them fools ?
or will they someday chuckle over our graves ?
i do n't know - i prefer to test their beliefs , scientifically .
i propose that we attempt to find a connectome of a frozen brain .
we know that damage to the brain occurs after death and during freezing .
the question is : has that damage erased the connectome ?
if it has , there is no way that any future civilization will be able to recover the memories of these frozen brains .
resurrection might succeed for the body , but not for the mind .
on the other hand , if the connectome is still intact , we can not ridicule the claims of cryonics so easily .
i 've described a quest that begins in the world of the very small , and propels us to the world of the far future .
connectomes will mark a turning point in human history .
as we evolved from our ape-like ancestors on the african savanna , what distinguished us was our larger brains .
we have used our brains to fashion ever more amazing technologies .
eventually , these technologies will become so powerful that we will use them to know ourselves by deconstructing and reconstructing our own brains .
i believe that this voyage of self-discovery is not just for scientists , but for all of us .
and i 'm grateful for the opportunity to share this voyage with you today .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- clearly , we 're living in a moment of crisis .
arguably the financial markets have failed us and the aid system is failing us , and yet i stand firmly with the optimists who believe that there has probably never been a more exciting moment to be alive .
because of some of technologies we 've been talking about .
because of the resources , the skills , and certainly the surge of talent we 're seeing all around the world , with the mindset to create change .
and we 've got a president who sees himself as a global citizen , who recognizes that no longer is there a single superpower , but that we 've got to engage in a different way with the world .
and by definition , every one of you who is in this room must consider yourself a global soul , a global citizen .
you work on the front lines . and you 've seen the best and the worst that human beings can do for one another and to one another .
and no matter what country you live or work in , you 've also seen the extraordinary things that individuals are capable of , even in their most ordinariness .
today there is a raging debate as to how best we lift people out of poverty , how best we release their energies .
on the one hand , we have people that say the aid system is so broken we need to throw it out .
and on the other we have people who say the problem is that we need more aid .
and what i want to talk about is something that compliments both systems .
we call it patient capital .
the critics point to the 500 billion dollars spent in africa since 1970 and say , and what do we have but environmental degradation and incredible levels of poverty , rampant corruption ?
they use mobutu as metaphor .
and their policy prescription is to make government more accountable , focus on the capital markets , invest , do n't give anything away .
on the other side , as i said , there are those who say the problem is that we need more money .
that when it comes to the rich , we 'll bail out and we 'll hand a lot of aid , but when it comes to our poor brethren , we want little to do with it .
they point to the successes of aid : the eradication of smallpox , and the distribution of tens of millions of malaria bed nets and antiretrovirals .
both sides are right .
and the problem is that neither side is listening to the other .
even more problematic , they 're not listening to poor people themselves .
after 25 years of working on issues of poverty and innovation , it 's true that there are probably no more market-oriented individuals on the planet than low-income people .
they must navigate markets daily , making micro-decisions , dozens and dozens , to move their way through society , and yet if a single catastrophic health problem impacts their family , they could be put back into poverty , sometimes for generations .
and so we need both the market and we need aid .
patient capital works between , and tries to take the best of both .
it 's money that 's invested in entrepreneurs who know their communities and are building solutions to healthcare , water , housing , alternative energy , thinking of low income people not as passive recipients of charity , but as individual customers , consumers , clients , people who want to make decisions in their own lives .
patient capital requires that we have incredible tolerance for risk , a long time horizon in terms of allowing those entrepreneurs time to experiment , to use the market as the best listening device that we have , and the expectation of below-market returns , but outsized social impact .
it recognizes that the market has its limitation , and so patient capital also works with smart subsidy to extend the benefits of a global economy to include all people .
now , entrepreneurs need patient capital for three reasons .
first , they tend to work in markets where people make one , two , three dollars a day and they are making all of their decisions within that income level .
second , the geographies in which they work have terrible infrastructure - no roads to speak of , sporadic electricity and high levels of corruption .
third , they are often creating markets .
even if you 're bringing clean water for the first time into rural villages , it is something new .
and so many low-income people have seen so many failed promises broken and seen so many quacks and sporadic medicines offered to them that building trust takes a lot of time , takes a lot of patience .
it also requires being connected to a lot of management assistance .
not only to build the systems , the business models that allow us to reach low income people in a sustainable way , but to connect those business to other markets , to governments , to corporations - real partnerships if we want to get to scale .
i want to share one story about an innovation called drip irrigation .
in 2002 i met this incredible entrepreneur named amitabha sadangi from india , who 'd been working for 20 years with some of the poorest farmers on the planet .
and he was expressing his frustration that the aid market had bypassed low-income farmers altogether , despite the fact that 200 million farmers alone in india make under a dollar a day .
they were creating subsidies either for large farms , or they were giving inputs to the farmers that they thought they should use , rather than that the farmers wanted to use .
at the same time amitabha was obsessed with this drip irrigation technology that had been invented in israel .
it was a way of bringing small amounts of water directly to the stalk of the plant .
and it could transform swaths of desert land into fields of emerald green .
but the market also had bypassed low income farmers , because these systems were both too expensive , and they were constructed for fields that were too large .
the average small village farmer works on two acres or less .
and so , amitabha decided that he would take that innovation and he would redesign it from the perspective of the poor farmers themselves , because he spent so many years listening to what they needed not what he thought that they should have .
and he used three fundamental principles .
the first one was miniaturization .
the drip irrigation system had to be small enough that a farmer only had to risk a quarter acre , even if he had two , because it was too frightening , given all that he had at stake .
second , it had to be extremely affordable .
in other words , that risk on the quarter acre needed to be repaid in a single harvest , or else they would n't take the risk .
and third , it had to be what amitabha calls infinitely expandable .
what i mean is with the profits from the first quarter acre , the farmers could buy a second and a third and a fourth .
as of today , ide india , amitabha 's organization , has sold over 300,000 farmers these systems and has seen their yields and incomes double or triple on average , but this did n't happen overnight .
in fact , when you go back to the beginning , there were no private investors who would be willing to take a risk on building a new technology for a market class that made under a dollar a day , that were known to be some of the most risk-averse people on the planet and that were working in one of the riskiest sectors , agriculture .
and so we needed grants . and he used significant grants to research , to experiment , to fail , to innovate and try again .
and when he had a prototype and had a better understanding of how to market to farmers , that 's when patient capital could come in .
and we helped him build a company , for profit , that would build on ide 's knowledge , and start looking at sales and exports , and be able to tap into other kinds of capital .
secondarily , we wanted to see if we could export this drip irrigation and bring it into other countries .
and so we met dr. sono khangharani in pakistan .
and while , again , you needed patience to move a technology for the poor in india into pakistan , just to get the permits , over time we were able to start a company with dr. sono , who runs a large community development organization in the thar desert , which is one of the remote and poorest areas of the country .
and though that company has just started , our assumption is that there too we 'll see the impact on millions .
but drip irrigation is n't the only innovation .
we 're starting to see these happening all around the world .
in arusha , tanzania , a to z textile manufacturing has worked in partnership with us , with unicef , with the global fund , to create a factory that now employs 7,000 people , mostly women .
and they produce 20 million lifesaving bednets for africans around the world .
lifespring hospital is a joint venture between acumen and the government of india to bring quality , affordable maternal health care to low-income women , and it 's been so successful that it 's currently building a new hospital every 35 days .
and 1298 ambulances decided that it was going to reinvent a completely broken industry , building an ambulance service in bombay that would use the technology of google earth , a sliding scale pricing system so that all people could have access , and a severe and public decision not to engage in any form of corruption .
so that in the terrorist attacks of november they were the first responder , and are now beginning to scale , because of partnership .
they 've just won four government contracts to build off their 100 ambulances , and are one of the largest and most effective ambulance companies in india .
this idea of scale is critical .
because we 're starting to see these enterprises reach hundreds of thousands of people . all of the ones i discussed have reached at least a quarter million people .
but that 's obviously not enough .
and it 's where the idea of partnership becomes so important .
whether it 's by finding those innovations that can access the capital markets , government itself , or partner with major corporations , there is unbelievable opportunity for innovation .
president obama understands that .
he recently authorized the creation of a social innovation fund to focus on what works in this country , and look at how we can scale it .
and i would submit that it 's time to consider a global innovation fund that would find these entrepreneurs around the world who really have innovations , not only for their country , but ones that we can use in the developed world as well .
invest financial assistance , but also management assistance .
and then measure the returns , both from a financial perspective and from a social impact perspective .
when we think about new approaches to aid , it 's impossible not to talk about pakistan .
we 've had a rocky relationship with that country and , in all fairness , the united states has not always been a very reliable partner .
but again i would say that this is our moment for extraordinary things to happen .
and if we take that notion of a global innovation fund , we could use this time to invest not directly in government , though we would have government 's blessing , nor in international experts , but in the many existing entrepreneurs and civil society leaders who already are building wonderful innovations that are reaching people all across the country .
people like rashani zafar , who created one of the largest microfinance banks in the country , and is a real role model for women inside and outside the country .
and tasneem siddiqui , who developed a way called incremental housing , where he has moved 40,000 slum dwellers into safe , affordable community housing .
educational initiatives like dil and the citizen foundation that are building schools across the country .
it 's not hyperbole to say that these civil society institutions and these social entrepreneurs are building real alternatives to the taliban .
i 've invested in pakistan for over seven years now , and those of you who 've also worked there can attest that pakistanis are an incredibly hard working population , and there is a fierce upward mobility in their very nature .
president kennedy said that those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable .
i would say that the converse is true .
that these social leaders who really are looking at innovation and extending opportunity to the 70 percent of pakistanis who make less than two dollars a day , provide real pathways to hope .
and as we think about how we construct aid for pakistan , while we need to strengthen the judiciary , build greater stability , we also need to think about lifting those leaders who can be role models for the rest of the world .
on one of my last visits to pakistan , i asked dr. sono if he would take me to see some of the drip irrigation in the thar desert .
and we left karachi one morning before dawn .
it was about 115 degrees .
and we drove for eight hours along this moonscape-like landscape with very little color , lots of heat , very little discussion , because we were exhausted .
and finally , at the end of the journey , i could see this thin little yellow line across the horizon .
and as we got closer , its significance became apparent .
that there in the desert was a field of sunflowers growing seven feet tall .
because one of the poorest farmers on earth had gotten access to a technology that had allowed him to change his own life .
his name was raja , and he had kind , twinkly hazel eyes and warm expressive hands that reminded me of my father .
and he said it was the first dry season in his entire life that he had n't taken his 12 children and 50 grandchildren on a two day journey across the desert to work as day laborers at a commercial farm for about 50 cents a day .
because he was building these crops .
and with the money he earned he could stay this year .
and for the first time ever in three generations , his children would go to school .
we asked him if he would send his daughters as well as his sons .
and he said , " of course i will .
because i do n't want them discriminated against anymore . "
when we think about solutions to poverty , we can not deny individuals their fundamental dignity .
because at the end of the day , dignity is more important to the human spirit than wealth .
and what 's exciting is to see so many entrepreneurs across sectors who are building innovations that recognize that what people want is freedom and choice and opportunity .
because that is where dignity really starts .
martin luther king said that love without power is anemic and sentimental , and that power without love is reckless and abusive .
our generation has seen both approaches tried , and often fail .
but i think our generation also might be the first to have the courage to embrace both love and power .
for that is what we 'll need , as we move forward to dream and imagine what it will really take to build a global economy that includes all of us , and to finally extend that fundamental proposition that all men are created equal to every human being on the planet .
the time for us to begin innovating and looking for new solutions , a cross sector , is now .
i can only talk from my own experience , but in eight years of running acumen fund , i 've seen the power of patient capital .
not only to inspire innovation and risk taking , but to truly build systems that have created more than 25,000 jobs and delivered tens of millions of services and products to some of the poorest people on the planet .
i know it works .
but i know that many other kinds of innovation also work .
and so i urge you , in whatever sector you work , in whatever job you do , to start thinking about how we might build solutions that start from the perspective of those we 're trying to help .
rather than what we think that they might need .
it will take embracing the world with both arms .
and it will take living with the spirit of generosity and accountability , with a sense of integrity and perseverance .
and yet these are the very qualities for which men and women have been honored throughout the generations .
and there is so much good that we can do .
just think of all those sunflowers in the desert .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- many of you could ask the question , you know , why is a flying car , or maybe more accurately , a roadable aircraft , possible at this time ?
a number of years ago , mr. ford predicted that flying cars of some form would be available .
now , 60 years later , i 'm here to tell you why it 's possible .
when i was about five years old , not very much - about a year after mr. ford made his predictions , i was living in a rural part of canada , on the side of a mountain in a very isolated area .
getting to school , for a kid that was actually pretty short for his age , through the canadian winter , was not a pleasant experience .
it was a trying and scary thing for a young kid to be going through .
at the end of my first year in school , in the summer of that year , i discovered a couple hummingbirds that were caught in a shed near my home .
they 'd worn themselves out , beating themselves against the window , i took them outside and as i let them go , that split second , even though they were very tired , that second i let them go they hovered for a second , then zipped off into the distance .
i thought , what a great way to get to school .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- for a kid at that age , this was like infinite speed , disappearing , and i was very inspired by that .
and so the next - over the next six decades , believe it or not , i 've built a number of aircraft , with the goal of creating something that could do for you , or me , what the hummingbird does , and give you that flexibility .
i 've called this vehicle , generically , a volantor , after the latin word " volant , " meaning , to fly in a light , nimble manner .
volantor-like helicopter , perhaps .
the faa , the controlling body above all , calls it a " powered lift aircraft . "
and they 've actually issued a pilot 's license - a powerlift pilot 's license - for this type of aircraft .
it 's closer than you think . it 's kind of remarkable when you consider that there are no operational powered lift aircraft .
so for once , perhaps , the government is ahead of itself .
the press calls my particular volantor a " skycar . "
this is a little bit earlier version of it , that 's why it 's given the x designation , but it 's a four-passenger aircraft that could take off vertically , like a helicopter - therefore it does n't need an airfield .
on the ground , it 's powered electrically .
it 's actually classified as a motorcycle because of the three wheels , which is a great asset because it allows you , theoretically , to use this on the highways in most states , and actually in all cities .
so that 's an asset because if you 've got to deal with the crash protection issues of the automobile , forget it - you 're never going to fly it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- one could say that a helicopter does pretty much what the hummingbird does , and gets around in much the same way , and it 's true , but a helicopter is a very complex device .
it 's expensive - so expensive that very few people could own or use it .
it 's often been described because of its fragile nature and its complexity , as a series of parts - a large number of parts - flying in formation .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- another difference , and i have to describe this , because it 's very personal , another great difference between the helicopter and the volantor - in my case the skycar volantor - is the experience that i 've had in flying both of those .
in a helicopter you feel - and it 's still a remarkable sensation - you feel like you 're being hauled up from above by a vibrating crane .
when you get in the skycar - and i can tell you , there 's only one other person that 's flown it , but he had the same sensation - you really feel like you 're being lifted up by a magic carpet , without any vibration whatsoever . the sensation is unbelievable .
and it 's been a great motivator .
i only get to fly this vehicle occasionally , and only when i can persuade my stockholders to let me do so , but it 's still one of those wonderful experiences that reward you for all that time .
what we really need is something to replace the automobile for those 50-plus mile trips .
very few people realize that 50 mile-plus trips make up 85 percent of the miles traveled in america .
if we can get rid of that , then the highways will now be useful to you , as contrasted by what 's happening in many parts of the world today .
on this next slide , is an interesting history of what we really have seen in infrastructure , because whether i give you a perfect skycar , the perfect vehicle for use , it 's going to have very little value to you unless you 've got a system to use it in .
i 'm sure any of you have asked the question , yeah , are there great things up there - what am i going to do , get up there ?
it 's bad enough on a highway , what 's it going to be like to be in the air ?
this world that you 're going to be talking about tomorrow is going to be completely integrated . you 're not going to be a pilot , you 're going to be a passenger .
and it 's the infrastructure that really determines whether this process goes forward .
i can tell you , technically we can build skycars - my god , we went to the moon !
the technology there was much more difficult than what i 'm dealing with here .
but we have to have these priority changes , we have to have infrastructure to go with this .
historically you see that we got around 200 years ago by canals , and as that system disappeared , were replaced by railroads .
as that disappeared we came in with highways .
but if you look at that top corner - the highway system - you see where we are today . highways are no longer being built , and that 's a fact . you wo n't see any additional highways in the next 10 years .
however , the next 10 years , if like the last 10 years , we 're going to see 30 percent more traffic .
and where is that going to lead you to ?
so the issue then , i 've often asked , is when is it going to happen ?
when are we going to be able to have these vehicles ?
and of course , if you ask me , i 'm going to give you a really optimistic view .
after all , i 've been spending 60 years here believing it 's going to happen tomorrow .
so , i 'm not going to quote myself on this .
i 'd prefer to quote someone else , who testified with me before congress , and in his position as head of nasa put forward this particular vision of the future of this type of aircraft .
now i would argue , actually , if you look at the fact that on the highways today , you 're only averaging about 30 miles per hour - on average , according to the dot - the skycar travels at over 300 miles an hour , up to 25,000 feet .
and so , in effect , you could see perhaps a tenfold increase in the ability to get around as far as speed is concerned .
unbeknownst to many of you , the highway in the sky that i 'm talking about here has been under construction for 10 years .
it makes use of the gps - you 're familiar with gps in your automobile , but you may not be familiar with the fact that there 's a gps u.s. , there 's a russian gps , and there 's a new gps system going to europe , called galileo .
with those three systems , you have what is always necessary - a level of redundancy that says , if one system fails , you 'll still have a way because if you 're in this world , where computers are controlling what you 're doing , it 's going to be very critical that something ca n't fail on you .
how would a trip in a skycar work ?
well , you ca n't right now take off from your home because it 's too noisy .
i mean to be able to take off from your home , you 'd have to be extremely quiet .
but it 's still fairly quiet .
you 'd motor , electrically , to a vertiport , which may be a few blocks , maybe even a few miles away .
this is clearly , as i said earlier , a roadable aircraft , and you 're not going to spend that much time on the road .
after all , if you can fly like that , why are you going to drive around on a highway ?
go to a local vertiport , plug in your destination , delivered almost like a passenger .
you can play computer games , you can sleep , you can read on the way .
this is the world - there wo n't be you as a pilot . and i know the pilots in the audience are n't going to like that - and i 've had a lot of bad feedback from people who want to be up there , flying around and experiencing that .
and of course , i suppose like recreational parks you can still do that .
but the vehicle itself is going to be a very , very controlled environment .
or it 's going to have no use to you as a person who might use such a system .
we flew the first vehicle for the international press in 1965 , when i really got it started .
i was a professor at the u.c. davis system , and i got a lot of excitement around this , and i was able to fund the initiation of the program back in that time .
and then through the various years we invented various vehicles .
actually the critical point was in 1989 , when we demonstrated the stability of this vehicle - how completely stable it was in all circumstances , which is of course very critical .
still not a practical vehicle during all of this , but moving in the right direction , we believe .
finally , in the early part of - or actually the middle of 2002 , we flew the 400 - m400 , which was the four-passenger vehicle .
in this case here , we 're flying it remotely , as we always did at the beginning .
and we had very small power plants in it at this time .
we are now installing larger powerplants , which will make it possible for me to get back on board .
a vertical-takeoff aircraft is not the safest vehicle during the test flight program .
there 's an old adage that applied for the years between 1950s and 1970s , when every aeronautical company was working on vertical-takeoff aircraft .
a vertical-takeoff aircraft needs an artificial stabilization system - that 's essential .
at least for the hover , and the low-speed flight .
if that single-stability system , that brain that flies that aircraft , fails , or if the engine fails , that vehicle crashes . there is no option to that .
and the adage that i 'm referring to , that applied at that time , was that nothing comes down faster than a vtol aircraft upside down .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's a macabre comment because we lost a lot of pilots .
in fact , the aircraft companies gave up on vertical-takeoff aircraft more or less for a number of years .
and there 's really only one operational aircraft in the world today that 's a vertical-takeoff aircraft - as distinct from a helicopter - and that 's the hawker harrier jump jet .
a vertical-takeoff aircraft , like the hummingbird , has a very high metabolism , which means it requires a lot of energy .
getting that energy is very , very difficult . it all comes down to that power plant - how to get a large amount of power in a small package .
fortunately , dr. felix wankel invented the rotary engine .
a very unique engine - it 's round , it 's small , it 's vibration-free .
it fits exactly where we need to fit it , right in the center of the hubs of the ducts in the system - very critical . in fact that engine - for those who are into the automobile - know that it recently is applied to the rx8 - the mazda .
and that sportscar won sports car of the year .
wonderful engine .
in that application , it generates one horsepower per pound , which is twice as good as your car engine today , but only half of what we need .
my company has spent 35 years and many millions of dollars taking that rotary engine , which was invented in the late ' 50s , and getting it to the point that we get over two horsepower per pound , reliably , and critical .
we actually get 175 horsepower into one cubic foot .
we have eight engines in this vehicle .
we have four computers . we have two parachutes .
redundancy is the critical issue here .
if you want to stay alive you 've got to have backups .
and we have actually flown this vehicle and lost an engine , and continued to hover .
the computers back up each other . there 's a voting system - if one computer is not agreeing with the other three , it 's kicked out of the system .
and then you have three - you still have the triple redundancy .
if one of those fails , you still have a second chance .
if you stick around , then good luck .
there wo n't be a third chance .
the parachutes are there - hopefully , more for psychological than real reasons , but they will be an ultimate backup if it comes to that .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'd like to show you an animation in this next one , which is one element of the skycar 's use , but it 's one that demonstrates how it could be used .
you could think of it personally in your own terms , video : skycar dispatched , launch rescue vehicle for san francisco .
paul moller : i believe that personal transportation in something like the skycar , probably in another volantor form as well , will be a significant part of our lives , as dr. goldin says , within the next 10 years .
and it 's going to change the demographics in a very significant way .
if you can live 75 miles from san francisco and get there in 15 minutes , you 're going to sell your 700,000-dollar apartment , buy an upscale home on the side of a mountain , buy a skycar , which i think would be priced at that time perhaps in the area of 100,000 dollars , put money in the bank ...
that 's a very significant incentive for getting out of san francisco .
but you better be the first one out of town as the real estate values go to hell .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- developing the skycar has been a real challenge .
obviously i 'm dependent on a lot of other people believing in what i 'm doing - both financially and in technical help .
and that has - you run into situations where you have this great acceptance of what you 're doing , i characterized this emerging technology in an aphorism , which really talks about what i 've experienced , and i 'm sure what other people may have experienced in emerging technologies .
there 's an interesting poll that came out recently under nas - i think it 's msnbc - in which they asked the question , " are you in the market for a volantor ? "
twenty-three percent said , " yes , as soon as possible . "
forty-seven percent - yes , as soon as they could - price could come down .
twenty-three percent said , " as soon as it 's proven safe . "
only seven percent said that they would n't consider buying a skycar .
i 'm encouraged by that . at least it makes me feel like , to some extent , it is becoming self-evident .
that we need an alternative to the automobile , at least for those 50-mile trips and more , so that the highways become usable in today 's world .
thank you .
so , last month , the encyclopaedia britannica announced that it is going out of print after 244 years , which made me nostalgic , because i remember playing a game with the colossal encyclopedia set in my hometown library back when i was a kid , maybe 12 years old .
and i wondered if i could update that game , not just for modern methods , but for the modern me .
so i tried .
i went to an online encyclopedia , wikipedia , and i entered the term " earth . "
you can start anywhere , this time i chose earth .
and the first rule of the game is pretty simple .
you just have to read the article until you find something you do n't know , and preferably something your dad does n't even know .
and in this case , i quickly found this : the furthest point from the center of the earth is not the tip of mount everest , like i might have thought , it 's the tip of this mountain : mount chimborazo in ecuador .
the earth spins , of course , as it travels around the sun , so the earth bulges a little bit around the middle , like some earthlings .
and even though mount chimborazo is n't the tallest mountain in the andes , it 's one degree away from the equator , it 's riding that bulge , and so the summit of chimborazo is the farthest point on earth from the center of the earth .
and it is really fun to say .
so i immediately decided , this is going to be the name of the game , or my new exclamation .
you can use it at ted .
chimborazo , right ?
it 's like " eureka " and " bingo " had a baby .
i did n't know that ; that 's pretty cool .
chimborazo !
so the next rule of the game is also pretty simple .
you just have to find another term and look that up .
now in the old days , that meant getting out a volume and browsing through it alphabetically , maybe getting sidetracked , that was fun .
nowadays there are hundreds of links to choose from .
i can go literally anywhere in the world , i think since i was already in ecuador , i just decided to click on the word " tropical . "
that took me to this wet and warm band of the tropics that encircles the earth .
now that 's the tropic of cancer in the north and the tropic of capricorn in the south , that much i knew , but i was surprised to learn this little fact : those are not cartographers ' lines , like latitude or the borders between nations , they are astronomical phenomena caused by the earth 's tilt , and they change .
they move ; they go up , they go down .
in fact , for years , the tropic of cancer and the tropic of capricorn have been steadily drifting towards the equator at the rate of about 15 meters per year , and nobody told me that .
i did n't know it .
chimborazo !
so to keep the game going , i just have to find another term and look that one up .
since i 'm already in the tropics , i chose " tropical rainforest . "
famous for its diversity , human diversity .
there are still dozens and dozens of uncontacted tribes living on this planet .
they 're all over the globe , but virtually all of them live in tropical rainforests .
this is the only place you can go nowadays and not get " friended . "
the link that i clicked on here was exotic in the beginning and then absolutely mysterious at the very end .
it mentioned leopards and ring-tailed coatis and poison dart frogs and boa constrictors and then coleoptera , which turn out to be beetles .
now i clicked on this on purpose , but if i 'd somehow gotten here by mistake , it does remind me , for the band , see " the beatles , " for the car see " volkswagon beetle , " but i am here for beetle beetles .
this is the most successful order on the planet by far .
something between 20 and 25 percent of all life forms on the planet , including plants , are beetles .
that means the next time you are in the grocery store , take a look at the four people ahead of you in line .
statistically , one of you is a beetle .
and if it is you , you are astonishingly well adapted .
there are scavenger beetles that pick the skin and flesh off of bones in museums .
there are predator beetles , that attack other insects and still look pretty cute to us .
there are beetles that roll little balls of dung great distances across the desert floor to feed to their hatchlings .
this reminded the ancient egyptians of their god khepri , who renews the ball of the sun every morning , which is how that dung-rolling scarab became that sacred scarab on the breastplate of the pharaoh tutankhamun .
beetles , i was reminded , have the most romantic flirtation in the animal kingdom .
fireflies are not flies , fireflies are beetles .
fireflies are coleoptera , and coleoptera communicate in other ways as well .
like my next link : the chemical language of pheromones .
now the pheromone page took me to a video of a sea urchin having sex .
yeah .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and the link to aphrodisiac .
now that 's something that increases sexual desire , possibly chocolate .
there is a compound in chocolate called phenethylamine that might be an aphrodisiac .
but as the article mentions , because of enzyme breakdown , it 's unlikely that phenethylamine will reach your brain if taken orally .
so those of you who only eat your chocolate , you might have to experiment .
the link i clicked on here , " sympathetic magic , " mostly because i understand what both of those words mean .
but not when they 're together like that .
i do like sympathy . i do like magic .
so when i click on " sympathetic magic , " i get sympathetic magic and voodoo dolls .
this is the boy in me getting lucky again .
sympathetic magic is imitation .
if you imitate something , maybe you can have an effect on it .
that 's the idea behind voodoo dolls , and possibly also cave paintings .
the link to cave paintings takes me to some of the oldest art known to humankind .
i would love to see google maps inside some of these caves .
we 've got tens-of-thousands-years-old artwork .
common themes around the globe include large wild animals and tracings of human hands , usually the left hand .
we have been a dominantly right-handed tribe for millenia , so even though i do n't know why a paleolithic person would trace his hand or blow pigment on it from a tube , i can easily picture how he did it .
and i really do n't think it 's that different form our own little dominant hand avatar right there that i 'm going to use now to click on the term for " hand , " go to the page for " hand , " where i found the most fun and possibly embarrassing bit of trivia i 've found in a long time . it 's simply this : the back of the hand is formally called the opisthenar .
now that 's embarrassing , because up until now , every time i 've said , " i know it like the back of my hand , " i 've really been saying , " i 'm totally familiar with that , i just do n't know it 's freaking name , right ? "
and the link i clicked on here , well , lemurs , monkeys and chimpanzees have the little opisthenar .
i click on chimpanzee , and i get our closest genetic relative .
pan troglodytes , the name we give him , means " cave dweller . "
he does n't .
he lives in rainforests and savannas .
it 's just that we 're always thinking of this guy as lagging behind us , evolutionarily or somehow uncannily creeping up on us , and in some cases , he gets places before us .
like my next link , the almost irresistible link , ham the astrochimp .
i click on him , and i really thought he was going to bring me full circle twice , in fact .
he 's born in cameroon , which is smack in the middle of my tropics map , and more specifically his skeleton wound up in the smithsonian museum getting picked clean by beetles .
in between those two landmarks in ham 's life , he flew into space .
he experienced weightlessness and re-entry months before the first human being to do it , soviet cosmonaut yuri gagarin .
when i click on yuri gagarin 's page , i get this guy who was surprisingly short in stature , huge in heroism .
top estimates , soviet estimates , put this guy at 1.65 meters , that is less than five and a half feet tall max , possibly because he was malnourished as a child .
germans occupied russia .
a nazi officer took over the gagarin household , and he and his family built and lived in a mud hut .
years later , the boy from that cramped mud hut would grow up to be the man in that cramped capsule on the tip of a rocket who volunteered to be launched into outer space , the first one of any of us to really physically leave this planet .
and he did n't just leave it , he circled it once .
fifty years later , as a tribute , the international space station , which is still up there tonight , synced its orbit with gagarin 's orbit , at the exact same time of day , and filmed it , so you can go online and you can watch over 100 minutes of what must have been an absolutely mesmerizing ride , possibly a lonely one , the first person to ever see such a thing .
and then when you 've had your fill of that , you can click on one more link .
you can come back to earth .
you return to where you started .
you can finish your game .
you just need to find one more fact that you did n't know .
and for me , i quickly landed on this one : the earth has a tolerance of about .17 percent from the reference spheroid , which is less than the .22 percent allowed in billiard balls .
this is the kind of fact i would have loved as a boy .
i found it myself .
it 's got some math that i can do .
i 'm pretty sure my dad does n't know it .
what this means is that if you could shrink the earth to the size of a billiard ball , if you could take planet earth , with all its mountain tops and caves and rainforests , astronauts and uncontacted tribes and chimpanzees , voodoo dolls , fireflies , chocolate , sea creatures making love in the deep blue sea , you just shrink that to the size of a billiard ball , it would be as smooth as a billiard ball , presumably a billiard ball with a slight bulge around the middle .
that 's pretty cool .
i did n't know that .
chimborazo !
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i want to start out by asking you to think back to when you were a kid , playing with blocks .
as you figured out how to reach out and grasp , pick them up and move them around , you were actually learning how to think and solve problems by understanding and manipulating spatial relationships .
spatial reasoning is deeply connected to how we understand a lot of the world around us .
so , as a computer scientist inspired by this utility of our interactions with physical objects - along with my adviser pattie , and my collaborator jeevan kalanithi - i started to wonder - what if when we used a computer , instead of having this one mouse cursor that was a like a digital fingertip moving around a flat desktop , what if we could reach in with both hands and grasp information physically , arranging it the way we wanted ?
this question was so compelling that we decided to explore the answer , by building siftables .
in a nutshell , a siftable is an interactive computer the size of a cookie .
they 're able to be moved around by hand , they can sense each other , they can sense their motion , and they have a screen and a wireless radio .
most importantly , they 're physical , so like the blocks , you can move them just by reaching out and grasping .
and siftables are an example of a new ecosystem of tools for manipulating digital information .
and as these tools become more physical , more aware of their motion , aware of each other , and aware of the nuance of how we move them , we can start to explore some new and fun interaction styles .
so , i 'm going to start with some simple examples .
this siftable is configured to show video , and if i tilt it in one direction , it 'll roll the video this way ; if i tilt it the other way it rolls it backwards .
and these interactive portraits are aware of each other .
so if i put them next to each other , they get interested .
if they get surrounded , they notice that too , they might get a little flustered .
and they can also sense their motion and tilt .
one of the interesting implications on interaction , we started to realize , was that we could use everyday gestures on data , like pouring a color the way we might pour a liquid .
so in this case , we 've got three siftables configured to be paint buckets and i can use them to pour color into that central one , where they get mixed .
if we overshoot , we can pour a little bit back .
there are also some neat possibilities for education , like language , math and logic games where we want to give people the ability to try things quickly , and view the results immediately .
so here i 'm - -lrb- applause -rrb- this is a fibonacci sequence that i 'm making with a simple equation program .
here we have a word game that 's kind of like a mash-up between scrabble and boggle .
basically , in every round you get a randomly assigned letter on each siftable , and as you try to make words it checks against a dictionary .
then , after about 30 seconds , it reshuffles , and you have a new set of letters and new possibilities to try .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so these are some kids that came on a field trip to the media lab , and i managed to get them to try it out , and shoot a video .
they really loved it .
and , one of the interesting things about this kind of application is that you do n't have to give people many instructions .
all you have to say is , " make words , " and they know exactly what to do .
so here 's another few people trying it out .
that 's our youngest beta tester , down there on the right .
turns out , all he wanted to do was to stack the siftables up .
so to him , they were just blocks .
now , this is an interactive cartoon application .
and we wanted to build a learning tool for language learners .
and this is felix , actually .
and he can bring new characters into the scene , just by lifting the siftables off the table that have that character shown on them .
here , he 's bringing the sun out .
video : the sun is rising .
david merrill : now he 's brought a tractor into the scene .
video : the orange tractor .
good job ! yeah !
dm : so by shaking the siftables and putting them next to each other he can make the characters interact - video : woof !
dm : inventing his own narrative .
video : hello !
dm : it 's an open-ended story , and he gets to decide how it unfolds .
video : fly away , cat .
dm : so , the last example i have time to show you today is a music sequencing and live performance tool that we 've built recently , in which siftables act as sounds like lead , bass and drums .
each of these has four different variations , you get to choose which one you want to use .
and you can inject these sounds into a sequence that you can assemble into the pattern that you want .
and you inject it by just bumping up the sound siftable against a sequence siftable .
there are effects that you can control live , like reverb and filter .
you attach it to a particular sound and then tilt to adjust it .
and then , overall effects like tempo and volume that apply to the entire sequence .
so let 's have a look .
video : -lrb- music -rrb- dm : we 'll start by putting a lead into two sequence siftables , arrange them into a series , extend it , add a little more lead .
now i put a bass line in .
video : -lrb- music -rrb- dm : now i 'll put some percussion in .
video : -lrb- music -rrb- dm : and now i 'll attach the filter to the drums , so i can control the effect live .
video : -lrb- music -rrb- dm : i can speed up the whole sequence by tilting the tempo one way or the other .
video : -lrb- music -rrb- dm : and now i 'll attach the filter to the bass for some more expression .
video : -lrb- music -rrb- dm : i can rearrange the sequence while it plays .
so i do n't have to plan it out in advance , but i can improvise , making it longer or shorter as i go .
and now , finally , i can fade the whole sequence out using the volume siftable , tilted to the left .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
so , as you can see , my passion is for making new human-computer interfaces that are a better match to the ways our brains and bodies work .
and today , i had time to show you one point in this new design space , and a few of the possibilities that we 're working to bring out of the laboratory .
so the thought i want to leave you with is that we 're on the cusp of this new generation of tools for interacting with digital media that are going to bring information into our world on our terms .
thank you very much .
i look forward to talking with all of you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- having spent 18 years as a child of the state in children 's homes and foster care , you could say that i 'm an expert on the subject , and in being an expert , i want to let you know that being an expert does in no way make you right in light of the truth .
if you 're in care , legally the government is your parent , loco parentis .
margaret thatcher was my mother . -lrb- laughter -rrb- let 's not talk about breastfeeding . -lrb- laughter -rrb- harry potter was a foster child .
pip from " great expectations " was adopted ; superman was a foster child ; cinderella was a foster child ; lisbeth salander , the girl with the dragon tattoo , was fostered and institutionalized ; batman was orphaned ; lyra belacqua from philip pullman 's " northern lights " was fostered ; jane eyre , adopted ; roald dahl 's james from " james and the giant peach ; " matilda ; moses - moses ! -lrb- laughter -rrb- moses ! -lrb- laughter -rrb- - the boys in michael morpurgo 's " friend or foe ; " alem in benjamin zephaniah 's " refugee boy ; " luke skywalker - luke skywalker ! -lrb- laughter -rrb- - oliver twist ; cassia in " the concubine of shanghai " by hong ying ; celie in alice walker 's " the color purple . "
all of these great fictional characters , all of them who were hurt by their condition , all of them who spawned thousands of other books and other films , all of them were fostered , adopted or orphaned .
it seems that writers know that the child outside of family reflects on what family truly is more than what it promotes itself to be .
that is , they also use extraordinary skills to deal with extraordinary situations on a daily basis .
how have we not made the connection ?
and why have we not made the connection , between - how has that happened ? - between these incredible characters of popular culture and religions , and the fostered , adopted or orphaned child in our midst ? it 's not our pity that they need .
it 's our respect .
i know famous musicians , i know actors and film stars and millionaires and novelists and top lawyers and television executives and magazine editors and national journalists and dustbinmen and hairdressers , all who were looked after children , fostered , adopted or orphaned , and many of them grow into their adult lives in fear of speaking of their background , as if it may somehow weaken their standing in the foreground , as if it were somehow kryptonite , as if it were a time bomb strapped on the inside . children in care , who 've had a life in care , deserve the right to own and live the memory of their own childhood .
it is that simple .
my own mother - and i should say this here - she same to this country in the late ' 60s , and she was , you know , she found herself pregnant , as women did in the late ' 60s . you know what i mean ?
they found themselves pregnant .
and she sort of , she had no idea of the context in which she 'd landed .
in the 1960s - i should give you some context - in the 1960s , if you were pregnant and you were single , you were seen as a threat to the community .
you were separated from your family by the state .
you were separated from your family and placed into mother and baby homes .
you were appointed a social worker .
the adoptive parents were lined up .
it was the primary purpose of the social worker , the aim , to get the woman at her most vulnerable time in her entire life , to sign the adoption papers .
so the adoption papers were signed .
the mother and baby 's homes were often run by nuns .
the adoption papers were signed , the child was given to the adoptive parents , and the mother shipped back to her community to say that she 'd been on a little break .
a little break .
a little break .
the first secret of shame for a woman for being a woman , " a little break . "
the adoption process took , like , a matter of months , so it was a closed shop , you know , sealed deal , an industrious , utilitarian solution : the government , the farmer , the adopting parents , the consumer , the mother , the earth , and the child , the crop .
it 's kind of easy to patronize the past , to forego our responsibilities in the present .
what happened then is a direct reflection of what is happening now . everybody believed themselves to be doing the right thing by god and by the state for the big society , fast-tracking adoption .
so anyway , she comes here , 1967 , she 's pregnant , and she comes from ethiopia that was celebrating its own jubilee at the time under the emperor haile selassie , and she lands months before the enoch powell speech , the " rivers of blood " speech .
she lands months before the beatles release " the white album , " months before martin luther king was killed .
it was a summer of love if you were white .
if you were black , it was a summer of hate .
so she goes from oxford , she 's sent to the north of england to a mother and baby home , and appointed a social worker .
it 's her plan . you know , i have to say this in the houses - it 's her plan to have me fostered for a short period of time while she studies . but the social worker , he had a different agenda .
he found the foster parents , and he said to them , " treat this as an adoption . he 's yours forever .
his name is norman . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- norman ! -lrb- laughter -rrb- norman !
so they took me . i was a message , they said .
i was a sign from god , they said .
i was norman mark greenwood .
now , for the next 11 years , all i know is that this woman , this birth woman , should have her eyes scratched out for not signing the adoption papers . she was an evil woman too selfish to sign , so i spent those 11 years kneeling and praying .
i tried praying . i swear i tried praying .
" god , can i have a bike for christmas ? "
but i would always answer myself , " yes , of course you can . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and then i was supposed to determine whether that was the voice of god or it was the voice of the devil .
and it turns out i 've got the devil inside of me .
who knew ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- so anyway , two years sort of passed , and they had a child of their own , and then another two years passed , and they had another child of their own , and then another time passed and they had another child that they called an accident , which i thought was an unusual name . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and i was on the cusp of , sort of , adolescence , so i was starting to take biscuits from the tin without asking .
i was starting to stay out a little bit late , etc . , etc .
now , in their religiosity , in their naivete , my mom and dad , which i believed them to be forever , as they said they were , my mom and dad conceived that i had the devil inside of me .
and what - i should say this here , because this is how they engineered my leaving .
they sat me at a table , my foster mom , and she said to me , " you do n't love us , do you ? " at 11 years old .
they 've had three other children . i 'm the fourth . the third was an accident .
and i said , " yeah , of course i do . " because you do .
my foster mother asked me to go away to think about love and what it is and to read the scriptures and to come back tomorrow and give my most honest and truthful answer .
so this was an opportunity . if they were asking me whether i loved them or not , then i must n't love them , which led me to the miracle of thought that i thought they wanted me to get to .
" i will ask god for forgiveness and his light will shine through me to them . how fantastic . " this was an opportunity .
the theology was perfect , the timing unquestionable , and the answer as honest as a sinner could get .
" i must n't love you , " i said to them . " but i will ask god for forgiveness . "
" because you do n't love us , norman , clearly you 've chosen your path . "
twenty-four hours later , my social worker , this strange man who used to visit me every couple of months , he 's waiting for me in the car as i say goodbye to my parents .
i did n't say goodbye to anybody , not my mother , my father , my sisters , my brothers , my aunts , my uncles , my cousins , my grandparents , nobody .
on the way to the children 's home , i started to ask myself , " what 's happened to me ? "
it 's not that i 'd had the rug pulled from beneath me as much as the entire floor had been taken away .
when i got to the - for the next four , five years , i was held in four different children 's homes .
on the third children 's home , at 15 , i started to rebel , and what i did was , i got three tins of paint , airfix paint that you use for models , and i was - it was a big children 's home , big victorian children 's home - and i was in a little turret at the top of it , and i poured them , red , yellow and green , the colors of africa , down the tiles .
you could n't see it from the street , because the home was surrounded by beech trees .
for doing this , i was incarcerated for a year in an assessment center which was actually a remand center . it was a virtual prison for young people .
by the way , years later , my social worker said that i should never have been put in there .
i was n't charged for anything . i had n't done anything wrong .
but because i had no family to inquire about me , they could do anything to me .
i 'm 17 years old , and they had a padded cell .
they would march me down corridors in last-size order .
they - i was put in a dormitory with a confirmed nazi sympathizer .
all of the staff were ex-police - interesting - and ex-probation officers .
the man who ran it was an ex-army officer .
every time i had a visit by a person who i did not know who would feed me grapes , once every three months , i was strip-searched .
that home was full of young boys who were on remand for things like murder .
and this was the preparation that i was being given after 17 years as a child of the state .
i have to tell this story .
i have to tell it , because there was no one to put two and two together .
i slowly became aware that i knew nobody that knew me for longer than a year .
see , that 's what family does .
it gives you reference points .
i 'm not defining a good family from a bad family .
i 'm just saying that you know when your birthday is by virtue of the fact that somebody tells you when your birthday is , a mother , a father , a sister , a brother , an aunt , an uncle , a cousin , a grandparent . it matters to someone , and therefore it matters to you . understand , i was 14 years old , tucked away in myself , into myself , and i was n't touched either , physically touched .
i 'm reporting back . i 'm reporting back simply to say that when i left the children 's home i had two things that i wanted to do . one was to find my family , and the other was to write poetry .
in creativity i saw light .
in the imagination i saw the endless possibility of life , the endless truth , the permanent creation of reality , the place where anger was an expression in the search for love , a place where dysfunction is a true reaction to untruth .
i 've just got to say it to you all : i found all of my family in my adult life . i spent all of my adult life finding them , and i 've now got a fully dysfunctional family just like everybody else .
but i 'm reporting back to you to say quite simply that you can define how strong a democracy is by how its government treats its child .
i do n't mean children . i mean the child of the state .
thanks very much . it 's been an honor . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
i 'm thrilled to be here .
i 'm going to talk about a new , old material that still continues to amaze us , and that might impact the way we think about material science , high technology - and maybe , along the way , also do some stuff for medicine and for global health and help reforestation .
so that 's kind of a bold statement .
i 'll tell you a little bit more .
this material actually has some traits that make it seem almost too good to be true .
it 's sustainable ; it 's a sustainable material that is processed all in water and at room temperature - and is biodegradable with a clock , so you can watch it dissolve instantaneously in a glass of water or have it stable for years .
it 's edible ; it 's implantable in the human body without causing any immune response .
it actually gets reintegrated in the body .
and it 's technological , so it can do things like microelectronics , and maybe photonics do .
and the material looks something like this .
in fact , this material you see is clear and transparent .
the components of this material are just water and protein .
so this material is silk .
so it 's kind of different from what we 're used to thinking about silk .
so the question is , how do you reinvent something that has been around for five millennia ?
the process of discovery , generally , is inspired by nature .
and so we marvel at silk worms - the silk worm you see here spinning its fiber .
the silk worm does a remarkable thing : it uses these two ingredients , protein and water , that are in its gland , to make a material that is exceptionally tough for protection - so comparable to technical fibers like kevlar .
and so in the reverse engineering process that we know about , and that we 're familiar with , for the textile industry , the textile industry goes and unwinds the cocoon and then weaves glamorous things .
we want to know how you go from water and protein to this liquid kevlar , to this natural kevlar .
so the insight is how do you actually reverse engineer this and go from cocoon to gland and get water and protein that is your starting material .
and this is an insight that came , about two decades ago , from a person that i 'm very fortunate to work with , david kaplan .
and so we get this starting material .
and so this starting material is back to the basic building block .
and then we use this to do a variety of things - like , for example , this film .
and we take advantage of something that is very simple .
the recipe to make those films is to take advantage of the fact that proteins are extremely smart at what they do .
they find their way to self-assemble .
so the recipe is simple : you take the silk solution , you pour it , and you wait for the protein to self-assemble .
and then you detach the protein and you get this film , as the proteins find each other as the water evaporates .
but i mentioned that the film is also technological .
and so what does that mean ?
it means that you can interface it with some of the things that are typical of technology , like microelectronics and nanoscale technology .
and the image of the dvd here is just to illustrate a point that silk follows very subtle topographies of the surface , which means that it can replicate features on the nanoscale .
so it would be able to replicate the information that is on the dvd .
and we can store information that 's film with water and protein .
so we tried something out , and we wrote a message in a piece of silk , which is right here , and the message is over there .
and much like in the dvd , you can read it out optically .
and this requires a stable hand , so this is why i decided to do it onstage in front of a thousand people .
so let me see .
so as you see the film go in transparently through there , and then ...
-lrb- applause -rrb- and the most remarkable feat is that my hand actually stayed still long enough to do that .
so once you have these attributes of this material , then you can do a lot of things .
it 's actually not limited to films .
and so the material can assume a lot of formats .
and then you go a little crazy , and so you do various optical components or you do microprism arrays , like the reflective tape that you have on your running shoes .
or you can do beautiful things that , if the camera can capture , you can make .
you can add a third dimensionality to the film .
and if the angle is right , you can actually see a hologram appear in this film of silk .
but you can do other things .
you can imagine that then maybe you can use a pure protein to guide light , and so we 've made optical fibers .
but silk is versatile and it goes beyond optics .
and you can think of different formats .
so for instance , if you 're afraid of going to the doctor and getting stuck with a needle , we do microneedle arrays .
what you see there on the screen is a human hair superimposed on the needle that 's made of silk - just to give you a sense of size .
you can do bigger things .
you can do gears and nuts and bolts - that you can buy at whole foods .
and the gears work in water as well .
so you think of alternative mechanical parts .
and maybe you can use that liquid kevlar if you need something strong to replace peripheral veins , for example , or maybe an entire bone .
and so you have here a little example of a small skull - what we call mini yorick .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but you can do things like cups , for example , and so , if you add a little bit of gold , if you add a little bit of semiconductors you could do sensors that stick on the surfaces of foods .
you can do electronic pieces that fold and wrap .
or if you 're fashion forward , some silk led tattoos .
so there 's versatility , as you see , in the material formats , that you can do with silk .
but there are still some unique traits .
i mean , why would you want to do all these things for real ?
i mentioned it briefly at the beginning ; the protein is biodegradable and biocompatible .
and you see here a picture of a tissue section .
and so what does that mean , that it 's biodegradable and biocompatible ?
you can implant it in the body without needing to retrieve what is implanted .
which means that all the devices that you 've seen before and all the formats , in principle , can be implanted and disappear .
and what you see there in that tissue section , in fact , is you see that reflector tape .
so , much like you 're seen at night by a car , then the idea is that you can see , if you illuminate tissue , you can see deeper parts of tissue because there is that reflective tape there that is made out of silk .
and you see there , it gets reintegrated in tissue .
and reintegration in the human body is not the only thing , but reintegration in the environment is important .
so you have a clock , you have protein , and now a silk cup like this can be thrown away without guilt - -lrb- applause -rrb- unlike the polystyrene cups that unfortunately fill our landfills everyday .
it 's edible , so you can do smart packaging around food that you can cook with the food .
it does n't taste good , so i 'm going to need some help with that .
but probably the most remarkable thing is that it comes full circle .
silk , during its self-assembly process , acts like a cocoon for biological matter .
and so if you change the recipe , and you add things when you pour - so you add things to your liquid silk solution - where these things are enzymes or antibodies or vaccines , the self-assembly process preserves the biological function of these dopants .
so it makes the materials environmentally active and interactive .
so that screw that you thought about beforehand can actually be used to screw a bone together - a fractured bone together - and deliver drugs at the same , while your bone is healing , for example .
or you could put drugs in your wallet and not in your fridge .
so we 've made a silk card with penicillin in it .
and we stored penicillin at 60 degrees c , so 140 degrees fahrenheit , for two months without loss of efficacy of the penicillin .
and so that could be - -lrb- applause -rrb- that could be potentially a good alternative to solar powered refrigerated camels . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and of course , there 's no use in storage if you ca n't use -lsb- it -rsb- .
and so there is this other unique material trait that these materials have , that they 're programmably degradable .
and so what you see there is the difference .
in the top , you have a film that has been programmed not to degrade , and in the bottom , a film that has been programmed to degrade in water .
and what you see is that the film on the bottom releases what is inside it .
so it allows for the recovery of what we 've stored before .
and so this allows for a controlled delivery of drugs and for reintegration in the environment in all of these formats that you 've seen .
so the thread of discovery that we have really is a thread .
we 're impassioned with this idea that whatever you want to do , whether you want to replace a vein or a bone , or maybe be more sustainable in microelectronics , perhaps drink a coffee in a cup and throw it away without guilt , maybe carry your drugs in your pocket , deliver them inside your body or deliver them across the desert , the answer may be in a thread of silk .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so if you 've been following the news , you 've heard that there 's a pack of giant asteroids headed for the united states , all scheduled to strike within the next 50 years .
now i do n't mean actual asteroids made of rock and metal .
that actually would n't be such a problem , because if we were really all going to die , we would put aside our differences , we 'd spend whatever it took , and we 'd find a way to deflect them .
i 'm talking instead about threats that are headed our way , but they 're wrapped in a special energy field that polarizes us , and therefore paralyzes us .
last march , i went to the ted conference , and i saw jim hansen speak , the nasa scientist who first raised the alarm about global warming in the 1980s , and it seems that the predictions he made back then are coming true .
this is where we 're headed in terms of global temperature rises , and if we keep on going the way we 're going , we get a four- or five-degree-centigrade temperature rise by the end of this century .
hansen says we can expect about a five-meter rise in sea levels .
this is what a five-meter rise in sea levels would look like .
low-lying cities all around the world will disappear within the lifetime of children born today .
hansen closed his talk by saying , " imagine a giant asteroid on a collision course with earth .
that is the equivalent of what we face now .
yet we dither , taking no action to deflect the asteroid , even though the longer we wait , the more difficult and expensive it becomes . "
of course , the left wants to take action , but the right denies that there 's any problem .
all right , so i go back from ted , and then the following week , i 'm invited to a dinner party in washington , d.c. , where i know that i 'll be meeting a number of conservative intellectuals , including yuval levin , and to prepare for the meeting , i read this article by levin in national affairs called " beyond the welfare state . "
levin writes that all over the world , nations are coming to terms with the fact that the social democratic welfare state is turning out to be untenable and unaffordable , dependent upon dubious economics and the demographic model of a bygone era .
all right , now this might not sound as scary as an asteroid , but look at these graphs that levin showed .
this graph shows the national debt as a percentage of america 's gdp , and as you see , if you go all the way back to the founding , we borrowed a lot of money to fight the revolutionary war .
wars are expensive . but then we 'd pay it off , pay it off , pay it off , and then , oh , what 's this ? the civil war . even more expensive .
borrow a lot of money , pay it off , pay it off , pay it off , get down to near zero , and bang ! - world war i.
once again , the same process repeats .
now then we get the great depression and world war ii .
we rise to an astronomical level , around 118 percent of gdp , really unsustainable , really dangerous .
but we pay it off , pay it off , pay it off , and then , what 's this ?
why has it been rising since the ' 70s ?
it 's partly due to tax cuts that were unfunded , but it 's due primarily to the rise of entitlement spending , especially medicare .
we 're approaching the levels of indebtedness we had at world war ii , and the baby boomers have n't even retired yet , and when they do , this is what will happen .
this is data from the congressional budget office showing its most realistic forecast of what would happen if current situations and expectations and trends are extended .
all right , now what you might notice is that these two graphs are actually identical , not in terms of the x- and y-axes , or in terms of the data they present , but in terms of their moral and political implications , they say the same thing .
let me translate for you .
" we are doomed unless we start acting now .
what 's wrong with you people on the other side in the other party ?
ca n't you see reality ? if you wo n't help , then get the hell out of the way . "
we can deflect both of these asteroids .
these problems are both technically solvable .
our problem and our tragedy is that in these hyper-partisan times , the mere fact that one side says , " look , there 's an asteroid , " means that the other side 's going to say , " huh ? what ?
no , i 'm not even going to look up . no . "
to understand why this is happening to us , and what we can do about it , we need to learn more about moral psychology .
so i 'm a social psychologist , and i study morality , and one of the most important principles of morality is that morality binds and blinds .
it binds us into teams that circle around sacred values but thereby makes us go blind to objective reality .
think of it like this .
large-scale cooperation is extremely rare on this planet .
there are only a few species that can do it .
that 's a beehive . that 's a termite mound , a giant termite mound .
and when you find this in other animals , it 's always the same story .
they 're always all siblings who are children of a single queen , so they 're all in the same boat .
they rise or fall , they live or die , as one .
there 's only one species on the planet that can do this without kinship , and that , of course , is us .
this is a reconstruction of ancient babylon , and this is tenochtitlan .
now how did we do this ? how did we go from being hunter-gatherers 10,000 years ago to building these gigantic cities in just a few thousand years ?
it 's miraculous , and part of the explanation is this ability to circle around sacred values .
as you see , temples and gods play a big role in all ancient civilizations .
this is an image of muslims circling the kaaba in mecca .
it 's a sacred rock , and when people circle something together , they unite , they can trust each other , they become one .
it 's as though you 're moving an electrical wire through a magnetic field that generates current .
when people circle together , they generate a current .
we love to circle around things .
we circle around flags , and then we can trust each other .
we can fight as a team , as a unit .
but even as morality binds people together into a unit , into a team , the circling blinds them .
it causes them to distort reality .
we begin separating everything into good versus evil .
now that process feels great . it feels really satisfying .
but it is a gross distortion of reality .
you can see the moral electromagnet operating in the u.s. congress .
this is a graph that shows the degree to which voting in congress falls strictly along the left-right axis , so that if you know how liberal or conservative someone is , you know exactly how they voted on all the major issues .
and what you can see is that , in the decades after the civil war , congress was extraordinarily polarized , as you would expect , about as high as can be .
but then , after world war i , things dropped , and we get this historically low level of polarization .
this was a golden age of bipartisanship , at least in terms of the parties ' ability to work together and solve grand national problems .
but in the 1980s and ' 90s , the electromagnet turns back on .
polarization rises .
it used to be that conservatives and moderates and liberals could all work together in congress .
they could rearrange themselves , form bipartisan committees , but as the moral electromagnet got cranked up , the force field increased , democrats and republicans were pulled apart .
it became much harder for them to socialize , much harder for them to cooperate .
retiring members nowadays say that it 's become like gang warfare .
did anybody notice that in two of the three debates , obama wore a blue tie and romney wore a red tie ?
do you know why they do this ?
it 's so that the bloods and the crips will know which side to vote for . -lrb- laughter -rrb- the polarization is strongest among our political elites .
nobody doubts that this is happening in washington .
but for a while , there was some doubt as to whether it was happening among the people .
well , in the last 12 years it 's become much more apparent that it is .
so look at this data . this is from the american national elections survey .
and what they do on that survey is they ask what 's called a feeling thermometer rating .
so , how warm or cold do you feel about , you know , native americans , or the military , the republican party , the democratic party , all sorts of groups in american life .
the blue line shows how warmly democrats feel about democrats , and they like them .
you know , ratings in the 70s on a 100-point scale .
republicans like republicans . that 's not a surprise .
but when you look at cross-party ratings , you find , well , that it 's lower , but actually , when i first saw this data , i was surprised .
that 's actually not so bad . if you go back to the carter and even reagan administrations , they were rating the other party 43 , 45 . it 's not terrible .
it drifts downwards very slightly , but now look what happens under george w. bush and obama .
it plummets . something is going on here .
the moral electromagnet is turning back on , and nowadays , just very recently , democrats really dislike republicans .
republicans really dislike the democrats . we 're changing .
it 's as though the moral electromagnet is affecting us too .
it 's like put out in the two oceans and it 's pulling the whole country apart , pulling left and right into their own territories like the bloods and the crips .
now , there are many reasons why this is happening to us , and many of them we can not reverse .
we will never again have a political class that was forged by the experience of fighting together in world war ii against a common enemy .
we will never again have just three television networks , all of which are relatively centrist .
and we will never again have a large group of conservative southern democrats and liberal northern republicans making it easy , making there be a lot of overlap for bipartisan cooperation .
so for a lot of reasons , those decades after the second world war were an historically anomalous time .
we will never get back to those low levels of polarization , i believe .
but there 's a lot that we can do . there are dozens and dozens of reforms we can do that will make things better , because a lot of our dysfunction can be traced directly to things that congress did to itself in the 1990s that created a much more polarized and dysfunctional institution .
these changes are detailed in many books .
these are two that i strongly recommend , and they list a whole bunch of reforms .
i 'm just going to group them into three broad classes here .
so if you think about this as the problem of a dysfunctional , hyper-polarized institution , well , the first step is , do what you can so that fewer hyper-partisans get elected in the first place , and when you have closed party primaries , and only the most committed republicans and democrats are voting , you 're nominating and selecting the most extreme hyper-partisans .
so open primaries would make that problem much , much less severe .
but the problem is n't primarily that we 're electing bad people to congress .
from my experience , and from what i 've heard from congressional insiders , most of the people going to congress are good , hard-working , intelligent people who really want to solve problems , but once they get there , they find that they are forced to play a game that rewards hyper-partisanship and that punishes independent thinking .
you step out of line , you get punished .
so there are a lot of reforms we could do that will counteract this .
for example , this " citizens united " ruling is a disaster , because it means there 's like a money gun aimed at your head , and if you step out of line , if you try to reach across the aisle , there 's a ton of money waiting to be given to your opponent to make everybody think that you are a terrible person through negative advertising .
but the third class of reforms is that we 've got to change the nature of social relationships in congress .
the politicians i 've met are generally very extroverted , friendly , very socially skillful people , and that 's the nature of politics . you 've got to make relationships , make deals , you 've got to cajole , please , flatter , you 've got to use your personal skills , and that 's the way politics has always worked .
but beginning in the 1990s , first the house of representatives changed its legislative calendar so that all business is basically done in the middle of the week .
nowadays , congressmen fly in on tuesday morning , they do battle for two days , then they fly home thursday afternoon .
they do n't move their families to the district .
they do n't meet each other 's spouses or children .
there 's no more relationship there .
and trying to run congress without human relationships is like trying to run a car without motor oil .
should we be surprised when the whole thing freezes up and descends into paralysis and polarization ?
a simple change to the legislative calendar , such as having business stretch out for three weeks and then they get a week off to go home , that would change the fundamental relationships in congress .
so there 's a lot we can do , but who 's going to push them to do it ?
there are a number of groups that are working on this .
no labels and common cause , i think , have very good ideas for changes we need to do to make our democracy more responsive and our congress more effective .
but i 'd like to supplement their work with a little psychological trick , and the trick is this .
nothing pulls people together like a common threat or a common attack , especially an attack from a foreign enemy , unless of course that threat hits on our polarized psychology , in which case , as i said before , it can actually pull us apart .
sometimes a single threat can polarize us , as we saw .
but what if the situation we face is not a single threat but is actually more like this , where there 's just so much stuff coming in , it 's just , " start shooting , come on , everybody , we 've got to just work together , just start shooting . "
because actually , we do face this situation .
this is where we are as a country .
so here 's another asteroid .
we 've all seen versions of this graph , right , which shows the changes in wealth since 1979 , and as you can see , almost all the gains in wealth have gone to the top 20 percent , and especially the top one percent .
rising inequality like this is associated with so many problems for a democracy .
especially , it destroys our ability to trust each other , to feel that we 're all in the same boat , because it 's obvious we 're not .
some of us are sitting there safe and sound in gigantic private yachts .
other people are clinging to a piece of driftwood .
we 're not all in the same boat , and that means nobody 's willing to sacrifice for the common good .
the left has been screaming about this asteroid for 30 years now , and the right says , " huh , what ? hmm ? no problem . no problem . "
now , why is that happening to us ? why is the inequality rising ?
well , one of the largest causes , after globalization , is actually this fourth asteroid , rising non-marital births .
this graph shows the steady rise of out-of-wedlock births since the 1960s .
most hispanic and black children are now born to unmarried mothers .
whites are headed that way too .
within a decade or two , most american children will be born into homes with no father .
this means that there 's much less money coming into the house .
but it 's not just money . it 's also stability versus chaos .
as i know from working with street children in brazil , mom 's boyfriend is often a really , really dangerous person for kids .
now the right has been screaming about this asteroid since the 1960s , and the left has been saying , " it 's not a problem . it 's not a problem . "
the left has been very reluctant to say that marriage is actually good for women and for children .
now let me be clear . i 'm not blaming the women here .
i 'm actually more critical of the men who wo n't take responsibility for their own children and of an economic system that makes it difficult for many men to earn enough money to support those children .
but even if you blame nobody , it still is a national problem , and one side has been more concerned about it than the other .
the new york times finally noticed this asteroid with a front-page story last july showing how the decline of marriage contributes to inequality .
we are becoming a nation of just two classes .
when americans go to college and marry each other , they have very low divorce rates .
they earn a lot of money , they invest that money in their kids , some of them become tiger mothers , the kids rise to their full potential , and the kids go on to become the top two lines in this graph .
and then there 's everybody else : the children who do n't benefit from a stable marriage , who do n't have as much invested in them , who do n't grow up in a stable environment , and who go on to become the bottom three lines in that graph .
so once again , we see that these two graphs are actually saying the same thing .
as before , we 've got a problem , we 've got to start working on this , we 've got to do something , and what 's wrong with you people that you do n't see my threat ?
but if everybody could just take off their partisan blinders , we 'd see that these two problems actually are best addressed together .
because if you really care about income inequality , you might want to talk to some evangelical christian groups that are working on ways to promote marriage .
but then you 're going to run smack into the problem that women do n't generally want to marry someone who does n't have a job .
so if you really care about strengthening families , you might want to talk to some liberal groups who are working on promoting educational equality , who are working on raising the minimum wage , who are working on finding ways to stop so many men from being sucked into the criminal justice system and taken out of the marriage market for their whole lives .
so to conclude , there are at least four asteroids headed our way .
how many of you can see all four ?
please raise your hand right now if you 're willing to admit that all four of these are national problems .
please raise your hands .
okay , almost all of you .
well , congratulations , you guys are the inaugural members of the asteroids club , which is a club for all americans who are willing to admit that the other side actually might have a point .
in the asteroids club , we do n't start by looking for common ground .
common ground is often very hard to find .
no , we start by looking for common threats because common threats make common ground .
now , am i being naive ? is it naive to think that people could ever lay down their swords , and left and right could actually work together ?
i do n't think so , because it happens , not all that often , but there are a variety of examples that point the way .
this is something we can do .
because americans on both sides care about the decline in civility , and they 've formed dozens of organizations , at the national level , such as this one , down to many local organizations , such as to the village square in tallahassee , florida , which tries to bring state leaders together to help facilitate that sort of working together human relationship that 's necessary to solve florida 's problems .
americans on both sides care about global poverty and aids , and on so many humanitarian issues , liberals and evangelicals are actually natural allies , and at times they really have worked together to solve these problems .
and most surprisingly to me , they sometimes can even see eye to eye on criminal justice .
for example , the incarceration rate , the prison population in this country has quadrupled since 1980 .
now this is a social disaster , and liberals are very concerned about this .
the southern poverty law center is often fighting the prison-industrial complex , fighting to prevent a system that 's just sucking in more and more poor young men .
but are conservatives happy about this ?
well , grover norquist is n't , because this system costs an unbelievable amount of money .
and so , because the prison-industrial complex is bankrupting our states and corroding our souls , groups of fiscal conservatives and christian conservatives have come together to form a group called right on crime .
and at times they have worked with the southern poverty law center to oppose the building of new prisons and to work for reforms that will make the justice system more efficient and more humane .
so this is possible . we can do it .
let us therefore go to battle stations , not to fight each other , but to begin deflecting these incoming asteroids .
and let our first mission be to press congress to reform itself , before it 's too late for our nation .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- organic chemists make molecules , very complicated molecules , by chopping up a big molecule into small molecules and reverse engineering .
and as a chemist , one of the things i wanted to ask my research group a couple of years ago is , could we make a really cool universal chemistry set ?
in essence , could we " app " chemistry ?
now what would this mean , and how would we do it ?
well to start to do this , we took a 3d printer and we started to print our beakers and our test tubes on one side and then print the molecule at the same time on the other side and combine them together in what we call reactionware .
and so by printing the vessel and doing the chemistry at the same time , we may start to access this universal toolkit of chemistry .
now what could this mean ?
well if we can embed biological and chemical networks like a search engine , so if you have a cell that 's ill that you need to cure or bacteria that you want to kill , if you have this embedded in your device at the same time , and you do the chemistry , you may be able to make drugs in a new way .
so how are we doing this in the lab ?
well it requires software , it requires hardware and it requires chemical inks .
and so the really cool bit is , the idea is that we want to have a universal set of inks that we put out with the printer , and you download the blueprint , the organic chemistry for that molecule and you make it in the device .
and so you can make your molecule in the printer using this software .
so what could this mean ?
well , ultimately , it could mean that you could print your own medicine .
and this is what we 're doing in the lab at the moment .
but to take baby steps to get there , first of all we want to look at drug design and production , or drug discovery and manufacturing .
because if we can manufacture it after we 've discovered it , we could deploy it anywhere .
you do n't need to go to the chemist anymore .
we can print drugs at point of need .
we can download new diagnostics .
say a new super bug has emerged .
you put it in your search engine , and you create the drug to treat the threat .
so this allows you on-the-fly molecular assembly .
but perhaps for me the core bit going into the future is this idea of taking your own stem cells , with your genes and your environment , and you print your own personal medicine .
and if that does n't seem fanciful enough , where do you think we 're going to go ?
well , you 're going to have your own personal matter fabricator .
beam me up , scotty .
-lrb- applause -rrb- mark zuckerberg , a journalist was asking him a question about the news feed .
and the journalist was asking him , " why is this so important ? "
and zuckerberg said , " a squirrel dying in your front yard may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in africa . "
and i want to talk about what a web based on that idea of relevance might look like .
so when i was growing up in a really rural area in maine , the internet meant something very different to me .
it meant a connection to the world .
it meant something that would connect us all together .
and i was sure that it was going to be great for democracy and for our society .
but there 's this shift in how information is flowing online , and it 's invisible .
and if we do n't pay attention to it , it could be a real problem .
so i first noticed this in a place i spend a lot of time - my facebook page .
i 'm progressive , politically - big surprise - but i 've always gone out of my way to meet conservatives .
i like hearing what they 're thinking about ; i like seeing what they link to ; i like learning a thing or two .
and so i was surprised when i noticed one day that the conservatives had disappeared from my facebook feed .
and what it turned out was going on was that facebook was looking at which links i clicked on , and it was noticing that , actually , i was clicking more on my liberal friends ' links than on my conservative friends ' links .
and without consulting me about it , it had edited them out .
they disappeared .
so facebook is n't the only place that 's doing this kind of invisible , algorithmic editing of the web .
google 's doing it too .
if i search for something , and you search for something , even right now at the very same time , we may get very different search results .
even if you 're logged out , one engineer told me , there are 57 signals that google looks at - everything from what kind of computer you 're on to what kind of browser you 're using to where you 're located - that it uses to personally tailor your query results .
think about it for a second : there is no standard google anymore .
and you know , the funny thing about this is that it 's hard to see .
you ca n't see how different your search results are from anyone else 's .
but a couple of weeks ago , i asked a bunch of friends to google " egypt " and to send me screen shots of what they got .
so here 's my friend scott 's screen shot .
and here 's my friend daniel 's screen shot .
when you put them side-by-side , you do n't even have to read the links to see how different these two pages are .
but when you do read the links , it 's really quite remarkable .
daniel did n't get anything about the protests in egypt at all in his first page of google results .
scott 's results were full of them .
and this was the big story of the day at that time .
that 's how different these results are becoming .
so it 's not just google and facebook either .
this is something that 's sweeping the web .
there are a whole host of companies that are doing this kind of personalization .
yahoo news , the biggest news site on the internet , is now personalized - different people get different things .
huffington post , the washington post , the new york times - all flirting with personalization in various ways .
and this moves us very quickly toward a world in which the internet is showing us what it thinks we want to see , but not necessarily what we need to see .
as eric schmidt said , " it will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them . "
so i do think this is a problem .
and i think , if you take all of these filters together , you take all these algorithms , you get what i call a filter bubble .
and your filter bubble is your own personal , unique universe of information that you live in online .
and what 's in your filter bubble depends on who you are , and it depends on what you do .
but the thing is that you do n't decide what gets in .
and more importantly , you do n't actually see what gets edited out .
so one of the problems with the filter bubble was discovered by some researchers at netflix .
and they were looking at the netflix queues , and they noticed something kind of funny that a lot of us probably have noticed , which is there are some movies that just sort of zip right up and out to our houses .
they enter the queue , they just zip right out .
so " iron man " zips right out , and " waiting for superman " can wait for a really long time .
what they discovered was that in our netflix queues there 's this epic struggle going on between our future aspirational selves and our more impulsive present selves .
you know we all want to be someone who has watched " rashomon , " but right now we want to watch " ace ventura " for the fourth time .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so the best editing gives us a bit of both .
it gives us a little bit of justin bieber and a little bit of afghanistan .
it gives us some information vegetables ; it gives us some information dessert .
and the challenge with these kinds of algorithmic filters , these personalized filters , is that , because they 're mainly looking at what you click on first , it can throw off that balance .
and instead of a balanced information diet , you can end up surrounded by information junk food .
what this suggests is actually that we may have the story about the internet wrong .
in a broadcast society - this is how the founding mythology goes - in a broadcast society , there were these gatekeepers , the editors , and they controlled the flows of information .
and along came the internet and it swept them out of the way , and it allowed all of us to connect together , and it was awesome .
but that 's not actually what 's happening right now .
what we 're seeing is more of a passing of the torch from human gatekeepers to algorithmic ones .
and the thing is that the algorithms do n't yet have the kind of embedded ethics that the editors did .
so if algorithms are going to curate the world for us , if they 're going to decide what we get to see and what we do n't get to see , then we need to make sure that they 're not just keyed to relevance .
we need to make sure that they also show us things that are uncomfortable or challenging or important - this is what ted does - other points of view .
and the thing is , we 've actually been here before as a society .
in 1915 , it 's not like newspapers were sweating a lot about their civic responsibilities .
then people noticed that they were doing something really important .
that , in fact , you could n't have a functioning democracy if citizens did n't get a good flow of information , that the newspapers were critical because they were acting as the filter , and then journalistic ethics developed .
it was n't perfect , but it got us through the last century .
and so now , we 're kind of back in 1915 on the web .
and we need the new gatekeepers to encode that kind of responsibility into the code that they 're writing .
i know that there are a lot of people here from facebook and from google - larry and sergey - people who have helped build the web as it is , and i 'm grateful for that .
but we really need you to make sure that these algorithms have encoded in them a sense of the public life , a sense of civic responsibility .
we need you to make sure that they 're transparent enough that we can see what the rules are that determine what gets through our filters .
and we need you to give us some control so that we can decide what gets through and what does n't .
because i think we really need the internet to be that thing that we all dreamed of it being .
we need it to connect us all together .
we need it to introduce us to new ideas and new people and different perspectives .
and it 's not going to do that if it leaves us all isolated in a web of one .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i want to open by quoting einstein 's wonderful statement , just so people will feel at ease that the great scientist of the 20th century also agrees with us , and also calls us to this action .
he said , " a human being is a part of the whole , called by us , the ' universe , ' - a part limited in time and space .
he experiences himself , his thoughts and feelings , as something separated from the rest , a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness .
this delusion is a kind of prison for us , restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us .
our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion , to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty . "
this insight of einstein 's is uncannily close to that of buddhist psychology , wherein compassion - " karuna , " it is called - is defined as , " the sensitivity to another 's suffering and the corresponding will to free the other from that suffering . "
it pairs closely with love , which is the will for the other to be happy , which requires , of course , that one feels some happiness oneself and wishes to share it .
this is perfect in that it clearly opposes self-centeredness and selfishness to compassion , the concern for others , and , further , it indicates that those caught in the cycle of self-concern suffer helplessly , while the compassionate are more free and , implicitly , more happy .
the dalai lama often states that compassion is his best friend .
it helps him when he is overwhelmed with grief and despair .
compassion helps him turn away from the feeling of his suffering as the most absolute , most terrible suffering anyone has ever had and broadens his awareness of the sufferings of others , even of the perpetrators of his misery and the whole mass of beings .
in fact , suffering is so huge and enormous , his own becomes less and less monumental .
and he begins to move beyond his self-concern into the broader concern for others .
and this immediately cheers him up , as his courage is stimulated to rise to the occasion .
thus , he uses his own suffering as a doorway to widening his circle of compassion .
he is a very good colleague of einstein 's , we must say .
now , i want to tell a story , which is a very famous story in the indian and buddhist tradition , of the great saint asanga who was a contemporary of augustine in the west and was sort of like the buddhist augustine .
and asanga lived 800 years after the buddha 's time .
and he was discontented with the state of people 's practice of the buddhist religion in india at that time .
and so he said , " i 'm sick of all this . nobody 's really living the doctrine .
they 're talking about love and compassion and wisdom and enlightenment , but they are acting selfish and pathetic .
so , buddha 's teaching has lost its momentum .
i know the next buddha will come a few thousand years from now , but exists currently in a certain heaven " - that 's maitreya - " so , i 'm going to go on a retreat and i 'm going to meditate and pray until the buddha maitreya reveals himself to me , and gives me a teaching or something to revive the practice of compassion in the world today . "
so he went on this retreat . and he meditated for three years and he did not see the future buddha maitreya .
and he left in disgust .
and as he was leaving , he saw a man - a funny little man sitting sort of part way down the mountain .
and he had a lump of iron .
and he was rubbing it with a cloth .
and he became interested in that .
he said , " well what are you doing ? "
and the man said , " i 'm making a needle . "
and he said , " that 's ridiculous . you ca n't make a needle by rubbing a lump of iron with a cloth . "
and the man said , " really ? " and he showed him a dish full of needles .
so he said , " okay , i get the point . "
he went back to his cave . he meditated again .
another three years , no vision . he leaves again .
this time , he comes down .
and as he 's leaving , he sees a bird making a nest on a cliff ledge .
and where it 's landing to bring the twigs to the cliff , its feathers brushes the rock - and it had cut the rock six to eight inches in . there was a cleft in the rock by the brushing of the feathers of generations of the birds .
so he said , " all right . i get the point . " he went back .
another three years .
again , no vision of maitreya after nine years .
and he again leaves , and this time : water dripping , making a giant bowl in the rock where it drips in a stream .
and so , again , he goes back . and after 12 years there is still no vision .
and he 's freaked out . and he wo n't even look left or right to see any encouraging vision .
and he comes to the town . he 's a broken person .
and there , in the town , he 's approached by a dog who comes like this - one of these terrible dogs you can see in some poor countries , even in america , i think , in some areas - and he 's looking just terrible .
and he becomes interested in this dog because it 's so pathetic , and it 's trying to attract his attention . and he sits down looking at the dog .
and the dog 's whole hindquarters are a complete open sore .
some of it is like gangrenous , and there are maggots in the flesh . and it 's terrible .
he thinks , " what can i do to fix up this dog ?
well , at least i can clean this wound and wash it . "
so , he takes it to some water . he 's about to clean , but then his awareness focuses on the maggots .
and he sees the maggots , and the maggots are kind of looking a little cute .
and they 're maggoting happily in the dog 's hindquarters there .
" well , if i clean the dog , i 'll kill the maggots . so how can that be ?
that 's it . i 'm a useless person and there 's no buddha , no maitreya , and everything is all hopeless .
and now i 'm going to kill the maggots ? "
so , he had a brilliant idea .
and he took a shard of something , and cut a piece of flesh from his thigh , and he placed it on ground .
he was not really thinking too carefully about the aspca .
he was just immediately caught with the situation .
so he thought , " i will take the maggots and put them on this piece of flesh , then clean the dog 's wounds , and then i 'll figure out what to do with the maggots . "
so he starts to do that . he ca n't grab the maggots .
apparently they wriggle around . they 're kind of hard to grab , these maggots .
so he says , " well , i 'll put my tongue on the dog 's flesh .
and then the maggots will jump on my warmer tongue " - the dog is kind of used up - " and then i 'll spit them one by one down on the thing . "
so he goes down , and he 's sticking his tongue out like this .
and he had to close his eyes , it 's so disgusting , and the smell and everything .
and then , suddenly , there 's a pfft , a noise like that .
he jumps back and there , of course , is the future buddha maitreya in a beautiful vision - rainbow lights , golden , jeweled , a plasma body , an exquisite mystic vision - that he sees .
and he says , " oh . " he bows .
but , being human , he 's immediately thinking of his next complaint .
so as he comes up from his first bow he says , " my lord , i 'm so happy to see you , but where have you been for 12 years ?
what is this ? "
and maitreya says , " i was with you . who do you think was making needles and making nests and dripping on rocks for you , mister dense ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " looking for the buddha in person , " he said .
and he said , " you did n't have , until this moment , real compassion .
and , until you have real compassion , you can not recognize love . "
" maitreya " means love , " the loving one , " in sanskrit .
and so he looked very dubious , asanga did .
and he said , " if you do n't believe me , just take me with you . "
and so he took the maitreya - it shrunk into a globe , a ball - took him on his shoulder .
and he ran into town in the marketplace , and he said , " rejoice ! rejoice !
the future buddha has come ahead of all predictions . here he is . "
and then pretty soon they started throwing rocks and stones at him - it was n't chautauqua , it was some other town - because they saw a demented looking , scrawny looking yogi man , like some kind of hippie , with a bleeding leg and a rotten dog on his shoulder , shouting that the future buddha had come .
so , naturally , they chased him out of town .
but on the edge of town , one elderly lady , a charwoman in the charnel ground , saw a jeweled foot on a jeweled lotus on his shoulder and then the dog , but she saw the jewel foot of the maitreya , and she offered a flower .
so that encouraged him , and he went with maitreya .
maitreya then took him to a certain heaven , which is the typical way a buddhist myth unfolds .
and maitreya then kept him in heaven for five years , dictating to him five complicated tomes of the methodology of how you cultivate compassion .
and then i thought i would share with you what that method is , or one of them .
a famous one , it 's called the " sevenfold causal method of developing compassion . "
and it begins first by one meditating and visualizing that all beings are with one - even animals too , but everyone is in human form .
the animals are in one of their human lives . the humans are human .
and then , among them , you think of your friends and loved ones , the circle at the table .
and you think of your enemies , and you think of the neutral ones .
and then you try to say , " well , the loved ones i love .
but , you know , after all , they 're nice to me .
i had fights with them . sometimes they were unfriendly .
i got mad . brothers can fight . parents and children can fight .
so , in a way , i like them so much because they 're nice to me .
while the neutral ones i do n't know . they could all be just fine .
and then the enemies i do n't like because they 're mean to me .
but they are nice to somebody . i could be them . "
and then the buddhists , of course , think that , because we 've all had infinite previous lives , we 've all been each other 's relatives , actually .
therefore all of you , in the buddhist view , in some previous life , although you do n't remember it and neither do i , have been my mother - for which i do apologize for the trouble i caused you .
and also , actually , i 've been your mother .
i 've been female , and i 've been every single one of yours ' mother in a previous life , the way the buddhists reflect .
so , my mother in this life is really great . but all of you in a way are part of the eternal mother .
you gave me that expression ; " the eternal mama , " you said . that 's wonderful .
so , that 's the way the buddhists do it .
a theist christian can think that all beings , even my enemies , are god 's children .
so , in that sense , we 're related .
so , they first create this foundation of equality .
so , we sort of reduce a little of the clinging to the ones we love - just in the meditation - and we open our mind to those we do n't know .
and we definitely reduce the hostility and the " i do n't want to be compassionate to them " to the ones we think of as the bad guys , the ones we hate and we do n't like .
and we do n't hate anyone , therefore . so we equalize . that 's very important .
and then the next thing we do is what is called " mother recognition . "
and that is , we think of every being as familiar , as family .
we expand . we take the feeling about remembering a mama , and we defuse that to all beings in this meditation .
and we see the mother in every being .
we see that look that the mother has on her face , looking at this child that is a miracle that she has produced from her own body , being a mammal , where she has true compassion , truly is the other , and identifies completely .
often the life of that other will be more important to her than her own life .
and that 's why it 's the most powerful form of altruism .
the mother is the model of all altruism for human beings , in spiritual traditions .
and so , we reflect until we can sort of see that motherly expression in all beings .
people laugh at me because , you know , i used to say that i used to meditate on mama cheney as my mom , when , of course , i was annoyed with him about all of his evil doings in iraq .
i used to meditate on george bush . he 's quite a cute mom in a female form .
he has his little ears and he smiles and he rocks you in his arms .
and you think of him as nursing you .
and then saddam hussein 's serious mustache is a problem , but you think of him as a mom .
and this is the way you do it . you take any being who looks weird to you , and you see how they could be familiar to you .
and you do that for a while , until you really feel that .
you can feel the familiarity of all beings .
nobody seems alien . they 're not " other . "
you reduce the feeling of otherness about beings .
then you move from there to remembering the kindness of mothers in general , if you can remember the kindness of your own mother , if you can remember the kindness of your spouse , or , if you are a mother yourself , how you were with your children .
and you begin to get very sentimental ; you cultivate sentimentality intensely .
you will even weep , perhaps , with gratitude and kindness .
and then you connect that with your feeling that everyone has that motherly possibility .
every being , even the most mean looking ones , can be motherly .
and then , third , you step from there to what is called " a feeling of gratitude . "
you want to repay that kindness that all beings have shown to you .
and then the fourth step , you go to what is called " lovely love . "
in each one of these you can take some weeks , or months , or days depending on how you do it , or you can do them in a run , this meditation .
and then you think of how lovely beings are when they are happy , when they are satisfied .
and every being looks beautiful when they are internally feeling a happiness .
their face does n't look like this . when they 're angry , they look ugly , every being , but when they 're happy they look beautiful .
and so you see beings in their potential happiness .
and you feel a love toward them and you want them to be happy , even the enemy .
we think jesus is being unrealistic when he says , " love thine enemy . "
he does say that , and we think he 's being unrealistic and sort of spiritual and highfalutin . " nice for him to say it , but i ca n't do that . "
but , actually , that 's practical .
if you love your enemy that means you want your enemy to be happy .
if your enemy was really happy , why would they bother to be your enemy ?
how boring to run around chasing you .
they would be relaxing somewhere having a good time .
so it makes sense to want your enemy to be happy , because they 'll stop being your enemy because that 's too much trouble .
but anyway , that 's the " lovely love . " and then finally , the fifth step is compassion , " universal compassion . "
and that is where you then look at the reality of all the beings you can think of .
and you look at them , and you see how they are .
and you realize how unhappy they are actually , mostly , most of the time .
you see that furrowed brow in people .
and then you realize they do n't even have compassion on themselves .
they 're driven by this duty and this obligation .
" i have to get that . i need more . i 'm not worthy . and i should do something . "
and they 're rushing around all stressed out .
and they think of it as somehow macho , hard discipline on themselves .
but actually they are cruel to themselves .
and , of course , they are cruel and ruthless toward others .
and they , then , never get any positive feedback .
and the more they succeed and the more power they have , the more unhappy they are .
and this is where you feel real compassion for them .
and you then feel you must act .
and the choice of the action , of course , hopefully will be more practical than poor asanga , who was fixing the maggots on the dog because he had that motivation , and whoever was in front of him , he wanted to help .
but , of course , that is impractical . he should have founded the aspca in the town and gotten some scientific help for dogs and maggots .
and i 'm sure he did that later . -lrb- laughter -rrb- but that just indicates the state of mind , you know .
and so the next step - the sixth step beyond " universal compassion " - is this thing where you 're linked with the needs of others in a true way , and you have compassion for yourself also , and it is n't sentimental only . you might be in fear of something .
some bad guy is making himself more and more unhappy being more and more mean to other people and getting punished in the future for it in various ways .
and in buddhism , they catch it in the future life .
of course in theistic religion they 're punished by god or whatever .
and materialism , they think they get out of it just by not existing , by dying , but they do n't .
and so they get reborn as whatever , you know .
never mind . i wo n't get into that .
but the next step is called " universal responsibility . "
and that is very important - the charter of compassion must lead us to develop through true compassion , what is called " universal responsibility . "
in the great teaching of his holiness the dalai lama that he always teaches everywhere , he says that that is the common religion of humanity : kindness .
but " kindness " means " universal responsibility . "
and that means whatever happens to other beings is happening to us : we are responsible for that , and we should take it and do whatever we can at whatever little level and small level that we can do it .
we absolutely must do that . there is no way not to do it .
and then , finally , that leads to a new orientation in life where we live equally for ourselves and for others and we are joyful and happy .
one thing we must n't think is that compassion makes you miserable .
compassion makes you happy .
the first person who is happy when you get great compassion is yourself , even if you have n't done anything yet for anybody else .
although , the change in your mind already does something for other beings : they can sense this new quality in yourself , and it helps them already , and gives them an example .
and that uncompassionate clock has just showed me that it 's all over .
so , practice compassion , read the charter , disseminate it and develop it within yourself .
do n't just think , " well , i 'm compassionate , " or " i 'm not compassionate , " and sort of think you 're stuck there .
you can develop this . you can diminish the non-compassion , the cruelty , the callousness , the neglect of others , and take universal responsibility for them .
and then , not only will god smile and the eternal mama will smile , but karen armstrong will smile .
thank you very much . -lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm going to talk to you today about hopefully converting fear into hope .
when we go to the physician today - when we go to the doctor 's office and we walk in , there are words that we just do n't want to hear .
there are words that we 're truly afraid of .
diabetes , cancer , parkinson 's , alzheimer 's , heart failure , lung failure - things that we know are debilitating diseases , for which there 's relatively little that can be done .
and what i want to lay out for you today is a different way of thinking about how to treat debilitating disease , why it 's important , why without it perhaps our health care system will melt down if you think it already has n't , and where we are clinically today , and where we might go tomorrow , and what some of the hurdles are .
and we 're going to do all of that in 18 minutes , i promise .
i want to start with this slide , because this slide sort of tells the story the way science magazine thinks of it .
this was an issue from 2002 that they published with a lot of different articles on the bionic human .
it was basically a regenerative medicine issue .
regenerative medicine is an extraordinarily simple concept that everybody can understand .
it 's simply accelerating the pace at which the body heals itself to a clinically relevant timescale .
so we know how to do this in many of the ways that are up there .
we know that if we have a damaged hip , you can put an artificial hip in .
and this is the idea that science magazine used on their front cover .
this is the complete antithesis of regenerative medicine .
this is not regenerative medicine .
regenerative medicine is what business week put up when they did a story about regenerative medicine not too long ago .
the idea is that instead of figuring out how to ameliorate symptoms with devices and drugs and the like - and i 'll come back to that theme a few times - instead of doing that , we will regenerate lost function of the body by regenerating the function of organs and damaged tissue .
so that at the end of the treatment , you are the same as you were at the beginning of the treatment .
very few good ideas - if you agree that this is a good idea - very few good ideas are truly novel .
and this is just the same .
if you look back in history , charles lindbergh , who was better known for flying airplanes , was actually one of the first people along with alexis carrel , one of the nobel laureates from rockefeller , to begin to think about , could you culture organs ?
and they published this book in 1937 , where they actually began to think about , what could you do in bio-reactors to grow whole organs ?
we 've come a long way since then .
i 'm going to share with you some of the exciting work that 's going on .
but before doing that , what i 'd like to do is share my depression about the health care system and the need for this with you .
many of the talks yesterday talked about improving the quality of life , and reducing poverty , and essentially increasing life expectancy all around the globe .
one of the challenges is that the richer we are , the longer we live .
and the longer we live , the more expensive it is to take care of our diseases as we get older .
this is simply the wealth of a country versus the percent of population over the age of 65 .
and you can basically see that the richer a country is , the older the people are within it .
why is this important ?
and why is this a particularly dramatic challenge right now ?
if the average age of your population is 30 , then the average kind of disease that you have to treat is maybe a broken ankle every now and again , maybe a little bit of asthma .
if the average age in your country is 45 to 55 , now the average person is looking at diabetes , early-onset diabetes , heart failure , coronary artery disease - things that are inherently more difficult to treat , and much more expensive to treat .
just have a look at the demographics in the u.s. here .
this is from " the untied states of america . "
in 1930 , there were 41 workers per retiree .
41 people who were basically outside of being really sick , paying for the one retiree who was experiencing debilitating disease .
in 2010 , two workers per retiree in the u.s.
and this is matched in every industrialized , wealthy country in the world .
how can you actually afford to treat patients when the reality of getting old looks like this ?
this is age versus cost of health care .
and you can see that right around age 45 , 40 to 45 , there 's a sudden spike in the cost of health care .
it 's actually quite interesting . if you do the right studies , you can look at how much you as an individual spend on your own health care , plotted over your lifetime .
and about seven years before you 're about to die , there 's a spike .
and you can actually - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - we wo n't get into that .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- there are very few things , very few things that you can really do that will change the way that you can treat these kinds of diseases and experience what i would call healthy aging .
i 'd suggest there are four things , and none of these things include an insurance system or a legal system .
all those things do is change who pays .
they do n't actually change what the actual cost of the treatment is .
one thing you can do is not treat . you can ration health care .
we wo n't talk about that anymore . it 's too depressing .
you can prevent .
obviously a lot of monies should be put into prevention .
but perhaps most interesting , to me anyway , and most important , is the idea of diagnosing a disease much earlier on in the progression , and then treating the disease to cure the disease instead of treating a symptom .
think of it in terms of diabetes , for instance .
today , with diabetes , what do we do ?
we diagnose the disease eventually , once it becomes symptomatic , and then we treat the symptom for 10 , 20 , 30 , 40 years .
and we do ok . insulin 's a pretty good therapy .
but eventually it stops working , and diabetes leads to a predictable onset of debilitating disease .
why could n't we just inject the pancreas with something to regenerate the pancreas early on in the disease , perhaps even before it was symptomatic ?
and it might be a little bit expensive at the time that we did it , but if it worked , we would truly be able to do something different .
this video , i think , gets across the concept that i 'm talking about quite dramatically .
this is a newt re-growing its limb .
if a newt can do this kind of thing , why ca n't we ?
i 'll actually show you some more important features about limb regeneration in a moment .
but what we 're talking about in regenerative medicine is doing this in every organ system of the body , for tissues and for organs themselves .
so today 's reality is that if we get sick , the message is we will treat your symptoms , and you need to adjust to a new way of life .
i would pose to you that tomorrow - and when tomorrow is we could debate , but it 's within the foreseeable future - we will talk about regenerative rehabilitation .
there 's a limb prosthetic up here , similar actually one on the soldier that 's come back from iraq .
there are 370 soldiers that have come back from iraq that have lost limbs .
imagine if instead of facing that , they could actually face the regeneration of that limb .
it 's a wild concept .
i 'll show you where we are at the moment in working towards that concept .
but it 's applicable , again , to every organ system .
how can we do that ?
the way to do that is to develop a conversation with the body .
we need to learn to speak the body 's language .
and to switch on processes that we knew how to do when we were a fetus .
a mammalian fetus , if it loses a limb during the first trimester of pregnancy , will re-grow that limb .
so our dna has the capacity to do these kinds of wound-healing mechanisms .
it 's a natural process , but it is lost as we age .
in a child , before the age of about six months , if they lose their fingertip in an accident , they 'll re-grow their fingertip .
by the time they 're five , they wo n't be able to do that anymore .
so to engage in that conversation with the body , we need to speak the body 's language .
and there are certain tools in our toolbox that allow us to do this today .
i 'm going to give you an example of three of these tools through which to converse with the body .
the first is cellular therapies .
clearly , we heal ourselves in a natural process , using cells to do most of the work .
therefore , if we can find the right cells and implant them in the body , they may do the healing .
secondly , we can use materials .
we heard yesterday about the importance of new materials .
if we can invent materials , design materials , or extract materials from a natural environment , then we might be able to have those materials induce the body to heal itself .
and finally , we may be able to use smart devices that will offload the work of the body and allow it to heal .
i 'm going to show you an example of each of these , and i 'm going to start with materials .
steve badylak - who 's at the university of pittsburgh - about a decade ago had a remarkable idea .
and that idea was that the small intestine of a pig , if you threw away all the cells , and if you did that in a way that allowed it to remain biologically active , may contain all of the necessary factors and signals that would signal the body to heal itself .
and he asked a very important question .
he asked the question , if i take that material , which is a natural material that usually induces healing in the small intestine , and i place it somewhere else on a person 's body , would it give a tissue-specific response , or would it make small intestine if i tried to make a new ear ?
i would n't be telling you this story if it were n't compelling .
the picture i 'm about to show you -lrb- laughter -rrb- however , for those of you that are even the slightest bit squeamish - even though you may not like to admit it in front of your friends - the lights are down . this is a good time to look at your feet , check your blackberry , do anything other than look at the screen .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- what i 'm about to show you is a diabetic ulcer .
and although - it 's good to laugh before we look at this .
this is the reality of diabetes .
i think a lot of times we hear about diabetics , diabetic ulcers , we just do n't connect the ulcer with the eventual treatment , which is amputation , if you ca n't heal it .
so i 'm going to put the slide up now . it wo n't be up for long .
this is a diabetic ulcer . it 's tragic .
the treatment for this is amputation .
this is an older lady . she has cancer of the liver as well as diabetes , and has decided to die with what 's left of her body intact .
and this lady decided , after a year of attempted treatment of that ulcer , that she would try this new therapy that steve invented .
that 's what the wound looked like 11 weeks later .
that material contained only natural signals .
and that material induced the body to switch back on a healing response that it did n't have before .
there 's going to be a couple more distressing slides for those of you - i 'll let you know when you can look again .
this is a horse . the horse is not in pain .
if the horse was in pain , i would n't show you this slide .
the horse just has another nostril that 's developed because of a riding accident .
just a few weeks after treatment - in this case , taking that material , turning it into a gel , and packing that area , and then repeating the treatment a few times - and the horse heals up .
and if you took an ultrasound of that area , it would look great .
here 's a dolphin where the fin 's been re-attached .
there are now 400,000 patients around the world who have used that material to heal their wounds .
could you regenerate a limb ?
darpa just gave steve 15 million dollars to lead an eight-institution project to begin the process of asking that question .
and i 'll show you the 15 million dollar picture .
this is a 78 year-old man who 's lost the end of his fingertip .
remember that i mentioned before the children who lose their fingertips .
after treatment that 's what it looks like .
this is happening today .
this is clinically relevant today .
there are materials that do this . here are the heart patches .
but could you go a little further ?
could you , say , instead of using material , can i take some cells along with the material , and remove a damaged piece of tissue , put a bio-degradable material on there ?
you can see here a little bit of heart muscle beating in a dish .
this was done by teruo okano at tokyo women 's hospital .
he can actually grow beating tissue in a dish .
he chills the dish , it changes its properties and he peels it right out of the dish .
it 's the coolest stuff .
now i 'm going to show you cell-based regeneration .
and what i 'm going to show you here is stem cells being removed from the hip of a patient .
again , if you 're squeamish , you do n't want to watch .
but this one 's kind of cool .
so this is a bypass operation , just like what al gore had , with a difference .
in this case , at the end of the bypass operation , you 're going to see the stem cells from the patient that were removed at the beginning of the procedure being injected directly into the heart of the patient .
and i 'm standing up here because at one point i 'm going to show you just how early this technology is .
here go the stem cells , right into the beating heart of the patient .
and if you look really carefully , it 's going to be right around this point you 'll actually see a back-flush .
you see the cells coming back out .
we need all sorts of new technology , new devices , to get the cells to the right place at the right time .
just a little bit of data , a tiny bit of data .
this was a randomized trial .
at this time this was an n of 20 . now there 's an n of about 100 .
basically , if you take an extremely sick patient and you give them a bypass , they get a little bit better .
if you give them stem cells as well as their bypass , for these particular patients , they became asymptomatic .
these are now two years out .
the coolest thing would be is if you could diagnose the disease early , and prevent the onset of the disease to a bad state .
this is the same procedure , but now done minimally invasively , with only three holes in the body where they 're taking the heart and simply injecting stem cells through a laparoscopic procedure .
there go the cells .
we do n't have time to go into all of those details , but basically , that works too .
you can take patients who are less sick , and bring them back to an almost asymptomatic state through that kind of therapy .
here 's another example of stem-cell therapy that is n't quite clinical yet , but i think very soon will be .
this is the work of kacey marra from pittsburgh , along with a number of colleagues around the world .
they 've decided that liposuction fluid , which - in the united states , we have a lot of liposuction fluid .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's a great source of stem cells .
stem cells are packed in that liposuction fluid .
so you could go in , you could get your tummy-tuck .
out comes the liposuction fluid , and in this case , the stem cells are isolated and turned into neurons .
all done in the lab .
and i think fairly soon , you will see patients being treated with their own fat-derived , or adipose-derived , stem cells .
i talked before about the use of devices to dramatically change the way we treat disease .
here 's just one example before i close up .
this is equally tragic .
we have a very abiding and heartbreaking partnership with our colleagues at the institute for surgical research in the us army , who have to treat the now 11,000 kids that have come back from iraq .
many of those patients are very severely burned .
and if there 's anything that 's been learned about burn , it 's that we do n't know how to treat it .
everything that is done to treat burn - basically we do a sodding approach .
we make something over here , and then we transplant it onto the site of the wound , and we try and get the two to take .
in this case here , a new , wearable bio-reactor has been designed - it should be tested clinically later this year at isr - by joerg gerlach in pittsburgh .
and that bio-reactor will lay down in the wound bed .
the gun that you see there sprays cells .
that 's going to spray cells over that area .
the reactor will serve to fertilize the environment , deliver other things as well at the same time , and therefore we will seed that lawn , as opposed to try the sodding approach .
it 's a completely different way of doing it .
so my 18 minutes is up .
so let me finish up with some good news , and maybe a little bit of bad news .
the good news is that this is happening today .
it 's very powerful work .
clearly the images kind of get that across .
it 's incredibly difficult because it 's highly inter-disciplinary .
almost every field of science engineering and clinical practice is involved in trying to get this to happen .
a number of governments , and a number of regions , have recognized that this is a new way to treat disease .
the japanese government were perhaps the first , when they decided to invest first 3 billion , later another 2 billion in this field .
it 's no coincidence .
japan is the oldest country on earth in terms of its average age .
they need this to work or their health system dies .
so they 're putting a lot of strategic investment focused in this area .
the european union , same thing .
china , the same thing .
china just launched a national tissue-engineering center .
the first year budget was 250 million us dollars .
in the united states we 've had a somewhat different approach .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- oh , for al gore to come and be in the real world as president .
we 've had a different approach .
and the approach has basically been to just sort of fund things as they come along .
but there 's been no strategic investment to bring all of the necessary things to bear and focus them in a careful way .
and i 'm going to finish up with a quote , maybe a little cheap shot , at the director of the nih , who 's a very charming man .
myself and jay vacanti from harvard went to visit with him and a number of his directors of his institute just a few months ago , to try and convince him that it was time to take just a little piece of that 27.5 billion dollars that he 's going to get next year and focus it , in a strategic way , to make sure we can accelerate the pace at which these things get to patients .
and at the end of a very testy meeting , what the nih director said was , " your vision is larger than our appetite . "
i 'd like to close by saying that no one 's going to change our vision , but together we can change his appetite .
thank you .
do you know how many choices you make in a typical day ?
do you know how many choices you make in typical week ?
i recently did a survey with over 2,000 americans , and the average number of choices that the typical american reports making is about 70 in a typical day .
there was also recently a study done with ceos in which they followed ceos around for a whole week .
and these scientists simply documented all the various tasks that these ceos engaged in and how much time they spent engaging in making decisions related to these tasks .
and they found that the average ceo engaged in about 139 tasks in a week .
each task was made up of many , many , many sub-choices of course .
50 percent of their decisions were made in nine minutes or less .
only about 12 percent of the decisions did they make an hour or more of their time .
think about your own choices .
do you know how many choices make it into your nine minute category versus your one hour category ?
how well do you think you 're doing at managing those choices ?
today i want to talk about one of the biggest modern day choosing problems that we have , which is the choice overload problem .
i want to talk about the problem and some potential solutions .
now as i talk about this problem , i 'm going to have some questions for you and i 'm going to want to know your answers .
so when i ask you a question , since i 'm blind , only raise your hand if you want to burn off some calories .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- otherwise , when i ask you a question , and if your answer is yes , so for my first question for you today : are you guys ready to hear about the choice overload problem ?
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
so when i was a graduate student at stanford university , i used to go to this very , very upscale grocery store ; at least at that time it was truly upscale .
it was a store called draeger 's .
now this store , it was almost like going to an amusement park .
they had 250 different kinds of mustards and vinegars and over 500 different kinds of fruits and vegetables and more than two dozen different kinds of bottled water - and this was during a time when we actually used to drink tap water .
i used to love going to this store , but on one occasion i asked myself , well how come you never buy anything ?
here 's their olive oil aisle .
they had over 75 different kinds of olive oil , including those that were in a locked case that came from thousand-year-old olive trees .
so i one day decided to pay a visit to the manager , and i asked the manager , " is this model of offering people all this choice really working ? "
and he pointed to the busloads of tourists that would show up everyday , with cameras ready usually .
we decided to do a little experiment , and we picked jam for our experiment .
here 's their jam aisle .
they had 348 different kinds of jam .
we set up a little tasting booth right near the entrance of the store .
we there put out six different flavors of jam or 24 different flavors of jam , and we looked at two things : first , in which case were people more likely to stop , sample some jam ?
more people stopped when there were 24 , about 60 percent , than when there were six , about 40 percent .
the next thing we looked at is in which case were people more likely to buy a jar of jam .
now we see the opposite effect .
of the people who stopped when there were 24 , only three percent of them actually bought a jar of jam .
of the people who stopped when there were six , well now we saw that 30 percent of them actually bought a jar of jam .
now if you do the math , people were at least six times more likely to buy a jar of jam if they encountered six than if they encountered 24 .
now choosing not to buy a jar of jam is probably good for us - at least it 's good for our waistlines - but it turns out that this choice overload problem affects us even in very consequential decisions .
we choose not to choose , even when it goes against our best self-interests .
so now for the topic of today : financial savings .
now i 'm going to describe to you a study i did with gur huberman , emir kamenica , wei jang where we looked at the retirement savings decisions of nearly a million americans from about 650 plans all in the u.s.
and what we looked at was whether the number of fund offerings available in a retirement savings plan , the 401 -lrb- k -rrb- plan , does that affect people 's likelihood to save more for tomorrow .
and what we found was that indeed there was a correlation .
so in these plans , we had about 657 plans that ranged from offering people anywhere from two to 59 different fund offerings .
and what we found was that , the more funds offered , indeed , there was less participation rate .
so if you look at the extremes , those plans that offered you two funds , participation rates were around in the mid-70s - still not as high as we want it to be .
in those plans that offered nearly 60 funds , participation rates have now dropped to about the 60th percentile .
now it turns out that even if you do choose to participate when there are more choices present , even then , it has negative consequences .
so for those people who did choose to participate , the more choices available , the more likely people were to completely avoid stocks or equity funds .
the more choices available , the more likely they were to put all their money in pure money market accounts .
now neither of these extreme decisions are the kinds of decisions that any of us would recommend for people when you 're considering their future financial well-being .
well , over the past decade , we have observed three main negative consequences to offering people more and more choices .
they 're more likely to delay choosing - procrastinate even when it goes against their best self-interest .
they 're more likely to make worse choices - worse financial choices , medical choices .
they 're more likely to choose things that make them less satisfied , even when they do objectively better .
the main reason for this is because , we might enjoy gazing at those giant walls of mayonnaises , mustards , vinegars , jams , but we ca n't actually do the math of comparing and contrasting and actually picking from that stunning display .
so what i want to propose to you today are four simple techniques - techniques that we have tested in one way or another in different research venues - that you can easily apply in your businesses .
the first : cut .
you 've heard it said before , but it 's never been more true than today , that less is more .
people are always upset when i say , " cut . "
they 're always worried they 're going to lose shelf space .
but in fact , what we 're seeing more and more is that if you are willing to cut , get rid of those extraneous redundant options , well there 's an increase in sales , there 's a lowering of costs , there is an improvement of the choosing experience .
when proctor & gamble went from 26 different kinds of head & shoulders to 15 , they saw an increase in sales by 10 percent .
when the golden cat corporation got rid of their 10 worst-selling cat litter products , they saw an increase in profits by 87 percent - a function of both increase in sales and lowering of costs .
you know , the average grocery store today offers you 45,000 products .
the typical walmart today offers you 100,000 products .
but the ninth largest retailer , the ninth biggest retailer in the world today is aldi , and it offers you only 1,400 products - one kind of canned tomato sauce .
now in the financial savings world , i think one of the best examples that has recently come out on how to best manage the choice offerings has actually been something that david laibson was heavily involved in designing , which was the program that they have at harvard .
every single harvard employee is now automatically enrolled in a lifecycle fund .
for those people who actually want to choose , they 're given 20 funds , not 300 or more funds .
you know , often , people say , " i do n't know how to cut .
they 're all important choices . "
and the first thing i do is i ask the employees , " tell me how these choices are different from one another .
and if your employees ca n't tell them apart , neither can your consumers . "
now before we started our session this afternoon , i had a chat with gary .
and gary said that he would be willing to offer people in this audience an all-expenses-paid free vacation to the most beautiful road in the world .
here 's a description of the road .
and i 'd like you to read it .
and now i 'll give you a few seconds to read it and then i want you to clap your hands if you 're ready to take gary up on his offer .
-lrb- light clapping -rrb- okay . anybody who 's ready to take him up on his offer .
is that all ?
all right , let me show you some more about this .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you guys knew there was a trick , did n't you .
-lrb- honk -rrb- now who 's ready to go on this trip .
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- i think i might have actually heard more hands .
all right .
now in fact , you had objectively more information the first time around than the second time around , but i would venture to guess that you felt that it was more real the second time around .
because the pictures made it feel more real to you .
which brings me to the second technique for handling the choice overload problem , which is concretization .
that in order for people to understand the differences between the choices , they have to be able to understand the consequences associated with each choice , and that the consequences need to be felt in a vivid sort of way , in a very concrete way .
why do people spend an average of 15 to 30 percent more when they use an atm card or a credit card as opposed to cash ?
because it does n't feel like real money .
and it turns out that making it feel more concrete can actually be a very positive tool to use in getting people to save more .
so a study that i did with shlomo benartzi and alessandro previtero , we did a study with people at ing - employees that are all working at ing - and now these people were all in a session where they 're doing enrollment for their 401 -lrb- k -rrb- plan .
and during that session , we kept the session exactly the way it used to be , but we added one little thing .
the one little thing we added was we asked people to just think about all the positive things that would happen in your life if you saved more .
by doing that simple thing , there was an increase in enrollment by 20 percent and there was an increase in the amount of people willing to save or the amount that they were willing to put down into their savings account by four percent .
the third technique : categorization .
we can handle more categories than we can handle choices .
so for example , here 's a study we did in a magazine aisle .
it turns out that in wegmans grocery stores up and down the northeast corridor , the magazine aisles range anywhere from 331 different kinds of magazines all the way up to 664 .
but you know what ?
if i show you 600 magazines and i divide them up into 10 categories , versus i show you 400 magazines and divide them up into 20 categories , you believe that i have given you more choice and a better choosing experience if i gave you the 400 than if i gave you the 600 .
because the categories tell me how to tell them apart .
here are two different jewelry displays .
one is called " jazz " and the other one is called " swing . "
if you think the display on the left is swing and the display on the right is jazz , clap your hands .
-lrb- light clapping -rrb- okay , there 's some .
if you think the one on the left is jazz and the one on the right is swing , clap your hands .
okay , a bit more .
now it turns out you 're right .
the one on the left is jazz and the one on the right is swing , but you know what ?
this is a highly useless categorization scheme .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the categories need to say something to the chooser , not the choice-maker .
and you often see that problem when it comes down to those long lists of all these funds .
who are they actually supposed to be informing ?
my fourth technique : condition for complexity .
it turns out we can actually handle a lot more information than we think we can , we 've just got to take it a little easier .
we have to gradually increase the complexity .
i 'm going to show you one example of what i 'm talking about .
let 's take a very , very complicated decision : buying a car .
here 's a german car manufacturer that gives you the opportunity to completely custom make your car .
you 've got to make 60 different decisions , completely make up your car .
now these decisions vary in the number of choices that they offer per decision .
car colors , exterior car colors - i 've got 56 choices .
engines , gearshift - four choices .
so now what i 'm going to do is i 'm going to vary the order in which these decisions appear .
so half of the customers are going to go from high choice , 56 car colors , to low choice , four gearshifts .
the other half of the customers are going to go from low choice , four gearshifts , to 56 car colors , high choice .
what am i going to look at ?
how engaged you are .
if you keep hitting the default button per decision , that means you 're getting overwhelmed , that means i 'm losing you .
what you find is the people who go from high choice to low choice , they 're hitting that default button over and over and over again .
we 're losing them .
they go from low choice to high choice , they 're hanging in there .
it 's the same information . it 's the same number of choices .
the only thing that i have done is i have varied the order in which that information is presented .
if i start you off easy , i learn how to choose .
even though choosing gearshift does n't tell me anything about my preferences for interior decor , it still prepares me for how to choose .
it also gets me excited about this big product that i 'm putting together , so i 'm more willing to be motivated to be engaged .
so let me recap .
i have talked about four techniques for mitigating the problem of choice overload - cut - get rid of the extraneous alternatives ; concretize - make it real ; categorize - we can handle more categories , less choices ; condition for complexity .
all of these techniques that i 'm describing to you today are designed to help you manage your choices - better for you , you can use them on yourself , better for the people that you are serving .
because i believe that the key to getting the most from choice is to be choosy about choosing .
and the more we 're able to be choosy about choosing the better we will be able to practice the art of choosing .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i have the answer to a question that we 've all asked .
the question is , why is it that the letter x represents the unknown ?
now i know we learned that in math class , but now it 's everywhere in the culture - the x prize , the x-files , project x , tedx .
where 'd that come from ?
about six years ago i decided that i would learn arabic , which turns out to be a supremely logical language .
to write a word or a phrase or a sentence in arabic is like crafting an equation , because every part is extremely precise and carries a lot of information .
that 's one of the reasons so much of what we 've come to think of as western science and mathematics and engineering was really worked out in the first few centuries of the common era by the persians and the arabs and the turks .
this includes the little system in arabic called al-jebra .
and al-jebr roughly translates to " the system for reconciling disparate parts . "
al-jebr finally came into english as algebra .
one example among many .
the arabic texts containing this mathematical wisdom finally made their way to europe - which is to say spain - in the 11th and 12th centuries .
and when they arrived there was tremendous interest in translating this wisdom into a european language .
but there were problems .
one problem is there are some sounds in arabic that just do n't make it through a european voice box without lots of practice .
trust me on that one .
also , those very sounds tend not to be represented by the characters that are available in european languages .
here 's one of the culprits .
this is the letter sheen , and it makes the sound we think of as sh - " sh . "
it 's also the very first letter of the word shalan , which means " something " just like the the english word " something " - some undefined , unknown thing .
now in arabic , we can make this definite by adding the definite article " al . "
so this is al-shalan - the unknown thing .
and this is a word that appears throughout early mathematics , such as this 10th century derivation of proofs .
the problem for the medieval spanish scholars who were tasked with translating this material is that the letter sheen and the word shalan ca n't be rendered into spanish because spanish does n't have that sh , that " sh " sound .
so by convention , they created a rule in which they borrowed the ck sound , " ck " sound , from the classical greek in the form of the letter kai .
later when this material was translated into a common european language , which is to say latin , they simply replaced the greek kai with the latin x.
and once that happened , once this material was in latin , it formed the basis for mathematics textbooks for almost 600 years .
but now we have the answer to our question .
why is it that x is the unknown ?
x is the unknown because you ca n't say " sh " in spanish .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i thought that was worth sharing .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm a garbage man .
and you might find it interesting that i became a garbage man , because i absolutely hate waste .
i hope , within the next 10 minutes , to change the way you think about a lot of the stuff in your life .
and i 'd like to start at the very beginning .
think back when you were just a kid .
how did look at the stuff in your life ?
perhaps it was like these toddler rules : it 's my stuff if i saw it first .
the entire pile is my stuff if i 'm building something .
the more stuff that 's mine , the better .
and of course , it 's your stuff if it 's broken .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- well after spending about 20 years in the recycling industry , it 's become pretty clear to me that we do n't necessarily leave these toddler rules behind as we develop into adults .
and let me tell you why i have that perspective .
because each and every day at our recycling plants around the world we handle about one million pounds of people 's discarded stuff .
now a million pounds a day sounds like a lot of stuff , but it 's a tiny drop of the durable goods that are disposed each and every year around the world - well less than one percent .
in fact , the united nations estimates that there 's about 85 billion pounds a year of electronics waste that gets discarded around the world each and every year - and that 's one of the most rapidly growing parts of our waste stream .
and if you throw in other durable goods like automobiles and so forth , that number well more than doubles .
and of course , the more developed the country , the bigger these mountains .
now when you see these mountains , most people think of garbage .
we see above-ground mines .
and the reason we see mines is because there 's a lot of valuable raw materials that went into making all of this stuff in the first place .
and it 's becoming increasingly important that we figure out how to extract these raw materials from these extremely complicated waste streams .
because as we 've heard all week at ted , the world 's getting to be a smaller place with more people in it who want more and more stuff .
and of course , they want the toys and the tools that many of us take for granted .
and what goes into making those toys and tools that we use every single day ?
it 's mostly many types of plastics and many types of metals .
and the metals , we typically get from ore that we mine in ever widening mines and ever deepening mines around the world .
and the plastics , we get from oil , which we go to more remote locations and drill ever deeper wells to extract .
and these practices have significant economic and environmental implications that we 're already starting to see today .
the good news is we are starting to recover materials from our end-of-life stuff and starting to recycle our end-of-life stuff , particularly in regions of the world like here in europe that have recycling policies in place that require that this stuff be recycled in a responsible manner .
most of what 's extracted from our end-of-life stuff , if it makes it to a recycler , are the metals .
to put that in perspective - and i 'm using steel as a proxy here for metals , because it 's the most common metal - if your stuff makes it to a recycler , probably over 90 percent of the metals are going to be recovered and reused for another purpose .
plastics are a whole other story : well less than 10 percent are recovered .
in fact , it 's more like five percent .
most of it 's incinerated or landfilled .
now most people think that 's because plastics are a throw-away material , have very little value .
but actually , plastics are several times more valuable than steel .
and there 's more plastics produced and consumed around the world on a volume basis every year than steel .
so why is such a plentiful and valuable material not recovered at anywhere near the rate of the less valuable material ?
well it 's predominantly because metals are very easy to recycle from other materials and from one another .
they have very different densities .
they have different electrical and magnetic properties .
and they even have different colors .
so it 's very easy for either humans or machines to separate these metals from one another and from other materials .
plastics have overlapping densities over a very narrow range .
they have either identical or very similar electrical and magnetic properties .
and any plastic can be any color , as you probably well know .
so the traditional ways of separating materials just simply do n't work for plastics .
another consequence of metals being so easy to recycle by humans is that a lot of our stuff from the developed world - and sadly to say , particularly from the united states , where we do n't have any recycling policies in place like here in europe - finds its way to developing countries for low-cost recycling .
people , for as little as a dollar a day , pick through our stuff .
they extract what they can , which is mostly the metals - circuit boards and so forth - and they leave behind mostly what they ca n't recover , which is , again , mostly the plastics .
or they burn the plastics to get to the metals in burn houses like you see here .
and they extract the metals by hand .
now while this may be the low-economic-cost solution , this is certainly not the low-environmental or human health-and-safety solution .
i call this environmental arbitrage .
and it 's not fair , it 's not safe and it 's not sustainable .
now because the plastics are so plentiful - and by the way , those other methods do n't lead to the recovery of plastics , obviously - but people do try to recover the plastics .
this is just one example .
this is a photo i took standing on the rooftops of one of the largest slums in the world in mumbai , india .
they store the plastics on the roofs .
they bring them below those roofs into small workshops like these , and people try very hard to separate the plastics , by color , by shape , by feel , by any technique they can .
and sometimes they 'll resort to what 's known as the " burn and sniff " technique where they 'll burn the plastic and smell the fumes to try to determine the type of plastic .
none of these techniques result in any amount of recycling in any significant way .
and by the way , please do n't try this technique at home .
so what are we to do about this space-age material , at least what we used to call a space-aged material , these plastics ?
well i certainly believe that it 's far too valuable and far too abundant to keep putting back in the ground or certainly send up in smoke .
so about 20 years ago , i literally started in my garage tinkering around , trying to figure out how to separate these very similar materials from each other , and eventually enlisted a lot of my friends , in the mining world actually , and in the plastics world , and we started going around to mining laboratories around the world .
because after all , we 're doing above-ground mining .
and we eventually broke the code .
this is the last frontier of recycling .
it 's the last major material to be recovered in any significant amount on the earth .
and we finally figured out how to do it .
and in the process , we started recreating how the plastics industry makes plastics .
the traditional way to make plastics is with oil or petrochemicals .
you breakdown the molecules , you recombine them in very specific ways , to make all the wonderful plastics that we enjoy each and every day .
we said , there 's got to be a more sustainable way to make plastics .
and not just sustainable from an environmental standpoint , sustainable from an economic standpoint as well .
well a good place to start is with waste .
it certainly does n't cost as much as oil , and it 's plentiful , as i hope that you 've been able to see from the photographs .
and because we 're not breaking down the plastic into molecules and recombining them , we 're using a mining approach to extract the materials .
we have significantly lower capital costs in our plant equipment .
we have enormous energy savings .
i do n't know how many other projects on the planet right now can save 80 to 90 percent of the energy compared to making something the traditional way .
and instead of plopping down several hundred million dollars to build a chemical plant that will only make one type of plastic for its entire life , our plants can make any type of plastic we feed them .
and we make a drop-in replacement for that plastic that 's made from petrochemicals .
our customers get to enjoy huge co2 savings .
they get to close the loop with their products .
and they get to make more sustainable products .
in the short time period i have , i want to show you a little bit of a sense about how we do this .
it starts with metal recyclers who shred our stuff into very small bits .
they recover the metals and leave behind what 's called shredder residue - it 's their waste - a very complex mixture of materials , but predominantly plastics .
we take out the things that are n't plastics , such as the metals they missed , carpeting , foam , rubber , wood , glass , paper , you name it .
even an occasional dead animal , unfortunately .
and it goes in the first part of our process here , which is more like traditional recycling .
we 're sieving the material , we 're using magnets , we 're using air classification .
it looks like the willy wonka factory at this point .
at the end of this process , we have a mixed plastic composite : many different types of plastics and many different grades of plastics .
this goes into the more sophisticated part of our process , and the really hard work , multi-step separation process begins .
we grind the plastic down to about the size of your small fingernail .
we use a very highly automated process to sort those plastics , not only by type , but by grade .
and out the end of that part of the process come little flakes of plastic : one type , one grade .
we then use optical sorting to color sort this material .
we blend it in 50,000-lb. blending silos .
we push that material to extruders where we melt it , push it through small die holes , make spaghetti-like plastic strands .
and we chop those strands into what are called pellets .
and this becomes the currency of the plastics industry .
this is the same material that you would get from oil .
and today , we 're producing it from your old stuff , and it 's going right back into your new stuff .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so now , instead of your stuff ending up on a hillside in a developing country or literally going up in smoke , you can find your old stuff back on top of your desk in new products , in your office , or back at work in your home .
and these are just a few examples of companies that are buying our plastic , replacing virgin plastic , to make their new products .
so i hope i 've changed the way you look at at least some of the stuff in your life .
we took our clues from mother nature .
mother nature wastes very little , reuses practically everything .
and i hope that you stop looking at yourself as a consumer - that 's a label i 've always hated my entire life - and think of yourself as just using resources in one form , until they can be transformed to another form for another use later in time .
and finally , i hope you agree with me to change that last toddler rule just a little bit to : " if it 's broken , it 's my stuff . "
thank you for your time .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so i 'm going to tell you a little bit about reimagining food .
i 've been interested in food for a long time .
i taught myself to cook with a bunch of big books like this .
i went to chef school in france .
and there is a way the world both envisions food , the way the world writes about food and learns about food .
and it 's largely what you would find in these books .
and it 's a wonderful thing .
but there 's some things that have been going on since this idea of food was established .
in the last 20 years , people have realized that science has a tremendous amount to do with food .
in fact , understanding why cooking works requires knowing the science of cooking - some of the chemistry , some of the physics and so forth .
but that 's not in any of those books .
there 's also a tremendous number of techniques that chefs have developed , some about new aesthetics , new approaches to food .
there 's a chef in spain named ferran adria .
he 's developed a very avant-garde cuisine .
a guy in england called heston blumenthal , he 's developed his avant-garde cuisine .
none of the techniques that these people have developed over the course of the last 20 years is in any of those books .
none of them are taught in cooking schools .
in order to learn them , you have to go work in those restaurants .
and finally , there 's the old way of viewing food is the old way .
and so a few years ago - fours years ago , actually - i set out to say , is there a way we can communicate science and technique and wonder ?
is there a way we can show people food in a way they have not seen it before ?
so we tried , and i 'll show you what we came up with .
this is a picture called a cutaway .
this is actually the first picture i took in the book .
the idea here is to explain what happens when you steam broccoli .
and this magic view allows you to see all of what 's happening while the broccoli steams .
then each of the different little pieces around it explain some fact .
and the hope was two-fold .
one is you can actually explain what happens when you steam broccoli .
but the other thing is that maybe we could seduce people into stuff that was a little more technical , maybe a little bit more scientific , maybe a little bit more chef-y than they otherwise would have .
because with that beautiful photo , maybe i can also package this little box here that talks about how steaming and boiling actually take different amounts of time .
steaming ought to be faster .
it turns out it is n't because of something called film condensation , and this explains that .
well , that first cutaway picture worked , so we said , " okay , let 's do some more . "
so here 's another one .
we discovered why woks are the shape they are .
this shaped wok does n't work very well ; this caught fire three times .
but we had a philosophy , which is it only has to look good for a thousandth of a second .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and one of our canning cutaways .
once you start cutting things in half , you kind of get carried away , so you see we cut the jars in half as well as the pan .
and each of these text blocks explains a key thing that 's going on .
in this case , boiling water canning is for canning things that are already pretty acidic .
you do n't have to heat them up as hot as you would something you do pressure canning because bacterial spores ca n't grow in the acid .
so this is great for pickled vegetables , which is what we 're canning here .
here 's our hamburger cutaway .
one of our philosophies in the book is that no dish is really intrinsically any better than any other dish .
so you can lavish all the same care , all the same technique , on a hamburger as you would on some much more fancy dish .
and if you do lavish as much technique as possible , and you try to make the highest quality hamburger , it gets to be a little bit involved .
the new york times ran a piece after my book was delayed and it was called " the wait for the 30-hour hamburger just got longer . "
because our hamburger recipe , our ultimate hamburger recipe , if you make the buns and you marinate the meat and you do all this stuff , it does take about 30 hours .
of course , you 're not actually working the whole time .
most of the time is kind of sitting there .
the point of this cutaway is to show people a view of hamburgers they have n't seen before and to explain the physics of hamburgers and the chemistry of hamburgers , because , believe it or not , there is something to the physics and chemistry - in particular , those flames underneath the burger .
most of the characteristic char-grilled taste does n't come from the wood or the charcoal .
buying mesquite charcoal will not actually make that much difference .
mostly it comes from fat pyrolyzing , or burning .
so it 's the fat that drips down and flares up that causes the characteristic taste .
now you might wonder , how do we make these cutaways ?
most people assume we use photoshop .
and the answer is : no , not really ; we use a machine shop .
and it turns out , the best way to cut things in half is to actually cut them in half .
so we have two halves of one of the best kitchens in the world .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we cut a $ 5,000 restaurant oven in half .
the manufacturer said , " what would it take for you to cut one in half ? "
i said , " it would have to show up free . "
and so it showed up , we used it a little while , we cut it in half .
now you can also see a little bit how we did some of these shots .
we would glue a piece of pyrex or heat-resistant glass in front .
we used a red , very high-temperature silicon to do that .
the great thing is , when you cut something in half , you have another half .
so you photograph that in exactly the same position , and then you can substitute in - and that part does use photoshop - just the edges .
so it 's very much like in a hollywood movie where a guy flies through the air , supported by wires , and then they take the wires away digitally so you 're flying through the air .
in most cases , though , there was no glass .
like for the hamburger , we just cut the damn barbecue .
and so those coals that kept falling off the edge , we kept having to put them back up .
but again , it only has to work for a thousandth of a second .
the wok shot caught fire three times .
what happens when you have your wok cut in half is the oil goes down into the fire and whoosh !
one of our cooks lost his eyebrows that way .
but hey , they grow back .
in addition to cutaways , we also explain physics .
this is fourier 's law of heat conduction .
it 's a partial differential equation .
we have the only cookbook in the world that has partial differential equations in it .
but to make them palatable , we cut it out of a steel plate and put it in front of a fire and photographed it like this .
we 've got lots of little tidbits in the book .
everybody knows that your various appliances have wattage , right ?
but you probably do n't know that much about james watt .
but now you will ; we put a biography of james watt in .
it 's a little couple paragraphs to explain why we call that unit of heat the watt , and where he got his inspiration .
it turned out he was hired by a scottish distillery to understand why they were burning so damn much peat to distill the whiskey .
we also did a lot of calculation .
i personally wrote thousands of lines of code to write this cookbook .
here 's a calculation that shows how the intensity of a barbecue , or other radiant heat source , goes as you move away from it .
so as you move vertically away from this surface , the heat falls off .
as you move side to side , it moves off .
that horn-shaped region is what we call the sweet spot .
that 's the place where the heat is even to within 10 percent .
so that 's the place where you really want to cook .
and it 's got this funny horn-shaped thing , which as far as i know , again , the first cookbook to ever do this .
now it may also be the last cookbook that ever does it .
you know , there 's two ways you can make a product .
you can do lots of market research and do focus groups and figure out what people really want , or you can just kind of go for it and make the book you want and hope other people like it .
here 's a step-by-step that shows grinding hamburger .
if you really want great hamburger , it turns out it makes a difference if you align the grain .
and it 's really simple , as you can see here .
as it comes out of the grinder , you just have a little tray , and you just take it off in little passes , build it up , slice it vertically .
here 's the final hamburger .
this is the 30-hour hamburger .
we make every aspect of this burger .
the lettuce has got liquid smoke infused into it .
we also have things about how to make the bun .
there 's a mushroom , ketchup - it goes on and on .
now watch closely . this is popcorn . i 'll explain it here .
the popcorn is illustrating a key thing in physics .
is n't that beautiful ?
we have a very high-speed camera , which we had lots of fun with on the book .
the key physics principle here is when water boils to steam it expands by a factor of 1,600 .
that 's what 's happening to the water inside that popcorn .
so it 's a great illustration of that .
now i 'm going to close with a video that is kind of unusual .
we have a chapter on gels .
and because people watch mythbusters and csi , i thought , well , let 's put in a recipe for a ballistics gelatin .
well , if you have a high-speed camera , and you have a block of ballistics gelatin lying around , pretty soon somebody does this .
-lrb- gasps -rrb- now the amazing thing here is that a ballistics gelatin is supposed to mimic what happens to human flesh when you get shot - that 's why you should n't get shot .
the other amazing thing is , when this ballistics gelatin comes down , it falls back down as a nice block .
anyway , here 's the book .
here it is .
2,438 pages .
and they 're nice big pages too .
-lrb- applause -rrb- a friend of mine complained that this was too big and too pretty to go in the kitchen , so there 's a sixth volume that has washable , waterproof paper .
-lrb- applause -rrb- a few months ago the nobel prize in physics was awarded to two teams of astronomers for a discovery that has been hailed as one of the most important astronomical observations ever .
and today , after briefly describing what they found , i 'm going to tell you about a highly controversial framework for explaining their discovery , namely the possibility that way beyond the earth , the milky way and other distant galaxies , we may find that our universe is not the only universe , but is instead part of a vast complex of universes that we call the multiverse .
now the idea of a multiverse is a strange one .
i mean , most of us were raised to believe that the word " universe " means everything .
and i say most of us with forethought , as my four-year-old daughter has heard me speak of these ideas since she was born .
and last year i was holding her and i said , " sophia , i love you more than anything in the universe . "
and she turned to me and said , " daddy , universe or multiverse ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but barring such an anomalous upbringing , it is strange to imagine other realms separate from ours , most with fundamentally different features , that would rightly be called universes of their own .
and yet , speculative though the idea surely is , i aim to convince you that there 's reason for taking it seriously , as it just might be right .
i 'm going to tell the story of the multiverse in three parts .
in part one , i 'm going to describe those nobel prize-winning results and to highlight a profound mystery which those results revealed .
in part two , i 'll offer a solution to that mystery .
it 's based on an approach called string theory , and that 's where the idea of the multiverse will come into the story .
finally , in part three , i 'm going to describe a cosmological theory called inflation , which will pull all the pieces of the story together .
okay , part one starts back in 1929 when the great astronomer edwin hubble realized that the distant galaxies were all rushing away from us , establishing that space itself is stretching , it 's expanding .
now this was revolutionary .
the prevailing wisdom was that on the largest of scales the universe was static .
but even so , there was one thing that everyone was certain of : the expansion must be slowing down .
that , much as the gravitational pull of the earth slows the ascent of an apple tossed upward , the gravitational pull of each galaxy on every other must be slowing now let 's fast-forward to the 1990s when those two teams of astronomers i mentioned at the outset were inspired by this reasoning to measure the rate at which the expansion has been slowing .
and they did this by painstaking observations of numerous distant galaxies , allowing them to chart how the expansion rate has changed over time .
here 's the surprise : they found that the expansion is not slowing down .
instead they found that it 's speeding up , going faster and faster .
that 's like tossing an apple upward and it goes up faster and faster .
now if you saw an apple do that , you 'd want to know why .
what 's pushing on it ?
similarly , the astronomers ' results are surely well-deserving of the nobel prize , but they raised an analogous question .
what force is driving all galaxies to rush away from every other at an ever-quickening speed ?
well the most promising answer comes from an old idea of einstein 's .
you see , we are all used to gravity being a force that does one thing , pulls objects together .
but in einstein 's theory of gravity , his general theory of relativity , gravity can also push things apart .
how ? well according to einstein 's math , if space is uniformly filled with an invisible energy , sort of like a uniform , invisible mist , then the gravity generated by that mist would be repulsive , repulsive gravity , which is just what we need to explain the observations .
because the repulsive gravity of an invisible energy in space - we now call it dark energy , but i 've made it smokey white here so you can see it - its repulsive gravity would cause each galaxy to push against every other , driving expansion to speed up , not slow down .
and this explanation represents great progress .
but i promised you a mystery here in part one .
here it is .
when the astronomers worked out how much of this dark energy must be infusing space to account for the cosmic speed up , look at what they found .
this number is small .
expressed in the relevant unit , it is spectacularly small .
and the mystery is to explain this peculiar number .
we want this number to emerge from the laws of physics , but so far no one has found a way to do that .
now you might wonder , should you care ?
maybe explaining this number is just a technical issue , a technical detail of interest to experts , but of no relevance to anybody else .
well it surely is a technical detail , but some details really matter .
some details provide windows into uncharted realms of reality , and this peculiar number may be doing just that , as the only approach that 's so far made headway to explain it invokes the possibility of other universes - an idea that naturally emerges from string theory , which takes me to part two : string theory .
so hold the mystery of the dark energy in the back of your mind as i now go on to tell you three key things about string theory .
first off , what is it ?
well it 's an approach to realize einstein 's dream of a unified theory of physics , a single overarching framework that would be able to describe all the forces at work in the universe .
and the central idea of string theory is quite straightforward .
it says that if you examine any piece of matter ever more finely , at first you 'll find molecules and then you 'll find atoms and subatomic particles .
but the theory says that if you could probe smaller , much smaller than we can with existing technology , you 'd find something else inside these particles - a little tiny vibrating filament of energy , a little tiny vibrating string .
and just like the strings on a violin , they can vibrate in different patterns producing different musical notes .
these little fundamental strings , when they vibrate in different patterns , they produce different kinds of particles - so electrons , quarks , neutrinos , photons , all other particles would be united into a single framework , as they would all arise from vibrating strings .
it 's a compelling picture , a kind of cosmic symphony , where all the richness that we see in the world around us emerges from the music that these little , tiny strings can play .
but there 's a cost to this elegant unification , because years of research have shown that the math of string theory does n't quite work .
it has internal inconsistencies , unless we allow for something wholly unfamiliar - extra dimensions of space .
that is , we all know about the usual three dimensions of space .
and you can think about those as height , width and depth .
but string theory says that , on fantastically small scales , there are additional dimensions crumpled to a tiny size so small that we have not detected them .
but even though the dimensions are hidden , they would have an impact on things that we can observe because the shape of the extra dimensions constrains how the strings can vibrate .
and in string theory , vibration determines everything .
so particle masses , the strengths of forces , and most importantly , the amount of dark energy would be determined by the shape of the extra dimensions .
so if we knew the shape of the extra dimensions , we should be able to calculate these features , calculate the amount of dark energy .
the challenge is we do n't know the shape of the extra dimensions .
all we have is a list of candidate shapes allowed by the math .
now when these ideas were first developed , there were only about five different candidate shapes , so you can imagine analyzing them one-by-one to determine if any yield the physical features we observe .
but over time the list grew as researchers found other candidate shapes .
from five , the number grew into the hundreds and then the thousands - a large , but still manageable , collection to analyze , since after all , graduate students need something to do .
but then the list continued to grow into the millions and the billions , until today .
the list of candidate shapes has soared to about 10 to the 500 .
so , what to do ?
well some researchers lost heart , concluding that was so many candidate shapes for the extra dimensions , each giving rise to different physical features , string theory would never make definitive , testable predictions .
but others turned this issue on its head , taking us to the possibility of a multiverse .
here 's the idea .
maybe each of these shapes is on an equal footing with every other .
each is as real as every other , in the sense that there are many universes , each with a different shape , for the extra dimensions .
and this radical proposal has a profound impact on this mystery : the amount of dark energy revealed by the nobel prize-winning results .
because you see , if there are other universes , and if those universes each have , say , a different shape for the extra dimensions , then the physical features of each universe will be different , and in particular , the amount of dark energy in each universe will be different .
which means that the mystery of explaining the amount of dark energy we 've now measured would take on a wholly different character .
in this context , the laws of physics ca n't explain one number for the dark energy because there is n't just one number , there are many numbers .
which means we have been asking the wrong question .
it 's that the right question to ask is , why do we humans find ourselves in a universe with a particular amount of dark energy we 've measured instead of any of the other possibilities that are out there ?
and that 's a question on which we can make headway .
because those universes that have much more dark energy than ours , whenever matter tries to clump into galaxies , the repulsive push of the dark energy is so strong that it blows the clump apart and galaxies do n't form .
and in those universes that have much less dark energy , well they collapse back on themselves so quickly that , again , galaxies do n't form .
and without galaxies , there are no stars , no planets and no chance for our form of life to exist in those other universes .
so we find ourselves in a universe with the particular amount of dark energy we 've measured simply because our universe has conditions hospitable to our form of life .
and that would be that .
mystery solved , multiverse found .
now some find this explanation unsatisfying .
we 're used to physics giving us definitive explanations for the features we observe .
but the point is , if the feature you 're observing can and does take on a wide variety of different values across the wider landscape of reality , then thinking one explanation for a particular value is simply misguided .
an early example comes from the great astronomer johannes kepler who was obsessed with understanding a different number - why the sun is 93 million miles away from the earth .
and he worked for decades trying to explain this number , but he never succeeded , and we know why .
kepler was asking the wrong question .
we now know that there are many planets at a wide variety of different distances from their host stars .
so hoping that the laws of physics will explain one particular number , 93 million miles , well that is simply wrongheaded .
instead the right question to ask is , why do we humans find ourselves on a planet at this particular distance , instead of any of the other possibilities ?
and again , that 's a question we can answer .
those planets which are much closer to a star like the sun would be so hot that our form of life would n't exist .
and those planets that are much farther away from the star , well they 're so cold that , again , our form of life would not take hold .
so we find ourselves on a planet at this particular distance simply because it yields conditions vital to our form of life .
and when it comes to planets and their distances , this clearly is the right kind of reasoning .
the point is , when it comes to universes and the dark energy that they contain , it may also be the right kind of reasoning .
one key difference , of course , is we know that there are other planets out there , but so far i 've only speculated on the possibility that there might be other universes .
so to pull it all together , we need a mechanism that can actually generate other universes .
and that takes me to my final part , part three .
because such a mechanism has been found by cosmologists trying to understand the big bang .
you see , when we speak of the big bang , we often have an image of a kind of cosmic explosion that created our universe and set space rushing outward .
but there 's a little secret .
the big bang leaves out something pretty important , the bang .
it tells us how the universe evolved after the bang , but gives us no insight into what would have powered the bang itself .
and this gap was finally filled by an enhanced version of the big bang theory .
it 's called inflationary cosmology , which identified a particular kind of fuel that would naturally generate an outward rush of space .
the fuel is based on something called a quantum field , but the only detail that matters for us is that this fuel proves to be so efficient that it 's virtually impossible to use it all up , which means in the inflationary theory , the big bang giving rise to our universe is likely not a one-time event .
instead the fuel not only generated our big bang , but it would also generate countless other big bangs , each giving rise to its own separate universe with our universe becoming but one bubble in a grand cosmic bubble bath of universes .
and now , when we meld this with string theory , here 's the picture we 're led to .
each of these universes has extra dimensions .
the extra dimensions take on a wide variety of different shapes .
the different shapes yield different physical features .
and we find ourselves in one universe instead of another simply because it 's only in our universe that the physical features , like the amount of dark energy , are right for our form of life to take hold .
and this is the compelling but highly controversial picture of the wider cosmos that cutting-edge observation and theory have now led us to seriously consider .
one big remaining question , of course , is , could we ever confirm the existence of other universes ?
well let me describe one way that might one day happen .
the inflationary theory already has strong observational support .
because the theory predicts that the big bang would have been so intense that as space rapidly expanded , tiny quantum jitters from the micro world would have been stretched out to the macro world , yielding a distinctive fingerprint , a pattern of slightly hotter spots and slightly colder spots , across space , which powerful telescopes have now observed .
going further , if there are other universes , the theory predicts that every so often those universes can collide .
and if our universe got hit by another , that collision would generate an additional subtle pattern of temperature variations across space that we might one day be able to detect .
and so exotic as this picture is , it may one day be grounded in observations , establishing the existence of other universes .
i 'll conclude with a striking implication of all these ideas for the very far future .
you see , we learned that our universe is not static , that space is expanding , that that expansion is speeding up and that there might be other universes all by carefully examining faint pinpoints of starlight coming to us from distant galaxies .
but because the expansion is speeding up , in the very far future , those galaxies will rush away so far and so fast that we wo n't be able to see them - not because of technological limitations , but because of the laws of physics .
the light those galaxies emit , even traveling at the fastest speed , the speed of light , will not be able to overcome the ever-widening gulf between us .
so astronomers in the far future looking out into deep space will see nothing but an endless stretch of static , inky , black stillness .
and they will conclude that the universe is static and unchanging and populated by a single central oasis of matter that they inhabit - a picture of the cosmos that we definitively know to be wrong .
now maybe those future astronomers will have records handed down from an earlier era , like ours , attesting to an expanding cosmos teeming with galaxies .
but would those future astronomers believe such ancient knowledge ?
or would they believe in the black , static empty universe that their own state-of-the-art observations reveal ?
i suspect the latter .
which means that we are living through a remarkably privileged era when certain deep truths about the cosmos are still within reach of the human spirit of exploration .
it appears that it may not always be that way .
because today 's astronomers , by turning powerful telescopes to the sky , have captured a handful of starkly informative photons - a kind of cosmic telegram billions of years in transit .
and the message echoing across the ages is clear .
sometimes nature guards her secrets with the unbreakable grip of physical law .
sometimes the true nature of reality beckons from just beyond the horizon .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : brian , thank you .
the range of ideas you 've just spoken about are dizzying , exhilarating , incredible .
how do you think of where cosmology is now , in a sort of historical side ?
are we in the middle of something unusual historically in your opinion ?
bg : well it 's hard to say .
when we learn that astronomers of the far future may not have enough information to figure things out , the natural question is , maybe we 're already in that position and certain deep , critical features of the universe already have escaped our ability to understand because of how cosmology evolves .
so from that perspective , maybe we will always be asking questions and never be able to fully answer them .
on the other hand , we now can understand how old the universe is .
we can understand how to understand the data from the microwave background radiation that was set down 13.72 billion years ago - and yet , we can do calculations today to predict how it will look and it matches .
holy cow ! that 's just amazing .
so on the one hand , it 's just incredible where we 've gotten , but who knows what sort of blocks we may find in the future .
ca : you 're going to be around for the next few days .
maybe some of these conversations can continue .
thank you . thank you , brian . -lrb- bg : my pleasure . -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- well when i was asked to do this tedtalk , i was really chuckled , because , you see , my father 's name was ted , and much of my life , especially my musical life , is really a talk that i 'm still having with him , or the part of me that he continues to be .
now ted was a new yorker , an all-around theater guy , and he was a self-taught illustrator and musician .
he did n't read a note , and he was profoundly hearing impaired .
yet , he was my greatest teacher .
because even through the squeaks of his hearing aids , his understanding of music was profound .
and for him , it was n't so much the way the music goes as about what it witnesses and where it can take you .
and he did a painting of this experience , which he called " in the realm of music . "
now ted entered this realm every day by improvising in a sort of tin pan alley style like this .
-lrb- music -rrb- but he was tough when it came to music .
he said , " there are only two things that matter in music : what and how .
and the thing about classical music , that what and how , it 's inexhaustible . "
that was his passion for the music .
both my parents really loved it .
they did n't know all that much about it , but they gave me the opportunity to discover it together with them .
and i think inspired by that memory , it 's been my desire to try and bring it to as many other people as i can , sort of pass it on through whatever means .
and how people get this music , how it comes into their lives , really fascinates me .
one day in new york , i was on the street and i saw some kids playing baseball between stoops and cars and fire hydrants .
and a tough , slouchy kid got up to bat , and he took a swing and really connected .
and he watched the ball fly for a second , and then he went , " dah dadaratatatah .
brah dada dadadadah . "
and he ran around the bases .
and i thought , go figure .
how did this piece of 18th century austrian aristocratic entertainment turn into the victory crow of this new york kid ?
how was that passed on ? how did he get to hear mozart ?
well when it comes to classical music , there 's an awful lot to pass on , much more than mozart , beethoven or tchiakovsky .
because classical music is an unbroken living tradition that goes back over 1,000 years .
and every one of those years has had something unique and powerful to say to us about what it 's like to be alive .
now the raw material of it , of course , is just the music of everyday life .
it 's all the anthems and dance crazes and ballads and marches .
but what classical music does is to distill all of these musics down , to condense them to their absolute essence , and from that essence create a new language , a language that speaks very lovingly and unflinchingly about who we really are .
it 's a language that 's still evolving .
now over the centuries it grew into the big pieces we always think of , like concertos and symphonies , but even the most ambitious masterpiece can have as its central mission to bring you back to a fragile and personal moment - like this one from the beethoven violin concerto .
-lrb- music -rrb- it 's so simple , so evocative .
so many emotions seem to be inside of it .
yet , of course , like all music , it 's essentially not about anything .
it 's just a design of pitches and silence and time .
and the pitches , the notes , as you know , are just vibrations .
they 're locations in the spectrum of sound .
and whether we call them 440 per second , a , or 3,729 , b flat - trust me , that 's right - they 're just phenomena .
but the way we react to different combinations of these phenomena is complex and emotional and not totally understood .
and the way we react to them has changed radically over the centuries , as have our preferences for them .
so for example , in the 11th century , people liked pieces that ended like this .
-lrb- music -rrb- and in the 17th century , it was more like this .
-lrb- music -rrb- and in the 21st century ...
-lrb- music -rrb- now your 21st century ears are quite happy with this last chord , even though a while back it would have puzzled or annoyed you or sent some of you running from the room .
and the reason you like it is because you 've inherited , whether you knew it or not , centuries-worth of changes in musical theory , practice and fashion .
and in classical music we can follow these changes very , very accurately because of the music 's powerful silent partner , the way it 's been passed on : notation .
now the impulse to notate , or , more exactly i should say , encode music has been with us for a very long time .
in 200 b.c. , a man named sekulos wrote this song for his departed wife and inscribed it on her gravestone in the notational system of the greeks .
-lrb- music -rrb- and a thousand years later , this impulse to notate took an entirely different form .
and you can see how this happened in these excerpts from the christmas mass " puer natus est nobis , " " for us is born . "
-lrb- music -rrb- in the 10th century , little squiggles were used just to indicate the general shape of the tune .
and in the 12th century , a line was drawn , like a musical horizon line , to better pinpoint the pitch 's location .
and then in the 13th century , more lines and new shapes of notes locked in the concept of the tune exactly , and that led to the kind of notation we have today .
well notation not only passed the music on , notating and encoding the music changed its priorities entirely , because it enabled the musicians to imagine music on a much vaster scale .
now inspired moves of improvisation could be recorded , saved , considered , prioritized , made into intricate designs .
and from this moment , classical music became what it most essentially is , a dialogue between the two powerful sides of our nature : instinct and intelligence .
and there began to be a real difference at this point between the art of improvisation and the art of composition .
now an improviser senses and plays the next cool move , but a composer is considering all possible moves , testing them out , prioritizing them out , until he sees how they can form a powerful and coherent design of ultimate and enduring coolness .
now some of the greatest composers , like bach , were combinations of these two things .
bach was like a great improviser with a mind of a chess master .
mozart was the same way .
but every musician strikes a different balance between faith and reason , instinct and intelligence .
and every musical era had different priorities of these things , different things to pass on , different ' whats ' and ' hows ' .
so in the first eight centuries or so of this tradition the big ' what ' was to praise god .
and by the 1400s , music was being written that tried to mirror god 's mind as could be seen in the design of the night sky .
the ' how ' was a style called polyphony , music of many independently moving voices that suggested the way the planets seemed to move in ptolemy 's geocentric universe .
this was truly the music of the spheres .
-lrb- music -rrb- this is the kind of music that leonardo davinci would have known .
and perhaps its tremendous intellectual perfection and serenity meant that something new had to happen - a radical new move , which in 1600 is what did happen .
-lrb- music -rrb- singer : ah , bitter blow !
ah , wicked , cruel fate !
ah , baleful stars !
ah , avaricious heaven !
mtt : this , of course , was the birth of opera , and its development put music on a radical new course .
the what now was not to mirror the mind of god , but to follow the emotion turbulence of man .
and the how was harmony , stacking up the pitches to form chords .
and the chords , it turned out , were capable of representing incredible varieties of emotions .
and the basic chords were the ones we still have with us , the triads , either the major one , which we think is happy , or the minor one , which we perceive as sad .
but what 's the actual difference between these two chords ?
it 's just these two notes in the middle .
it 's either e natural , and 659 vibrations per second , or e flat , at 622 .
so the big difference between human happiness and sadness ?
37 freakin ' vibrations .
so you can see in a system like this there was enormous subtle potential of representing human emotions .
and in fact , as man began to understand more his complex and ambivalent nature , harmony grew more complex to reflect it .
turns out it was capable of expressing emotions beyond the ability of words .
now with all this possibility , classical music really took off .
it 's the time in which the big forms began to arise .
and the effects of technology began to be felt also , because printing put music , the scores , the codebooks of music , into the hands of performers everywhere .
and new and improved instruments made the age of the virtuoso possible .
this is when those big forms arose - the symphonies , the sonatas , the concertos .
and in these big architectures of time , composers like beethoven could share the insights of a lifetime .
a piece like beethoven 's fifth basically witnessing how it was possible for him to go from sorrow and anger , over the course of a half an hour , step by exacting step of his route , to the moment when he could make it across to joy .
-lrb- music -rrb- and it turned out the symphony could be used for more complex issues , like gripping ones of culture , such as nationalism or quest for freedom or the frontiers of sensuality .
but whatever direction the music took , one thing until recently was always the same , and that was when the musicians stopped playing , the music stopped .
now this moment so fascinates me .
i find it such a profound one .
what happens when the music stops ?
where does it go ? what 's left ?
what sticks with people in the audience at the end of a performance ?
is it a melody or a rhythm or a mood or an attitude ?
and how might that change their lives ?
to me this is the intimate , personal side of music .
it 's the passing on part . it 's the ' why ' part of it .
and to me that 's the most essential of all .
mostly it 's been a person-to-person thing , a teacher-student , performer-audience thing , and then around 1880 came this new technology that first mechanically then through analogs then digitally created a new and miraculous way of passing things on , albeit an impersonal one .
people could now hear music all the time , even though it was n't necessary for them to play an instrument , read music or even go to concerts .
and technology democratized music by making everything available .
it spearheaded a cultural revolution in which artists like caruso and bessie smith were on the same footing .
and technology pushed composers to tremendous extremes , using computers and synthesizers to create works of intellectually impenetrable complexity beyond the means of performers and audiences .
at the same time technology , by taking over the role that notation had always played , shifted the balance within music between instinct and intelligence way over to the instinctive side .
the culture in which we live now is awash with music of improvisation that 's been sliced , diced , layered and , god knows , distributed and sold .
what 's the long-term effect of this on us or on music ?
nobody knows .
the question remains : what happens when the music stops ?
what sticks with people ?
now that we have unlimited access to music , what does stick with us ?
well let me show you a story of what i mean by " really sticking with us . "
i was visiting a cousin of mine in an old age home , and i spied a very shaky old man making his way across the room on a walker .
he came over to a piano that was there , and he balanced himself and began playing something like this .
-lrb- music -rrb- and he said something like , " me ... boy ... symphony ... beethoven . "
and i suddenly got it , and i said , " friend , by any chance are you trying to play this ? "
-lrb- music -rrb- and he said , " yes , yes . i was a little boy .
the symphony : isaac stern , the concerto , i heard it . "
and i thought , my god , how much must this music mean to this man that he would get himself out of his bed , across the room to recover the memory of this music that , after everything else in his life is sloughing away , still means so much to him ?
well , that 's why i take every performance so seriously , why it matters to me so much .
i never know who might be there , who might be absorbing it and what will happen to it in their life .
but now i 'm excited that there 's more chance than ever before possible of sharing this music .
that 's what drives my interest in projects like the tv series " keeping score " with the san francisco symphony that looks at the backstories of music , and working with the young musicians at the new world symphony on projects that explore the potential of the new performing arts centers for both entertainment and education .
and of course , the new world symphony led to the youtube symphony and projects on the internet that reach out to musicians and audiences all over the world .
and the exciting thing is all this is just a prototype .
there 's just a role here for so many people - teachers , parents , performers - to be explorers together .
sure , the big events attract a lot of attention , but what really matters is what goes on every single day .
we need your perspectives , your curiosity , your voices .
and it excites me now to meet people who are hikers , chefs , code writers , taxi drivers , people i never would have guessed who loved the music and who are passing it on .
you do n't need to worry about knowing anything .
if you 're curious , if you have a capacity for wonder , if you 're alive , you know all that you need to know .
you can start anywhere . ramble a bit .
follow traces . get lost . be surprised , amused inspired .
all that ' what ' , all that ' how ' is out there waiting for you to discover its ' why ' , to dive in and pass it on .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'd like to share with you the story of one of my patients called celine .
celine is a housewife and lives in a rural district of cameroon in west central africa .
six years ago , at the time of her hiv diagnosis , she was recruited to participate in the clinical trial which was running in her health district at the time .
when i first met celine , a little over a year ago , she had gone for 18 months without any antiretroviral therapy , and she was very ill .
she told me that she stopped coming to the clinic when the trial ended because she had no money for the bus fare and was too ill to walk the 35-kilometer distance .
now during the clinical trial , she 'd been given all her antiretroviral drugs free of charge , and her transportation costs had been covered by the research funds .
all of these ended once the trial was completed , leaving celine with no alternatives .
she was unable to tell me the names of the drugs she 'd received during the trial , or even what the trial had been about .
i did n't bother to ask her what the results of the trial were because it seemed obvious to me that she would have no clue .
yet what puzzled me most was celine had given her informed consent to be a part of this trial , yet she clearly did not understand the implications of being a participant or what would happen to her once the trial had been completed .
now , i have shared this story with you as an example of what can happen to participants in the clinical trial when it is poorly conducted .
maybe this particular trial yielded exciting results .
maybe it even got published in a high-profile scientific journal .
maybe it would inform clinicians around the world on how to improve on the clinical management of hiv patients .
but it would have done so at a price to hundreds of patients who , like celine , were left to their own devices once the research had been completed .
i do not stand here today to suggest in any way that conducting hiv clinical trials in developing countries is bad .
on the contrary , clinical trials are extremely useful tools , and are much needed to address the burden of disease in developing countries .
however , the inequalities that exist between richer countries and developing countries in terms of funding pose a real risk for exploitation , especially in the context of externally-funded research .
sadly enough , the fact remains that a lot of the studies that are conducted in developing countries could never be authorized in the richer countries which fund the research .
i 'm sure you must be asking yourselves what makes developing countries , especially those in sub-saharan africa , so attractive for these hiv clinical trials ?
well , in order for a clinical trial to generate valid and widely applicable results , they need to be conducted with large numbers of study participants and preferably on a population with a high incidence of new hiv infections .
sub-saharan africa largely fits this description , with 22 million people living with hiv , an estimated 70 percent of the 30 million people who are infected worldwide .
also , research within the continent is a lot easier to conduct due to widespread poverty , endemic diseases and inadequate health care systems .
a clinical trial that is considered to be potentially beneficial to the population is more likely to be authorized , and in the absence of good health care systems , almost any offer of medical assistance is accepted as better than nothing .
even more problematic reasons include lower risk of litigation , less rigorous ethical reviews , and populations that are willing to participate in almost any study that hints at a cure .
as funding for hiv research increases in developing countries and ethical review in richer countries become more strict , you can see why this context becomes very , very attractive .
the high prevalence of hiv drives researchers to conduct research that is sometimes scientifically acceptable but on many levels ethically questionable .
how then can we ensure that , in our search for the cure , we do not take an unfair advantage of those who are already most affected by the pandemic ?
i invite you to consider four areas i think we can focus on in order to improve the way in which things are done .
the first of these is informed consent .
now , in order for a clinical trial to be considered ethically acceptable , participants must be given the relevant information in a way in which they can understand , and must freely consent to participate in the trial .
this is especially important in developing countries , where a lot of participants consent to research because they believe it is the only way in which they can receive medical care or other benefits .
consent procedures that are used in richer countries are often inappropriate or ineffective in a lot of developing countries .
for example , it is counterintuitive to have an illiterate study participant , like celine , sign a lengthy consent form that they are unable to read , let alone understand .
local communities need to be more involved in establishing the criteria for recruiting participants in clinical trials , as well as the incentives for participation .
the information in these trials needs to be given to the potential participants in linguistically and culturally acceptable formats .
the second point i would like for you to consider is the standard of care that is provided to participants within any clinical trial .
now , this is subject to a lot of debate and controversy .
should the control group in the clinical trial be given the best current treatment which is available anywhere in the world ?
or should they be given an alternative standard of care , such as the best current treatment available in the country in which the research is being conducted ?
is it fair to evaluate a treatment regimen which may not be affordable or accessible to the study participants once the research has been completed ?
now , in a situation where the best current treatment is inexpensive and simple to deliver , the answer is straightforward .
however , the best current treatment available anywhere in the world is often very difficult to provide in developing countries .
it is important to assess the potential risks and benefits of the standard of care which is to be provided to participants in any clinical trial , and establish one which is relevant for the context of the study and most beneficial for the participants within the study .
that brings us to the third point i want you think about : the ethical review of research .
an effective system for reviewing the ethical suitability of clinical trials is primordial to safeguard participants within any clinical trial .
unfortunately , this is often lacking or inefficient in a lot of developing countries .
local governments need to set up effective systems for reviewing the ethical issues around the clinical trials which are authorized in different developing countries , ethical review committees that are independent of the government and research sponsors .
public accountability needs to be promoted through transparency and independent review by nongovernmental and international organizations as appropriate .
the final point i would like for you to consider tonight is what happens to participants in the clinical trial once the research has been completed .
i think it is absolutely wrong for research to begin in the first place without a clear plan for what would happen to the participants once the trial has ended .
now , researchers need to make every effort to ensure that an intervention that has been shown to be beneficial during a clinical trial is accessible to the participants of the trial once the trial has been completed .
in addition , they should be able to consider the possibility of introducing and maintaining effective treatments in the wider community once the trial ends .
if , for any reason , they feel that this might not be possible , then i think they should have to ethically justify why the clinical trial should be conducted in the first place .
now , fortunately for celine , our meeting did not end in my office .
i was able to get her enrolled into a free hiv treatment program closer to her home , and with a support group to help her cope .
her story has a positive ending , but there are thousands of others in similar situations who are much less fortunate .
although she may not know this , my encounter with celine has completely changed the way in which i view hiv clinical trials in developing countries , and made me even more determined to be part of the movement to change the way in which things are done .
i believe that every single person listening to me tonight can be part of that change .
if you are a researcher , i hold you to a higher standard of moral conscience , to remain ethical in your research , and not compromise human welfare in your search for answers .
if you work for a funding agency or pharmaceutical company , i challenge you to hold your employers to fund research that is ethically sound .
if you come from a developing country like myself , i urge you to hold your government to a more thorough review of the clinical trials which are authorized in your country .
yes , there is a need for us to find a cure for hiv , to find an effective vaccine for malaria , to find a diagnostic tool that works for t.b. , but i believe that we owe it to those who willingly and selflessly consent to participate in these clinical trials to do this in a humane way .
thank you .
to give me an idea of how many of you here may find what i 'm about to tell you of practical value , let me ask you please to raise your hands : who here is either over 65 years old or hopes to live past age 65 or has parents or grandparents who did live or have lived past 65 , raise your hands please . -lrb- laughter -rrb- okay . you are the people to whom my talk will be of practical value . -lrb- laughter -rrb- the rest of you but i think that you will still find the subject fascinating .
i 'm going to talk about growing older in traditional societies .
this subject constitutes just one chapter of my latest book , which compares traditional , small , tribal societies with our large , modern societies , with respect to many topics such as bringing up children , growing older , health , dealing with danger , settling disputes , religion and speaking more than one language .
those tribal societies , which constituted all human societies for most of human history , are far more diverse than are our modern , recent , big societies .
all big societies that have governments , and where most people are strangers to each other , are inevitably similar to each other and different from tribal societies .
tribes constitute thousands of natural experiments in how to run a human society .
they constitute experiments from which we ourselves may be able to learn .
tribal societies should n't be scorned as primitive and miserable , but also they should n't be romanticized as happy and peaceful .
when we learn of tribal practices , some of them will horrify us , but there are other tribal practices which , when we hear about them , we may admire and envy and wonder whether we could adopt those practices ourselves .
most old people in the u.s. end up living separately from their children and from most of their friends of their earlier years , and often they live in separate retirements homes for the elderly , whereas in traditional societies , older people instead live out their lives among their children , their other relatives , and their lifelong friends .
nevertheless , the treatment of the elderly varies enormously among traditional societies , from much worse to much better than in our modern societies .
at the worst extreme , many traditional societies get rid of their elderly in one of four increasingly direct ways : by neglecting their elderly and not feeding or cleaning them until they die , or by abandoning them when the group moves , or by encouraging older people to commit suicide , or by killing older people .
in which tribal societies do children abandon or kill their parents ?
it happens mainly under two conditions .
one is in nomadic , hunter-gather societies that often shift camp and that are physically incapable of transporting old people who ca n't walk when the able-bodied younger people already have to carry their young children and all their physical possessions .
the other condition is in societies living in marginal or fluctuating environments , such as the arctic or deserts , where there are periodic food shortages , and occasionally there just is n't enough food to keep everyone alive .
whatever food is available has to be reserved for able-bodied adults and for children .
to us americans , it sounds horrible to think of abandoning or killing your own sick wife or husband or elderly mother or father , but what could those traditional societies do differently ?
they face a cruel situation of no choice .
their old people had to do it to their own parents , and the old people know what now is going to happen to them .
at the opposite extreme in treatment of the elderly , the happy extreme , are the new guinea farming societies where i 've been doing my fieldwork for the past 50 years , and most other sedentary traditional societies around the world .
in those societies , older people are cared for .
they are fed . they remain valuable .
and they continue to live in the same hut or else in a nearby hut near their children , relatives and lifelong friends .
there are two main sets of reasons for this variation among societies in their treatment of old people .
the variation depends especially on the usefulness of old people and on the society 's values .
first , as regards usefulness , older people continue to perform useful services .
one use of older people in traditional societies is that they often are still effective at producing food .
another traditional usefulness of older people is that they are capable of babysitting their grandchildren , thereby freeing up their own adult children , the parents of those grandchildren , to go hunting and gathering food for the grandchildren .
still another traditional value of older people is in making tools , weapons , baskets , pots and textiles .
in fact , they 're usually the people who are best at it .
older people usually are the leaders of traditional societies , and the people most knowledgeable about politics , medicine , religion , songs and dances .
finally , older people in traditional societies have a huge significance that would never occur to us in our modern , literate societies , where our sources of information are books and the internet .
in contrast , in traditional societies without writing , older people are the repositories of information .
it 's their knowledge that spells the difference between survival and death for their whole society in a time of crisis caused by rare events for which only the oldest people alive have had experience .
those , then , are the ways in which older people are useful in traditional societies .
their usefulness varies and contributes to variation in the society 's treatment of the elderly .
the other set of reasons for variation in the treatment of the elderly is the society 's cultural values .
for example , there 's particular emphasis on respect for the elderly in east asia , associated with confucius ' doctrine of filial piety , which means obedience , respect and support for elderly parents .
cultural values that emphasize respect for older people contrast with the low status of the elderly in the u.s.
older americans are at a big disadvantage in job applications .
they 're at a big disadvantage in hospitals .
our hospitals have an explicit policy called age-based allocation of healthcare resources .
that sinister expression means that if hospital resources are limited , for example if only one donor heart becomes available for transplant , or if a surgeon has time to operate on only a certain number of patients , american hospitals have an explicit policy of giving preference to younger patients over older patients on the grounds that younger patients are considered more valuable to society because they have more years of life ahead of them , even though the younger patients have fewer years of valuable life experience behind them .
there are several reasons for this low status of the elderly in the u.s.
one is our protestant work ethic which places high value on work , so older people who are no longer working are n't respected .
another reason is our american emphasis on the virtues of self-reliance and independence , so we instinctively look down on older people who are no longer self-reliant and independent .
still a third reason is our american cult of youth , which shows up even in our advertisements .
ads for coca-cola and beer always depict smiling young people , even though old as well as young people buy and drink coca-cola and beer .
just think , what 's the last time you saw a coke or beer ad depicting smiling people 85 years old ? never .
instead , the only american ads featuring white-haired old people are ads for retirement homes and pension planning .
well , what has changed in the status of the elderly today compared to their status in traditional societies ?
there have been a few changes for the better and more changes for the worse .
big changes for the better include the fact that today we enjoy much longer lives , much better health in our old age , and much better recreational opportunities .
another change for the better is that we now have specialized retirement facilities and programs to take care of old people .
changes for the worse begin with the cruel reality that we now have more old people and fewer young people than at any time in the past .
that means that all those old people are more of a burden on the few young people , and that each old person has less individual value .
another big change for the worse in the status of the elderly is the breaking of social ties with age , because older people , their children , and their friends , all move and scatter independently of each other many times during their lives .
we americans move on the average every five years .
hence our older people are likely to end up living distant from their children and the friends of their youth .
yet another change for the worse in the status of the elderly is formal retirement from the workforce , carrying with it a loss of work friendships and a loss of the self-esteem associated with work .
perhaps the biggest change for the worse is that our elderly are objectively less useful than in traditional societies .
widespread literacy means that they are no longer useful as repositories of knowledge .
when we want some information , we look it up in a book or we google it instead of finding some old person to ask .
the slow pace of technological change in traditional societies means that what someone learns there as a child is still useful when that person is old , but the rapid pace of technological change today means that what we learn as children is no longer useful 60 years later .
and conversely , we older people are not fluent in the technologies essential for surviving in modern society .
for example , as a 15-year-old , i was considered outstandingly good at multiplying numbers because i had memorized the multiplication tables and i know how to use logarithms and i 'm quick at manipulating a slide rule .
today , though , those skills are utterly useless because any idiot can now multiply eight-digit numbers accurately and instantly with a pocket calculator .
conversely , i at age 75 am incompetent at skills essential for everyday life .
my family 's first tv set in 1948 had only three knobs that i quickly mastered : an on-off switch , a volume knob , and a channel selector knob .
today , just to watch a program on the tv set in my own house , i have to operate a 41-button tv remote that utterly defeats me .
i have to telephone my 25-year-old sons and ask them to talk me through it while i try to push those wretched 41 buttons .
what can we do to improve the lives of the elderly in the u.s. , and to make better use of their value ?
that 's a huge problem .
in my remaining four minutes today , i can offer just a few suggestions .
one value of older people is that they are increasingly useful as grandparents for offering high-quality childcare to their grandchildren , if they choose to do it , as more young women enter the workforce and as fewer young parents of either gender stay home as full-time caretakers of their children .
compared to the usual alternatives of paid babysitters and day care centers , grandparents offer superior , motivated , experienced child care .
they 've already gained experience from raising their own children .
they usually love their grandchildren , and are eager to spend time with them .
unlike other caregivers , grandparents do n't quit their job because they found another job with higher pay looking after another baby .
a second value of older people is paradoxically related to their loss of value as a result of changing world conditions and technology .
at the same time , older people have gained in value today precisely because of their unique experience of living conditions that have now become rare because of rapid change , but that could come back .
for example , only americans now in their 70s or older today can remember the experience of living through a great depression , the experience of living through a world war , and agonizing whether or not dropping atomic bombs would be more horrible than the likely consequences of not dropping atomic bombs .
most of our current voters and politicians have no personal experience of any of those things , but millions of older americans do .
unfortunately , all of those terrible situations could come back .
even if they do n't come back , we have to be able to plan for them on the basis of the experience of what they were like .
older people have that experience .
younger people do n't .
the remaining value of older people that i 'll mention involves recognizing that while there are many things that older people can no longer do , there are other things that they can do better than younger people .
a challenge for society is to make use of those things that older people are better at doing .
some abilities , of course , decrease with age .
those include abilities at tasks requiring physical strength and stamina , ambition , and the power of novel reasoning in a circumscribed situation , such as figuring out the structure of dna , best left to scientists under the age of 30 .
conversely , valuable attributes that increase with age include experience , understanding of people and human relationships , ability to help other people without your own ego getting in the way , and interdisciplinary thinking about large databases , such as economics and comparative history , best left to scholars over the age of 60 .
hence older people are much better than younger people at supervising , administering , advising , strategizing , teaching , synthesizing , and devising long-term plans .
i 've seen this value of older people with so many of my friends in their 60s , 70s , 80s and 90s , who are still active as investment managers , farmers , lawyers and doctors .
in short , many traditional societies make better use of their elderly and give their elderly more satisfying lives than we do in modern , big societies .
paradoxically nowadays , when we have more elderly people than ever before , living healthier lives and with better medical care than ever before , old age is in some respects more miserable than ever before .
the lives of the elderly are widely recognized as constituting a disaster area of modern american society .
we can surely do better by learning from the lives of the elderly in traditional societies .
but what 's true of the lives of the elderly in traditional societies is true of many other features of traditional societies as well .
of course , i 'm not advocating that we all give up agriculture and metal tools and return to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle .
there are many obvious respects in which our lives today are far happier than those in small , traditional societies .
to mention just a few examples , our lives are longer , materially much richer , and less plagued by violence than are the lives of people in traditional societies .
but there are also things to be admired about people in traditional societies , and perhaps to be learned from them .
their lives are usually socially much richer than our lives , although materially poorer .
their children are more self-confident , more independent , and more socially skilled than are our children .
they think more realistically about dangers than we do .
they almost never die of diabetes , heart disease , stroke , and the other noncommunicable diseases that will be the causes of death of almost all of us in this room today .
features of the modern lifestyle predispose us to those diseases , and features of the traditional lifestyle protect us against them .
those are just some examples of what we can learn from traditional societies .
i hope that you will find it as fascinating to read about traditional societies as i found it to live in those societies .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so i 'm here to explain why i 'm wearing these ninja pajamas .
and to do that , i 'd like to talk first about environmental toxins in our bodies .
so some of you may know about the chemical bisphenol a , bpa .
it 's a material hardener and synthetic estrogen that 's found in the lining of canned foods and some plastics .
so bpa mimics the body 's own hormones and causes neurological and reproductive problems .
and it 's everywhere .
a recent study found bpa in 93 percent of people six and older .
but it 's just one chemical .
the center for disease control in the u.s.
says we have 219 toxic pollutants in our bodies , and this includes preservatives , pesticides and heavy metals like lead and mercury .
to me , this says three things .
first , do n't become a cannibal .
second , we are both responsible for and the victims of our own pollution .
and third , our bodies are filters and storehouses for environmental toxins .
so what happens to all these toxins when we die ?
the short answer is : they return to the environment in one way or another , continuing the cycle of toxicity .
but our current funeral practices make the situation much worse .
if you 're cremated , all those toxins i mentioned are released into the atmosphere .
and this includes 5,000 pounds of mercury from our dental fillings alone every year .
and in a traditional american funeral , a dead body is covered with fillers and cosmetics to make it look alive .
it 's then pumped with toxic formaldehyde to slow decomposition - a practice which causes respiratory problems and cancer in funeral personnel .
so by trying to preserve our dead bodies , we deny death , poison the living and further harm the environment .
green or natural burials , which do n't use embalming , are a step in the right direction , but they do n't address the existing toxins in our bodies .
i think there 's a better solution .
i 'm an artist , so i 'd like to offer a modest proposal at the intersection of art , science and culture .
the infinity burial project , an alternative burial system that uses mushrooms to decompose and clean toxins in bodies .
the infinity burial project began a few years ago with a fantasy to create the infinity mushroom - a new hybrid mushroom that would decompose bodies , clean the toxins and deliver nutrients to plant roots , leaving clean compost .
but i learned it 's nearly impossible to create a new hybrid mushroom .
i also learned that some of our tastiest mushrooms can clean environmental toxins in soil .
so i thought maybe i could train an army of toxin-cleaning edible mushrooms to eat my body .
so today , i 'm collecting what i shed or slough off - my hair , skin and nails - and i 'm feeding these to edible mushrooms .
as the mushrooms grow , i pick the best feeders to become infinity mushrooms .
it 's a kind of imprinting and selective breeding process for the afterlife .
so when i die , the infinity mushrooms will recognize my body and be able to eat it .
all right , so for some of you , this may be really , really out there .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- just a little .
i realize this is not the kind of relationship that we usually aspire to have with our food .
we want to eat , not be eaten by , our food .
but as i watch the mushrooms grow and digest my body , i imagine the infinity mushroom as a symbol of a new way of thinking about death and the relationship between my body and the environment .
see for me , cultivating the infinity mushroom is more than just scientific experimentation or gardening or raising a pet , it 's a step towards accepting the fact that someday i will die and decay .
it 's also a step towards taking responsibility for my own burden on the planet .
growing a mushroom is also part of a larger practice of cultivating decomposing organisms called decompiculture , a concept that was developed by an entomologist , timothy myles .
the infinity mushroom is a subset of decompiculture i 'm calling body decompiculture and toxin remediation - the cultivation of organisms that decompose and clean toxins in bodies .
and now about these ninja pajamas .
once it 's completed , i plan to integrate the infinity mushrooms into a number of objects .
first , a burial suit infused with mushroom spores , the mushroom death suit .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'm wearing the second prototype of this burial suit .
it 's covered with a crocheted netting that is embedded with mushroom spores .
the dendritic pattern you see mimics the growth of mushroom mycelia , which are the equivalent of plant roots .
i 'm also making a decompiculture kit , a cocktail of capsules that contain infinity mushroom spores and other elements that speed decomposition and toxin remediation .
these capsules are embedded in a nutrient-rich jelly , a kind of second skin , which dissolves quickly and becomes baby food for the growing mushrooms .
so i plan to finish the mushroom and decompiculture kit in the next year or two , and then i 'd like to begin testing them , first with expired meat from the market and then with human subjects .
and believe it or not , a few people have offered to donate their bodies to the project to be eaten by mushrooms .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- what i 've learned from talking to these folks is that we share a common desire to understand and accept death and to minimize the impact of our death on the environment .
i wanted to cultivate this perspective just like the mushrooms , so i formed the decompiculture society , a group of people called decompinauts who actively explore their postmortem options , seek death acceptance and cultivate decomposing organisms like the infinity mushroom .
the decompiculture society shares a vision of a cultural shift , from our current culture of death denial and body preservation to one of decompiculture , a radical acceptance of death and decomposition .
accepting death means accepting that we are physical beings who are intimately connected to the environment , as the research on environmental toxins confirms .
and the saying goes , we came from dust and will return to dust .
and once we understand that we 're connected to the environment , we see that the survival of our species depends on the survival of the planet .
i believe this is the beginning of true environmental responsibility .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so , indeed , i have spent my life looking into the lives of presidents who are no longer alive .
waking up with abraham lincoln in the morning , thinking of franklin roosevelt when i went to bed at night .
but when i try and think about what i 've learned about the meaning in life , my mind keeps wandering back to a seminar that i took when i was a graduate student at harvard with the great psychologist erik erikson .
he taught us that the richest and fullest lives attempt to achieve an inner balance between three realms : work , love and play .
and that to pursue one realm to the disregard of the other , is to open oneself to ultimate sadness in older age .
whereas to pursue all three with equal dedication , is to make possible a life filled not only with achievement , but with serenity .
so since i tell stories , let me look back on the lives of two of the presidents i 've studied to illustrate this point - abraham lincoln and lyndon johnson .
as for that first sphere of work , i think what abraham lincoln 's life suggests is that fierce ambition is a good thing .
he had a huge ambition .
but it was n't simply for office or power or celebrity or fame - what it was for was to accomplish something worthy enough in life so that he could make the world a little better place for his having lived in it .
even as a child , it seemed , lincoln dreamed heroic dreams .
he somehow had to escape that hard-scrabble farm from which he was born .
no schooling was possible for him , except a few weeks here , a few weeks there .
but he read books in every spare moment he could find .
it was said when he got a copy of the king james bible or " aesop 's fables , " he was so excited he could n't sleep .
he could n't eat .
the great poet emily dickinson once said , " there is no frigate like a book to take us lands away . "
how true for lincoln .
though he never would travel to europe , he went with shakespeare 's kings to merry england , he went with lord byron 's poetry to spain and portugal .
literature allowed him to transcend his surroundings .
but there were so many losses in his early life that he was haunted by death .
his mother died when he was only nine years old ; his only sister , sarah , in childbirth a few years later ; and his first love , ann rutledge , at the age of 22 .
moreover , when his mother lay dying , she did not hold out for him the hope that they would meet in an afterworld .
she simply said to him , " abraham , i 'm going away from you now , and i shall never return . "
as a result he became obsessed with the thought that when we die our life is swept away - dust to dust .
but only as he grew older did he develop a certain consolation from an ancient greek notion - but followed by other cultures as well - that if you could accomplish something worthy in your life , you could live on in the memory of others .
your honor and your reputation would outlive your earthly existence .
and that worthy ambition became his lodestar .
it carried him through the one significant depression that he suffered when he was in his early 30s .
three things had combined to lay him low .
he had broken his engagement with mary todd , not certain he was ready to marry her , but knowing how devastating it was to her that he did that .
his one intimate friend , joshua speed , was leaving illinois to go back to kentucky because speed 's father had died .
and his political career in the state legislature was on a downward slide .
he was so depressed that friends worried he was suicidal .
they took all knives and razors and scissors from his room .
and his great friend speed went to his side and said , " lincoln , you must rally or you will die . "
he said that , " i would just as soon die right now , but i 've not yet done anything to make any human being remember that i have lived . "
so fueled by that ambition , he returned to the state legislature .
he eventually won a seat in congress .
he then ran twice for the senate , lost twice .
" everyone is broken by life , " ernest hemingway once said , " but some people are stronger in the broken places . "
so then he surprised the nation with an upset victory for the presidency over three far more experienced , far more educated , far more celebrated rivals .
and then when he won the general election , he stunned the nation even more by appointing each of these three rivals into his cabinet .
it was an unprecedented act at the time because everybody thought , " he 'll look like a figurehead compared to these people . "
they said , " why are you doing this , lincoln ? "
he said , " look , these are the strongest and most able men in the country .
the country is in peril . i need them by my side . "
but perhaps my old friend lyndon johnson might have put it in less noble fashion : " better to have your enemies inside the tent pissing out , than outside the tent pissing in . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but it soon became clear that abraham lincoln would emerge as the undisputed captain of this unruly team .
for each of them soon came to understand that he possessed an unparalleled array of emotional strengths and political skills that proved far more important than the thinness of his external résumé .
for one thing , he possessed an uncanny ability to empathize with and to think about other peoples ' point of view .
he repaired injured feelings that might have escalated into permanent hostility .
he shared credit with ease , assumed responsibility for the failure of his subordinates , constantly acknowledged his errors and learned from his mistakes .
these are the qualities we should be looking for in our candidates in 2008 .
-lrb- applause -rrb- he refused to be provoked by petty grievances .
he never submitted to jealousy or brooded over perceived slights .
and he expressed his unshakeable convictions in everyday language , in metaphors , in stories .
and with a beauty of language - almost as if the shakespeare and the poetry he had so loved as a child had worked their way into his very soul .
in 1863 , when the emancipation proclamation was signed , he brought his old friend , joshua speed , back to the white house , and remembered that conversation of decades before , when he was so sad .
and he , pointing to the proclamation , said , " i believe , in this measure , my fondest hopes will be realized . "
but as he was about to put his signature on the proclamation his own hand was numb and shaking because he had shaken a thousand hands that morning at a new year 's reception .
so he put the pen down .
he said , " if ever my soul were in an act , it is in this act .
but if i sign with a shaking hand , posterity will say , ' he hesitated . " ' so he waited until he could take up the pen and sign with a bold and clear hand .
but even in his wildest dreams , lincoln could never have imagined how far his reputation would reach .
i was so thrilled to find an interview with the great russian writer , leo tolstoy , in a new york newspaper in the early 1900s .
and in it , tolstoy told of a trip that he 'd recently made to a very remote area of the caucasus , where there were only wild barbarians , who had never left this part of russia .
knowing that tolstoy was in their midst , they asked him to tell stories of the great men of history .
so he said , " i told them about napoleon and alexander the great and frederick the great and julius caesar , and they loved it .
but before i finished , the chief of the barbarians stood up and said , ' but wait , you have n't told us about the greatest ruler of them all .
we want to hear about that man who spoke with a voice of thunder , who laughed like the sunrise , who came from that place called america , which is so far from here , that if a young man should travel there , he would be an old man when he arrived .
tell us of that man . tell us of abraham lincoln . " ' he was stunned .
he told them everything he could about lincoln .
and then in the interview he said , " what made lincoln so great ?
not as great a general as napoleon , not as great a statesman as frederick the great . "
but his greatness consisted , and historians would roundly agree , in the integrity of his character and the moral fiber of his being .
so in the end that powerful ambition that had carried lincoln through his bleak childhood had been realized .
that ambition that had allowed him to laboriously educate himself by himself , to go through that string of political failures and the darkest days of the war .
his story would be told .
so as for that second sphere , not of work , but of love - encompassing family , friends and colleagues - it , too , takes work and commitment .
the lyndon johnson that i saw in the last years of his life , when i helped him on his memoirs , was a man who had spent so many years in the pursuit of work , power and individual success , that he had absolutely no psychic or emotional resources left to get him through the days once the presidency was gone .
my relationship with him began on a rather curious level .
i was selected as a white house fellow when i was 24 years old .
we had a big dance at the white house .
president johnson did dance with me that night .
not that peculiar - there were only three women out of the 16 white house fellows .
but he did whisper in my ear that he wanted me to work directly for him in the white house .
but it was not to be that simple .
for in the months leading up to my selection , like many young people , i 'd been active in the anti-vietnam war movement , and had written an article against lyndon johnson , which unfortunately came out in the new republic two days after the dance in the white house .
-lrb- laugher -rrb- and the theme of the article was how to remove lyndon johnson from power .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i was certain he would kick me out of the program .
but instead , surprisingly , he said , " oh , bring her down here for a year , and if i ca n't win her over , no one can . "
so i did end up working for him in the white house .
eventually accompanied him to his ranch to help him on those memoirs , never fully understanding why he 'd chosen me to spend so many hours with .
i like to believe it was because i was a good listener .
he was a great storyteller .
fabulous , colorful , anecdotal stories .
there was a problem with these stories , however , which i later discovered , which is that half of them were n't true .
but they were great , nonetheless .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i think that part of his attraction for me was that i loved listening to his tall tales .
but i also worried that part of it was that i was then a young woman .
and he had somewhat of a minor league womanizing reputation .
so i constantly chatted to him about boyfriends , even when i did n't have any at all .
everything was working perfectly , until one day he said he wanted to discuss our relationship .
sounded very ominous when he took me nearby to the lake , conveniently called lake lyndon baines johnson .
and there was wine and cheese and a red-checked tablecloth - all the romantic trappings .
and he started out , " doris , more than any other woman i have ever known ... " and my heart sank .
and then he said , " you remind me of my mother . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it was pretty embarrassing , given what was going on in my mind .
but i must say , the older i 've gotten , the more i realize what an incredible privilege it was to have spent so many hours with this aging lion of a man .
a victor in a thousand contests , three great civil rights laws , medicare , aid to education .
and yet , roundly defeated in the end by the war in vietnam .
and because he was so sad and so vulnerable , he opened up to me in ways he never would have had i known him at the height of his power - sharing his fears , his sorrows and his worries .
and i 'd like to believe that the privilege fired within me the drive to understand the inner person behind the public figure , that i 've tried to bring to each of my books since then .
but it also brought home to me the lessons which erik erikson had tried to instill in all of us about the importance of finding balance in life .
for on the surface , lyndon johnson should have had everything in the world to feel good about in those last years , in the sense that he had been elected to the presidency ; he had all the money he needed to pursue any leisure activity he wanted ; he owned a spacious ranch in the countryside , a penthouse in the city , sailboats , speedboats .
he had servants to answer any whim , and he had a family who loved him deeply .
and yet , years of concentration solely on work and individual success meant that in his retirement he could find no solace in family , in recreation , in sports or in hobbies .
it was almost as if the hole in his heart was so large that even the love of a family , without work , could not fill it .
as his spirits sagged , his body deteriorated until , i believe , he slowly brought about his own death .
in those last years , he said he was so sad watching the american people look toward a new president and forgetting him .
he spoke with immense sadness in his voice , saying maybe he should have spent more time with his children , and their children in turn .
but it was too late .
despite all that power , all that wealth , he was alone when he finally died - his ultimate terror realized .
so as for that third sphere of play , which he never had learned to enjoy , i 've learned over the years that even this sphere requires a commitment of time and energy - enough so that a hobby , a sport , a love of music , or art , or literature , or any form of recreation , can provide true pleasure , relaxation and replenishment .
so deep , for instance , was abraham lincoln 's love of shakespeare , that he made time to spend more than a hundred nights in the theater , even during those dark days of the war .
he said , when the lights went down and a shakespeare play came on , for a few precious hours he could imagine himself back in prince hal 's time .
but an even more important form of relaxation for him , that lyndon johnson never could enjoy , was a love of - somehow - humor , and feeling out what hilarious parts of life can produce as a sidelight to the sadness .
he once said that he laughed so he did not cry , that a good story , for him , was better than a drop of whiskey .
his storytelling powers had first been recognized when he was on the circuit in illinois .
the lawyers and the judges would travel from one county courthouse to the other , and when anyone was knowing lincoln was in town , they would come from miles around to listen to him tell stories .
he would stand with his back against a fire and entertain the crowd for hours with his winding tales .
and all these stories became part of his memory bank , so he could call on them whenever he needed to .
and they 're not quite what you might expect from our marble monument .
one of his favorite stories , for example , had to do with the revolutionary war hero , ethan allen .
and as lincoln told the story , mr. allen went to britain after the war .
and the british people were still upset about losing the revolution , so they decided to embarrass him a little bit by putting a huge picture of general washington in the only outhouse , where he 'd have to encounter it .
they figured he 'd be upset about the indignity of george washington being in an outhouse .
but he came out of the outhouse not upset at all .
and so they said , " well , did you see george washington in there ? "
" oh , yes , " he said , " perfectly appropriate place for him . "
" what do you mean ? " they said .
" well , " he said , " there 's nothing to make an englishman shit faster than the sight of general george washington . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so you can imagine , if you are in the middle of a tense cabinet meeting - and he had hundreds of these stories - you would have to relax .
so between his nightly treks to the theater , his story telling , and his extraordinary sense of humor and his love of quoting shakespeare and poetry , he found that form of play which carried him through his days .
in my own life , i shall always be grateful for having found a form of play in my irrational love of baseball .
which allows me , from the beginning of spring training to the end of the fall , to have something to occupy my mind and heart other than my work .
it all began when i was only six years old , and my father taught me that mysterious art of keeping score while listening to baseball games - so that when he went to work in new york during the day , i could record for him the history of that afternoon 's brooklyn dodgers game .
now , when you 're only six years old , and your father comes home every single night and listens to you - as i now realize that i , in excruciating detail , recounted every single play of every inning of the game that had just taken place that afternoon .
but he made me feel i was telling him a fabulous story .
it makes you think there 's something magic about history to keep your father 's attention .
in fact , i 'm convinced i learned the narrative art from those nightly sessions with my father .
because at first , i 'd be so excited i would blurt out , " the dodgers won ! " or , " the dodgers lost ! "
which took much of the drama of this two-hour telling away .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i finally learned you had to tell a story from beginning to middle to end .
i must say , so fervent was my love of the old brooklyn dodgers in those days that i had to confess in my first confession two sins that related to baseball .
the first occurred because the dodgers ' catcher , roy campanella , came to my hometown of rockville centre , long island , just as i was in preparation for my first holy communion .
and i was so excited - first person i 'd ever see outside of ebbets field .
but it so happened he was speaking in a protestant church .
when you are brought up as a catholic , you think that if you ever set foot in a protestant church , you 'll be struck dead at the threshold .
so i went to my father in tears , " what are we going to do ? "
he said , " do n't worry . he 's speaking in a parish hall .
we 're sitting in folding chairs . he 's talking about sportsmanship .
it 's not a sin . "
but as i left that night , i was certain that somehow i 'd traded the life of my everlasting soul for this one night with roy campanella .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and there were no indulgences around that i could buy .
so i had this sin on my soul when i went to my first confession .
i told the priest right away .
he said , " no problem . it was n't a religious service . "
but then , unfortunately , he said , " and what else , my child ? "
and then came my second sin .
i tried to sandwich it in between talking too much in church , wishing harm to others , being mean to my sisters .
and he said , " to whom did you wish harm ? "
and i had to say that i wished that various new york yankees players would break arms , legs and ankles - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - so that the brooklyn dodgers could win their first world series .
he said , " how often do you make these horrible wishes ? "
and i had to say , every night when i said my prayers .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so he said , " look , i 'll tell you something .
i love the brooklyn dodgers , as you do , but i promise you some day they will win fairly and squarely .
you do not need to wish harm on others to make it happen . "
" oh yes , " i said .
but luckily , my first confession - to a baseball-loving priest !
-lrb- laughter -rrb- well , though my father died of a sudden heart attack when i was still in my 20s , before i had gotten married and had my three sons , i have passed his memory - as well as his love of baseball - on to my boys .
though when the dodgers abandoned us to come to l.a. , i lost faith in baseball until i moved to boston and became an irrational red socks fan .
and i must say , even now , when i sit with my sons with our season tickets , i can sometimes close my eyes against the sun and imagine myself , a young girl once more , in the presence of my father , watching the players of my youth on the grassy fields below : jackie robinson , roy campanella , pee wee reese , and duke snider .
i must say there is magic in these moments .
when i open my eyes and i see my sons in the place where my father once sat , i feel an invisible loyalty and love linking my sons to the grandfather whose face they never had a chance to see , but whose heart and soul they have come to know through all the stories i have told .
which is why , in the end , i shall always be grateful for this curious love of history , allowing me to spend a lifetime looking back into the past .
allowing me to learn from these large figures about the struggle for meaning for life .
allowing me to believe that the private people we have loved and lost in our families , and the public figures we have respected in our history , just as abraham lincoln wanted to believe , really can live on , so long as we pledge to tell and to retell the stories of their lives .
thank you for letting me be that storyteller today .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
i 'm very fortunate to be here .
i feel so fortunate .
i 've been so impressed by the kindness expressed to me .
i called my wife leslie , and i said , " you know , there 's so many good people trying to do so much good .
it feels like i 've landed in a colony of angels . "
it 's a true feeling .
but let me get to the talk - i see the clock is running .
i 'm a public school teacher , and i just want to share a story of my superintendent .
her name is pam moran in albemarle county , virginia , the foothills of the blue ridge mountains .
and she 's a very high-tech superintendent .
she uses smart boards , she blogs , she tweets , she does facebook , she does all this sort of high-tech stuff .
she 's a technology leader and instructional leader .
but in her office , there 's this old wooden , weather-worn table , kitchen table - peeling green paint , it 's kind of rickety .
and i said , " pam , you 're such a modern , cutting-edge person .
why is this old table in your office ? "
and she told me , she said , " you know , i grew up in southwestern virginia , in the coal mines and the farmlands of rural virginia , and this table was in my grandfather 's kitchen .
and we 'd come in from playing , he 'd come in from plowing and working , and we 'd sit around that table every night .
and as i grew up , i heard so much knowledge and so many insights and so much wisdom come out around this table , i began to call it the wisdom table .
and when he passed on , i took this table with me and brought it to my office , and it reminds me of him .
it reminds me of what goes on around an empty space sometimes . "
the project i 'm going to tell you about is called the world peace game , and essentially it is also an empty space .
and i 'd like to think of it as a 21st century wisdom table , really .
it all started back in 1977 .
i was a young man , and i had been dropping in and out of college .
and my parents were very patient , but i had been doing intermittent sojourns to india on a mystical quest .
and i remember the last time i came back from india - in my long white flowing robes and my big beard and my john lennon glasses - and i said to my father , " dad , i think i 've just about found spiritual enlightenment . "
he said , " well there 's one more thing you need to find . "
i said , " what is that , dad ? " " a job . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and so they pleaded with me to get a degree in something .
so i got a degree and it turned out to be education .
it was an experimental education program .
it could have been dentistry , but the word " experimental " was in it , and so that 's what i had to go for .
and i went in for a job interview in the richmond public schools in virginia , the capital city , bought a three-piece suit - my concession to convention - kept my long beard and my afro and my platform shoes - at the time it was the ' 70s - and i walked in , and i sat down and had an interview .
and i guess they were hard up for teachers because the supervisor , her name was anna aro , said i had the job teaching gifted children .
and i was so shocked , so stunned , i got up and said , " well , thank you , but what do i do ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- gifted education had n't really taken hold too much .
there were n't really many materials or things to use .
and i said , " what do i do ? "
and her answer shocked me . it stunned me .
her answer set the template for the entire career i was to have after that .
she said , " what do you want to do ? "
and that question cleared the space .
there was no program directive , no manual to follow , no standards in gifted education in that way .
and she cleared such a space that i endeavored from then on to clear a space for my students , an empty space , whereby they could create and make meaning out of their own understanding .
so this happened in 1978 , and i was teaching many years later , and a friend of mine introduced me to a young filmmaker .
his name is chris farina .
chris farina is here today at his own cost .
chris , could you stand up and let them see you - a young , visionary filmmaker who 's made a film .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this film is called " world peace and other 4th grade achievements . "
he proposed the film to me - it 's a great title .
he proposed the film to me , and i said , " yeah , maybe it 'll be on local tv , and we can say hi to our friends . "
but the film has really gone places .
now it 's still in debt , but chris has managed , through his own sacrifice , to get this film out .
so we made a film and it turns out to be more than a story about me , more than a story about one teacher .
it 's a story that 's a testament to teaching and teachers .
and it 's a beautiful thing .
and the strange thing is , when i watch the film - i have the eerie sensation of seeing it - i saw myself literally disappear .
what i saw was my teachers coming through me .
i saw my geometry teacher in high school , mr. rucell 's wry smile under his handlebar mustache .
that 's the smile i use - that 's his smile .
i saw jan polo 's flashing eyes .
and they were n't flashing in anger , they were flashing in love , intense love for her students .
and i have that kind of flash sometimes .
and i saw miss ethel j. banks who wore pearls and high-heels to elementary school every day .
and you know , she had that old-school teacher stare .
you know the one .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " and i 'm not even talking about you behind me , because i 've got eyes in the back of my head . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you know that teacher ?
i did n't use that stare very often , but i do have it in my repertoire .
and miss banks was there as a great mentor for me .
and then i saw my own parents , my first teachers .
my father , very inventive , spatial thinker .
that 's my brother malcolm there on the right .
and my mother , who taught me in fourth grade in segregated schools in virginia , who was my inspiration .
and really , i feel as though , when i see the film - i have a gesture she does , like this - i feel like i am a continuation of her gesture .
i am one of her teaching gestures .
and the beautiful thing was , i got to teach my daughter in elementary school , madeline .
and so that gesture of my mother 's continues through many generations .
it 's an amazing feeling to have that lineage .
and so i 'm here standing on the shoulders of many people .
i 'm not here alone .
there are many people on this stage right now .
and so this world peace game i 'd like to tell you about .
it started out like this : it 's just a four-foot by five-foot plywood board in an inner-city urban school , 1978 .
i was creating a lesson for students on africa .
we put all the problems of the world there , and i thought , let 's let them solve it .
i did n't want to lecture or have just book reading .
i wanted to have them be immersed and learn the feeling of learning through their bodies .
so i thought , well they like to play games .
i 'll make something - i did n't say interactive ; we did n't have that term in 1978 - but something interactive .
and so we made the game , and it has since evolved to a four-foot by four-foot by four-foot plexiglass structure .
and it has four plexiglass layers .
there 's an outer space layer with black holes and satellites and research satellites and asteroid mining .
there 's an air and space level with clouds that are big puffs of cotton we push around and territorial air spaces and air forces , a ground and sea level with thousands of game pieces on it - even an undersea level with submarines and undersea mining .
there are four countries around the board .
the kids make up the names of the countries - some are rich ; some are poor .
they have different assets , commercial and military .
and each country has a cabinet .
there 's a prime minister , secretary of state , minister of defense and a cfo , or comptroller .
i choose the prime minister based on my relationship with them .
i offer them the job , they can turn it down , and then they choose their own cabinet .
there 's a world bank , arms dealers and a united nations .
there 's also a weather goddess who controls a random stock market and random weather .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's not all .
and then there 's a 13-page crisis document with 50 interlocking problems .
so that , if one thing changes , everything else changes .
i throw them into this complex matrix , and they trust me because we have a deep , rich relationship together .
and so with all these crises , we have - let 's see - ethnic and minority tensions ; we have chemical and nuclear spills , nuclear proliferation .
there 's oil spills , environmental disasters , water rights disputes , breakaway republics , famine , endangered species and global warming .
if al gore is here , i 'm going to send my fourth-graders from agnor-hurt and venable schools to you because they solved global warming in a week .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- and they 've done it several times too .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i also have in the game a saboteur - some child - it 's basically a troublemaker - and i have my troublemaker put to use because they , on the surface , are trying to save the world and their position in the game .
but they 're also trying to undermine everything in the game .
and they do it secretly through misinformation and ambiguities and irrelevancies , trying to cause everyone to think more deeply .
the saboteur is there , and we also read from sun tzu 's " the art of war . "
fourth-graders understand it - nine years old - and they handle that and use that to understand how to , not follow - at first they do - the paths to power and destruction , the path to war .
they learn to overlook short-sighted reactions and impulsive thinking , to think in a long-term , more consequential way .
stewart brand is here , and one of the ideas for this game came from him with a coevolution quarterly article on a peace force .
and in the game , sometimes students actually form a peace force .
i 'm just a clock watcher .
i 'm just a clarifier . i 'm just a facilitator .
the students run the game .
i have no chance to make any policy whatsoever once they start playing .
so i 'll just share with you ...
-lrb- video -rrb- boy : the world peace game is serious .
you 're actually getting taught something like how to take care of the world .
see , mr. hunter is doing that because he says his time has messed up a lot , and he 's trying to tell us how to fix that problem .
john hunter : i offered them a - -lrb- applause -rrb- actually , i ca n't tell them anything because i do n't know the answer .
and i admit the truth to them right up front : i do n't know .
and because i do n't know , they 've got to dig up the answer .
and so i apologize to them as well .
i say , " i 'm so sorry , boys and girls , but the truth is we have left this world to you in such a sad and terrible shape , and we hope you can fix it for us , and maybe this game will help you learn how to do it . "
it 's a sincere apology , and they take it very seriously .
now you may be wondering what all this complexity looks like .
well when we have the game start , here 's what you see .
-lrb- video -rrb- jh : all right , we 're going into negotiations as of now . go .
-lrb- chatter -rrb- jh : my question to you is , who 's in charge of that classroom ?
it 's a serious question : who is really in charge ?
i 've learned to cede control of the classroom over to the students over time .
there 's a trust and an understanding and a dedication to an ideal that i simply do n't have to do what i thought i had to do as a beginning teacher : control every conversation and response in the classroom .
it 's impossible . their collective wisdom is much greater than mine , and i admit it to them openly .
so i 'll just share with you some stories very quickly of some magical things that have happened .
in this game we had a little girl , and she was the defense minister of the poorest nation .
and the defense minister - she had the tank corps and air force and so forth .
and she was next door to a very wealthy , oil-rich neighbor .
without provocation , suddenly she attacked , against her prime minister 's orders , the next-door neighbor 's oil fields .
she marched into the oil field reserves , surrounded it , without firing a shot , and secured it and held it .
and that neighbor was unable to conduct any military operations because their fuel supply was locked up .
we were all upset with her , " why are you doing this ?
this is the world peace game . what is wrong with you ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this was a little girl and , at nine years old , she held her pieces and said , " i know what i 'm doing . "
to her girlfriends she said that .
that 's a breach there .
and we learned in this , you do n't really ever want to cross a nine year-old girl with tanks .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- they are the toughest opponents .
and we were very upset .
i thought i was failing as a teacher . why would she do this ?
but come to find out , a few game days later - and there are turns where we take negotiation from a team - actually there 's a negotiation period with all teams , and each team takes a turn , then we go back in negotiation , around and around , so each turn around is one game day .
so a few game days later it came to light that we found out this major country was planning a military offensive to dominate the entire world .
had they had their fuel supplies , they would have done it .
she was able to see the vectors and trend lines and intentions long before any of us and understand what was going to happen and made a philosophical decision to attack in a peace game .
now she used a small war to avert a larger war , so we stopped and had a very good philosophical discussion about whether that was right , conditional good , or not right .
that 's the kind of thinking that we put them in , the situations .
i could not have designed that in teaching it .
it came about spontaneously through their collective wisdom .
-lrb- applause -rrb- another example , a beautiful thing happened .
we have a letter in the game .
if you 're a military commander and you wage troops - the little plastic toys on the board - and you lose them , i put in a letter .
you have to write a letter to their parents - the fictional parents of your fictional troops - explaining what happened and offering your condolences .
so you have a little bit more thought before you commit to combat .
and so we had this situation come up - last summer actually , at agnor-hurt school in albemarle county - and one of our military commanders got up to read that letter and one of the other kids said , " mr. hunter , let 's ask - there 's a parent over there . "
there was a parent visiting that day , just sitting in the back of the room .
" let 's ask that mom to read the letter .
it 'll be more realer if she reads it . "
so we did , we asked her , and she gamely picked up the letter .
" sure . " she started reading . she read one sentence .
she read two sentences .
by the third sentence , she was in tears .
i was in tears .
everybody understood that when we lose somebody , the winners are not gloating .
we all lose .
and it was an amazing occurrence and an amazing understanding .
i 'll show you what my friend david says about this .
he 's been in many battles .
-lrb- video -rrb- david : we 've really had enough of people attacking .
i mean , we 've been lucky -lsb- most of -rsb- the time .
but now i 'm feeling really weird because i 'm living what sun tzu said one week .
one week he said , " those who go into battle and win will want to go back , and those who lose in battle will want to go back and win . "
and so i 've been winning battles , so i 'm going into battles , more battles .
and i think it 's sort of weird to be living what sun tzu said .
jh : i get chills every time i see that .
that 's the kind of engagement you want to have happen .
and i ca n't design that , i ca n't plan that , and i ca n't even test that .
but it 's self-evident assessment .
we know that 's an authentic assessment of learning .
we have a lot of data , but i think sometimes we go beyond data with the real truth of what 's going on .
so i 'll just share a third story .
this is about my friend brennan .
we had played the game one session after school for many weeks , about seven weeks , and we had essentially solved all 50 of the interlocking crises .
the way the game is won is all 50 problems have to be solved and every country 's asset value has to be increased above its starting point .
some are poor , some are wealthy . there are billions .
the world bank president was a third-grader one time .
he says , " how many zeros in a trillion ? i 've got to calculate that right away . "
but he was setting fiscal policy in that game for high school players who were playing with him .
so the team that was the poorest had gotten even poorer .
there was no way they could win .
and we were approaching four o 'clock , our cut-off time - there was about a minute left - and despair just settled over the room .
i thought , i 'm failing as a teacher .
i should have gotten it so they could have won .
they should n't be failing like this .
i 've failed them .
and i was just feeling so sad and dejected .
and suddenly , brennan walked over to my chair and he grabbed the bell , the bell i ring to signal a change or a reconvening of cabinets , and he ran back to his seat , rang the bell .
everybody ran to his chair : there was screaming ; there was yelling , waving of their dossiers .
they get these dossiers full of secret documents .
they were gesticulating ; they were running around .
i did n't know what they were doing . i 'd lost control of my classroom .
principal walks in , i 'm out of a job .
the parents were looking in the window .
and brennan runs back to his seat . everybody runs back to their seat .
he rings the bell again . he says , " we have " - and there 's 12 seconds left on the clock - " we have , all nations , pooled all our funds together .
and we 've got 600 billion dollars .
we 're going to offer it as a donation to this poor country .
and if they accept it , it 'll raise their asset value and we can win the game .
will you accept it ? "
and there are three seconds left on the clock .
everybody looks at this prime minister of that country , and he says , " yes . "
and the game is won .
spontaneous compassion that could not be planned for , that was unexpected and unpredictable .
every game we play is different .
some games are more about social issues , some are more about economic issues .
some games are more about warfare .
but i do n't try to deny them that reality of being human .
i allow them to go there and , through their own experience , learn , in a bloodless way , how not to do what they consider to be the wrong thing .
and they find out what is right their own way , their own selves .
and so in this game , i 've learned so much from it , but i would say that if only they could pick up a critical thinking tool or creative thinking tool from this game and leverage something good for the world , they may save us all .
if only .
and on behalf of all of my teachers on whose shoulders i 'm standing , thank you . thank you . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- how do groups get anything done ? right ?
how do you organize a group of individuals so that the output of the group is something coherent and of lasting value , instead of just being chaos ?
and the economic framing of that problem is called coordination costs .
and a coordination cost is essentially all of the financial or institutional difficulties in arranging group output .
and we 've had a classic answer for coordination costs , which is , if you want to coordinate the work of a group of people , you start an institution , right ? you raise some resources .
you found something . it can be private or public .
it can be for profit or not profit . it can be large or small .
but you get these resources together .
you found an institution , and you use the institution to coordinate the activities of the group .
more recently , because the cost of letting groups communicate with each other has fallen through the floor - and communication costs are one of the big inputs to coordination - there has been a second answer , which is to put the cooperation into the infrastructure , to design systems that coordinate the output of the group as a by-product of the operating of the system , without regard to institutional models .
so , that 's what i want to talk about today .
i 'm going to illustrate it with some fairly concrete examples , but always pointing to the broader themes .
so , i 'm going to start by trying to answer a question that i know each of you will have asked yourself at some point or other , and which the internet is purpose-built to answer , which is , where can i get a picture of a roller-skating mermaid ?
so , in new york city , on the first saturday of every summer , coney island , our local , charmingly run-down amusement park , hosts the mermaid parade . it 's an amateur parade ; people come from all over the city ; people get all dressed up .
some people get less dressed up .
young and old , dancing in the streets .
colorful characters , and a good time is had by all .
and what i want to call your attention to is not the mermaid parade itself , charming though it is , but rather to these photos .
i did n't take them . how did i get them ?
and the answer is : i got them from flickr .
flickr is a photo-sharing service that allows people to take photos , upload them , share them over the web and so forth .
recently , flickr has added an additional function called tagging .
tagging was pioneered by delicious and joshua schachter .
delicious is a social bookmarking service .
tagging is a cooperative infrastructure answer to classification .
right ? if i had given this talk last year , i could n't do what i just did , because i could n't have found those photos .
but instead of saying , we need to hire a professional class of librarians to organize these photos once they 're uploaded , flickr simply turned over to the users the ability to characterize the photos .
so , i was able to go in and draw down photos that had been tagged " mermaid parade . " there were 3,100 photos taken by 118 photographers , all aggregated and then put under this nice , neat name , shown in reverse chronological order .
and i was then able to go and retrieve them to give you that little slideshow .
now , what hard problem is being solved here ?
and it 's - in the most schematic possible view , it 's a coordination problem , right ?
there are a large number of people on the internet , a very small fraction of them have photos of the mermaid parade .
how do we get those people together to contribute that work ?
the classic answer is to form an institution , right ?
to draw those people into some prearranged structure that has explicit goals .
and i want to call your attention to some of the side effects of going the institutional route .
first of all , when you form an institution , you take on a management problem , right ?
no good just hiring employees , you also have to hire other employees to manage those employees and to enforce the goals of the institution and so forth .
secondly , you have to bring structure into place .
right ? you have to have economic structure .
you have to have legal structure .
you have to have physical structure .
and that creates additional costs .
third , forming an institution is inherently exclusionary .
you notice we have n't got everybody who has a photo .
you ca n't hire everyone in a company , right ?
you ca n't recruit everyone into a governmental organization .
you have to exclude some people .
and fourth , as a result of that exclusion , you end up with a professional class . look at the change here .
we 've gone from people with photos to photographers .
right ? we 've created a professional class of photographers whose goal is to go out and photograph the mermaid parade , or whatever else they 're sent out to photograph .
when you build cooperation into the infrastructure , which is the flickr answer , you can leave the people where they are and you take the problem to the individuals , rather than moving the individuals to the problem .
you arrange the coordination in the group , and by doing that you get the same outcome , without the institutional difficulties .
you lose the institutional imperative .
you lose the right to shape people 's work when it 's volunteer effort , but you also shed the institutional cost , which gives you greater flexibility .
what flickr does is it replaces planning with coordination .
and this is a general aspect of these cooperative systems .
right . you 'll have experienced this in your life whenever you bought your first mobile phone , and you stopped making plans .
you just said , " i 'll call you when i get there . "
" call me when you get off work . " right ?
that is a point-to-point replacement of coordination with planning .
right . we 're now able to do that kind of thing with groups .
to say instead of , we must make an advance plan , we must have a five-year projection of where the wikipedia is going to be , or whatever , you can just say , let 's coordinate the group effort , and let 's deal with it as we go , because we 're now well-enough coordinated that we do n't have to take on the problems of deciding in advance what to do .
so here 's another example . this one 's somewhat more somber .
these are photos on flickr tagged " iraq . "
and everything that was hard about the coordination cost with the mermaid parade is even harder here .
there are more pictures . there are more photographers .
it 's taken over a wider geographic area .
the photos are spread out over a longer period of time .
and worst of all , that figure at the bottom , approximately ten photos per photographer , is a lie .
it 's mathematically true , but it does n't really talk about anything important - because in these systems , the average is n't really what matters .
what matters is this .
this is a graph of photographs tagged iraq as taken by the 529 photographers who contributed the 5,445 photos .
and it 's ranked in order of number of photos taken per photographer .
you can see here , over at the end , our most prolific photographer has taken around 350 photos , and you can see there 's a few people who have taken hundreds of photos .
then there 's dozens of people who 've taken dozens of photos .
and by the time we get around here , we get ten or fewer photos , and then there 's this long , flat tail .
and by the time you get to the middle , you 've got hundreds of people who have contributed only one photo each .
this is called a power-law distribution .
it appears often in unconstrained social systems where people are allowed to contribute as much or as little as they like - this is often what you get . right ?
the math behind the power-law distribution is that whatever 's in the nth position is doing about one-nth of whatever 's being measured , relative to the person in the first position .
so , we 'd expect the tenth most prolific photographer to have contributed about a tenth of the photos , and the hundredth most prolific photographer to have contributed only about a hundred as many photos as the most prolific photographer did .
so , the head of the curve can be sharper or flatter .
but that basic math accounts both for the steep slope and for the long , flat tail .
and curiously , in these systems , as they grow larger , the systems do n't converge ; they diverge more .
in bigger systems , the head gets bigger and the tail gets longer , so the imbalance increases .
you can see the curve is obviously heavily left-weighted . here 's how heavily : if you take the top 10 percent of photographers contributing to this system , they account for three quarters of the photos taken - just the top 10 percent most prolific photographers .
if you go down to five percent , you 're still accounting for 60 percent of the photos .
if you go down to one percent , exclude 99 percent of the group effort , you 're still accounting for almost a quarter of the photos .
and because of this left weighting , the average is actually here , way to the left .
and that sounds strange to our ears , but what ends up happening is that 80 percent of the contributors have contributed a below-average amount .
that sounds strange because we expect average and middle to be about the same , but they 're not at all .
this is the math underlying the 80/20 rule . right ?
whenever you hear anybody talking about the 80/20 rule , this is what 's going on . right ?
20 percent of the merchandise accounts for 80 percent of the revenue , 20 percent of the users use 80 percent of the resources - this is the shape people are talking about when that happens .
institutions only have two tools : carrots and sticks .
and the 80 percent zone is a no-carrot and no-stick zone .
the costs of running the institution mean that you can not take on the work of those people easily in an institutional frame .
the institutional model always pushes leftwards , treating these people as employees .
the institutional response is , i can get 75 percent of the value for 10 percent of the hires - great , that 's what i 'll do .
the cooperative infrastructure model says , why do you want to give up a quarter of the value ?
if your system is designed so that you have to give up a quarter of the value , re-engineer the system .
do n't take on the cost that prevents you from getting to the contributions of these people .
build the system so that anybody can contribute at any amount .
so the coordination response asks not , how are these people as employees , but rather , what is their contribution like ? right ?
we have over here psycho milt , a flickr user , who has contributed one , and only one , photo titled " iraq . "
and here 's the photo . right . labeled , " bad day at work . "
right ? so the question is , do you want that photo ? yes or no .
the question is not , is psycho milt a good employee ?
and the tension here is between institution as enabler and institution as obstacle .
when you 're dealing with the left-hand edge of one of these distributions , when you 're dealing with the people who spend a lot of time producing a lot of the material you want , that 's an institution-as-enabler world .
you can hire those people as employees , you can coordinate their work and you can get some output .
but when you 're down here , where the psycho milts of the world are adding one photo at a time , that 's institution as obstacle .
institutions hate being told they 're obstacles .
one of the first things that happens when you institutionalize a problem is that the first goal of the institution immediately shifts from whatever the nominal goal was to self-preservation .
and the actual goal of the institution goes to two through n .
right ? so , when institutions are told they are obstacles , and that there are other ways of coordinating the value , they go through something a little bit like the kubler-ross stages - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - of reaction , being told you have a fatal illness : denial , anger , bargaining , acceptance .
most of the cooperative systems we 've seen have n't been around long enough to have gotten to the acceptance phase .
many , many institutions are still in denial , but we 're seeing recently a lot of both anger and bargaining .
there 's a wonderful , small example going on right now .
in france , a bus company is suing people for forming a carpool , right , because the fact that they have coordinated themselves to create cooperative value is depriving them of revenue .
you can follow this in the guardian .
it 's actually quite entertaining .
the bigger question is , what do you do about the value down here ?
right ? how do you capture that ?
and institutions , as i 've said , are prevented from capturing that .
steve ballmer , now ceo of microsoft , was criticizing linux a couple of years ago , and he said , " oh , this business of thousands of programmers contributing to linux , this is a myth .
we 've looked at who 's contributed to linux , and most of the patches have been produced by programmers who 've only done one thing . " right ?
you can hear this distribution under that complaint .
and you can see why , from ballmer 's point of view , that 's a bad idea , right ?
we hired this programmer , he came in , he drank our cokes and played foosball for three years and he had one idea .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- right ? bad hire . right ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the psycho milt question is , was it a good idea ?
what if it was a security patch ?
what if it was a security patch for a buffer overflow exploit , of which windows has not some , -lsb- but -rsb- several ?
do you want that patch , right ?
the fact that a single programmer can , without having to move into a professional relation to an institution , improve linux once and never be seen from again , should terrify ballmer .
because this kind of value is unreachable in classic institutional frameworks , but is part of cooperative systems of open-source software , of file sharing , of the wikipedia . i 've used a lot of examples from flickr , but there are actually stories about this from all over .
meetup , a service founded so that users could find people in their local area who share their interests and affinities and actually have a real-world meeting offline in a cafe or a pub or what have you .
when scott heiferman founded meetup , he thought it would be used for , you know , train spotters and cat fanciers - classic affinity groups .
the inventors do n't know what the invention is .
number one group on meetup right now , most chapters in most cities with most members , most active ?
stay-at-home moms . right ?
in the suburbanized , dual-income united states , stay-at-home moms are actually missing the social infrastructure that comes from extended family and local , small-scale neighborhoods .
so they 're reinventing it , using these tools .
meetup is the platform , but the value here is in social infrastructure .
if you want to know what technology is going to change the world , do n't pay attention to 13-year-old boys - pay attention to young mothers , because they have got not an ounce of support for technology that does n't materially make their lives better .
this is so much more important than xbox , but it 's a lot less glitzy .
i think this is a revolution .
i think that this is a really profound change in the way human affairs are arranged .
and i use that word advisedly .
it 's a revolution in that it 's a change in equilibrium .
it 's a whole new way of doing things , which includes new downsides .
in the united states right now , a woman named judith miller is in jail for not having given to a federal grand jury her sources - she 's a reporter for the new york times - her sources , in a very abstract and hard-to-follow case .
and journalists are in the street rallying to improve the shield laws .
the shield laws are our laws - pretty much a patchwork of state laws - that prevent a journalist from having to betray a source .
this is happening , however , against the background of the rise of web logging .
web logging is a classic example of mass amateurization .
it has de-professionalized publishing .
want to publish globally anything you think today ?
it is a one-button operation that you can do for free .
that has sent the professional class of publishing down into the ranks of mass amateurization .
and so the shield law , as much as we want it - we want a professional class of truth-tellers - it is becoming increasingly incoherent , because the institution is becoming incoherent .
there are people in the states right now tying themselves into knots , trying to figure out whether or not bloggers are journalists .
and the answer to that question is , it does n't matter , because that 's not the right question .
journalism was an answer to an even more important question , which is , how will society be informed ?
how will they share ideas and opinions ?
and if there is an answer to that that happens outside the professional framework of journalism , it makes no sense to take a professional metaphor and apply it to this distributed class .
so as much as we want the shield laws , the background - the institution to which they were attached - is becoming incoherent .
here 's another example .
pro-ana , the pro-ana groups .
these are groups of teenage girls who have taken on web logs , bulletin boards , other kinds of cooperative infrastructure , and have used it to set up support groups for remaining anorexic by choice .
they post pictures of thin models , which they call " thinspiration . "
they have little slogans , like " salvation through starvation . "
they even have lance armstrong-style bracelets , these red bracelets , which signify , in the small group , i am trying to maintain my eating disorder .
they trade tips , like , if you feel like eating something , clean a toilet or the litter box . the feeling will pass .
we 're used to support groups being beneficial .
we have an attitude that support groups are inherently beneficial .
but it turns out that the logic of the support group is value neutral .
a support group is simply a small group that wants to maintain a way of living in the context of a larger group .
now , when the larger group is a bunch of drunks , and the small group wants to stay sober , then we think , that 's a great support group .
but when the small group is teenage girls who want to stay anorexic by choice , then we 're horrified .
what 's happened is that the normative goals of the support groups that we 're used to , came from the institutions that were framing them , and not from the infrastructure .
once the infrastructure becomes generically available , the logic of the support group has been revealed to be accessible to anyone , including people pursuing these kinds of goals .
so , there are significant downsides to these changes as well as upsides . and of course , in the current environment , one need allude only lightly to the work of non-state actors trying to influence global affairs , and taking advantage of these .
this is a social map of the hijackers and their associates who perpetrated the 9/11 attack .
it was produced by analyzing their communications patterns using a lot of these tools . and doubtless the intelligence communities of the world are doing the same work today for the attacks of last week .
now , this is the part of the talk where i tell you what 's going to come as a result of all of this , but i 'm running out of time , which is good , because i do n't know .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- right . as with the printing press , if it 's really a revolution , it does n't take us from point a to point b.
it takes us from point a to chaos .
the printing press precipitated 200 years of chaos , moving from a world where the catholic church was the sort of organizing political force to the treaty of westphalia , when we finally knew what the new unit was : the nation state .
now , i 'm not predicting 200 years of chaos as a result of this . 50 .
50 years in which loosely coordinated groups are going to be given increasingly high leverage , and the more those groups forego traditional institutional imperatives - like deciding in advance what 's going to happen , or the profit motive - the more leverage they 'll get .
and institutions are going to come under an increasing degree of pressure , and the more rigidly managed , and the more they rely on information monopolies , the greater the pressure is going to be .
and that 's going to happen one arena at a time , one institution at a time . the forces are general , but the results are going to be specific .
and so the point here is not , " this is wonderful , " or " we 're going to see a transition from only institutions to only cooperative framework . "
it 's going to be much more complicated than that .
but the point is that it 's going to be a massive readjustment .
and since we can see it in advance and know it 's coming , my argument is essentially : we might as well get good at it .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- martin luther king did not say , " i have a nightmare , " when he inspired the civil rights movements .
he said , " i have a dream . "
and i have a dream .
i have a dream that we can stop thinking that the future will be a nightmare , and this is going to be a challenge , because , if you think of every major blockbusting film of recent times , nearly all of its visions for humanity are apocalyptic .
i think this film is one of the hardest watches of modern times , " the road . "
it 's a beautiful piece of filmmaking , but everything is desolate , everything is dead .
and just a father and son trying to survive , walking along the road .
and i think the environmental movement of which i am a part of has been complicit in creating this vision of the future .
for too long , we have peddled a nightmarish vision of what 's going to happen .
we have focused on the worst-case scenario .
we have focused on the problems .
and we have not thought enough about the solutions .
we 've used fear , if you like , to grab people 's attention .
and any psychologist will tell you that fear in the organism is linked to flight mechanism .
it 's part of the fight and flight mechanism , that when an animal is frightened - think of a deer .
a deer freezes very , very still , poised to run away .
and i think that 's what we 're doing when we 're asking people to engage with our agenda around environmental degradation and climate change .
people are freezing and running away because we 're using fear .
and i think the environmental movement has to grow up and start to think about what progress is .
what would it be like to be improving the human lot ?
and one of the problems that we face , i think , is that the only people that have cornered the market in terms of progress is a financial definition of what progress is , an economic definition of what progress is - that somehow , if we get the right numbers to go up , we 're going to be better off , whether that 's on the stock market , whether that 's with gdp and economic growth , that somehow life is going to get better .
this is somehow appealing to human greed instead of fear - that more is better .
come on . in the western world , we have enough .
maybe some parts of the world do n't , but we have enough .
and we 've know for a long time that this is not a good measure of the welfare of nations .
in fact , the architect of our national accounting system , simon kuznets , in the 1930s , said that , " a nation 's welfare can scarcely be inferred from their national income . "
but we 've created a national accounting system which is firmly based on production and producing stuff .
and indeed , this is probably historical , and it had its time .
in the second world war , we needed to produce a lot of stuff .
and indeed , we were so successful at producing certain types of stuff that we destroyed a lot of europe , and we had to rebuild it afterwards .
and so our national accounting system became fixated on what we can produce .
but as early as 1968 , this visionary man , robert kennedy , at the start of his ill-fated presidential campaign , gave the most eloquent deconstruction of gross national product and he finished his talk with the phrase , that , " the gross national product measures everything except that which makes life worthwhile . "
how crazy is that ? that our measure of progress , our dominant measure of progress in society , is measuring everything except that which makes life worthwhile ?
i believe , if kennedy was alive today , he would be asking statisticians such as myself to go out and find out what makes life worthwhile .
he 'd be asking us to redesign our national accounting system to be based upon such important things as social justice , sustainability and people 's well-being .
and actually , social scientists have already gone out and asked these questions around the world .
this is from a global survey .
it 's asking people , what do they want .
and unsurprisingly , people all around the world say that what they want is happiness , for themselves , for their families , their children , their communities .
okay , they think money is slightly important .
it 's there , but it 's not nearly as important as happiness , and it 's not nearly as important as love .
we all need to love and be loved in life .
it 's not nearly as important as health .
we want to be healthy and live a full life .
these seem to be natural human aspirations .
why are statisticians not measuring these ?
why are we not thinking of the progress of nations in these terms , instead of just how much stuff we have ?
and really , this is what i 've done with my adult life - is think about how do we measure happiness , how do we measure well-being , how can we do that within environmental limits .
and we created , at the organization that i work for , the new economics foundation , something we call the happy planet index , because we think people should be happy and the planet should be happy .
why do n't we create a measure of progress that shows that ?
and what we do , is we say that the ultimate outcome of a nation is how successful is it at creating happy and healthy lives for its citizens .
that should be the goal of every nation on the planet .
but we have to remember that there 's a fundamental input to that , and that is how many of the planet 's resources we use .
we all have one planet . we all have to share it .
it is the ultimate scarce resource , the one planet that we share .
and economics is very interested in scarcity .
when it has a scarce resource that it wants to turn into a desirable outcome , it thinks in terms of efficiency .
it thinks in terms of how much bang do we get for our buck .
and this is a measure of how much well-being we get for our planetary resource use .
it is an efficiency measure .
and probably the easiest way to show you that , is to show you this graph .
running horizontally along the graph , is " ecological footprint , " which is a measure of how much resources we use and how much pressure we put on the planet .
more is bad .
running vertically upwards , is a measure called " happy life years . "
it 's about the well-being of nations .
it 's like a happiness adjusted life-expectancy .
it 's like quality and quantity of life in nations .
and the yellow dot there you see , is the global average .
now , there 's a huge array of nations around that global average .
to the top right of the graph , are countries which are doing reasonably well and producing well-being , but they 're using a lot of planet to get there .
they are the u.s.a. , other western countries going across in those triangles and a few gulf states in there actually .
conversely , at the bottom left of the graph , are countries that are not producing much well-being - typically , sub-saharan africa .
in hobbesian terms , life is short and brutish there .
the average life expectancy in many of these countries is only 40 years .
malaria , hiv / aids are killing a lot of people in these regions of the world .
but now for the good news !
there are some countries up there , yellow triangles , that are doing better than global average , that are heading up towards the top left of the graph .
this is an aspirational graph .
we want to be top left , where good lives do n't cost the earth .
they 're latin american .
the country on its own up at the top is a place i have n't been to .
maybe some of you have .
costa rica .
costa rica - average life expectancy is 78-and-a-half years .
that is longer than in the usa .
they are , according to the latest gallup world poll , the happiest nation on the planet - than anybody ; more than switzerland and denmark .
they are the happiest place .
they are doing that on a quarter of the resources that are used typically in -lsb- the -rsb- western world - a quarter of the resources .
what 's going on there ?
what 's happening in costa rica ?
we can look at some of the data .
99 percent of their electricity comes from renewable resources .
their government is one of the first to commit to be carbon neutral by 2021 .
they abolished the army in 1949 - 1949 .
and they invested in social programs - health and education .
they have one of the highest literacy rates in latin america and in the world .
and they have that latin vibe , do n't they .
they have the social connectedness .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the challenge is , that possibly - and the thing we might have to think about - is that the future might not be north american , might not be western european .
it might be latin american .
and the challenge , really , is to pull the global average up here .
that 's what we need to do .
and if we 're going to do that , we need to pull countries from the bottom , and we need to pull countries from the right of the graph .
and then we 're starting to create a happy planet .
that 's one way of looking at it .
another way of looking at it is looking at time trends .
we do n't have good data going back for every country in the world , but for some of the richest countries , the oecd group , we do .
and this is the trend in well-being over that time , a small increase , but this is the trend in ecological footprint .
and so in strict happy-planet methodology , we 've become less efficient at turning our ultimate scarce resource into the outcome we want to .
and the point really is , is that i think , probably everybody in this room would like society to get to 2050 without an apocalyptic something happening .
it 's actually not very long away .
it 's half a human lifetime away .
a child entering school today will be my age in 2050 .
this is not the very distant future .
this is what the u.k. government target on carbon and greenhouse emissions looks like .
and i put it to you , that is not business as usual .
that is changing our business .
that is changing the way we create our organizations , we do our government policy and we live our lives .
and the point is , we need to carry on increasing well-being .
no one can go to the polls and say that quality of life is going to reduce .
none of us , i think , want human progress to stop .
i think we want it to carry on .
i think we want the lot of humanity to keep on increasing .
and i think this is where climate change skeptics and deniers come in .
i think this is what they want . they want quality of life to keep increasing .
they want to hold on to what they 've got .
and if we 're going to engage them , i think that 's what we 've got to do .
and that means we have to really increase efficiency even more .
now that 's all very easy to draw graphs and things like that , but the point is we need to turn those curves .
and this is where i think we can take a leaf out of systems theory , systems engineers , where they create feedback loops , put the right information at the right point of time .
human beings are very motivated by the " now . "
you put a smart meter in your home , and you see how much electricity you 're using right now , how much it 's costing you , your kids go around and turn the lights off pretty quickly .
what would that look like for society ?
why is it , on the radio news every evening , i hear the ftse 100 , the dow jones , the dollar pound ratio - i do n't even know which way the dollar pound ratio should go to be good news .
and why do i hear that ?
why do n't i hear how much energy britain used yesterday , or american used yesterday ?
did we meet our three percent annual target on reducing carbon emissions ?
that 's how you create a collective goal .
you put it out there into the media and start thinking about it .
and we need positive feedback loops for increasing well-being at a government level , they might create national accounts of well-being .
at a business level , you might look at the well-being of your employees , which we know is really linked to creativity , which is linked to innovation , and we 're going to need a lot of innovation to deal with those environmental issues .
at a personal level , we need these nudges too .
maybe we do n't quite need the data , but we need reminders .
in the u.k. , we have a strong public health message on five fruit and vegetables a day and how much exercise we should do - never my best thing .
what are these for happiness ?
what are the five things that you should do every day to be happier ?
we did a project for the government office of science a couple of years ago , a big program called the foresight program - lots and lots of people - involved lots of experts - everything evidence based - a huge tome .
but a piece of work we did was on : what five positive actions can you do to improve well-being in your life ?
and the point of these is they are , not quite , the secrets of happiness , but they are things that i think happiness will flow out the side from .
and the first of these is to connect , is that your social relationships are the most important cornerstones of your life .
do you invest the time with your loved ones that you could do , and energy ?
keep building them .
the second one is be active .
the fastest way out of a bad mood : step outside , go for a walk , turn the radio on and dance .
being active is great for our positive mood .
the third one is take notice .
how aware are you of things going on around the world , the seasons changing , people around you ?
do you notice what 's bubbling up for you and trying to emerge ?
based on a lot of evidence for mindfulness , cognitive behavioral therapy , -lsb- very -rsb- strong for our well being .
the fourth is keep learning and keep is important - learning throughout the whole life course .
older people who keep learning and are curious , they have much better health outcomes than those who start to close down .
but it does n't have to be formal learning ; it 's not knowledge based .
it 's more curiosity .
it can be learning to cook a new dish , picking up an instrument you forgot as a child .
keep learning .
and the final one is that most anti-economic of activities , but give .
our generosity , our altruism , our compassion , are all hardwired to the reward mechanism in our brain .
we feel good if we give .
you can do an experiment where you give two groups of people a hundred dollars in the morning .
you tell one of them to spend it on themselves and one on other people .
you measure their happiness at the end of the day , those that have gone and spent on other people are much happier that those that spent it on themselves .
and these five ways , which we put onto these handy postcards , i would say , do n't have to cost the earth .
they do n't have any carbon content .
they do n't need a lot of material goods to be satisfied .
and so i think it 's really quite feasible that happiness does not cost the earth .
now , martin luther king , on the eve of his death , gave an incredible speech .
he said , " i know there are challenges ahead , there may be trouble ahead , but i fear no one . i do n't care .
i have been to the mountain top , and i have seen the promised land . "
now , he was a preacher , but i believe the environmental movement and , in fact , the business community , government , needs to go to the top of the mountain top , and it needs to look out , and it needs to see the promised land , or the land of promise , and it needs to have a vision of a world that we all want .
and not only that , we need to create a great transition to get there , and we need to pave that great transition with good things .
human beings want to be happy .
pave them with the five ways .
and we need to have signposts gathering people together and pointing them - something like the happy planet index .
and then i believe that we can all create a world we all want , where happiness does not cost the earth .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the story i wanted to share with you today is my challenge as an iranian artist , as an iranian woman artist , as an iranian woman artist living in exile .
well , it has its pluses and minuses .
on the dark side , politics does n't seem to escape people like me .
every iranian artist , in one form or another , is political .
politics have defined our lives .
if you 're living in iran , you 're facing censorship , harassment , arrest , torture - at times , execution .
if you 're living outside like me , you 're faced with life in exile - the pain of the longing and the separation from your loved ones and your family .
therefore , we do n't find the moral , emotional , psychological and political space to distance ourselves from the reality of social responsibility .
oddly enough , an artist such as myself finds herself also in the position of being the voice , the speaker of my people , even if i have , indeed , no access to my own country .
also , people like myself , we 're fighting two battles on different grounds .
we 're being critical of the west , the perception of the west about our identity - about the image that is constructed about us , about our women , about our politics , about our religion .
we are there to take pride and insist on respect .
and at the same time , we 're fighting another battle .
that is our regime , our government - our atrocious government , -lsb- that -rsb- has done every crime in order to stay in power .
our artists are at risk .
we are in a position of danger .
we pose a threat to the order of the government .
but ironically , this situation has empowered all of us , because we are considered , as artists , central to the cultural , political , social discourse in iran .
we are there to inspire , to provoke , to mobilize , to bring hope to our people .
we are the reporters of our people , and are communicators to the outside world .
art is our weapon .
culture is a form of resistance .
i envy sometimes the artists of the west for their freedom of expression .
for the fact that they can distance themselves from the question of politics .
from the fact that they are only serving one audience , mainly the western culture .
but also , i worry about the west , because often in this country , in this western world that we have , culture risks being a form of entertainment .
our people depend on our artists , and culture is beyond communication .
my journey as an artist started from a very , very personal place .
i did not start to make social commentary about my country .
the first one that you see in front of you is actually when i first returned to iran after being separated for a good 12 years .
it was after the islamic revolution of 1979 .
while i was absent from iran , the islamic revolution had descended on iran and had entirely transformed the country from persian to the islamic culture .
i came mainly to be reunited with my family and to reconnect in a way that i found my place in the society .
but instead , i found a country that was totally ideological and that i did n't recognize anymore .
more so , i became very interested , as i was facing my own personal dilemmas and questions , i became immersed in the study of the islamic revolution - how , indeed , it had incredibly transformed the lives of iranian women .
i found the subject of iranian women immensely interesting , in the way the women of iran , historically , seemed to embody the political transformation .
so in a way , by studying a woman , you can read the structure and the ideology of the country .
so i made a group of work that at once faced my own personal questions in life , and yet it brought my work into a larger discourse - the subject of martyrdom , the question of those who willingly stand in that intersection of love of god , faith , but violence and crime and cruelty .
for me , this became incredibly important .
and yet , i had an unusual position toward this .
i was an outsider who had come back to iran to find my place , but i was not in a position to be critical of the government or the ideology of the islamic revolution .
this changed slowly as i found my voice and i discovered things that i did n't know i would discover .
so my art became slightly more critical .
my knife became a little sharper .
and i fell into a life in exile .
i am a nomadic artist .
i work in morocco , in turkey , in mexico .
i go everywhere to make believe it 's iran .
now i am making films .
last year , i finished a film called " women without men . "
" women without men " returns to history , but another part of our iranian history .
it goes to 1953 when american cia exercised a coup and removed a democratically elected leader , dr. mossadegh .
the book is written by an iranian woman , shahrnush parsipur .
it 's a magical realist novel .
this book is banned , and she spent five years in prison .
my obsession with this book , and the reason i made this into a film , is because it at once was addressing the question of being a female - traditionally , historically in iran - and the question of four women who are all looking for an idea of change , freedom and democracy - while the country of iran , equally , as if another character , also struggled for an idea of freedom and democracy and independence from the foreign interventions .
i made this film because i felt it 's important for it to speak to the westerners about our history as a country .
that all of you seem to remember iran after the islamic revolution .
that iran was once a secular society , and we had democracy , and this democracy was stolen from us by the american government , by the british government .
this film also speaks to the iranian people in asking them to return to their history and look at themselves before they were so islamicized - in the way we looked , in the way we played music , in the way we had intellectual life .
and most of all , in the way that we fought for democracy .
these are some of the shots actually from my film .
these are some of the images of the coup .
and we made this film in casablanca , recreating all the shots .
this film tried to find a balance between telling a political story , but also a feminine story .
being a visual artist , indeed , i am foremost interested to make art - to make art that transcends politics , religion , the question of feminism , and become an important , timeless , universal work of art .
the challenge i have is how to do that .
how to tell a political story but an allegorical story .
how to move you with your emotions , but also make your mind work .
these are some of the images and the characters of the film .
now comes the green movement - the summer of 2009 , as my film is released - the uprising begins in the streets of tehran .
what is unbelievably ironic is the period that we tried to depict in the film , the cry for democracy and social justice , repeats itself now again in tehran .
the green movement significantly inspired the world .
it brought a lot of attention to all those iranians who stand for basic human rights and struggle for democracy .
what was most significant for me was , once again , the presence of the women .
they 're absolutely inspirational for me .
if in the islamic revolution , the images of the woman portrayed were submissive and did n't have a voice , now we saw a new idea of feminism in the streets of tehran - women who were educated , forward thinking , non-traditional , sexually open , fearless and seriously feminist .
these women and those young men united iranians across the world , inside and outside .
i then discovered why i take so much inspiration from iranian women .
that , under all circumstances , they have pushed the boundary .
they have confronted the authority .
they have broken every rule in the smallest and the biggest way .
and once again , they proved themselves .
i stand here to say that iranian women have found a new voice , and their voice is giving me my voice .
and it 's a great honor to be an iranian woman and an iranian artist , even if i have to operate in the west only for now .
thank you so much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this is about a hidden corner of the labor market .
it 's the world of people who need to work ultra-flexibly , if they 're to work at all .
so think , for instance , of someone who has a recurring but unpredictable medical condition , or somebody who 's caring for a dependent adult , or a parent with complex child care needs .
their availability for work can be such that it 's , " a few hours today .
maybe i can work tomorrow , but i do n't know if and when yet . "
and it 's extraordinarily difficult for these people to find the work that they so often need very badly .
which is a tragedy because there are employers who can use pools of very flexible local people booked completely ad hoc around when that person wants to work .
imagine that you run a cafe .
it 's mid-morning , the place is filling up .
you 're going to have a busy lunchtime rush .
if you could get two extra workers for 90 minutes to start in an hour 's time , you 'd do it , but they 'd have to be reliable , inducted in how your cafe works .
they 'd have to be available at very competitive rates .
they 'd have to be bookable in about the next minute .
in reality , no recruitment agency wants to handle that sort of business , so you are going to muddle by , understaffed .
and it 's not just caterers , it 's hoteliers , it 's retailers , it 's anyone who provides services to the public or businesses .
there 's all sorts of organizations that can use these pools of very flexible people , possibly already once they 've been inducted .
at this level of the labor market , what you need is a marketplace for spare hours .
they do exist . here 's how they work .
so in this example , a distribution company has said , we 've got a rush order that we 've got to get out of the warehouse tomorrow morning .
show us everyone who 's available .
it 's found 31 workers .
everybody on this screen is genuinely available at those specific hours tomorrow .
they 're all contactable in time for this booking .
they 've all defined the terms on which they will accept bookings .
and this booking is within all the parameters for each individual .
and they would all be legally compliant by doing this booking .
of course , they 're all trained to work in warehouses .
you can select as many of them as you want .
they 're from multiple agencies .
it 's calculated the charge rate for each person for this specific booking .
and it 's monitoring their reliability .
the people on the top row are the provenly reliable ones .
they 're likely to be more expensive .
in an alternative view of this pool of local , very flexible people , here 's a market research company , and it 's inducted maybe 25 local people in how to do street interviewing .
and they 've got a new campaign . they want to run it next week .
and they 're looking at how many of the people they 've inducted are available each hour next week .
and they 'll then decide when to do their street interviews .
but is there more that could be done for this corner of the labor market ?
because right now there are so many people who need whatever economic opportunity they can get .
let 's make it personal .
imagine that a young woman - base of the economic pyramid , very little prospect of getting a job - what economic activity could she theoretically engage in ?
well , she might be willing to work odd hours in a call center , in a reception area , in a mail room .
she may be interested in providing local services to her community : babysitting , local deliveries , pet care .
she may have possessions that she would like to trade at times she does n't need them .
so she might have a sofa bed in her front room that she would like to let out .
she might have a bike , a video games console she only uses occasionally .
and you 're probably thinking - because you 're all very web-aware - yes , and we 're in the era of collaborative consumption , so she can go online and do all this .
she can go to airbnb to list her sofa bed , she can go to taskrabbit.com and say , " i want to do local deliveries , " and so on .
these are good sites , but i believe we can go a step further .
and the key to that is a philosophy that we call modern markets for all .
markets have changed beyond recognition in the last 20 years , but only for organizations at the top of the economy .
if you 're a wall street trader , you now take it for granted that you sell your financial assets in a system of markets that identifies the most profitable opportunities for you in real time , executes on that in microseconds within the boundaries you 've set .
it analyzes supply and demand and pricing and tells you where your next wave of opportunities are coming from .
it manages counterparty risk in incredibly sophisticated ways .
it 's all extremely low overhead .
what have we gained at the bottom of the economy in terms of markets in the last 20 years ?
basically classified adverts with a search facility .
so why do we have this disparity between these incredibly sophisticated markets at the top of the economy that are increasingly sucking more and more activity and resource out of the main economy into this rarefied level of trading , and what the rest of us have ?
a modern market is more than a website ; it 's a web of interoperable marketplaces , back office mechanisms , regulatory regimes , settlement mechanisms , liquidity sources and so on .
and when a wall street trader comes into work in the morning , she does not write a listing for every financial derivative she wants to sell today and then post that listing on multiple websites and wait for potential buyers to get in touch and start negotiating the terms on which she might trade .
in the early days of this modern markets technology , the financial institutions worked out how they could leverage their buying power , their back office processes , their relationships , their networks to shape these new markets that would create all this new activity .
they asked governments for supporting regulatory regimes , and in a lot of cases they got it .
but throughout the economy , there are facilities that could likewise leverage a new generation of markets for the benefit of all of us .
and those facilities - i 'm talking about things like the mechanisms that prove our identity , the licensing authorities that know what each of us is allowed to do legally at any given time , the processes by which we resolve disputes through official channels .
these mechanisms , these facilities are not in the gift of craigslist or gumtree or yahoo , they 're controlled by the state .
and the policymakers who sit on top of them are , i suggest , simply not thinking about how those facilities could be used to underpin a whole new era of markets .
like everyone else , those policymakers are taking it for granted that modern markets are the preserve of organizations powerful enough to create them for themselves .
suppose we stopped taking that for granted .
suppose tomorrow morning the prime minister of britain or the president of the u.s. , or the leader of any other developed nation , woke up and said , " i 'm never going to be able to create all the jobs i need in the current climate .
i have got to focus on whatever economic opportunity i can get to my citizens .
and for that they have to be able to access state-of-the-art markets .
how do i make that happen ? "
and i think i can see a few eyes rolling .
politicians in a big , complex , sophisticated i.t. project ?
oh , that 's going to be a disaster waiting to happen .
not necessarily .
there is a precedent for technology-enabled service that has been initiated by politicians in multiple countries and has been hugely successful : national lotteries .
let 's take britain as an example .
our government did n't design the national lottery , it did n't fund the national lottery , it does n't operate the national lottery .
it simply passed the national lottery act and this is what followed .
this act defines what a national lottery will look like .
it specifies certain benefits that the state can uniquely bestow on the operators .
and it puts some obligations on those operators .
in terms of spreading gambling activity to the masses , this was an unqualified success .
but let 's suppose that our aim is to bring new economic activity to the base of the pyramid .
could we use the same model ?
i believe we could .
so imagine that policymakers outlined a facility .
let 's call it national e-markets , nems for short .
think of it as a regulated public utility .
so it 's on a par with the water supply or the road network .
and it 's a series of markets for low-level trade that can be fulfilled by a person or a small company .
and government has certain benefits it can uniquely bestow on these markets .
it 's about public spending going through these markets to buy public services at the local level .
it 's about interfacing these markets direct into the highest official channels in the land .
it 's about enshrining government 's role as a publicist for these markets .
it 's about deregulating some sectors so that local people can enter them .
so , taxi journeys might be one example .
and there are certain obligations that should go with those benefits to be placed on the operators , and the key one is , of course , that the operators pay for everything , including all the interfacing into the public sector .
so imagine that the operators make their return by building a percentage markup into each transaction .
imagine that there 's a concession period defined of maybe 15 years in which they can take all these benefits and run with them .
and imagine that the consortia who bid to run it are told , whoever comes in at the lowest percentage markup on each transaction to fund the whole thing will get the deal .
so government then exits the frame .
this is now in the hands of the consortium .
either they are going to unlock an awful lot of economic opportunity and make a percentage on all of it or it 's all going to crash and burn , which is tough on their shareholders .
it does n't bother the taxpayer necessarily .
and there would be no constraints on alternative markets .
so this would just be one more choice among millions of internet forums .
but it could be very different , because having access to those state-backed facilities could incentivize this consortium to seriously invest in the service .
because they would have to get a lot of these small transactions going to start making their return .
so we 're talking about sectors like home hair care , the hire of toys , farm work , hire of clothes even , meals delivered to your door , services for tourists , home care .
this would be a world of very small trades , but very well-informed , because national e-markets will deliver data .
so this is a local person potentially deciding whether to enter the babysitting market .
and they might be aware that they would have to fund vetting and training if they wanted to go into that market .
they 'd have to do assessment interviews with local parents who wanted a pool of babysitters .
is it worth their while ?
should they be looking at other sectors ?
should they be moving to another part of the country where there 's a shortage of babysitters ?
this kind of data can become routine .
and this data can be used by investors .
so if there 's a problem with a shortage of babysitters in some parts of the country and the problem is nobody can afford the vetting and training , an investor can pay for it and the system will tithe back the enhanced earnings of the individuals for maybe the next two years .
this is a world of atomized capitalism .
so it 's small trades by small people , but it 's very informed , safe , convenient , low-overhead and immediate .
some rough research suggests this could unlock around 100 million pounds ' worth a day of new economic activity in a country the size of the u.k.
does that sound improbable to you ?
that 's what a lot of people said about turbo trading in financial exchanges 20 years ago .
do not underestimate the transformative power of truly modern markets .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm here to share my photography .
or is it photography ?
because , of course , this is a photograph that you ca n't take with your camera .
yet , my interest in photography started as i got my first digital camera at the age of 15 .
it mixed with my earlier passion for drawing , but it was a bit different , because using the camera , the process was in the planning instead .
and when you take a photograph with a camera , the process ends when you press the trigger .
so to me it felt like photography was more about being at the right place and the right time .
i felt like anyone could do that .
so i wanted to create something different , something where the process starts when you press the trigger .
photos like this : construction going on along a busy road .
but it has an unexpected twist .
and despite that , it retains a level of realism .
or photos like these - both dark and colorful , but all with a common goal of retaining the level of realism .
when i say realism , i mean photo-realism .
because , of course , it 's not something you can capture really , but i always want it to look like it could have been captured somehow as a photograph .
photos where you will need a brief moment to think to figure out the trick .
so it 's more about capturing an idea than about capturing a moment really .
but what 's the trick that makes it look realistic ?
is it something about the details or the colors ?
is it something about the light ?
what creates the illusion ?
sometimes the perspective is the illusion .
but in the end , it comes down to how we interpret the world and how it can be realized on a two-dimensional surface .
it 's not really what is realistic , it 's what we think looks realistic really .
so i think the basics are quite simple .
i just see it as a puzzle of reality where you can take different pieces of reality and put it together to create alternate reality .
and let me show you a simple example .
here we have three perfectly imaginable physical objects , something we all can relate to living in a three-dimensional world .
but combined in a certain way , they can create something that still looks three-dimensional , like it could exist .
but at the same time , we know it ca n't .
so we trick our brains , because our brain simply does n't accept the fact that it does n't really make sense .
and i see the same process with combining photographs .
it 's just really about combining different realities .
so the things that make a photograph look realistic , i think it 's the things that we do n't even think about , the things all around us in our daily lives .
but when combining photographs , this is really important to consider , because otherwise it just looks wrong somehow .
so i would like to say that there are three simple rules to follow to achieve a realistic result .
as you can see , these images are n't really special .
but combined , they can create something like this .
so the first rule is that photos combined should have the same perspective .
secondly , photos combined should have the same type of light .
and these two images both fulfill these two requirements - shot at the same height and in the same type of light .
the third one is about making it impossible to distinguish where the different images begin and end by making it seamless .
make it impossible to say how the image actually was composed .
so by matching color , contrast and brightness in the borders between the different images , adding photographic defects like depth of field , desaturated colors and noise , we erase the borders between the different images and make it look like one single image , despite the fact that one image can contain hundreds of layers basically .
so here 's another example .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- one might think that this is just an image of a landscape and the lower part is what 's manipulated .
but this image is actually entirely composed of photographs from different locations .
i personally think that it 's easier to actually create a place than to find a place , because then you do n't need to compromise with the ideas in your head .
but it does require a lot of planning .
and getting this idea during winter , i knew that i had several months to plan it , to find the different locations for the pieces of the puzzle basically .
so for example , the fish was captured on a fishing trip .
the shores are from a different location .
the underwater part was captured in a stone pit .
and yeah , i even turned the house on top of the island red to make it look more swedish .
so to achieve a realistic result , i think it comes down to planning .
it always starts with a sketch , an idea .
then it 's about combining the different photographs .
and here every piece is very well planned .
and if you do a good job capturing the photos , the result can be quite beautiful and also quite realistic .
so all the tools are out there , and the only thing that limits us is our imagination .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- ladies and gentlemen , the history of music and television on the internet in three minutes .
a ted medley - a tedley .
♫ it 's nine o ' clock on a saturday ♫ ♫ the record store 's closed for the night ♫ ♫ so i fire up the old itunes music store ♫ ♫ and soon i am feelin ' all right ♫ ♫ i know steve jobs can find me a melody ♫ ♫ with one dollar pricing that rocks ♫ ♫ i can type in the track and get album names back ♫ ♫ while still in my pjs and socks ♫ ♫ sell us a song , you 're the music man ♫ ♫ my ipod 's still got 10 gigs to go ♫ ♫ yes , we might prefer more compatibility ♫
♫ but steve likes to run the whole show ♫ ♫ i heard " desperate housewives " was great last night ♫ ♫ but i had a bad piece of cod ♫ ♫ as i threw up my meal , i thought , " it 's no big deal " ♫ ♫ i 'll watch it tonight on my ' pod ♫ ♫ and now all of the networks are joining in ♫ ♫ two bucks a show without ads ♫ ♫ it 's a business those guys always wanted to try ♫ ♫ but only steve jobs had the ' nads ♫ ♫ they say we 're young , do n't watch tv ♫
♫ they say the internet is all we see ♫ ♫ but that 's not true ; they 've got it wrong ♫ ♫ see , all our shows are just two minutes long ♫ ♫ hey ♫ ♫ i got youtube ♫ ♫ i got youtube ♫ and now , ladies and gentlemen , a tribute to the recording industry association of america - the riaa !
♫ young man , you were surfin ' along ♫ ♫ and then , young man , you downloaded a song ♫ ♫ and then , dumb man , copied it to your ' pod ♫ ♫ then a phone call came to tell you ... ♫ ♫ you 've just been sued by the r-i-a-a ♫ ♫ you 've just been screwed by the r-i-a-a ♫ ♫ their attorneys say you committed a crime ♫ ♫ and there 'd better not be a next time ♫ ♫ they 've lost their minds at the r-i-a-a ♫ ♫ justice is blind at the r-i-a-a ♫ ♫ you 're depriving the bands ♫ ♫ you are learning to steal ♫
♫ you ca n't do whatever you feel ♫ ♫ cd sales have dropped every year ♫ ♫ they 're not greedy , they 're just quaking with fear ♫ ♫ yes indeedy , what if their end is near ♫ ♫ and we download all our music ♫ ♫ yeah , that would piss off the r-i-a-a ♫ ♫ no plastic discs from the r-i-a-a ♫ ♫ what a way to make friends ♫ ♫ it 's a plan that ca n't fail ♫ ♫ all your customers off to jail ♫ ♫ who 'll be next for the r-i-a-a ? ♫ ♫ what else is vexing the r-i-a-a ? ♫
♫ maybe whistling a tune ♫ ♫ maybe humming along ♫ ♫ maybe mocking ' em in a song ♫ i 'm a huge believer in hands-on education .
but you have to have the right tools .
if i 'm going to teach my daughter about electronics , i 'm not going to give her a soldering iron .
and similarly , she finds prototyping boards really frustrating for her little hands .
so my wonderful student sam and i decided to look at the most tangible thing we could think of : play-doh .
and so we spent a summer looking at different play-doh recipes .
and these recipes probably look really familiar to any of you who have made homemade play-dough - pretty standard ingredients you probably have in your kitchen .
we have two favorite recipes - one that has these ingredients and a second that had sugar instead of salt .
and they 're great . we can make great little sculptures with these .
but the really cool thing about them is when we put them together .
you see that really salty play-doh ?
well , it conducts electricity .
and this is nothing new .
it turns out that regular play-doh that you buy at the store conducts electricity , and high school physics teachers have used that for years .
but our homemade play-dough actually has half the resistance of commercial play-doh .
and that sugar dough ?
well it 's 150 times more resistant to electric current than that salt dough .
so what does that mean ?
well it means if you them together you suddenly have circuits - circuits that the most creative , tiny , little hands can build on their own .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and so i want to do a little demo for you .
so if i take this salt dough , again , it 's like the play-dough you probably made as kids , and i plug it in - it 's a two-lead battery pack , simple battery pack , you can buy them at radio shack and pretty much anywhere else - we can actually then light things up .
but if any of you have studied electrical engineering , we can also create a short circuit .
if i push these together , the light turns off .
right , the current wants to run through the play-dough , not through that led .
if i separate them again , i have some light .
well now if i take that sugar dough , the sugar dough does n't want to conduct electricity .
it 's like a wall to the electricity .
if i place that between , now all the dough is touching , but if i stick that light back in , i have light .
in fact , i could even add some movement to my sculptures .
if i want a spinning tail , let 's grab a motor , put some play-dough on it , stick it on and we have spinning .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and once you have the basics , we can make a slightly more complicated circuit .
we call this our sushi circuit . it 's very popular with kids .
i plug in again the power to it .
and now i can start talking about parallel and series circuits .
i can start plugging in lots of lights .
and we can start talking about things like electrical load .
what happens if i put in lots of lights and then add a motor ?
it 'll dim .
we can even add microprocessors and have this as an input and create squishy sound music that we 've done .
you could do parallel and series circuits for kids using this .
so this is all in your home kitchen .
we 've actually tried to turn it into an electrical engineering lab .
we have a website , it 's all there . these are the home recipes .
we 've got some videos . you can make them yourselves .
and it 's been really fun since we put them up to see where these have gone .
we 've had a mom in utah who used them with her kids , to a science researcher in the u.k. , and curriculum developers in hawaii .
so i would encourage you all to grab some play-doh , grab some salt , grab some sugar and start playing .
we do n't usually think of our kitchen as an electrical engineering lab or little kids as circuit designers , but maybe we should .
have fun . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- as a clergyman , you can imagine how out of place i feel .
i feel like a fish out of water , or maybe an owl out of the air .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i was preaching in san jose some time ago , and my friend mark kvamme , who helped introduce me to this conference , brought several ceos and leaders of some of the companies here in the silicon valley to have breakfast with me , or i with them .
and i was so stimulated .
and had such - it was an eye-opening experience to hear them talk about the world that is yet to come through technology and science .
i know that we 're near the end of this conference , and some of you may be wondering why they have a speaker from the field of religion .
richard can answer that , because he made that decision .
but some years ago i was on an elevator in philadelphia , coming down .
i was to address a conference at a hotel .
and on that elevator a man said , " i hear billy graham is staying in this hotel . "
and another man looked in my direction and said , " yes , there he is . he 's on this elevator with us . "
and this man looked me up and down for about 10 seconds , and he said , " my , what an anticlimax ! "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i hope that you wo n't feel that these few moments with me is not a - is an anticlimax , after all these tremendous talks that you 've heard , and addresses , which i intend to listen to every one of them .
but i was on an airplane in the east some years ago , and the man sitting across the aisle from me was the mayor of charlotte , north carolina .
his name was john belk . some of you will probably know him .
and there was a drunk man on there , and he got up out of his seat two or three times , and he was making everybody upset by what he was trying to do .
and he was slapping the stewardess and pinching her as she went by , and everybody was upset with him .
and finally , john belk said , " do you know who 's sitting here ? "
and the man said , " no , who ? "
he said , " it 's billy graham , the preacher . "
he said , " you do n't say ! "
and he turned to me , and he said , " put her there ! "
he said , " your sermons have certainly helped me . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i suppose that that 's true with thousands of people .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i know that as you have been peering into the future , and as we 've heard some of it here tonight , i would like to live in that age and see what is going to be .
but i wo n't , because i 'm 80 years old . this is my eightieth year , and i know that my time is brief .
i have phlebitis at the moment , in both legs , and that 's the reason that i had to have a little help in getting up here , because i have parkinson 's disease in addition to that , and some other problems that i wo n't talk about .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but this is not the first time that we 've had a technological revolution .
we 've had others .
and there 's one that i want to talk about .
in one generation , the nation of the people of israel had a tremendous and dramatic change that made them a great power in the near east .
a man by the name of david came to the throne , and king david became one of the great leaders of his generation .
he was a man of tremendous leadership .
he had the favor of god with him .
he was a brilliant poet , philosopher , writer , soldier - with strategies in battle and conflict that people study even today .
but about two centuries before david , the hittites had discovered the secret of smelting and processing of iron , and , slowly , that skill spread .
but they would n't allow the israelis to look into it , or to have any .
but david changed all of that , and he introduced the iron age to israel .
and the bible says that david laid up great stores of iron , and which archaeologists have found , that in present-day palestine , there are evidences of that generation .
now , instead of crude tools made of sticks and stones , israel now had iron plows , and sickles , and hoes and military weapons .
and in the course of one generation , israel was completely changed .
the introduction of iron , in some ways , had an impact a little bit like the microchip has had on our generation .
and david found that there were many problems that technology could not solve .
there were many problems still left .
and they 're still with us , and you have n't solved them , and i have n't heard anybody here speak to that .
how do we solve these three problems that i 'd like to mention ?
the first one that david saw was human evil .
where does it come from ?
how do we solve it ?
over again and again in the psalms , which gladstone said was the greatest book in the world , david describes the evils of the human race .
and yet he says , " he restores my soul . "
have you ever thought about what a contradiction we are ?
on one hand , we can probe the deepest secrets of the universe and dramatically push back the frontiers of technology , as this conference vividly demonstrates .
we 've seen under the sea , three miles down , or galaxies hundreds of billions of years out in the future .
but on the other hand , something is wrong .
our battleships , our soldiers , are on a frontier now , almost ready to go to war with iraq .
now , what causes this ?
why do we have these wars in every generation , and in every part of the world ?
and revolutions ?
we ca n't get along with other people , even in our own families .
we find ourselves in the paralyzing grip of self-destructive habits we ca n't break .
racism and injustice and violence sweep our world , bringing a tragic harvest of heartache and death .
even the most sophisticated among us seem powerless to break this cycle .
i would like to see oracle take up that , or some other technological geniuses work on this .
how do we change man , so that he does n't lie and cheat , and our newspapers are not filled with stories of fraud in business or labor or athletics or wherever ?
the bible says the problem is within us , within our hearts and our souls .
our problem is that we are separated from our creator , which we call god , and we need to have our souls restored , something only god can do .
jesus said , " for out of the heart come evil thoughts : murders , sexual immorality , theft , false testimonies , slander . "
the british philosopher bertrand russell was not a religious man , but he said , " it 's in our hearts that the evil lies , and it 's from our hearts that it must be plucked out . "
albert einstein - i was just talking to someone , when i was speaking at princeton , and i met mr. einstein .
he did n't have a doctor 's degree , because he said nobody was qualified to give him one .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but he made this statement .
he said , " it 's easier to denature plutonium than to denature the evil spirit of man . "
and many of you , i 'm sure , have thought about that and puzzled over it .
you 've seen people take beneficial technological advances , such as the internet we 've heard about tonight , and twist them into something corrupting .
you 've seen brilliant people devise computer viruses that bring down whole systems .
the oklahoma city bombing was simple technology , horribly used .
the problem is not technology .
the problem is the person or persons using it .
king david said that he knew the depths of his own soul .
he could n't free himself from personal problems and personal evils that included murder and adultery .
yet king david sought god 's forgiveness , and said , " you can restore my soul . "
you see , the bible teaches that we 're more than a body and a mind .
we are a soul .
and there 's something inside of us that is beyond our understanding .
that 's the part of us that yearns for god , or something more than we find in technology .
your soul is that part of you that yearns for meaning in life , and which seeks for something beyond this life .
it 's the part of you that yearns , really , for god .
i find -lsb- that -rsb- young people all over the world are searching for something .
they do n't know what it is . i speak at many universities , and i have many questions and answer periods , and whether it 's cambridge , or harvard , or oxford - i 've spoken at all of those universities .
i 'm going to harvard in about three or four - no , it 's about two months from now - to give a lecture .
and i 'll be asked the same questions that i was asked the last few times i 've been there .
and it 'll be on these questions : where did i come from ? why am i here ? where am i going ?
what 's life all about ? why am i here ?
even if you have no religious belief , there are times when you wonder that there 's something else .
thomas edison also said , " when you see everything that happens in the world of science , and in the working of the universe , you can not deny that there 's a captain on the bridge . "
i remember once , i sat beside mrs. gorbachev at a white house dinner .
i went to ambassador dobrynin , whom i knew very well .
and i 'd been to russia several times under the communists , and they 'd given me marvelous freedom that i did n't expect .
and i knew mr. dobrynin very well , and i said , " i 'm going to sit beside mrs. gorbachev tonight .
what shall i talk to her about ? "
and he surprised me with the answer .
he said , " talk to her about religion and philosophy .
that 's what she 's really interested in . "
i was a little bit surprised , but that evening that 's what we talked about , and it was a stimulating conversation .
and afterward , she said , " you know , i 'm an atheist , but i know that there 's something up there higher than we are . "
the second problem that king david realized he could not solve was the problem of human suffering .
writing the oldest book in the world was job , and he said , " man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward . "
yes , to be sure , science has done much to push back certain types of human suffering .
but i 'm - in a few months , i 'll be 80 years of age .
i admit that i 'm very grateful for all the medical advances that have kept me in relatively good health all these years .
my doctors at the mayo clinic urged me not to take this trip out here to this - to be here .
i have n't given a talk in nearly four months .
and when you speak as much as i do , three or four times a day , you get rusty .
that 's the reason i 'm using this podium and using these notes .
every time you ever hear me on the television or somewhere , i 'm ad-libbing .
i 'm not reading . i never read an address .
i never read a speech or a talk or a lecture .
i talk ad lib .
but tonight , i 've got some notes here so that if i begin to forget , which i do sometimes , i 've got something i can turn to .
but even here among us , most - in the most advanced society in the world , we have poverty .
we have families that self-destruct , friends that betray us .
unbearable psychological pressures bear down on us .
i 've never met a person in the world that did n't have a problem or a worry .
why do we suffer ? it 's an age-old question that we have n't answered .
yet david again and again said that he would turn to god .
he said , " the lord is my shepherd . "
the final problem that david knew he could not solve was death .
many commentators have said that death is the forbidden subject of our generation .
most people live as if they 're never going to die .
technology projects the myth of control over our mortality .
we see people on our screens .
marilyn monroe is just as beautiful on the screen as she was in person , and our - many young people think she 's still alive .
they do n't know that she 's dead .
or clark gable , or whoever it is .
the old stars , they come to life .
and they 're - they 're just as great on that screen as they were in person .
but death is inevitable .
i spoke some time ago to a joint session of congress , last year .
and we were meeting in that room , the statue room .
about 300 of them were there .
and i said , " there 's one thing that we have in common in this room , all of us together , whether republican or democrat , or whoever . "
i said , " we 're all going to die .
and we have that in common with all these great men of the past that are staring down at us . "
and it 's often difficult for young people to understand that .
it 's difficult for them to understand that they 're going to die .
as the ancient writer of ecclesiastes wrote , he said , there 's every activity under heaven .
there 's a time to be born , and there 's a time to die .
i 've stood at the deathbed of several famous people , whom you would know .
i 've talked to them .
i 've seen them in those agonizing moments when they were scared to death .
and yet , a few years earlier , death never crossed their mind .
i talked to a woman this past week whose father was a famous doctor .
she said he never thought of god , never talked about god , did n't believe in god . he was an atheist .
but she said , as he came to die , he sat up on the side of the bed one day , and he asked the nurse if he could see the chaplain .
and he said , for the first time in his life he 'd thought about the inevitable , and about god .
was there a god ?
a few years ago , a university student asked me , " what is the greatest surprise in your life ? "
and i said , " the greatest surprise in my life is the brevity of life .
it passes so fast . "
but it does not need to have to be that way .
wernher von braun , in the aftermath of world war ii concluded , quote : " science and religion are not antagonists .
on the contrary , they 're sisters . "
he put it on a personal basis .
i knew dr. von braun very well .
and he said , " speaking for myself , i can only say that the grandeur of the cosmos serves only to confirm a belief in the certainty of a creator . "
he also said , " in our search to know god , i 've come to believe that the life of jesus christ should be the focus of our efforts and inspiration .
the reality of this life and his resurrection is the hope of mankind . "
i 've done a lot of speaking in germany and in france , and in different parts of the world - 105 countries it 's been my privilege to speak in .
and i was invited one day to visit chancellor adenauer , who was looked upon as sort of the founder of modern germany , since the war .
and he once - and he said to me , he said , " young man . " he said , " do you believe in the resurrection of jesus christ ? "
and i said , " sir , i do . "
he said , " so do i. "
he said , " when i leave office , i 'm going to spend my time writing a book on why jesus christ rose again , and why it 's so important to believe that . "
in one of his plays , alexander solzhenitsyn depicts a man dying , who says to those gathered around his bed , " the moment when it 's terrible to feel regret is when one is dying . "
how should one live in order not to feel regret when one is dying ?
blaise pascal asked exactly that question in seventeenth-century france .
pascal has been called the architect of modern civilization .
he was a brilliant scientist at the frontiers of mathematics , even as a teenager .
he is viewed by many as the founder of the probability theory , and a creator of the first model of a computer .
and of course , you are all familiar with the computer language named for him .
pascal explored in depth our human dilemmas of evil , suffering and death .
he was astounded at the phenomenon we 've been considering : that people can achieve extraordinary heights in science , the arts and human enterprise , yet they also are full of anger , hypocrisy and have - and self-hatreds .
pascal saw us as a remarkable mixture of genius and self-delusion .
on november 23 , 1654 , pascal had a profound religious experience .
he wrote in his journal these words : " i submit myself , absolutely , to jesus christ , my redeemer . "
a french historian said , two centuries later , " seldom has so mighty an intellect submitted with such humility to the authority of jesus christ . "
pascal came to believe not only the love and the grace of god could bring us back into harmony , but he believed that his own sins and failures could be forgiven , and that when he died he would go to a place called heaven .
he experienced it in a way that went beyond scientific observation and reason .
it was he who penned the well-known words , " the heart has its reasons , which reason knows not of . "
equally well known is pascal 's wager .
essentially , he said this : " if you bet on god , and open yourself to his love , you lose nothing , even if you 're wrong .
but if instead you bet that there is no god , then you can lose it all , in this life and the life to come . "
for pascal , scientific knowledge paled beside the knowledge of god .
the knowledge of god was far beyond anything that ever crossed his mind .
he was ready to face him when he died at the age of 39 .
king david lived to be 70 , a long time in his era .
yet he too had to face death , and he wrote these words : " even though i walk through the valley of the shadow of death , i will fear no evil , for you are with me . "
this was david 's answer to three dilemmas of evil , suffering and death .
it can be yours , as well , as you seek the living god and allow him to fill your life and give you hope for the future .
when i was 17 years of age , i was born and reared on a farm in north carolina .
i milked cows every morning , and i had to milk the same cows every evening when i came home from school .
and there were 20 of them that i had - that i was responsible for , and i worked on the farm and tried to keep up with my studies .
i did n't make good grades in high school .
i did n't make them in college , until something happened in my heart .
one day , i was faced face-to-face with christ .
he said , " i am the way , the truth and the life . "
can you imagine that ? " i am the truth .
i 'm the embodiment of all truth . "
he was a liar .
or he was insane .
or he was what he claimed to be .
which was he ?
i had to make that decision .
i could n't prove it .
i could n't take it to a laboratory and experiment with it .
but by faith i said , i believe him , and he came into my heart and changed my life .
and now i 'm ready , when i hear that call , to go into the presence of god .
thank you , and god bless all of you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you for the privilege . it was great .
richard wurman : you did it .
thanks .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i know what you 're thinking .
you think i 've lost my way , and somebody 's going to come on the stage in a minute and guide me gently back to my seat .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i get that all the time in dubai .
" here on holiday are you , dear ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " come to visit the children ?
how long are you staying ? "
well actually , i hope for a while longer yet .
i have been living and teaching in the gulf for over 30 years .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and in that time , i have seen a lot of changes .
now that statistic is quite shocking .
and i want to talk to you today about language loss and the globalization of english .
i want to tell you about my friend who was teaching english to adults in abu dhabi .
and one fine day , she decided to take them into the garden to teach them some nature vocabulary .
but it was she who ended up learning all the arabic words for the local plants , as well as their uses - medicinal uses , cosmetics , cooking , herbal .
how did those students get all that knowledge ?
of course , from their grandparents and even their great-grandparents .
it 's not necessary to tell you how important it is to be able to communicate across generations .
but sadly , today , languages are dying at an unprecedented rate .
a language dies every 14 days .
now , at the same time , english is the undisputed global language .
could there be a connection ?
well i do n't know .
but i do know that i 've seen a lot of changes .
when i first came out to the gulf , i came to kuwait in the days when it was still a hardship post .
actually , not that long ago .
that is a little bit too early .
but nevertheless , i was recruited by the british council , along with about 25 other teachers .
and we were the first non-muslims to teach in the state schools there in kuwait .
we were brought to teach english because the government wanted to modernize the country and to empower the citizens through education .
and of course , the u.k. benefited from some of that lovely oil wealth .
okay .
now this is the major change that i 've seen - how teaching english has morphed from being a mutually beneficial practice to becoming a massive international business that it is today .
no longer just a foreign language on the school curriculum , and no longer the sole domain of mother england , it has become a bandwagon for every english-speaking nation on earth .
and why not ?
after all , the best education - according to the latest world university rankings - is to be found in the universities of the u.k. and the u.s.
so everybody wants to have an english education , naturally .
but if you 're not a native speaker , you have to pass a test .
now can it be right to reject a student on linguistic ability alone ?
perhaps you have a computer scientist who 's a genius .
would he need the same language as a lawyer , for example ?
well , i do n't think so .
we english teachers reject them all the time .
we put a stop sign , and we stop them in their tracks .
they ca n't pursue their dream any longer , ' til they get english .
now let me put it this way : if i met a monolingual dutch speaker who had the cure for cancer , would i stop him from entering my british university ?
i do n't think so .
but indeed , that is exactly what we do .
we english teachers are the gatekeepers .
and you have to satisfy us first that your english is good enough .
now it can be dangerous to give too much power to a narrow segment of society .
maybe the barrier would be too universal .
okay .
" but , " i hear you say , " what about the research ?
it 's all in english . "
so the books are in english , the journals are done in english , but that is a self-fulfilling prophecy .
it feeds the english requirement .
and so it goes on .
i ask you , what happened to translation ?
if you think about the islamic golden age , there was lots of translation then .
they translated from latin and greek into arabic , into persian , and then it was translated on into the germanic languages of europe and the romance languages .
and so light shone upon the dark ages of europe .
now do n't get me wrong ; i am not against teaching english , all you english teachers out there .
i love it that we have a global language .
we need one today more than ever .
but i am against using it as a barrier .
do we really want to end up with 600 languages and the main one being english , or chinese ?
we need more than that . where do we draw the line ?
this system equates intelligence with a knowledge of english , which is quite arbitrary .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and i want to remind you that the giants upon whose shoulders today 's intelligentsia stand did not have to have english , they did n't have to pass an english test .
case in point , einstein .
he , by the way , was considered remedial at school because he was , in fact , dyslexic .
but fortunately for the world , he did not have to pass an english test .
because they did n't start until 1964 with toefl , the american test of english .
now it 's exploded .
there are lots and lots of tests of english .
and millions and millions of students take these tests every year .
now you might think , you and me , " those fees are n't bad , they 're okay , " but they are prohibitive to so many millions of poor people .
so immediately , we 're rejecting them .
-lrb- applause -rrb- it brings to mind a headline i saw recently : " education : the great divide . "
now i get it , i understand why people would want to focus on english .
they want to give their children the best chance in life .
and to do that , they need a western education .
because , of course , the best jobs go to people out of the western universities , that i put on earlier .
it 's a circular thing .
okay .
let me tell you a story about two scientists , two english scientists .
they were doing an experiment to do with genetics and the forelimbs and the hind limbs of animals .
but they could n't get the results they wanted .
they really did n't know what to do , until along came a german scientist who realized that they were using two words for forelimb and hind limb , whereas genetics does not differentiate and neither does german .
so bingo , problem solved .
if you ca n't think a thought , you are stuck .
but if another language can think that thought , then , by cooperating , we can achieve and learn so much more .
my daughter came to england from kuwait .
she had studied science and mathematics in arabic .
it 's an arabic-medium school .
she had to translate it into english at her grammar school .
and she was the best in the class at those subjects .
which tells us that when students come to us from abroad , we may not be giving them enough credit for what they know , and they know it in their own language .
when a language dies , we do n't know what we lose with that language .
this is - i do n't know if you saw it on cnn recently - they gave the heroes award to a young kenyan shepherd boy who could n't study at night in his village , like all the village children , because the kerosene lamp , it had smoke and it damaged his eyes .
and anyway , there was never enough kerosene , because what does a dollar a day buy for you ?
so he invented a cost-free solar lamp .
and now the children in his village get the same grades at school as the children who have electricity at home .
-lrb- applause -rrb- when he received his award , he said these lovely words : " the children can lead africa from what it is today , a dark continent , to a light continent . "
a simple idea , but it could have such far-reaching consequences .
people who have no light , whether it 's physical or metaphorical , can not pass our exams , and we can never know what they know .
let us not keep them and ourselves in the dark .
let us celebrate diversity .
mind your language .
use it to spread great ideas .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- climate change is already a heavy topic , and it 's getting heavier because we 're understanding that we need to do more than we are .
we 're understanding , in fact , that those of us who live in the developed world need to be really pushing towards eliminating our emissions .
that 's , to put it mildly , not what 's on the table now .
and it tends to feel a little overwhelming when we look at what is there in reality today and the magnitude of the problem that we face .
and when we have overwhelming problems in front of us , we tend to seek simple answers .
and i think this is what we 've done with climate change .
we look at where the emissions are coming from - they 're coming out of our tailpipes and smokestacks and so forth , and we say , okay , well the problem is that they 're coming out of fossil fuels that we 're burning , so therefore , the answer must be to replace those fossil fuels with clean sources of energy .
and while , of course , we do need clean energy , i would put to you that it 's possible that by looking at climate change as a clean energy generation problem , we 're in fact setting ourselves up not to solve it .
and the reason why is that we live on a planet that is rapidly urbanizing .
that should n't be news to any of us .
however , it 's hard sometimes to remember the extent of that urbanization .
by mid-century , we 're going to have about eight billion - perhaps more - people living in cities or within a day 's travel of one .
we will be an overwhelmingly urban species .
in order to provide the kind of energy that it would take that are even somewhat like the cities that those of us in the global north live in today , we would have to generate an absolutely astonishing amount of energy .
that we are not even able to build that much clean energy .
so if we 're seriously talking about tackling climate change on an urbanizing planet , we need to look somewhere else for the solution .
the solution , in fact , may be closer to hand than we think , because all of those cities we 're building are opportunities .
every city determines to a very large extent the amount of energy used by its inhabitants .
we tend to think of energy use as a behavioral thing - i choose to turn this light switch on - but really , enormous amounts of our energy use are predestined by the kinds of communities and cities that we live in .
i wo n't show you very many graphs today , but if i can just focus on this one for a moment , it really tells us a lot of what we need to know - which is , quite simply , that if you look , for example , at transportation , a major category of climate emissions , there is a direct relationship between how dense a city is and the amount of climate emissions that its residents spew out into the air .
and the correlation , of course , is that denser places tend to have lower emissions - which is n't really all that difficult to figure out , if you think about it .
basically , we substitute , in our lives , access to the things we want .
we go out there and we hop in our cars and we drive from place to place .
and we 're basically using mobility to get the access we need .
but when we live in a denser community , suddenly what we find , of course , is that the things we need are close by .
and since the most sustainable trip is the one that you never had to make in the first place , suddenly our lives become instantly more sustainable .
and it is possible , of course , to increase the density of the communities around us .
some places are doing this with new eco districts , developing whole new sustainable neighborhoods , which is nice work if you can get it , but most of the time , what we 're talking about is , in fact , reweaving the urban fabric that we already have .
so we 're talking about things like infill development : really sharp little changes to where we have buildings , where we 're developing .
urban retrofitting : creating different sorts of spaces and uses out of places that are already there .
increasingly , we 're realizing that we do n't even need to densify an entire city .
what we need instead is an average density that rises to a level where we do n't drive as much and so on .
and that can be done by raising the density in very specific spots a whole lot .
so you can think of it as tent poles that actually raise the density of the entire city .
and we find that when we do that , we can , in fact , have a few places that are really hyper-dense within a wider fabric of places that are perhaps a little more comfortable and achieve the same results .
now we may find that there are places that are really , really dense and still hold onto their cars , but the reality is that , by and large , what we see when we get a lot of people together with the right conditions is a threshold effect , where people simply stop driving as much , and increasingly , more and more people , if they 're surrounded by places that make them feel at home , give up their cars altogether .
and this is a huge , huge energy savings , because what comes out of our tailpipe is really just the beginning of the story with climate emissions from cars .
we have the manufacture of the car , the disposal of the car , all of the parking and freeways and so on .
when you can get rid of all of those because somebody does n't use any of them really , you find that you can actually cut transportation emissions as much as 90 percent .
and people are embracing this .
all around the world , we 're seeing more and more people embrace this walkshed life .
people are saying that it 's moving from the idea of the dream home to the dream neighborhood .
and when you layer that over with the kind of ubiquitous communications that we 're starting to see , what you find is , in fact , even more access suffused into spaces .
some of it 's transportation access .
this is a mapnificent map that shows me , in this case , how far i can get from my home in 30 minutes using public transportation .
some of it is about walking . it 's not all perfect yet .
this is google walking maps .
i asked how to do the greater ridgeway , and it told me to go via guernsey .
it did tell me that this route maybe missing sidewalks or pedestrian paths , though .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but the technologies are getting better , and we 're starting to really kind of crowdsource this navigation .
and as we just heard earlier , of course , we 're also learning how to put information on dumb objects .
things that do n't have any wiring in them at all , we 're learning how to include in these systems of notation and navigation .
part of what we 're finding with this is that what we thought was the major point of manufacturing and consumption , which is to get a bunch of stuff , is not , in fact , how we really live best in dense environments .
what we 're finding is that what we want is access to the capacities of things .
my favorite example is a drill . who here owns a drill , a home power drill ?
okay . i do too .
the average home power drill is used somewhere between six and 20 minutes in its entire lifetime , depending on who you ask .
and so what we do is we buy these drills that have a potential capacity of thousands of hours of drill time , use them once or twice to put a hole in the wall and let them sit .
our cities , i would put to you , are stockpiles of these surplus capacities .
and while we could try and figure out new ways to use those capacities - such as cooking or making ice sculptures or even a mafia hit - what we probably will find is that , in fact , turning those products into services that we have access to when we want them , is a far smarter way to go .
and in fact , even space itself is turning into a service .
we 're finding that people can share the same spaces , do stuff with vacant space .
buildings are becoming bundles of services .
so we have new designs that are helping us take mechanical things that we used to spend energy on - like heating , cooling etc . - and turn them into things that we avoid spending energy on .
so we light our buildings with daylight .
we cool them with breezes . we heat them with sunshine .
in fact , when we use all these things , what we 've found is that , in some cases , energy use in a building can drop as much as 90 percent .
which brings on another threshold effect i like to call furnace dumping , which is , quite simply , if you have a building that does n't need to be heated with a furnace , you save a whole bunch of money up front .
these things actually become cheaper to build than the alternatives .
now when we look at being able to slash our product use , slash our transportation use , slash our building energy use , all of that is great , but it still leaves something behind .
and if we 're going to really , truly become sustainable cities , we need to think a little differently .
this is one way to do it .
this is vancouver 's propaganda about how green a city they are .
and certainly lots of people have taken to heart this idea that a sustainable city is covered in greenery .
so we have visions like this .
we have visions like this . we have visions like this .
now all of these are fine projects , but they really have missed an essential point , which is it 's not about the leaves above , it 's about the systems below .
do they , for instance , capture rainwater so that we can reduce water use ?
water is energy intensive .
do they , perhaps , include green infrastructure , so that we can take runoff and water that 's going out of our houses and clean it and filter it and grow urban street trees ?
do they connect us back to the ecosystems around us by , for example , connecting us to rivers and allowing for restoration ?
do they allow for pollination , pollinator pathways that bees and butterflies and such can come back into our cities ?
do they even take the very waste matter that we have from food and fiber and so forth , and turn it back into soil and sequester carbon - take carbon out of the air in the process of using our cities ?
i would submit to you that all of these things are not only possible , they 're being done right now , and that it 's a darn good thing .
because right now , our economy by and large operates as paul hawken said , " by stealing the future , selling it in the present and calling it gdp . "
and if we have another eight billion or seven billion , or six billion , even , people , living on a planet where their cities also steal the future , we 're going to run out of future really fast .
but if we think differently , i think that , in fact , we can have cities that are not only zero emissions , but have unlimited possibilities as well .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i was sitting with my girls , and joy said , " dang , i wish he 'd get off my back .
my daddy , he calls me all the time . "
" lucky for you he calls at all , " said jasmine .
" i have n't heard from my dad in years . "
at this moment , i knew the girls needed a way to connect with their fathers .
at camp diva , my non-profit organization , we have these types of conversations all the time as a way to help girls of african descent prepare for their passage into womanhood .
these girls just needed a way to invite their fathers into their lives on their own terms .
so i asked the girls , " how can we help other girls develop healthy relationships with their fathers ? "
" let 's have a dance , " one girl shouted , and all the girls quickly backed her up .
they started dreaming about the decorations , invitations , the dresses they were going to wear , and what their fathers could and could not wear . -lrb- laughter -rrb- it was off and running before i could even blink my eyes , but even if i could have slowed down those girls , i would n't have , because one thing that i have learned from over a decade of working with girls is that they already know what they need .
the wisdom lives inside of them .
as long as they have infrastructure , mentorship and resources , they can build what they need , not only to survive , but to thrive .
so we had a dance , and girls and their fathers came in multitudes .
they were dressed to the nines .
they acted sweet .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- they acted silly .
they really enjoyed each other 's company .
it was a huge success .
and the girls decided to make it an annual event .
so as the seasons changed , and it was time to plan the dance again , one girl named brianna spoke up , and she said , " my dad ca n't come to the dance , and this whole thing is making me sad . "
" why not ? " the girls asked .
" because he 's in jail , " she bravely admitted .
" well , can he just get out for a day ? " one of the girls asked . -lrb- laughter -rrb- " and come in shackles ?
that 's worse than not having him here at all . "
at this moment , i saw an opportunity for the girls to rise to the occasion and to become their own heroes .
so i asked , " what do you think we should do about this ?
we want every girl to experience the dance , right ? "
so the girls thought for a moment , and one girl suggested , " why do n't we just take the dance in the jail ? "
most of the girls doubted the possibility of that , and said , " are you crazy ?
who is going to allow a bunch of little girls , dressed up - " -lrb- laughter -rrb- " - to come inside a jail and dance with their daddies in spongebob suits ? "
because that 's what they called them .
i said , " girls , well , well , you never know unless you ask . "
so a letter was written to the richmond city sheriff , signed collectively by each girl , and i would have to say , he is a very special sheriff .
he contacted me immediately and said , whenever there is an opportunity to bring families inside , his doors are always open .
because one thing he did know , that when fathers are connected to their children , it is less likely that they will return .
so , 16 inmates and 18 girls were invited .
the girls were dressed in their sunday best , and the fathers traded in their yellow and blue jumpsuits for shirts and ties .
they hugged .
they shared a full catered meal of chicken and fish .
they laughed together .
it was beautiful .
the fathers and daughters even experienced an opportunity to have a physical connection , something that a lot of them did n't even have for a while .
fathers were in a space where they were able to make their daughters play , and pull out her chair and extend his hand for a dance .
even the guards cried .
but after the dance , we all realized that dad still would be in jail .
so we needed to create something that they could take with them .
so we brought in flip cams , and we had them look at the flip cams and just interview each other - their messages , their thoughts .
this was going to be used as a touchstone so when they started to miss each other and feel disconnected , they could reconnect through this image .
i 'll never forget that one girl looked in her father 's eyes with that camera and said , " daddy , when you look at me , what do you see ? "
because our daddies are our mirrors that we reflect back on when we decide about what type of man we deserve , and how they see us for the rest of our lives .
i know that very well , because i was one of the lucky girls .
i have had my father in my life always .
he 's even here today .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and that is why it is extremely special for me to make sure that these girls are connected to their fathers , especially those who are separated because of barbed wires and metal doors .
we have just created a form for girls who have heavy questions on their heart to be in a position to ask their fathers those questions and given the fathers the freedom to answer .
because we know that the fathers are even leaving with this one thought : what type of woman am i preparing to put in the world ?
because a father is locked in does not mean he should be locked out of his daughter 's life .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm a man who 's trying to live from his heart , and so just before i get going , i wanted to tell you as a south african that one of the men who has inspired me most passed away a few hours ago .
nelson mandela has come to the end of his long walk to freedom .
and so this talk is going to be for him .
i grew up in wonder .
i grew up amongst those animals .
i grew up in the wild eastern part of south africa at a place called londolozi game reserve .
it 's a place where my family has been in the safari business for four generations .
now for as long as i can remember , my job has been to take people out into nature , and so i think it 's a lovely twist of fate today to have the opportunity to bring some of my experiences out in nature in to this gathering .
africa is a place where people still sit under starlit skies and around campfires and tell stories , and so what i have to share with you today is the simple medicine of a few campfire stories , stories about heroes of heart .
when i was nine years old , president mandela came to stay with my family .
he had just been released from his 27 years of incarceration , and was in a period of readjustment to his sudden global icon status .
members of the african national congress thought that in the bush he would have time to rest and recuperate away from the public eye , and it 's true that lions tend to be a very good deterrent to press and paparazzi .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but it was a defining time for me as a young boy .
i would take him breakfast in bed , and then , in an old track suit and slippers , he would go for a walk around the garden .
at night , i would sit with my family around the snowy , bunny-eared tv , and watch images of that same quiet man from the garden surrounded by hundreds and thousands of people as scenes from his release were broadcast nightly .
he was bringing peace to a divided and violent south africa , one man with an unbelievable sense of his humanity .
mandela said often that the gift of prison was the ability to go within and to think , to create in himself the things he most wanted for south africa : peace , reconciliation , harmony .
through this act of immense open-heartedness , he was to become the embodiment of what in south africa we call " ubuntu . "
ubuntu : i am because of you .
or , people are not people without other people .
it 's not a new idea or value but it 's one that i certainly think at these times is worth building on .
in fact , it is said that in the collective consciousness of africa , we get to experience the deepest parts of our own humanity through our interactions with others .
ubuntu is at play right now .
you are holding a space for me to express the deepest truth of who i am .
without you , i 'm just a guy talking to an empty room , and i spent a lot of time last week doing that , and it 's not the same as this .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- if mandela was the national and international embodiment , then the man who taught me the most about this value personally was this man , solly mhlongo .
solly was born under a tree 60 kilometers from where i grew up in mozambique .
he would never have a lot of money , but he was to be one of the richest men i would ever meet .
solly grew up tending to his father 's cattle .
now , i can tell you , i do n't know what it is about people who grow up looking after cattle , but it makes for über-resourcefulness .
the first job that he ever got in the safari business was fixing the safari trucks .
where he had learned to do that out in the bush i have no idea , but he could do it .
he then moved across into what we called the habitat team .
these were the people on the reserve who were responsible for its well-being .
he fixed roads , he mended wetlands , he did some anti-poaching .
and then one day we were out together , and he came across the tracks of where a female leopard had walked .
and it was an old track , but for fun he turned and he began to follow it , and i tell you , i could tell by the speed at which he moved on those pad marks that this man was a ph.d.-level tracker .
if you drove past solly somewhere out on the reserve , you look up in your rearview mirror , you 'd see he 'd stopped the car 20 , 50 meters down the road just in case you need help with something .
the only accusation i ever heard leveled at him was when one of our clients said , " solly , you are pathologically helpful . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- when i started professionally guiding people out into this environment , solly was my tracker .
we worked together as a team .
and the first guests we ever got were a philanthropy group from your east coast , and they said to solly , on the side , they said , " before we even go out to see lions and leopards , we want to see where you live . "
so we took them up to his house , and this visit of the philanthropist to his house coincided with a time when solly 's wife , who was learning english , was going through a phase where she would open the door by saying , " hello , i love you .
welcome , i love you . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- and there was something so beautifully african about it to me , this small house with a huge heart in it .
now on the day that solly saved my life , he was already my hero .
it was a hot day , and we found ourselves down by the river .
because of the heat , i took my shoes off , and i rolled up my pants , and i walked into the water .
solly remained on the bank .
the water was clear running over sand , and we turned and we began to make our way upstream .
and a few meters ahead of us , there was a place where a tree had fallen out of the bank , and its branches were touching the water , and it was shadowy .
and if had been a horror movie , people in the audience would have started saying , " do n't go in there . do n't go in there . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- and of course , the crocodile was in the shadows .
now the first thing that you notice when a crocodile hits you is the ferocity of the bite .
wham ! it hits me by my right leg .
it pulls me . it turns . i throw my hand up . i 'm able to grab a branch .
it 's shaking me violently .
it 's a very strange sensation having another creature try and eat you , and there are few things that promote vegetarianism like that .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- solly on the bank sees that i 'm in trouble .
he turns . he begins to make his way to me .
the croc again continues to shake me .
it goes to bite me a second time .
i notice a slick of blood in the water around me that gets washed downstream .
as it bites the second time , i kick .
my foot goes down its throat . it spits me out .
i pull myself up into the branches , and as i come out of the water , i look over my shoulder .
my leg from the knee down is mangled beyond description .
the bone is cracked .
the meat is torn up .
i make an instant decision that i 'll never look at that again .
as i come out of the water , solly arrives at a deep section , a channel between us .
he knows , he sees the state of my leg , he knows that between him and i there is a crocodile , and i can tell you this man does n't slow down for one second .
he comes straight into the channel .
he wades in to above his waist .
he gets to me . he grabs me .
i 'm still in a vulnerable position .
he picks me and puts me on his shoulder .
this is the other thing about solly , he 's freakishly strong .
he turns . he walks me up the bank .
he lays me down . he pulls his shirt off .
he wraps it around my leg , picks me up a second time , walks me to a vehicle , and he 's able to get me to medical attention .
and i survive .
now - -lrb- applause -rrb- now i do n't know how many people you know that go into a deep channel of water that they know has a crocodile in it to come and help you , but for solly , it was as natural as breathing .
and he is one amazing example of what i have experienced all over africa .
in a more collective society , we realize from the inside that our own well-being is deeply tied to the well-being of others .
danger is shared . pain is shared .
joy is shared . achievement is shared .
houses are shared . food is shared .
ubuntu asks us to open our hearts and to share , and what solly taught me that day is the essence of this value , his animated , empathetic action in every moment .
now although the root word is about people , i thought that maybe ubuntu was only about people .
and then i met this young lady .
her name was elvis .
in fact , solly gave her the name elvis because he said she walked like she was doing the elvis the pelvis dance .
she was born with very badly deformed back legs and pelvis .
she arrived at our reserve from a reserve east of us on her migratory route .
when i first saw her , i thought she would be dead in a matter of days .
and yet , for the next five years she returned in the winter months .
and we would be so excited to be out in the bush and to come across this unusual track .
it looked like an inverted bracket , and we would drop whatever we were doing and we would follow , and then we would come around the corner , and there she would be with her herd .
and that outpouring of emotion from people on our safari trucks as they saw her , it was this sense of kinship .
and it reminded me that even people who grow up in cities feel a natural connection with the natural world and with animals .
and yet still i remained amazed that she was surviving .
and then one day we came across them at this small water hole .
it was sort of a hollow in the ground .
and i watched as the matriarch drank , and then she turned in that beautiful slow motion of elephants , looks like the arm in motion , and she began to make her way up the steep bank .
the rest of the herd turned and began to follow .
and i watched young elvis begin to psych herself up for the hill .
she got visibly - ears came forward , she had a full go of it and halfway up , her legs gave way , and she fell backwards .
she attempted it a second time , and again , halfway up , she fell backwards .
and on the third attempt , an amazing thing happened .
halfway up the bank , a young teenage elephant came in behind her , and he propped his trunk underneath her , and he began to shovel her up the bank .
and it occurred to me that the rest of the herd was in fact looking after this young elephant .
the next day i watched again as the matriarch broke a branch and she would put it in her mouth , and then she would break a second one and drop it on the ground .
and a consensus developed between all of us who were guiding people in that area that that herd was in fact moving slower to accommodate that elephant .
what elvis and the herd taught me caused me to expand my definition of ubuntu , and i believe that in the cathedral of the wild , we get to see the most beautiful parts of ourselves reflected back at us .
and it is not only through other people that we get to experience our humanity but through all the creatures that live on this planet .
if africa has a gift to share , it 's a gift of a more collective society .
and while it 's true that ubuntu is an african idea , what i see is the essence of that value being invented here .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- pat mitchell : so boyd , we know that you knew president mandela from early childhood and that you heard the news as we all did today , and deeply distraught and know the tragic loss that it is to the world .
but i just wondered if you wanted to share any additional thoughts , because we know that you heard that news just before coming in to do this session .
boyd varty : well thanks , pat .
i 'm so happy because it was time for him to pass on .
he was suffering .
and so of course there 's the mixed emotions .
but i just think of so many occurrences like the time he went on the oprah show and asked her what the show would be about .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and she was like , " well , it 'll be about you . "
i mean , that 's just incredible humility .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- he was the father of our nation and we 've got a road to walk in south africa .
and everything , they used to call it madiba magic .
you know , he used to go to a rugby match and we would win .
anywhere he went , things went well .
but i think that magic will be with us , and the important thing is that we carry what he stood for .
and so that 's what i 'm going to try and do , and that 's what people all over south africa are trying to do .
pm : and that 's what you 've done today . bv : oh , thank you .
pm : thank you . bv : thank you . thanks very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- what i 'd like you to do is , just really quickly , is just , sort of , nod to the person on your right , and then nod to the person on your left .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , chances are that over the last winter , if you had been a beehive , either you or one of the two people you just nodded at would have died .
now , that 's an awful lot of bees .
and this is the second year in a row we have lost over 30 percent of the colonies , or we estimate we 've lost 30 percent of the colonies over the winter .
now , that 's a lot , a lot of bees , and that 's really important .
and most of those losses are because of things we know .
we know that there are these varroa mites that have introduced and caused a lot of losses , and we also have this new phenomenon , which i talked about last year , colony collapse disorder .
and here we see a picture on top of a hill in central valley last december .
and below , you can see all these out yards , or temporary yards , where the colonies are brought in until february , and then they 're shipped out to the almonds .
and one documentary writer , who was here and looked at this two months after i was here , described this not as beehives but as a graveyard , with these empty white boxes with no bees left in them .
now , i 'm going to sum up a year 's worth of work in two sentences to say that we have been trying to figure out what the cause of this is .
and what we know is that it 's as if the bees have caught a flu .
and this flu has wiped through the population of bees .
in some cases , and in fact in most cases in one year , this flu was caused by a new virus to us , or newly identified by us , called israeli acute paralysis virus .
it was called that because a guy in israel first found it , and he now regrets profoundly calling it that disease , because , of course , there 's the implication .
but we think this virus is pretty ubiquitous .
it 's also pretty clear that the bees sometimes catch other viruses or other flus , and so the question we 're still struggling with , and the question that keeps us up at night , is why have the bees suddenly become so susceptible to this flu , and why are they so susceptible to these other diseases ?
and we do n't have the answer to that yet , and we spend a lot of time trying to figure that out .
we think perhaps it 's a combination of factors .
we know from the work of a very large and dynamic working team that , you know , we 're finding a lot of different pesticides in the hive , and surprisingly , sometimes the healthiest hives have the most pesticides . and so we discover all these very strange things that we ca n't begin to understand .
and so this opens up the whole idea of looking at colony health .
now of course , if you lose a lot of colonies , beekeepers can replace them very quickly .
and that 's why we 've been able to recover from a lot of loss .
if we lost one in every three cows in the winter , you know , the national guard would be out .
but what beekeepers can do is , if they have one surviving colony , they can split that colony in two .
and then the one half that does n't have a queen , they can buy a queen .
it comes in the mail ; it can come from australia or hawaii or florida , and you can introduce that queen .
and in fact , america was the first country that ever did mail-delivery queens and in fact , it 's part of the postal code that you have to deliver queens by mail in order to make sure that we have enough bees in this country .
if you do n't just want a queen , you can buy , actually , a three-pound package of bees , which comes in the mail , and of course , the postal office is always very concerned when they get , you know , your three-pound packages of bees .
and you can install this in your hive and replace that dead-out .
so it means that beekeepers are very good at replacing dead-outs , and so they 've been able to cover those losses .
so even though we 've lost 30 percent of the colonies every year , the same number of colonies have existed in the country , at about 2.4 million colonies .
now , those losses are tragic on many fronts , and one of those fronts is for the beekeeper .
and it 's really important to talk about beekeepers first , because beekeepers are among the most fascinating people you 'll ever meet .
if this was a group of beekeepers , you would have everyone from the card-carrying nra member who 's , you know , live free or die , to the , you know , the self-expressed quirky san francisco backyard pig farmer .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and you get all of these people in the same room , and they 're all engaged and they 're getting along , and they 're all there because of the passion for bees .
now , there 's another part of that community which are the commercial beekeepers , the ones who make their livelihood from beekeeping alone .
and these tend to be some of the most independent , tenacious , intuitive , you know , inventive people you will ever meet .
they 're just fascinating . and they 're like that all over the world .
i had the privilege of working in haiti just for two weeks earlier this year .
and haiti , if you 've ever been there , is just a tragedy .
i mean , there may be 100 explanations for why haiti is the impoverished nation it is , but there is no excuse to see that sort of squalor .
but you meet this beekeeper , and i met this beekeeper here , and he is one of the most knowledgeable beekeepers i 've ever met .
no formal education , but very knowledgeable .
we needed beeswax for a project we were working on ; he was so capable , he was able to render the nicest block of beeswax i have ever seen from cow dung , tin cans and his veil , which he used as a screening , right in this meadow . and so that ingenuity is inspiring .
we also have dave hackenberg , who is the poster child of ccd .
he 's the one who first identified this condition and raised the alarm bells .
and he has a history of these trucks , and he 's moved these bees up and down the coast .
and a lot of people talk about trucks and moving bees , and that being bad , but we 've done that for thousands of years .
the ancient egyptians used to move bees up and down the nile on rafts , so this idea of a movable bee force is not new at all .
and one of our real worries with colony collapse disorder is the fact that it costs so much money to replace those dead-out colonies .
and you can do that one year in a row , you may be able to do it two years in a row .
but if you 're losing 50 percent to 80 percent of your colonies , you ca n't survive three years in a row . and we 're really worried about losing this segment of our industry .
and that 's important for many fronts , and one of them is because of that culture that 's in agriculture .
and these migratory beekeepers are the last nomads of america .
you know , they pick up their hives ; they move their families once or twice in a year .
and if you look at florida , in dade city , florida , that 's where all the pennsylvania beekeepers go .
and then 20 miles down the road is groveland , and that 's where all the wisconsin beekeepers go .
and if you 're ever in central valley in february , you go to this café at 10 o 'clock in the morning , kathy and kate 's .
and that 's where all the beekeepers come after a night of moving bees into the almond groves .
they all have their breakfast and complain about everyone right there . and it 's a great experience , and i really encourage you to drop in at that diner during that time , because that 's quite essential american experience .
and we see these families , these nomadic families , you know , father to son , father to son , and these guys are hurting .
and they 're not people who like to ask for help , although they are the most helpful people ever .
if there 's one guy who loses all his bees because of a truck overhaul , everyone pitches in and gives 20 hives to help him replace those lost colonies .
and so , it 's a very dynamic , and i think , historic and exciting community to be involved with .
of course , the real importance for bees is not the honey .
and although i highly encourage you , all use honey .
i mean , it 's the most ethical sweetener , and you know , it 's a dynamic and fun sweetener .
but we estimate that about one in three bites of food we eat is directly or indirectly pollinated by honeybees .
now , i want to just illustrate that in the fact that if we look at the breakfast i had yesterday morning - a little cranberry juice , some fruits , some granola , i should have had whole wheat bread , i realized , but you know , jam on my wonderbread , and some coffee - and had we taken out all those ingredients , - except for the almonds i was n't going to pick out from the granola - if we had taken out all those ingredients the bees had indirectly or directly pollinated , we would n't have much on our plate .
so if we did not have bees , it 's not like we would starve , but clearly our diet would be diminished .
it 's said that for bees , the flower is the fountain of life , and for flowers bees are the messengers of love .
and that 's a really great expression , because really , bees are the sex workers for flowers . they are , you know - they get paid for their services .
they get paid by pollen and nectar , to move that male sperm , the pollen , from flower to flower .
and there are flowers that are self-infertile . that means they ca n't - the pollen in their bloom ca n't fertilize themselves .
so in an apple orchard , for instance , you 'll have rows of 10 apples of one variety , and then you have another apple tree that 's a different type of pollen .
and bees are very faithful .
when they 're out pollinating or gathering pollen from one flower , they stay to that crop exclusively , in order to help generate .
and of course , they 're made to carry this pollen .
they build up a static electric charge and the pollen jumps on them and helps spread that pollen from bloom to bloom .
however , honeybees are a minority .
honeybees are not native to america ; they were introduced with the colonialists .
and there are actually more species of bees than there are mammals and birds combined .
in pennsylvania alone , we have been surveying bees for 150 years , and very intensely in the last three years .
we have identified over 400 species of bees in pennsylvania .
thirty-two species have not been identified or found in the state since 1950 .
now , that could be because we have n't been sampling right , but it does , i think , suggest that something 's wrong with the pollinator force . and these bees are fascinating .
we have bumblebees on the top .
and bumblebees are what we call eusocial : they 're not truly social , because only the queen is , over winter .
we also have the sweat bees , and these are little gems flying around .
they 're like tiny little flies and they fly around .
and then you have another type of bee , which we call kleptoparasites , which is a very fancy way of saying , bad-minded , murdering - what 's the word i 'm looking for ? murdering - audience : bee ?
dennis vanengelsdorp : bee . okay , thanks .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- what these bees do is , they sit there . these solitary bees , they drill a hole in the ground or drill a hole in a branch , and they collect pollen and make it into a ball , and they lay an egg on it .
well , these bees hang out at that hole , and they wait for that mother to fly away , they go in , eat the egg , and lay their own egg there . so they do n't do any work .
and so , in fact , if you know you have these kleptoparasitic bees , you know that your environment is healthy , because they 're top-of-the-food-chain bees .
and in fact , there is now a red list of pollinators that we 're worried have disappeared , and on top of that list are a lot of these kleptoparasites , but also these bumblebees .
and in fact , if you guys live on the west coast , go to these websites here , and they 're really looking for people to look for some of these bumblebees , because we think some have gone extinct . or some , the population has declined .
and so it 's not just honeybees that are in trouble , but we do n't understand these native pollinators or all those other parts of our community .
and of course , bees are not the only important factor here .
there are other animals that pollinate , like bats , and bats are in trouble too .
and i 'm glad i 'm a bee man and not a bat man , because there 's no money to research the bat problems .
and bats are dying at an extraordinary rate .
white-nose syndrome has wiped out populations of bats .
if there 's a cave in new york that had 15,000 bats in it , and there are 1,000 left . that 's like san francisco becoming the population of half of this county in three years .
and so that 's incredible . and there 's no money to do that .
but i 'm glad to say that i think we know the cause of all these conditions , and that cause is ndd : nature deficit disorder .
and that is that i think that what we have in our society is , we forgot our connection with nature .
and i think if we reconnect to nature , we 'll be able to have the resources and that interest to solve these problems .
and i think that there is an easy cure for ndd .
and that is , make meadows and not lawns .
and i think we have lost our connection , and this is a wonderful way of reconnecting to our environment .
i 've had the privilege of living by a meadow for the last little while , and it is terribly engaging .
and if we look at the history of lawns , it 's actually rather tragic .
it used to be , two , three hundred years ago , that a lawn was a symbol of prestige , and so it was only the very rich that could keep these green actually , deserts : they 're totally sterile .
americans spent , in 2001 - 11 percent of all pesticide use was done on lawns .
five percent of our greenhouse gases are produced by mowing our lawns .
and so it 's incredible the amount of resources we 've spent keeping our lawns , which are these useless biosystems .
and so we need to rethink this idea .
in fact , you know , the white house used to have sheep in front in order to help fund the war effort in world war i , which probably is not a bad idea ; it would n't be a bad idea .
i want to say this not because i 'm opposed completely to mowing lawns .
i think that there is perhaps some advantage to keeping lawns at a limited scale , and i think we 're encouraged to do that .
but i also want to reinforce some of the ideas we 've heard here , because having a meadow or living by a meadow is transformational .
that it is amazing that connection we can have with what 's there .
these milkweed plants have grown up in my meadow over the last four years . add to watch the different plants , or insects , that come to these flowers , to watch that - and we 've heard about , you know , this relationship you can have with wine , this companion you can have as it matures and as it has these different fragrances .
and this is a companion , and this is a relationship that never dries up .
you never run out of that companion as you drink this wine , too .
and i encourage you to look at that .
now , not all of us have meadows , or lawns that we can convert , and so you can always , of course , grow a meadow in a pot .
bees apparently , can be the gateway to , you know , other things .
so i 'm not saying that you should plant a meadow of pot , but a pot in a meadow .
but you can also have this great community of city or building-top beekeepers , these beekeepers that live - this is in paris where these beekeepers live .
and everyone should open a beehive , because it is the most amazing , incredible thing .
and if we want to cure ourselves of ndd , or nature deficit disorder , i think this is a great way of doing it .
get a beehive and grow a meadow , and watch that life come back into your life .
and so with that , i think that what we can do , if we do this , we can make sure that our future - our more perfect future - includes beekeepers and it includes bees and it includes those meadows .
and that journey - that journey of transformation that occurs as you grow your meadow and as you keep your bees or you watch those native bees there - is an extremely exciting one .
and i hope that you experience it and i hope you tell me about it one day .
so thank you very much for being here . thank you very much .
-lrb- music -rrb- ♫ i do n't understand myself , ♫ ♫ why they keep talking of love , ♫ ♫ if they come near me , ♫ ♫ if they look into my eyes and kiss my hand . ♫ ♫ i do n't understand myself , ♫ ♫ why they talk of magic , ♫ ♫ that no one withstands , ♫ ♫ if he sees me , if he passes by . ♫ ♫ but if the red light is on ♫ ♫ in the middle of the night ♫ ♫ and everybody listens to my song , ♫ ♫ then it is plain to see . ♫ ♫ my lips , they give so fiery a kiss , ♫
♫ my limbs , they are supple and soft . ♫ ♫ it is written for me in the stars , ♫ ♫ thou shalt kiss , thou shalt love . ♫ ♫ my feet , they glide and float , ♫ ♫ my eyes , they lure and glow . ♫ ♫ and i dance as if entranced , ' cause i know , ♫ ♫ my lips give so fiery a kiss . ♫ ♫ in my veins , ♫ ♫ runs a dancer 's blood , ♫ ♫ because my beautiful mother ♫ ♫ was the queen of dance ♫ ♫ in the gilded alcazar . ♫ ♫ she was so very beautiful , ♫ ♫ i often saw her in my dreams . ♫
♫ if she beat the tambourine ♫ ♫ to her beguiling dance , all eyes were glowing admiringly . ♫ ♫ she reawakened in me , ♫ ♫ mine is the same lot . ♫ ♫ i dance like her at midnight ♫ ♫ and from deep within i feel : ♫ ♫ my lips , they give so fiery a kiss , ♫ ♫ my limbs , they are supple and soft . ♫ ♫ it is written for me in the stars , ♫ ♫ thou shalt kiss , thou shalt love . ♫ ♫ and i dance as if entranced , ' cause i know , ♫ ♫ my lips give so fiery a kiss . ♫
-lrb- applause -rrb- i want to take you back basically to my hometown , and to a picture of my hometown of the week that " emergence " came out .
and it 's a picture we 've seen several times .
basically , " emergence " was published on 9/11 .
i live right there in the west village , so the plume was luckily blowing west , away from us .
we had a two-and-a-half-day-old baby in the house that was ours - we had n't taken it from somebody else .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and one of the thoughts that i had dealing with these two separate emergences of a book and a baby , and having this event happen so close - that my first thought , when i was still kind of in the apartment looking out at it all or walking out on the street and looking out on it just in front of our building , was that i 'd made a terrible miscalculation in the book that i 'd just written .
because so much of that book was a celebration of the power and creative potential of density , of largely urban density , of connecting people and putting them together in one place , and putting them on sidewalks together and having them share ideas and share physical space together .
and it seemed to me looking at that - that tower burning and then falling , those towers burning and falling - that in fact , one of the lessons here was that density kills .
and that of all the technologies that were exploited to make that carnage come into being , probably the single group of technologies that cost the most lives were those that enable 50,000 people to live in two buildings 110 stories above the ground .
if they had n't been crowded - you compare the loss of life at the pentagon to the twin towers , and you can see that very powerfully .
and so i started to think , well , you know , density , density - i 'm not sure if , you know , this was the right call .
and i kind of ruminated on that for a couple of days .
and then about two days later , the wind started to change a little bit , and you could sense that the air was not healthy .
and so even though there were no cars still in the west village where we lived , my wife sent me out to buy a , you know , a large air filter at the bed bath and beyond , which was located about 20 blocks away , north .
and so i went out .
and obviously i 'm physically a very strong person , as you can tell - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - so i was n't worried about carrying this thing 20 blocks .
and i walked out , and this really miraculous thing happened to me as i was walking north to buy this air filter , which was that the streets were completely alive with people .
there was an incredible - it was , you know , a beautiful day , as it was for about a week after , and the west village had never seemed more lively .
i walked up along hudson street - where jane jacobs had lived and written her great book that so influenced what i was writing in " emergence " - past the white horse tavern , that great old bar where dylan thomas drank himself to death , and the bleecker street playground was filled with kids .
and all the people who lived in the neighborhood , who owned restaurants and bars in the neighborhood , were all out there - had them all open .
people were out .
there were no cars , so it seemed even better , in some ways .
and it was a beautiful urban day , and the incredible thing about it was that the city was working .
the city was there .
all the things that make a great city successful and all the things that make a great city stimulating - they were all on display there on those streets .
and i thought , well , this is the power of a city .
i mean , the power of the city - we talked about cities as being centralized in space , but what makes them so strong most of the time is they 're decentralized in function .
they do n't have a center executive branch that you can take out and cause the whole thing to fail .
if they did , it probably was right there at ground zero .
i mean , you know , the emergency bunker was right there , was destroyed by the attacks , and obviously the damage done to the building and the lives .
but nonetheless , just 20 blocks north , two days later , the city had never looked more alive .
if you 'd gone into the minds of the people , well , you would have seen a lot of trauma , and you would have seen a lot of heartache , and you would have seen a lot of things that would take a long time to recover .
but the system itself of this city was thriving .
so i took heart in seeing that .
so i wanted to talk a little bit about the reasons why that works so well , and how some of those reasons kind of map on to where the web is going right now .
the question that i found myself asking to people when i was talking about the book afterwards is - when you 've talked about emergent behavior , when you 've talked about collective intelligence , the best way to get people to kind of wrap their heads around that is to ask , who builds a neighborhood ?
who decides that soho should have this personality and that the latin quarter should have this personality ?
well , there are some kind of executive decisions , but mostly the answer is - everybody and nobody .
everybody contributes a little bit .
no single person is really the ultimate actor behind the personality of a neighborhood .
same thing to the question of , who was keeping the streets alive post-9/11 in my neighborhood ?
well , it was the whole city .
the whole system kind of working on it , and everybody contributing a small little part .
and this is increasingly what we 're starting to see on the web in a bunch of interesting ways - most of which were n't around , actually , except in very experimental things , when i was writing " emergence " and when the book came out .
so it 's been a very optimistic time , i think , and i want to just talk about a few of those things .
i think that there is effectively a new kind of model of interactivity that 's starting to emerge online right now .
and the old one looked like this .
this is not the future king of england , although it looks like it .
it 's some guy , it 's a geocities homepage of some guy that i found online who 's interested , if you look at the bottom , in soccer and jesus and garth brooks and clint beckham and " my hometown " - those are his links .
but nothing really says this model of interactivity - which was so exciting and captures the real , the web zeitgeist of 1995 - than " click here for a picture of my dog . "
that is - you know , there 's no sentence that kind of conjures up that period better than that , i think , which is that you suddenly have the power to put up a picture of your dog and link to it , and somebody reading the page has the power to click on that link or not click on that link .
and , you know , i do n't want to belittle that . that , in a sense - to reference what jeff was talking about yesterday - that was , in a sense , the kind of interface electricity that powered a lot of the explosion of interest in the web : that you could put up a link , and somebody could click on it , and it could take you anywhere you wanted to go .
but it 's still a very one-to-one kind of relationship .
there 's one person putting up the link , and there 's another person on the other end trying to decide whether to click on it or not .
the new model is much more like this , and we 've already seen a couple of references to this .
this is what happens when you search " steven johnson " on google .
about two months ago , i had the great breakthrough - one of my great , kind of shining achievements - which is that my website finally became a top result for " steven johnson . "
there 's some theoretical physicist at mit named steven johnson who has dropped two spots , i 'm happy to say .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and , you know , i mean , i 'll look at a couple of things like this , but google is obviously the greatest technology ever invented for navel gazing .
it 's just that there are so many other people in your navel when you gaze .
because effectively , what 's happening here , what 's creating this page , obviously - and we all know this , but it 's worth just thinking about it - is not some person deciding that i am the number one answer for steven johnson , but rather somehow the entire web of people putting up pages and deciding to link to my page or not link to it , and google just sitting there and running the numbers .
so there 's this collective decision-making that 's going on .
this page is effectively , collectively authored by the web , and google is just helping us kind of to put the authorship in one kind of coherent place .
now , they 're more innovative - well , google 's pretty innovative - but there are some new twists on this .
there 's this incredibly interesting new site - technorati - that 's filled with lots of little widgets that are expanding on these .
and these are looking in the blog world and the world of weblogs .
he 's analyzed basically all the weblogs out there that he 's tracking .
and he 's tracking how many other weblogs linked to those weblogs , and so you have kind of an authority - a weblog that has a lot of links to it is more authoritative than a weblog that has few links to it .
and so at any given time , on any given page on the web , actually , you can say , what does the weblog community think about this page ?
and you can get a list .
this is what they think about my site ; it 's ranked by blog authority .
you can also rank it by the latest posts .
so when i was talking in " emergence , " i talked about the limitations of the one-way linking architecture that , basically , you could link to somebody else but they would n't necessarily know that you were pointing to them .
and that was one of the reasons why the web was n't quite as emergent as it could be because you needed two-way linking , you needed that kind of feedback mechanism to be able to really do interesting things .
well , something like technorati is supplying that .
now what 's interesting here is that this is a quote from dave weinberger , where he talks about everything being purposive in the web - there 's nothing artificial .
he has this line where he says , you know , you 're going to put up a link there , if you see a link , somebody decided to put it there .
and he says , the link to one site did n't just grow on the other page " like a tree fungus . "
and in fact , i think that 's not entirely true anymore .
i could put up a feed of all those links generated by technorati on the right-hand side of my page , and they would change as the overall ecology of the web changes .
that little list there would change .
i would n't really be directly in control of it .
so it 's much closer , in a way , to a data fungus , in a sense , wrapped around that page , than it is to a deliberate link that i 've placed there .
now , what you 're having here is basically a global brain that you 're able to do lots of kind of experiments on to see what it 's thinking .
and there are all these interesting tools .
google does the google zeitgeist , which looks at search requests to test what 's going on , what people are interested in , and they publish it with lots of fun graphs .
and i 'm saying a lot of nice things about google , so i 'll be i 'll be saying one little critical thing .
there 's a problem with the google zeitgeist , which is it often comes back with news that a lot of people are searching for britney spears pictures , which is not necessarily news .
the columbia blows up , suddenly there are a lot of searches on columbia .
well , you know , we should expect to see that .
that 's not necessarily something we did n't know already .
so the key thing in terms of these new tools that are kind of plumbing the depths of the global brain , that are sending kind of trace dyes through that whole bloodstream - the question is , are you finding out something new ?
and one of the things that i experimented with is this thing called google share which is basically , you take an abstract term , and you search google for that term , and then you search the results that you get back for somebody 's name .
so basically , the number of pages that mention this term , that also mention this page , the percentage of those pages is that person 's google share of that term .
so you can do kind of interesting contests .
like for instance , this is a google share of the ted conference .
so richard saul wurman has about a 15 percent google share of the ted conference .
our good friend chris has about a six percent - but with a bullet , i might add .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but the interesting thing is , you can broaden the search a little bit .
and it turns out , actually , that 42 percent is the mola mola fish .
i had no idea .
no , that 's not true .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i made that up because i just wanted to put up a slide of the mola mola fish .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i also did - and i do n't want to start a little fight in the next panel - but i did a google share analysis of evolution and natural selection .
so right here - now this is a big category , you have smaller percentages , so this is 0.7 percent - dan dennett , who 'll be speaking shortly .
right below him , 0.5 percent , steven pinker .
so dennett 's in the lead a little bit there .
but what 's interesting is you can then broaden the search and actually see interesting things and get a sense of what else is out there .
so gary bauer is not too far behind - has slightly different theories about evolution and natural selection .
and right behind him is l. ron hubbard . so - -lrb- laughter -rrb- you can see we 're in the ascot , which is always good .
and by the way , chris , that would 've been a really good panel , i think , right there .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- hubbard apparently started to reach , but besides that , i think it would be good next year .
another quick thing - this is a slightly different thing , but this analysis some of you may have seen .
it just came out . this is bursty words , looking at the historical record of state of the union addresses .
so these are words that suddenly start to appear out of nowhere , so they 're kind of , you know , memes that start taking off , that did n't have a lot of historical precedent before .
so the first one is - these are the bursty words around 1860s - slaves , emancipation , slavery , rebellion , kansas .
that 's britney spears . i mean , you know , ok , interesting .
they 're talking about slavery in 1860 .
1935 - relief , depression , recovery banks .
and ok , i did n't learn anything new there as well - that 's pretty obvious .
1985 , right at the center of the reagan years - that 's , we 're , there 's , we 've , it 's .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , there 's one way to interpret this , which is to say that " emancipation " and " depression " and " recovery " all have a lot of syllables .
so you know , you can actually download - it 's hard to remember those .
but seriously , actually , what you can see there , in a way that would be very hard to detect otherwise , is reagan reinventing the political language of the country and shifting to a much more intimate , much more folksy , much more telegenic - contracting all those verbs .
you know , 20 years before it was still , " ask not what you can do , " but with reagan , it 's , " that 's where , there 's nancy and i , " that kind of language .
and so something we kind of knew , but you did n't actually notice syntactically what he was doing .
i 'll go very quickly .
the question now - and this is the really interesting question - is , what kind of higher-level shape is emerging right now in the overall web ecosystem - and particularly in the ecosystem of the blogs because they are really kind of at the cutting edge .
and i think what happens there will also happen in the wider system .
now there was a very interesting article by clay shirky that got a lot of attention about a month ago , and this is basically the distribution of links on the web to all these various different blogs .
it follows a power law , so that there are a few extremely well-linked to , popular blogs , and a long tail of blogs with very few links .
so 20 percent of the blogs get 80 percent of the links .
now this is a very interesting thing .
it 's caused a lot of controversy because people thought that this was the ultimate kind of one man , one modem democracy , where anybody can get out there and get their voice heard .
and so the question is , " why is this happening ? "
it 's not being imposed by fiat from above .
it 's an emergent property of the blogosphere right now .
now , what 's great about it is that people are working on - within seconds of clay publishing this piece , people started working on changing the underlying rules of the system so that a different shape would start appearing .
and basically , the shape appears largely because of a kind of a first-mover advantage .
if you 're the first site there , everybody links to you .
if you 're the second site there , most people link to you .
and so very quickly you can accumulate a bunch of links , and it makes it more likely for newcomers to link to you in the future , and then you get this kind of shape .
and so what dave sifry at technorati started working on , literally as shirky started - after he published his piece - was something that basically just gave a new kind of priority to newcomers .
and he started looking at interesting newcomers that do n't have a lot of links , that suddenly get a bunch of links in the last 24 hours .
so in a sense , bursty weblogs coming from new voices .
so he 's working on a tool right there that can actually change the overall system .
and it creates a kind of planned emergence .
you 're not totally in control , but you 're changing the underlying rules in interesting ways because you have an end result which is maybe a more democratic spread of voices .
so the most amazing thing about this - and i 'll end on this note - is , most emergent systems , most self-organizing systems are not made up of component parts that are capable of looking at the overall pattern and changing their behavior based on whether they like the pattern or not .
so the most wonderful thing , i think , about this whole debate about power laws and software that could change it is the fact that we 're having the conversation .
i hope it continues here .
thanks a lot .
right now there is an aspiring teacher who is working on a 60-page paper based on some age-old education theory developed by some dead education professor wondering to herself what this task that she 's engaging in has to do with what she wants to do with her life , which is be an educator , change lives , and spark magic .
right now there is an aspiring teacher in a graduate school of education who is watching a professor babble on and on about engagement in the most disengaging way possible .
right now there 's a first-year teacher at home who is pouring through lesson plans trying to make sense of standards , who is trying to make sense of how to grade students appropriately , while at the same time saying to herself over and over again , " do n't smile till november , " because that 's what she was taught in her teacher education program .
right now there 's a student who is coming up with a way to convince his mom or dad that he 's very , very sick and ca n't make it to school tomorrow .
on the other hand , right now there are amazing educators that are sharing information , information that is shared in such a beautiful way that the students are sitting at the edge of their seats just waiting for a bead of sweat to drop off the face of this person so they can soak up all that knowledge .
right now there is also a person who has an entire audience rapt with attention , a person that is weaving a powerful narrative about a world that the people who are listening have never imagined or seen before , but if they close their eyes tightly enough , they can envision that world because the storytelling is so compelling .
right now there 's a person who can tell an audience to put their hands up in the air and they will stay there till he says , " put them down . "
right now .
so people will then say , " well , chris , you describe the guy who is going through some awful training but you 're also describing these powerful educators .
if you 're thinking about the world of education or urban education in particular , these guys will probably cancel each other out , and then we 'll be okay . "
the reality is , the folks i described as the master teachers , the master narrative builders , the master storytellers are far removed from classrooms .
the folks who know the skills about how to teach and engage an audience do n't even know what teacher certification means .
they may not even have the degrees to be able to have anything to call an education .
and that to me is sad .
it 's sad because the people who i described , they were very disinterested in the learning process , want to be effective teachers , but they have no models .
i 'm going to paraphrase mark twain .
mark twain says that proper preparation , or teaching , is so powerful that it can turn bad morals to good , it can turn awful practices into powerful ones , it can change men and transform them into angels .
the folks who i described earlier got proper preparation in teaching , not in any college or university , but by virtue of just being in the same spaces of those who engage .
guess where those places are ?
barber shops , rap concerts , and most importantly , in the black church .
and i 've been framing this idea called pentecostal pedagogy .
who here has been to a black church ?
we got a couple of hands .
you go to a black church , their preacher starts off and he realizes that he has to engage the audience , so he starts off with this sort of wordplay in the beginning oftentimes , and then he takes a pause , and he says , " oh my gosh , they 're not quite paying attention . "
so he says , " can i get an amen ? "
audience : amen .
chris emdin : so i can i get an amen ? audience : amen .
ce : and all of a sudden , everybody 's reawoken .
that preacher bangs on the pulpit for attention .
he drops his voice at a very , very low volume when he wants people to key into him , and those things are the skills that we need for the most engaging teachers .
so why does teacher education only give you theory and theory and tell you about standards and tell you about all of these things that have nothing to do with the basic skills , that magic that you need to engage an audience , to engage a student ?
so i make the argument that we reframe teacher education , that we could focus on content , and that 's fine , and we could focus on theories , and that 's fine , but content and theories with the absence of the magic of teaching and learning means nothing .
now people oftentimes say , " well , magic is just magic . "
there are teachers who , despite all their challenges , who have those skills , get into those schools and are able to engage an audience , and the administrator walks by and says , " wow , he 's so good , i wish all my teachers could be that good . "
and when they try to describe what that is , they just say , " he has that magic . "
but i 'm here to tell you that magic can be taught .
magic can be taught .
magic can be taught .
now , how do you teach it ?
you teach it by allowing people to go into those spaces where the magic is happening .
if you want to be an aspiring teacher in urban education , you 've got to leave the confines of that university and go into the hood .
you 've got to go in there and hang out at the barbershop , you 've got to attend that black church , and you 've got to view those folks that have the power to engage and just take notes on what they do .
at our teacher education classes at my university , i 've started a project where every single student that comes in there sits and watches rap concerts .
they watch the way that the rappers move and talk with their hands .
they study the way that he walks proudly across that stage .
they listen to his metaphors and analogies , and they start learning these little things that if they practice enough becomes the key to magic .
they learn that if you just stare at a student and raise your eyebrow about a quarter of an inch , you do n't have to say a word because they know that that means that you want more .
and if we could transform teacher education to focus on teaching teachers how to create that magic then poof ! we could make dead classes come alive , we could reignite imaginations , and we can change education .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- namaste . good morning .
i 'm very happy to be here in india .
and i 've been thinking a lot about what i have learned over these last particularly 11 years with v-day and " the vagina monologues , " traveling the world , essentially meeting with women and girls across the planet to stop violence against women .
what i want to talk about today is this particular cell , or grouping of cells , that is in each and every one of us .
and i want to call it the girl cell .
and it 's in men as well as in women .
i want you to imagine that this particular grouping of cells is central to the evolution of our species and the continuation of the human race .
and i want you imagine that at some point in history a group of powerful people invested in owning and controlling the world understood that the suppression of this particular cell , the oppression of these cells , the reinterpretation of these cells , the undermining of these cells , getting us to believe in the weakness of these cells and the crushing , eradicating , destroying , reducing these cells , basically began the process of killing off the girl cell , which was , by the way , patriarchy .
i want you to imagine that the girl is a chip in the huge macrocosm of collective consciousness .
and it is essential to balance , to wisdom and to actually the future of all of us .
and then i want you to imagine that this girl cell is compassion , and it 's empathy , and it 's passion itself , and it 's vulnerability , and it 's openness , and it 's intensity , and it 's association , and it 's relationship , and it is intuitive .
and then let 's think how compassion informs wisdom , and that vulnerability is our greatest strength , and that emotions have inherent logic , which lead to radical , appropriate , saving action .
and then let 's remember that we 've been taught the exact opposite by the powers that be , that compassion clouds your thinking , that it gets in the way , that vulnerability is weakness , that emotions are not to be trusted , and you 're not supposed to take things personally , which is one of my favorites .
i think the whole world has essentially been brought up not to be a girl .
how do we bring up boys ? what does it mean to be a boy ?
to be a boy really means not to be a girl .
to be a man means not to be a girl .
to be a woman means not to be a girl .
to be strong means not to be a girl .
to be a leader means not to be a girl .
i actually think that being a girl is so powerful that we 've had to train everyone not to be that .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i 'd also like to say that the irony of course , is that denying girl , suppressing girl , suppressing emotion , refusing feeling has lead thus here .
where we have now come to live in a world where the most extreme forms of violence , the most horrific poverty , genocide , mass rapes , the destruction of the earth , is completely out of control .
and because we have suppressed our girl cells and suppressed our girl-ship , we do not feel what is going on .
so , we are not being charged with the adequate response to what is happening .
i want to talk a little bit about the democratic republic of congo .
for me , it was the turning point of my life .
i have spent a lot of time there in the last three years .
i feel up to that point i had seen a lot in the world , a lot of violence .
i essentially lived in the rape mines of the world for the last 12 years .
but the democratic republic of congo really was the turning point in my soul .
i went and i spent time in a place called bukavu in a hospital called the panzi hospital , with a doctor who was as close to a saint as any person i 've ever met .
his name is dr. denis mukwege .
in the congo , for those of you who do n't know , there has been a war raging for the last 12 years , a war that has killed nearly six million people .
it is estimated that somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 women have been raped there .
when i spent my first weeks at panzi hospital i sat with women who sat and lined up every day to tell me their stories .
their stories were so horrific , and so mind-blowing and so on the other side of human existence , that to be perfectly honest with you , i was shattered .
and i will tell you that what happened is through that shattering , listening to the stories of eight-year-old girls who had their insides eviscerated , who had guns and bayonets and things shoved inside them so they had holes , literally , inside them where their pee and poop came out of them .
listening to the story of 80-year-old women who were tied to chains and circled , and where groups of men would come and rape them periodically , all in the name of economic exploitation to steal the minerals so the west can have it and profit from them .
my mind was so shattered .
but what happened for me is that that shattering actually emboldened me in a way i have never been emboldened .
that shattering , that opening of my girl cell , that kind of massive breakthrough of my heart allowed me to become more courageous , and braver , and actually more clever than i had been in the past in my life .
i want to say that i think the powers that be know that empire-building is actually - that feelings get in the way of empire-building .
feelings get in the way of the mass acquisition of the earth , and excavating the earth , and destroying things .
i remember , for example , when my father , who was very , very violent , used to beat me .
and he would actually say , while he was beating me , " do n't you cry . do n't you dare cry . "
because my crying somehow exposed his brutality to him .
and even in the moment he did n't want to be reminded of what he was doing .
i know that we have systematically annihilated the girl cell .
and i want to say we 've annihilated it in men as well as in women .
and i think in some ways we 've been much harsher to men in the annihilation of their girl cell .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i see how boys have been brought up , and i see this across the planet : to be tough , to be hardened , to distance themselves from their tenderness , to not cry .
i actually realized once in kosovo , when i watched a man break down , that bullets are actually hardened tears , that when we do n't allow men to have their girl self and have their vulnerability , and have their compassion , and have their hearts , that they become hardened and hurtful and violent .
and i think we have taught men to be secure when they are insecure , to pretend they know things when they do n't know things , or why would we be where we are ?
to pretend they 're not a mess when they are a mess .
and i will tell you a very funny story .
on my way here on the airplane , i was walking up and down the aisle of the plane .
and all these men , literally at least 10 men , were in their little seats watching chick flicks .
and they were all alone , and i thought , " this is the secret life of men . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i 've traveled , as i said , to many , many countries , and i 've seen , if we do what we do to the girl inside us then obviously it 's horrific to think what we do to girls in the world .
and we heard from sunitha yesterday , and kavita about what we do to girls .
but i just want to say that i 've met girls with knife wounds and cigarette burns , who are literally being treated like ashtrays .
i 've seen girls be treated like garbage cans .
i 've seen girls who were beaten by their mothers and brothers and fathers and uncles .
i 've seen girls starving themselves to death in america in institutions to look like some idealized version of themselves .
i 've seen that we cut girls and we control them and we keep them illiterate , or we make them feel bad about being too smart .
we silence them . we make them feel guilty for being smart . we get them to behave , to tone it down , not to be too intense .
we sell them , we kill them as embryos , we enslave them , we rape them .
we are so accustomed to robbing girls of the subject of being the subjects of their lives that we have now actually objectified them and turned them into commodities .
the selling of girls is rampant across the planet .
and in many places they are worth less than goats and cows .
but i also want to talk about the fact that if one in eight people on the planet are girls between the ages of 10 to 24 , they are they key , really , in the developing world , as well as in the whole world , to the future of humanity .
and if girls are in trouble because they face systematic disadvantages that keep them where society wants them to be , including lack of access to healthcare , education , healthy foods , labor force participation .
the burden of all the household tasks usually falls on girls and younger siblings , which ensures that they will never overcome these barriers .
the state of girls , the condition of girls , will , in my belief - and that 's the girl inside us and the girl in the world - determine whether the species survives .
and what i want to suggest is that , having talked to girls , because i just finished a new book called " i am an emotional creature : the secret life of girls around the world , " i 've been talking to girls for five years , and one of the things that i 've seen is true everywhere is that the verb that 's been enforced on girl is the verb " to please . "
girls are trained to please .
i want to change the verb .
i want us all to change the verb .
i want the verb to be " educate , " or " activate , " or " engage , " or " confront , " or " defy , " or " create . "
if we teach girls to change the verb we will actually enforce the girl inside us and the girl inside them .
and i have to now share a few stories of girls i 've seen across the planet who have engaged their girl , who have taken on their girl in spite of all the circumstances around them .
i know a 14-year-old girl in the netherlands , for example , who is demanding that she take a boat and go around the entire world by herself .
there is a teenage girl who just recently went out and knew that she needed 56 stars tattooed on the right side of her face .
there is a girl , julia butterfly hill , who lived for a year in a tree because she wanted to protect the wild oaks .
there is a girl who i met 14 years ago in afghanistan who i have adopted as my daughter because her mother was killed . her mother was a revolutionary .
and this girl , when she was 17 years old , wore a burqa in afghanistan , and went into the stadiums and documented the atrocities that were going on towards women , underneath her burqa , with a video .
and that video became the video that went out all over the world after 9/11 to show what was going on in afghanistan .
i want to talk about rachel corrie who was in her teens when she stood in front of an israeli tank to say , " end the occupation . "
and she knew she risked death and she was literally gunned down and rolled over by that tank .
and i want to talk about a girl that i just met recently in bukavu , who was impregnated by her rapist .
and she was holding her baby .
and i asked her if she loved her baby .
and she looked into her baby 's eyes and she said , " of course i love my baby . how could i not love my baby ?
it 's my baby and it 's full of love . "
the capacity for girls to overcome situations and to move on levels , to me , is mind-blowing .
there is a girl named dorcas , and i just met her in kenya .
dorcas is 15 years old , and she was trained in self-defense .
a few months ago she was picked up on the street by three older men .
they kidnapped her , they put her in a car .
and through her self-defense , she grabbed their adam 's apples , she punched them in the eyes and she got herself free and out of the car .
in kenya , in august , i went to visit one of the v-day safe houses for girls , a house we opened seven years ago with an amazing woman named agnes pareyio .
agnes was a woman who was cut when she was a little girl , she was female genitally mutilated .
and she made a decision as many women do across this planet , that what was done to her would not be enforced and done to other women and girls .
so , for years agnes walked through the rift valley .
she taught girls what a healthy vagina looked like , and what a mutilated vagina looked like .
and in that time she saved many girls . and when we met her we asked her what we could do for her , and she said , " well , if you got me a jeep i could get around a lot faster . "
so , we got her a jeep . and then she saved 4,500 girls .
and then we asked her , " okay , what else do you need ? "
and she said , " well , now , i need a house . "
so , seven years ago agnes built the first v-day safe house in narok , kenya , in the masai land .
and it was a house where girls could run away , they could save their clitoris , they would n't be cut , they could go to school .
and in the years that agnes has had the house , she has changed the situation there .
she has literally become deputy mayor .
she 's changed the rules .
the whole community has bought in to what she 's doing .
when we were there she was doing a ritual where she reconciles girls , who have run away , with their families .
and there was a young girl named jaclyn .
jaclyn was 14 years old and she was in her masai family and there 's a drought in kenya .
so cows are dying , and cows are the most valued possession .
and jaclyn overheard her father talking to an old man about how he was about to sell her for the cows .
and she knew that meant she would be cut .
she knew that meant she would n't go to school .
she knew that meant she would n't have a future .
she knew she would have to marry that old man , and she was 14 .
so , one afternoon , she 'd heard about the safe house , jaclyn left her father 's house and she walked for two days , two days through masai land .
she slept with the hyenas . she hid at night .
she imagined her father killing her on one hand , and mama agnes greeting her , with the hope that she would greet her when she got to the house .
and when she got to the house she was greeted .
agnes took her in , and agnes loved her , and agnes supported her for the year .
she went to school and she found her voice , and she found her identity , and she found her heart .
then , her time was ready when she had to go back to talk to her father about the reconciliation , after a year .
i had the privilege of being in the hut when she was reunited with her father and reconciled .
in that hut , we walked in , and her father and his four wives were sitting there , and her sisters who had just returned because they had all fled when she had fled , and her primary mother , who had been beaten in standing up for her with the elders .
when her father saw her and saw who she had become , in her full girl self , he threw his arms around her and broke down crying .
he said , " you are beautiful . you have grown into a gorgeous woman .
we will not cut you .
and i give you my word , here and now , that we will not cut your sisters either . "
and what she said to him was , " you were willing to sell me for four cows , and a calf and some blankets .
but i promise you , now that i will be educated i will always take care of you , and i will come back and i will build you a house .
and i will be in your corner for the rest of your life . "
for me , that is the power of girls .
and that is the power of transformation .
i want to close today with a new piece from my book .
and i want to do it tonight for the girl in everybody here .
and i want to do it for sunitha .
and i want to do it for the girls that sunitha talked about yesterday , the girls who survive , the girls who can become somebody else .
but i really want to do it for each and every person here , to value the girl in us , to value the part that cries , to value the part that 's emotional , to value the part that 's vulnerable , to understand that 's where the future lies .
this is called " i 'm an emotional creature . "
and it happened because i met a girl in watts , l.a.
i was asking girls if they like being a girl , and all the girls were like , " no , i hate it . i ca n't stand it .
it 's all bad . my brothers get everything . "
and this girl just sat up and went , " i love being a girl .
i 'm an emotional creature ! "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this is for her : i love being a girl .
i can feel what you 're feeling as you 're feeling inside the feeling before .
i am an emotional creature .
things do not come to me as intellectual theories or hard-pressed ideas .
they pulse through my organs and legs and burn up my ears .
oh , i know when your girlfriend 's really pissed off , even though she appears to give you what you want .
i know when a storm is coming .
i can feel the invisible stirrings in the air .
i can tell you he wo n't call back . it 's a vibe i share .
i am an emotional creature .
i love that i do not take things lightly .
everything is intense to me , the way i walk in the street , the way my momma wakes me up , the way it 's unbearable when i lose , the way i hear bad news .
i am an emotional creature .
i am connected to everything and everyone . i was born like that .
do n't you say all negative that it 's only only a teenage thing , or it 's only because i 'm a girl .
these feelings make me better .
they make me present . they make me ready . they make me strong .
i am an emotional creature .
there is a particular way of knowing .
it 's like the older women somehow forgot .
i rejoice that it 's still in my body .
oh , i know when the coconut 's about to fall .
i know we have pushed the earth too far .
i know my father is n't coming back , and that no one 's prepared for the fire .
i know that lipstick means more than show , and boys are super insecure , and so-called terrorists are made , not born .
i know that one kiss could take away all my decision-making ability .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and you know what ? sometimes it should .
this is not extreme . it 's a girl thing , what we would all be if the big door inside us flew open .
do n't tell me not to cry , to calm it down , not to be so extreme , to be reasonable .
i am an emotional creature .
it 's how the earth got made , how the wind continues to pollinate .
you do n't tell the atlantic ocean to behave .
i am an emotional creature .
why would you want to shut me down or turn me off ?
i am your remaining memory .
i can take you back .
nothing 's been diluted .
nothing 's leaked out .
i love , hear me , i love that i can feel the feelings inside you , even if they stop my life , even if they break my heart , even if they take me off track , they make me responsible .
i am an emotional , i am an emotional , incondotional , devotional creature .
and i love , hear me , i love , love , love being a girl .
can you say it with me ?
i love , i love , love , love being a girl !
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this is a recent comic strip from the los angeles times .
the punch line ?
" on the other hand , i do n't have to get up at four every single morning to milk my labrador . "
this is a recent cover of new york magazine .
best hospitals where doctors say they would go for cancer treatment , births , strokes , heart disease , hip replacements , 4 a.m. emergencies .
and this is a song medley i put together - -lrb- music -rrb- did you ever notice that four in the morning has become some sort of meme or shorthand ?
it means something like you are awake at the worst possible hour .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- a time for inconveniences , mishaps , yearnings .
a time for plotting to whack the chief of police , like in this classic scene from " the godfather . "
coppola 's script describes these guys as , " exhausted in shirt sleeves .
it is four in the morning . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- a time for even grimmer stuff than that , like autopsies and embalmings in isabel allende 's " the house of the spirits . "
after the breathtaking green-haired rosa is murdered , the doctors preserve her with unguents and morticians ' paste .
they worked until four o 'clock in the morning .
a time for even grimmer stuff than that , like in last april 's new yorker magazine .
this short fiction piece by martin amis starts out , " on september 11 , 2001 , he opened his eyes at 4 a.m. in portland , maine , and mohamed atta 's last day began . "
for a time that i find to be the most placid and uneventful hour of the day , four in the morning sure gets an awful lot of bad press - -lrb- laughter -rrb- across a lot of different media from a lot of big names .
and it made me suspicious .
i figured , surely some of the most creative artistic minds in the world , really , are n't all defaulting back to this one easy trope like they invented it , right ?
could it be there is something more going on here ?
something deliberate , something secret , and who got the four in the morning bad rap ball rolling anyway ?
i say this guy - alberto giacometti , shown here with some of his sculptures on the swiss 100 franc note .
he did it with this famous piece from the new york museum of modern art .
its title - " the palace at four in the morning - -lrb- laughter -rrb- 1932 .
not just the earliest cryptic reference to four in the morning i can find .
i believe that this so-called first surrealist sculpture may provide an incredible key to virtually every artistic depiction of four in the morning to follow it .
i call this the giacometti code , a ted exclusive .
no , feel free to follow along on your blackberries or your iphones if you 've got them .
it works a little something like - this is a recent google search for four in the morning .
results vary , of course . this is pretty typical .
the top 10 results yield you four hits for faron young 's song , " it 's four in the morning , " three hits for judi dench 's film , " four in the morning , " one hit for wislawa szymborska 's poem , " four in the morning . "
but what , you may ask , do a polish poet , a british dame , a country music hall of famer all have in common besides this totally excellent google ranking ?
well , let 's start with faron young - who was born incidentally in 1932 .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- in 1996 , he shot himself in the head on december ninth - which incidentally is judi dench 's birthday .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but he did n't die on dench 's birthday .
he languished until the following afternoon when he finally succumbed to a supposedly self-inflicted gunshot wound at the age of 64 - which incidentally is how old alberto giacometti was when he died .
where was wislawa szymborska during all this ?
she has the world 's most absolutely watertight alibi .
on that very day , december 10 , 1996 while mr. four in the morning , faron young , was giving up the ghost in nashville , tennessee , ms. four in the morning - or one of them anyway - wislawa szymborska was in stockholm , sweden , accepting the nobel prize for literature .
100 years to the day after the death of alfred nobel himself .
coincidence ? no , it 's creepy .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- coincidence to me has a much simpler metric .
that 's like me telling you , " hey , you know the nobel prize was established in 1901 , which coincidentally is the same year alberto giacometti was born ? "
no , not everything fits so tidily into the paradigm , but that does not mean there 's not something going on at the highest possible levels .
in fact there are people in this room who may not want me to show you this clip we 're about to see .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- video : homer simpson : we have a tennis court , a swimming pool , a screening room - you mean if i want pork chops , even in the middle of the night , your guy will fry them up ?
herbert powell : sure , that 's what he 's paid for .
now do you need towels , laundry , maids ?
hs : wait , wait , wait , wait , wait , wait - let me see if i got this straight .
it is christmas day , 4 a.m.
there 's a rumble in my stomach .
marge simpson : homer , please .
rives : wait , wait , wait , wait , wait , wait , wait .
let me see if i got this straight , matt .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- when homer simpson needs to imagine the most remote possible moment of not just the clock , but the whole freaking calendar , he comes up with 0400 on the birthday of the baby jesus .
and no , i do n't know how it works into the whole puzzling scheme of things , but obviously i know a coded message when i see one .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i said , i know a coded message when i see one .
and folks , you can buy a copy of bill clinton 's " my life " from the bookstore here at ted .
parse it cover to cover for whatever hidden references you want .
or you can go to the random house website where there is this excerpt .
and how far down into it you figure we 'll have to scroll to get to the golden ticket ?
would you believe about a dozen paragraphs ?
this is page 474 on your paperbacks if you 're following along : " though it was getting better , i still was n't satisfied with the inaugural address .
my speechwriters must have been tearing their hair out because as we worked between one and four in the morning on inauguration day , i was still changing it . "
sure you were , because you 've prepared your entire life for this historic quadrennial event that just sort of sneaks up on you .
and then - -lrb- laughter -rrb- three paragraphs later we get this little beauty : " we went back to blair house to look at the speech for the last time .
it had gotten a lot better since 4 a.m. "
well , how could it have ?
by his own writing , this man was either asleep , at a prayer meeting with al and tipper or learning how to launch a nuclear missile out of a suitcase .
what happens to american presidents at 0400 on inauguration day ?
what happened to william jefferson clinton ?
we might not ever know .
and i noticed , he 's not exactly around here today to face any tough questions .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it could get awkward , right ?
i mean after all , this whole business happened on his watch .
but if he were here - -lrb- laughter -rrb- he might remind us , as he does in the wrap-up to his fine autobiography , that on this day bill clinton began a journey - a journey that saw him go on to become the first democrat president elected to two consecutive terms in decades .
in generations .
the first since this man , franklin delano roosevelt , who began his own unprecedented journey way back at his own first election , way back in a simpler time , way back in 1932 - -lrb- laughter -rrb- the year alberto giacometti -lrb- laughter -rrb- made " the palace at four in the morning . "
the year , let 's remember , that this voice , now departed , first came a-cryin ' into this big old crazy world of ours .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- last year , i told you the story , in seven minutes , of project orion , which was this very implausible technology that technically could have worked , but it had this one-year political window where it could have happened .
so it did n't happen . it was a dream that did not happen .
this year i 'm going to tell you the story of the birth of digital computing .
this was a perfect introduction .
and it 's a story that did work . it did happen , and the machines are all around us .
and it was a technology that was inevitable .
if the people i 'm going to tell you the story about , if they had n't done it , somebody else would have .
so , it was sort of the right idea at the right time .
this is barricelli 's universe . this is the universe we live in now .
it 's the universe in which these machines are now doing all these things , including changing biology .
i 'm starting the story with the first atomic bomb at trinity , which was the manhattan project . it was a little bit like ted : it brought a whole lot of very smart people together .
and three of the smartest people were stan ulam , richard feynman and john von neumann .
and it was von neumann who said , after the bomb , he was working on something much more important than bombs : he 's thinking about computers .
so , he was n't only thinking about them ; he built one . this is the machine he built .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- he built this machine , and we had a beautiful demonstration of how this thing really works , with these little bits . and it 's an idea that goes way back .
the first person to really explain that was thomas hobbes , who , in 1651 , explained how arithmetic and logic are the same thing , and if you want to do artificial thinking and artificial logic , you can do it all with arithmetic .
he said you needed addition and subtraction .
leibniz , who came a little bit later - this is 1679 - showed that you did n't even need subtraction .
you could do the whole thing with addition .
here , we have all the binary arithmetic and logic that drove the computer revolution .
and leibniz was the first person to really talk about building such a machine .
he talked about doing it with marbles , having gates and what we now call shift registers , where you shift the gates , drop the marbles down the tracks .
and that 's what all these machines are doing , except , instead of doing it with marbles , they 're doing it with electrons .
and then we jump to von neumann , 1945 , when he sort of reinvents the whole same thing .
and 1945 , after the war , the electronics existed to actually try and build such a machine .
so june 1945 - actually , the bomb has n't even been dropped yet - and von neumann is putting together all the theory to actually build this thing , which also goes back to turing , who , before that , gave the idea that you could do all this with a very brainless , little , finite state machine , just reading a tape in and reading a tape out .
the other sort of genesis of what von neumann did was the difficulty of how you would predict the weather .
lewis richardson saw how you could do this with a cellular array of people , giving them each a little chunk , and putting it together .
here , we have an electrical model illustrating a mind having a will , but capable of only two ideas .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and that 's really the simplest computer .
it 's basically why you need the qubit , because it only has two ideas .
and you put lots of those together , you get the essentials of the modern computer : the arithmetic unit , the central control , the memory , the recording medium , the input and the output .
but , there 's one catch . this is the fatal - you know , we saw it in starting these programs up .
the instructions which govern this operation must be given in absolutely exhaustive detail .
so , the programming has to be perfect , or it wo n't work .
if you look at the origins of this , the classic history sort of takes it all back to the eniac here .
but actually , the machine i 'm going to tell you about , the institute for advanced study machine , which is way up there , really should be down there . so , i 'm trying to revise history , and give some of these guys more credit than they 've had .
such a computer would open up universes , which are , at the present , outside the range of any instruments .
so it opens up a whole new world , and these people saw it .
the guy who was supposed to build this machine was the guy in the middle , vladimir zworykin , from rca .
rca , in probably one of the lousiest business decisions of all time , decided not to go into computers .
but the first meetings , november 1945 , were at rca 's offices .
rca started this whole thing off , and said , you know , televisions are the future , not computers .
the essentials were all there - all the things that make these machines run .
von neumann , and a logician , and a mathematician from the army put this together . then , they needed a place to build it .
when rca said no , that 's when they decided to build it in princeton , where freeman works at the institute .
that 's where i grew up as a kid .
that 's me , that 's my sister esther , who 's talked to you before , so we both go back to the birth of this thing .
that 's freeman , a long time ago , and that was me .
and this is von neumann and morgenstern , who wrote the " theory of games . "
all these forces came together there , in princeton .
oppenheimer , who had built the bomb .
the machine was actually used mainly for doing bomb calculations .
and julian bigelow , who took zworkykin 's place as the engineer , to actually figure out , using electronics , how you would build this thing . the whole gang of people who came to work on this , and women in front , who actually did most of the coding , were the first programmers .
these were the prototype geeks , the nerds .
they did n't fit in at the institute .
this is a letter from the director , concerned about - " especially unfair on the matter of sugar . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you can read the text .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this is hackers getting in trouble for the first time .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- .
these were not theoretical physicists .
they were real soldering-gun type guys , and they actually built this thing .
and we take it for granted now , that each of these machines has billions of transistors , doing billions of cycles per second without failing .
they were using vacuum tubes , very narrow , sloppy techniques to get actually binary behavior out of these radio vacuum tubes .
they actually used 6j6 , the common radio tube , because they found they were more reliable than the more expensive tubes .
and what they did at the institute was publish every step of the way .
reports were issued , so that this machine was cloned at 15 other places around the world .
and it really was . it was the original microprocessor .
all the computers now are copies of that machine .
the memory was in cathode ray tubes - a whole bunch of spots on the face of the tube - very , very sensitive to electromagnetic disturbances .
so , there 's 40 of these tubes , like a v-40 engine running the memory .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the input and the output was by teletype tape at first .
this is a wire drive , using bicycle wheels .
this is the archetype of the hard disk that 's in your machine now .
then they switched to a magnetic drum .
this is modifying ibm equipment , which is the origins of the whole data-processing industry , later at ibm .
and this is the beginning of computer graphics .
the " graph 'g-beam turn on . " this next slide , that 's the - as far as i know - the first digital bitmap display , 1954 .
so , von neumann was already off in a theoretical cloud , doing abstract sorts of studies of how you could build reliable machines out of unreliable components .
those guys drinking all the tea with sugar in it were writing in their logbooks , trying to get this thing to work , with all these 2,600 vacuum tubes that failed half the time .
and that 's what i 've been doing , this last six months , is going through the logs .
" running time : two minutes . input , output : 90 minutes . "
this includes a large amount of human error .
so they are always trying to figure out , what 's machine error ? what 's human error ?
what 's code , what 's hardware ?
that 's an engineer gazing at tube number 36 , trying to figure out why the memory 's not in focus .
he had to focus the memory - seems ok .
so , he had to focus each tube just to get the memory up and running , let alone having , you know , software problems .
" no use , went home . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- " impossible to follow the damn thing , where 's a directory ? "
so , already , they 're complaining about the manuals : " before closing down in disgust ... " " the general arithmetic : operating logs . "
burning lots of midnight oil .
" maniac , " which became the acronym for the machine , mathematical and numerical integrator and calculator , " lost its memory . "
" maniac regained its memory , when the power went off . " " machine or human ? "
" aha ! " so , they figured out it 's a code problem .
" found trouble in code , i hope . "
" code error , machine not guilty . "
" damn it , i can be just as stubborn as this thing . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " and the dawn came . " so they ran all night .
twenty-four hours a day , this thing was running , mainly running bomb calculations .
" everything up to this point is wasted time . " " what 's the use ? good night . "
" master control off . the hell with it . way off . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- " something 's wrong with the air conditioner - smell of burning v-belts in the air . "
" a short - do not turn the machine on . "
" ibm machine putting a tar-like substance on the cards . the tar is from the roof . "
so they really were working under tough conditions .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- here , " a mouse has climbed into the blower behind the regulator rack , set blower to vibrating . result : no more mouse . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " here lies mouse . born : ? . died : 4:50 a.m. , may 1953 . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- there 's an inside joke someone has penciled in : " here lies marston mouse . "
if you 're a mathematician , you get that , because marston was a mathematician who objected to the computer being there .
" picked a lightning bug off the drum . " " running at two kilocycles . "
that 's two thousand cycles per second - " yes , i 'm chicken " - so two kilocycles was slow speed .
the high speed was 16 kilocycles .
i do n't know if you remember a mac that was 16 megahertz , that 's slow speed .
" i have now duplicated both results .
how will i know which is right , assuming one result is correct ?
this now is the third different output .
i know when i 'm licked . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " we 've duplicated errors before . "
" machine run , fine . code is n't . "
" only happens when the machine is running . "
and sometimes things are okay .
" machine a thing of beauty , and a joy forever . " " perfect running . "
" parting thought : when there 's bigger and better errors , we 'll have them . "
so , nobody was supposed to know they were actually designing bombs .
they 're designing hydrogen bombs . but someone in the logbook , late one night , finally drew a bomb .
so , that was the result . it was mike , the first thermonuclear bomb , in 1952 .
that was designed on that machine , in the woods behind the institute .
so von neumann invited a whole gang of weirdos from all over the world to work on all these problems .
barricelli , he came to do what we now call , really , artificial life , trying to see if , in this artificial universe - he was a viral-geneticist , way , way , way ahead of his time .
he 's still ahead of some of the stuff that 's being done now .
trying to start an artificial genetic system running in the computer .
began - his universe started march 3 , ' 53 .
so it 's almost exactly - it 's 50 years ago next tuesday , i guess .
and he saw everything in terms of - he could read the binary code straight off the machine .
he had a wonderful rapport .
other people could n't get the machine running . it always worked for him .
even errors were duplicated .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " dr. barricelli claims machine is wrong , code is right . "
so he designed this universe , and ran it .
when the bomb people went home , he was allowed in there .
he would run that thing all night long , running these things , if anybody remembers stephen wolfram , who reinvented this stuff .
and he published it . it was n't locked up and disappeared .
it was published in the literature .
" if it 's that easy to create living organisms , why not create a few yourself ? "
so , he decided to give it a try , to start this artificial biology going in the machines .
and he found all these , sort of - it was like a naturalist coming in and looking at this tiny , 5,000-byte universe , and seeing all these things happening that we see in the outside world , in biology .
this is some of the generations of his universe .
but they 're just going to stay numbers ; they 're not going to become organisms .
they have to have something .
you have a genotype and you have to have a phenotype .
they have to go out and do something . and he started doing that , started giving these little numerical organisms things they could play with - playing chess with other machines and so on .
and they did start to evolve .
and he went around the country after that .
every time there was a new , fast machine , he started using it , and saw exactly what 's happening now .
that the programs , instead of being turned off - when you quit the program , you 'd keep running and , basically , all the sorts of things like windows is doing , running as a multi-cellular organism on many machines , he envisioned all that happening .
and he saw that evolution itself was an intelligent process .
it was n't any sort of creator intelligence , but the thing itself was a giant parallel computation that would have some intelligence .
and he went out of his way to say that he was not saying this was lifelike , or a new kind of life .
it just was another version of the same thing happening .
and there 's really no difference between what he was doing in the computer and what nature did billions of years ago .
and could you do it again now ?
so , when i went into these archives looking at this stuff , lo and behold , the archivist came up one day , saying , " i think we found another box that had been thrown out . "
and it was his universe on punch cards .
so there it is , 50 years later , sitting there - sort of suspended animation .
that 's the instructions for running - this is actually the source code for one of those universes , with a note from the engineers saying they 're having some problems .
" there must be something about this code that you have n't explained yet . "
and i think that 's really the truth . we still do n't understand how these very simple instructions can lead to increasing complexity .
what 's the dividing line between when that is lifelike and when it really is alive ?
these cards , now , thanks to me showing up , are being saved .
and the question is , should we run them or not ?
you know , could we get them running ?
do you want to let it loose on the internet ?
these machines would think they - these organisms , if they came back to life now - whether they 've died and gone to heaven , there 's a universe .
my laptop is 10 thousand million times the size of the universe that they lived in when barricelli quit the project .
he was thinking far ahead , to how this would really grow into a new kind of life .
and that 's what 's happening !
when juan enriquez told us about these 12 trillion bits being transferred back and forth , of all this genomics data going to the proteomics lab , that 's what barricelli imagined : that this digital code in these machines is actually starting to code - it already is coding from nucleic acids .
we 've been doing that since , you know , since we started pcr and synthesizing small strings of dna .
and real soon , we 're actually going to be synthesizing the proteins , and , like steve showed us , that just opens an entirely new world .
it 's a world that von neumann himself envisioned .
this was published after he died : his sort of unfinished notes on self-reproducing machines , what it takes to get the machines sort of jump-started to where they begin to reproduce .
it took really three people : barricelli had the concept of the code as a living thing ; von neumann saw how you could build the machines - that now , last count , four million of these von neumann machines is built every 24 hours ; and julian bigelow , who died 10 days ago - this is john markoff 's obituary for him - he was the important missing link , the engineer who came in and knew how to put those vacuum tubes together and make it work .
and all our computers have , inside them , the copies of the architecture that he had to just design one day , sort of on pencil and paper .
and we owe a tremendous credit to that .
and he explained , in a very generous way , the spirit that brought all these different people to the institute for advanced study in the ' 40s to do this project , and make it freely available with no patents , no restrictions , no intellectual property disputes to the rest of the world .
that 's the last entry in the logbook when the machine was shut down , july 1958 .
and it 's julian bigelow who was running it until midnight when the machine was officially turned off .
and that 's the end .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the global economic financial crisis has reignited public interest in something that 's actually one of the oldest questions in economics , dating back to at least before adam smith .
and that is , why is it that countries with seemingly similar economies and institutions can display radically different savings behavior ?
now , many brilliant economists have spent their entire lives working on this question , and as a field we 've made a tremendous amount of headway and we understand a lot about this .
what i 'm here to talk with you about today is an intriguing new hypothesis and some surprisingly powerful new findings that i 've been working on about the link between the structure of the language you speak and how you find yourself with the propensity to save .
let me tell you a little bit about savings rates , a little bit about language , and then i 'll draw that connection .
let 's start by thinking about the member countries of the oecd , or the organization of economic cooperation and development .
oecd countries , by and large , you should think about these as the richest , most industrialized countries in the world .
and by joining the oecd , they were affirming a common commitment to democracy , open markets and free trade .
despite all of these similarities , we see huge differences in savings behavior .
so all the way over on the left of this graph , what you see is many oecd countries saving over a quarter of their gdp every year , and some oecd countries saving over a third of their gdp per year .
holding down the right flank of the oecd , all the way on the other side , is greece .
and what you can see is that over the last 25 years , greece has barely managed to save more than 10 percent of their gdp .
it should be noted , of course , that the united states and the u.k. are the next in line .
now that we see these huge differences in savings rates , how is it possible that language might have something to do with these differences ?
let me tell you a little bit about how languages fundamentally differ .
linguists and cognitive scientists have been exploring this question for many years now .
and then i 'll draw the connection between these two behaviors .
many of you have probably already noticed that i 'm chinese .
i grew up in the midwest of the united states .
and something i realized quite early on was that the chinese language forced me to speak about and - in fact , more fundamentally than that - ever so slightly forced me to think about family in very different ways .
now , how might that be ? let me give you an example .
suppose i were talking with you and i was introducing you to my uncle .
you understood exactly what i just said in english .
if we were speaking mandarin chinese with each other , though , i would n't have that luxury .
i would n't have been able to convey so little information .
what my language would have forced me to do , instead of just telling you , " this is my uncle , " is to tell you a tremendous amount of additional information .
my language would force me to tell you whether or not this was an uncle on my mother 's side or my father 's side , whether this was an uncle by marriage or by birth , and if this man was my father 's brother , whether he was older than or younger than my father .
all of this information is obligatory . chinese does n't let me ignore it .
and in fact , if i want to speak correctly , chinese forces me to constantly think about it .
now , that fascinated me endlessly as a child , but what fascinates me even more today as an economist is that some of these same differences carry through to how languages speak about time .
so for example , if i 'm speaking in english , i have to speak grammatically differently if i 'm talking about past rain , " it rained yesterday , " current rain , " it is raining now , " or future rain , " it will rain tomorrow . "
notice that english requires a lot more information with respect to the timing of events .
why ? because i have to consider that and i have to modify what i 'm saying to say , " it will rain , " or " it 's going to rain . "
it 's simply not permissible in english to say , " it rain tomorrow . "
in contrast to that , that 's almost exactly what you would say in chinese .
a chinese speaker can basically say something that sounds very strange to an english speaker 's ears .
they can say , " yesterday it rain , " " now it rain , " " tomorrow it rain . "
in some deep sense , chinese does n't divide up the time spectrum in the same way that english forces us to constantly do in order to speak correctly .
is this difference in languages only between very , very distantly related languages , like english and chinese ?
actually , no .
so many of you know , in this room , that english is a germanic language .
what you may not have realized is that english is actually an outlier .
it is the only germanic language that requires this .
for example , most other germanic language speakers feel completely comfortable talking about rain tomorrow by saying , " morgen regnet es , " quite literally to an english ear , " it rain tomorrow . "
this led me , as a behavioral economist , to an intriguing hypothesis .
could how you speak about time , could how your language forces you to think about time , affect your propensity to behave across time ?
you speak english , a futured language .
and what that means is that every time you discuss the future , or any kind of a future event , grammatically you 're forced to cleave that from the present and treat it as if it 's something viscerally different .
now suppose that that visceral difference makes you subtly dissociate the future from the present every time you speak .
if that 's true and it makes the future feel like something more distant and more different from the present , that 's going to make it harder to save .
if , on the other hand , you speak a futureless language , the present and the future , you speak about them identically .
if that subtly nudges you to feel about them identically , that 's going to make it easier to save .
now this is a fanciful theory .
i 'm a professor , i get paid to have fanciful theories .
but how would you actually go about testing such a theory ?
well , what i did with that was to access the linguistics literature .
and interestingly enough , there are pockets of futureless language speakers situated all over the world .
this is a pocket of futureless language speakers in northern europe .
interestingly enough , when you start to crank the data , these pockets of futureless language speakers all around the world turn out to be , by and large , some of the world 's best savers .
just to give you a hint of that , let 's look back at that oecd graph that we were talking about .
what you see is that these bars are systematically taller and systematically shifted to the left compared to these bars which are the members of the oecd that speak futured languages .
what is the average difference here ?
five percentage points of your gdp saved per year .
over 25 years that has huge long-run effects on the wealth of your nation .
now while these findings are suggestive , countries can be different in so many different ways that it 's very , very difficult sometimes to account for all of these possible differences .
what i 'm going to show you , though , is something that i 've been engaging in for a year , which is trying to gather all of the largest datasets that we have access to as economists , and i 'm going to try and strip away all of those possible differences , hoping to get this relationship to break .
and just in summary , no matter how far i push this , i ca n't get it to break .
let me show you how far you can do that .
one way to imagine that is i gather large datasets from around the world .
so for example , there is the survey of health , -lsb- aging -rsb- and retirement in europe .
from this dataset you actually learn that retired european families are extremely patient with survey takers .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so imagine that you 're a retired household in belgium and someone comes to your front door .
" excuse me , would you mind if i peruse your stock portfolio ?
do you happen to know how much your house is worth ? do you mind telling me ?
would you happen to have a hallway that 's more than 10 meters long ?
if you do , would you mind if i timed how long it took you to walk down that hallway ?
would you mind squeezing as hard as you can , in your dominant hand , this device so i can measure your grip strength ?
how about blowing into this tube so i can measure your lung capacity ? "
the survey takes over a day .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- combine that with a demographic and health survey collected by usaid in developing countries in africa , for example , which that survey actually can go so far as to directly measure the hiv status of families living in , for example , rural nigeria .
combine that with a world value survey , which measures the political opinions and , fortunately for me , the savings behaviors of millions of families in hundreds of countries around the world .
take all of that data , combine it , and this map is what you get .
what you find is nine countries around the world that have significant native populations which speak both futureless and futured languages .
and what i 'm going to do is form statistical matched pairs between families that are nearly identical on every dimension that i can measure , and then i 'm going to explore whether or not the link between language and savings holds even after controlling for all of these levels .
what are the characteristics we can control for ?
well i 'm going to match families on country of birth and residence , the demographics - what sex , their age - their income level within their own country , their educational achievement , a lot about their family structure .
it turns out there are six different ways to be married in europe .
and most granularly , i break them down by religion where there are 72 categories of religions in the world - so an extreme level of granularity .
there are 1.4 billion different ways that a family can find itself .
now effectively everything i 'm going to tell you from now on is only comparing these basically nearly identical families .
it 's getting as close as possible to the thought experiment of finding two families both of whom live in brussels who are identical on every single one of these dimensions , but one of whom speaks flemish and one of whom speaks french ; or two families that live in a rural district in nigeria , one of whom speaks hausa and one of whom speaks igbo .
now even after all of this granular level of control , do futureless language speakers seem to save more ?
yes , futureless language speakers , even after this level of control , are 30 percent more likely to report having saved in any given year .
does this have cumulative effects ?
yes , by the time they retire , futureless language speakers , holding constant their income , are going to retire with 25 percent more in savings .
can we push this data even further ?
yes , because i just told you , we actually collect a lot of health data as economists .
now how can we think about health behaviors to think about savings ?
well , think about smoking , for example .
smoking is in some deep sense negative savings .
if savings is current pain in exchange for future pleasure , smoking is just the opposite .
it 's current pleasure in exchange for future pain .
what we should expect then is the opposite effect .
and that 's exactly what we find .
futureless language speakers are 20 to 24 percent less likely and they 're going to be 13 to 17 percent less likely to be obese by the time they retire , and they 're going to report being 21 percent more likely to have used a condom in their last sexual encounter .
i could go on and on with the list of differences that you can find .
it 's almost impossible not to find a savings behavior for which this strong effect is n't present .
my linguistics and economics colleagues at yale and i are just starting to do this work and really explore and understand the ways that these subtle nudges cause us to think more or less about the future every single time we speak .
ultimately , the goal , once we understand how these subtle effects can change our decision making , we want to be able to provide people tools so that they can consciously make themselves better savers and more conscious investors in their own future .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- everyone 's familiar with cancer , but we do n't normally think of cancer as being a contagious disease .
the tasmanian devil has shown us that , not only can cancer be a contagious disease , but it can also threaten an entire species with extinction .
so first of all , what is a tasmanian devil ?
many of you might be familiar with taz , the cartoon character , the one that spins around and around and around .
but not many people know that there actually is a real animal called the tasmanian devil , and it 's the world 's largest carnivorous marsupial .
a marsupial is a mammal with a pouch like a kangaroo .
the tasmanian devil got its name from the terrifying nocturnal scream that it makes .
-lrb- screaming -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- the tasmanian devil is predominantly a scavenger , and it uses its powerful jaws and its sharp teeth to chomp on the bones of rotting dead animals .
-lsb- the -rsb- tasmanian devil is found only on the island of tasmania , which is that small island just to the south of the mainland of australia .
and despite their ferocious appearance , tasmanian devils are actually quite adorable little animals .
in fact , growing up in tasmania , it always was incredibly exciting when we got a chance to see a tasmanian devil in the wild .
but the tasmanian devil population has been undergoing a really extremely fast decline .
and in fact , there 's concern that the species could go extinct in the wild within 20 to 30 years .
and the reason for that is the emergence of a new disease , a contagious cancer .
the story begins in 1996 when a wildlife photographer took this photograph here of a tasmanian devil with a large tumor on its face .
at the time , this was thought to be a one-off .
animals , just like humans , sometimes get strange tumors .
however , we now believe that this is the first sighting of a new disease , which is now an epidemic spreading through tasmania .
the disease was first sighted in the northeast of tasmania in 1996 and has spread across tasmania like a huge wave .
now there 's only a small part of the population , which remains unaffected .
this disease appears first as tumors , usually on the face or inside the mouth of affected tasmanian devils .
these tumors inevitably grow into larger tumors , such as these ones here .
and the next image i 'm going to show is quite gruesome .
but inevitably , these tumors progress towards being enormous , ulcerating tumors like this one here .
this one in particular sticks in my mind , because this is the first case of this disease that i saw myself .
and i remember the horror of seeing this little female devil with this huge ulcerating , foul-smelling tumor inside her mouth that had actually cracked off her entire lower jaw .
she had n't eaten for days .
her guts were swimming with parasitic worms .
her body was riddled with secondary tumors .
and yet , she was feeding three little baby tasmanian devils in her pouch .
of course , they died along with the mother .
they were too young to survive without their mother .
in fact , in the area where she comes from , more than 90 percent of the tasmanian devil population has already died of this disease .
scientists around the world were intrigued by this cancer , this infectious cancer , that was spreading through the tasmanian devil population .
and our minds immediately turned to cervical cancer in women , which is spread by a virus , and to the aids epidemic , which is associated with a number of different types of cancer .
all the evidence suggested that this devil cancer was spread by a virus .
however , we now know - and i 'll tell you right now - that we know that this cancer is not spread by a virus .
in fact , the infectious agent of disease in this cancer is something altogether more sinister , and something that we had n't really thought of before .
but in order for me to explain what that is , i need to spend just a couple of minutes talking more about cancer itself .
cancer is a disease that affects millions of people around the world every year .
one in three people in this room will develop cancer at some stage in their lives .
i myself had a tumor removed from my large intestine when i was only 14 .
cancer occurs when a single cell in your body acquires a set of random mutations in important genes that cause that cell to start to produce more and more and more copies of itself .
paradoxically , once established , natural selection actually favors the continued growth of cancer .
natural selection is survival of the fittest .
and when you have a population of fast-dividing cancer cells , if one of them acquires new mutations , which allow them to grow more quickly , acquire nutrients more successfully , invade the body , they 'll be selected for by evolution .
that 's why cancer is such a difficult disease to treat .
it evolves .
throw a drug at it , and resistant cells will grow back .
an amazing fact is that , given the right environment and the right nutrients , a cancer cell has the potential to go on growing forever .
however cancer is constrained by living inside our bodies , and its continued growth , its spreading through our bodies and eating away at our tissues , leads to the death of the cancer patient and also to the death of the cancer itself .
so cancer could be thought of as a strange , short-lived , self-destructive life form - an evolutionary dead end .
but that is where the tasmanian devil cancer has acquired an absolutely amazing evolutionary adaptation .
and the answer came from studying the tasmanian devil cancer 's dna .
this was work from many people , but i 'm going to explain it through a confirmatory experiment that i did a few years ago .
the next slide is going to be gruesome .
this is jonas .
he 's a tasmanian devil that we found with a large tumor on his face .
and being a geneticist , i 'm always interested to look at dna and mutations .
so i took this opportunity to collect some samples from jonas ' tumor and also some samples from other parts of his body .
i took these back to the lab .
i extracted dna from them .
and when i looked at the sequence of the dna , and compared the sequence of jonas ' tumor to that of the rest of his body , i discovered that they had a completely different genetic profile .
in fact , jonas and his tumor were as different from each other as you and the person sitting next to you .
what this told us was that jonas ' tumor did not arise from cells of his own body .
in fact , more genetic profiling told us that this tumor in jonas actually probably first arose from the cells of a female tasmanian devil - and jonas was clearly a male .
so how come a tumor that arose from the cells of another individual is growing on jonas ' face ?
well the next breakthrough came from studying hundreds of tasmanian devil cancers from all around tasmania .
we found that all of these cancers shared the same dna .
think about that for a minute .
that means that all of these cancers actually are the same cancer that arose once from one individual devil , that have broken free of that first devil 's body and spread through the entire tasmanian devil population .
but how can a cancer spread in a population ?
well the final piece of the puzzle came when we remember how devils behave when they meet each other in the wild .
they tend to bite each other , often quite ferociously and usually on the face .
we think that cancer cells actually come off the tumor , get into the saliva .
when the devil bites another devil , it actually physically implants living cancer cells into the next devil , so the tumor continues to grow .
so this tasmanian devil cancer is perhaps the ultimate cancer .
it 's not constrained by living within the body that gave rise to it .
it spreads through the population , has mutations that allow it to evade the immune system , and it 's the only cancer that we know of that 's threatening an entire species with extinction .
but if this can happen in tasmanian devils , why has n't it happened in other animals or even humans ?
well the answer is , it has .
this is kimbo .
he 's a dog that belongs to a family in mombasa in kenya .
last year , his owner noticed some blood trickling from his genital region .
she took him to the vet and the vet discovered something quite disgusting .
and if you 're squeamish , please look away now .
he discovered this , a huge bleeding tumor at the base of kimbo 's penis .
the vet diagnosed this as transmissible venereal tumor , a sexually transmitted cancer that affects dogs .
and just as the tasmanian devil cancer is contagious through the spread of living cancer cells , so is this dog cancer .
but this dog cancer is quite remarkable , because it spread all around the world .
and in fact , these same cells that are affecting kimbo here are also found affecting dogs in new york city , in mountain villages in the himalayas and in outback australia .
we also believe this cancer might be very old .
in fact , genetic profiling tells that it may be tens of thousands of years old , which means that this cancer may have first arisen from the cells of a wolf that lived alongside the neanderthals .
this cancer is remarkable .
it 's the oldest mammalian-derived life form that we know of .
it 's a living relic of the distant past .
so we 've seen that this can happen in animals .
could cancers be contagious between people ?
well this is a question which fascinated chester southam , a cancer doctor in the 1950s .
ad he decided to put this to the test by actually deliberately inoculating people with cancer from somebody else .
and this is a photograph of dr. southam in 1957 injecting cancer into a volunteer , who in this case was an inmate in ohio state penitentiary .
most of the people that dr. southam injected did not go on to develop cancer from the injected cells .
but a small number of them did , and they were mostly people who were otherwise ill - whose immune systems were probably compromised .
what this tells us , ethical issues aside , is that ...
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's probably extremely rare for cancers to be transferred between people .
however , under some circumstances , it can happen .
and i think that this is something that oncologists and epidemiologists should be aware of in the future .
so just finally , cancer is an inevitable outcome of the ability of our cells to divide and to adapt to their environments .
but that does not mean that we should give up hope in the fight against cancer .
in fact , i believe , given more knowledge of the complex evolutionary processes that drive cancer 's growth , we can defeat cancer .
my personal aim is to defeat the tasmanian devil cancer .
let 's prevent the tasmanian devil from being the first animal to go extinct from cancer .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- adam ockelford : i promise there wo n't be too much of me talking , and a lot of derek playing , but i thought it would just be nice to recap on how derek got to where he is today .
it 's amazing now , because he 's so much bigger than me , but when derek was born , he could have fitted on the palm of your hand .
he was born three and a half months premature , and really it was a fantastic fight for him to survive .
he had to have a lot of oxygen , and that affected your eyes , derek , and also the way you understand language and the way you understand the world .
but that was the end of the bad news , because when derek came home from the hospital , his family decided to employ the redoubtable nanny who was going to look after you , derek , really for the rest of your childhood .
and nanny 's great insight , really , was to think , here 's a child who ca n't see .
music must be the thing for derek .
and sure enough , she sang , or as derek called it , warbled , to him for his first few years of life .
and i think it was that excitement with hearing her voice hour after hour every day that made him think maybe , you know , in his brain something was stirring , some sort of musical gift .
here 's a little picture of derek going up now , when you were with your nanny .
now nanny 's great other insight was to think , perhaps we should get derek something to play , and sure enough , she dragged this little keyboard out of the loft , never thinking really that anything much would come of it .
but derek , your tiny hand must have gone out to that thing and actually bashed it , bashed it so hard they thought it was going to break .
but out of all the bashing , after a few months , emerged the most fantastic music , and i think there was just a miracle moment , really , derek , when you realized that all the sounds you hear in the world out there is something that you can copy on the keyboard .
that was the great eureka moment .
now , not being able to see meant , of course , that you taught yourself .
derek paravicini : i taught myself to play .
ao : you did teach yourself to play , and as a consequence , playing the piano for you , derek , was a lot of knuckles and karate chops , and even a bit of nose going on in there .
and now , here 's what nanny did also do was to press the record button on one of those little early tape recorders that they had , and this is a wonderful tape , now , of derek playing when you were four years old .
dp : " molly malone -lrb- cockles and mussels -rrb- . "
ao : it was n't actually " cockles and mussels . "
this one is " english country garden . "
dp : " english country garden . "
-lrb- music : " english country garden " -rrb- ao : there you are .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i think that 's just fantastic .
you know , there 's this little child who ca n't see , ca n't really understand much about the world , has no one in the family who plays an instrument , and yet he taught himself to play that .
and as you can see from the picture , there was quite a lot of body action going on while you were playing , derek .
now , along - derek and i met when he was four and a half years old , and at first , derek , i thought you were mad , to be honest , because when you played the piano , you seemed to want to play every single note on the keyboard , and also you had this little habit of hitting me out of the way .
so as soon as i tried to get near the piano , i was firmly shoved off .
and having said to your dad , nic , that i would try to teach you , i was then slightly confused as to how i might go about that if i was n't allowed near the piano .
but after a while , i thought , well , the only way is to just pick you up , shove derek over to the other side of the room , and in the 10 seconds that i got before derek came back , i could just play something very quickly for him to learn .
and in the end , derek , i think you agreed that we could actually have some fun playing the piano together .
as you can see , there 's me in my early , pre-marriage days with a brown beard , and little derek concentrating there .
i just realized this is going to be recorded , is n't it ? right . okay .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now then , by the age of 10 , derek really had taken the world by storm .
this is a photo of you , derek , playing at the barbican with the royal philharmonic pops .
basically it was just an exciting journey , really .
and in those days , derek , you did n't speak very much , and so there was always a moment of tension as to whether you 'd actually understood what it was we were going to play and whether you 'd play the right piece in the right key , and all that kind of thing .
but the orchestra were wowed as well , and the press of the world were fascinated by your ability to play these fantastic pieces .
now the question is , how do you do it , derek ?
and hopefully we can show the audience now how it is you do what you do .
i think that one of the first things that happened when you were very little , derek , was that by the time you were two , your musical ear had already outstripped that of most adults .
and so whenever you heard any note at all - if i just play a random note - -lrb- piano notes -rrb- - you knew instantly what it was , and you 'd got the ability as well to find that note on the piano .
now that 's called perfect pitch , and some people have perfect pitch for a few white notes in the middle of the piano .
-lrb- piano notes -rrb- you can see how - you get a sense of playing with derek .
-lrb- applause -rrb- but derek , your ear is so much more than that .
if i just put the microphone down for a bit , i 'm going to play a cluster of notes .
those of you who can see will know how many notes , but derek , of course , ca n't .
not only can you say how many notes , it 's being able to play them all at the same time . here we are .
-lrb- chords -rrb- well , forget the terminology , derek . fantastic .
and it 's that ability , that ability to hear simultaneous sounds , not only just single sounds , but when a whole orchestra is playing , derek , you can hear every note , and instantly , through all those hours and hours of practice , reproduce those on the keyboard , that makes you , i think , is the basis of all your ability .
now then .
it 's no use having that kind of raw ability without the technique , and luckily , derek , you decided that , once we did start learning , you 'd let me help you learn all the scale fingerings .
so for example using your thumb under with c major .
-lrb- piano notes -rrb- etc .
and in the end , you got so quick , that things like " flight of the bumblebee " were no problem , were they ?
dp : no .
ao : right . so here , by the age of 11 , derek was playing things like this .
dp : this .
-lrb- music : " flight of the bumblebee " -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- ao : derek , let 's have a bow .
well done .
now the truly amazing thing was , with all those scales , derek , you could not only play " flight of the bumblebee " in the usual key , but any note i play , derek can play it on .
so if i just choose a note at random , like that one .
-lrb- piano notes -rrb- can you play " flight of the bumblebee " on that note ?
dp : " flight of the bumblebee " on that note .
-lrb- music : " flight of the bumblebee " -rrb- ao : or another one ? how about in g minor ?
dp : g minor .
-lrb- music : " flight of the bumblebee " -rrb- ao : fantastic . well done , derek .
so you see , in your brain , derek , is this amazing musical computer that can instantly recalibrate , recalculate , all the pieces in the world that are out there .
most pianists would have a heart attack if you said , " sorry , do you mind playing ' flight of the bumblebee ' in b minor instead of a minor ? " as we went on .
in fact , the first time , derek , you played that with an orchestra , you 'd learned the version that you 'd learned , and then the orchestra , in fact , did have a different version , so while we were waiting in the two hours before the rehearsal and the concert , derek listened to the different version and learned it quickly and then was able to play it with the orchestra .
fantastic chap .
the other wonderful thing about you is memory .
dp : memory . ao : your memory is truly amazing , and every concert we do , we ask the audience to participate , of course , by suggesting a piece derek might like to play .
and people say , " well , that 's terribly brave because what happens if derek does n't know it ? "
and i say , " no , it 's not brave at all , because if you ask for something that derek does n't know , you 're invited to come and sing it first , and then he 'll pick it up . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- so just be thoughtful before you suggest something too outlandish .
but seriously , would anyone like to choose a piece ?
dp : choose a piece . choose , choose , would you like to choose ? ao : because it 's quite dark . you 'll just have to shout out .
would you like to hear me play ?
-lrb- audience : " theme of paganini . " -rrb- ao : paganini . dp : " the theme of paganini . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- music : " theme of paganini " -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- ao : well done .
derek 's going to l.a. soon , and it 's a milestone , because it means that derek and i will have spent over 100 hours on long-haul flights together , which is quite interesting , is n't it derek ?
dp : very interesting , adam , yes . long-haul flights . yes .
ao : you may think 13 hours is a long time to keep talking , but derek does it effortlessly . now then .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but in america , they 've coined this term , " the human ipod " for derek , which i think is just missing the point , really , because derek , you 're so much more than an ipod .
you 're a fantastic , creative musician , and i think that was nowhere clearer to see , really , than when we went to slovenia , and someone - in a longer concert we tend to get people joining in , and this person , very , very nervously came onto the stage .
dp : he played " chopsticks . " ao : and played " chopsticks . "
dp : " chopsticks . "
ao : a bit like this . dp : like this . yes .
-lrb- piano notes -rrb- ao : i should really get derek 's manager to come and play it .
he 's sitting there .
dp : somebody played " chopsticks " like this . ao : just teasing , right ? here we go .
-lrb- music : " chopsticks " -rrb- dp : let derek play it .
ao : what did you do with it , derek ?
dp : i got to improvise with it , adam .
ao : this is derek the musician .
-lrb- music : " chopsticks " improvisation -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- clapping -rrb- keep up with derek .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- the ted people will kill me , but perhaps there 's time for one encore .
dp : for one encore . ao : one encore , yes .
so this is one of derek 's heroes .
it 's the great art tatum - dp : art tatum .
ao : - who also was a pianist who could n't see , and also , i think , like derek , thought that all the world was a piano , so whenever art tatum plays something , it sounds like there 's three pianos in the room .
and here is derek 's take on art tatum 's take on " tiger rag . "
dp : " tiger rag . "
-lrb- music : " tiger rag " -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- what i 'd like to talk about is really the biggest problems in the world .
i 'm not going to talk about " the skeptical environmentalist " - probably that 's also a good choice .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but i am going talk about : what are the big problems in the world ?
and i must say , before i go on , i should ask every one of you to try and get out pen and paper because i 'm actually going to ask you to help me to look at how we do that .
so get out your pen and paper .
bottom line is , there is a lot of problems out there in the world .
i 'm just going to list some of them .
there are 800 million people starving .
there 's a billion people without clean drinking water .
two billion people without sanitation .
there are several million people dying of hiv and aids .
the lists go on and on .
there 's two billions of people who will be severely affected by climate change - so on .
there are many , many problems out there .
in an ideal world , we would solve them all , but we do n't .
we do n't actually solve all problems .
and if we do not , the question i think we need to ask ourselves - and that 's why it 's on the economy session - is to say , if we do n't do all things , we really have to start asking ourselves , which ones should we solve first ?
and that 's the question i 'd like to ask you .
if we had say , 50 billion dollars over the next four years to spend to do good in this world , where should we spend it ?
we identified 10 of the biggest challenges in the world , and i will just briefly read them : climate change , communicable diseases , conflicts , education , financial instability , governance and corruption , malnutrition and hunger , population migration , sanitation and water , and subsidies and trade barriers .
we believe that these in many ways encompass the biggest problems in the world .
the obvious question would be to ask , what do you think are the biggest things ?
where should we start on solving these problems ?
but that 's a wrong problem to ask .
that was actually the problem that was asked in davos in january .
but of course , there 's a problem in asking people to focus on problems .
because we ca n't solve problems .
surely the biggest problem we have in the world is that we all die .
but we do n't have a technology to solve that , right ?
so the point is not to prioritize problems , but the point is to prioritize solutions to problems .
and that would be - of course that gets a little more complicated .
to climate change that would be like kyoto .
to communicable diseases , it might be health clinics or mosquito nets .
to conflicts , it would be u.n. 's peacekeeping forces , and so on .
the point that i would like to ask you to try to do , is just in 30 seconds - and i know this is in a sense an impossible task - write down what you think is probably some of the top priorities .
and also - and that 's , of course , where economics gets evil - to put down what are the things we should not do , first .
what should be at the bottom of the list ?
please , just take 30 seconds , perhaps talk to your neighbor , and just figure out what should be the top priorities and the bottom priorities of the solutions that we have to the world 's biggest issues .
the amazing part of this process - and of course , i mean , i would love to - i only have 18 minutes , i 've already given you quite a substantial amount of my time , right ?
i 'd love to go into , and get you to think about this process , and that 's actually what we did .
and i also strongly encourage you , and i 'm sure we 'll also have these discussions afterwards , to think about , how do we actually prioritize ?
of course , you have to ask yourself , why on earth was such a list never done before ?
and one reason is that prioritization is incredibly uncomfortable .
nobody wants to do this .
of course , every organization would love to be on the top of such a list .
but every organization would also hate to be not on the top of the list .
and since there are many more not-number-one spots on the list than there is number ones , it makes perfect sense not to want to do such a list .
we 've had the u.n. for almost 60 years , yet we 've never actually made a fundamental list of all the big things that we can do in the world , and said , which of them should we do first ?
so it does n't mean that we are not prioritizing - any decision is a prioritization , so of course we are still prioritizing , if only implicitly - and that 's unlikely to be as good as if we actually did the prioritization , and went in and talked about it .
so what i 'm proposing is really to say that we have , for a very long time , had a situation when we 've had a menu of choices .
there are many , many things we can do out there , but we 've not had the prices , nor the sizes .
we have not had an idea .
imagine going into a restaurant and getting this big menu card , but you have no idea what the price is .
you know , you have a pizza ; you 've no idea what the price is .
it could be at one dollar ; it could be 1,000 dollars .
it could be a family-size pizza ; it could be a very individual-size pizza , right ?
we 'd like to know these things .
and that is what the copenhagen consensus is really trying to do - to try to put prices on these issues .
and so basically , this has been the copenhagen consensus ' process .
we got 30 of the world 's best economists , three in each area .
so we have three of world 's top economists write about climate change .
what can we do ? what will be the cost and what will be the benefit of that ?
likewise in communicable diseases .
three of the world 's top experts saying , what can we do ?
what would be the price ?
what should we do about it , and what will be the outcome ?
and so on .
then we had some of the world 's top economists , eight of the world 's top economists , including three nobel laureates , meet in copenhagen in may 2004 .
we called them the " dream team . "
the cambridge university prefects decided to call them the real madrid of economics .
that works very well in europe , but it does n't really work over here .
and what they basically did was come out with a prioritized list .
and then you ask , why economists ?
and of course , i 'm very happy you asked that question - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - because that 's a very good question .
the point is , of course , if you want to know about malaria , you ask a malaria expert .
if you want to know about climate , you ask a climatologist .
but if you want to know which of the two you should deal with first , you ca n't ask either of them , because that 's not what they do .
that is what economists do .
they prioritize .
they make that in some ways disgusting task of saying , which one should we do first , and which one should we do afterwards ?
so this is the list , and this is the one i 'd like to share with you .
of course , you can also see it on the website , and we 'll also talk about it more , i 'm sure , as the day goes on .
they basically came up with a list where they said there were bad projects - basically , projects where if you invest a dollar , you get less than a dollar back .
then there 's fair projects , good projects and very good projects .
and of course , it 's the very good projects we should start doing .
i 'm going to go from backwards so that we end up with the best projects .
these were the bad projects .
as you might see the bottom of the list was climate change .
this offends a lot of people , and that 's probably one of the things where people will say i should n't come back , either .
and i 'd like to talk about that , because that 's really curious .
why is it it came up ?
and i 'll actually also try to get back to this because it 's probably one of the things that we 'll disagree with on the list that you wrote down .
the reason why they came up with saying that kyoto - or doing something more than kyoto - is a bad deal is simply because it 's very inefficient .
it 's not saying that global warming is not happening .
it 's not saying that it 's not a big problem .
but it 's saying that what we can do about it is very little , at a very high cost .
what they basically show us , the average of all macroeconomic models , is that kyoto , if everyone agreed , would cost about 150 billion dollars a year .
that 's a substantial amount of money .
that 's two to three times the global development aid that we give the third world every year .
yet it would do very little good .
all models show it will postpone warming for about six years in 2100 .
so the guy in bangladesh who gets a flood in 2100 can wait until 2106 .
which is a little good , but not very much good .
so the idea here really is to say , well , we 've spent a lot of money doing a little good .
and just to give you a sense of reference , the u.n. actually estimate that for half that amount , for about 75 billion dollars a year , we could solve all major basic problems in the world .
we could give clean drinking water , sanitation , basic healthcare and education to every single human being on the planet .
so we have to ask ourselves , do we want to spend twice the amount on doing very little good ?
or half the amount on doing an amazing amount of good ?
and that is really why it becomes a bad project .
it 's not to say that if we had all the money in the world , we would n't want to do it .
but it 's to say , when we do n't , it 's just simply not our first priority .
the fair projects - notice i 'm not going to comment on all these - but communicable diseases , scale of basic health services - just made it , simply because , yes , scale of basic health services is a great thing .
it would do a lot of good , but it 's also very , very costly .
again , what it tells us is suddenly we start thinking about both sides of the equation .
if you look at the good projects , a lot of sanitation and water projects came in .
again , sanitation and water is incredibly important , but it also costs a lot of infrastructure .
so i 'd like to show you the top four priorities which should be at least the first ones that we deal with when we talk about how we should deal with the problems in the world .
the fourth best problem is malaria - dealing with malaria .
the incidence of malaria is about a couple of -lsb- million -rsb- people get infected every year .
it might even cost up towards a percentage point of gdp every year for affected nations .
if we invested about 13 billion dollars over the next four years , we could bring that incidence down to half .
we could avoid about 500,000 people dying , but perhaps more importantly , we could avoid about a -lsb- million -rsb- people getting infected every year .
we would significantly increase their ability to deal with many of the other problems that they have to deal with - of course , in the long run , also to deal with global warming .
this third best one was free trade .
basically , the model showed that if we could get free trade , and especially cut subsidies in the u.s. and europe , we could basically enliven the global economy to an astounding number of about 2,400 billion dollars a year , half of which would accrue to the third world .
again , the point is to say that we could actually pull two to three hundred million people out of poverty , very radically fast , in about two to five years .
that would be the third best thing we could do .
the second best thing would be to focus on malnutrition .
not just malnutrition in general , but there 's a very cheap way of dealing with malnutrition , namely , the lack of micronutrients .
basically , about half of the world 's population is lacking in iron , zinc , iodine and vitamin a.
if we invest about 12 billion dollars , we could make a severe inroad into that problem .
that would be the second best investment that we could do .
and the very best project would be to focus on hiv / aids .
basically , if we invest 27 billion dollars over the next eight years , we could avoid 28 new million cases of hiv / aids .
again , what this does and what it focuses on is saying there are two very different ways that we can deal with hiv / aids .
one is treatment ; the other one is prevention .
and again , in an ideal world , we would do both .
but in a world where we do n't do either , or do n't do it very well , we have to at least ask ourselves where should we invest first .
and treatment is much , much more expensive than prevention .
so basically , what this focuses on is saying , we can do a lot more by investing in prevention .
basically for the amount of money that we spend , we can do x amount of good in treatment , and 10 times as much good in prevention .
so again , what we focus on is prevention rather than treatment , at first rate .
what this really does is that it makes us think about our priorities .
i 'd like to have you look at your priority list and say , did you get it right ?
or did you get close to what we came up with here ?
well , of course , one of the things is climate change again .
i find a lot of people find it very , very unlikely that we should do that .
we should also do climate change , if for no other reason , simply because it 's such a big problem .
but of course , we do n't do all problems .
there are many problems out there in the world .
and what i want to make sure of is , if we actually focus on problems , that we focus on the right ones .
the ones where we can do a lot of good rather than a little good .
and i think , actually - thomas schelling , one of the participants in the dream team , he put it very , very well .
one of things that people forget , is that in 100 years , when we 're talking about most of the climate change impacts will be , people will be much , much richer .
even the most pessimistic impact scenarios of the u.n.
estimate that the average person in the developing world in 2100 will be about as rich as we are today .
much more likely , they will be two to four times richer than we are .
and of course , we 'll be even richer than that .
but the point is to say , when we talk about saving people , or helping people in bangladesh in 2100 , we 're not talking about a poor bangladeshi .
we 're actually talking about a fairly rich dutch guy .
and so the real point , of course , is to say , do we want to spend a lot of money helping a little , 100 years from now , a fairly rich dutch guy ?
or do we want to help real poor people , right now , in bangladesh , who really need the help , and whom we can help very , very cheaply ?
or as schelling put it , imagine if you were a rich - as you will be - a rich chinese , a rich bolivian , a rich congolese , in 2100 , thinking back on 2005 , and saying , " how odd that they cared so much about helping me a little bit through climate change , and cared so fairly little about helping my grandfather and my great grandfather , whom they could have helped so much more , and who needed the help so much more ? "
so i think that really does tell us why it is we need to get our priorities straight .
even if it does n't accord to the typical way we see this problem .
of course , that 's mainly because climate change has good pictures .
we have , you know , " the day after tomorrow " - it looks great , right ?
it 's a good film in the sense that i certainly want to see it , right , but do n't expect emmerich to cast brad pitt in his next movie digging latrines in tanzania or something . -lrb- laughter -rrb- it just does n't make for as much of a movie .
so in many ways , i think of the copenhagen consensus and the whole discussion of priorities as a defense for boring problems .
to make sure that we realize it 's not about making us feel good .
it 's not about making things that have the most media attention , but it 's about making places where we can actually do the most good .
the other objections , i think , that are important to say , is that i 'm somehow - or we are somehow - positing a false choice .
of course , we should do all things , in an ideal world - i would certainly agree .
i think we should do all things , but we do n't .
in 1970 , the developed world decided we were going to spend twice as much as we did , right now , than in 1970 , on the developing world .
since then our aid has halved .
so it does n't look like we 're actually on the path of suddenly solving all big problems .
likewise , people are also saying , but what about the iraq war ?
you know , we spend 100 billion dollars - why do n't we spend that on doing good in the world ?
i 'm all for that .
if any one of you guys can talk bush into doing that , that 's fine .
but the point , of course , is still to say , if you get another 100 billion dollars , we still want to spend that in the best possible way , do n't we ?
so the real issue here is to get ourselves back and think about what are the right priorities .
i should just mention briefly , is this really the right list that we got out ?
you know , when you ask the world 's best economists , you inevitably end up asking old , white american men .
and they 're not necessarily , you know , great ways of looking at the entire world .
so we actually invited 80 young people from all over the world to come and solve the same problem .
the only two requirements were that they were studying at the university , and they spoke english .
the majority of them were , first , from developing countries .
they had all the same material but they could go vastly outside the scope of discussion , and they certainly did , to come up with their own lists .
and the surprising thing was that the list was very similar - with malnutrition and diseases at the top and climate change at the bottom .
we 've done this many other times .
there 's been many other seminars and university students , and different things .
they all come out with very much the same list .
and that gives me great hope , really , in saying that i do believe that there is a path ahead to get us to start thinking about priorities , and saying , what is the important thing in the world ?
of course , in an ideal world , again we 'd love to do everything .
but if we do n't do it , then we can start thinking about where should we start ?
i see the copenhagen consensus as a process .
we did it in 2004 , and we hope to assemble many more people , getting much better information for 2008 , 2012 .
map out the right path for the world - but also to start thinking about political triage .
to start thinking about saying , " let 's do not the things where we can do very little at a very high cost , not the things that we do n't know how to do , but let 's do the great things where we can do an enormous amount of good , at very low cost , right now . "
at the end of the day , you can disagree with the discussion of how we actually prioritize these , but we have to be honest and frank about saying , if there 's some things we do , there are other things we do n't do .
if we worry too much about some things , we end by not worrying about other things .
so i hope this will help us make better priorities , and think about how we better work for the world .
thank you .
i wrote a letter last week talking about the work of the foundation , sharing some of the problems .
and warren buffet had recommended i do that - being honest about what was going well , what was n't , and making it kind of an annual thing .
a goal i had there was to draw more people in to work on those problems , because i think there are some very important problems that do n't get worked on naturally .
that is , the market does not drive the scientists , the communicators , the thinkers , the governments to do the right things .
and only by paying attention to these things and having brilliant people who care and draw other people in can we make as much progress as we need to .
so this morning i 'm going to share two of these problems and talk about where they stand .
but before i dive into those i want to admit that i am an optimist .
any tough problem , i think it can be solved .
and part of the reason i feel that way is looking at the past .
over the past century , average lifespan has more than doubled .
another statistic , perhaps my favorite , is to look at childhood deaths .
as recently as 1960 , 110 million children were born , and 20 million of those died before the age of five .
five years ago , 135 million children were born - so , more - and less than 10 million of them died before the age of five .
so that 's a factor of two reduction of the childhood death rate .
it 's a phenomenal thing .
each one of those lives matters a lot .
and the key reason we were able to it was not only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs : vaccines that were used more widely .
for example , measles was four million of the deaths back as recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000 .
so we really can make changes .
the next breakthrough is to cut that 10 million in half again .
and i think that 's doable in well under 20 years .
why ? well there 's only a few diseases that account for the vast majority of those deaths : diarrhea , pneumonia and malaria .
so that brings us to the first problem that i 'll raise this morning , which is how do we stop a deadly disease that 's spread by mosquitos ?
well , what 's the history of this disease ?
it 's been a severe disease for thousands of years .
in fact , if we look at the genetic code , it 's the only disease we can see that people who lived in africa actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths .
deaths actually peaked at a bit over five million in the 1930s .
so it was absolutely gigantic .
and the disease was all over the world .
a terrible disease . it was in the united states . it was in europe .
people did n't know what caused it until the early 1900s , when a british military man figured out that it was mosquitos .
so it was everywhere .
and two tools helped bring the death rate down .
one was killing the mosquitos with ddt .
the other was treating the patients with quinine , or quinine derivatives .
and so that 's why the death rate did come down .
now , ironically , what happened was it was eliminated from all the temperate zones , which is where the rich countries are .
so we can see : 1900 , it 's everywhere .
1945 , it 's still most places .
1970 , the u.s. and most of europe have gotten rid of it .
1990 , you 've gotten most of the northern areas .
and more recently you can see it 's just around the equator .
and so this leads to the paradox that because the disease is only in the poorer countries , it does n't get much investment .
for example , there 's more money put into baldness drugs than are put into malaria .
now , baldness , it 's a terrible thing .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and rich men are afflicted .
and so that 's why that priority has been set .
but , malaria - even the million deaths a year caused by malaria greatly understate its impact .
over 200 million people at any one time are suffering from it .
it means that you ca n't get the economies in these areas going because it just holds things back so much .
now , malaria is of course transmitted by mosquitos .
i brought some here , just so you could experience this .
we 'll let those roam around the auditorium a little bit .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- there 's no reason only poor people should have the experience .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- those mosquitos are not infected .
so we 've come up with a few new things . we 've got bed nets .
and bed nets are a great tool .
what it means is the mother and child stay under the bed net at night , so the mosquitos that bite late at night ca n't get at them .
and when you use indoor spraying with ddt and those nets you can cut deaths by over 50 percent .
and that 's happened now in a number of countries .
it 's great to see .
but we have to be careful because malaria - the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves .
so every tool that we 've ever had in the past has eventually become ineffective .
and so you end up with two choices .
if you go into a country with the right tools and the right way , you do it vigorously , you can actually get a local eradication .
and that 's where we saw the malaria map shrinking .
or , if you go in kind of half-heartedly , for a period of time you 'll reduce the disease burden , but eventually those tools will become ineffective , and the death rate will soar back up again .
and the world has gone through this where it paid attention and then did n't pay attention .
now we 're on the upswing .
bed net funding is up .
there 's new drug discovery going on .
our foundation has backed a vaccine that 's going into phase three trial that starts in a couple months .
and that should save over two thirds of the lives if it 's effective .
so we 're going to have these new tools .
but that alone does n't give us the road map .
because the road map to get rid of this disease involves many things .
it involves communicators to keep the funding high , to keep the visibility high , to tell the success stories .
it involves social scientists , so we know how to get not just 70 percent of the people to use the bed nets , but 90 percent .
we need mathematicians to come in and simulate this , to do monte carlo things to understand how these tools combine and work together .
of course we need drug companies to give us their expertise .
we need rich-world governments to be very generous in providing aid for these things .
and so as these elements come together , i 'm quite optimistic that we will be able to eradicate malaria .
now let me turn to a second question , a fairly different question , but i 'd say equally important .
and this is : how do you make a teacher great ?
it seems like the kind of question that people would spend a lot of time on , and we 'd understand very well .
and the answer is , really , that we do n't .
let 's start with why this is important .
well , all of us here , i 'll bet , had some great teachers .
we all had a wonderful education .
that 's part of the reason we 're here today , part of the reason we 're successful .
i can say that , even though i 'm a college drop-out .
i had great teachers .
in fact , in the united states , the teaching system has worked fairly well .
there are fairly effective teachers in a narrow set of places .
so the top 20 percent of students have gotten a good education .
and those top 20 percent have been the best in the world , if you measure them against the other top 20 percent .
and they 've gone on to create the revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep the u.s. at the forefront .
now , the strength for those top 20 percent is starting to fade on a relative basis , but even more concerning is the education that the balance of people are getting .
not only has that been weak. it 's getting weaker .
and if you look at the economy , it really is only providing opportunities now to people with a better education .
and we have to change this .
we have to change it so that people have equal opportunity .
we have to change it so that the country is strong and stays at the forefront of things that are driven by advanced education , like science and mathematics .
when i first learned the statistics , i was pretty stunned at how bad things are .
over 30 percent of kids never finish high school .
and that had been covered up for a long time because they always took the dropout rate as the number who started in senior year and compared it to the number who finished senior year .
because they were n't tracking where the kids were before that .
but most of the dropouts had taken place before that .
they had to raise the stated dropout rate as soon as that tracking was done to over 30 percent .
for minority kids , it 's over 50 percent .
and even if you graduate from high school , if you 're low-income , you have less than a 25 percent chance of ever completing a college degree .
if you 're low-income in the united states , you have a higher chance of going to jail than you do of getting a four-year degree .
and that does n't seem entirely fair .
so , how do you make education better ?
now , our foundation , for the last nine years , has invested in this .
there 's many people working on it .
we 've worked on small schools , we 've funded scholarships , we 've done things in libraries .
a lot of these things had a good effect .
but the more we looked at it , the more we realized that having great teachers was the very key thing .
and we hooked up with some people studying how much variation is there between teachers , between , say , the top quartile - the very best - and the bottom quartile .
how much variation is there within a school or between schools ?
and the answer is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable .
a top quartile teacher will increase the performance of their class - based on test scores - by over 10 percent in a single year .
what does that mean ?
that means that if the entire u.s. , for two years , had top quartile teachers , the entire difference between us and asia would go away .
within four years we would be blowing everyone in the world away .
so , it 's simple . all you need are those top quartile teachers .
and so you 'd say , " wow , we should reward those people .
we should retain those people .
we should find out what they 're doing and transfer that skill to other people . "
but i can tell you that absolutely is not happening today .
what are the characteristics of this top quartile ?
what do they look like ?
you might think these must be very senior teachers .
and the answer is no .
once somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality does not change thereafter .
the variation is very , very small .
you might think these are people with master 's degrees .
they 've gone back and they 've gotten their master 's of education .
this chart takes four different factors and says how much do they explain teaching quality .
that bottom thing , which says there 's no effect at all , is a master 's degree .
now , the way the pay system works is there 's two things that are rewarded .
one is seniority .
because your pay goes up and you vest into your pension .
the second is giving extra money to people who get their master 's degree .
but it in no way is associated with being a better teacher .
teach for america : slight effect .
for math teachers majoring in math there 's a measurable effect .
but , overwhelmingly , it 's your past performance .
there are some people who are very good at this .
and we 've done almost nothing to study what that is and to draw it in and to replicate it , to raise the average capability - or to encourage the people with it to stay in the system .
you might say , " do the good teachers stay and the bad teacher 's leave ? "
the answer is , on average , the slightly better teachers leave the system .
and it 's a system with very high turnover .
now , there are a few places - very few - where great teachers are being made .
a good example of one is a set of charter schools called kipp .
kipp means knowledge is power .
it 's an unbelievable thing .
they have 66 schools - mostly middle schools , some high schools - and what goes on is great teaching .
they take the poorest kids , and over 96 percent of their high school graduates go to four-year colleges .
and the whole spirit and attitude in those schools is very different than in the normal public schools .
they 're team teaching . they 're constantly improving their teachers .
they 're taking data , the test scores , and saying to a teacher , " hey , you caused this amount of increase . "
they 're deeply engaged in making teaching better .
when you actually go and sit in one of these classrooms , at first it 's very bizarre .
i sat down and i thought , " what is going on ? "
the teacher was running around , and the energy level was high .
i thought , " i 'm in the sports rally or something .
what 's going on ? "
and the teacher was constantly scanning to see which kids were n't paying attention , which kids were bored , and calling kids rapidly , putting things up on the board .
it was a very dynamic environment , because particularly in those middle school years - fifth through eighth grade - keeping people engaged and setting the tone that everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention , nobody gets to make fun of it or have the position of the kid who does n't want to be there .
everybody needs to be involved .
and so kipp is doing it .
how does that compare to a normal school ?
well , in a normal school , teachers are n't told how good they are .
the data is n't gathered .
in the teacher 's contract , it will limit the number of times the principal can come into the classroom - sometimes to once per year .
and they need advanced notice to do that .
so imagine running a factory where you 've got these workers , some of them just making crap and the management is told , " hey , you can only come down here once a year , but you need to let us know , because we might actually fool you , and try and do a good job in that one brief moment . "
even a teacher who wants to improve does n't have the tools to do it .
they do n't have the test scores , and there 's a whole thing of trying to block the data .
for example , new york passed a law that said that the teacher improvement data could not be made available and used in the tenure decision for the teachers .
and so that 's sort of working in the opposite direction .
but i 'm optimistic about this , i think there are some clear things we can do .
first of all , there 's a lot more testing going on , and that 's given us the picture of where we are .
and that allows us to understand who 's doing it well , and call them out , and find out what those techniques are .
of course , digital video is cheap now .
putting a few cameras in the classroom and saying that things are being recorded on an ongoing basis is very practical in all public schools .
and so every few weeks teachers could sit down and say , " ok , here 's a little clip of something i thought i did well .
here 's a little clip of something i think i did poorly .
advise me - when this kid acted up , how should i have dealt with that ? "
and they could all sit and work together on those problems .
you can take the very best teachers and kind of annotate it , have it so everyone sees who is the very best at teaching this stuff .
you can take those great courses and make them available so that a kid could go out and watch the physics course , learn from that .
if you have a kid who 's behind , you would know you could assign them that video to watch and review the concept .
and in fact , these free courses could not only be available just on the internet , but you could make it so that dvds were always available , and so anybody who has access to a dvd player can have the very best teachers .
and so by thinking of this as a personnel system , we can do it much better .
now there 's a book actually , about kipp - the place that this is going on - that jay matthews , a news reporter , wrote - called , " work hard , be nice . "
and i thought it was so fantastic .
it gave you a sense of what a good teacher does .
i 'm going to send everyone here a free copy of this book .
-lrb- applause -rrb- now , we put a lot of money into education , and i really think that education is the most important thing to get right for the country to have as strong a future as it should have .
in fact we have in the stimulus bill - it 's interesting - the house version actually had money in it for these data systems , and it was taken out in the senate because there are people who are threatened by these things .
but i - i 'm optimistic .
i think people are beginning to recognize how important this is , and it really can make a difference for millions of lives , if we get it right .
i only had time to frame those two problems .
there 's a lot more problems like that - aids , pneumonia - i can just see you 're getting excited , just at the very name of these things .
and the skill sets required to tackle these things are very broad .
you know , the system does n't naturally make it happen .
governments do n't naturally pick these things in the right way .
the private sector does n't naturally put its resources into these things .
so it 's going to take brilliant people like you to study these things , get other people involved - and you 're helping to come up with solutions .
and with that , i think there 's some great things that will come out of it .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- " what i will " i will not dance to your war drum .
i will not lend my soul nor my bones to your war drum .
i will not dance to that beating .
i know that beat .
it is lifeless .
i know intimately that skin you are hitting .
it was alive once , hunted , stolen , stretched .
i will not dance to your drummed-up war .
i will not pop , spin , break for you .
i will not hate for you or even hate you .
i will not kill for you .
especially i will not die for you .
i will not mourn the dead with murder nor suicide .
i will not side with you or dance to bombs because everyone is dancing .
everyone can be wrong .
life is a right , not collateral or casual .
i will not forget where i come from .
i will craft my own drum .
gather my beloved near , and our chanting will be dancing .
our humming will be drumming .
i will not be played .
i will not lend my name nor my rhythm to your beat .
i will dance and resist and dance and persist and dance .
this heartbeat is louder than death .
your war drum ai n't louder than this breath . haaa .
what 's up ted people ? let me hear you make some noise .
-lrb- applause -rrb- a bunch of pacifists .
confused , aspiring pacifists .
i understand .
i 've been wrong a lot lately .
like a lot .
so i could n't figure out what to read today .
i mean , i 've been saying i 've been prepping .
what that means is prepping my outfit , -lrb- laughter -rrb- prepping options , trying to figure out what i 'm coming behind and going in front of .
poetry does that .
it preps you . it aims you .
so i am going to read a poem that was chosen just now .
but i 'm going to need you to just sit for like 10 minutes and hold a woman who is not here .
hold her now with you .
you do n't need to say her name out loud , you can just hold her .
are you holding her ?
this is " break clustered . "
all holy history banned .
unwritten books predicted the future , projected the past .
but my head unwraps around what appears limitless , man 's creative violence .
whose son shall it be ?
which male child will perish a new day ?
our boys ' deaths galvanize .
we cherish corpses .
we mourn women , complicated .
bitches get beat daily .
profits made , prophets ignored .
war and tooth , enameled salted lemon childhoods .
all colors run , none of us solid .
do n't look for shadow behind me . i carry it within .
i live cycles of light and darkness .
rhythm is half silence .
i see now , i never was one and not the other .
sickness , health , tender violence .
i think now i never was pure .
before form i was storm , blind , ign 'ant - still am .
human contracted itself blind , malignant .
i never was pure .
girl spoiled before ripened .
language ca n't math me .
i experience exponentially .
everything is everything .
one woman loses 15 , maybe 20 , members of her family .
one woman loses six .
one woman loses her head .
one woman searches rubble . one woman feeds on trash .
one woman shoots her face . one woman shoots her husband .
one woman straps herself .
one woman gives birth to a baby .
one woman gives birth to borders .
one woman no longer believes love will ever find her .
one woman never did .
where do refugee hearts go ?
broken , dissed , placed where they 're not from , do n't want to be missed .
faced with absence .
we mourn each one or we mean nothing at all .
my spine curves spiral .
precipice running to and running from human beings .
cluster bombs left behind .
de facto landmines .
a smoldering grief .
harvest contaminated tobacco .
harvest bombs .
harvest baby teeth .
harvest palms , smoke .
harvest witness , smoke .
resolutions , smoke .
salvation , smoke .
redemption , smoke .
breathe .
do not fear what has blown up .
if you must , fear the unexploded .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i love theater .
i love the idea that you can transform , become somebody else and look at life with a completely new perspective .
i love the idea that people will sit in one room for a couple of hours and listen .
the idea that in that room at that moment , everyone , regardless of their age , their gender , their race , their color , their religion , comes together .
at that moment , we transcend space and time together .
theater awakens our senses and opens the door to our imagination .
and our ability to imagine is what makes us explorers .
our ability to imagine makes us inventors and creators and unique .
i was commissioned in 2003 to create an original show , and began developing " upwake . "
" upwake " tells the story of zero , a modern-day business man , going to work with his life in a suitcase , stuck between dream and reality and not able to decipher the two .
i wanted " upwake " to have the same audiovisual qualities as a movie would .
and i wanted to let my imagination run wild .
so i began drawing the story that was moving in my head .
if antoine de saint-exupery , the author of " the little prince , " were here , he would have drawn three holes inside that box and told you your sheep was inside .
because , if you look closely enough , things will begin to appear .
this is not a box ; these are the renderings of my imagination from head to paper to screen to life .
in " upwake " buildings wear suits , zero tap dances on a giant keyboard , clones himself with a scanner , tames and whips the computer mice , sails away into dreamscape from a single piece of paper and launches into space .
i wanted to create environments that moved and morphed like an illusionist .
go from one world to another in a second .
i wanted to have humor , beauty , simplicity and complexity and use metaphors to suggest ideas .
at the beginning of the show , for example , zero deejays dream and reality .
technology is an instrument that allowed me to manifest my visions in high definition , live , on stage .
so today , i would like to talk to you about the relationship between theater and technology .
let 's start with technology .
-lrb- fuse blowing -rrb- all right . let 's start with theater .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- buzzing -rrb- -lrb- click , click , bang -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
" upwake " lasts 52 minutes and 54 seconds .
i project 3d animation on all the four surfaces of the stage which i interact with .
the use of animation and projection was a process of discovery .
i did n't use it as a special effect , but as a partner on stage .
there are no special effects in " upwake , " no artifice .
it 's as lavish and intricate as it is simple and minimal .
three hundred and forty-four frames , four and a half years and commissions later , what started as a one person show became a collaborative work of nineteen most talented artists .
and here are some excerpts .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
so this is , relatively , a new show that we 're now beginning to tour .
and in austin , texas , i was asked to give small demonstrations in schools during the afternoon .
when i arrived at one of the schools , i certainly did not expect this : six hundred kids , packed in a gymnasium , waiting .
i was a little nervous performing without animation , costume - really - and make-up .
but the teachers came to me afterward and told me they had n't seen the kids that attentive .
and i think the reason why is that i was able to use their language and their reality in order to transport them into another .
something happened along the way .
zero became a person and not just a character in a play .
zero does not speak , is neither man nor woman .
zero is zero , a little hero of the 21st century , and zero can touch so many more people than i possibly could .
it 's as much about bringing new disciplines inside this box as it is about taking theater out of its box .
as a street performer , i have learned that everybody wants to connect .
and that usually , if you 're a bit extraordinary , if you 're not exactly of human appearance , then people will feel inclined to participate and to feel out loud .
it 's as though you made something resonate within them .
it 's as though the mystery of the person they 're interacting with and connecting allows them to be themselves just a bit more .
because through your mask , they let theirs go .
being human is an art form .
i know theater can improve the quality of people 's lives , and i know theater can heal .
i 've worked as a doctor clown in a hospital for two years .
i have seen sick kids and sad parents and doctors be lifted and transported in moments of pure joy .
i know theater unites us .
zero wants to engage the generation of today and tomorrow , tell various stories through different mediums .
comic books . quantum physics video games .
and zero wants to go to the moon .
in 2007 , zero launched a green campaign , suggesting his friends and fans to turn off their electricity the idea is simple , basic . it 's not original , but it 's important , and it 's important to participate .
there is a revolution .
it 's a human and technological revolution .
it 's motion and emotion .
it 's information .
it 's visual . it 's musical . it 's sensorial .
it 's conceptual . it 's universal . it 's beyond words and numbers .
it 's happening .
the natural progression of science and art finding each other to better touch and define the human experience .
there is a revolution in the way that we think , in the way that we share , and the way that we express our stories , our evolution .
this is a time of communication , connection and creative collaboration .
charlie chaplin innovated motion pictures and told stories through music , silence , humor and poetry .
he was social , and his character , the tramp , spoke to millions .
he gave entertainment , pleasure and relief to so many human beings when they needed it the most .
we are not here to question the possible ; we are here to challenge the impossible .
in the science of today , we become artists .
in the art of today , we become scientists .
we design our world . we invent possibilities .
we teach , touch and move .
it is now that we can use the diversity of our talents to create intelligent , meaningful and extraordinary work . it 's now .
-lrb- ringing -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- twelve years ago , i founded zipcar .
zipcar buys cars and parks them throughout dense metropolitan areas for people to use , by the hour and by the day , instead of owning their own cars .
each zipcar replaces 15 personal cars , and each driver drives about 80 percent less because they 're now paying the full cost , all at once , in real time .
but what zipcar really did was make sharing the norm .
now , a decade later , it 's really time to push the envelope a little bit , and so a couple years ago i moved to paris with my husband and youngest child , and we launched buzzcar a year ago .
buzzcar lets people rent out their own cars to their friends and neighbors .
instead of investing in a car , we invest in a community .
we bring the power of a corporation to individuals who add their cars to the network .
some people call this peer-to-peer .
this does express the humanity of what 's going on , and the personal relationships , but that is also like saying that it 's the same thing as a yard sale or a bake sale or babysitting .
that 's peer-to-peer .
it 's like saying yard sales are the same thing as ebay , or craft fairs are the same thing as etsy .
but what 's really happening is that we 've got the power of a free and open internet , and on top of that we 're putting a platform for participation , and the peers are now in partnership with the company , creating shared value on shared values , and each strengthening the other , and doing what the other ca n't do .
i call this peers , inc .
the incorporated side , the company , is doing things that it does really well .
what does it do really well ? it creates economies of scale , significant and long-term resource investment , the expertise of many different kinds of people and different kinds of minds , and for individuals , consumers , it 's bringing the standards , rules and recourse that we really want as consumers , and this is kind of bound up in a brand promise , and the companies are providing this on a platform for participation .
peers are giving and doing things that are incredibly expensive for companies to do .
what do they bring ? they bring this fabulous diversity , expensive for companies . and what does that deliver ?
it delivers localization and customization , specialization , and all of this aspect about social networks and how companies are yearning and eager to get inside there ?
it 's natural for me . me and my friends , i can connect to them easily .
and it also delivers really fabulous innovation , and i 'll talk about that later .
so we have the peers that are providing the services and the product , and the company that 's doing the stuff that companies do .
the two of these are delivering the best of both worlds .
some of my favorite examples : in transportation , carpooling.com. ten years old , three and a half million people have joined up , and a million rides are shared every day .
it 's a phenomenal thing . it 's the equivalent of 2,500 tgv trains , and just think , they did n't have to lay a track or buy a car .
this is all happening with excess capacity .
and it 's not just with transportation , my love , but of course in other realms . here 's fiverr.com.
i met these founders just weeks after they had launched , and now , in two years , what would you do for five dollars ?
seven hundred and fifty thousand gigs are now posted after two years , what people would do for five dollars .
and not just easy things that anyone can do .
this peers , inc. concept is in a very difficult and complex realm .
topcoder has 400,000 engineers who are delivering complex design and engineering services .
when i talked to their ceo , he had this great line .
he said , " we have a community that owns its own company . "
and then my all-time favorite , etsy .
etsy is providing goods that people make themselves and they 're selling it in a marketplace .
it just celebrated its seventh anniversary , and after seven years , last year it delivered 530 million dollars ' worth of sales to all those individuals who have been making those objects .
i know you guys out there who are businesspeople , are thinking , " oh my god , i want to build one of those .
i see this incredible speed and scale .
you mean all i have to do is build a platform and all these people are going to put their stuff on top and i sit back and roll it in ? "
building these platforms for participation are so nontrivial to do .
i think of the difference of google video versus youtube .
who would have thought that two young guys and a start-up would beat out google video ? why ?
i actually have no idea why . i did n't talk to them .
but i 'm thinking , you know , they probably had the " share " button a little bit brighter and to the right , and so it was easier and more convenient for the two sides that are always participating on these networks .
so i actually know a lot about building a peer platform now , and a peers , inc. company , because i 've spent the last two years doing that in paris .
so let me take you back how it 's so incredibly different building buzzcar than it was building zipcar , because now every single thing we do has these two different bodies that i have to be thinking about : the owners who are going to provide the cars and the drivers who are going to rent them .
every single decision , i have to think about what is right for both sides .
there are many , many examples and i 'll give you one that is not my favorite example : insurance .
it took me a year and a half to get the insurance just right .
hours and hours of sitting with insurers and many companies and their thoughts about risk and how this is totally innovative , they 'd never thought of it before .
way too much money , i just ca n't even go there , with lawyers , trying to figure out how this is different , who 's responsible to whom , and the result was that we were able to provide owners protection for their own driving records and their own history .
the cars are completely insured during the rental , and it gives drivers what they need , and what do they need ?
they need a low deductible , and 24-hour roadside assistance .
so this was a trick to get these two sides .
so now i want to take you to the moment of - when you 're an entrepreneur , and you 've started a new company , there 's the , here 's all the stuff we do beforehand , and then the service launches . what happens ?
so all those months of work , they come into play .
last june 1 , we launched . it was an exciting moment .
and all the owners are adding their cars . it 's really exciting .
all the drivers are becoming members . it 's excellent .
the reservations start coming in , and here , owners who were getting text messages and emails that said , " hey , joe wants to rent your car for the weekend .
you can earn 60 euros . is n't that great ? yes or no ? "
no reply . like , a huge proportion of them could n't be bothered after they had just started , they just signed up , to reply .
so i thought , " duh , robin , this is the difference between industrial production and peer production . "
industrial production , the whole point of industrial production is to provide a standardized , exact service model that is consistent every single time , and i 'm really thankful that my smartphone is made using industrial production .
and zipcar provides a very nice , consistent service that works fabulously .
but what does peer production do ? peer production is this completely different way of doing things , and you have a big quality range , and so ebay , cleverly , the first peer production , peer , inc. company , i 'd say , they figured out early on , we need to have ratings and commentaries and all that yucky side stuff .
we can flag that and we can put it to the side , and people who are buyers and consumers do n't have to deal with it .
so going back , this is my look of excitement and joy , because all this stuff that i 'd also been hoping for actually really did happen , and what 's that ?
that is the diversity of what 's going on .
you have these different fabulous owners and their different cars , different prices , different locations . -lrb- laughter -rrb- they dress differently , and they look different , and , really , i love these photos every time i look at them .
cool guys , excited guys , and here is selma , who - i love this driver .
and after a year , we have 1,000 cars that are parked across france and 6,000 people who are members and eager to drive them .
this would not be possible to do that in economic fashion for a traditional company .
back to this spectrum .
so what 's happening is , we had the yuck side , but we actually had this real wow side .
and i can tell you two great stories .
a driver was telling me that they went to rent a car to go up the coast of france and the owner gave it to them , and said , " you know what , here 's where the cliffs are , and here 's all the beaches , and this is my best beach , and this is where the best fish restaurant is . "
and the peers also become , peers and owners create relationships , and so at the last minute people can - a driver can say , " hey , you know what , i really need the car , is it available ? " and that person will say , " sure , my wife 's at home . go pick up the keys . go do it . "
so you can have these really nice things that ca n't happen , and it 's a kind of " wow ! " and i want to say " wow ! "
type of thing that 's happening here , because individuals , if you 're a company , what happens is you might have 10 people who are in charge of innovation , or 100 people who are in charge of innovation .
what happens in peer , inc. companies is that you have tens and hundreds and thousands and even millions of people who are creating experiments on this model , and so out of all that influence and that effort , you are having this exceptional amount of innovation that is coming out .
so one of the reasons , if we come back to why did i call it buzzcar ? i wanted to remind all of us about the power of the hive , and its incredible facility to create this platform that individuals want to participate and innovate on .
and for me , when i think about our future , and all of those problems that seem incredibly large , the scale is impossible , the urgency is there , peers , inc. provides the speed and scale and the innovation and the creativity that is going to answer these problems .
all we have to do is create a fabulous platform for participation - nontrivial .
so i continue to think that transportation is the center of the hard universe .
all problems come back to transportation for me .
but there are all these other areas that are these profound , big problems that i know that we can work on , and people are working on them in many different sectors , but there 's this really fabulous group of things with the power of this peers , inc. model .
so over the last decade , we 've been reveling in the power of the internet and how it 's empowered individuals , and for me , what peers , inc. does is it takes it up a notch . we 're now bringing the power of the company and the corporation and supercharging individuals .
so for me , it 's a collaboration .
together , we can . -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- the maxim , " know thyself " has been around since the ancient greeks .
some attribute this golden world knowledge to plato , others to pythagoras .
but the truth is it does n't really matter which sage said it first , because it 's still sage advice , even today .
" know thyself . "
it 's pithy almost to the point of being meaningless , but it rings familiar and true , does n't it ?
" know thyself . "
i understand this timeless dictum as a statement about the problems , or more exactly the confusions , of consciousness .
i 've always been fascinated with knowing the self .
this fascination led me to submerge myself in art , study neuroscience and later to become a psychotherapist .
today i combine all my passions as the ceo of interaxon , a thought-controlled computing company .
my goal , quite simply , is to help people become more in tune with themselves .
i take it from this little dictum , " know thyself . "
if you think about it , this imperative is kind of the defining characteristic of our species , is n't it ?
i mean , it 's self-awareness that separates homo sapiens from earlier instances of our mankind .
today we 're often too busy tending to our iphones and ipods to really stop and get to know ourselves .
under the deluge of minute-to-minute text conversations , emails , relentless exchange of media channels and passwords and apps and reminders and tweets and tags , we lose sight of what all this fuss is supposed to be about in the first place : ourselves .
much of the time we 're transfixed by all of the ways we can reflect ourselves into the world .
and we can barely find the time to reflect deeply back in on our own selves .
we 've cluttered ourselves up with all this .
and we feel like we have to get far , far away to a secluded retreat , leaving it all behind .
so we go far away to the top of a mountain , assuming that perching ourselves on a piece is bound to give us the respite we need to sort the clutter , the chaotic everyday , and find ourselves again .
but on that mountain where we gain that beautiful peace of mind , what are we really achieving ?
it 's really only a successful escape .
think of the term we use , " retreat . "
this is the term that armies use when they 've lost a battle .
it means we 've got to get out of here .
is this how we feel about the pressures of our world , that in order to get inside ourselves , you have to run for the hills ?
and the problem with escaping your day-to-day life is that you have to come home eventually .
so when you think about it , we 're almost like a tourist visiting ourselves over there .
and eventually that vacation 's got to come to an end .
so my question to you is , can we find ways to know ourselves without the escape ?
can we redefine our relationship with the technologized world in order to have the heightened sense of self-awareness that we seek ?
can we live here and now in our wired web and still follow those ancient instructions , " know thyself ? "
i say the answer is yes .
and i 'm here today to share a new way that we 're working with technology to this end to get familiar with our inner self like never before - humanizing technology and furthering that age-old quest of ours to more fully know the self .
it 's called thought-controlled computing .
you may or may not have noticed that i 'm wearing a tiny electrode on my forehead .
this is actually a brainwave sensor that 's reading the electrical activity of my brain as i give this talk .
these brainwaves are being analyzed and we can see them as a graph .
let me show you what it looks like .
that blue line there is my brainwave .
it 's the direct signal being recorded from my head , rendered in real time .
the green and red bars show that same signal displayed by frequency , with lower frequencies here and higher frequencies up here .
you 're actually looking inside my head as i speak .
these graphs are compelling , they 're undulating , but from a human 's perspective , they 're actually not very useful .
that 's why we 've spent a lot of time thinking about how to make this data meaningful to the people who use it .
for instance , what if i could use this data to find out how relaxed i am at any moment ?
or what if i can take that information and put it into an organic shape up on the screen ?
the shape on the right over here has become an indicator of what 's going on in my head .
the more relaxed i am , the more the energy 's going to fall through it .
i may also be interested in knowing how focused i am , so i can put my level of attention into the circuit board on the other side .
and the more focused my brain is , the more the circuit board is going to surge with energy .
ordinarily , i would have no way of knowing how focused or relaxed i was in any tangible way .
as we know , our feelings about how we 're feeling are notoriously unreliable .
we 've all had stress creep up on us without even noticing it until we lost it on someone who did n't deserve it , and then we realize that we probably should have checked in with ourselves a little earlier .
this new awareness opens up vast possibilities for applications that help improve our lives and ourselves .
we 're trying to create technology that uses the insights to make our work more efficient , our breaks more relaxing and our connections deeper and more fulfilling than ever .
i 'm going to share some of these visions with you in a bit , but first i want to take a look at how we got here .
by the way , feel free to check in on my head at any time .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- my team at interaxon and i have been developing throught-controlled application for almost a decade now .
in the first phase of development we were really enthused by all the things we could control with our mind .
we were making things activate , light up and work just by thinking .
we were transcending the space between the mind and the device .
we brought to life a vast array of prototypes and products that you could control with your mind , like thought-controlled home appliances or a levitating chair .
we created technology and applications that engaged people 's imaginations , and it was really exciting .
and then we were asked to do something really big for the olympics .
we were invited to create a massive installation at the vancouver 2010 winter olympics , were used in vancouver , got to control the lighting on the c.n. tower , the canadian parliament buildings and niagara falls from all the way across the country using their minds .
over 17 days at the olympics 7,000 visitors from all over the world actually got to individually control the light from the c.n. tower , parliament and niagara in real time with their minds from across the country , 3,000 km away .
so controlling stuff with your mind is pretty cool .
but we 're always interested in multi-tiered levels of human interaction .
and so we began looking into inventing thought-controlled applications in a more complex frame than just control .
and that was responsiveness .
we realized that we had a system that allowed technology to know something about you .
and it could join into the relationship with you .
we created the responsive room where the lights music and blinds adjusted to your state .
they followed these little shifts in your mental activity .
so as you settled into relaxation at the end of a hard day , on the couch in our office , the music would mellow with you .
when you read , the desk lamp would get brighter .
if you nod off , the system would know , dimming to darkness as you do .
we then realized that if technology could know something about you and use it to help you , there 's an even more valuable application than that .
that you could know something about yourself .
we could know sides of ourselves that were all but invisible and come to see things that were previously hidden .
let me show you an example of what i 'm talking about here .
here 's an application that i created for the ipad .
so the goal of the original game zen bound is to wrap a rope around a wooden form .
so you use it with your headset .
the headset connects wirelessly to an ipad or a smartphone .
in that headset you have fabric sensors on your forehead and above the ear .
in the original zen bound game , you play it by scrolling your fingers over the pad .
in the game that we created , of course , you control the wooden form that 's on the screen there with your mind .
as you focus on the wooden form , it rotates .
the more you focus , the faster the rotation .
this is for real .
this is not a fake .
what 's really interesting to me though is at the end of the game you get stats and feedback about how you did .
you have graphs and charts that tell you how your brain was doing - not just how much rope you used or what your high score is , but what was going on inside of your mind .
and this is valuable feedback that we can use to understand what 's going on inside of ourselves .
i like to call this " intra-active . "
normally we think about technology as interactive .
this technology is intra-active .
it understands what 's inside of you and builds a sort of responsive relationship between you and your technology so that you can use this information to move you forward .
so you can use this information to understand you in a responsive loop .
at interaxon , intra-active technology is one of our really defining mandates .
it 's how we understand the world inside and reflect it outside into this tight loop .
for example , thought-controlled computing can teach children with add how to improve their focus .
with add , children have a low proportion of beta waves for focus states and a high proportion of theta states .
so you can create applications that reward focused brain states .
so you can imagine kids playing video games with their brain waves and improving their add symptoms as they do it .
this can be as effective as ritalin .
perhaps even more importantly , thought-controlled computing can give children with add insights into their own fluctuating mental states , so they can better understand themselves and their learning needs .
the way these children will be able to use their new awareness to improve themselves will upend many of the damaging and widespread social stigmas that people who are diagnosed as different are challenged with .
we can peer inside our heads and interact with what was once locked away from us , what once mystified and separated us .
brainwave technology can understand us , anticipate our emotions and find the best solutions for our needs .
imagine this collected awareness of the individual computed and reflected across an entire lifespan .
imagine the insights that you can gain from this kind of second sight .
it would be like plugging into your own personal google .
on the subject of google , today you can search and tag images based on the thoughts and feelings you had while you watched them .
you can tag pictures of baby animals as happy , or whatever baby animals are to you , and then you can search that database , navigating with your feelings , rather than the keywords that just hint at them .
or you could tag facebook photos with the emotions that you had associated with those memories and then instantly prioritize the streams that catch your attention , just like this .
humanizing technology is about taking what 's already natural about the human-tech experience and building technology seamlessly in tandem with it .
as it aligns with our human behaviors , it can allow us to make better sense of what we do and , more importantly , why , creating a big picture out of all the important little details that make up who we are .
with humanized technology we can monitor the quality of your sleep cycles .
when our productivity starts to slacken , we can go back to that data and see how we can make more effective balance between work and play .
do you know what causes fatigue in you or what brings out your energetic self , what triggers cause you to be depressed or what fun things are going to bring you out of that funk ?
imagine if you had access to data that allowed you to rank on a scale of overall happiness which people in your life made you the happiest , or what activities brought you joy .
would you make more time for those people ? would you prioritize ?
would you get a divorce ?
what thought-controlled computing can allow you to do is build colorful layered pictures of our lives .
and with this , we can get the skinny on our psychological happenings and build a story of our behaviors over time .
we can begin to see the underlying narratives that propel us forward and tell us about what 's going on .
and from this , we can learn how to change the plot , the outcome and the character of our personal stories .
two millennia ago , those greeks had some powerful insights .
they knew that a fundamental piece falls into place when you start to live out their little phrase , when you come into contact with yourself .
they understood the power of human narrative and the value that we place on humans as changing , evolving and growing .
but they understood something more fundamental - the sheer joy in discovery , the delight and fascination that we get from the world and being ourselves in it , the richness that we get from seeing , feeling and knowing the lives that we are .
my mom 's an artist , and as a child i 'd often see her bring things to life with the stroke of a brush .
one moment it was all white space , pure possibility .
the next , it was alive with her colorful ideas and expressions .
as i sat easel-side , watching her transform canvas after canvas , i learned that you could create your own world .
i learned that our own inner worlds - our ideas , emotions and imaginations - were , in fact , not bound by our brains and bodies .
if you could think it , if you could discover it , you could bring it to life .
to me , thought-controlled computing is as simple and powerful as a paintbrush - one more tool to unlock and enliven the hidden worlds within us .
i look forward to the day that i can sit beside you , easel-side , watching the world that we can create with our new toolboxes and the discoveries that we can make about ourselves .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- other people . everyone is interested in other people .
everyone has relationships with other people , and they 're interested in these relationships for a variety of reasons .
good relationships , bad relationships , annoying relationships , agnostic relationships , and what i 'm going to do is focus on the central piece of an interaction that goes on in a relationship .
so i 'm going to take as inspiration the fact that we 're all interested in interacting with other people , i 'm going to completely strip it of all its complicating features , and i 'm going to turn that object , that simplified object , into a scientific probe , and provide the early stages , embryonic stages of new insights into what happens in two brains while they simultaneously interact .
but before i do that , let me tell you a couple of things that made this possible .
the first is we can now eavesdrop safely on healthy brain activity .
without needles and radioactivity , without any kind of clinical reason , we can go down the street and record from your friends ' and neighbors ' brains while they do a variety of cognitive tasks , and we use a method called functional magnetic resonance imaging .
you 've probably all read about it or heard about in some incarnation . let me give you a two-sentence version of it .
so we 've all heard of mris . mris use magnetic fields and radio waves and they take snapshots of your brain or your knee or your stomach , grayscale images that are frozen in time .
in the 1990s , it was discovered you could use the same machines in a different mode , and in that mode , you could make microscopic blood flow movies from hundreds of thousands of sites independently in the brain .
okay , so what ? in fact , the so what is , in the brain , changes in neural activity , the things that make your brain work , the things that make your software work in your brain , are tightly correlated with changes in blood flow .
you make a blood flow movie , you have an independent proxy of brain activity .
this has literally revolutionized cognitive science .
take any cognitive domain you want , memory , motor planning , thinking about your mother-in-law , getting angry at people , emotional response , it goes on and on , put people into functional mri devices , and image how these kinds of variables map onto brain activity .
it 's in its early stages , and it 's crude by some measures , but in fact , 20 years ago , we were at nothing .
you could n't do people like this . you could n't do healthy people .
that 's caused a literal revolution , and it 's opened us up to a new experimental preparation . neurobiologists , as you well know , have lots of experimental preps , worms and rodents and fruit flies and things like this .
and now , we have a new experimental prep : human beings .
we can now use human beings to study and model the software in human beings , and we have a few burgeoning biological measures .
okay , let me give you one example of the kinds of experiments that people do , and it 's in the area of what you 'd call valuation .
valuation is just what you think it is , you know ?
if you went and you were valuing two companies against one another , you 'd want to know which was more valuable .
cultures discovered the key feature of valuation thousands of years ago .
if you want to compare oranges to windshields , what do you do ?
well , you ca n't compare oranges to windshields .
they 're immiscible . they do n't mix with one another .
so instead , you convert them to a common currency scale , put them on that scale , and value them accordingly .
well , your brain has to do something just like that as well , and we 're now beginning to understand and identify brain systems involved in valuation , and one of them includes a neurotransmitter system whose cells are located in your brainstem and deliver the chemical dopamine to the rest of your brain .
i wo n't go through the details of it , but that 's an important discovery , and we know a good bit about that now , and it 's just a small piece of it , but it 's important because those are the neurons that you would lose if you had parkinson 's disease , and they 're also the neurons that are hijacked by literally every drug of abuse , and that makes sense .
drugs of abuse would come in , and they would change the way you value the world . they change the way you value the symbols associated with your drug of choice , and they make you value that over everything else .
here 's the key feature though . these neurons are also involved in the way you can assign value to literally abstract ideas , and i put some symbols up here that we assign value to for various reasons .
we have a behavioral superpower in our brain , and it at least in part involves dopamine .
we can deny every instinct we have for survival for an idea , for a mere idea . no other species can do that .
in 1997 , the cult heaven 's gate committed mass suicide predicated on the idea that there was a spaceship hiding in the tail of the then-visible comet hale-bopp waiting to take them to the next level . it was an incredibly tragic event .
more than two thirds of them had college degrees .
but the point here is they were able to deny their instincts for survival using exactly the same systems that were put there to make them survive . that 's a lot of control , okay ?
one thing that i 've left out of this narrative is the obvious thing , which is the focus of the rest of my little talk , and that is other people .
these same valuation systems are redeployed when we 're valuing interactions with other people .
so this same dopamine system that gets addicted to drugs , that makes you freeze when you get parkinson 's disease , that contributes to various forms of psychosis , is also redeployed to value interactions with other people and to assign value to gestures that you do when you 're interacting with somebody else .
let me give you an example of this .
you bring to the table such enormous processing power in this domain that you hardly even notice it .
let me just give you a few examples . so here 's a baby .
she 's three months old . she still poops in her diapers and she ca n't do calculus .
she 's related to me . somebody will be very glad that she 's up here on the screen .
you can cover up one of her eyes , and you can still read something in the other eye , and i see sort of curiosity in one eye , i see maybe a little bit of surprise in the other .
here 's a couple . they 're sharing a moment together , and we 've even done an experiment where you can cut out different pieces of this frame and you can still see that they 're sharing it . they 're sharing it sort of in parallel .
now , the elements of the scene also communicate this to us , but you can read it straight off their faces , and if you compare their faces to normal faces , it would be a very subtle cue .
here 's another couple . he 's projecting out at us , and she 's clearly projecting , you know , love and admiration at him .
here 's another couple . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and i 'm thinking i 'm not seeing love and admiration on the left . -lrb- laughter -rrb- in fact , i know this is his sister , and you can just see him saying , " okay , we 're doing this for the camera , and then afterwards you steal my candy and you punch me in the face . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- he 'll kill me for showing that .
all right , so what does this mean ?
it means we bring an enormous amount of processing power to the problem .
it engages deep systems in our brain , in dopaminergic systems that are there to make you chase sex , food and salt .
they keep you alive . it gives them the pie , it gives that kind of a behavioral punch which we 've called a superpower .
so how can we take that and arrange a kind of staged social interaction and turn that into a scientific probe ?
and the short answer is games .
economic games . so what we do is we go into two areas .
one area is called experimental economics . the other area is called behavioral economics .
and we steal their games . and we contrive them to our own purposes .
so this shows you one particular game called an ultimatum game .
red person is given a hundred dollars and can offer a split to blue . let 's say red wants to keep 70 , and offers blue 30 . so he offers a 70-30 split with blue .
control passes to blue , and blue says , " i accept it , " in which case he 'd get the money , or blue says , " i reject it , " in which case no one gets anything . okay ?
so a rational choice economist would say , well , you should take all non-zero offers .
what do people do ? people are indifferent at an 80-20 split .
at 80-20 , it 's a coin flip whether you accept that or not .
why is that ? you know , because you 're pissed off .
you 're mad . that 's an unfair offer , and you know what an unfair offer is .
this is the kind of game done by my lab and many around the world .
that just gives you an example of the kind of thing that these games probe . the interesting thing is , these games require that you have a lot of cognitive apparatus on line .
you have to be able to come to the table with a proper model of another person .
you have to be able to remember what you 've done .
you have to stand up in the moment to do that .
then you have to update your model based on the signals coming back , and you have to do something that is interesting , which is you have to do a kind of depth of thought assay .
that is , you have to decide what that other person expects of you .
you have to send signals to manage your image in their mind .
like a job interview . you sit across the desk from somebody , they have some prior image of you , you send signals across the desk to move their image of you from one place to a place where you want it to be .
we 're so good at this we do n't really even notice it .
these kinds of probes exploit it . okay ?
in doing this , what we 've discovered is that humans are literal canaries in social exchanges .
canaries used to be used as kind of biosensors in mines .
when methane built up , or carbon dioxide built up , or oxygen was diminished , the birds would swoon before people would - so it acted as an early warning system : hey , get out of the mine . things are n't going so well .
people come to the table , and even these very blunt , staged social interactions , and they , and there 's just numbers going back and forth between the people , and they bring enormous sensitivities to it .
so we realized we could exploit this , and in fact , as we 've done that , and we 've done this now in many thousands of people , i think on the order of five or six thousand . we actually , to make this a biological probe , need bigger numbers than that , remarkably so . but anyway , patterns have emerged , and we 've been able to take those patterns , convert them into mathematical models , and use those mathematical models to gain new insights into these exchanges . okay , so what ?
well , the so what is , that 's a really nice behavioral measure , the economic games bring to us notions of optimal play .
we can compute that during the game .
and we can use that to sort of carve up the behavior .
here 's the cool thing . six or seven years ago , we developed a team . it was at the time in houston , texas .
it 's now in virginia and london . and we built software that 'll link functional magnetic resonance imaging devices up over the internet . i guess we 've done up to six machines at a time , but let 's just focus on two .
so it synchronizes machines anywhere in the world .
we synchronize the machines , set them into these staged social interactions , and we eavesdrop on both of the interacting brains . so for the first time , we do n't have to look at just averages over single individuals , or have individuals playing computers , or try to make inferences that way . we can study individual dyads .
we can study the way that one person interacts with another person , turn the numbers up , and start to gain new insights into the boundaries of normal cognition , but more importantly , we can put people with classically defined mental illnesses , or brain damage , into these social interactions , and use these as probes of that .
so we 've started this effort . we 've made a few hits , a few , i think , embryonic discoveries .
we think there 's a future to this . but it 's our way of going in and redefining , with a new lexicon , a mathematical one actually , as opposed to the standard ways that we think about mental illness , characterizing these diseases , by using the people as birds in the exchanges . that is , we exploit the fact that the healthy partner , playing somebody with major depression , or playing somebody with autism spectrum disorder , or playing somebody with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder , we use that as a kind of biosensor , and then we use computer programs to model that person , and it gives us a kind of assay of this .
early days , and we 're just beginning , we 're setting up sites around the world . here are a few of our collaborating sites .
the hub , ironically enough , is centered in little roanoke , virginia .
there 's another hub in london , now , and the rest are getting set up . we hope to give the data away at some stage . that 's a complicated issue about making it available to the rest of the world .
but we 're also studying just a small part of what makes us interesting as human beings , and so i would invite other people who are interested in this to ask us for the software , or even for guidance on how to move forward with that .
let me leave you with one thought in closing .
the interesting thing about studying cognition has been that we 've been limited , in a way .
we just have n't had the tools to look at interacting brains simultaneously .
the fact is , though , that even when we 're alone , we 're a profoundly social creature . we 're not a solitary mind built out of properties that kept it alive in the world independent of other people . in fact , our minds depend on other people . they depend on other people , and they 're expressed in other people , so the notion of who you are , you often do n't know who you are until you see yourself in interaction with people that are close to you , people that are enemies of you , people that are agnostic to you .
so this is the first sort of step into using that insight into what makes us human beings , turning it into a tool , and trying to gain new insights into mental illness .
thanks for having me . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- what 's in the box ?
whatever it is must be pretty important , because i 've traveled with it , moved it , from apartment to apartment to apartment .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- sound familiar ?
did you know that we americans have about three times the amount of space we did 50 years ago ?
three times .
so you 'd think , with all this extra space , we 'd have plenty of room for all our stuff .
nope .
there 's a new industry in town , a 22 billion-dollar , 2.2 billion sq. ft. industry : that of personal storage .
so we 've got triple the space , but we 've become such good shoppers that we need even more space .
so where does this lead ?
lots of credit card debt , huge environmental footprints , and perhaps not coincidentally , our happiness levels flat-lined over the same 50 years .
well i 'm here to suggest there 's a better way , that less might actually equal more .
i bet most of us have experienced at some point the joys of less : college - in your dorm , traveling - in a hotel room , camping - rig up basically nothing , maybe a boat .
whatever it was for you , i bet that , among other things , this gave you a little more freedom , a little more time .
so i 'm going to suggest that less stuff and less space are going to equal a smaller footprint .
it 's actually a great way to save you some money .
and it 's going to give you a little more ease in your life .
so i started a project called life edited at lifeedited.org to further this conversation and to find some great solutions in this area .
first up : crowd-sourcing my 420 sq. ft. apartment in manhattan with partners mutopo and jovoto.com.
i wanted it all - home office , sit down dinner for 10 , room for guests , and all my kite surfing gear .
with over 300 entries from around the world , i got it , my own little jewel box .
by buying a space that was 420 sq. ft .
instead of 600 , immediately i 'm saving 200 grand .
smaller space is going to make for smaller utilities - save some more money there , but also a smaller footprint .
and because it 's really designed around an edited set of possessions - my favorite stuff - and really designed for me , i 'm really excited to be there .
so how can you live little ?
three main approaches .
first of all , you have to edit ruthlessly .
we 've got to clear the arteries of our lives .
and that shirt that i had n't worn in years ?
it 's time for me to let it go .
we 've got to cut the extraneous out of our lives , and we 've got to learn to stem the inflow .
we need to think before we buy .
ask ourselves , " is that really going to make me happier ? truly ? "
by all means , we should buy and own some great stuff .
but we want stuff that we 're going to love for years , not just stuff .
secondly , our new mantra : small is sexy .
we want space efficiency .
we want things that are designed for how they 're used the vast majority of the time , not that rare event .
why have a six burner stove when you rarely use three ?
so we want things that nest , we want things that stack , and we want it digitized .
you can take paperwork , books , movies , and you can make it disappear - it 's magic .
finally , we want multifunctional spaces and housewares - a sink combined with a toilet , a dining table becomes a bed - same space , a little side table stretches out to seat 10 .
in the winning life edited scheme in a render here , we combine a moving wall with transformer furniture to get a lot out of the space .
look at the coffee table - it grows in height and width to seat 10 .
my office folds away , easily hidden .
my bed just pops out of the wall with two fingers .
guests ? move the moving wall , have some fold-down guest beds .
and of course , my own movie theater .
so i 'm not saying that we all need to live in 420 sq. ft .
but consider the benefits of an edited life .
go from 3,000 to 2,000 , from 1,500 to 1,000 .
most of us , maybe all of us , are here pretty happily for a bunch of days with a couple of bags , maybe a small space , a hotel room .
so when you go home and you walk through your front door , take a second and ask yourselves , " could i do with a little life editing ?
would that give me a little more freedom ?
maybe a little more time ? "
what 's in the box ?
it does n't really matter .
i know i do n't need it .
what 's in yours ?
maybe , just maybe , less might equal more .
so let 's make room for the good stuff .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- those of us who believe in heaven have some sort of idea of what heaven would be .
and in my idea , heaven is satisfied curiosity .
i think of heaven as a really comfortable cloud where i can just lie down with my belly down , like i was watching tv when i was a child , and my elbows up .
and i can basically look everywhere i want , see every movie i 've always wanted to see .
and in the same kind of trance that you can feel sometimes in the subway in new york when you 're reading , there 's something really soothing and easy .
well , the funny thing is that i already have that kind of life , in a way , because i discovered ...
it took me a while to understand it , but when i discovered around 24 years of age that i was much more comfortable with objects than with people , i finally decided to really embrace this passion .
and i basically live my life in sort of a trance , and i look around and everything i see is just the beginning of a long story .
just to give you an example : this is the exhibition , humble masterpieces , as it was at moma in 2004 .
we were in queens , we were building the big , big , big , big building in midtown , so we were in the small , small , small boondocks .
that was one of the funnest moments of my career .
but it 's not only that .
the typeface - the typeface is helvetica ; it 's its 50th anniversary this year .
and so i start thinking - max miedinger and all those swiss designers together , trying to outdo akzidenz-grotesk , and come up with a new sans-serif typeface - and the movie starts playing in my head already .
and of course , you can imagine , with humble masterpieces it was the same thing multiplied by a hundred .
and i do hope , by the way , that the real goal of the exhibition is going to have the same effect on you .
the exhibition was meant to be a way to have children think of doing ...
you know when they do homeworks at home ?
instead of having a tray with two peas , i was hoping that they would go into the kitchen cabinet or the mother 's handbag and do their museum-quality design collection on a tray .
so , everybody 's always suggesting new humble masterpieces , and at moma we put out some books just for people to suggest their own humble masterpieces .
and when you do that , usually you get 80 percent porn and 20 percent real suggestions , and instead it was all - almost - all good suggestions .
and a lot of nationalism came in .
for instance , i did n't know that the spaniards invented the mop , but they were very proud so every spaniard said " la frego . " and italians did the pizza .
and i wanted to show you , also , the suggestions from kentucky are pretty good - they had moonshine , laundry detergents and liquid nails .
and i keep it going , and i just got , -lrb- laughter -rrb- also , this suggestion from milan : it 's our traffic divider , which we call " panettone , " and it 's painted ; it 's these beautiful concrete things that you use around milan to define all the lanes of traffic .
so , think of your own , send them on if you want to - they 're always welcome .
but an exhibition like that made me understand even more what i 've been thinking of for 13 years ever since i got to moma .
i 'm italian . in italy , design is normal .
different parts of the world have a knack for different things .
i was just recently in argentina and in uruguay , and the default way of building homes in the country is a beautiful modernism that you do n't see elsewhere , but the contemporary art was terrible .
in italy , in milan especially , contemporary art really does n't have that much of a place .
but design - oh , my god .
what you find at the store at the corner , without going to any kind of fancy store , is the kind of refined design that makes everybody think that we are all so sophisticated .
it 's just what you find at the store .
and new york has another kind of knack for contemporary art .
i 'm always amazed - three-year-olds know who richard serra is and take you to the galleries .
but design , for some reason , is still misunderstood for decoration .
it 's really interesting : what many people think when i say the word " design " is they think of this kind of overdesigned - in this case , it 's overdesigned on purpose , but - decoration , interior decoration .
they think of somebody choosing fabrics .
design can be that , of course , but it can also be this .
it can be a school of design in jerusalem that tries to find a better way to design gas masks for people , because , as you know , israel deploys one gas mask per person including babies .
so , what these designers do is they find a way to lower the neckline , so that instead of being completely strangled , a teenager can also sip a coke .
they tried to make a toddler 's gas mask in such a way that the toddler can be held by the parent because proximity of the body is so important .
and then they make a little tent for the baby .
however cruel , however ruthless you can think this is it 's a great design , and it is miles away from the fancy furniture , but still , it 's part of my same field of passion .
what i 've been doing at moma since the beginning is to try to harness the power of moma because it 's great to work there . you really have power in that people usually tend to know about your exhibition or see the exhibitions , and that is power because in a design museum i would n't have as many visitors .
i 'm very well aware that 80 percent of my public is there to see picasso and matisse , and then they stumble upon my show and i keep them there .
but what i 've been trying to do is something that the curators at moma in my department have been doing ever since the museum was founded in 1929 , which is to try and see what 's going on in the world and try to use that authority in order to make things better .
there have been many episodes , and actually eames demetrius may be here in the audience , but in two instances , his great-grandfather , grandfather - i 'm always a little perplexed about the relation , exactly - charles eames the first time and then charles and ray eames the second time were involved in two competitions : one in 1940 , it was about organic furniture , and the second one in 1948 was low-cost furniture for the gis coming back from the war that then sparked a whole line of furniture .
and then there was good design for very low price .
there were a lot of programs in architecture and design that were about pointing people in the direction of a better design for a better life .
so , i started out in ' 95 with this exhibition that was called mutant materials in contemporary design .
it was about a new phase , in my opinion , in the world of design in that materials could be customized by the designers themselves .
and that put me in touch with such diverse design examples as the aerogels from the lawrence livermore lab in california ; at that time , they were beginning to be brought into the civilian market .
and at the same time , the gorgeous work of takeshi ishiguro , who did these beautiful salt-and-pepper containers that are made of rice dough .
so you see , the range is really quite diverse .
and then , for instance , this other exhibition that was entitled workspheres in 2001 , where i asked different designers to come up with ideas for the new type of work styles that were happening in the world at that time .
and you see ideo there .
it was beautiful - it was called personal skies .
the idea was that if you had a cubicle , you could project a sky on top of your head and have your own " cielo in una stanza " - a sky in a room - it 's a very famous italian song .
and other examples : this was marti guixe about working on the go , and hella jongerius , my favorite , about how to work at home .
and this lets me introduce a very important idea about design : designers are the biggest synthesizers in the world .
what they do best is make a synthesis of human needs , current conditions in economy , in materials , in sustainability issues , and then what they do at the end - if they are good - is much more than the sum of its parts .
hella jongerius is a person that is able to make a synthesis that is really quite amazing and also quite hilarious .
the idea behind her work was that at that time , everybody was saying you have to really divide your life .
instead , she said , " no , no . work and leisure can be together . "
yeah , that 's particularly gorgeous - it 's the tv dinner of 2001 .
there have been many other exhibitions in the meantime , but i do n't want to focus on my shows .
i would like , instead , to talk about how great some designers are .
i 've always had a hard time with the word " maverick . "
i came to the united states 13 years ago , and to this day i have to ask , " what does that mean ? "
so , this morning i went to see on the dictionary and it said that there was this gentleman that was not branding its cattle .
therefore , he was not following everybody 's lead , and therefore , he was a maverick .
so , designers do need to be mavericks , because the best way to design a successful object - and also an object that we were missing before - is to pretend that either it never existed or that people will be able to have a new behavior with it .
so , safe is the last exhibition that i did at moma and it ended at the beginning of last year .
it was about design that deals with safety and deals with protection .
it 's a long story because it started before 2001 and it was called emergency .
and then when 9/11 happened , i had a shock and i canceled the exhibition until , slowly but surely , it came back - as a half-full glass instead of half-empty - and it was about protection and safety .
but it ranged from such items as a complete de-mining equipment to these kind of water-sterilizing straws , so it was really wide-ranging .
it also had ... you know , cameron and i worked a little bit together , and some of the entries that you see in his website were actually in the exhibition .
but what is interesting is that we do n't need to talk about design and art anymore ; design uses whatever tools it has at its disposal in order to make a point .
it 's a sense of economy and a sense , also , of humor .
this is a beautiful project by ralph borland , who 's south african .
it 's a suit for civil disobedience .
the idea is that when you have a riot or a protest and the police comes towards you , you 're wearing this thing - it 's like a big heart and it has a loudspeaker over your heart so your heartbeat is amplified - and the police is reminded ; it 's like having a flower in front of the rifle .
and also , you can imagine , a whole group of people with the same suit will have this mounting collective heartbeat that will be scary to the police .
so , designers sometimes do n't do things that are immediately functional , but they 're functional to our understanding of issues .
tony dunne and fiona raby did this series of objects that are about our anguish and our paranoia , like this hideaway furniture that 's made in the same wood as your floor so it disappears completely and you can hide away ; or even better , the huggable atomic mushroom , which got me an article on the bulletin of atomic scientists of the united states - i do n't think it ever happened before at moma ; or this faraday chair that is supposed to protect you from radiations .
but the interesting thing in the exhibition is the discovery that the ultimate shelter is your sense of self , and there are quite a few designers that are working on this particular topic .
this is cindy van den bremen , who is a dutch designer that 's done this series of capsters .
they are athletic gear for muslim women that enable them to ski , play tennis , do whatever they want to do without having to uncap themselves .
and sometimes by doing this kind of research , you encounter such beautiful ideas of design .
twan verdonck is really young , i think he 's 27 , and working together with some psychologist he did a series of toys that are for sensorial stimulation for children that have psychological impairments .
they 're quite beautiful .
they range from this fluffy toy that is about hugging you - because autistic children like to be hugged tight , so it has a spring inside - all the way to this doll with a mirror so the child can see him or herself in the mirror and regain a sense of self .
design really looks upon the whole world and it considers the world in all of its different ranges .
i was recently at a conference on luxury organized by the herald tribune in istanbul .
and it was really interesting because i was the last speaker and before me there were people that were really talking about luxury , and i did n't want to be a party pooper but at the same time i felt that i had to kind of bring back the discourse to reality .
and the truth is that there are very different kinds of luxury , and there 's luxury that is relative for people that do n't have that much .
i want to make this point by showing you two examples of design coming from a sense of economy - very , very clear limits .
this is cuba , and this is the recycling of a squeaky toy as a bicycle bell , and this is a raincoat that is made out of rice sacks .
so they 're quite beautiful , but they 're beautiful because they 're so smart and economical .
and here is the work of two brothers from sao paulo , fernando and humberto campana , who got inspired by the poverty and smartness that they saw around them to do pieces of furniture that now are selling for an enormous amount of money .
but that 's because of the kind of strangeness of the market itself .
so really , design takes everything into account , and the interesting thing is that as the technology advances , as we become more and more wireless and impalpable , designers , instead , want us to be hands-on .
sometimes hammer-on .
this is a whole series of furniture that wants to engage you physically .
even this chair that you have to open up and then sit on so that it takes your imprint , all the way to this beautiful series of objects that are considered design by ana mir in barcelona .
from this kind of bijou made with human hair to these chocolate nipples to these intra-toe candies that your lover is supposed to suck from your toes .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's quite beautiful because somehow , this is a gorgeous moment for design .
many years ago i heard a mathematician from vienna , whose name was marchetti , explain how the innovation in the military industry - therefore , secret innovation - and the innovation in the civilian society are two sinusoids that are kind of opposed .
and that makes sense .
in moments of war there 's great technological innovation , and in the world you have to do without - well , during the second world war , you had to do without steel , you had to do without aluminum .
and then as peace comes , all of these technologies get all of a sudden available for the civilian market .
many of you might know that the potato chip chair by charles and ray eames comes exactly from that kind of instance : fiberglass was available for civilian use all of a sudden .
i think that this is a strange moment .
the rhythm of the sinusoids has changed tremendously , just like the rhythm of our life in the past 25 years , so i 'm not sure anymore what the wavelength is .
but it surely is a very important moment for design , because not only is the technology proceeding , not only is computing technology making open-source possible also in the world of design , but also the idea of sustainability - which is not only sustainability from the viewpoint of co2 emissions and footprint , but also sustainability of human interrelationships - is very much part of the work of so many designers .
and that 's why designers , more and more , are working on behaviors rather than on objects .
especially the good ones , not all of them .
i wanted to show you , for instance , the work of mathieu lehanneur , which is quite fantastic .
he 's another young designer from france who 's working - and at this point he 's working , also , with pharmaceutical companies - on new ways to engage patients , especially children , in taking their medicines with constancy and with certainty .
for instance , this is a beautiful container for asthma medicine that kind of inflates itself when it 's time for you to take the medicine , so the child has to go - pffff ! - to release and relieve the container itself .
and this other medicine is something that you can draw on your skin , so intradermal delivery enables you to joyfully be involved in this particular kind of delivery .
similarly , there 's the work of people like marti guixe that tries to involve you in a way that is really about making everything pass through your mouth so that you learn from your mistakes or from your taste , orally .
the next show that i 'm going to work on - and i 've been bugging a lot of you about this here - is about the relationship between design and science .
i 'm trying to find not the metaphors , but , rather , the points in common - the common gripes , the common issues , the common preoccupations - and i think that it will enable us to go a little further in this idea of design as an instruction , as a direction rather than a prescription of form .
and i am hoping that many of you will respond to this .
i 've sent an email already to quite a few of you .
but design and science and the possibility of visualizing different scales , and therefore , really work at the scale of the very small to make it very big and very meaningful .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- this is a thousand-year-old drawing of the brain .
it 's a diagram of the visual system .
and some things look very familiar today .
two eyes at the bottom , optic nerve flowing out from the back .
there 's a very large nose that does n't seem to be connected to anything in particular .
and if we compare this to more recent representations of the visual system , you 'll see that things have gotten substantially more complicated over the intervening thousand years .
and that 's because today we can see what 's inside of the brain , rather than just looking at its overall shape .
imagine you wanted to understand how a computer works and all you could see was a keyboard , a mouse , a screen .
you really would be kind of out of luck .
you want to be able to open it up , crack it open , look at the wiring inside .
and up until a little more than a century ago , nobody was able to do that with the brain .
nobody had had a glimpse of the brain 's wiring .
and that 's because if you take a brain out of the skull and you cut a thin slice of it , put it under even a very powerful microscope , there 's nothing there .
it 's gray , formless .
there 's no structure . it wo n't tell you anything .
and this all changed in the late 19th century .
suddenly , new chemical stains for brain tissue were developed and they gave us our first glimpses at brain wiring .
the computer was cracked open .
so what really launched modern neuroscience was a stain called the golgi stain .
and it works in a very particular way .
instead of staining all of the cells inside of a tissue , it somehow only stains about one percent of them .
it clears the forest , reveals the trees inside .
if everything had been labeled , nothing would have been visible .
so somehow it shows what 's there .
spanish neuroanatomist santiago ramon y cajal , who 's widely considered the father of modern neuroscience , applied this golgi stain , which yields data which looks like this , and really gave us the modern notion of the nerve cell , the neuron .
and if you 're thinking of the brain as a computer , this is the transistor .
and very quickly cajal realized that neurons do n't operate alone , but rather make connections with others that form circuits just like in a computer .
today , a century later , when researchers want to visualize neurons , they light them up from the inside rather than darkening them .
and there 's several ways of doing this .
but one of the most popular ones involves green fluorescent protein .
now green fluorescent protein , which oddly enough comes from a bioluminescent jellyfish , is very useful .
because if you can get the gene for green fluorescent protein and deliver it to a cell , that cell will glow green - or any of the many variants now of green fluorescent protein , you get a cell to glow many different colors .
and so coming back to the brain , this is from a genetically engineered mouse called " brainbow . "
and it 's so called , of course , because all of these neurons are glowing different colors .
now sometimes neuroscientists need to identify individual molecular components of neurons , molecules , rather than the entire cell .
and there 's several ways of doing this , but one of the most popular ones involves using antibodies .
and you 're familiar , of course , with antibodies as the henchmen of the immune system .
but it turns out that they 're so useful to the immune system because they can recognize specific molecules , like , for example , the coat protein of a virus that 's invading the body .
and researchers have used this fact in order to recognize specific molecules inside of the brain , recognize specific substructures of the cell and identify them individually .
and a lot of the images i 've been showing you here are very beautiful , but they 're also very powerful .
they have great explanatory power .
this , for example , is an antibody staining against serotonin transporters in a slice of mouse brain .
and you 've heard of serotonin , of course , in the context of diseases like depression and anxiety .
you 've heard of ssris , which are drugs that are used to treat these diseases .
and in order to understand how serotonin works , it 's critical to understand where the serontonin machinery is .
and antibody stainings like this one can be used to understand that sort of question .
i 'd like to leave you with the following thought : green fluorescent protein and antibodies are both totally natural products at the get-go .
they were evolved by nature in order to get a jellyfish to glow green for whatever reason , or in order to detect the coat protein of an invading virus , for example .
and only much later did scientists come onto the scene and say , " hey , these are tools , these are functions that we could use in our own research tool palette . "
and instead of applying feeble human minds to designing these tools from scratch , there were these ready-made solutions right out there in nature developed and refined steadily for millions of years by the greatest engineer of all .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- there 's actually a major health crisis today in terms of the shortage of organs .
the fact is that we 're living longer .
medicine has done a much better job of making us live longer , and the problem is , as we age , our organs tend to fail more , and so currently there are not enough organs to go around .
in fact , in the last 10 years , the number of patients requiring an organ has doubled , while in the same time , the actual number of transplants has barely gone up .
so this is now a public health crisis .
so that 's where this field comes in that we call the field of regenerative medicine .
it really involves many different areas .
you can use , actually , scaffolds , biomaterials - they 're like the piece of your blouse or your shirt - but specific materials you can actually implant in patients and they will do well and help you regenerate .
or we can use cells alone , either your very own cells or different stem cell populations .
or we can use both .
we can use , actually , biomaterials and the cells together .
and that 's where the field is today .
but it 's actually not a new field .
interestingly , this is a book that was published back in 1938 .
it 's titled " the culture of organs . "
the first author , alexis carrel , a nobel prize winner .
he actually devised some of the same technologies used today for suturing blood vessels , and some of the blood vessel grafts we use today were actually designed by alexis .
but i want you to note his co-author : charles lindbergh .
that 's the same charles lindbergh who actually spent the rest of his life working with alexis at the rockefeller institute in new york so if the field 's been around for so long , why so few clinical advances ?
and that really has to do to many different challenges .
but if i were to point to three challenges , the first one is actually the design of materials that could go in your body and do well over time .
and many advances now , we can do that fairly readily .
the second challenge was cells .
we could not get enough of your cells to grow outside of your body .
over the last 20 years , we 've basically tackled that .
many scientists can now grow many different types of cells .
plus we have stem cells .
but even now , 2011 , there 's still certain cells that we just ca n't grow from the patient .
liver cells , nerve cells , pancreatic cells - we still ca n't grow them even today .
and the third challenge is vascularity , the actual supply of blood to allow those organs or tissues to survive once we regenerate them .
so we can actually use biomaterials now .
this is actually a biomaterial .
we can weave them , knit them , or we can make them like you see here .
this is actually like a cotton candy machine .
you saw the spray going in .
that was like the fibers of the cotton candy creating this structure , this tubularized structure , which is a biomaterial that we can then use to help your body regenerate using your very own cells to do so .
and that 's exactly what we did here .
this is actually a patient who -lsb- was -rsb- presented with a deceased organ , and we then created one of these smart biomaterials , and then we then used that smart biomaterial to replace and repair that patient 's structure .
what we did was we actually used the biomaterial as a bridge so that the cells in the organ could walk on that bridge , if you will , and help to bridge the gap to regenerate that tissue .
and you see that patient now six months after with an x-ray showing you the regenerated tissue , which is fully regenerated when you analyze it under the microscope .
we can also use cells alone .
these are actually cells that we obtained .
these are stem cells that we create from specific sources , and we can drive them to become heart cells , and they start beating in culture .
so they know what to do .
the cells genetically know what to do , and they start beating together .
now today , many clinical trials are using different kinds of stem cells for heart disease .
so that 's actually now in patients .
or if we 're going to use larger structures to replace larger structures , we can then use the patient 's own cells , or some cell population , and the biomaterials , the scaffolds , together .
so the concept here : so if you do have a deceased or injured organ , we take a very small piece of that tissue , less than half the size of a postage stamp .
we then tease the cells apart , we grow the cells outside the body .
we then take a scaffold , a biomaterial - again , looks very much like a piece of your blouse or your shirt - we then shape that material , and we then use those cells to coat that material one layer at a time - very much like baking a layer cake , if you will .
we then place it in an oven-like device , and we 're able to create that structure and bring it out .
this is actually a heart valve that we 've engineered , and you can see here , we have the structure of the heart valve and we 've seeded that with cells , and then we exercise it .
so you see the leaflets opening and closing - of this heart valve that 's currently being used experimentally to try to get it to further studies .
another technology that we have used in patients actually involves bladders .
we actually take a very small piece of the bladder from the patient - less than half the size of a postage stamp .
we then grow the cells outside the body , take the scaffold , coat the scaffold with the cells - the patient 's own cells , two different cell types .
we then put it in this oven-like device .
it has the same conditions as the human body - 37 degrees centigrade , 95 percent oxygen .
a few weeks later , you have your engineered organ that we 're able to implant back into the patient .
for these specific patients , we actually just suture these materials .
we use three-dimensional imagining analysis , but we actually created these biomaterials by hand .
but we now have better ways to create these structures with the cells .
we use now some type of technologies , where for solid organs , for example , like the liver , what we do is we take discard livers .
as you know , a lot of organs are actually discarded , not used .
so we can take these liver structures , which are not going to be used , and we then put them in a washing machine-like structure that will allow the cells to be washed away .
two weeks later , you have something that looks like a liver .
you can hold it like a liver , but it has no cells ; it 's just a skeleton of the liver .
and we then can re-perfuse the liver with cells , preserving the blood vessel tree .
so we actually perfuse first the blood vessel tree with the patient 's own blood vessel cells , and we then infiltrate the parenchyma with the liver cells .
and we now have been able just to show the creation of human liver tissue just this past month using this technology .
another technology that we 've used is actually that of printing .
this is actually a desktop inkjet printer , but instead of using ink , we 're using cells .
and you can actually see here the printhead going through and printing this structure , and it takes about 40 minutes to print this structure .
and there 's a 3d elevator that then actually goes down one layer at a time each time the printhead goes through .
and then finally you 're able to get that structure out .
you can pop that structure out of the printer and implant it .
and this is actually a piece of bone that i 'm going to show you in this slide that was actually created with this desktop printer and implanted as you see here .
that was all new bone that was implanted using these techniques .
another more advanced technology we 're looking at right now , our next generation of technologies , are more sophisticated printers .
this particular printer we 're designing now is actually one where we print right on the patient .
so what you see here - i know it sounds funny , but that 's the way it works .
because in reality , what you want to do is you actually want to have the patient on the bed with the wound , and you have a scanner , basically like a flatbed scanner .
that 's what you see here on the right side .
you see a scanner technology that first scans the wound on the patient and then it comes back with the printheads actually printing the layers that you require on the patients themselves .
this is how it actually works .
here 's the scanner going through , scanning the wound .
once it 's scanned , it sends information in the correct layers of cells where they need to be .
and now you 're going to see here a demo of this actually being done in a representative wound .
and we actually do this with a gel so that you can lift the gel material .
so once those cells are on the patient they will stick where they need to be .
and this is actually new technology still under development .
we 're also working on more sophisticated printers .
because in reality , our biggest challenge are the solid organs .
i do n't know if you realize this , but 90 percent of the patients on the transplant list are actually waiting for a kidney .
patients are dying every day because we do n't have enough of those organs to go around .
so this is more challenging - large organ , vascular , a lot of blood vessel supply , a lot of cells present .
so the strategy here is - this is actually a ct scan , an x-ray - and we go layer by layer , using computerized morphometric imaging analysis and 3d reconstruction to get right down to those patient 's own kidneys .
we then are able to actually image those , do 360 degree rotation to analyze the kidney in its full volumetric characteristics , and we then are able to actually take this information and then scan this in a printing computerized form .
so we go layer by layer through the organ , analyzing each layer as we go through the organ , and we then are able to send that information , as you see here , through the computer and actually design the organ for the patient .
this actually shows the actual printer .
and this actually shows that printing .
in fact , we actually have the printer right here .
so while we 've been talking today , you can actually see the printer back here in the back stage .
that 's actually the actual printer right now , and that 's been printing this kidney structure that you see here .
it takes about seven hours to print a kidney , so this is about three hours into it now .
and dr. kang 's going to walk onstage right now , and we 're actually going to show you one of these kidneys that we printed a little bit earlier today .
put a pair of gloves here .
thank you .
go backwards .
so , these gloves are a little bit small on me , but here it is .
you can actually see that kidney as it was printed earlier today .
-lrb- applause -rrb- has a little bit of consistency to it .
this is dr. kang who 's been working with us on this project , and part of our team .
thank you , dr. kang . i appreciate it .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so this is actually a new generation .
this is actually the printer that you see here onstage .
and this is actually a new technology we 're working on now .
in reality , we now have a long history of doing this .
i 'm going to share with you a clip in terms of technology we have had in patients now for a while .
and this is actually a very brief clip - only about 30 seconds - of a patient who actually received an organ .
-lrb- video -rrb- luke massella : i was really sick . i could barely get out of bed .
i was missing school . it was pretty much miserable .
i could n't go out and play basketball at recess without feeling like i was going to pass out when i got back inside .
i felt so sick .
i was facing basically a lifetime of dialysis , and i do n't even like to think about what my life would be like if i was on that .
so after the surgery , life got a lot better for me .
i was able to do more things .
i was able to wrestle in high school .
i became the captain of the team , and that was great .
i was able to be a normal kid with my friends .
and because they used my own cells to build this bladder , it 's going to be with me .
i 've got it for life , so i 'm all set .
-lrb- applause -rrb- juan enriquez : these experiments sometimes work , and it 's very cool when they do .
luke , come up please .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so luke , before last night , when 's the last time you saw tony ?
lm : ten years ago , when i had my surgery - and it 's really great to see him .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- je : and tell us a little bit about what you 're doing .
lm : well right now i 'm in college at the university of connecticut .
i 'm a sophomore and studying communications , tv and mass media , and basically trying to live life like a normal kid , which i always wanted growing up .
but it was hard to do that when i was born with spina bifida and my kidneys and bladder were n't working .
i went through about 16 surgeries , and it seemed impossible to do that when i was in kidney failure when i was 10 .
and this surgery came along and basically made me who i am today and saved my life .
-lrb- applause -rrb- je : and tony 's done hundreds of these ?
lm : what i know from , he 's working really hard in his lab and coming up with crazy stuff .
i know i was one of the first 10 people to have this surgery .
and when i was 10 , i did n't realize how amazing it was .
i was a little kid , and i was like , " yeah . i 'll have that . i 'll have that surgery . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- all i wanted to do was to get better , and i did n't realize how amazing it really was until now that i 'm older and i see the amazing things that he 's doing .
je : when you got this call out of the blue - tony 's really shy , and it took a lot of convincing to get somebody as modest as tony to allow us to bring luke .
so luke , you go to your communications professors - you 're majoring in communications - and you ask them for permission to come to ted , which might have a little bit to do with communications , and what was their reaction ?
lm : most of my professors were all for it , and they said , " bring pictures and show me the clips online , " and " i 'm happy for you . "
there were a couple that were a little stubborn , but i had to talk to them .
i pulled them aside .
je : well , it 's an honor and a privilege to meet you .
thank you so much . -lrb- lm : thank you so much . -rrb- je : thank you , tony .
-lrb- applause -rrb- john hockenberry : it 's great to be here with you , tom .
and i want to start with a question that has just been consuming me since i first became familiar with your work .
in you work there 's always this kind of hybrid quality of a natural force in some sort of interplay with creative force .
are they ever in equilibrium in the way that you see your work ?
tom shannon : yeah , the subject matter that i 'm looking for , it 's usually to solve a question .
i had the question popped into my head : what does the cone that connects the sun and the earth look like if you could connect the two spheres ?
and in proportion , what would the size of the sphere and the length , and what would the taper be to the earth ?
and so i went about and made that sculpture , turning it out of solid bronze .
and i did one that was about 35 feet long .
the sun end was about four inches in diameter , and then it tapered over about 35 feet to about a millimeter at the earth end .
and so for me , it was really exciting just to see what it looks like if you could step outside and into a larger context , as though you were an astronaut , and see these two things as an object , because they are so intimately bound , and one is meaningless without the other .
jh : is there a relief in playing with these forces ?
and i 'm wondering how much of a sense of discovery there is in playing with these forces .
ts : well , like the magnetically levitated objects - like that silver one there , that was the result of hundreds of experiments with magnets , trying to find a way to make something float with the least possible connection to the ground .
so i got it down to just one tether to be able to support that .
jh : now is this electromagnetic here , or are these static ?
ts : those are permanent magnets , yeah .
jh : because if the power went out , there would just be a big noise .
ts : yeah .
it 's really unsatisfactory having plug-in art .
jh : i agree .
ts : the magnetic works are a combination of gravity and magnetism , so it 's a kind of mixture of these ambient forces that influence everything .
the sun has a tremendous field that extends way beyond the planets and the earth 's magnetic field protects us from the sun .
so there 's this huge invisible shape structures that magnetism takes in the universe .
but with the pendulum , it allows me to manifest these invisible forces that are holding the magnets up .
my sculptures are normally very simplified .
i try to refine them down to very simple forms .
but the paintings become very complex , because i think the fields that are supporting them , they 're billowing , and they 're interpenetrating , and they 're interference patterns .
jh : and they 're non-deterministic .
i mean , you do n't know necessarily where you 're headed when you begin , even though the forces can be calculated .
so the evolution of this - i gather this is n't your first pendulum .
ts : no . -lrb- jh : no . -rrb- ts : the first one i did was in the late 70 's , and i just had a simple cone with a spigot at the bottom of it .
i threw it into an orbit , and it only had one color , and when it got to the center , the paint kept running out , so i had to run in there , did n't have any control over the spigot remotely .
so that told me right away : i need a remote control device .
but then i started dreaming of having six colors .
i sort of think about it as the dna - these colors , the red , blue , yellow , the primary colors and white and black .
and if you put them together in different combinations - just like printing in a sense , like how a magazine color is printed - and put them under certain forces , which is orbiting them or passing them back and forth or drawing with them , these amazing things started appearing .
jh : it looks like we 're loaded for bear here .
ts : yeah , well let 's put a couple of canvases .
i 'll ask a couple of my sons to set up the canvases here .
i want to just say - so this is jack , nick and louie .
jh : thanks guys .
ts : so here are the - jh : all right , i 'll get out of the way here .
ts : i 'm just going to throw this into an orbit and see if i can paint everybody 's shoes in the front .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- jh : whoa . that is ...
ooh , nice .
ts : so something like this .
i 'm doing this as a demo , and it 's more playful , but inevitably , all of this can be used .
i can redeem this painting , just continuing on , doing layers upon layers .
and i keep it around for a couple of weeks , and i 'm contemplating it , and i 'll do another session with it and bring it up to another level , where all of this becomes the background , the depth of it .
jh : that 's fantastic .
so the valves at the bottom of those tubes there are like radio-controlled airplane valves .
ts : yes , they 're servos with cams that pinch these rubber tubes .
and they can pinch them very tight and stop it , or you can have them wide open .
and all of the colors come out one central port at the bottom .
you can always be changing colors , put aluminum paint , or i could put anything into this .
it could be tomato sauce , or anything could be dispensed - sand , powders or anything like that .
jh : so many forces there .
you 've got gravity , you 've got the centrifugal force , you 've got the fluid dynamics .
each of these beautiful paintings , are they images in and of themselves , or are they records of a physical event called the pendulum approaching the canvas ?
ts : well , this painting here , i wanted to do something very simple , a simple , iconic image of two ripples interfering .
so the one on the right was done first , and then the one on the left was done over it .
and then i left gaps so you could see the one that was done before .
and then when i did the second one , it really disturbed the piece - these big blue lines crashing through the center of it - and so it created a kind of tension and an overlap .
there are lines in front of the one on the right , and there are lines behind the one on the left , and so it takes it into different planes .
what it 's also about , just the little events , the events of the interpenetration of - jh : two stars , or - ts : two things that happened - there 's an interference pattern , and then a third thing happens .
there are shapes that come about just by the marriage of two events that are happening , and i 'm very interested in that .
like the occurrence of moire patterns .
like this green one , this is a painting i did about 10 years ago , but it has some - see , in the upper third - there are these moires and interference patterns that are radio kind of imagery .
and that 's something that in painting i 've never seen done .
i 've never seen a representation of a kind of radio interference patterns , which are so ubiquitous and such an important part of our lives .
jh : is that a literal part of the image , or is my eye making that interference pattern - is my eye completing that interference pattern ?
ts : it is the paint actually , makes it real .
it 's really manifested there .
if i throw a very concentric circle , or concentric ellipse , it just dutifully makes these evenly spaced lines , which get closer and closer together , which describes how gravity works .
there 's something very appealing about the exactitude of science that i really enjoy .
and i love the shapes that i see in scientific observations and apparatus , especially astronomical forms and the idea of the vastness of it , the scale , is very interesting to me .
my focus in recent years has kind of shifted more toward biology .
some of these paintings , when you look at them very close , odd things appear that really look like horses or birds or crocodiles , elephants .
there are lots of things that appear .
when you look into it , it 's sort of like looking at cloud patterns , but sometimes they 're very modeled and highly rendered .
and then there are all these forms that we do n't know what they are , but they 're equally well-resolved and complex .
so i think , conceivably , those could be predictive .
because since it has the ability to make forms that look like forms that we 're familiar with in biology , it 's also making other forms that we 're not familiar with .
and maybe it 's the kind of forms we 'll discover underneath the surface of mars , where there are probably lakes with fish swimming under the surface .
jh : oh , let 's hope so . oh , my god , let 's .
oh , please , yes . oh , i 'm so there .
you know , it seems at this stage in your life , you also very personally are in this state of confrontation with a sort of dissonant - i suppose it 's an electromagnetic force that somehow governs your parkinson 's and this creative force that is both the artist who is in the here and now and this sort of arc of your whole life .
is that relevant to your work ?
ts : as it turns out , this device kind of comes in handy , because i do n't have to have the fine motor skills to do , that i can operate slides , which is more of a mental process .
i 'm looking at it and making decisions : it needs more red , it needs more blue , it needs a different shape .
and so i make these creative decisions and can execute them in a much , much simpler way .
i mean , i 've got the symptoms .
i guess parkinson 's kind of creeps up over the years , but at a certain point you start seeing the symptoms .
in my case , my left hand has a significant tremor and my left leg also .
i 'm left-handed , and so i draw .
all my creations really start on small drawings , which i have thousands of , and it 's my way of just thinking .
i draw with a simple pencil , and at first , the parkinson 's was really upsetting , because i could n't get the pencil to stand still .
jh : so you 're not a gatekeeper for these forces .
you do n't think of yourself as the master of these forces .
you think of yourself as the servant .
ts : nature is - well , it 's a godsend .
it just has so much in it .
and i think nature wants to express itself in the sense that we are nature , humans are of the universe .
the universe is in our mind , and our minds are in the universe .
and we are expressions of the universe , basically .
as humans , ultimately being part of the universe , we 're kind of the spokespeople or the observer part of the constituency of the universe .
and to interface with it , with a device that lets these forces that are everywhere act and show what they can do , giving them pigment and paint just like an artist , it 's a good ally .
it 's a terrific studio assistant .
jh : well , i love the idea that somewhere within this idea of fine motion and control with the traditional skills that you have with your hand , some sort of more elemental force gets revealed , and that 's the beauty here .
tom , thank you so much . it 's been really , really great .
ts : thank you , john .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i want to start with a story , a la seth godin , from when i was 12 years old .
my uncle ed gave me a beautiful blue sweater - at least i thought it was beautiful .
and it had fuzzy zebras walking across the stomach , and mount kilimanjaro and mount meru were kind of right across the chest , that were also fuzzy .
and i wore it whenever i could , thinking it was the most fabulous thing i owned .
until one day in ninth grade , when i was standing with a number of the football players .
and my body had clearly changed , and matt , who was undeniably my nemesis in high school , said in a booming voice that we no longer had to go far away to go on ski trips , but we could all ski on mount novogratz .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i was so humiliated and mortified that i immediately ran home to my mother and chastised her for ever letting me wear the hideous sweater .
we drove to the goodwill and we threw the sweater away somewhat ceremoniously , my idea being that i would never have to think about the sweater nor see it ever again .
fast forward - 11 years later , i 'm a 25-year-old kid .
i 'm working in kigali , rwanda , jogging through the steep slopes , when i see , 10 feet in front of me , a little boy - 11 years old - running toward me , wearing my sweater .
and i 'm thinking , no , this is not possible .
but so , curious , i run up to the child - of course scaring the living bejesus out of him - grab him by the collar , turn it over , and there is my name written on the collar of this sweater .
i tell that story , because it has served and continues to serve as a metaphor to me about the level of connectedness that we all have on this earth .
we so often do n't realize what our action and our inaction does to people we think we will never see and never know .
i also tell it because it tells a larger contextual story of what aid is and can be .
that this traveled into the goodwill in virginia , and moved its way into the larger industry , which at that point was giving millions of tons of secondhand clothing to africa and asia .
which was a very good thing , providing low cost clothing .
and at the same time , certainly in rwanda , it destroyed the local retailing industry .
not to say that it should n't have , but that we have to get better at answering the questions that need to be considered when we think about consequences and responses .
so , i 'm going to stick in rwanda , circa 1985 , 1986 , where i was doing two things .
i had started a bakery with 20 unwed mothers .
we were called the " bad news bears , " and our notion was we were going to corner the snack food business in kigali , which was not hard because there were no snacks before us .
and because we had a good business model , we actually did it , and i watched these women transform on a micro-level .
but at the same time , i started a micro-finance bank , and tomorrow iqbal quadir is going to talk about grameen , which is the grandfather of all micro-finance banks , which now is a worldwide movement - you talk about a meme - but then it was quite new , especially in an economy that was moving from barter into trade .
we got a lot of things right .
we focused on a business model ; we insisted on skin in the game .
the women made their own decisions at the end of the day as to how they would use this access to credit to build their little businesses , earn more income so they could take care of their families better .
what we did n't understand , what was happening all around us , with the confluence of fear , ethnic strife and certainly an aid game , if you will , that was playing into this invisible but certainly palpable movement inside rwanda , that at that time , 30 percent of the budget was all foreign aid .
the genocide happened in 1994 , seven years after these women all worked together to build this dream .
and the good news was that the institution , the banking institution , lasted .
in fact , it became the largest rehabilitation lender in the country .
the bakery was completely wiped out , but the lessons for me were that accountability counts - got to build things with people on the ground , using business models where , as steven levitt would say , the incentives matter .
understand , however complex we may be , incentives matter .
so when chris raised to me how wonderful everything that was happening in the world , that we were seeing a shift in zeitgeist , on the one hand i absolutely agree with him , and i was so thrilled to see what happened with the g8 - that the world , because of people like tony blair and bono and bob geldof - the world is talking about global poverty ; the world is talking about africa in ways i have never seen in my life .
it 's thrilling .
and at the same time , what keeps me up at night is a fear that we 'll look at the victories of the g8 - 50 billion dollars in increased aid to africa , 40 billion in reduced debt - as the victory , as more than chapter one , as our moral absolution .
and in fact , what we need to do is see that as chapter one , celebrate it , close it , and recognize that we need a chapter two that is all about execution , all about the how-to .
and if you remember one thing from what i want to talk about today , it 's that the only way to end poverty , to make it history , is to build viable systems on the ground that deliver critical and affordable goods and services to the poor , in ways that are financially sustainable and scaleable .
if we do that , we really can make poverty history .
and it was that - that whole philosophy - that encouraged me to start my current endeavor called " acumen fund , " which is trying to build some mini-blueprints for how we might do that in water , health and housing in pakistan , india , kenya , tanzania and egypt .
and i want to talk a little bit about that , and some of the examples , so you can see what it is that we 're doing .
but before i do this - and this is another one of my pet peeves - i want to talk a little bit about who the poor are .
because we too often talk about them as these strong , huge masses of people yearning to be free , when in fact , it 's quite an amazing story .
on a macro level , four billion people on earth make less than four dollars a day .
that 's who we talk about when we think about " the poor . "
if you aggregate it , it 's the third largest economy on earth , and yet most of these people go invisible .
where we typically work , there 's people making between one and three dollars a day .
who are these people ?
they are farmers and factory workers .
they work in government offices . they 're drivers .
they are domestics .
they typically pay for critical goods and services like water , like healthcare , like housing , and they pay 30 to 40 times what their middleclass counterparts pay - certainly where we work in karachi and nairobi .
the poor also are willing to make , and do make , smart decisions , if you give them that opportunity .
so , two examples .
one is in india , where there are 240 million farmers , most of whom make less than two dollars a day .
where we work in aurangabad , the land is extraordinarily parched .
you see people on average making 60 cents to a dollar .
this guy in pink is a social entrepreneur named ami tabar .
what he did was see what was happening in israel , larger approaches , and figure out how to do a drip irrigation , which is a way of bringing water directly to the plant stock .
but previously it 's only been created for large-scale farms , so ami tabar took this and modularized it down to an eighth of an acre .
a couple of principles : build small .
make it infinitely expandable and affordable to the poor .
this family , sarita and her husband , bought a 15-dollar unit when they were living in a - literally a three-walled lean-to with a corrugated iron roof .
after one harvest , they had increased their income enough to buy a second system to do their full quarter-acre .
a couple of years later , i meet them .
they now make four dollars a day , which is pretty much middle class for india , and they showed me the concrete foundation they had just laid to build their house .
and i swear , you could see the future in that woman 's eyes .
something i truly believe .
you ca n't talk about poverty today without talking about malaria bed nets , and i again give jeffrey sachs of harvard huge kudos for bringing to the world this notion of his rage - for five dollars you can save a life .
malaria is a disease that kills one to three million people a year .
300 to 500 million cases are reported .
it 's estimated that africa loses about 13 billion dollars a year to the disease .
five dollars can save a life .
we can send people to the moon ; we can see if there 's life on mars - why ca n't we get five-dollar nets to 500 million people ?
the question , though , is not " why ca n't we ? "
the question is how can we help africans do this for themselves ?
a lot of hurdles .
one : production is too low . two : price is too high .
three : this is a good road in - right near where our factory is located .
distribution is a nightmare , but not impossible .
we started by making a 350,000-dollar loan to the largest traditional bed net manufacturer in africa so that they could transfer technology from japan and build these long-lasting , five-year nets .
here are just some pictures of the factory .
today , three years later , the company has employed another thousand women .
it contributes about 600,000 dollars in wages to the economy of tanzania .
it 's the largest company in tanzania .
the throughput rate right now is 1.5 million nets , three million by the end of the year .
we hope to have seven million at the end of next year .
so the production side is working .
on the distribution side , though , as a world , we have a lot of work to do .
right now , 95 percent of these nets are being bought by the u.n. , and then given primarily to people around africa .
we 're looking at building on some of the most precious resources of africa : people .
their women .
and so i want you to meet jacqueline , my namesake , 21 years old .
if she were born anywhere else but tanzania , i 'm telling you , she could run wall street .
she runs two of the lines , and has already saved enough money to put a down payment on her house .
she makes about two dollars a day , is creating an education fund , and told me she is not marrying nor having children until these things are completed .
and so , when i told her about our idea - that maybe we could take a tupperware model from the united states , and find a way for the women themselves to go out and sell these nets to others - she quickly started calculating what she herself could make and signed up .
we took a lesson from ideo , one of our favorite companies , and quickly did a prototyping on this , and took jacqueline into the area where she lives .
she brought 10 of the women with whom she interacts together to see if she could sell these nets , five dollars apiece , despite the fact that people say nobody will buy one , and we learned a lot about how you sell things .
not coming in with our own notions , because she did n't even talk about malaria until the very end .
first , she talked about comfort , status , beauty .
these nets , she said , you put them on the floor , bugs leave your house .
children can sleep through the night ; the house looks beautiful ; you hang them in the window .
and we 've started making curtains , and not only is it beautiful , but people can see status - that you care about your children .
only then did she talk about saving your children 's lives .
a lot of lessons to be learned in terms of how we sell goods and services to the poor .
i want to end just by saying that there 's enormous opportunity to make poverty history .
to do it right , we have to build business models that matter , that are scaleable and that work with africans , indians , people all over the developing world who fit in this category , to do it themselves .
because at the end of the day , it 's about engagement .
it 's about understanding that people really do n't want handouts , that they want to make their own decisions ; they want to solve their own problems ; and that by engaging with them , not only do we create much more dignity for them , but for us as well .
and so i urge all of you to think next time as to how to engage with this notion and this opportunity that we all have - to make poverty history - by really becoming part of the process and moving away from an us-and-them world , and realizing that it 's about all of us , and the kind of world that we , together , want to live in and share .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you . ooh , i 'm like , " phew , phew , calm down . get back into my body now . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- usually when i play out , the first thing that happens is people scream out , " what 's she doing ? ! "
i 'll play at these rock shows , be on stage standing completely still , and they 're like , " what 's she doing ? ! what 's she doing ? ! "
and then i 'll kind of be like - -lrb- vvvwow ! -rrb- - and then they 're like , " whoa ! "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'm sure you 're trying to figure out , " well , how does this thing work ? "
well , what i 'm doing is controlling the pitch with my left hand .
see , the closer i get to this antenna , the higher the note gets - -lrb- portamento -rrb- - and you can get it really low .
and with this hand i 'm controlling the volume , so the further away my right hand gets , the louder it gets .
-lrb- tones -rrb- so basically , with both of your hands you 're controlling pitch and volume and kind of trying to create the illusion that you 're doing separate notes , when really it 's continuously going ...
-lrb- flourish ... beep -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- sometimes i startle myself : i 'll forget that i have it on , and i 'll lean over to pick up something , and then it goes like - -lrb- blip -rrb- - " oh ! "
and it 's like a funny sound effect that follows you around if you do n't turn the thing off .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- maybe we 'll go into the next tune , because i totally lost where this is going .
we 're going to do a song by david mash called " listen : the words are gone , " and maybe i 'll have words come back into me afterwards if i can relax .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so , i 'm trying to think of some of the questions that are commonly asked ; there are so many .
and ... well , i guess i could tell you a little of the history of the theremin .
it was invented around the 1920s , and the inventor , léon theremin - he also was a musician besides an inventor - he came up with the idea for making the theremin , i think , when he was working on some shortwave radios .
and there 'd be that sound in the signal - it 's like -lrb- screeching -rrb- - and he thought , " oh , what if i could control that sound and turn it into an instrument , because there are pitches in it . "
and so somehow through developing that , he eventually came to make the theremin the way it is now .
and a lot of times , even kids nowadays , they 'll make reference to a theremin by going , " whoo-hoo-hoo-hoo , " because in the ' 50s it was used in the sci-fi horror movies , that sound that 's like ... -lrb- woo-hoo-hoo-hoo -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's kind of a funny , goofy sound to do .
and sometimes if i have too much coffee , then my vibrato gets out of hand .
you 're really sensitive to your body and its functions when you 're behind this thing .
you have to stay so still if you want to have the most control .
it reminds me of the balancing act earlier on - what michael was doing - because you 're fighting so hard to keep the balance with what you 're playing with and stay in tune , and at the same time you do n't want to focus so much on being in tune all the time ; you want to be feeling the music .
and then also , you 're trying to stay very , very , very still because little movements with other parts of your body will affect the pitch , or sometimes if you 're holding a low note - -lrb- tone rising out of key -rrb- - and breathing will make it ...
-lrb- laughter -rrb- if i pass out on the next song ...
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i think of it almost like like a yoga instrument because it makes you so aware of every little crazy thing your body is doing , or just aware of what you do n't want it to be doing while you 're playing ; you do n't want to have any sudden movements .
and if i go to a club and play a gig , people are like , " here , have some drinks on us ! "
and it 's like , " well , i 'm about to go on soon ; i do n't want to be like - -lrb- teetering tones -rrb- - you know ? "
it really does reflect the mood that you 're in also , if you 're ...
it 's similar to being a vocalist , except instead of it coming out of your throat , you 're controlling it just in the air and you do n't really have a point of reference ; you 're always relying on your ears and adjusting constantly .
you just have to always adjust to what 's happening and realize you 'll have bummer notes come here and there and listen to it , adjust it , and just move on , or else you 'll get too tied up and go crazy . like me .
i think we will play another tune now .
i 'm going to do " lush life . " it 's one of my favorite tunes to play .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- i want to start my talk today with two observations about the human species .
the first observation is something that you might think is quite obvious , and that 's that our species , homo sapiens , is actually really , really smart - like , ridiculously smart - like you 're all doing things that no other species on the planet does right now .
and this is , of course , not the first time you 've probably recognized this .
of course , in addition to being smart , we 're also an extremely vain species .
so we like pointing out the fact that we 're smart .
you know , so i could turn to pretty much any sage from shakespeare to stephen colbert to point out things like the fact that we 're noble in reason and infinite in faculties and just kind of awesome-er than anything else on the planet when it comes to all things cerebral .
but of course , there 's a second observation about the human species that i want to focus on a little bit more , and that 's the fact that even though we 're actually really smart , sometimes uniquely smart , we can also be incredibly , incredibly dumb when it comes to some aspects of our decision making .
now i 'm seeing lots of smirks out there .
do n't worry , i 'm not going to call anyone in particular out on any aspects of your own mistakes .
but of course , just in the last two years we see these unprecedented examples of human ineptitude .
and we 've watched as the tools we uniquely make to pull the resources out of our environment kind of just blow up in our face .
we 've watched the financial markets that we uniquely create - these markets that were supposed to be foolproof - we 've watched them kind of collapse before our eyes .
but both of these two embarrassing examples , i think , do n't highlight what i think is most embarrassing about the mistakes that humans make , which is that we 'd like to think that the mistakes we make are really just the result of a couple bad apples or a couple really sort of fail blog-worthy decisions .
but it turns out , what social scientists are actually learning is that most of us , when put in certain contexts , will actually make very specific mistakes .
the errors we make are actually predictable .
we make them again and again .
and they 're actually immune to lots of evidence .
when we get negative feedback , we still , the next time we 're face with a certain context , tend to make the same errors .
and so this has been a real puzzle to me as a sort of scholar of human nature .
what i 'm most curious about is , how is a species that 's as smart as we are capable of such bad and such consistent errors all the time ?
you know , we 're the smartest thing out there , why ca n't we figure this out ?
in some sense , where do our mistakes really come from ?
and having thought about this a little bit , i see a couple different possibilities .
one possibility is , in some sense , it 's not really our fault .
because we 're a smart species , we can actually create all kinds of environments that are super , super complicated , sometimes too complicated for us to even actually understand , even though we 've actually created them .
we create financial markets that are super complex .
we create mortgage terms that we ca n't actually deal with .
and of course , if we are put in environments where we ca n't deal with it , in some sense makes sense that we actually might mess certain things up .
if this was the case , we 'd have a really easy solution to the problem of human error .
we 'd actually just say , okay , let 's figure out the kinds of technologies we ca n't deal with , the kinds of environments that are bad - get rid of those , design things better , and we should be the noble species that we expect ourselves to be .
but there 's another possibility that i find a little bit more worrying , which is , maybe it 's not our environments that are messed up .
maybe it 's actually us that 's designed badly .
this is a hint that i 've gotten from watching the ways that social scientists have learned about human errors .
and what we see is that people tend to keep making errors exactly the same way , over and over again .
it feels like we might almost just be built to make errors in certain ways .
this is a possibility that i worry a little bit more about , because , if it 's us that 's messed up , it 's not actually clear how we go about dealing with it .
we might just have to accept the fact that we 're error prone and try to design things around it .
so this is the question my students and i wanted to get at .
how can we tell the difference between possibility one and possibility two ?
what we need is a population that 's basically smart , can make lots of decisions , but does n't have access to any of the systems we have , any of the things that might mess us up - no human technology , human culture , maybe even not human language .
and so this is why we turned to these guys here .
these are one of the guys i work with . this is a brown capuchin monkey .
these guys are new world primates , which means they broke off from the human branch about 35 million years ago .
this means that your great , great , great great , great , great - with about five million " greats " in there - grandmother was probably the same great , great , great , great grandmother with five million " greats " in there as holly up here .
you know , so you can take comfort in the fact that this guy up here is a really really distant , but albeit evolutionary , relative .
the good news about holly though is that she does n't actually have the same kinds of technologies we do .
you know , she 's a smart , very cut creature , a primate as well , but she lacks all the stuff we think might be messing us up .
so she 's the perfect test case .
what if we put holly into the same context as humans ?
does she make the same mistakes as us ?
does she not learn from them ? and so on .
and so this is the kind of thing we decided to do .
my students and i got very excited about this a few years ago .
we said , all right , let 's , you know , throw so problems at holly , see if she messes these things up .
first problem is just , well , where should we start ?
because , you know , it 's great for us , but bad for humans .
we make a lot of mistakes in a lot of different contexts .
you know , where are we actually going to start with this ?
and because we started this work around the time of the financial collapse , around the time when foreclosures were hitting the news , we said , hhmm , maybe we should actually start in the financial domain .
maybe we should look at monkey 's economic decisions and try to see if they do the same kinds of dumb things that we do .
of course , that 's when we hit a sort second problem - a little bit more methodological - which is that , maybe you guys do n't know , but monkeys do n't actually use money . i know , you have n't met them .
but this is why , you know , they 're not in the queue behind you at the grocery store or the atm - you know , they do n't do this stuff .
so now we faced , you know , a little bit of a problem here .
how are we actually going to ask monkeys about money if they do n't actually use it ?
so we said , well , maybe we should just , actually just suck it up and teach monkeys how to use money .
so that 's just what we did .
what you 're looking at over here is actually the first unit that i know of of non-human currency .
we were n't very creative at the time we started these studies , so we just called it a token .
but this is the unit of currency that we 've taught our monkeys at yale to actually use with humans , to actually buy different pieces of food .
it does n't look like much - in fact , it is n't like much .
like most of our money , it 's just a piece of metal .
as those of you who 've taken currencies home from your trip know , once you get home , it 's actually pretty useless .
it was useless to the monkeys at first before they realized what they could do with it .
when we first gave it to them in their enclosures , they actually kind of picked them up , looked at them .
they were these kind of weird things .
but very quickly , the monkeys realized that they could actually hand these tokens over to different humans in the lab for some food .
and so you see one of our monkeys , mayday , up here doing this .
this is a and b are kind of the points where she 's sort of a little bit curious about these things - does n't know .
there 's this waiting hand from a human experimenter , and mayday quickly figures out , apparently the human wants this .
hands it over , and then gets some food .
it turns out not just mayday , all of our monkeys get good at trading tokens with human salesman .
so here 's just a quick video of what this looks like .
here 's mayday . she 's going to be trading a token for some food and waiting happily and getting her food .
here 's felix , i think . he 's our alpha male ; he 's a kind of big guy .
but he too waits patiently , gets his food and goes on .
so the monkeys get really good at this .
they 're surprisingly good at this with very little training .
we just allowed them to pick this up on their own .
the question is : is this anything like human money ?
is this a market at all , or did we just do a weird psychologist 's trick by getting monkeys to do something , looking smart , but not really being smart .
and so we said , well , what would the monkeys spontaneously do if this was really their currency , if they were really using it like money ?
well , you might actually imagine them to do all the kinds of smart things that humans do when they start exchanging money with each other .
you might have them start paying attention to price , paying attention to how much they buy - sort of keeping track of their monkey token , as it were .
do the monkeys do anything like this ?
and so our monkey marketplace was born .
the way this works is that our monkeys normally live in a kind of big zoo social enclosure .
when they get a hankering for some treats , we actually allowed them a way out into a little smaller enclosure where they could enter the market .
upon entering the market - it was actually a much more fun market for the monkeys than most human markets because , as the monkeys entered the door of the market , a human would give them a big wallet full of tokens so they could actually trade the tokens with one of these two guys here - two different possible human salesmen that they could actually buy stuff from .
the salesmen were students from my lab .
they dressed differently ; they were different people .
and over time , they did basically the same thing so the monkeys could learn , you know , who sold what at what price - you know , who was reliable , who was n't , and so on .
and you can see that each of the experimenters is actually holding up a little , yellow food dish .
and that 's what the monkey can for a single token .
so everything costs one token , but as you can see , sometimes tokens buy more than others , sometimes more grapes than others .
so i 'll show you a quick video of what this marketplace actually looks like .
here 's a monkey-eye-view . monkeys are shorter , so it 's a little short .
but here 's honey .
she 's waiting for the market to open a little impatiently .
all of a sudden the market opens . here 's her choice : one grapes or two grapes .
you can see honey , very good market economist , goes with the guy who gives more .
she could teach our financial advisers a few things or two .
so not just honey , most of the monkeys went with guys who had more .
most of the monkeys went with guys who had better food .
when we introduced sales , we saw the monkeys paid attention to that .
they really cared about their monkey token dollar .
the more surprising thing was that when we collaborated with economists to actually look at the monkeys ' data using economic tools , they basically matched , not just qualitatively , but quantitatively with what we saw humans doing in a real market .
so much so that , if you saw the monkeys ' numbers , you could n't tell whether they came from a monkey or a human in the same market .
and what we 'd really thought we 'd done is like we 'd actually introduced something that , at least for the monkeys and us , works like a real financial currency .
question is : do the monkeys start messing up in the same ways we do ?
well , we already saw anecdotally a couple of signs that they might .
one thing we never saw in the monkey marketplace was any evidence of saving - you know , just like our own species .
the monkeys entered the market , spent their entire budget and then went back to everyone else .
the other thing we also spontaneously saw , embarrassingly enough , is spontaneous evidence of larceny .
the monkeys would rip-off the tokens at every available opportunity - from each other , often from us - you know , things we did n't necessarily think we were introducing , but things we spontaneously saw .
so we said , this looks bad .
can we actually see if the monkeys are doing exactly the same dumb things as humans do ?
one possibility is just kind of let the monkey financial system play out , you know , see if they start calling us for bailouts in a few years .
we were a little impatient so we wanted to sort of speed things up a bit .
so we said , let 's actually give the monkeys the same kinds of problems that humans tend to get wrong in certain kinds of economic challenges , or certain kinds of economic experiments .
and so , since the best way to see how people go wrong is to actually do it yourself , i 'm going to give you guys a quick experiment to sort of watch your own financial intuitions in action .
so imagine that right now i handed each and every one of you a thousand u.s. dollars - so 10 crisp hundred dollar bills .
take these , put it in your wallet and spend a second thinking about what you 're going to do with it .
because it 's yours now ; you can buy whatever you want .
donate it , take it , and so on .
sounds great , but you get one more choice to earn a little bit more money .
and here 's your choice : you can either be risky , in which case i 'm going to flip one of these monkey tokens .
if it comes up heads , you 're going to get a thousand dollars more .
if it comes up tails , you get nothing .
so it 's a chance to get more , but it 's pretty risky .
your other option is a bit safe . your just going to get some money for sure .
i 'm just going to give you 500 bucks .
you can stick it in your wallet and use it immediately .
so see what your intuition is here .
most people actually go with the play-it-safe option .
most people say , why should i be risky when i can get 1,500 dollars for sure ?
this seems like a good bet . i 'm going to go with that .
you might say , eh , that 's not really irrational .
people are a little risk-averse . so what ?
well , the " so what ? " comes when start thinking about the same problem set up just a little bit differently .
so now imagine that i give each and every one of you 2,000 dollars - 20 crisp hundred dollar bills .
now you can buy double to stuff you were going to get before .
think about how you 'd feel sticking it in your wallet .
and now imagine that i have you make another choice but this time , it 's a little bit worse .
now , you 're going to be deciding how you 're going to lose money , but you 're going to get the same choice .
you can either take a risky loss - so i 'll flip a coin . if it comes up heads , you 're going to actually lose a lot .
if it comes up tails , you lose nothing , you 're fine , get to keep the whole thing - or you could play it safe , which means you have to reach back into your wallet and give me five of those $ 100 bills , for certain .
and i 'm seeing a lot of furrowed brows out there .
so maybe you 're having the same intuitions as the subjects that were actually tested in this , which is when presented with these options , people do n't choose to play it safe .
they actually tend to go a little risky .
the reason this is irrational is that we 've given people in both situations the same choice .
it 's a 50/50 shot of a thousand or 2,000 , or just 1,500 dollars with certainty .
but people 's intuitions about how much risk to take varies depending on where they started with .
so what 's going on ?
well , it turns out that this seems to be the result of at least two biases that we have at the psychological level .
one is that we have a really hard time thinking in absolute terms .
you really have to do work to figure out , well , one option 's a thousand , 2,000 ; one is 1,500 .
instead , we find it very easy to think in very relative terms as options change from one time to another .
so we think of things as , " oh , i 'm going to get more , " or " oh , i 'm going to get less . "
this is all well and good , except that changes in different directions actually effect whether or not we think options are good or not .
and this leads to the second bias , which economists have called loss aversion .
the idea is that we really hate it when things go into the red .
we really hate it when we have to lose out on some money .
and this means that sometimes we 'll actually switch our preferences to avoid this .
what you saw in that last scenario is that subjects get risky because they want the small shot that there wo n't be any loss .
that means when we 're in a risk mindset - excuse me , when we 're in a loss mindset , we actually become more risky , which can actually be really worrying .
these kinds of things play out in lots of bad ways in humans .
they 're why stock investors hold onto losing stocks longer - because they 're evaluating them in relative terms .
they 're why people in the housing market refused to sell their house - because they do n't want to sell at a loss .
the question we were interested in is whether the monkeys show the same biases .
if we set up those same scenarios in our little monkey market , would they do the same thing as people ?
and so this is what we did , we gave the monkeys choices between guys who were safe - they did the same thing every time - or guys who were risky - they did things differently half the time .
and then we gave them options that were bonuses - like you guys did in the first scenario - so they actually have a chance more , or pieces where they were experiencing losses - they actually thought they were going to get more than they really got .
and so this is what this looks like .
we introduced the monkeys to two new monkey salesmen .
the guy on the left and right both start with one piece of grape , so it looks pretty good .
but they 're going to give the monkeys bonuses .
the guy on the left is a safe bonus .
all the time , he adds one , to give the monkeys two .
the guy on the right is actually a risky bonus .
sometimes the monkeys get no bonus - so this is a bonus of zero .
sometimes the monkeys get two extra .
for a big bonus , now they get three .
but this is the same choice you guys just faced .
do the monkeys actually want to play it safe and then go with the guy who 's going to do the same thing on every trial , or do they want to be risky and try to get a risky , but big , bonus , but risk the possibility of getting no bonus .
people here played it safe .
turns out , the monkeys play it safe too .
qualitatively and quantitatively , they choose exactly the same way as people , when tested in the same thing .
you might say , well , maybe the monkeys just do n't like risk .
maybe we should see how they do with losses .
and so we ran a second version of this .
now , the monkeys meet two guys who are n't giving them bonuses ; they 're actually giving them less than they expect .
so they look like they 're starting out with a big amount .
these are three grapes ; the monkey 's really psyched for this .
but now they learn these guys are going to give them less than they expect .
they guy on the left is a safe loss .
every single time , he 's going to take one of these away and give the monkeys just two .
the guy on the right is the risky loss .
sometimes he gives no loss , so the monkeys are really psyched , but sometimes he actually gives a big loss , taking away two to give the monkeys only one .
and so what do the monkeys do ?
again , same choice ; they can play it safe for always getting two grapes every single time , or they can take a risky bet and choose between one and three .
the remarkable thing to us is that , when you give monkeys this choice , they do the same irrational thing that people do .
they actually become more risky depending on how the experimenters started .
this is crazy because it suggests that the monkeys too are evaluating things in relative terms and actually treating losses differently than they treat gains .
so what does all of this mean ?
well , what we 've shown is that , first of all , we can actually give the monkeys a financial currency , and they do very similar things with it .
they do some of the smart things we do , some of the kind of not so nice things we do , like steal it and so on .
but they also do some of the irrational things we do .
they systematically get things wrong and in the same ways that we do .
this is the first take-home message of the talk , which is that if you saw the beginning of this and you thought , oh , i 'm totally going to go home and hire a capuchin monkey financial adviser .
they 're way cuter than the one at ... you know - do n't do that ; they 're probably going to be just as dumb as the human one you already have .
so , you know , a little bad - sorry , sorry , sorry .
a little bad for monkey investors .
but of course , you know , the reason you 're laughing is bad for humans too .
because we 've answered the question we started out with .
we wanted to know where these kinds of errors came from .
and we started with the hope that maybe we can sort of tweak our financial institutions , tweak our technologies to make ourselves better .
but what we 've learn is that these biases might be a deeper part of us than that .
in fact , they might be due to the very nature of our evolutionary history .
you know , maybe it 's not just humans at the right side of this chain that 's duncey .
maybe it 's sort of duncey all the way back .
and this , if we believe the capuchin monkey results , means that these duncey strategies might be 35 million years old .
that 's a long time for a strategy to potentially get changed around - really , really old .
what do we know about other old strategies like this ?
well , one thing we know is that they tend to be really hard to overcome .
you know , think of our evolutionary predilection for eating sweet things , fatty things like cheesecake .
you ca n't just shut that off .
you ca n't just look at the dessert cart as say , " no , no , no . that looks disgusting to me . "
we 're just built differently .
we 're going to perceive it as a good thing to go after .
my guess is that the same thing is going to be true when humans are perceiving different financial decisions .
when you 're watching your stocks plummet into the red , when you 're watching your house price go down , you 're not going to be able to see that in anything but old evolutionary terms .
this means that the biases that lead investors to do badly , that lead to the foreclosure crisis are going to be really hard to overcome .
so that 's the bad news . the question is : is there any good news ?
i 'm supposed to be up here telling you the good news .
well , the good news , i think , is what i started with at the beginning of the talk , which is that humans are not only smart ; we 're really inspirationally smart to the rest of the animals in the biological kingdom .
we 're so good at overcoming our biological limitations - you know , i flew over here in an airplane .
i did n't have to try to flap my wings .
i 'm wearing contact lenses now so that i can see all of you .
i do n't have to rely on my own near-sightedness .
we actually have all of these cases where we overcome our biological limitations through technology and other means , seemingly pretty easily .
but we have to recognize that we have those limitations .
and here 's the rub .
it was camus who once said that , " man is the only species who refuses to be what he really is . "
but the irony is that it might only be in recognizing our limitations that we can really actually overcome them .
the hope is that you all will think about your limitations , not necessarily as unovercomable , but to recognize them , accept them and then use the world of design to actually figure them out .
that might be the only way that we will really be able to achieve our own human potential and really be the noble species we hope to all be .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i want to share some personal friends and stories with you that i 've actually never talked about in public before to help illustrate the idea and the need and the hope for us to reinvent our health care system around the world .
twenty-four years ago , i had - a sophomore in college , i had a series of fainting spells . no alcohol was involved .
and i ended up in student health , and they ran some labwork and came back right away , and said , " kidney problems . "
and before i knew it , i was involved and thrown into this six months of tests and trials and tribulations with six doctors across two hospitals in this clash of medical titans to figure out which one of them was right about what was wrong with me .
and i 'm sitting in a waiting room some time later for an ultrasound , and all six of these doctors actually show up in the room at once , and i 'm like , " uh oh , this is bad news . "
and their diagnosis was this : they said , " you have two rare kidney diseases that are going to actually destroy your kidneys eventually , you have cancer-like cells in your immune system that we need to start treatment right away , and you 'll never be eligible for a kidney transplant , and you 're not likely to live more than two or three years . "
now , with the gravity of this doomsday diagnosis , it just sucked me in immediately , as if i began preparing myself as a patient to die according to the schedule that they had just given to me , until i met a patient named verna in a waiting room , who became a dear friend , and she grabbed me one day and took me off to the medical library and did a bunch of research on these diagnoses and these diseases , and said , " eric , these people who get this are normally in their ' 70s and ' 80s .
they do n't know anything about you . wake up .
take control of your health and get on with your life . "
and i did .
now , these people making these proclamations to me were not bad people .
in fact , these professionals were miracle workers , but they 're working in a flawed , expensive system that 's set up the wrong way .
it 's dependent on hospitals and clinics for our every care need .
it 's dependent on specialists who just look at parts of us .
it 's dependent on guesswork of diagnoses and drug cocktails , and so something either works or you die .
and it 's dependent on passive patients who just take it and do n't ask any questions .
now the problem with this model is that it 's unsustainable globally .
it 's unaffordable globally .
we need to invent what i call a personal health system .
so what does this personal health system look like , and what new technologies and roles is it going to entail ?
now , i 'm going to start by actually sharing with you a new friend of mine , libby , somebody i 've become quite attached to over the last six months .
this is libby , or actually , this is an ultrasound image of libby .
this is the kidney transplant i was never supposed to have .
now , this is an image that we shot a couple of weeks ago for today , and you 'll notice , on the edge of this image , there 's some dark spots there , which was really concerning to me .
so we 're going to actually do a live exam to sort of see how libby 's doing .
this is not a wardrobe malfunction . i have to take my belt off here .
do n't you in the front row worry or anything .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'm going to use a device from a company called mobisante .
this is a portable ultrasound .
it can plug into a smartphone . it can plug into a tablet .
mobisante is up in redmond , washington , and they kindly trained me to actually do this on myself .
they 're not approved to do this . patients are not approved to do this .
this is a concept demo , so i want to make that clear .
all right , i gotta gel up .
now the people in the front row are very nervous . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and i want to actually introduce you to dr. batiuk , who 's another friend of mine .
he 's up in legacy good samaritan hospital in portland , oregon .
so let me just make sure . hey , dr. batiuk . can you hear me okay ?
and actually , can you see libby ?
thomas batuik : hi there , eric .
you look busy . how are you ?
eric dishman : i 'm good . i 'm just taking my clothes off in front of a few hundred people . it 's wonderful .
so i just wanted to see , is this the image you need to get ?
and i know you want to look and see if those spots are still there .
tb : okay . well let 's scan around a little bit here , give me a lay of the land .
ed : all right.tb : okay . turn it a little bit inside , a little bit toward the middle for me .
okay , that 's good . how about up a little bit ?
okay , freeze that image . that 's a good one for me .
ed : all right . now last week , when i did this , you had me measure that spot to the right .
should i do that again ?
tb : yeah , let 's do that .
ed : all right . this is kind of hard to do with one hand on your belly and one hand on measuring , but i 've got it , i think , and i 'll save that image and send it to you .
so tell me a little bit about what this dark spot means .
it 's not something i was very happy about .
tb : many people after a kidney transplant will develop a little fluid collection around the kidney .
most of the time it does n't create any kind of mischief , but it does warrant looking at , so i 'm happy we 've got an opportunity to look at it today , make sure that it 's not growing , it 's not creating any problems .
based on the other images we have , i 'm really happy how it looks today .
ed : all right . well , i guess we 'll double check it when i come in .
i 've got my six month biopsy in a couple of weeks , and i 'm going to let you do that in the clinic , because i do n't think i can do that one on myself .
tb : good choice.ed : all right , thanks , dr. batiuk .
all right . so what you 're sort of seeing here is an example of disruptive technologies , of mobile , social and analytic technologies .
these are the foundations of what 's going to make personal health possible .
now there 's really three pillars of this personal health i want to talk to you about now , and it 's care anywhere , care networking and care customization .
and you just saw a little bit of the first two with my interaction with dr. batiuk .
so let 's start with care anywhere .
humans invented the idea of hospitals and clinics in the 1780s . it is time to update our thinking .
we have got to untether clinicians and patients from the notion of traveling to a special bricks-and-mortar place for all of our care , because these places are often the wrong tool , and the most expensive tool , for the job .
and these are sometimes unsafe places to send our sickest patients , especially in an era of superbugs and hospital-acquired infections .
and many countries are going to go brickless from the start because they 're never going to be able to afford the mega-medicalplexes that a lot of the rest of the world has built .
now i personally learned that hospitals can be a very dangerous place at a young age .
this was me in third grade .
i broke my elbow very seriously , had to have surgery , worried that they were going to actually lose the arm .
recovering from the surgery in the hospital , i get bedsores .
those bedsores become infected , and they give me an antibiotic which i end up being allergic to , and now my whole body breaks out , and now all of those become infected .
the longer i stayed in the hospital , the sicker i became , and the more expensive it became , and this happens to millions of people around the world every year .
the future of personal health that i 'm talking about says care must occur at home as the default model , not in a hospital or clinic .
you have to earn your way into those places by being sick enough to use that tool for the job .
now the smartphones that we 're already carrying can clearly have diagnostic devices like ultrasounds plugged into them , and a whole array of others , today , and as sensing is built into these , we 'll be able to do vital signs monitor and behavioral monitoring like we 've never had before .
many of us will have implantables that will actually look real-time at what 's going on with our blood chemistry and in our proteins right now .
now the software is also getting smarter , right ?
think about a coach , an agent online , that 's going to help me do safe self-care .
that same interaction that we just did with the ultrasound will likely have real-time image processing , and the device will say , " up , down , left , right , ah , eric , that 's the perfect spot to send that image off to your doctor . "
now , if we 've got all these networked devices that are helping us to do care anywhere , it stands to reason that we also need a team to be able to interact with all of that stuff , and that leads to the second pillar i want to talk about , care networking .
we have got to go beyond this paradigm of isolated specialists doing parts care to multidisciplinary teams doing person care .
uncoordinated care today is expensive at best , and it is deadly at worst .
eighty percent of medical errors are actually caused by communication and coordination problems amongst medical team members .
i had my own heart scare years ago in graduate school , when we 're under treatment for the kidney , and suddenly , they 're like , " oh , we think you have a heart problem . "
and i have these palpitations that are showing up .
they put me through five weeks of tests - very expensive , very scary - before the nurse finally notices the piece of the paper , my meds list that i 've been carrying to every single appointment , and says , " oh my gosh . "
three different specialists had prescribed three different versions of the same drug to me .
i did not have a heart problem . i had an overdose problem .
i had a care coordination problem .
and this happens to millions of people every year .
i want to use technology that we 're all working on and making happen to make health care a coordinated team sport .
now this is the most frightening thing to me .
out of all the care i 've had in hospitals and clinics around the world , the first time i 've ever had a true team-based care experience was at legacy good sam these last six months for me to go get this .
and this is a picture of my graduation team from legacy .
there 's a couple of the folks here . you 'll recognize dr. batiuk .
we just talked to him . here 's jenny , one of the nurses , allison , who helped manage the transplant list , and a dozen other people who are n't pictured , a pharmacist , a psychologist , a nutritionist , even a financial counselor , lisa , who helped us deal with all the insurance hassles .
i wept the day i graduated .
i should have been happy , because i was so well that i could go back to my normal doctors , but i wept because i was so actually connected to this team .
and here 's the most important part .
the other people in this picture are me and my wife , ashley .
legacy trained us on how to do care for me at home so that they could offload the hospitals and clinics .
that 's the only way that the model works .
my team is actually working in china on one of these self-care models for a project we called age-friendly cities .
we 're trying to help build a social network that can help track and train the care of seniors caring for themselves as well as the care provided by their family members or volunteer community health workers , as well as have an exchange network online , where , for example , i can donate three hours of care a day to your mom , if somebody else can help me with transportation to meals , and we exchange all of that online .
the most important point i want to make to you about this is the sacred and somewhat over-romanticized doctor-patient one-on-one is a relic of the past .
the future of health care is smart teams , and you 'd better be on that team for yourself .
now , the last thing that i want to talk to you about is care customization , because if you 've got care anywhere and you 've got care networking , those are going to go a long way towards improving our health care system , but there 's still too much guesswork .
randomized clinical trials were actually invented in 1948 to help invent the drugs that cured tuberculosis , and those are important things , do n't get me wrong .
these population studies that we 've done have created tons of miracle drugs that have saved millions of lives , but the problem is that health care is treating us as averages , not unique individuals , because at the end of the day , the patient is not the same thing as the population who are studied . that 's what 's leading to the guesswork .
the technologies that are coming , high-performance computing , analytics , big data that everyone 's talking about , will allow us to build predictive models for each of us as individual patients .
and the magic here is , experiment on my avatar in software , not my body in suffering .
now , i 've had two examples i want to quickly share with you of this kind of care customization on my own journey .
the first was quite simple . i finally realized some years ago that all my medical teams were optimizing my treatment for longevity .
it 's like a badge of honor to see how long they can get the patient to live .
i was optimizing my life for quality of life , and quality of life for me means time in snow .
so on my chart , i forced them to put , " patient goal : low doses of drugs over longer periods of time , side effects friendly to skiing . "
and i think that 's why i achieved longevity .
i think that time-in-snow therapy was as important as the pharmaceuticals that i had .
now the second example of customization - and by the way , you ca n't customize care if you do n't know your own goals , so health care ca n't know those until you know your own health care goals .
but the second example i want to give you is , i happened to be an early guinea pig , and i got very lucky to have my whole genome sequenced .
now it took about two weeks of processing on intel 's highest-end servers to make this happen , and another six months of human and computing labor to make sense of all of that data .
and at the end of all of that , they said , " yes , those diagnoses of that clash of medical titans all of those years ago were wrong , and we have a better path forward . "
the future that intel 's working on now is to figure out how to make that computing for personalized medicine go from months and weeks to even hours , and make this kind of tool available , not just in the mainframes of tier-one research hospitals around the world , but in the mainstream - every patient , every clinic with access to whole genome sequencing .
and i tell you , this kind of care customization for everything from your goals to your genetics will be the most game-changing transformation that we witness in health care during our lifetime .
so these three pillars of personal health , care anywhere , care networking , care customization , are happening in pieces now , but this vision will completely fail if we do n't step up as caregivers and as patients to take on new roles .
it 's what my friend verna said : wake up and take control of your health .
because at the end of the day these technologies are simply about people caring for other people and ourselves in some powerful new ways .
and it 's in that spirit that i want to introduce you to one last friend , very quickly .
tracey gamley stepped up to give me the impossible kidney that i was never supposed to have .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so tracey , just tell us a little bit quickly about what the donor experience was like with you .
tracey gamley : for me , it was really easy .
i only had one night in the hospital .
the surgery was done laparoscopically , so i have just five very small scars on my abdomen , and i had four weeks away from work and went back to doing everything i 'd done before without any changes .
ed : well , i probably will never get a chance to say this to you in such a large audience ever again .
so " thank you " feel likes a really trite word , but thank you from the bottom of my heart for saving my life .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this ted stage and all of the ted stages are often about celebrating innovation and celebrating new technologies , and i 've done that here today , and i 've seen amazing things coming from ted speakers , i mean , my gosh , artificial kidneys , even printable kidneys , that are coming .
but until such time that these amazing technologies are available to all of us , and even when they are , it 's up to us to care for , and even save , one another .
i hope you will go out and make personal health happen for yourselves and for everyone . thanks so much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so , the first robot to talk about is called strider .
it stands for self-excited tripedal dynamic experimental robot .
it 's a robot that has three legs , which is inspired by nature .
but have you seen anything in nature , an animal that has three legs ?
probably not . so , why do i call this a biologically inspired robot ? how would it work ?
but before that , let 's look at pop culture .
so , you know h.g. wells ' " war of the worlds , " novel and movie .
and what you see over here is a very popular video game , and in this fiction they describe these alien creatures that are robots that have three legs that terrorize earth .
but my robot , strider , does not move like this .
so , this is an actual dynamic simulation animation .
i 'm just going to show you how the robot works .
it flips its body 180 degrees and it swings its leg between the two legs and catches the fall .
so , that 's how it walks . but when you look at us human being , bipedal walking , what you 're doing is you 're not really using a muscle to lift your leg and walk like a robot . right ?
what you 're doing is you really swing your leg and catch the fall , stand up again , swing your leg and catch the fall .
you 're using your built-in dynamics , the physics of your body , just like a pendulum .
we call that the concept of passive dynamic locomotion .
what you 're doing is , when you stand up , potential energy to kinetic energy , potential energy to kinetic energy .
it 's a constantly falling process .
so , even though there is nothing in nature that looks like this , really , we were inspired by biology and applying the principles of walking to this robot . thus it 's a biologically inspired robot .
what you see over here , this is what we want to do next .
we want to fold up the legs and shoot it up for long-range motion .
and it deploys legs - it looks almost like " star wars " - when it lands , it absorbs the shock and starts walking .
what you see over here , this yellow thing , this is not a death ray . -lrb- laughter -rrb- this is just to show you that if you have cameras or different types of sensors - because it is tall , it 's 1.8 meters tall - you can see over obstacles like bushes and those kinds of things .
so we have two prototypes .
the first version , in the back , that 's strider i.
the one in front , the smaller , is strider ii .
the problem that we had with strider i is it was just too heavy in the body . we had so many motors , you know , aligning the joints , and those kinds of things .
so , we decided to synthesize a mechanical mechanism so we could get rid of all the motors , and with a single motor we can coordinate all the motions .
it 's a mechanical solution to a problem , instead of using mechatronics .
so , with this now the top body is light enough . so , it 's walking in our lab ; this was the very first successful step .
it 's still not perfected - its coffee falls down - so we still have a lot of work to do .
the second robot i want to talk about is called impass .
it stands for intelligent mobility platform with actuated spoke system .
so , it 's a wheel-leg hybrid robot .
so , think of a rimless wheel or a spoke wheel , but the spokes individually move in and out of the hub ; so , it 's a wheel-leg hybrid .
we are literally re-inventing the wheel here .
let me demonstrate how it works .
so , in this video we 're using an approach called the reactive approach .
just simply using the tactile sensors on the feet , it 's trying to walk over a changing terrain , a soft terrain where it pushes down and changes .
and just by the tactile information , it successfully crosses over these type of terrain .
but , when it encounters a very extreme terrain , in this case , this obstacle is more than three times the height of the robot , then it switches to a deliberate mode , where it uses a laser range finder , and camera systems , to identify the obstacle and the size , and it plans , carefully plans the motion of the spokes and coordinates it so that it can show this kind of very very impressive mobility .
you probably have n't seen anything like this out there .
this is a very high mobility robot that we developed called impass .
ah , is n't that cool ?
when you drive your car , when you steer your car , you use a method called ackermann steering .
the front wheels rotate like this .
for most small wheeled robots , they use a method called differential steering where the left and right wheel turns the opposite direction .
for impass , we can do many , many different types of motion .
for example , in this case , even though the left and right wheel is connected with a single axle rotating at the same angle of velocity .
we just simply change the length of the spoke .
it affects the diameter and then can turn to the left , turn to the right .
so , these are just some examples of the neat things that we can do with impass .
this robot is called climber : cable-suspended limbed intelligent matching behavior robot .
so , i 've been talking to a lot of nasa jpl scientists - at jpl they are famous for the mars rovers - and the scientists , geologists always tell me that the real interesting science , the science-rich sites , are always at the cliffs .
but the current rovers can not get there .
so , inspired by that we wanted to build a robot that can climb a structured cliff environment .
so , this is climber .
so , what it does , it has three legs . it 's probably difficult to see , but it has a winch and a cable at the top - and it tries to figure out the best place to put its foot .
and then once it figures that out in real time , it calculates the force distribution : how much force it needs to exert to the surface so it does n't tip and does n't slip .
once it stabilizes that , it lifts a foot , and then with the winch it can climb up these kinds of thing .
also for search and rescue applications as well .
five years ago i actually worked at nasa jpl during the summer as a faculty fellow .
and they already had a six legged robot called lemur .
so , this is actually based on that . this robot is called mars : multi-appendage robotic system . so , it 's a hexapod robot .
we developed our adaptive gait planner .
we actually have a very interesting payload on there .
the students like to have fun . and here you can see that it 's walking over unstructured terrain .
it 's trying to walk on the coarse terrain , sandy area , but depending on the moisture content or the grain size of the sand the foot 's soil sinkage model changes .
so , it tries to adapt its gait to successfully cross over these kind of things .
and also , it does some fun stuff , as can imagine .
we get so many visitors visiting our lab .
so , when the visitors come , mars walks up to the computer , starts typing " hello , my name is mars . "
welcome to romela , the robotics mechanisms laboratory at virginia tech .
this robot is an amoeba robot .
now , we do n't have enough time to go into technical details , i 'll just show you some of the experiments .
so , this is some of the early feasibility experiments .
we store potential energy to the elastic skin to make it move .
or use an active tension cords to make it move forward and backward . it 's called chimera .
we also have been working with some scientists and engineers from upenn to come up with a chemically actuated version of this amoeba robot .
we do something to something and just like magic , it moves . the blob .
this robot is a very recent project . it 's called raphael .
robotic air powered hand with elastic ligaments .
there are a lot of really neat , very good robotic hands out there in the market .
the problem is they 're just too expensive , tens of thousands of dollars .
so , for prosthesis applications it 's probably not too practical , because it 's not affordable .
we wanted to go tackle this problem in a very different direction .
instead of using electrical motors , electromechanical actuators , we 're using compressed air .
we developed these novel actuators for joints .
it is compliant . you can actually change the force , simply just changing the air pressure .
and it can actually crush an empty soda can .
it can pick up very delicate objects like a raw egg , or in this case , a lightbulb .
the best part , it took only $ 200 dollars to make the first prototype .
this robot is actually a family of snake robots that we call hydras , hyper degrees-of-freedom robotic articulated serpentine .
this is a robot that can climb structures .
this is a hydras 's arm .
it 's a 12 degrees of freedom robotic arm .
but the cool part is the user interface .
the cable over there , that 's an optical fiber .
and this student , probably the first time using it , but she can articulate it many different ways .
so , for example in iraq , you know , the war zone , there is roadside bombs . currently you send these remotely controlled vehicles that are armed .
it takes really a lot of time and it 's expensive to train the operator to operate this complex arm .
in this case it 's very intuitive ; this student , probably his first time using it , doing very complex manipulation tasks , picking up objects and doing manipulation , just like that . very intuitive .
now , this robot is currently our star robot .
we actually have a fan club for the robot , darwin : dynamic anthropomorphic robot with intelligence .
as you know , we are very interested in humanoid robot , human walking , so we decided to build a small humanoid robot .
this was in 2004 ; at that time , this was something really , really revolutionary .
this was more of a feasibility study : what kind of motors should we use ?
is it even possible ? what kinds of controls should we do ?
so , this does not have any sensors .
so , it 's an open loop control .
for those who probably know , if you do n't have any sensors and there are any disturbances , you know what happens .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , based on that success , the following year we did the proper mechanical design starting from kinematics .
and thus , darwin i was born in 2005 .
it stands up , it walks - very impressive .
however , still , as you can see , it has a cord , umbilical cord . so , we 're still using an external power source and external computation .
so , in 2006 , now it 's really time to have fun .
let 's give it intelligence . we give it all the computing power it needs : a 1.5 gigahertz pentium m chip , two firewire cameras , rate gyros , accelerometers , four force sensors on the foot , lithium polymer batteries .
and now darwin ii is completely autonomous .
it is not remote controlled .
there are no tethers . it looks around , searches for the ball , looks around , searches for the ball , and it tries to play a game of soccer , autonomously : artificial intelligence .
let 's see how it does . this was our very first trial , and ... spectators -lrb- video -rrb- : goal !
dennis hong : so , there is actually a competition called robocup .
i do n't know how many of you have heard about robocup .
it 's an international autonomous robot soccer competition .
and the goal of robocup , the actual goal is , by the year 2050 we want to have full size , autonomous humanoid robots play soccer against the human world cup champions and win .
it 's a true actual goal . it 's a very ambitious goal , but we truly believe that we can do it .
so , this is last year in china .
we were the very first team in the united states that qualified in the humanoid robocup competition .
this is this year in austria .
you 're going to see the action , three against three , completely autonomous .
there you go . yes !
the robots track and they team play amongst themselves .
it 's very impressive . it 's really a research event packaged in a more exciting competition event .
what you see over here , this is the beautiful louis vuitton cup trophy .
so , this is for the best humanoid , and we would like to bring this for the very first time , to the united states next year , so wish us luck .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
darwin also has a lot of other talents .
last year it actually conducted the roanoke symphony orchestra for the holiday concert .
this is the next generation robot , darwin iv , but smarter , faster , stronger .
and it 's trying to show off its ability : " i 'm macho , i 'm strong .
i can also do some jackie chan-motion , martial art movements . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and it walks away . so , this is darwin iv .
and again , you 'll be able to see it in the lobby .
we truly believe this is going to be the very first running humanoid robot in the united states . so , stay tuned .
all right . so i showed you some of our exciting robots at work .
so , what is the secret of our success ?
where do we come up with these ideas ?
how do we develop these kinds of ideas ?
we have a fully autonomous vehicle that can drive into urban environments . we won a half a million dollars in the darpa urban challenge .
we also have the world 's very first vehicle that can be driven by the blind .
we call it the blind driver challenge , very exciting .
and many , many other robotics projects i want to talk about .
these are just the awards that we won in 2007 fall from robotics competitions and those kinds of things .
so , really , we have five secrets .
first is : where do we get inspiration ?
where do we get this spark of imagination ?
this is a true story , my personal story .
at night when i go to bed , 3 - 4 a.m. in the morning , i lie down , close my eyes , and i see these lines and circles and different shapes floating around .
and they assemble , and they form these kinds of mechanisms .
and then i think , " ah this is cool . "
so , right next to my bed i keep a notebook , a journal , with a special pen that has a light on it , led light , because i do n't want to turn on the light and wake up my wife .
so , i see this , scribble everything down , draw things , and i go to bed .
every day in the morning , the first thing i do before my first cup of coffee , before i brush my teeth , i open my notebook .
many times it 's empty , sometimes i have something there - if something 's there , sometimes it 's junk - but most of the time i ca n't even read my handwriting .
and so , 4 am in the morning , what do you expect , right ?
so , i need to decipher what i wrote .
but sometimes i see this ingenious idea in there , and i have this eureka moment .
i directly run to my home office , sit at my computer , i type in the ideas , i sketch things out and i keep a database of ideas .
so , when we have these calls for proposals , i try to find a match between my potential ideas and the problem . if there is a match we write a research proposal , get the research funding in , and that 's how we start our research programs .
but just a spark of imagination is not good enough .
how do we develop these kinds of ideas ?
at our lab romela , the robotics and mechanisms laboratory , we have these fantastic brainstorming sessions .
so , we gather around , we discuss about problems and social problems and talk about it .
but before we start we set this golden rule .
the rule is : nobody criticizes anybody 's ideas .
nobody criticizes any opinion .
this is important , because many times students , they fear or they feel uncomfortable how others might think about their opinions and thoughts .
so , once you do this , it is amazing how the students open up .
they have these wacky , cool , crazy , brilliant ideas , and the whole room is just electrified with creative energy .
and this is how we develop our ideas .
well , we 're running out of time . one more thing i want to talk about is , you know , just a spark of idea and development is not good enough .
there was a great ted moment , i think it was sir ken robinson , was it ?
he gave a talk about how education and school kills creativity .
well , actually , there are two sides to the story .
so , there is only so much one can do with just ingenious ideas and creativity and good engineering intuition .
if you want to go beyond a tinkering , if you want to go beyond a hobby of robotics and really tackle the grand challenges of robotics through rigorous research we need more than that . this is where school comes in .
batman , fighting against bad guys , he has his utility belt , he has his grappling hook , he has all different kinds of gadgets .
for us roboticists , engineers and scientists , these tools , these are the courses and classes you take in class .
math , differential equations .
i have linear algebra , science , physics , even nowadays , chemistry and biology , as you 've seen .
these are all the tools that we need .
so , the more tools you have , for batman , more effective at fighting the bad guys , for us , more tools to attack these kinds of big problems .
so , education is very important .
also , it 's not about that , only about that . you also have to work really , really hard .
so , i always tell my students , " work smart , then work hard . "
this picture in the back this is 3 a.m. in the morning .
i guarantee if you come to your lab at 3 - 4 am we have students working there , not because i tell them to , but because we are having too much fun .
which leads to the last topic : do not forget to have fun .
that 's really the secret of our success , we 're having too much fun .
i truly believe that highest productivity comes when you 're having fun , and that 's what we 're doing .
there you go . thank you so much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i love the internet .
it 's true .
think about everything it has brought us .
think about all the services we use , all the connectivity , all the entertainment , all the business , all the commerce .
and it 's happening during our lifetimes .
i 'm pretty sure that one day we 'll be writing history books hundreds of years from now . this time our generation will be remembered as the generation that got online , the generation that built something really and truly global .
but yes , it 's also true that the internet has problems , very serious problems , problems with security and problems with privacy .
i 've spent my career fighting these problems .
so let me show you something .
this here is brain .
this is a floppy disk - five and a quarter-inch floppy disk infected by brain.a.
it 's the first virus we ever found for pc computers .
and we actually know where brain came from .
we know because it says so inside the code .
let 's take a look .
all right .
that 's the boot sector of an infected floppy , and if we take a closer look inside , we 'll see that right there , it says , " welcome to the dungeon . "
and then it continues , saying , 1986 , basit and amjad .
and basit and amjad are first names , pakistani first names .
in fact , there 's a phone number and an address in pakistan .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , 1986 .
now it 's 2011 .
that 's 25 years ago .
the pc virus problem is 25 years old now .
so half a year ago , i decided to go to pakistan myself .
so let 's see , here 's a couple of photos i took while i was in pakistan .
this is from the city of lahore , which is around 300 kilometers south from abbottabad , where bin laden was caught .
here 's a typical street view .
and here 's the street or road leading to this building , which is 730 nizam block at allama iqbal town .
and i knocked on the door .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you want to guess who opened the door ?
basit and amjad ; they are still there .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so here standing up is basit .
sitting down is his brother amjad .
these are the guys who wrote the first pc virus .
now of course , we had a very interesting discussion .
i asked them why .
i asked them how they feel about what they started .
and i got some sort of satisfaction from learning that both basit and amjad had had their computers infected dozens of times by completely unrelated other viruses over these years .
so there is some sort of justice in the world after all .
now , the viruses that we used to see in the 1980s and 1990s obviously are not a problem any more .
so let me just show you a couple of examples of what they used to look like .
what i 'm running here is a system that enables me to run age-old programs on a modern computer .
so let me just mount some drives . go over there .
what we have here is a list of old viruses .
so let me just run some viruses on my computer .
for example , let 's go with the centipede virus first .
and you can see at the top of the screen , there 's a centipede scrolling across your computer when you get infected by this one .
you know that you 're infected because it actually shows up .
here 's another one . this is the virus called crash , invented in russia in 1992 .
let me show you one which actually makes some sound .
-lrb- siren noise -rrb- and the last example , guess what the walker virus does ?
yes , there 's a guy walking across your screen once you get infected .
so it used to be fairly easy to know that you 're infected by a virus , when the viruses were written by hobbyists and teenagers .
today , they are no longer being written by hobbyists and teenagers .
today , viruses are a global problem .
what we have here in the background is an example of our systems that we run in our labs , where we track virus infections worldwide .
so we can actually see in real time that we 've just blocked viruses in sweden and taiwan and russia and elsewhere .
in fact , if i just connect back to our lab systems through the web , we can see in real time just some kind of idea of how many viruses , how many new examples of malware we find every single day .
here 's the latest virus we 've found , in a file called server.exe.
and we found it right over here three seconds ago - the previous one , six seconds ago .
and if we just scroll around , it 's just massive .
we find tens of thousands , even hundreds of thousands .
and that 's the last 20 minutes of malware every single day .
so where are all these coming from then ?
well today , it 's the organized criminal gangs writing these viruses because they make money with their viruses .
it 's gangs like - let 's go to gangstabucks.com.
this is a website operating in moscow where these guys are buying infected computers .
so if you are a virus writer and you 're capable of infecting windows computers , but you do n't know what to do with them , you can sell those infected computers - somebody else 's computers - to these guys .
and they 'll actually pay you money for those computers .
so how do these guys then monetize those infected computers ?
well there 's multiple different ways , such as banking trojans , which will steal money from your online banking accounts when you do online banking , or keyloggers .
keyloggers silently sit on your computer , hidden from view , and they record everything you type .
so you 're sitting on your computer and you 're doing google searches .
every single google search you type is saved and sent to the criminals .
every single email you write is saved and sent to the criminals .
same thing with every single password and so on .
but the thing that they 're actually looking for most are sessions where you go online and do online purchases in any online store .
because when you do purchases in online stores , you will be typing in your name , the delivery address , your credit card number and the credit card security codes .
and here 's an example of a file we found from a server a couple of weeks ago .
that 's the credit card number , that 's the expiration date , that 's the security code , and that 's the name of the owner of the card .
once you gain access to other people 's credit card information , you can just go online and buy whatever you want with this information .
and that , obviously , is a problem .
we now have a whole underground marketplace and business ecosystem built around online crime .
one example of how these guys actually are capable of monetizing their operations : we go and have a look at the pages of interpol and search for wanted persons .
we find guys like bjorn sundin , originally from sweden , and his partner in crime , also listed on the interpol wanted pages , mr. shaileshkumar jain , a u.s. citizen .
these guys were running an operation called i.m.u. , a cybercrime operation through which they netted millions .
they are both right now on the run .
nobody knows where they are .
u.s. officials , just a couple of weeks ago , froze a swiss bank account belonging to mr. jain , and that bank account had 14.9 million u.s. dollars on it .
so the amount of money online crime generates is significant .
and that means that the online criminals can actually afford to invest into their attacks .
we know that online criminals are hiring programmers , hiring testing people , testing their code , having back-end systems with sql databases .
and they can afford to watch how we work - like how security people work - and try to work their way around any security precautions we can build .
they also use the global nature of internet to their advantage .
i mean , the internet is international .
that 's why we call it the internet .
and if you just go and take a look at what 's happening in the online world , here 's a video built by clarified networks , which illustrates how one single malware family is able to move around the world .
this operation , believed to be originally from estonia , moves around from one country to another as soon as the website is tried to shut down .
so you just ca n't shut these guys down .
they will switch from one country to another , from one jurisdiction to another - moving around the world , using the fact that we do n't have the capability to globally police operations like this .
so the internet is as if someone would have given free plane tickets to all the online criminals of the world .
now , criminals who were n't capable of reaching us before can reach us .
so how do you actually go around finding online criminals ?
how do you actually track them down ?
let me give you an example .
what we have here is one exploit file .
here , i 'm looking at the hex dump of an image file , which contains an exploit .
and that basically means , if you 're trying to view this image file on your windows computer , it actually takes over your computer and runs code .
now , if you 'll take a look at this image file - well there 's the image header , and there the actual code of the attack starts .
and that code has been encrypted , so let 's decrypt it .
it has been encrypted with xor function 97 .
you just have to believe me , it is , it is .
and we can go here and actually start decrypting it .
well the yellow part of the code is now decrypted .
and i know , it does n't really look much different from the original .
but just keep staring at it .
you 'll actually see that down here you can see a web address : unionseek.com / d / ioo.exe and when you view this image on your computer it actually is going to download and run that program .
and that 's a backdoor which will take over your computer .
but even more interestingly , if we continue decrypting , we 'll find this mysterious string , which says o600ko78rus .
that code is there underneath the encryption as some sort of a signature .
it 's not used for anything .
and i was looking at that , trying to figure out what it means .
so obviously i googled for it .
i got zero hits ; was n't there .
so i spoke with the guys at the lab .
and we have a couple of russian guys in our labs , and one of them mentioned , well , it ends in rus like russia .
and 78 is the city code for the city of st. petersburg .
for example , you can find it from some phone numbers and car license plates and stuff like that .
so i went looking for contacts in st. petersburg , and through a long road , we eventually found this one particular website .
here 's this russian guy who 's been operating online for a number of years who runs his own website , and he runs a blog under the popular live journal .
and on this blog , he blogs about his life , about his life in st. petersburg - he 's in his early 20s - about his cat , about his girlfriend .
and he drives a very nice car .
in fact , this guy drives a mercedes-benz s600 v12 with a six-liter engine with more than 400 horsepower .
now that 's a nice car for a 20-something year-old kid in st. petersburg .
how do i know about this car ?
because he blogged about the car .
he actually had a car accident .
in downtown st. petersburg , he actually crashed his car into another car .
and he put blogged images about the car accident - that 's his mercedes - right here is the lada samara he crashed into .
and you can actually see that the license plate of the samara ends in 78rus .
and if you actually take a look at the scene picture , you can see that the plate of the mercedes is o600ko78rus .
now i 'm not a lawyer , but if i would be , this is where i would say , " i rest my case . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so what happens when online criminals are caught ?
well in most cases it never gets this far .
the vast majority of the online crime cases , we do n't even know which continent the attacks are coming from .
and even if we are able to find online criminals , quite often there is no outcome .
the local police do n't act , or if they do , there 's not enough evidence , or for some reason we ca n't take them down .
i wish it would be easier ; unfortunately it is n't .
but things are also changing at a very rapid pace .
you 've all heard about things like stuxnet .
so if you look at what stuxnet did is that it infected these .
that 's a siemens s7-400 plc , programmable logic -lsb- controller -rsb- .
and this is what runs our infrastructure .
this is what runs everything around us .
plc 's , these small boxes which have no display , no keyboard , which are programmed , are put in place , and they do their job .
for example , the elevators in this building most likely are controlled by one of these .
and when stuxnet infects one of these , that 's a massive revolution on the kinds of risks we have to worry about .
because everything around us is being run by these .
i mean , we have critical infrastructure .
you go to any factory , any power plant , any chemical plant , any food processing plant , you look around - everything is being run by computers .
everything is being run by computers .
everything is reliant on these computers working .
we have become very reliant on internet , on basic things like electricity , obviously , on computers working .
and this really is something which creates completely new problems for us .
we must have some way of continuing to work even if computers fail .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so preparedness means that we can do stuff even when the things we take for granted are n't there .
it 's actually very basic stuff - thinking about continuity , thinking about backups , thinking about the things that actually matter .
now i told you - -lrb- laughter -rrb- i love the internet . i do .
think about all the services we have online .
think about if they are taken away from you , if one day you do n't actually have them for some reason or another .
i see beauty in the future of the internet , but i 'm worried that we might not see that .
i 'm worried that we are running into problems because of online crime .
online crime is the one thing that might take these things away from us .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i 've spent my life defending the net , and i do feel that if we do n't fight online crime , we are running a risk of losing it all .
we have to do this globally , and we have to do it right now .
what we need is more global , international law enforcement work to find online criminal gangs - these organized gangs that are making millions out of their attacks .
that 's much more important than running anti-viruses or running firewalls .
what actually matters is actually finding the people behind these attacks , and even more importantly , we have to find the people who are about to become part of this online world of crime , but have n't yet done it .
we have to find the people with the skills , but without the opportunities and give them the opportunities to use their skills for good .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm extremely excited to be given the opportunity to come and speak to you today about what i consider to be the biggest stunt on earth .
or perhaps not quite on earth .
a parachute jump from the very edge of space .
more about that a bit later on .
what i 'd like to do first is take you through a very brief helicopter ride of stunts and the stunts industry in the movies and in television , and show you how technology has started to interface with the physical skills of the stunt performer in a way that makes the stunts bigger and actually makes them safer than they 've ever been before .
i 've been a professional stunt man for 13 years .
i 'm a stunt coordinator . and as well as perform stunts i often design them .
during that time , health and safety has become everything about my job .
it 's critical now that when a car crash happens it is n't just the stunt person we make safe , it 's the crew .
we ca n't be killing camera men . we ca n't be killing stunt men .
we ca n't be killing anybody or hurting anybody on set , or any passerby . so , safety is everything .
but it was n't always that way .
in the old days of the silent movies - harold lloyd here , hanging famously from the clock hands - a lot of these guys did their own stunts . they were quite remarkable .
they had no safety , no real technology .
what safety they had was very scant .
this is the first stunt woman , rosie venger , an amazing woman .
you can see from the slide , very very strong .
she really paved the way at a time when nobody was doing stunts , let alone women .
my favorite and a real hero of mine is yakima canutt .
yakima canutt really formed the stunt fight .
he worked with john wayne and most of those old punch-ups you see in the westerns . yakima was either there or he stunt coordinated .
this is a screen capture from " stagecoach , " where yakima canutt is doing one of the most dangerous stunts i 've ever seen .
there is no safety , no back support , no pads , no crash mats , no sand pits in the ground .
that 's one of the most dangerous horse stunts , certainly .
talking of dangerous stunts and bringing things slightly up to date , some of the most dangerous stunts we do as stunt people are fire stunts .
we could n't do them without technology .
these are particularly dangerous because there is no mask on my face .
they were done for a photo shoot . one for the sun newspaper , one for fhm magazine .
highly dangerous , but also you 'll notice it does n't look as though i 'm wearing anything underneath the suit .
the fire suits of old , the bulky suits , the thick woolen suits , have been replaced with modern materials like nomex or , more recently , carbonex - fantastic materials that enable us as stunt professionals to burn for longer , look more spectacular , and in pure safety .
here 's a bit more .
there 's a guy with a flame thrower there , giving me what for .
one of the things that a stuntman often does , and you 'll see it every time in the big movies , is be blown through the air .
well , we used to use trampettes . in the old days , that 's all they had .
and that 's a ramp . spring off the thing and fly through the air , and hopefully you make it look good .
now we 've got technology . this thing is called an air ram .
it 's a frightening piece of equipment for the novice stunt performer , because it will break your legs very , very quickly if you land on it wrong .
having said that , it works with compressed nitrogen .
and that 's in the up position . when you step on it , either by remote control or with the pressure of your foot , it will fire you , depending on the gas pressure , anything from five feet to 30 feet .
i could , quite literally , fire myself into the gallery .
which i 'm sure you would n't want .
not today .
car stunts are another area where technology and engineering advances have made life easier for us , and safer .
we can do bigger car stunts than ever before now .
being run over is never easy .
that 's an old-fashioned , hard , gritty , physical stunt .
but we have padding , and fantastic shock-absorbing things like sorbothane - the materials that help us , when we 're hit like this , not to hurt ourselves too much .
the picture in the bottom right-hand corner there is of some crash test dummy work that i was doing .
showing how stunts work in different areas , really .
and testing breakaway signpost pillars .
a company makes a lattix pillar , which is a network , a lattice-type pillar that collapses when it 's hit .
the car on the left drove into the steel pillar .
and you ca n't see it from there , but the engine was in the driver 's lap .
they did it by remote control .
i drove the other one at 60 miles an hour , exactly the same speed , and clearly walked away from it .
rolling a car over is another area where we use technology .
we used to have to drive up a ramp , and we still do sometimes .
but now we have a compressed nitrogen cannon .
you can just see , underneath the car , there is a black rod on the floor by the wheel of the other car .
that 's the piston that was fired out of the floor .
we can flip lorries , coaches , buses , anything over with a nitrogen cannon with enough power . -lrb- laughs -rrb- it 's a great job , really . -lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's such fun !
you should hear some of the phone conversations that i have with people on my bluetooth in the shop .
" well , we can flip the bus over , we can have it burst into flames , and how about someone , you know , big explosion . "
and people are looking like this ...
-lrb- laughs -rrb- i sort of forget how bizarre some of those conversations are .
the next thing that i 'd like to show you is something that dunlop asked me to do earlier this year with our channel five 's " fifth gear show . "
a loop-the-loop , biggest in the world .
only one person had ever done it before .
now , the stuntman solution to this in the old days would be , " let 's hit this as fast as possible . 60 miles an hour .
let 's just go for it . foot flat to the floor . "
well , you 'd die if you did that .
we went to cambridge university , the other university , and spoke to a doctor of mechanical engineering there , a physicist who taught us that it had to be 37 miles an hour .
even then , i caught seven g and lost a bit of consciousness on the way in .
that 's a long way to fall , if you get it wrong . that was just about right .
so again , science helps us , and with the engineering too - the modifications to the car and the wheel .
high falls , they 're old fashioned stunts .
what 's interesting about high falls is that although we use airbags , and some airbags are quite advanced , they 're designed so you do n't slip off the side like you used to , if you land a bit wrong . so , they 're a much safer proposition .
just basically though , it is a basic piece of equipment .
it 's a bouncy castle with slats in the side to allow the air to escape .
that 's all it is , a bouncy castle .
that 's the only reason we do it . see , it 's all fun , this job .
what 's interesting is we still use cardboard boxes .
they used to use cardboard boxes years ago and we still use them .
and that 's interesting because they are almost retrospective .
they 're great for catching you , up to certain heights .
and on the other side of the fence , that physical art , the physical performance of the stuntman , has interfaced with the very highest technology in i.t. and in software .
not the cardboard box , but the green screen .
this is a shot of " terminator , " the movie .
two stunt guys doing what i consider to be a rather benign stunt .
it 's 30 feet . it 's water . it 's very simple .
with the green screen we can put any background in the world on it , moving or still , and i can assure you , nowadays you ca n't see the joint .
this is a parachutist with another parachutist doing exactly the same thing .
completely in the safety of a studio , and yet with the green screen we can have some moving image that a skydiver took , and put in the sky moving and the clouds whizzing by .
decelerator rigs and wires , we use them a lot .
we fly people on wires , like this .
this guy is not skydiving . he 's being flown like a kite , or moved around like a kite .
and this is a guinness world record attempt .
they asked me to open their 50th anniversary show in 2004 .
and again , technology meant that i could do the fastest abseil over 100 meters , and stop within a couple of feet of the ground without melting the rope with the friction , because of the alloys i used in the descender device .
and that 's centre point in london .
we brought oxford street and tottenham court road to a standstill .
helicopter stunts are always fun , hanging out of them , whatever .
and aerial stunts . no aerial stunt would be the same without skydiving .
which brings us quite nicely to why i 'm really here today : project space jump .
in 1960 , joseph kittenger of the united states air force did the most spectacular thing .
he did a jump from 100,000 feet , 102,000 to be precise , and he did it to test high altitude systems for military pilots in the new range of aircraft that were going up to 80,000 feet or so .
and i 'd just like to show you a little footage of what he did back then .
and just how brave he was in 1960 , bear in mind .
project excelsior , it was called .
there were three jumps .
they first dropped some dummies .
so that 's the balloon , big gas balloon .
it 's that shape because the helium has to expand .
my balloon will expand to 500 times and look like a big pumpkin when it 's at the top .
these are the dummies being dropped from 100,000 feet , and there is the camera that 's strapped to them .
you can clearly see the curvature of the earth at that kind of altitude .
and i 'm planning to go from 120,000 feet , which is about 22 miles .
you 're in a near vacuum in that environment , which is in minus 50 degrees .
so it 's an extremely hostile place to be .
this is joe kittenger himself .
bear in mind , ladies and gents , this was 1960 .
he did n't know if he would live or die . this is an extremely brave man .
i spoke with him on the phone a few months ago .
he 's a very humble and wonderful human being .
he sent me an email , saying , " if you get this thing off the ground i wish you all the best . " and he signed it , " happy landings , " which i thought was quite lovely .
he 's in his 80s and he lives in florida . he 's a tremendous guy .
this is him in a pressure suit .
now one of the challenges of going up to altitude is when you get to 30,000 feet - it 's great , is n't it ? - when you get to 30,000 feet you can really only use oxygen .
above 30,000 feet up to nearly 50,000 feet , you need pressure breathing , which is where you 're wearing a g suit .
this is him in his old rock-and-roll jeans there , pushing him in , those turned up jeans .
you need a pressure suit .
you need a pressure breathing system with a g suit that squeezes you , that helps you to breathe in and helps you to exhale .
above 50,000 feet you need a space suit , a pressure suit .
certainly at 100,000 feet no aircraft will fly .
not even a jet engine .
it needs to be rocket-powered or one of these things , a great big gas balloon .
it took me a while ; it took me years to find the right balloon team to build the balloon that would do this job .
i 've found that team in america now .
and it 's made of polyethylene , so it 's very thin .
we will have two balloons for each of my test jumps , and two balloons for the main jump , because they notoriously tear on takeoff .
they 're just so , so delicate .
this is the step off . he 's written on that thing , " the highest step in the world . "
and what must that feel like ?
i 'm excited and i 'm scared , both at the same time in equal measures .
and this is the camera that he had on him as he tumbled before his drogue chute opened to stabilize him .
a drogue chute is just a smaller chute which helps to keep your face down .
you can just see them there , popping open .
those are the drogue chutes . he had three of them .
i did quite a lot of research .
and you 'll see in a second there , he comes back down to the floor .
now just to give you some perspective of this balloon , the little black dots are people .
it 's hundreds of feet high . it 's enormous .
that 's in new mexico .
that 's the u.s. air force museum .
and they 've made a dummy of him . that 's exactly what it looked like .
my gondola will be more simple than that .
it 's a three sided box , basically .
so i 've had to do quite a lot of training .
this is morocco last year in the atlas mountains , training in preparation for some high altitude jumps .
this is what the view is going to be like at 90,000 feet for me .
now you may think this is just a thrill-seeking trip , a pleasure ride , just the world 's biggest stunt .
well there 's a little bit more to it than that .
trying to find a space suit to do this has led me to an area of technology that i never really expected when i set about doing this .
i contacted a company in the states who make suits for nasa .
that 's a current suit . this was me last year with their chief engineer .
that suit would cost me about a million and a half dollars .
and it weighs 300 pounds and you ca n't skydive in it .
so i 've been stuck . for the past 15 years i 've been trying to find a space suit that would do this job , or someone that will make one .
something revolutionary happened a little while ago , at the same facility .
that 's the prototype of the parachute . i 've now had them custom make one , the only one of its kind in the world . and that 's the only suit of its kind in the world .
it was made by a russian that 's designed most of the suits of the past 18 years for the soviets .
he left the company because he saw , as some other people in the space suit industry , an emerging market for space suits for space tourists .
you know if you are in an aircraft at 30,000 feet and the cabin depressurizes , you can have oxygen .
if you 're at 100,000 feet you die .
in six seconds you 've lost consciousness . in 10 seconds you 're dead .
your blood tries to boil . it 's called vaporization .
the body swells up . it 's awful .
and so we expect - it 's not much fun .
we expect , and others expect , that perhaps the faa , the caa might say , " you need to put someone in a suit that 's not inflated , that 's connected to the aircraft . "
then they 're comfortable , they have good vision , like this great big visor .
and then if the cabin depressurizes while the aircraft is coming back down , in whatever emergency measures , everyone is okay .
i would like to bring costa on , if he 's here , to show you the only one of its kind in the world .
i was going to wear it , but i thought i 'd get costa to do it , my lovely assistant .
thank you . he 's very hot . thank you , costa .
this is the communication headset you 'll see on lots of space suits .
it 's a two-layer suit . nasa suits have got 13 layers .
this is a very lightweight suit . it weighs about 15 pounds .
it 's next to nothing . especially designed for me .
it 's a working prototype . i will use it for all the jumps .
would you just give us a little twirl , please , costa ?
thank you very much .
and it does n't look far different when it 's inflated , as you can see from the picture down there .
i 've even skydived in it in a wind tunnel , which means that i can practice everything i need to practice , in safety , before i ever jump out of anything . thanks very much , costa .
-lrb- applause -rrb- ladies and gentlemen , that 's just about it from me .
the status of my mission at the moment is it still needs a major sponsor .
i 'm confident that we 'll find one .
i think it 's a great challenge .
and i hope that you will agree with me , it is the greatest stunt on earth .
thank you very much for your time .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm going to talk about compassion and the golden rule from a secular perspective and even from a kind of scientific perspective .
i 'm going to try to give you a little bit of a natural history of compassion and the golden rule .
so , i 'm going to be sometimes using kind of clinical language , and so it 's not going to sound as warm and fuzzy as your average compassion talk .
i want to warn you about that .
so , i do want to say , at the outset , that i think compassion 's great .
the golden rule is great . i 'm a big supporter of both .
and i think it 's great that the leaders of the religions of the world are affirming compassion and the golden rule as fundamental principles that are integral to their faiths .
at the same time , i think religions do n't deserve all the credit .
i think nature gave them a helping hand here .
i 'm going to argue tonight that compassion and the golden rule are , in a certain sense , built into human nature .
but i 'm also going to argue that once you understand the sense in which they are built into human nature , you realize that just affirming compassion , and affirming the golden rule , is really not enough .
there 's a lot of work to be done after that .
ok so , a quick natural history , first of compassion .
in the beginning , there was compassion , and i mean not just when human beings first showed up , but actually even before that .
i think it 's probably the case that , in the human evolutionary lineage , even before there were homo sapiens , feelings like compassion and love and sympathy had earned their way into the gene pool , and biologists have a pretty clear idea of how this first happened .
it happened through a principle known as kin selection .
and the basic idea of kin selection is that , if an animal feels compassion for a close relative , and this compassion leads the animal to help the relative , then , in the end , the compassion actually winds up helping the genes underlying the compassion itself .
so , from a biologist 's point of view , compassion is actually a gene 's way of helping itself . ok .
i warned you this was not going to be very warm and fuzzy .
i 'll get there - i hope to get a little fuzzier .
this does n't bother me so much , that the underlying darwinian rationale of compassion is kind of self-serving at the genetic level .
actually , i think the bad news about kin selection is just that it means that this kind of compassion is naturally deployed only within the family .
that 's the bad news . the good news is compassion is natural .
the bad news is that this kin selected compassion is naturally confined to the family .
now , there 's more good news that came along later in evolution , a second kind of evolutionary logic .
biologists call that " reciprocal altruism . " ok .
and there , the basic idea is that compassion leads you to do good things for people who then will return the favor .
again , i know this is not as inspiring a notion of compassion as you may have heard in the past , but from a biologist 's point of view , this reciprocal altruism kind of compassion is ultimately self-serving too .
it 's not that people think that , when they feel the compassion .
it 's not consciously self-serving , but to a biologist , that 's the logic .
and so , you wind up most easily extending compassion to friends and allies .
i 'm sure a lot of you , if a close friend has something really terrible happen to them , you feel really bad .
but if you read in the newspaper that something really horrible happened to somebody you 've never heard of , you can probably live with that .
that 's just human nature .
so , it 's another good news / bad news story .
it 's good that compassion was extended beyond the family by this kind of evolutionary logic .
the bad news is this does n't bring us universal compassion by itself .
so , there 's still work to be done .
now , there 's one other result of this dynamic called reciprocal altruism , which i think is kind of good news , which is that the way that this is played out in the human species , it has given people an intuitive appreciation of the golden rule .
i do n't quite mean that the golden rule itself is written in our genes , but you can go to a hunter gatherer society that has had no exposure to any of the great religious traditions , no exposure to ethical philosophy , and you 'll find , if you spend time with these people , that , basically , they believe that one good turn deserves another , and that bad deeds should be punished .
and evolutionary psychologists think that these intuitions have a basis in the genes .
so , they do understand that if you want to be treated well , you treat other people well .
and it 's good to treat other people well .
that 's close to being a kind of built-in intuition .
so , that 's good news . now , if you 've been paying attention , you 're probably anticipating that there 's bad news here ; we still are n't to universal love , and it 's true because , although an appreciation of the golden rule is natural , it 's also natural to carve out exceptions to the golden rule .
i mean , for example , none of us , probably , want to go to prison , but we all think that there are some people who should go to prison . right ?
so , we think we should treat them differently than we would want to be treated .
now , we have a rationale for that .
we say they did these bad things that make it just that they should go to prison .
none of us really extends the golden rule in truly diffuse and universal fashion .
we have the capacity to carve out exceptions , put people in a special category .
and the problem is that - although in the case of sending people to prison , you have this impartial judiciary determining who gets excluded from the golden rule - that in everyday life , the way we all make these decisions about who we 're not going to extend the golden rule to , is we use a much rougher and readier formula .
basically it 's just like , if you 're my enemy , if you 're my rival - if you 're not my friend , if you 're not in my family - i 'm much less inclined to apply the golden rule to you .
we all do that , and you see it all over the world .
you see it in the middle east : people who , from gaza , are firing missiles at israel .
they would n't want to have missiles fired at them , but they say , " well , but the israelis , or some of them have done things that put them in a special category . "
the israelis would not want to have an economic blockade imposed on them , but they impose one on gaza , and they say , " well , the palestinians , or some of them , have brought this on themselves . "
so , it 's these exclusions to the golden rule that amount to a lot of the world 's trouble .
and it 's natural to do that .
so , the fact that the golden rule is in some sense built in to us is not , by itself , going to bring us universal love .
it 's not going to save the world .
now , there 's one piece of good news i have that may save the world . okay .
are you on the edges of your seats here ?
good , because before i tell you about that good news , i 'm going to have to take a little excursion through some academic terrain .
so , i hope i 've got your attention with this promise of good news that may save the world .
it 's this non-zero-sumness stuff you just heard a little bit about .
it 's just a quick introduction to game theory .
this wo n't hurt . okay .
it 's about zero-sum and non-zero-sum games .
if you ask what kind of a situation is conducive to people becoming friends and allies , the technical answer is a non-zero-sum situation .
and if you ask what kind of situation is conducive to people defining people as enemies , it 's a zero-sum situation .
so , what do those terms mean ?
basically , a zero-sum game is the kind you 're used to in sports , where there 's a winner and a loser .
so , their fortunes add up to zero .
so , in tennis , every point is either good for you and bad for the other person , or good for them , bad for you .
either way , your fortunes add up to zero . that 's a zero-sum game .
now , if you 're playing doubles , then the person on your side of the net is in a non-zero-sum relationship with you , because every point is either good for both of you - positive , win-win - or bad for both of you , it 's lose-lose .
that 's a non-zero-sum game .
and in real life , there are lots of non-zero-sum games .
in the realm of economics , say , if you buy something : that means you 'd rather have the merchandise than the money , but the merchant would rather have the money than the merchandise .
you both feel you 've won .
in a war , two allies are playing a non-zero-sum game .
it 's going to either be win-win or lose-lose for them .
so , there are lots of non-zero-sum games in real life .
and you could basically reformulate what i said earlier , about how compassion is deployed and the golden rule is deployed , by just saying , well , compassion most naturally flows along non-zero-sum channels where people perceive themselves as being in a potentially win-win situation with some of their friends or allies .
the deployment of the golden rule most naturally happens along these non-zero-sum channels .
so , kind of webs of non-zero-sumness are where you would expect compassion and the golden rule to kind of work their magic .
with zero-sum channels you would expect something else .
okay . so , now you 're ready for the good news that i said might save the world .
and now i can admit that it might not too , now that i 've held your attention for three minutes of technical stuff .
but it may . and the good news is that history has naturally expanded these webs of non-zero-sumness , these webs that can be these channels for compassion .
you can go back all the way to the stone age : technological evolution - roads , the wheel , writing , a lot of transportation and communication technologies - has just inexorably made it so that more people can be in more non-zero-sum relationships with more and more people at greater and greater distances .
that 's the story of civilization .
it 's why social organization has grown from the hunter-gatherer village to the ancient state , the empire , and now here we are in a globalized world .
and the story of globalization is largely a story of non-zero-sumness .
you 've probably heard the term " interdependence " applied to the modern world . well , that 's just another term for non-zero-sum .
if your fortunes are interdependent with somebody , then you live in a non-zero-sum relationship with them .
and you see this all the time in the modern world .
you saw it with the recent economic crash , where bad things happen in the economy - bad for everybody , for much of the world .
good things happen , and it 's good for much of the world .
and , you know , i 'm happy to say , i think there 's really evidence that this non-zero-sum kind of connection can expand the moral compass .
i mean , if you look at the american attitudes toward japanese during world war ii - look at the depictions of japanese in the american media as just about subhuman , and look at the fact that we dropped atomic bombs , really without giving it much of a thought - and you compare that to the attitude now , i think part of that is due to a kind of economic interdependence .
any form of interdependence , or non-zero-sum relationship forces you to acknowledge the humanity of people .
so , i think that 's good .
and the world is full of non-zero-sum dynamics .
environmental problems , in many ways , put us all in the same boat .
and there are non-zero-sum relationships that maybe people are n't aware of .
for example , probably a lot of american christians do n't think of themselves as being in a non-zero-sum relationship with muslims halfway around the world , but they really are , because if these muslims become happier and happier with their place in the world and feel that they have a place in it , that 's good for americans , because there will be fewer terrorists to threaten american security .
if they get less and less happy , that will be bad for americans .
so , there 's plenty of non-zero-sumness .
and so , the question is : if there 's so much non-zero-sumness , why has the world not yet been suffused in love , peace , and understanding ?
the answer 's complicated . it 's the occasion for a whole other talk .
certainly , a couple of things are that , first of all , there are a lot of zero-sum situations in the world .
and also , sometimes people do n't recognize the non-zero-sum dynamics in the world .
in both of these areas , i think politicians can play a role .
this is n't only about religion .
i think politicians can help foster non-zero-sum relationships , economic engagement is generally better than blockades and so on , in this regard .
and politicians can be aware , and should be aware that , when people around the world are looking at them , are looking at their nation and picking up their cues for whether they are in a zero-sum or a non-zero-sum relationship with a nation - like , say , america , or any other nation - human psychology is such that they use cues like : do we feel we 're being respected ?
because , you know , historically , if you 're not being respected , you 're probably not going to wind up in a non-zero-sum , mutually profitable relationship with people .
so , we need to be aware of what kind of signals we 're sending out .
and some of this , again , is in the realm of political work .
if there 's one thing i can encourage everyone to do , politicians , religious leaders , and us , it would be what i call " expanding the moral imagination " - that is to say , your ability to put yourself in the shoes of people in very different circumstances .
this is not the same as compassion , but it 's conducive to compassion . it opens the channels for compassion .
and i 'm afraid we have another good news / bad news story , which is that the moral imagination is part of human nature .
that 's good , but again we tend to deploy it selectively .
once we define somebody as an enemy , we have trouble putting ourselves in their shoes , just naturally .
so , if you want to take a particularly hard case for an american : somebody in iran who is burning an american flag , and you see them on tv .
well , the average american is going to resist the moral exercise of putting themselves in that person 's head and is going to resist the idea that they have much in common with that person .
and if you tell them , " well , they think america disrespects them and even wants to dominate them , and they hate america .
has there ever been somebody who disrespected you so much that you kind of hated them briefly " ?
you know , they 'll resist that comparison and that 's natural , that 's human .
and , similarly , the person in iran : when you try to humanize somebody in america who said that islam is evil , they 'll have trouble with that .
so , it 's a very difficult thing to get people to expand the moral imagination to a place it does n't naturally go .
i think it 's worth the trouble because , again , it just helps us to understand .
if you want to reduce the number of people who are burning flags , it helps to understand what makes them do it .
and i think it 's good moral exercise .
i would say here is where religious leaders come in , because religious leaders are good at reframing issues for people , at harnessing the emotional centers of the brain to get people to alter their awareness and reframe the way they think .
i mean , religious leaders are kind of in the inspiration business .
it 's their great calling right now , to get people all around the world better at expanding their moral imaginations , appreciating that in so many ways they 're in the same boat .
i would just sum up the way things look , at least from this secular perspective , as far as compassion and the golden rule go , by saying that it 's good news that compassion and the golden rule are in some sense built into human nature .
it 's unfortunate that they tend to be selectively deployed .
and it 's going to take real work to change that .
but , nobody ever said that doing god 's work was going to be easy . thanks .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so i understand that this meeting was planned , and the slogan was from was to still .
and i am illustrating still .
which , of course , i am not agreeing with because , although i am 94 , i am not still working .
and anybody who asks me , " are you still doing this or that ? "
i do n't answer because i 'm not doing things still , i 'm doing it like i always did .
i still have - or did i use the word still ? i did n't mean that .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i have my file which is called to do . i have my plans .
i have my clients . i am doing my work like i always did .
so this takes care of my age .
i want to show you my work so you know what i am doing and why i am here .
this was about 1925 .
all of these things were made during the last 75 years .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- but , of course , i 'm working since 25 , doing more or less what you see here . this is castleton china .
this was an exhibition at the museum of modern art .
this is now for sale at the metropolitan museum .
this is still at the metropolitan museum now for sale .
this is a portrait of my daughter and myself .
-lrb- applause -rrb- these were just some of the things i 've made .
i made hundreds of them for the last 75 years .
i call myself a maker of things .
i do n't call myself an industrial designer because i 'm other things .
industrial designers want to make novel things .
novelty is a concept of commerce , not an aesthetic concept .
the industrial design magazine , i believe , is called " innovation . "
innovation is not part of the aim of my work .
well , makers of things : they make things more beautiful , more elegant , more comfortable than just the craftsmen do .
i have so much to say . i have to think what i am going to say .
well , to describe our profession otherwise , we are actually concerned with the playful search for beauty .
that means the playful search for beauty was called the first activity of man .
sarah smith , who was a mathematics professor at mit , wrote , " the playful search for beauty was man 's first activity - that all useful qualities and all material qualities were developed from the playful search for beauty . "
these are tiles . the word , " playful " is a necessary aspect of our work because , actually , one of our problems is that we have to make , produce , lovely things throughout all of life , and this for me is now 75 years .
so how can you , without drying up , make things with the same pleasure , as a gift to others , for so long ?
the playful is therefore an important part of our quality as designer .
let me tell you some about my life .
as i said , i started to do these things 75 years ago .
my first exhibition in the united states was at the sesquicentennial exhibition in 1926 - that the hungarian government sent one of my hand-drawn pieces as part of the exhibit .
my work actually took me through many countries , and showed me a great part of the world .
this is not that they took me - the work did n't take me - i made the things particularly because i wanted to use them to see the world .
i was incredibly curious to see the world , and i made all these things , which then finally did take me to see many countries and many cultures .
i started as an apprentice to a hungarian craftsman , and this taught me what the guild system was in middle ages .
the guild system : that means when i was an apprentice , i had to apprentice myself in order to become a pottery master .
in my shop where i studied , or learned , there was a traditional hierarchy of master , journeyman and learned worker , and apprentice , and i worked as the apprentice .
the work as an apprentice was very primitive .
that means i had to actually learn every aspect of making pottery by hand .
we mashed the clay with our feet when it came from the hillside .
after that , it had to be kneaded . it had to then go in , kind of , a mangle .
and then finally it was prepared for the throwing .
and there i really worked as an apprentice .
my master took me to set ovens because this was part of oven-making , oven-setting , in the time .
and finally , i had received a document that i had accomplished my apprenticeship successfully , that i had behaved morally , and this document was given to me by the guild of roof-coverers , rail-diggers , oven-setters , chimney sweeps and potters .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i also got at the time a workbook which explained my rights and my working conditions , and i still have that workbook .
first i set up a shop in my own garden , and made pottery which i sold on the marketplace in budapest .
and there i was sitting , and my then-boyfriend - i did n't mean it was a boyfriend like it is meant today - but my boyfriend and i sat at the market and sold the pots .
my mother thought that this was not very proper , so she sat with us to add propriety to this activity .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- however , after a while there was a new factory being built in budapest , a pottery factory , a large one .
and i visited it with several ladies , and asked all sorts of questions of the director .
then the director asked me , why do you ask all these questions ?
i said , i also have a pottery .
so he asked me , could he please visit me , and then finally he did , and explained to me that what i did now in my shop was an anachronism , that the industrial revolution had broken out , and that i rather should join the factory .
there he made an art department for me where i worked for several months .
however , everybody in the factory spent his time at the art department .
the director there said there were several women casting and producing my designs now in molds , and this was sold also to america .
i remember that it was quite successful .
however , the director , the chemist , model maker - everybody - concerned himself much more with the art department - that means , with my work - than making toilets , so finally they got a letter from the center , from the bank who owned the factory , saying , make toilet-setting behind the art department , and that was my end .
so this gave me the possibility because now i was a journeyman , and journeymen also take their satchel and go to see the world .
so as a journeyman , i put an ad into the paper that i had studied , that i was a down-to-earth potter 's journeyman and i was looking for a job as a journeyman .
and i got several answers , and i accepted the one which was farthest from home and practically , i thought , halfway to america .
and that was in hamburg .
then i first took this job in hamburg , at an art pottery where everything was done on the wheel , and so i worked in a shop where there were several potters .
and the first day , i was coming to take my place at the turntable - there were three or four turntables - and one of them , behind where i was sitting , was a hunchback , a deaf-mute hunchback , who smelled very bad .
so i doused him in cologne every day , which he thought was very nice , and therefore he brought bread and butter every day , which i had to eat out of courtesy .
the first day i came to work in this shop there was on my wheel a surprise for me .
my colleagues had thoughtfully put on the wheel where i was supposed to work a very nicely modeled natural man 's organs .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- after i brushed them off with a hand motion , they were very - i finally was now accepted , and worked there for some six months .
this was my first job .
if i go on like this , you will be here till midnight .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so i will try speed it up a little -lrb- laughter -rrb- moderator : eva , we have about five minutes .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- eva zeisel : are you sure ?
moderator : yes , i am sure .
ez : well , if you are sure , i have to tell you that within five minutes i will talk very fast .
and actually , my work took me to many countries because i used my work to fill my curiosity .
and among other things , other countries i worked , was in the soviet union , where i worked from ' 32 to ' 37 - actually , to ' 36 .
i was finally there , although i had nothing to do - i was a foreign expert .
i became art director of the china and glass industry , and eventually under stalin 's purges - at the beginning of stalin 's purges , i did n't know that hundreds of thousands of innocent people were arrested .
so i was arrested quite early in stalin 's purges , and spent 16 months in a russian prison .
the accusation was that i had successfully prepared an attentat on stalin 's life .
this was a very dangerous accusation .
and if this is the end of my five minutes , i want to tell you that i actually did survive , which was a surprise .
but since i survived and i 'm here , and since this is the end of the five minutes , i will - moderator : tell me when your last trip to russia was .
were n't you there recently ?
ez : oh , this summer , in fact , the lomonosov factory was bought by an american company , invited me .
they found out that i had worked in ' 33 at this factory , and they came to my studio in rockland county , and brought the 15 of their artists to visit me here .
and they invited myself to come to the russian factory last summer , in july , to make some dishes , design some dishes .
and since i do n't like to travel alone , they also invited my daughter , son-in-law and granddaughter , so we had a lovely trip to see russia today , which is not a very pleasant and happy view .
here i am now , if this is the end ? thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- okay , i have no idea what we 're going to play .
i wo n't be able to tell you what it is until it happens .
i did n't realize there was going to be a little music before .
so i think i 'm going to start with what i just heard .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- okay , so first of all , let 's welcome mr. jamire williams on the drums , -lrb- applause -rrb- burniss travis on the bass , -lrb- applause -rrb- and mr. christian sands on the piano .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so the bandstand , as we call it , this is an incredible space .
it is really a sacred space .
and one of the things that is really sacred about it is that you have no opportunity to think about the future , or the past .
you really are alive right here in this moment .
there are so many decisions being made when you walk on the bandstand .
we had no idea what key we were going to play in .
in the middle , we sort of made our way into a song called " titi boom . "
but that could have happened - maybe , maybe not .
everyone 's listening . we 're responding .
you have no time for projected ideas .
so the idea of a mistake : from the perspective of a jazz musician , it 's easier to talk about someone else 's mistake .
so the way i perceive a mistake when i 'm on the bandstand - first of all , we do n't really see it as a mistake .
the only mistake lies in that i 'm not able to perceive what it is that someone else did .
every " mistake " is an opportunity in jazz .
so it 's hard to even describe what a funny note would be .
so for example , if i played a color , like we were playing on a palette , that sounded like this ...
-lrb- music -rrb- so if christian played a note - like play an f.
-lrb- music -rrb- see , these are all right inside of the color palette .
if you played an e.
see , these all lie right inside of this general emotional palette that we were painting .
if you played an f # though , -lrb- dissonance -rrb- to most people 's ears , they would perceive that as a mistake .
so i 'm going to show you , we 're going to play just for a second .
and we 're going to play on this palette .
and at some point , christian will introduce this note .
and we wo n't react to it .
he 'll introduce it for a second and then i 'll stop , i 'll talk for a second .
we 'll see what happens when we play with this palette .
-lrb- music -rrb- so someone could conceptually perceive that as a mistake .
the only way that i would say it was a mistake is in that we did n't react to it .
it was an opportunity that was missed .
so it 's unpredictable . we 'll paint this palette again .
he 'll play it . i do n't know how we 'll react to it , but something will change .
we 'll all accept his ideas , or not .
-lrb- music -rrb- so you see , he played this note .
i ended up creating a melody out of it .
the texture changed in the drums this time .
it got a little bit more rhythmic , a little bit more intense in response to how i responded to it .
so there is no mistake .
the only mistake is if i 'm not aware , if each individual musician is not aware and accepting enough of his fellow band member to incorporate the idea and we do n't allow for creativity .
so jazz , this bandstand is absolutely amazing .
it 's a very purifying experience .
and i know that i speak for all of us when i tell you that we do n't take it for granted .
we know that to be able to come on the bandstand and play music is a blessing .
so how does this all relate to behavioral finance ?
well we 're jazz musicians , so stereotypically we do n't have a great relationship to finance .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- anyway , i just wanted to sort of point out the way that we handle it .
and the other dynamic of it is that we do n't micromanage in jazz .
you have some people who do .
but what that does is it actually limits the artistic possibilities .
if i come up and i dictate to the band that i want to play like this and i want the music to go this way , and i just jump right in ...
ready , just play some time .
one , two , one , two , three , four .
-lrb- music -rrb- it 's kind of chaotic because i 'm bullying my ideas .
i 'm telling them , " you come with me over this way . "
if i really want the music to go there , the best way for me to do it is to listen .
this is a science of listening .
it has far more to do with what i can perceive than what it is that i can do .
so if i want the music to get to a certain level of intensity , the first step for me is to be patient , to listen to what 's going on and pull from something that 's going on around me .
when you do that , you engage and inspire the other musicians and they give you more , and gradually it builds .
watch . one , two , a one , two , three , four .
-lrb- music -rrb- totally different experience when i 'm pulling ideas .
it 's much more organic . it 's much more nuanced .
it 's not about bullying my vision or anything like that .
it 's about being here in the moment , accepting one another and allowing creativity to flow .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this is shivdutt yadav , and he 's from uttar pradesh , india .
now shivdutt was visiting the local land registry office in uttar pradesh , and he discovered that official records were listing him as dead .
his land was no longer registered in his name .
his brothers , chandrabhan and phoolchand , were also listed as dead .
family members had bribed officials to interrupt the hereditary transfer of land by having the brothers declared dead , allowing them to inherit their father 's share of the ancestral farmland .
because of this , all three brothers and their families had to vacate their home .
according to the yadav family , the local court has been scheduling a case review since 2001 , but a judge has never appeared .
there are several instances in uttar pradesh of people dying before their case is given a proper review .
shivdutt 's father 's death and a want for his property led to this corruption .
he was laid to rest in the ganges river , where the dead are cremated along the banks of the river or tied to heavy stones and sunk in the water .
photographing these brothers was a disorienting exchange because on paper they do n't exist , and a photograph is so often used as an evidence of life .
yet , these men remain dead .
this quandary led to the title of the project , which considers in many ways that we are all the living dead and that we in some ways represent ghosts of the past and the future .
so this story is the first of 18 chapters in my new body of work titled " a living man declared dead and other chapters . "
and for this work , i traveled around the world over a four-year period researching and recording bloodlines and their related stories .
i was interested in ideas surrounding fate and whether our fate is determined by blood , chance or circumstance .
the subjects i documented ranged from feuding families in brazil to victims of genocide in bosnia to the first woman to hijack an airplane and the living dead in india .
in each chapter , you can see the external forces of governance , power and territory or religion colliding with the internal forces of psychological and physical inheritance .
each work that i make is comprised of three segments .
on the left are one or more portrait panels in which i systematically order the members of a given bloodline .
this is followed by a text panel , it 's designed in scroll form , in which i construct the narrative at stake .
and then on the right is what i refer to as a footnote panel .
it 's a space that 's more intuitive in which i present fragments of the story , beginnings of other stories , photographic evidence .
and it 's meant to kind of reflect how we engage with histories or stories on the internet , in a less linear form .
so it 's more disordered .
and this disorder is in direct contrast to the unalterable order of a bloodline .
in my past projects i 've often worked in serial form , documenting things that have the appearance of being comprehensive through a determined title and a determined presentation , but in fact , are fairly abstract .
in this project i wanted to work in the opposite direction and find an absolute catalog , something that i could n't interrupt , curate or edit by choice .
this led me to blood .
a bloodline is determined and ordered .
but the project centers on the collision of order and disorder - the order of blood butting up against the disorder represented in the often chaotic and violent stories that are the subjects of my chapters .
in chapter two , i photograph the descendants of arthur ruppin .
he was sent in 1907 to palestine by the zionist organization to look at areas for jewish settlement and acquire land for jewish settlement .
he oversaw land acquisition on behalf of the palestine land development company whose work led to the establishment of a jewish state .
through my research at the zionist archives in jerusalem , i wanted to look at the early paperwork of the establishment of the jewish state .
and i found these maps which you see here .
and these are studies commissioned by the zionist organization for alternative areas for jewish settlement .
in this , i was interested in the consequences of geography and imagining how the world would be different if israel were in uganda , which is what these maps demonstrate .
these archives in jerusalem , they maintain a card index file of the earliest immigrants and applicants for immigration to palestine , and later israel , from 1919 to 1965 .
chapter three : joseph nyamwanda jura ondijo treated patients outside of kisumu , kenya for aids , tuberculosis , infertility , mental illness , evil spirits .
he 's most often paid for his services in cash , cows or goats .
but sometimes when his female patients ca n't afford his services , their families give the women to jura in exchange for medical treatment .
as a result of these transactions , jura has nine wives , 32 children and 63 grandchildren .
in his bloodline you see the children and grandchildren here .
two of his wives were brought to him suffering from infertility and he cured them , three for evil spirits , one for an asthmatic condition and severe chest pain and two wives ondijo claims he took for love , paying their families a total of 16 cows .
one wife deserted him and another passed away during treatment for evil spirits .
polygamy is widely practiced in kenya .
it 's common among a privileged class capable of paying numerous dowries and keeping multiple homes .
instances of prominent social and political figures in polygamous relationships has led to the perception of polygamy as a symbol of wealth , status and power .
you may notice in several of the chapters that i photographed there are empty portraits .
these empty portraits represent individuals , living individuals , who could n't be present .
and the reasons for their absence are given in my text panel .
they include dengue fever , imprisonment , army service , women not allowed to be photographed for religious and cultural reasons .
and in this particular chapter , it 's children whose mothers would n't allow them to travel to the photographic shoot for fear that their fathers would kidnap them during it .
twenty-four european rabbits were brought to australia in 1859 by a british settler for sporting purposes , for hunting .
and within a hundred years , that population of 24 had exploded to half a billion .
the european rabbit has no natural predators in australia , and it competes with native wildlife and damages native plants and degrades the land .
since the 1950s , australia has been introducing lethal diseases into the wild rabbit population to control growth .
these rabbits were bred at a government facility , biosecurity queensland , where they bred three bloodlines of rabbits and have infected them with a lethal disease and are monitoring their progress to see if it will effectively kill them .
so they 're testing its virulence .
during the course of this trial , all of the rabbits died , except for a few , which were euthanized .
haigh 's chocolate , in collaboration with the foundation for rabbit-free australia , stopped all production of the easter bunny in chocolate and has replaced it with the easter bilby .
now this was done to counter the annual celebration of rabbits and presumably make the public more comfortable with the killing of rabbits and promote an animal that 's native to australia , and actually an animal that is threatened by the european rabbit .
in chapter seven , i focus on the effects of a genocidal act on one bloodline .
so over a two-day period , six individuals from this bloodline were killed in the srebrenica massacre .
this is the only work in which i visually represent the dead .
but i only represent those that were killed in the srebrenica massacre , which is recorded as the largest mass murder in europe since the second world war .
and during this massacre , 8,000 bosnian muslim men and boys were systematically executed .
so when you look at a detail of this work , you can see , the man on the upper-left is the father of the woman sitting next to him .
her name is zumra .
she is followed by her four children , all of whom were killed in the srebrenica massacre .
following those four children is zumra 's younger sister who is then followed by her children who were killed as well .
during the time i was in bosnia , the mortal remains of zumra 's eldest son were exhumed from a mass grave .
and i was therefore able to photograph the fully assembled remains .
however , the other individuals are represented by these blue slides , which show tooth and bone samples that were matched to dna evidence collected from family members to prove they were the identities of those individuals .
they 've all been given a proper burial , so what remains are these blue slides at the international commission for missing persons .
these are personal effects dug up from a mass grave that are awaiting identification from family members and graffiti at the potochari battery factory , which was where the dutch u.n. soldiers were staying , and also the serbian soldiers later during the times of the executions .
this is video footage used at the milosevic trial , which from top to bottom shows a serbian scorpion unit being blessed by an orthodox priest before rounding up the boys and men and killing them .
chapter 15 is more of a performance piece .
i solicited china 's state council information office in 2009 to select a multi-generational bloodline to represent china for this project .
they chose a large family from beijing for its size , and they declined to give me any further reasoning for their choice .
this is one of the rare situations where i have no empty portraits .
everyone showed up .
you can also see the evolution of the one-child-only policy as it travels through the bloodline .
previously known as the department of foreign propaganda , the state council information office is responsible for all of china 's external publicity operations .
it controls all foreign media and image production outside of china from foreign media working within china .
it also monitors the internet and instructs local media on how to handle any potentially controversial issues , including tibet , ethnic minorities , human rights , religion , democracy movements and terrorism .
for the footnote panel in this work , this office instructed me to photograph their central television tower in beijing .
and i also photographed the gift bag they gave me when i left .
these are the descendants of hans frank who was hitler 's personal legal advisor and governor general of occupied poland .
now this bloodline includes numerous empty portraits , highlighting a complex relationship to one 's family history .
the reasons for these absences include people who declined participation .
there 's also parents who participated who would n't let their children participate because they thought they were too young to decide for themselves .
another section of the family presented their clothing , as opposed to their physical presence , because they did n't want to be identified with the past that i was highlighting .
and finally , another individual sat for me from behind and later rescinded his participation , so i had to pixelate him out so he 's unrecognizable .
in the footnote panel that accompanies this work i photographed an official adolph hitler postage stamp and an imitation of that stamp produced by british intelligence with hans frank 's image on it .
it was released in poland to create friction between frank and hitler , so that hitler would imagine frank was trying to usurp his power .
again , talking about fate , i was interested in the stories and fate of particular works of art .
these paintings were taken by hans frank during the time of the third reich .
and i 'm interested in the impact of their absence and presence through time .
they are leonardo da vinci 's " lady with an ermine , " rembrandt 's " landscape with good samaritan " and raphael 's " portrait of a youth , " which has never been found .
chapter 12 highlights people being born into a battle that is not of their making , but becomes their own .
so this is the ferraz family and the novaes family .
and they are in an active blood feud .
this feud has been going on since 1991 in northeast brazil in pernambuco , and it involved the deaths of 20 members of the families and 40 others associated with the feud , including hired hit men , innocent bystanders and friends .
tensions between these two families date back to 1913 when there was a dispute over local political power .
but it got violent in the last two decades and includes decapitation and the death of two mayors .
installed into a protective wall surrounding the suburban home of louis novaes , who 's the head of the novaes family , are these turret holes , which were used for shooting and looking .
brazil 's northeast state of pernambuco is one of the nation 's most violent regions .
it 's rooted in a principle of retributive justice , or an eye for an eye , so retaliatory killings have led to several deaths in the area .
this story , like many of the stories in my chapters , reads almost as an archetypal episode , like something out of shakespeare , that 's happening now and will happen again in the future .
i 'm interested in these ideas of repetition .
so after i returned home , i received word that one member of the family had been shot 30 times in the face .
chapter 17 is an exploration of the absence of a bloodline and the absence of a history .
children at this ukrainian orphanage are between the ages of six and 16 .
this piece is ordered by age because it ca n't be ordered by blood .
in a 12-month period when i was at the orphanage , only one child had been adopted .
children have to leave the orphanage at age 16 , despite the fact that there 's often nowhere for them to go .
it 's commonly reported in ukraine that children , when leaving the orphanage are targeted for human trafficking , child pornography and prostitution .
many have to turn to criminal activity for their survival , and high rates of suicide are recorded .
this is a boys ' bedroom .
there 's an insufficient supply of beds at the orphanage and not enough warm clothing .
children bathe infrequently because the hot water is n't turned on until october .
this is a girls ' bedroom .
and the director listed the orphanage 's most urgent needs as an industrial size washing machine and dryer , four vacuum cleaners , two computers , a video projector , a copy machine , winter shoes and a dentist 's drill .
this photograph , which i took at the orphanage of one of the classrooms , shows a sign which i had translated when i got home .
and it reads : " those who do not know their past are not worthy of their future . "
there are many more chapters in this project .
this is just an abridged rendering of over a thousand images .
and this mass pile of images and stories forms an archive .
and within this accumulation of images and texts , i 'm struggling to find patterns and imagine that the narratives that surround the lives we lead are just as coded as blood itself .
but archives exist because there 's something that ca n't necessarily be articulated .
something is said in the gaps between all the information that 's collected .
and there 's this relentless persistence of birth and death and an unending collection of stories in between .
it 's almost machine-like the way people are born and people die , and the stories keep coming and coming .
and in this , i 'm considering , is this actual accumulation leading to some sort of evolution , or are we on repeat over and over again ?
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm going to start by asking you a question : is anyone familiar with the blue algae problem ?
okay , so most of you are .
i think we can all agree it 's a serious issue .
nobody wants to drink blue algae-contaminated water , or swim in a blue algae-infested lake .
right ?
i hope you wo n't be disappointed , but today , i wo n't be talking about blue algae .
instead , i 'll be talking about the main cause at the root of this issue , which i will be referring to as the phosphorus crisis .
why have i chosen to talk to you about the phosphorus crisis today ?
for the simple reason that nobody else is talking about it .
and by the end of my presentation , i hope that the general public will be more aware of this crisis and this issue .
now , the problem is that if i ask , why do we find ourselves in this situation with blue algae ?
the answer is that it comes from how we farm .
we use fertilizers in our farming , chemical fertilizers .
why do we use chemical fertilizers in agriculture ?
basically , to help plants grow and to produce a better yield .
the issue is that this is set to engender an environmental problem that is without precedent .
before going further , let me give you a crash course in plant biology .
so , what does a plant need in order to grow ?
a plant , quite simply , needs light , it needs co2 , but even more importantly , it needs nutrients , which it draws from the soil .
several of these nutrients are essential chemical elements : phosphorus , nitrogen and calcium .
so , the plant 's roots will extract these resources .
today i 'll be focusing on a major problem that is linked to phosphorus .
why phosphorus in particular ?
because it is the most problematic chemical element .
by the end of my presentation , you will have seen what these problems are , and where we are today .
phosphorus is a chemical element that is essential to life . this is a very important point .
i 'd like everyone to understand precisely what the phosphorus issue is .
phosphorus is a key component in several molecules , in many of our molecules of life .
experts in the field will know that cellular communication is phosphorus-based - phosphorylation , dephosphorylation .
cell membranes are phosphorus-based : these are called phospholipids .
the energy in all living things , atp , is phosphorus-based .
and more importantly still , phosphorus is a key component of dna , something everyone is familiar with , and which is shown in this image .
dna is our genetic heritage .
it is extremely important , and once again , phosphorus is a key player .
now , where do we find this phosphorus ?
as humans , where do we find it ?
as i explained earlier , plants extract phosphorus from the soil , through water .
so , we humans get it from the things we eat : plants , vegetables , fruits , and also from eggs , meat and milk .
it 's true that some humans eat better than others .
some are happier than others .
and now , looking at this picture , which speaks for itself , we see modern agriculture , which i also refer to as intensive agriculture .
intensive agriculture is based on the use of chemical fertilizers .
without them , we would not manage to produce enough to feed the world 's population .
speaking of humans , there are currently 7 billion of us on earth .
in less than 40 years , there will be 9 billion of us .
and the question is a simple one : do we have enough phosphorus to feed our future generations ?
so , in order to understand these issues , where do we find our phosphorus ?
let me explain .
but first , let 's just suppose that we are using 100 percent of a given dose of phosphorus .
only 15 percent of this 100 percent goes to the plant . eighty-five percent is lost .
it goes into the soil , ending its journey in the lakes , resulting in lakes with extra phosphorus , which leads to the blue algae problem .
so , you 'll see there 's a problem here , something that is illogical .
a hundred percent of the phosphorus is used , but only 15 percent goes to the plant .
you 're going to tell me it 's wasteful .
yes , it is . what is worse is that it is very expensive .
nobody wants to throw their money out the window , but unfortunately that 's what is happening here .
eighty percent of each dose of phosphorus is lost .
modern agriculture depends on phosphorus .
and because in order to get 15 percent of it to the plant , all the rest is lost , we have to add more and more .
now , where will we get this phosphorus from ?
basically , we get it out of mines .
this is the cover of an extraordinary article published in nature in 2009 , which really launched the discussion about the phosphorus crisis .
phosphorus , a nutrient essential to life , which is becoming increasingly scarce , yet nobody is talking about it .
and everyone agrees : politicians and scientists are in agreement that we are headed for a phosphorus crisis .
what you are seeing here is an open-pit mine in the u.s. , and to give you an idea of the dimensions of this mine , if you look in the top right-hand corner , the little crane you can see , that is a giant crane .
so that really puts it into perspective .
so , we get phosphorus from mines .
and if i make a comparison with oil , there 's an oil crisis , we talk about it , we talk about global warming , yet we never mention the phosphorus crisis .
to come back to the oil problem , oil is something we can replace .
we can use biofuels , or solar power , or hydropower , but phosphorus is an essential element , indispensable to life , and we ca n't replace it .
what is the current state of the world 's phosphorus reserves ?
this graph gives you a rough idea of where we are today .
the black line represents predictions for phosphorus reserves .
in 2030 , we 'll reach the peak .
by the end of this century , it will all be gone .
the dotted line shows where we are today .
as you can see , they meet in 2030 , i 'll be retired by then .
but we are indeed heading for a major crisis , and i 'd like people to become aware of this problem .
do we have a solution ?
what are we to do ? we are faced with a paradox .
less and less phosphorus will be available .
by 2050 there will be 9 billion of us , and according to the u.n. food and agriculture organization , we will need to produce twice as much food in 2050 than we do today .
so , we will have less phosphorus , but we 'll need to produce more food .
what should we do ?
it truly is a paradoxical situation .
do we have a solution , or an alternative which will allow us to optimize phosphorus use ?
remember that 80 percent is destined to be lost .
the solution i 'm offering today is one that has existed for a very long time , even before plants existed on earth , and it 's a microscopic mushroom that is very mysterious , very simple , and yet also extremely complex .
i 've been fascinated by this little mushroom for over 16 years now .
it has led me to further my research and to use it as a model for my laboratory research .
this mushroom exists in symbiosis with the roots .
by symbiosis , i mean a bidirectional and mutually beneficial association which is also called mycorrhiza .
this slide illustrates the elements of a mycorrhiza .
you 're looking at the root of wheat , one of the world 's most important plants .
normally , a root will find phosphorus all by itself .
it will go in search of phosphorus , but only within the one millimeter which surrounds it .
beyond one millimeter , the root is ineffective .
it can not go further in its search for phosphorus .
now , imagine this tiny , microscopic mushroom .
it grows much faster , and is much better designed to seek out phosphorus .
it can go beyond the root 's one-millimeter scope to seek out phosphorus .
i have n't invented anything at all ; it 's a biotechnology that has existed for 450 million years .
and over time , this mushroom has evolved and adapted to seek out even the tiniest trace of phosphorus , and to put it to use , to make it available to the plant .
what you 're seeing here , in the real world , is a carrot root , and the mushroom with its very fine filaments .
looking closer , we can see that this mushroom is very gentle in its penetration .
it will proliferate between the root 's cells , eventually penetrating a cell and starting to form a typical arbuscular structure , which will considerably increase the exchange interface between the plant and the mushroom .
and it is through this structure that mutual exchanges will occur .
it 's a win-win trade : i give you phosphorus , and you feed me .
true symbiosis .
now let 's add a mycorrhiza plant into the diagram i used earlier .
and instead of using a 100 percent dose , i 'm going to reduce it to 25 percent .
you 'll see that of this 25 percent , most will benefit the plant , more than 90 percent .
a very small amount of phosphorus will remain in the soil .
that 's completely natural .
what 's more is that in certain cases , we do n't even need to add phosphorus .
if you recall the graphs i showed you earlier , 85 percent of phosphorus is lost in the soil , and the plants are unable to access it .
even though it is present in the soil , it is in insoluble form .
the plant is only able to seek out soluble forms .
the mushroom is capable of dissolving this insoluble form and making it available for the plant to use .
to further support my argument , here is a picture that speaks for itself .
these are trials in a field of sorghum .
on the left side , you see the yield produced using conventional agriculture , with a 100 percent phosphorus dose .
on the other side , the dose was reduced to 50 percent , and just look at the yield .
with only a half-dose , we achieved a better yield .
this is to show you that this method works .
and in some cases , in cuba , mexico and india , the dose can be reduced to 25 percent , and in several other cases , there 's no need to add any phosphorus at all , because the mushrooms are so well adapted to finding phosphorus and drawing it from the soil .
this is an example of soy production in canada .
mycorrhiza was used in one field but not in the other .
and here , where blue indicates a better yield , and yellow a weaker yield .
the black rectangle is the plot from which the mycorrhiza was added .
in other words , as i already said , i have invented nothing .
mycorrhiza has existed for 450 million years , and it has even helped modern-day plant species to diversify .
so , this it is n't something that is still undergoing lab tests .
mycorrhiza exists , it works , it 's produced at an industrial scale and commercialized worldwide .
the problem is that people are not aware of it .
people like food producers and farmers are still not aware of this problem .
we have a technology that works , and one that , if used correctly , will alleviate some of the pressure we are putting on the world 's phosphorus reserves .
in conclusion , i am a scientist and a dreamer .
i 'm passionate about this topic .
so if you were to ask me what my retirement dream is , which will be at the moment we reach that phosphorus peak , it would be that we use one label , " made with mycorrhiza , " and that my children and grandchildren buy products bearing that label too .
thank you for your attention .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm an ecologist , mostly a coral reef ecologist .
i started out in chesapeake bay and went diving in the winter and became a tropical ecologist overnight .
and it was really a lot of fun for about 10 years .
i mean , somebody pays you to go around and travel and look at some of the most beautiful places on the planet .
and that was what i did .
and i ended up in jamaica , in the west indies , where the coral reefs were really among the most extraordinary , structurally , that i ever saw in my life .
and this picture here , it 's really interesting , it shows two things : first of all , it 's in black and white because the water was so clear and you could see so far , and film was so slow in the 1960s and early 70s , you took pictures in black and white .
the other thing it shows you is that , although there 's this beautiful forest of coral , there are no fish in that picture .
those reefs at discovery bay , jamaica were the most studied coral reefs in the world for 20 years .
we were the best and the brightest .
people came to study our reefs from australia , which is sort of funny because now we go to theirs .
and the view of scientists about how coral reefs work , how they ought to be , was based on these reefs without any fish .
then , in 1980 , there was a hurricane , hurricane allen .
i put half the lab up in my house .
the wind blew very strong .
the waves were 25 to 50 feet high .
and the reefs disappeared , and new islands formed , and we thought , " well , we 're real smart .
we know that hurricanes have always happened in the past . "
and we published a paper in science , the first time that anybody ever described the destruction on a coral reef by a major hurricane .
and we predicted what would happen , and we got it all wrong .
and the reason was because of overfishing , and the fact that a last common grazer , a sea urchin , died .
and within a few months after that sea urchin dying , the seaweed started to grow .
and that is the same reef ; that 's the same reef 15 years ago ; that 's the same reef today .
the coral reefs of the north coast of jamaica have a few percent live coral cover and a lot of seaweed and slime .
and that 's more or less the story of the coral reefs of the caribbean , and increasingly , tragically , the coral reefs worldwide .
now , that 's my little , depressing story .
all of us in our 60s and 70s have comparable depressing stories .
there are tens of thousands of those stories out there , and it 's really hard to conjure up much of a sense of well-being , because it just keeps getting worse .
and the reason it keeps getting worse is that after a natural catastrophe , like a hurricane , it used to be that there was some kind of successional sequence of recovery , but what 's going on now is that overfishing and pollution and climate change are all interacting in a way that prevents that .
and so i 'm going to sort of go through and talk about those three kinds of things .
we hear a lot about the collapse of cod .
it 's difficult to imagine that two , or some historians would say three world wars were fought during the colonial era for the control of cod .
cod fed most of the people of western europe .
it fed the slaves brought to the antilles , the song " jamaica farewell " - " ackee rice salt fish are nice " - is an emblem of the importance of salt cod from northeastern canada .
it all collapsed in the 80s and the 90s : 35,000 people lost their jobs .
and that was the beginning of a kind of serial depletion from bigger and tastier species to smaller and not-so-tasty species , from species that were near to home to species that were all around the world , and what have you .
it 's a little hard to understand that , because you can go to a costco in the united states and buy cheap fish .
you ought to read the label to find out where it came from , but it 's still cheap , and everybody thinks it 's okay .
it 's hard to communicate this , and one way that i think is really interesting is to talk about sport fish , because people like to go out and catch fish .
it 's one of those things .
this picture here shows the trophy fish , the biggest fish caught by people who pay a lot of money to get on a boat , go to a place off of key west in florida , drink a lot of beer , throw a lot of hooks and lines into the water , come back with the biggest and the best fish , and the champion trophy fish are put on this board , where people take a picture , and this guy is obviously really excited about that fish .
well , that 's what it 's like now , but this is what it was like in the 1950s from the same boat in the same place on the same board on the same dock .
the trophy fish were so big that you could n't put any of those small fish up on it .
and the average size trophy fish weighed 250 to 300 pounds , goliath grouper , and if you wanted to go out and kill something , you could pretty much count on being able to catch one of those fish .
and they tasted really good .
and people paid less in 1950 dollars to catch that than what people pay now to catch those little , tiny fish .
and that 's everywhere .
it 's not just the fish , though , that are disappearing .
industrial fishing uses big stuff , big machinery .
we use nets that are 20 miles long .
we use longlines that have one million or two million hooks .
and we trawl , which means to take something the size of a tractor trailer truck that weighs thousands and thousands of pounds , put it on a big chain , and drag it across the sea floor to stir up the bottom and catch the fish .
think of it as being kind of the bulldozing of a city or of a forest , because it clears it away .
and the habitat destruction is unbelievable .
this is a photograph , a typical photograph , of what the continental shelves of the world look like .
you can see the rows in the bottom , the way you can see the rows in a field that has just been plowed to plant corn .
what that was , was a forest of sponges and coral , which is a critical habitat for the development of fish .
what it is now is mud , and the area of the ocean floor that has been transformed from forest to level mud , to parking lot , is equivalent to the entire area of all the forests that have ever been cut down on all of the earth in the history of humanity .
we 've managed to do that in the last 100 to 150 years .
we tend to think of oil spills and mercury and we hear a lot about plastic these days .
and all of that stuff is really disgusting , but what 's really insidious is the biological pollution that happens because of the magnitude of the shifts that it causes to entire ecosystems .
and i 'm going to just talk very briefly about two kinds of biological pollution : one is introduced species and the other is what comes from nutrients .
so this is the infamous caulerpa taxifolia , the so-called killer algae .
a book was written about it .
it 's a bit of an embarrassment .
it was accidentally released from the aquarium in monaco , it was bred to be cold tolerant to have in peoples aquaria .
it 's very pretty , and it has rapidly started to overgrow the once very rich biodiversity of the northwestern mediterranean .
i do n't know how many of you remember the movie " the little shop of horrors , " but this is the plant of " the little shop of horrors . "
but , instead of devouring the people in the shop , and smothering virtually all of the bottom-dwelling life of the entire northwestern mediterranean sea .
we do n't know anything that eats it , we 're trying to do all sorts of genetics and figure out something that could be done , but , as it stands , it 's the monster from hell , about which nobody knows what to do .
now another form of pollution that 's biological pollution is what happens from excess nutrients .
the green revolution , all of this artificial nitrogen fertilizer , we use too much of it .
it 's subsidized , which is one of the reasons we used too much of it .
it runs down the rivers , and it feeds the plankton , the little microscopic plant cells in the coastal water .
but since we ate all the oysters and we ate all the fish that would eat the plankton , there 's nothing to eat the plankton and there 's more and more of it , so it dies of old age , which is unheard of for plankton .
and when it dies , it falls to the bottom and then it rots , which means that bacteria break it down .
and in the process they use up all the oxygen , and in using up all the oxygen they make the environment utterly lethal for anything that ca n't swim away .
so , what we end up with is a microbial zoo dominated by bacteria and jellyfish , as you see on the left in front of you .
and the only fishery left - and it is a commercial fishery - is the jellyfish fishery you see on the right , where there used to be prawns .
even in newfoundland where we used to catch cod , we now have a jellyfish fishery .
and another version of this sort of thing is what is often called red tides or toxic blooms .
that picture on the left is just staggering to me .
i have talked about it a million times , but it 's unbelievable .
in the upper right of that picture on the left is almost the mississippi delta , and the lower left of that picture is the texas-mexico border .
you 're looking at the entire northwestern gulf of mexico ; you 're looking at one toxic dinoflagellate bloom that can kill fish , made by that beautiful little creature on the lower right .
and in the upper right you see this black sort of cloud moving ashore .
that 's the same species .
and as it comes to shore and the wind blows , and little droplets of the water get into the air , the emergency rooms of all the hospitals fill up with people with acute respiratory distress .
and that 's retirement homes on the west coast of florida .
a friend and i did this thing in hollywood we called hollywood ocean night , and i was trying to figure out how to explain to actors what 's going on .
and i said , " so , imagine you 're in a movie called ' escape from malibu ' because all the beautiful people have moved to north dakota , where it 's clean and safe .
and the only people who are left there are the people who ca n't afford to move away from the coast , because the coast , instead of being paradise , is harmful to your health . "
and then this is amazing .
it was when i was on holiday last early autumn in france .
this is from the coast of brittany , which is being enveloped in this green , algal slime .
the reason that it attracted so much attention , besides the fact that it 's disgusting , is that sea birds flying over it are asphyxiated by the smell and die , and a farmer died of it , and you can imagine the scandal that happened .
and so there 's this war between the farmers and the fishermen about it all , and the net result is that the beaches of brittany have to be bulldozed of this stuff on a regular basis .
and then , of course , there 's climate change , and we all know about climate change .
i guess the iconic figure of it is the melting of the ice in the arctic sea .
think about the thousands and thousands of people who died trying to find the northwest passage .
well , the northwest passage is already there .
i think it 's sort of funny ; it 's on the siberian coast , maybe the russians will charge tolls .
the governments of the world are taking this really seriously .
the military of the arctic nations is taking it really seriously .
for all the denial of climate change by government leaders , the cia and the navies of norway and the u.s. and canada , whatever are busily thinking about how they will secure their territory in this inevitability from their point of view .
and , of course , arctic communities are toast .
the other kinds of effects of climate change - this is coral bleaching . it 's a beautiful picture , right ?
all that white coral .
except it 's supposed to be brown .
what happens is that the corals are a symbiosis , and they have these little algal cells that live inside them .
and the algae give the corals sugar , and the corals give the algae nutrients and protection .
but when it gets too hot , the algae ca n't make the sugar .
the corals say , " you cheated . you did n't pay your rent . "
they kick them out , and then they die .
not all of them die ; some of them survive , some more are surviving , but it 's really bad news .
to try and give you a sense of this , imagine you go camping in july somewhere in europe or in north america , and you wake up the next morning , and you look around you , and you see that 80 percent of the trees , as far as you can see , have dropped their leaves and are standing there naked .
and you come home , and you discover that 80 percent of all the trees in north america and in europe have dropped their leaves .
and then you read in the paper a few weeks later , " oh , by the way , a quarter of those died . "
well , that 's what happened in the indian ocean during the 1998 el nino , an area vastly greater than the size of north america and europe , when 80 percent of all the corals bleached and a quarter of them died .
and then the really scary thing about all of this - the overfishing , the pollution and the climate change - is that each thing does n't happen in a vacuum .
but there are these , what we call , positive feedbacks , the synergies among them that make the whole vastly greater than the sum of the parts .
and the great scientific challenge for people like me in thinking about all this , is do we know how to put humpty dumpty back together again ?
i mean , because we , at this point , we can protect it .
but what does that mean ?
we really do n't know .
so what are the oceans going to be like in 20 or 50 years ?
well , there wo n't be any fish except for minnows , and the water will be pretty dirty , and all those kinds of things and full of mercury , etc . , etc .
and dead zones will get bigger and bigger and they 'll start to merge , and we can imagine something like the dead-zonification of the global , coastal ocean .
then you sure wo n't want to eat fish that were raised in it , because it would be a kind of gastronomic russian roulette .
sometimes you have a toxic bloom ; sometimes you do n't .
that does n't sell .
the really scary things though are the physical , chemical , oceanographic things that are happening .
as the surface of the ocean gets warmer , the water is lighter when it 's warmer , it becomes harder and harder to turn the ocean over .
we say it becomes more strongly stratified .
the consequence of that is that all those nutrients that fuel the great anchoveta fisheries , of the sardines of california or in peru or whatever , those slow down and those fisheries collapse .
and , at the same time , water from the surface , which is rich in oxygen , does n't make it down and the ocean turns into a desert .
so the question is : how are we all going to respond to this ?
and we can do all sorts of things to fix it , but in the final analysis , the thing we really need to fix is ourselves .
it 's not about the fish ; it 's not about the pollution ; it 's not about the climate change .
it 's about us and our greed and our need for growth and our inability to imagine a world that is different from the selfish world we live in today .
so the question is : will we respond to this or not ?
i would say that the future of life and the dignity of human beings depends on our doing that .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm a believer .
i 'm a believer in global warming , and my record is good on the subject .
but my subject is national security .
we have to get off of oil purchased from the enemy .
i 'm talking about opec oil .
and let me take you back 100 years to 1912 .
you 're probably thinking that was my birth year .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it was n't . it was 1928 .
but go back to 1912 , 100 years ago , and look at that point what we , our country , was faced with .
it 's the same energy question that you 're looking at today , but it 's different sources of fuel .
a hundred years ago we were looking at coal , of course , and we were looking at whale oil and we were looking at crude oil .
at that point , we were looking for a fuel that was cleaner , it was cheaper , and it was n't ours though , it was theirs .
so at that point , 1912 , we selected crude oil over whale oil and some more coal .
but as we moved on to the period now , 100 years later , we 're back really at another decision point .
what is the decision point ?
it 's what we 're going to use in the future .
so from here , it 's pretty clear to me , we would prefer to have cleaner , cheaper , domestic , ours - and we have that , we have that - which is natural gas .
so here you are , that the cost of all this to the world is 89 million barrels of oil , and the cost annually is three trillion dollars .
and one trillion of that goes to opec .
that has got to be stopped .
now if you look at the cost of opec , it cost seven trillion dollars - on the milken institute study last year - seven trillion dollars since 1976 , is what we paid for oil from opec .
now that includes the cost of military and the cost of the fuel both .
but it 's the greatest transfer of wealth , from one group to another in the history of mankind .
and it continues .
now when you look at where is the transfer of wealth , you can see here that we have the arrows going into the mid-east and away from us .
and with that , we have found ourselves to be the world 's policemen .
we are policing the world , and how are we doing that ?
i know the response to this .
i would bet there are n't 10 percent of you in the room that know how many aircraft carriers there are in the world .
raise your hand if you think you know .
there are 12 .
one is under construction by the chinese and the other 11 belong to us .
why do we have 11 aircraft carriers ?
do we have a corner on the market ?
are we smarter than anybody else ? i 'm not sure .
if you look at where they 're located - and on this slide it 's the red blobs on there - there are five that are operating in the mid-east , and the rest of them are in the united states .
they just move back to the mid-east and those come back .
so actually most of the 11 we have are tied up in the mid-east .
why ? why are they in the mid-east ?
they 're there to control , keep the shipping lanes open and make oil available .
and the united states uses about 20 million barrels a day , which is about 25 percent of all the oil used everyday in the world .
and we 're doing it with four percent of the population .
somehow that does n't seem right .
that 's not sustainable .
so where do we go from here ?
does that continue ?
yes , it 's going to continue .
the slide you 're looking at here is 1990 to 2040 .
over that period you are going to double your demand .
and when you look at what we 're using the oil for , 70 percent of it is used for transportation fuel .
so when somebody says , " let 's go more nuclear , let 's go wind , let 's go solar , " fine ; i 'm for anything american , anything american .
but if you 're going to do anything about the dependency on foreign oil , you have to address transportation .
so here we are using 20 million barrels a day - producing eight , importing 12 , and from the 12 , five comes from opec .
when you look at the biggest user and the second largest user , we use 20 million barrels and the chinese use 10 .
the chinese have a little bit better plan - or they have a plan ; we have no plan .
in the history of america , we 've never had an energy plan .
we do n't even realize the resources that we have available to us .
if you take the last 10 years and bring forward , you 've transferred to opec a trillion dollars .
if you go forward the next 10 years and cap the price of oil at 100 dollars a barrel , you will pay 2.2 trillion .
that 's not sustainable either .
but the days of cheap oil are over .
they 're over .
the saudis do , they have to have 94 dollars a barrel to make their social commitments .
now i had people in washington last week told me , he said , " the saudis can produce the oil for five dollars a barrel .
that has nothing to do with it .
it 's what they have to pay for is what we are going to pay for oil . "
there is no free market for oil .
the oil is priced off the margin .
and the opec nations are the ones that price the oil .
so where are we headed from here ?
we 're headed to natural gas .
natural gas will do everything we want it to do .
it 's 130 octane fuel .
it 's 25 percent cleaner than oil .
it 's ours , we have an abundance of it .
and it does not require a refinery .
it comes out of the ground at 130 octane .
run it through the separator and you 're ready to use it .
it 's going to be very simple for us to use .
it 's going to be simple to accomplish this .
you 're going to find , and i 'll tell you in just a minute , what you 're looking for to make it happen .
but here you can look at the list .
natural gas will fit all of those .
it will replace or be able to be used for that .
it 's for power generation , transportation , it 's peaking fuel , it 's all those .
do we have enough natural gas ?
look at the bar on the left . it 's 24 trillion .
it 's what we use a year .
go forward and the estimates that you have from the eia and onto the industry estimates - the industry knows what they 're talking about - we 've got 4,000 trillion cubic feet of natural gas that 's available to us .
how does that translate to barrels of oil equivalent ?
it would be three times what the saudis claim they have .
and they claim they have 250 billion barrels of oil , which i do not believe .
i think it 's probably 175 billion barrels .
but anyway , whether they say they 're right or whatever , we have plenty of natural gas .
so i have tried to target on where we use the natural gas .
and where i 've targeted is on the heavy-duty trucks .
there are eight million of them .
you take eight million trucks - these are 18-wheelers - and take them to natural gas , reduce carbon by 30 percent , it is cheaper and it will cut our imports three million barrels .
so you will cut 60 percent off of opec with eight million trucks .
there are 250 million vehicles in america .
so what you have is the way i see it .
i do n't have to worry about the bridge to where at my age .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's your concern .
but when you look at the natural gas we have it could very well be the bridge to natural gas , because you have plenty of natural gas .
but as i said , i 'm for anything american .
now let me take you - i 've been a realist - i went from theorist early to realist .
i 'm back to theorist again .
if you look at the world , you have methane hydrates in the ocean around every continent .
and here you can see methane , if that 's the way you 're going to go , that there 's plenty of methane - natural gas is methane , methane and natural gas are interchangeable - but if you decide that you 're going to use some methane - and i 'm gone , so it 's up to you - but we do have so i think i 've made my point that we have to get on our own resources in america .
if we do - it 's costing us a billion dollars a day for oil .
and yet , we have no energy plan .
so there 's nothing going on that impresses me in washington on that plan , other than i 'm trying to focus on that eight million 18-wheelers .
if we could do that , i think we would take our first step to an energy plan .
if we did , we could see that our own resources are easier to use than anybody can imagine .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : thanks for that .
so from your point of view , you had this great pickens plan that was based on wind energy , and you abandoned it basically because the economics changed .
what happened ?
tbp : i lost 150 million dollars .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that 'll make you abandon something .
no , what happened to us , chris , is that power , it 's priced off the margin .
and so the margin is natural gas .
and at the time i went into the wind business , natural gas was nine dollars .
today it 's two dollars and forty cents .
you can not do a wind deal under six dollars an mcf .
ca : so what happened was that , through increased ability to use fracking technology , the calculated reserves of natural gas kind of exploded and the price plummeted , which made wind uncompetitive .
in a nutshell that 's what happened ?
tbp : that 's what happened .
we found out that we could go to the source rock , which were the carboniferous shales in the basins .
the first one was barnett shale in texas and then the marcellus up in the northeast across new york , pennsylvania , west virginia ; and haynesville in louisiana .
this stuff is everywhere .
we are overwhelmed with natural gas .
ca : and now you 're a big investor in that and bringing that to market ?
tbp : well you say a big investor .
it 's my life .
i 'm a geologist , got out of school in ' 51 , and i 've been in the industry my entire life .
now i do own stocks .
i 'm not a big natural gas producer .
somebody the other day said i was the second largest natural gas producer in the united states .
do n't i wish .
but no , i 'm not . i own stocks .
but i also am in the fueling business .
ca : but natural gas is a fossil fuel .
you burn it , you release co2 .
so you believe in the threat of climate change .
why does n't that prospect concern you ?
tbp : well you 're going to have to use something .
what do you have to replace it ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ca : no , no . the argument that it 's a bridge fuel makes sense , because the amount of co2 per unit of energy is lower than oil and coal , correct ?
and so everyone can be at least happy to see a shift from coal or oil to natural gas .
but if that 's it and that becomes the reason that renewables do n't get invested in , then , long-term , we 're screwed anyway , right ?
tbp : well i 'm not ready to give up , but jim and i talked there as he left , and i said , " how do you feel about natural gas ? "
and he said , " well it 's a bridge fuel , is what it is . "
and i said , " bridge to what ?
where are we headed ? "
see but again , i told you , i do n't have to worry with that .
you all do .
ca : but i do n't think that 's right , boone .
i think you 're a person who believes in your legacy .
you 've made the money you need .
you 're one of the few people in a position to really swing the debate .
do you support the idea of some kind of price on carbon ?
does that make sense ?
tbp : i do n't like that because it ends up the government is going to run the program .
i can tell you it will be a failure .
the government is not successful on these things .
they just are n't , it 's a bad deal .
look at solyndra , or whatever it was .
i mean , that was told to be a bad idea 10 times , they went ahead and did it anyway .
but that only blew out 500 million .
i think it 's closer to a billion .
but chris , i think where we 're headed , the long-term , i do n't mind going back to nuclear .
and i can tell you what the last page of the report that will take them five years to write will be .
one , do n't build a reformer on a fault .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and number two , do not build a reformer on the ocean .
and now i think reformers are safe .
move them inland and on very stable ground and build the reformers .
there is n't anything wrong with nuke .
you 're going to have to have energy . there is no question .
you ca n't - okay .
ca : one of the questions from the audience is , with fracking and the natural gas process , what about the problem of methane leaking from that , methane being a worse global warming gas than co2 ?
is that a concern ?
tbp : fracking ? what is fracking ?
ca : fracking .
tbp : i 'm teasing .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ca : we 've got a little bit of accent incompatibility here , you know .
tbp : no , let me tell you , i 've told you what my age was .
i got out of school in ' 51 .
i witnessed my first frack job at border texas in 1953 .
fracking came out in ' 47 , and do n't believe for a minute when our president gets up there and says the department of energy 30 years ago developed fracking .
i do n't know what in the hell he 's talking about .
i mean seriously , the department of energy did not have anything to do with fracking .
the first frack job was in ' 47 .
i saw my first one in ' 53 .
i 've fracked over 3,000 wells in my life .
never had a problem with messing up an aquifer or anything else .
now the largest aquifer in north america is from midland , texas to the south dakota border , across eight states - big aquifer : ogallala , triassic age .
there had to have been 800,000 wells fracked in oklahoma , texas , kansas in that aquifer .
there 's no problems .
i do n't understand why the media is focused on eastern pennsylvania .
ca : all right , so you do n't support a carbon tax of any kind or a price on carbon .
your picture then i guess of how the world eventually gets off fossil fuels is through innovation ultimately , that we 'll someday make solar and nuclear cost competitive ?
tbp : solar and wind , jim and i agreed on that in 13 seconds .
that is , it 's going to be a small part , because you ca n't rely on it .
ca : so how does the world get off fossil fuels ?
tbp : how do we get there ?
we have so much natural gas , a day will not come where you say , " well let 's do n't use that anymore . "
you 'll keep using it . it is the cleanest of all .
and if you look at california , they use 2,500 buses .
lamta have been on natural gas for 25 years .
the ft . worth t has been on it for 25 years .
why ? air quality was the reason they used natural gas and got away from diesel .
why are all the trash trucks today in southern california on natural gas ?
it 's because of air quality .
i know what you 're telling me , and i 'm not disagreeing with you .
how in the hell can we get off the natural gas at some point ?
and i say , that is your problem .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ca : all right , so it 's the bridge fuel .
what is at the other end of that bridge is for this audience to figure out .
if someone comes to you with a plan that really looks like it might be part of this solution , are you ready to invest in those technologies , even if they are n't maximized for profits , they might be maximized for the future health of the planet ?
tbp : i lost 150 million on the wind , okay .
yeah , sure , i 'm game for it .
because , again , i 'm trying to get energy solved for america .
and anything american will work for me .
ca : boone , i really , really appreciate you coming here , engaging in this conversation .
i think there 's a lot of people who will want to engage with you .
and that was a real gift you gave this audience .
thank you so much . -lrb- tbp : you bet , chris . thank you . -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- human beings start putting each other into boxes the second that they see each other - is that person dangerous ? are they attractive ?
are they a potential mate ? are they a potential networking opportunity ?
we do this little interrogation when we meet people to make a mental resume for them .
what 's your name ? where are you from ?
how old are you ? what do you do ?
then we get more personal with it .
have you ever had any diseases ?
have you ever been divorced ?
does your breath smell bad while you 're answering my interrogation right now ?
what are you into ? who are you into ?
what gender do you like to sleep with ?
i get it .
we are neurologically hardwired to seek out people like ourselves .
we start forming cliques as soon as we 're old enough to know what acceptance feels like .
we bond together based on anything that we can - music preference , race , gender , the block that we grew up on .
we seek out environments that reinforce our personal choices .
sometimes , though , just the question " what do you do ? "
can feel like somebody 's opening a tiny little box and asking you to squeeze yourself inside of it .
because the categories , i 've found , are too limiting .
the boxes are too narrow .
and this can get really dangerous .
so here 's a disclaimer about me , though , before we get too deep into this .
i grew up in a very sheltered environment .
i was raised in downtown manhattan in the early 1980s , two blocks from the epicenter of punk music .
i was shielded from the pains of bigotry and the social restrictions of a religiously-based upbringing .
where i come from , if you were n't a drag queen or a radical thinker or a performance artist of some kind , you were the weirdo .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it was an unorthodox upbringing , but as a kid on the streets of new york , you learn how to trust your own instincts , you learn how to go with your own ideas .
so when i was six , i decided that i wanted to be a boy .
i went to school one day and the kids would n't let me play basketball with them .
they said they would n't let girls play .
so i went home , and i shaved my head , and i came back the next day and i said , " i 'm a boy . "
i mean , who knows , right ?
when you 're six , maybe you can do that .
i did n't want anyone to know that i was a girl , and they did n't .
i kept up the charade for eight years .
so this is me when i was 11 .
i was playing a kid named walter in a movie called " julian po . "
i was a little street tough that followed christian slater around and badgered him .
see , i was also a child actor , which doubled up the layers of the performance of my identity , because no one knew that i was actually a girl really playing a boy .
in fact , no one in my life knew that i was a girl - not my teachers at school , not my friends , not the directors that i worked with .
kids would often come up to me in class and grab me by the throat to check for an adam 's apple or grab my crotch to check what i was working with .
when i would go to the bathroom , i would turn my shoes around in the stalls so that it looked like i was peeing standing up .
at sleepovers i would have panic attacks trying to break it to girls that they did n't want to kiss me without outing myself .
it 's worth mentioning though that i did n't hate my body or my genitalia .
i did n't feel like i was in the wrong body .
i felt like i was performing this elaborate act .
i would n't have qualified as transgender .
if my family , though , had been the kind of people to believe in therapy , they probably would have diagnosed me as something like gender dysmorphic and put me on hormones to stave off puberty .
but in my particular case , i just woke up one day when i was 14 , and i decided that i wanted to be a girl again .
puberty had hit , and i had no idea what being a girl meant , and i was ready to figure out who i actually was .
when a kid behaves like i did , they do n't exactly have to come out , right ?
no one is exactly shocked .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but i was n't asked to define myself by my parents .
when i was 15 , and i called my father to tell him that i had fallen in love , it was the last thing on either of our minds to discuss what the consequences were of the fact that my first love was a girl .
three years later , when i fell in love with a man , neither of my parents batted an eyelash either .
see , it 's one of the great blessings of my very unorthodox childhood that i was n't ever asked to define myself as any one thing at any point .
i was just allowed to be me , growing and changing in every moment .
so four , almost five years ago , proposition 8 , the great marriage equality debate , was raising a lot of dust around this country .
and at the time , getting married was n't really something i spent a lot of time thinking about .
but i was struck by the fact that america , a country with such a tarnished civil rights record , could be repeating its mistakes so blatantly .
and i remember watching the discussion on television and thinking how interesting it was that the separation of church and state was essentially drawing geographical boundaries throughout this country , between places where people believed in it and places where people did n't .
and then , that this discussion was drawing geographical boundaries around me .
if this was a war with two disparate sides , i , by default , fell on team gay , because i certainly was n't 100 percent straight .
at the time i was just beginning to emerge from this eight-year personal identity crisis zigzag that saw me go from being a boy to being this awkward girl that looked like a boy in girl 's clothes to the opposite extreme of this super skimpy , over-compensating , boy-chasing girly-girl to finally just a hesitant exploration of what i actually was , a tomboyish girl who liked both boys and girls depending on the person .
i had spent a year photographing this new generation of girls , much like myself , who fell kind of between-the-lines - girls who skateboarded but did it in lacy underwear , girls who had boys ' haircuts but wore girly nail polish , girls who had eyeshadow to match their scraped knees , girls who liked girls and boys who all liked boys and girls who all hated being boxed in to anything .
i loved these people , and i admired their freedom , but i watched as the world outside of our utopian bubble exploded into these raging debates where pundits started likening our love to bestiality on national television .
and this powerful awareness rolled in over me that i was a minority , and in my own home country , based on one facet of my character .
i was legally and indisputably a second-class citizen .
i was not an activist .
i wave no flags in my own life .
but i was plagued by this question : how could anyone vote to strip the rights of the vast variety of people that i knew based on one element of their character ?
how could they say that we as a group were not deserving of equal rights as somebody else ?
were we even a group ? what group ?
and had these people ever even consciously met a victim of their discrimination ?
did they know who they were voting against and what the impact was ?
and then it occurred to me , perhaps if they could look into the eyes of the people that they were casting into second-class citizenship it might make it harder for them to do .
it might give them pause .
obviously i could n't get 20 million people to the same dinner party , so i figured out a way where i could introduce them to each other photographically without any artifice , without any lighting , or without any manipulation of any kind on my part .
because in a photograph you can examine a lion 's whiskers without the fear of him ripping your face off .
for me , photography is not just about exposing film , it 's about exposing the viewer to something new , a place they have n't gone before , but most importantly , to people that they might be afraid of .
life magazine introduced generations of people to distant , far-off cultures they never knew existed through pictures .
so i decided to make a series of very simple portraits , mugshots if you will .
and i basically decided to photograph anyone in this country that was not 100 percent straight , which , if you do n't know , is a limitless number of people .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so this was a very large undertaking , and to do it we needed some help .
so i ran out in the freezing cold , and i photographed every single person that i knew that i could get to in february of about two years ago .
and i took those photographs , and i went to the hrc and i asked them for some help .
and they funded two weeks of shooting in new york .
and then we made this .
-lrb- music -rrb- video : i 'm io tillett wright , and i 'm an artist born and raised in new york city .
-lrb- music -rrb- self evident truths is a photographic record of lgbtq america today .
my aim is to take a simple portrait of anyone who 's anything other than 100 percent straight or feels like they fall in the lgbtq spectrum in any way .
my goal is to show the humanity that exists in every one of us through the simplicity of a face .
-lrb- music -rrb- " we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal . "
it 's written in the declaration of independence .
we are failing as a nation to uphold the morals upon which we were founded .
there is no equality in the united states .
-lsb- " what does equality mean to you ? " -rsb- -lsb- " marriage " -rsb- -lsb- " freedom " -rsb- -lsb- " civil rights " -rsb- -lsb- " treat every person as you 'd treat yourself " -rsb- it 's when you do n't have to think about it , simple as that .
the fight for equal rights is not just about gay marriage .
today in 29 states , more than half of this country , you can legally be fired just for your sexuality .
-lsb- " who is responsible for equality ? " -rsb- i 've heard hundreds of people give the same answer : " we are all responsible for equality . "
so far we 've shot 300 faces in new york city .
and we would n't have been able to do any of it without the generous support of the human rights campaign .
i want to take the project across the country .
i want to visit 25 american cities , and i want to shoot 4,000 or 5,000 people .
this is my contribution to the civil rights fight of my generation .
i challenge you to look into the faces of these people and tell them that they deserve less than any other human being .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lsb- " self evident truths " -rsb- -lsb- " 4,000 faces across america " -rsb- -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- io tillett wright : absolutely nothing could have prepared us for what happened after that .
almost 85,000 people watched that video , and then they started emailing us from all over the country , asking us to come to their towns and help them to show their faces .
and a lot more people wanted to show their faces than i had anticipated .
so i changed my immediate goal to 10,000 faces .
that video was made in the spring of 2011 , and as of today i have traveled to almost 20 cities and photographed almost 2,000 people .
i know that this is a talk , but i 'd like to have a minute of just quiet and have you just look at these faces because there is nothing that i can say that will add to them .
because if a picture is worth a thousand words , then a picture of a face needs a whole new vocabulary .
so after traveling and talking to people in places like oklahoma or small-town texas , we found evidence that the initial premise was dead on .
visibility really is key .
familiarity really is the gateway drug to empathy .
once an issue pops up in your own backyard or amongst your own family , you 're far more likely to explore sympathy for it or explore a new perspective on it .
of course , in my travels i met people who legally divorced their children for being other than straight , but i also met people who were southern baptists who switched churches because their child was a lesbian .
sparking empathy had become the backbone of self evident truths .
but here 's what i was starting to learn that was really interesting : self evident truths does n't erase the differences between us .
in fact , on the contrary , it highlights them .
it presents , not just the complexities found in a procession of different human beings , but the complexities found within each individual person .
it was n't that we had too many boxes , it was that we had too few .
at some point i realized that my mission to photograph " gays " was inherently flawed , because there were a million different shades of gay .
here i was trying to help , and i had perpetuated the very thing i had spent my life trying to avoid - yet another box .
at some point i added a question to the release form that asked people to quantify themselves on a scale of one to 100 percent gay .
and i watched so many existential crises unfold in front of me .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- people did n't know what to do because they had never been presented with the option before .
can you quantify your openness ?
once they got over the shock , though , by and large people opted for somewhere between 70 to 95 percent or the 3 to 20 percent marks .
of course , there were lots of people who opted for a 100 percent one or the other , but i found that a much larger proportion of people identified as something that was much more nuanced .
i found that most people fall on a spectrum of what i have come to refer to as " grey . "
let me be clear though - and this is very important - in no way am i saying that preference does n't exist .
and i am not even going to address the issue of choice versus biological imperative , because if any of you happen to be of the belief that sexual orientation is a choice , i invite you to go out and try to be grey .
i 'll take your picture just for trying .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- what i am saying though is that human beings are not one-dimensional .
the most important thing to take from the percentage system is this : if you have gay people over here and you have straight people over here , and while we recognize that most people identify as somewhere closer to one binary or another , there is this vast spectrum of people that exist in between .
and the reality that this presents is a complicated one .
because , for example , if you pass a law that allows a boss to fire an employee for homosexual behavior , where exactly do you draw the line ?
is it over here , by the people who have had one or two heterosexual experiences so far ?
or is it over here by the people who have only had one or two homosexual experiences thus far ?
where exactly does one become a second-class citizen ?
another interesting thing that i learned from my project and my travels is just what a poor binding agent sexual orientation is .
after traveling so much and meeting so many people , let me tell you , there are just as many jerks and sweethearts and democrats and republicans and jocks and queens and every other polarization you can possibly think of within the lgbt community as there are within the human race .
aside from the fact that we play with one legal hand tied behind our backs , and once you get past the shared narrative of prejudice and struggle , just being other than straight does n't necessarily mean that we have anything in common .
so in the endless proliferation of faces that self evident truths is always becoming , as it hopefully appears across more and more platforms , bus shelters , billboards , facebook pages , screen savers , perhaps in watching this procession of humanity , something interesting and useful will begin to happen .
hopefully these categories , these binaries , these over-simplified boxes will begin to become useless and they 'll begin to fall away .
because really , they describe nothing that we see and no one that we know and nothing that we are .
what we see are human beings in all their multiplicity .
and seeing them makes it harder to deny their humanity .
at the very least i hope it makes it harder to deny their human rights .
so is it me particularly that you would choose to deny the right to housing , the right to adopt children , the right to marriage , the freedom to shop here , live here , buy here ?
am i the one that you choose to disown as your child or your brother or your sister or your mother or your father , your neighbor , your cousin , your uncle , the president , your police woman or the fireman ?
it 's too late .
because i already am all of those things .
we already are all of those things , and we always have been .
so please do n't greet us as strangers , greet us as your fellow human beings , period .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- one of the things i want to establish right from the start is that not all neurosurgeons wear cowboy boots .
i just wanted you to know that .
so i am indeed a neurosurgeon , and i follow a long tradition of neurosurgery , and what i 'm going to tell you about today is adjusting the dials in the circuits in the brain , being able to go anywhere in the brain and turning areas of the brain up or down to help our patients .
so as i said , neurosurgery comes from a long tradition .
it 's been around for about 7,000 years .
in mesoamerica , there used to be neurosurgery , and there were these neurosurgeons that used to treat patients .
and they were trying to - they knew that the brain was involved in neurological and psychiatric disease .
they did n't know exactly what they were doing .
not much has changed , by the way . -lrb- laughter -rrb- but they thought that , if you had a neurologic or psychiatric disease , it must be because you are possessed by an evil spirit .
so if you are possessed by an evil spirit causing neurologic or psychiatric problems , then the way to treat this is , of course , to make a hole in your skull and let the evil spirit escape .
so this was the thinking back then , and these individuals made these holes .
sometimes the patients were a little bit reluctant to go through this because , you can tell that the holes are made partially and then , i think , there was some trepanation , and then they left very quickly and it was only a partial hole , and we know they survived these procedures .
but this was common .
there were some sites where one percent of all the skulls have these holes , and so you can see that neurologic and psychiatric disease is quite common , and it was also quite common about 7,000 years ago .
now , in the course of time , we 've come to realize that different parts of the brain do different things .
so there are areas of the brain that are dedicated to controlling your movement or your vision or your memory or your appetite , and so on .
and when things work well , then the nervous system works well , and everything functions .
but once in a while , things do n't go so well , and there 's trouble in these circuits , and there are some rogue neurons that are misfiring and causing trouble , or sometimes they 're underactive and they 're not quite working as they should .
now , the manifestation of this depends on where in the brain these neurons are .
so when these neurons are in the motor circuit , you get dysfunction in the movement system , and you get things like parkinson 's disease .
when the malfunction is in a circuit that regulates your mood , you get things like depression , and when it is in a circuit that controls your memory and cognitive function , then you get things like alzheimer 's disease .
so what we 've been able to do is to pinpoint where these disturbances are in the brain , and we 've been able to intervene within these circuits in the brain to either turn them up or turn them down .
so this is very much like choosing the correct station on the radio dial .
once you choose the right station , whether it be jazz or opera , in our case whether it be movement or mood , we can put the dial there , and then we can use a second button to adjust the volume , to turn it up or turn it down .
so what i 'm going to tell you about is using the circuitry of the brain to implant electrodes and turning areas of the brain up and down to see if we can help our patients .
and this is accomplished using this kind of device , and this is called deep brain stimulation .
so what we 're doing is placing these electrodes throughout the brain .
again , we are making holes in the skull about the size of a dime , putting an electrode in , and then this electrode is completely underneath the skin down to a pacemaker in the chest , and with a remote control very much like a television remote control , we can adjust how much electricity we deliver to these areas of the brain .
we can turn it up or down , on or off .
now , about a hundred thousand patients in the world have received deep brain stimulation , and i 'm going to show you some examples of using deep brain stimulation to treat disorders of movement , disorders of mood and disorders of cognition .
so this looks something like this when it 's in the brain .
you see the electrode going through the skull into the brain and resting there , and we can place this really anywhere in the brain .
i tell my friends that no neuron is safe from a neurosurgeon , because we can really reach just about anywhere in the brain quite safely now .
with parkinson 's disease , and this lady has parkinson 's disease , and she has these electrodes in her brain , and i 'm going to show you what she 's like when the electrodes are turned off and she has her parkinson 's symptoms , and then we 're going to turn it on .
so this looks something like this .
the electrodes are turned off now , and you can see that she has tremor .
-lrb- video -rrb- man : okay . woman : i ca n't . man : can you try to touch my finger ?
-lrb- video -rrb- man : that 's a little better . woman : that side is better .
we 're now going to turn it on .
it 's on . just turned it on .
and this works like that , instantly .
and the difference between shaking in this way and not - -lrb- applause -rrb- the difference between shaking in this way and not is related to the misbehavior of 25,000 neurons in her subthalamic nucleus .
so we now know how to find these troublemakers and tell them , " gentlemen , that 's enough .
we want you to stop doing that . "
and we do that with electricity .
so we use electricity to dictate how they fire , and we try to block their misbehavior using electricity .
so in this case , we are suppressing the activity of abnormal neurons .
we started using this technique in other problems , and i 'm going to tell you about a fascinating problem that we encountered , a case of dystonia .
so dystonia is a disorder affecting children .
it 's a genetic disorder , and it involves a twisting motion , and these children get progressively more and more twisting until they ca n't breathe , until they get sores , urinary infections , and then they die .
so back in 1997 , i was asked to see this young boy , perfectly normal . he has this genetic form of dystonia .
there are eight children in the family .
five of them have dystonia .
so here he is .
this boy is nine years old , perfectly normal until the age six , and then he started twisting his body , first the right foot , then the left foot , then the right arm , then the left arm , then the trunk , and then by the time he arrived , within the course of one or two years of the disease onset , he could no longer walk , he could no longer stand .
he was crippled , and indeed the natural progression as this gets worse is for them to become progressively twisted , progressively disabled , and many of these children do not survive .
so he is one of five kids .
the only way he could get around was crawling on his belly like this .
he did not respond to any drugs .
we did not know what to do with this boy .
we did not know what operation to do , where to go in the brain , but on the basis of our results in parkinson 's disease , we reasoned , why do n't we try to suppress the same area in the brain that we suppressed in parkinson 's disease , and let 's see what happens ?
so here he was . we operated on him hoping that he would get better . we did not know .
so here he is now , back in israel where he lives , three months after the procedure , and here he is .
-lrb- applause -rrb- on the basis of this result , this is now a procedure that 's done throughout the world , and there have been hundreds of children that have been helped with this kind of surgery .
this boy is now in university and leads quite a normal life .
this has been one of the most satisfying cases that i have ever done in my entire career , to restore movement and walking to this kind of child .
-lrb- applause -rrb- we realized that perhaps we could use this technology not only in circuits that control your movement but also circuits that control other things , and the next thing that we took on was circuits that control your mood .
and we decided to take on depression , and the reason we took on depression is because it 's so prevalent , and as you know , there are many treatments for depression , with medication and psychotherapy , even electroconvulsive therapy , but there are millions of people , and there are still 10 or 20 percent of patients with depression that do not respond , and it is these patients that we want to help .
and let 's see if we can use this technique to help these patients with depression .
so the first thing we did was , we compared , what 's different in the brain of someone with depression and someone who is normal , and what we did was pet scans to look at the blood flow of the brain , and what we noticed is that in patients with depression compared to normals , areas of the brain are shut down , and those are the areas in blue .
so here you really have the blues , and the areas in blue are areas that are involved in motivation , in drive and decision-making , and indeed , if you 're severely depressed as these patients were , those are impaired . you lack motivation and drive .
the other thing we discovered was an area that was overactive , area 25 , seen there in red , and area 25 is the sadness center of the brain .
if i make any of you sad , for example , i make you remember the last time you saw your parent before they died or a friend before they died , this area of the brain lights up .
it is the sadness center of the brain .
and so patients with depression have hyperactivity .
the area of the brain for sadness is on red hot .
the thermostat is set at 100 degrees , and the other areas of the brain , involved in drive and motivation , are shut down .
so we wondered , can we place electrodes in this area of sadness and see if we can turn down the thermostat , can we turn down the activity , and what will be the consequence of that ?
so we went ahead and implanted electrodes in patients with depression .
this is work done with my colleague helen mayberg from emory .
and we placed electrodes in area 25 , and in the top scan you see before the operation , area 25 , the sadness area is red hot , and the frontal lobes are shut down in blue , and then , after three months of continuous stimulation , 24 hours a day , or six months of continuous stimulation , we have a complete reversal of this .
we 're able to drive down area 25 , down to a more normal level , and we 're able to turn back online the frontal lobes of the brain , and indeed we 're seeing very striking results in these patients with severe depression .
so now we are in clinical trials , and are in phase iii clinical trials , and this may become a new procedure , if it 's safe and we find that it 's effective , to treat patients with severe depression .
i 've shown you that we can use deep brain stimulation to treat the motor system in cases of parkinson 's disease and dystonia .
i 've shown you that we can use it to treat a mood circuit in cases of depression .
can we use deep brain stimulation to make you smarter ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- anybody interested in that ?
-lrb- applause -rrb- of course we can , right ?
so what we 've decided to do is we 're going to try to turbocharge we 're going to place electrodes within the circuits that regulate your memory and cognitive function to see if we can turn up their activity .
now we 're not going to do this in normal people .
we 're going to do this in people that have cognitive deficits , and we 've chosen to treat patients with alzheimer 's disease who have cognitive and memory deficits .
as you know , this is the main symptom of early onset alzheimer 's disease .
so we 've placed electrodes within this circuit in an area of the brain called the fornix , which is the highway in and out of this memory circuit , with the idea to see if we can turn on this memory circuit , and whether that can , in turn , help these patients with alzheimer 's disease .
now it turns out that in alzheimer 's disease , there 's a huge deficit in glucose utilization in the brain .
the brain is a bit of a hog when it comes to using glucose .
it uses 20 percent of all your - even though it only weighs two percent - it uses 10 times more glucose than it should based on its weight .
twenty percent of all the glucose in your body is used by the brain , and as you go from being normal to having mild cognitive impairment , which is a precursor for alzheimer 's , all the way to alzheimer 's disease , then there are areas of the brain that stop using glucose .
they shut down . they turn off .
and indeed , what we see is that these areas in red around the outside ribbon of the brain are progressively getting more and more blue until they shut down completely .
this is analogous to having a power failure in an area of the brain , a regional power failure .
so the lights are out in parts of the brain in patients with alzheimer 's disease , and the question is , are the lights out forever , or can we turn the lights back on ?
can we get those areas of the brain to use glucose once again ?
so this is what we did . we implanted electrodes in the fornix of patients with alzheimer 's disease , we turned it on , and we looked at what happens to glucose use in the brain .
and indeed , at the top , you 'll see before the surgery , the areas in blue are the areas that use less glucose than normal , predominantly the parietal and temporal lobes .
these areas of the brain are shut down .
the lights are out in these areas of the brain .
we then put in the dbs electrodes and we wait for a month or a year , and the areas in red represent the areas where we increase glucose utilization .
and indeed , we are able to get these areas of the brain that were not using glucose to use glucose once again .
so the message here is that , in alzheimer 's disease , the lights are out , but there is someone home , and we 're able to turn the power back on to these areas of the brain , and as we do so , we expect that their functions will return .
so this is now in clinical trials .
we are going to operate on 50 patients with early alzheimer 's disease to see whether this is safe and effective , whether we can improve their neurologic function .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so the message i want to leave you with today is that , indeed , there are several circuits in the brain that are malfunctioning across various disease states , whether we 're talking about parkinson 's disease , depression , schizophrenia , alzheimer 's .
we are now learning to understand what are the circuits , what are the areas of the brain that are responsible for the clinical signs and the symptoms of those diseases .
we can now reach those circuits .
we can introduce electrodes within those circuits .
we can graduate the activity of those circuits .
we can turn them down if they are overactive , if they 're causing trouble , trouble that is felt throughout the brain , or we can turn them up if they are underperforming , and in so doing , we think that we may be able to help the overall function of the brain .
the implications of this , of course , is that we may be able to modify the symptoms of the disease , but i have n't told you but there 's also some evidence that we might be able to help the repair of damaged areas of the brain using electricity , and this is something for the future , to see if , indeed , we not only change the activity but also some of the reparative functions of the brain can be harvested .
so i envision that we 're going to see a great expansion of indications of this technique .
we 're going to see electrodes being placed for many disorders of the brain .
one of the most exciting things about this is that , indeed , it involves multidisciplinary work .
it involves the work of engineers , of imaging scientists , of basic scientists , of neurologists , psychiatrists , neurosurgeons , and certainly at the interface of these multiple disciplines that there 's the excitement .
and i think that we will see that we will be able to chase more of these evil spirits out from the brain as time goes on , and the consequence of that , of course , will be that we will be able to help many more patients .
thank you very much .
so , i kind of believe that we 're in like the " cave-painting " era of computer interfaces .
like , they 're very kind of - they do n't go as deep or as emotionally engaging as they possibly could be and i 'd like to change all that .
hit me .
ok . so i mean , this is the kind of status quo interface , right ?
it 's very flat , kind of rigid .
and ok , so you could sex it up and like go to a much more lickable mac , you know , but really it 's the kind of same old crap we 've had for the last , you know , 30 years .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- like i think we really put up with a lot of crap with our computers .
i mean it 's point and click , it 's like the menus , icons , it 's all the kind of same thing .
and so one kind of information space that i take inspiration from is my real desk .
it 's so much more subtle , so much more visceral - you know , what 's visible , what 's not .
and i 'd like to bring that experience to the desktop .
so i kind of have a - this is bumptop .
it 's kind of like a new approach to desktop computing .
so you can bump things - they 're all physically , you know , manipulable and stuff .
and instead of that point and click , it 's like a push and pull , things collide as you 'd expect them . just like on my real desk , i can - let me just grab these guys - i can turn things into piles instead of just the folders that we have .
and once things are in a pile i can browse them by throwing them into a grid , or you know , flip through them like a book or i can lay them out like a deck of cards .
when they 're laid out , i can pull things to new locations or delete things or just quickly sort a whole pile , you know , just immediately , right ?
and then , it 's all smoothly animated , instead of these jarring changes you see in today 's interfaces .
also , if i want to add something to a pile , well , how do i do that ?
i just toss it to the pile , and it 's added right to the top . it 's a kind of nice way .
also some of the stuff we can do is , for these individual icons we thought - i mean , how can we play with the idea of an icon , and push that further ?
and one of the things i can do is make it bigger if i want to emphasize it and make it more important .
but what 's really cool is that since there 's a physics simulation running under this , it 's actually heavier . so the lighter stuff does n't really move but if i throw it at the lighter guys , right ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so it 's cute , but it 's also like a subtle channel of conveying information , right ?
this is heavy so it feels more important . so it 's kind of cool .
despite computers everywhere paper really has n't disappeared , because it has a lot of , i think , valuable properties .
and some of those we wanted to transfer to the icons in our system .
so one of the things you can do to our icons , just like paper , is crease them and fold them , just like paper . remember , you know , something for later .
or if you want to be destructive , you can just crumple it up and , you know , toss it to the corner .
also just like paper , around our workspace we 'll pin things up to the wall to remember them later , and i can do the same thing here , and you know , you 'll see post-it notes and things like that around people 's offices .
and i can pull them off when i want to work with them .
so , one of the criticisms of this kind of approach to organization is that , you know , " okay , well my real desk is really messy . i do n't want that mess on my computer . "
so one thing we have for that is like a grid align , kind of - so you get that more traditional desktop . things are kind of grid aligned .
more boring , but you still have that kind of colliding and bumping .
and you can still do fun things like make shelves on your desktop .
let 's just break this shelf . okay , that shelf broke .
i think beyond the icons , i think another really cool domain for this software - i think it applies to more than just icons and your desktop - but browsing photographs .
i think you can really enrich the way we browse our photographs and bring it to that kind of shoebox of , you know , photos with your family on the kitchen table kind of thing .
i can toss these things around . they 're so much more tangible and touchable - and you know i can double-click on something to take a look at it .
and i can do all that kind of same stuff i showed you before .
so i can pile things up , i can flip through it , i can , you know - okay , let 's move this photo to the back , let 's delete this guy here , and i think it 's just a much more rich kind of way of interacting with your information .
and that 's bumptop . thanks !
meet tony . he 's my student .
he 's about my age , and he 's in san quentin state prison .
when tony was 16 years old , one day , one moment , " it was mom 's gun .
just flash it , scare the guy . he 's a punk .
he took some money ; we 'll take his money . that 'll teach him .
then last minute , i 'm thinking , ' ca n't do this . this is wrong . ' my buddy says , ' c 'mon , let 's do this . ' i say , ' let 's do this . " ' and those three words , tony 's going to remember , because the next thing he knows , he hears the pop .
there 's the punk on the ground , puddle of blood .
and that 's felony murder - 25 to life , parole at 50 if you 're lucky , and tony 's not feeling very lucky .
so when we meet in my philosophy class in his prison and i say , " in this class , we will discuss the foundations of ethics , " tony interrupts me .
" what are you going to teach me about right and wrong ?
i know what is wrong . i have done wrong .
i am told every day , by every face i see , every wall i face , that i am wrong .
if i ever get out of here , there will always be a mark by my name .
i 'm a convict ; i am branded ' wrong . ' what are you going to tell me about right and wrong ? "
so i say to tony , " sorry , but it 's worse than you think .
you think you know right and wrong ?
then can you tell me what wrong is ?
no , do n't just give me an example .
i want to know about wrongness itself , the idea of wrong .
what is that idea ?
what makes something wrong ?
how do we know that it 's wrong ? maybe you and i disagree .
maybe one of us is wrong about the wrong .
maybe it 's you , maybe it 's me - but we 're not here to trade opinions ; everyone 's got an opinion .
we are here for knowledge .
our enemy is thoughtlessness . this is philosophy . "
and something changes for tony .
" could be i 'm wrong . i 'm tired of being wrong .
i want to know what is wrong .
i want to know what i know . "
what tony sees in that moment is the project of philosophy , the project that begins in wonder - what kant called " admiration and awe at the starry sky above and the moral law within . "
what can creatures like us know of such things ?
it is the project that always takes us back to the condition of existence - what heidegger called " the always already there . "
it is the project of questioning what we believe and why we believe it - what socrates called " the examined life . "
socrates , a man wise enough to know that he knows nothing .
socrates died in prison , his philosophy intact .
so tony starts doing his homework .
he learns his whys and wherefores , his causes and correlations , his logic , his fallacies .
turns out , tony 's got the philosophy muscle .
his body is in prison , but his mind is free .
tony learns about the ontologically promiscuous , the epistemologically anxious , the ethically dubious , the metaphysically ridiculous .
that 's plato , descartes , nietzsche and bill clinton .
so when he gives me his final paper , in which he argues that the categorical imperative is perhaps too uncompromising to deal with the conflict that affects our everyday and challenges me to tell him whether therefore we are condemned to moral failure , i say , " i do n't know .
let us think about that . "
because in that moment , there 's no mark by tony 's name ; it 's just the two of us standing there .
it is not professor and convict , it is just two minds ready to do philosophy .
and i say to tony , " let 's do this . "
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- it sure used to be a lot easier to be from iceland , because until a couple of years ago , people knew hardly anything about us , and i could basically come out here and say only good things about us .
but in the last couple of years we 've become infamous for a couple of things .
first , of course , the economic meltdown .
it actually got so bad that somebody put our country up for sale on ebay .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ninety-nine pence was the starting price and no reserve .
then there was the volcano that interrupted the travel plans of almost all of you and many of your friends , including president obama .
by the way , the pronunciation is " eyjafjallajokull . "
none of your media got it right .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but i 'm not here to share these stories about these two things exactly .
i 'm here to tell you the story of audur capital , which is a financial firm founded by me and kristin - who you see in the picture - in the spring of 2007 , just over a year before the economic collapse hit .
why would two women who were enjoying successful careers in investment banking in the corporate sector leave to found a financial services firm ?
well let it suffice to say that we felt a bit overwhelmed with testosterone .
and i 'm not here to say that men are to blame for the crisis and what happened in my country .
but i can surely tell you that in my country , much like on wall street and the city of london and elsewhere , men were at the helm of the game of the financial sector , and that kind of lack of diversity and sameness leads to disastrous problems .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so we decided , a bit fed-up with this world and also with the strong feeling in our stomach that this was n't sustainable , to found a financial services firm based on our values , and we decided to incorporate feminine values into the world of finance .
raised quite a few eyebrows in iceland .
we were n't known as the typical " women " women in iceland up until then .
so it was almost like coming out of the closet to actually talk about the fact that we were women and that we believed that we had a set of values and a way of doing business that would be more sustainable than what we had experienced until then .
and we got a great group of people to join us - principled people with great skills , and investors with a vision and values to match ours .
and together we got through the eye of the financial storm in iceland without taking any direct losses to our equity or to the funds of our clients .
and although i want to thank the talented people of our company foremost for that - and also there 's a factor of luck and timing - we are absolutely convinced that we did this because of our values .
so let me share with you our values .
we believe in risk awareness .
what does that mean ?
we believe that you should always understand the risks that you 're taking , and we will not invest in things we do n't understand .
not a complicated thing .
but in 2007 , at the height of the sub-prime and all the complicated financial structures , it was quite opposite to the reckless risk-taking behaviors that we saw on the market .
we also believe in straight-talking , telling it as it is , using simple language that people understand , telling people about the downsides as well as the potential upsides , and even telling the bad news that no one wants to utter , like our lack of belief in the sustainability of the icelandic financial sector that already we had months before the collapse hit us .
and , although we do work in the financial sector , where excel is king , we believe in emotional capital .
and we believe that doing emotional due diligence is just as important as doing financial due diligence .
it is actually people that make money and lose money , not excel spreadsheets .
-lrb- applause -rrb- last , but not least , we believe in profit with principles .
we care how we make our profit .
so while we want to make economic profit for ourselves and our customers , we are willing to do it with a long-term view , and we like to have a wider definition of profits than just the economic profit in the next quarter .
so we like to see profits , plus positive social and environmental benefits , when we invest .
but it was n't just about the values , although we are convinced that they matter .
it was also about a business opportunity .
it 's the female trend , and it 's the sustainability trend , that are going to create some of the most interesting investment opportunities in the years to come .
the whole thing about the female trend is not about women being better than men ; it is actually about women being different from men , bringing different values and different ways to the table .
so what do you get ? you get better decision-making , and you get less herd behavior , and both of those things hit your bottom line with very positive results .
but one has to wonder , now that we 've had this financial sector collapse upon us in iceland - and by the way , europe looks pretty bad right now , and many would say that you in america are heading for some more trouble as well .
now that we 've had all that happen , and we have all this data out there telling us that it 's much better to have diversity around the decision-making tables , will we see business and finance change ?
will government change ?
well i 'll give you my straight talk about this .
i have days that i believe , but i have days that i 'm full of doubt .
have you seen the incredible urge out there to rebuild the very things that failed us ?
-lrb- applause -rrb- einstein said that this was the definition of insanity - to do the same things over and over again , hoping for a different outcome .
so i guess the world is insane , because i see entirely too much of doing the same things over and over again , hoping that this time it 's not going to collapse upon us .
i want to see more revolutionary thinking , and i remain hopeful .
like ted , i believe in people .
and i know that consumers are becoming more conscious , and they are going to start voting with their wallets , and they are going to change the face of business and finance from the outside , if they do n't do it from the inside .
but i 'm more of the revolutionary , and i should be ; i 'm from iceland .
we have a long history of strong , courageous , independent women , ever since the viking age .
and i want to tell you when i first realized that women matter to the economy and to the society , i was seven - it happened to be my mother 's birthday - october 24 , 1975 .
women in iceland took the day off .
from work or from home , they took the day off , and nothing worked in iceland .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- they marched into the center of reykjavik , and they put women 's issues onto the agenda .
and some say this was the start of a global movement .
for me it was the start of a long journey , but i decided that day to matter .
five years later , iceland elected vigdis finnbogadottir as their president - first female to become head of state , single mom , a breast cancer survivor who had had one of her breasts removed .
and at one of the campaign sessions , she had one of her male contenders allude to the fact that she could n't become president - she was a woman , and even half a woman .
that night she won the election , because she came back - not just because of his crappy behavior - but she came back and said , " well , i 'm actually not going to breastfeed the icelandic nation ; i 'm going to lead it . "
-lrb- applause -rrb- so i 've had incredibly many women role models that have influenced who i am and where i am today .
but in spite of that , i went through the first 10 or 15 years of my career mostly in denial of being a woman .
started in corporate america , and i was absolutely convinced that it was just about the individual , that women and men would have just the same opportunities .
but i 've come to conclude lately that it is n't like that .
we are not the same , and it 's great . because of our differences , we create and sustain life .
so we should embrace our difference and aim for challenge .
the final thought i want to leave with you is that i 'm fed up with this tyranny of either / or choices in life - either it 's men or it 's women .
we need to start embracing the beauty of balance .
so let 's move away from thinking about business here and philanthropy there , and let 's start thinking about doing good business .
that 's how we change the world . that 's the only sustainable future .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- my name is kate hartman .
and i like to make devices that play with the ways that we relate and communicate .
so i 'm specifically interested in how we , as humans , relate to ourselves , each other and the world around us .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so just to give you a bit of context , as june said , i 'm an artist , a technologist and an educator .
i teach courses in physical computing and wearable electronics .
and much of what i do is either wearable or somehow related to the human form .
and so anytime i talk about what i do , i like to just quickly address the reason why bodies matter .
and it 's pretty simple .
everybody 's got one - all of you .
i can guarantee , everyone in this room , all of you over there , the people in the cushy seats , the people up top with the laptops - we all have bodies .
do n't be ashamed .
it 's something that we have in common and they act as our primary interfaces for the world .
and so when working as an interaction designer , or as an artist who deals with participation - creating things that live on , in or around the human form - it 's really a powerful space to work within .
so within my own work , i use a broad range of materials and tools .
so i communicate through everything from radio transceivers to funnels and plastic tubing .
and to tell you a bit about the things that i make , the easiest place to start the story is with a hat .
and so it all started several years ago , late one night when i was sitting on the subway , riding home , and i was thinking .
and i tend to be a person who thinks too much and talks too little .
and so i was thinking about how it might be great if i could just take all these noises - like all these sounds of my thoughts in my head - if i could just physically extricate them and pull them out in such a form that i could share them with somebody else .
and so i went home , and i made a prototype of this hat .
and i called it the muttering hat , because it emitted these muttering noises that were kind of tethered to you , but you could detach them and share them with somebody else .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i make other hats as well .
this one is called the talk to yourself hat .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's fairly self-explanatory .
it physically carves out conversation space for one .
and when you speak out loud , the sound of your voice is actually channeled back into your own ears .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and so when i make these things , it 's really not so much about the object itself , but rather the negative space around the object .
so what happens when a person puts this thing on ?
what kind of an experience do they have ?
and how are they transformed by wearing it ?
so many of these devices really kind of focus on the ways in which we relate to ourselves .
so this particular device is called the gut listener .
and it is a tool that actually enables one to listen to their own innards .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and so some of these things are actually more geared toward expression and communication .
and so the inflatable heart is an external organ that can be used by the wearer to express themselves .
so they can actually inflate it and deflate it according to their emotions .
so they can express everything from admiration and lust to anxiety and angst .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and some of these are actually meant to mediate experiences .
so the discommunicator is a tool for arguments .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and so actually it allows for an intense emotional exchange , but is serves to absorb the specificity of the words that are delivered .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and in the end , some of these things just act as invitations .
so the ear bender literally puts something out there so someone can grab your ear and say what they have to say .
so even though i 'm really interested in the relationship between people , i also consider the ways in which we relate to the world around us .
and so when i was first living in new york city a few years back , i was thinking a lot about the familiar architectural forms that surrounded me and how i would like to better relate to them .
and i thought , " well , hey !
maybe if i want to better relate to walls , maybe i need to be more wall-like myself . "
so i made a wearable wall that i could wear as a backpack .
and so i would put it on and sort of physically transform myself so that i could either contribute to or critique the spaces that surrounded me .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and so jumping off of that , thinking beyond the built environment into the natural world , i have this ongoing project called botanicalls - which actually enables houseplants to tap into human communication protocols .
so when a plant is thirsty , it can actually make a phone call or post a message to a service like twitter .
and so this really shifts the human / plant dynamic , because a single house plant can actually express its needs to thousands of people at the same time .
and so kind of thinking about scale , my most recent obsession is actually with glaciers - of course .
and so glaciers are these magnificent beings , and there 's lots of reasons to be obsessed with them , but what i 'm particularly interested in is in human-glacier relations .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- because there seems to be an issue .
the glaciers are actually leaving us .
they 're both shrinking and retreating - and some of them have disappeared altogether .
and so i actually live in canada now , so i 've been visiting one of my local glaciers .
and this one 's particularly interesting , because , of all the glaciers in north america , it receives the highest volume of human traffic in a year .
they actually have these buses that drive up and over the lateral moraine and drop people off on the surface of the glacier .
and this has really gotten me thinking about this experience of the initial encounter .
when i meet a glacier for the very first time , what do i do ?
there 's no kind of social protocol for this .
i really just do n't even know how to say hello .
do i carve a message in the snow ?
or perhaps i can assemble one out of dot and dash ice cubes - ice cube morse code .
or perhaps i need to make myself a speaking tool , like an icy megaphone that i can use to amplify my voice when i direct it at the ice .
but really the most satisfying experience i 've had is the act of listening , which is what we need in any good relationship .
and i was really struck by how much it affected me .
this very basic shift in my physical orientation helped me shift my perspective in relation to the glacier .
and so since we use devices to figure out how to relate to the world these days , i actually made a device called the glacier embracing suit .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and so this is constructed out of a heat reflected material that serves to mediate the difference in temperature between the human body and the glacial ice .
and once again , it 's this invitation that asks people to lay down on the glacier and give it a hug .
so , yea , this is actually just the beginning .
these are initial musings for this project .
and just as with the wall , how i wanted to be more wall-like , with this project , i 'd actually like to take more a of glacial pace .
and so my intent is to actually just take the next 10 years and go on a series of collaborative projects where i work with people from different disciplines - artists , technologists , scientists - to kind of work on this project of how we can improve human-glacier relations .
so beyond that , in closing , i 'd just like to say that we 're in this era of communications and device proliferation , and it 's really tremendous and exciting and sexy , but i think what 's really important is thinking about how we can simultaneously maintain a sense of wonder and a sense of criticality about the tools that we use and the ways in which we relate to the world .
thanks .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i want to start off by saying , houston , we have a problem .
we 're entering a second generation of no progress in terms of human flight in space . in fact , we 've regressed .
we stand a very big chance of losing our ability to inspire our youth to go out and continue this very important thing that we as a species have always done .
and that is , instinctively we 've gone out and climbed over difficult places , went to more hostile places , and found out later , maybe to our surprise , that that 's the reason we survived .
and i feel very strongly that it 's not good enough for us to have generations of kids that think that it 's ok to look forward to a better version of a cell phone with a video in it .
they need to look forward to exploration ; they need to look forward to colonization ; they need to look forward to breakthroughs .
we need to inspire them , because they need to lead us and help us survive in the future .
i 'm particularly troubled that what nasa 's doing right now with this new bush doctrine to - for this next decade and a half - oh shoot , i screwed up .
we have real specific instructions here not to talk about politics .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- what we 're looking forward to is - -lrb- applause -rrb- what we 're looking forward to is not only the inspiration of our children , but the current plan right now is not really even allowing the most creative people in this country - the boeing 's and lockheed 's space engineers - to go out and take risks and try new stuff .
we 're going to go back to the moon ... 50 years later ?
and we 're going to do it very specifically planned to not learn anything new .
i 'm really troubled by that . but anyway that 's - the basis of the thing that i want to share with you today , though , is that right back to where we inspire people who will be our great leaders later .
that 's the theme of my next 15 minutes here .
and i think that the inspiration begins when you 're very young : three-year-olds , up to 12- , 14-year-olds .
what they look at is the most important thing .
let 's take a snapshot at aviation .
and there was a wonderful little short four-year time period when marvelous things happened .
it started in 1908 , when the wright brothers flew in paris , and everybody said , " ooh , hey , i can do that . " there 's only a few people that have flown in early 1908 . in four years , 39 countries had hundreds of airplanes , thousand of pilots . airplanes were invented by natural selection .
now you can say that intelligent design designs our airplanes of today , but there was no intelligent design really designing those early airplanes .
there were probably at least 30,000 different things tried , and when they crash and kill the pilot , do n't try that again .
the ones that flew and landed ok because there were no trained pilots who had good flying qualities by definition .
so we , by making a whole bunch of attempts , thousands of attempts , in that four-year time period , we invented the concepts of the airplanes that we fly today . and that 's why they 're so safe , as we gave it a lot of chance to find what 's good .
that has not happened at all in space flying .
there 's only been two concepts tried - two by the u.s. and one by the russians .
well , who was inspired during that time period ?
aviation week asked me to make a list of who i thought were the movers and shakers of the first 100 years of aviation .
and i wrote them down and i found out later that every one of them was a little kid in that wonderful renaissance of aviation .
well , what happened when i was a little kid was - some pretty heavy stuff too .
the jet age started : the missile age started . von braun was on there showing how to go to mars - and this was before sputnik .
and this was at a time when mars was a hell of a lot more interesting than it is now . we thought there 'd be animals there ; we knew there were plants there ; the colors change , right ?
but , you know , nasa screwed that up because they 've sent these robots and they 've landed it only in the deserts .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- if you look at what happened - this little black line is as fast as man ever flew , and the red line is top-of-the-line military fighters and the blue line is commercial air transport .
you notice here 's a big jump when i was a little kid - and i think that had something to do with giving me the courage to go out and try something that other people were n't having the courage to try .
well , what did i do when i was a kid ?
i did n't do the hotrods and the girls and the dancing and , well , we did n't have drugs in those days . but i did competition model airplanes .
i spent about seven years during the vietnam war flight-testing airplanes for the air force .
and then i went in and i had a lot of fun building airplanes that people could build in their garages .
and some 3,000 of those are flying . of course , one of them is around the world voyager . i founded another company in ' 82 , which is my company now .
and we have developed more than one new type of airplane every year since 1982 .
and there 's a lot of them that i actually ca n't show you on this chart .
the most impressive airplane ever , i believe , was designed only a dozen years after the first operational jet .
stayed in service till it was too rusty to fly , taken out of service .
we retreated in ' 98 back to something that was developed in ' 56 . what ?
the most impressive spaceship ever , i believe , was a grumman lunar lander . it was a - you know , it landed on the moon , take off of the moon , did n't need any maintenance guys - that 's kind of cool .
we 've lost that capability . we abandoned it in ' 72 .
this thing was designed three years after gagarin first flew in space in 1961 .
three years , and we ca n't do that now . crazy .
talk very briefly about innovation cycles , things that grow , have a lot of activity ; they die out when they 're replaced by something else .
these things tend to happen every 25 years .
40 years long , with an overlap . you can put that statement on all kinds of different technologies . the interesting thing - by the way , the speed here , excuse me , higher-speed travel is the title of these innovation cycles . there is none here .
these two new airplanes are the same speed as the dc8 that was done in 1958 .
here 's the biggie , and that is , you do n't have innovation cycles if the government develops and the government uses it .
you know , a good example , of course , is the darpa net .
computers were used for artillery first , then irs .
but when we got it , now you have all the level of activity , all the benefit from it . private sector has to do it .
keep that in mind . i put down innovation - i 've looked for innovation cycles in space ; i found none .
the very first year , starting when gagarin went in space , and a few weeks later alan shepherd , there were five manned space flights in the world - the very first year .
in 2003 , everyone that the united states sent to space was killed .
there were only three or four flights in 2003 .
in 2004 , there were only two flights : two russian soyuz flights to the international manned station . and i had to fly three in mojave with my little group of a couple dozen people in order to get to a total of five , which was the number the same year back in 1961 .
there is no growth . there 's no activity . there 's no nothing .
this is a picture here taken from spaceshipone .
this is a picture here taken from orbit .
our goal is to make it so that you can see this picture and really enjoy that .
we know how to do it for sub-orbital flying now , do it safe enough - at least as safe as the early airlines - so that can be done .
and i think i want to talk a little bit about why we had the courage to go out and try that as a small company .
well , first of all , what 's going to happen next ?
the first industry will be a high volume , a lot of players .
there 's another one announced just last week .
and it will be sub-orbital . and the reason it has to be sub-orbital is , there is not solutions for adequate safety to fly the public to orbit . the governments have been doing this - three governments have been doing this for 45 years , and still four percent of the people that have left the atmosphere have died .
that 's - you do n't want to run a business with that kind of a safety record .
it 'll be very high volume ; we think 100,000 people will fly by 2020 .
i ca n't tell you when this will start , because i do n't want my competition to know my schedule .
but i think once it does , we will find solutions , and very quickly , you 'll see those resort hotels in orbit .
and that real easy thing to do , which is a swing around the moon so you have this cool view . and that will be really cool .
because the moon does n't have an atmosphere - you can do an elliptical orbit and miss it by 10 feet if you want .
oh , it 's going to be so much fun .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ok . my critics say , " hey , rutan 's just spending a lot of these billionaires ' money for joyrides for billionaires .
what 's this ? this is not a transportation system ; it 's just for fun . "
and i used to be bothered by that , and then i got to thinking , well , wait a minute . i bought my first apple computer in 1978 and i bought it because i could say , " i got a computer at my house and you do n't .
' what do you use it for ? ' come over . it does frogger . " ok .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- not the bank 's computer or lockheed 's computer , but the home computer was for games .
for a whole decade it was for fun - we did n't even know what it was for .
but what happened , the fact that we had this big industry , big development , big improvement and capability and so on , and they get out there in enough homes - we were ripe for a new invention .
and the inventor is in this audience .
al gore invented the internet and because of that , something that we used for a whole year - excuse me - a whole decade for fun , became everything - our commerce , our research , our communication and , if we let the google guys think for another couple weekends , we can add a dozen more things to the list . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and it wo n't be very long before you wo n't be able to convince kids that we did n't always have computers in our homes .
so fun is defendable .
ok , i want to show you kind of a busy chart , but in it is my prediction with what 's going to happen .
and in it also brings up another point , right here .
there 's a group of people that have come forward - and you do n't know all of them - but the ones that have come forward were inspired as young children , this little three- to 15-year-old age , by us going to orbit and going to the moon here , right in this time period .
paul allen , elan musk , richard branson , jeff bezos , the ansari family , which is now funding the russians ' sub-orbital thing , bob bigelow , a private space station , and carmack .
these people are taking money and putting it in an interesting area , and i think it 's a lot better than they put it in an area of a better cell phone or something - but they 're putting it in very - areas and this will lead us into this kind of capability , and it will lead us into the next really big thing and it will allow us to explore . and i think eventually it will allow us to colonize and to keep us from going extinct .
they were inspired by big progress . but look at the progress that 's going on after that .
there were a couple of examples here .
the military fighters had a - highest-performance military airplane was the sr71 . it went a whole life cycle , got too rusty to fly , and was taken out of service . the concorde doubled the speed for airline travel .
it went a whole life cycle without competition , took out of service . and we 're stuck back here with the same kind of capability for military fighters and commercial airline travel that we had back in the late ' 50s .
but something is out there to inspire our kids now .
and i 'm talking about if you 've got a baby now , or if you 've got a 10-year-old now .
what 's out there is there 's something really interesting going to happen here .
relatively soon , you 'll be able to buy a ticket and fly higher and faster than the highest-performance military operational airplane . it 's never happened before .
the fact that they have stuck here with this kind of performance has been , well , you know , you win the war in 12 minutes ; why do you need something better ?
but i think when you guys start buying tickets and flying sub-orbital flights to space , very soon - wait a minute , what 's happening here , we 'll have military fighters with sub-orbital capability , and i think very soon this .
but the interesting thing about it is the commercial guys are going to go first .
ok , i look forward to a new " capitalist 's space race , " let 's call it .
you remember the space race in the ' 60s was for national prestige , because we lost the first two milestones .
we did n't lose them technically . the fact that we had the hardware to put something in orbit when we let von braun fly it - you can argue that 's not a technical loss .
sputnik was n't a technical loss , but it was a prestige loss .
america - the world saw america as not being the leader in technology , and that was a very strong thing .
and then we flew alan shepherd weeks after gagarin , not months or decades , or whatever . so we had the capability .
but america lost . we lost . and because of that , we made a big jump to recover it .
well , again , what 's interesting here is we 've lost to the russians on the first couple of milestones already .
you can not buy a ticket commercially to fly into space in america - ca n't do it . you can buy it in russia .
you can fly with russian hardware . this is available because a russian space program is starving , and it 's nice for them to get 20 million here and there to take one of the seats .
it 's commercial . it can be defined as space tourism . they are also offering a trip to go on this whip around the moon , like apollo 8 was done .
100 million bucks - hey , i can go to the moon .
but , you know , would you have thought back in the ' 60s , when the space race was going on , that the first commercial capitalist-like thing to do to buy a ticket to go to the moon would be in russian hardware ?
and would you have thought , would the russians have thought , that when they first go to the moon in their developed hardware , the guys inside wo n't be russians ? maybe it 'll probably be a japanese or an american billionaire ? well , that 's weird : you know , it really is .
but anyway , i think we need to beat them again .
i think what we 'll do is we 'll see a successful , very successful , private space flight industry . whether we 're first or not really does n't matter .
the russians actually flew a supersonic transport before the concorde .
and then they flew a few cargo flights , and took it out of service .
i think you kind of see the same kind of parallel when the commercial stuff is offered .
ok , we 'll talk just a little bit about commercial development for human space flight .
this little thing says here : five times what nasa 's doing by 2020 . i want to tell you , already there 's about 1.5 billion to 1.7 billion investment in private space flight that is not government at all - already , worldwide . if you read - if you google it , you 'll find about half of that money , but there 's twice of that being committed out there - not spent yet , but being committed and planned for the next few years . hey , that 's pretty big .
i 'm predicting , though , as profitable as this industry is going to be - and it certainly is profitable when you fly people at 200,000 dollars on something that you can actually operate at a tenth of that cost , or less - this is going to be very profitable .
i predict , also , that the investment that will flow into this will be somewhere around half of what the u.s. taxpayer spends for nasa 's manned spacecraft work .
and every dollar that flows into that will be spent more efficiently by a factor of 10 to 15 . and what that means is before we know it , the progress in human space flight , with no taxpayer dollars , will be at a level of about five times as much as the current nasa budgets for human space flight .
and that is because it 's us . it 's private industry .
you should never depend on the government to do this sort of stuff - and we 've done it for a long time . the naca , before nasa , never developed an airliner and never ran an airline .
but nasa is developing the space liner , always has , and runs the only space line , ok . and we 've shied away from it because we 're afraid of it . but starting back in june of 2004 , when i showed that a little group out there actually can do it , can get a start with it , everything changed after that time .
ok , thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- as a particle physicist , i study the elementary particles and how they interact on the most fundamental level .
for most of my research career , i 've been using accelerators , such as the electron accelerator at stanford university , just up the road , to study things on the smallest scale .
but more recently , i 've been turning my attention to the universe on the largest scale .
because , as i 'll explain to you , the questions on the smallest and the largest scale are actually very connected .
so i 'm going to tell you about our twenty-first-century view of the universe , what it 's made of and what the big questions in the physical sciences are - at least some of the big questions .
so , recently , we have realized that the ordinary matter in the universe - and by ordinary matter , i mean you , me , the planets , the stars , the galaxies - the ordinary matter makes up only a few percent of the content of the universe .
almost a quarter , or approximately a quarter of the matter in the universe , is stuff that 's invisible .
by invisible , i mean it does n't absorb in the electromagnetic spectrum .
it does n't emit in the electromagnetic spectrum . it does n't reflect .
it does n't interact with the electromagnetic spectrum , which is what we use to detect things .
it does n't interact at all . so how do we know it 's there ?
we know it 's there by its gravitational effects .
in fact , this dark matter dominates the gravitational effects in the universe on a large scale , and i 'll be telling you about the evidence for that .
what about the rest of the pie ?
the rest of the pie is a very mysterious substance called dark energy .
more about that later , ok .
so for now , let 's turn to the evidence for dark matter .
in these galaxies , especially in a spiral galaxy like this , most of the mass of the stars is concentrated in the middle of the galaxy .
this huge mass of all these stars keeps stars in circular orbits in the galaxy .
so we have these stars going around in circles like this .
as you can imagine , even if you know physics , this should be intuitive , ok - that stars that are closer to the mass in the middle will be rotating at a higher speed than those that are further out here , ok .
so what you would expect is that if you measured the orbital speed of the stars , that they should be slower on the edges than on the inside .
in other words , if we measured speed as a function of distance - this is the only time i 'm going to show a graph , ok - we would expect that it goes down as the distance increases from the center of the galaxy .
when those measurements are made , instead what we find is that the speed is basically constant , as a function of distance .
if it 's constant , that means that the stars out here are feeling the gravitational effects of matter that we do not see .
in fact , this galaxy and every other galaxy appears to be embedded in a cloud of this invisible dark matter .
and this cloud of matter is much more spherical than the galaxy themselves , and it extends over a much wider range than the galaxy .
so we see the galaxy and fixate on that , but it 's actually a cloud of dark matter that 's dominating the structure and the dynamics of this galaxy .
galaxies themselves are not strewn randomly in space ; they tend to cluster .
and this is an example of a very , actually , famous cluster , the coma cluster .
and there are thousands of galaxies in this cluster .
they 're the white , fuzzy , elliptical things here .
so these galaxy clusters - we take a snapshot now , we take a snapshot in a decade , it 'll look identical .
but these galaxies are actually moving at extremely high speeds .
they 're moving around in this gravitational potential well of this cluster , ok .
so all of these galaxies are moving .
we can measure the speeds of these galaxies , their orbital velocities , and figure out how much mass is in this cluster .
and again , what we find is that there is much more mass there than can be accounted for by the galaxies that we see .
or if we look in other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum , we see that there 's a lot of gas in this cluster , as well .
but that can not account for the mass either .
in fact , there appears to be about ten times as much mass here in the form of this invisible or dark matter as there is in the ordinary matter , ok .
it would be nice if we could see this dark matter a little bit more directly .
i 'm just putting this big , blue blob on there , ok , to try to remind you that it 's there .
can we see it more visually ? yes , we can .
and so let me lead you through how we can do this .
so here 's an observer : it could be an eye ; it could be a telescope .
and suppose there 's a galaxy out here in the universe .
how do we see that galaxy ?
a ray of light leaves the galaxy and travels through the universe for perhaps billions of years before it enters the telescope or your eye .
now , how do we deduce where the galaxy is ?
well , we deduce it by the direction that the ray is traveling as it enters our eye , right ?
we say , the ray of light came this way ; the galaxy must be there , ok .
now , suppose i put in the middle a cluster of galaxies - and do n't forget the dark matter , ok .
now , if we consider a different ray of light , one going off like this , we now need to take into account what einstein predicted when he developed general relativity .
and that was that the gravitational field , due to mass , will deflect not only the trajectory of particles , but will deflect light itself .
so this light ray will not continue in a straight line , but would rather bend and could end up going into our eye .
where will this observer see the galaxy ?
you can respond . up , right ?
we extrapolate backwards and say the galaxy is up here .
is there any other ray of light that could make into the observer 's eye from that galaxy ?
yes , great . i see people going down like this .
so a ray of light could go down , be bent up into the observer 's eye , and the observer sees a ray of light here .
now , take into account the fact that we live in a three-dimensional universe , ok , a three-dimensional space .
are there any other rays of light that could make it into the eye ?
yes ! the rays would lie on a - i 'd like to see - yeah , on a cone .
so there 's a whole ray of light - rays of light on a cone - that will all be bent by that cluster and make it into the observer 's eye .
if there is a cone of light coming into my eye , what do i see ?
a circle , a ring . it 's called an einstein ring . einstein predicted that , ok .
now , it will only be a perfect ring if the source , the deflector and the eyeball , in this case , are all in a perfectly straight line .
if they 're slightly skewed , we 'll see a different image .
now , you can do an experiment tonight over the reception , ok , to figure out what that image will look like .
because it turns out that there is a kind of lens that we can devise , that has the right shape to produce this kind of effect .
we call this gravitational lensing .
and so , this is your instrument , ok .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- .
but ignore the top part .
it 's the base that i want you to concentrate , ok .
so , actually , at home , whenever we break a wineglass , i save the bottom , take it over to the machine shop .
we shave it off , and i have a little gravitational lens , ok .
so it 's got the right shape to produce the lensing .
and so the next thing you need to do in your experiment is grab a napkin . i grabbed a piece of graph paper - i 'm a physicist . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so , a napkin . draw a little model galaxy in the middle .
and now put the lens over the galaxy , and what you 'll find is that you 'll see a ring , an einstein ring .
now , move the base off to the side , and the ring will split up into arcs , ok .
and you can put it on top of any image .
on the graph paper , you can see how all the lines on the graph paper have been distorted .
and again , this is a kind of an accurate model of what happens with the gravitational lensing .
ok , so the question is : do we see this in the sky ?
do we see arcs in the sky when we look at , say , a cluster of galaxies ?
and the answer is yes .
and so , here 's an image from the hubble space telescope .
many of the images you are seeing are earlier from the hubble space telescope .
well , first of all , for the golden shape galaxies - those are the galaxies in the cluster .
they 're the ones that are embedded in that sea of dark matter that are causing the bending of the light to cause these optical illusions , or mirages , practically , of the background galaxies .
so the streaks that you see , all these streaks , are actually distorted images of galaxies that are much further away .
so what we can do , then , is based on how much distortion we see in those images , we can calculate how much mass there must be in this cluster .
and it 's an enormous amount of mass .
and also , you can tell by eye , by looking at this , that these arcs are not centered on individual galaxies .
they are centered on some more spread out structure , and that is the dark matter in which the cluster is embedded , ok .
so this is the closest you can get to kind of seeing at least the effects of the dark matter with your naked eye .
ok , so , a quick review then , to see that you 're following .
so the evidence that we have that a quarter of the universe is dark matter - this gravitationally attracting stuff - is that galaxies , the speed with which stars orbiting galaxies is much too large ; it must be embedded in dark matter .
the speed with which galaxies within clusters are orbiting is much too large ; it must be embedded in dark matter .
and we see these gravitational lensing effects , these distortions that say that , again , clusters are embedded in dark matter .
ok . so now , let 's turn to dark energy .
so to understand the evidence for dark energy , we need to discuss something that stephen hawking referred to in the previous session .
and that is the fact that space itself is expanding .
so if we imagine a section of our infinite universe - and so i 've put down four spiral galaxies , ok - and imagine that you put down a set of tape measures , so every line on here corresponds to a tape measure , horizontal or vertical , for measuring where things are .
if you could do this , what you would find that with each passing day , each passing year , each passing billions of years , ok , the distance between galaxies is getting greater .
and it 's not because galaxies are moving away from each other through space .
they 're not necessarily moving through space .
they 're moving away from each other because space itself is getting bigger , ok .
that 's what the expansion of the universe or space means .
so they 're moving further apart .
now , what stephen hawking mentioned , as well , is that after the big bang , space expanded at a very rapid rate .
but because gravitationally attracting matter is embedded in this space , it tends to slow down the expansion of the space , ok .
so the expansion slows down with time .
so , in the last century , ok , people debated about whether this expansion of space would continue forever ; whether it would slow down , you know , will be slowing down , but continue forever ; slow down and stop , asymptotically stop ; or slow down , stop , and then reverse , so it starts to contract again .
so a little over a decade ago , two groups of physicists and astronomers set out to measure the rate at which the expansion of space was slowing down , ok .
by how much less is it expanding today , compared to , say , a couple of billion years ago ?
the startling answer to this question , ok , from these experiments , was that space is expanding at a faster rate today than it was a few billion years ago , ok .
so the expansion of space is actually speeding up .
this was a completely surprising result .
there is no persuasive theoretical argument for why this should happen , ok .
no one was predicting ahead of time this is what 's going to be found .
it was the opposite of what was expected .
so we need something to be able to explain that .
now it turns out , in the mathematics , you can put it in as a term that 's an energy , but it 's a completely different type of energy from anything we 've ever seen before .
we call it dark energy , and it has this effect of causing space to expand .
but we do n't have a good motivation for putting it in there at this point , ok .
so it 's really unexplained as to why we need to put it in .
now , so at this point , then , what i want to really emphasize to you , is that , first of all , dark matter and dark energy are completely different things , ok .
there are really two mysteries out there as to what makes up most of the universe , and they have very different effects .
dark matter , because it gravitationally attracts , it tends to encourage the growth of structure , ok .
so clusters of galaxies will tend to form , because of all this gravitational attraction .
dark energy , on the other hand , is putting more and more space between the galaxies , makes it , the gravitational attraction between them decrease , and so it impedes the growth of structure .
so by looking at things like clusters of galaxies , and how they - their number density , how many there are as a function of time - we can learn about how dark matter and dark energy compete against each other in structure forming .
in terms of dark matter , i said that we do n't have any , you know , really persuasive argument for dark energy .
do we have anything for dark matter ? and the answer is yes .
we have well-motivated candidates for the dark matter .
now , what do i mean by well motivated ?
i mean that we have mathematically consistent theories that were actually introduced to explain a completely different phenomenon , ok , things that i have n't even talked about , that each predict the existence of a very weakly interacting , new particle .
so , this is exactly what you want in physics : where a prediction comes out of a mathematically consistent theory that was actually developed for something else .
but we do n't know if either of those are actually the dark matter candidate , ok .
one or both , who knows ? or it could be something completely different .
now , we look for these dark matter particles because , after all , they are here in the room , ok , and they did n't come in the door .
they just pass through anything .
they can come through the building , through the earth - they 're so non-interacting .
so one way to look for them is to build detectors that are extremely sensitive to a dark matter particle coming through and bumping it .
so a crystal that will ring if that happens .
so one of my colleagues up the road and his collaborators have built such a detector .
and they 've put it deep down in an iron mine in minnesota , ok , deep under the ground , and in fact , in the last couple of days announced the most sensitive results so far .
they have n't seen anything , ok , but it puts limits on what the mass and the interaction strength of these dark matter particles are .
there 's going to be a satellite telescope launched later this year and it will look towards the middle of the galaxy , to see if we can see dark matter particles annihilating and producing gamma rays that could be detected with this .
the large hadron collider , a particle physics accelerator , that we 'll be turning on later this year .
it is possible that dark matter particles might be produced at the large hadron collider .
now , because they are so non-interactive , they will actually escape the detector , so their signature will be missing energy , ok .
now , unfortunately , there is a lot of new physics whose signature could be missing energy , so it will be hard to tell the difference .
and finally , for future endeavors , there are telescopes being designed specifically to address the questions of dark matter and dark energy - ground-based telescopes , and there are three space-based telescopes that are in competition right now to be launched to investigate dark matter and dark energy .
so in terms of the big questions : what is dark matter ? what is dark energy ?
the big questions facing physics .
and i 'm sure you have lots of questions , which i very much look forward to addressing over the next 72 hours , while i 'm here . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the kind of neuroscience that i do and my colleagues do is almost like the weatherman .
we are always chasing storms .
we want to see and measure storms - brainstorms , that is .
and we all talk about brainstorms in our daily lives , but we rarely see or listen to one .
so i always like to start these talks by actually introducing you to one of them .
actually , the first time we recorded more than one neuron - a hundred brain cells simultaneously - we could measure the electrical sparks of a hundred cells in the same animal , this is the first image we got , the first 10 seconds of this recording .
so we got a little snippet of a thought , and we could see it in front of us .
i always tell the students that we could also call neuroscientists some sort of astronomer , because we are dealing with a system that is only comparable in terms of number of cells to the number of galaxies that we have in the universe .
and here we are , out of billions of neurons , just recording , 10 years ago , a hundred .
we are doing a thousand now .
and we hope to understand something fundamental about our human nature .
because , if you do n't know yet , everything that we use to define what human nature is comes from these storms , comes from these storms that roll over the hills and valleys of our brains and define our memories , our beliefs , our feelings , our plans for the future .
everything that we ever do , everything that every human has ever done , do or will do , requires the toil of populations of neurons producing these kinds of storms .
and the sound of a brainstorm , if you 've never heard one , is somewhat like this .
you can put it louder if you can .
my son calls this " making popcorn while listening to a badly-tuned a.m. station . "
this is a brain .
this is what happens when you route these electrical storms to a loudspeaker and you listen to a hundred brain cells firing , your brain will sound like this - my brain , any brain .
and what we want to do as neuroscientists in this time is to actually listen to these symphonies , these brain symphonies , and try to extract from them the messages they carry .
in particular , about 12 years ago we created a preparation that we named brain-machine interfaces .
and you have a scheme here that describes how it works .
the idea is , let 's have some sensors that listen to these storms , this electrical firing , and see if you can , in the same time that it takes for this storm to leave the brain and reach the legs or the arms of an animal - about half a second - let 's see if we can read these signals , extract the motor messages that are embedded in it , translate it into digital commands and send it to an artificial device that will reproduce the voluntary motor wheel of that brain in real time .
and see if we can measure how well we can translate that message when we compare to the way the body does that .
and if we can actually provide feedback , sensory signals that go back from this robotic , mechanical , computational actuator that is now under the control of the brain , back to the brain , how the brain deals with that , of receiving messages from an artificial piece of machinery .
and that 's exactly what we did 10 years ago .
we started with a superstar monkey called aurora that became one of the superstars of this field .
and aurora liked to play video games .
as you can see here , she likes to use a joystick , like any one of us , any of our kids , to play this game .
and as a good primate , she even tries to cheat before she gets the right answer .
so even before a target appears that she 's supposed to cross with the cursor that she 's controlling with this joystick , aurora is trying to find the target , no matter where it is .
and if she 's doing that , because every time she crosses that target with the little cursor , she gets a drop of brazilian orange juice .
and i can tell you , any monkey will do anything for you if you get a little drop of brazilian orange juice .
actually any primate will do that .
think about that .
well , while aurora was playing this game , as you saw , and doing a thousand trials a day and getting 97 percent correct and 350 milliliters of orange juice , we are recording the brainstorms that are produced in her head and sending them to a robotic arm that was learning to reproduce the movements that aurora was making .
because the idea was to actually turn on this brain-machine interface and have aurora play the game just by thinking , without interference of her body .
her brainstorms would control an arm that would move the cursor and cross the target .
and to our shock , that 's exactly what aurora did .
she played the game without moving her body .
so every trajectory that you see of the cursor now , this is the exact first moment she got that .
that 's the exact first moment a brain intention was liberated from the physical domains of a body of a primate and could act outside , in that outside world , just by controlling an artificial device .
and aurora kept playing the game , kept finding the little target and getting the orange juice that she wanted to get , that she craved for .
well , she did that because she , at that time , had acquired a new arm .
the robotic arm that you see moving here 30 days later , after the first video that i showed to you , is under the control of aurora 's brain and is moving the cursor to get to the target .
and aurora now knows that she can play the game with this robotic arm , but she has not lost the ability to use her biological arms to do what she pleases .
she can scratch her back , she can scratch one of us , she can play another game .
by all purposes and means , aurora 's brain has incorporated that artificial device as an extension of her body .
the model of the self that aurora had in her mind has been expanded to get one more arm .
well , we did that 10 years ago .
just fast forward 10 years .
just last year we realized that you do n't even need to have a robotic device .
you can just build a computational body , an avatar , a monkey avatar .
and you can actually use it for our monkeys to either interact with them , or you can train them to assume in a virtual world the first-person perspective of that avatar and use her brain activity to control the movements of the avatar 's arms or legs .
and what we did basically was to train the animals to learn how to control these avatars and explore objects that appear in the virtual world .
and these objects are visually identical , but when the avatar crosses the surface of these objects , they send an electrical message that is proportional to the microtactile texture of the object that goes back directly to the monkey 's brain , informing the brain what it is the avatar is touching .
and in just four weeks , the brain learns to process this new sensation and acquires a new sensory pathway - like a new sense .
and you truly liberate the brain now because you are allowing the brain to send motor commands to move this avatar .
and the feedback that comes from the avatar is being processed directly by the brain without the interference of the skin .
so what you see here is this is the design of the task .
you 're going to see an animal basically touching these three targets .
and he has to select one because only one carries the reward , the orange juice that they want to get .
and he has to select it by touch using a virtual arm , an arm that does n't exist .
and that 's exactly what they do .
this is a complete liberation of the brain from the physical constraints of the body and the motor in a perceptual task .
the animal is controlling the avatar to touch the targets .
and he 's sensing the texture by receiving an electrical message directly in the brain .
and the brain is deciding what is the texture associated with the reward .
the legends that you see in the movie do n't appear for the monkey .
and by the way , they do n't read english anyway , so they are here just for you to know that the correct target is shifting position .
and yet , they can find them by tactile discrimination , and they can press it and select it .
so when we look at the brains of these animals , on the top panel you see the alignment of 125 cells showing what happens with the brain activity , the electrical storms , of this sample of neurons in the brain when the animal is using a joystick .
and that 's a picture that every neurophysiologist knows .
the basic alignment shows that these cells are coding for all possible directions .
the bottom picture is what happens when the body stops moving and the animal starts controlling either a robotic device or a computational avatar .
as fast as we can reset our computers , the brain activity shifts to start representing this new tool , as if this too was a part of that primate 's body .
the brain is assimilating that too , as fast as we can measure .
so that suggests to us that our sense of self does not end at the last layer of the epithelium of our bodies , but it ends at the last layer of electrons of the tools that we 're commanding with our brains .
our violins , our cars , our bicycles , our soccer balls , our clothing - they all become assimilated by this voracious , amazing , dynamic system called the brain .
how far can we take it ?
well , in an experiment that we ran a few years ago , we took this to the limit .
we had an animal running on a treadmill at duke university on the east coast of the united states , producing the brainstorms necessary to move .
and we had a robotic device , a humanoid robot , in kyoto , japan at atr laboratories that was dreaming its entire life to be controlled by a brain , a human brain , or a primate brain .
what happens here is that the brain activity that generated the movements in the monkey was transmitted to japan and made this robot walk while footage of this walking was sent back to duke , so that the monkey could see the legs of this robot walking in front of her .
so she could be rewarded , not by what her body was doing but for every correct step of the robot on the other side of the planet controlled by her brain activity .
funny thing , that round trip around the globe took 20 milliseconds less than it takes for that brainstorm to leave its head , the head of the monkey , and reach its own muscle .
the monkey was moving a robot that was six times bigger , across the planet .
this is one of the experiments in which that robot was able to walk autonomously .
this is cb1 fulfilling its dream in japan under the control of the brain activity of a primate .
so where are we taking all this ?
what are we going to do with all this research , besides studying the properties of this dynamic universe that we have between our ears ?
well the idea is to take all this knowledge and technology and try to restore one of the most severe neurological problems that we have in the world .
millions of people have lost the ability to translate these brainstorms into action , into movement .
although their brains continue to produce those storms and code for movements , they can not cross a barrier that was created by a lesion on the spinal cord .
so our idea is to create a bypass , is to use these brain-machine interfaces to read these signals , larger-scale brainstorms that contain the desire to move again , bypass the lesion using computational microengineering and send it to a new body , a whole body called an exoskeleton , a whole robotic suit that will become the new body of these patients .
and you can see an image produced by this consortium .
this is a nonprofit consortium called the walk again project that is putting together scientists from europe , from here in the united states , and in brazil together to work to actually get this new body built - a body that we believe , through the same plastic mechanisms that allow aurora and other monkeys to use these tools through a brain-machine interface and that allows us to incorporate the tools that we produce and use in our daily life .
this same mechanism , we hope , will allow these patients , not only to imagine again the movements that they want to make and translate them into movements of this new body , but for this body to be assimilated as the new body that the brain controls .
so i was told about 10 years ago that this would never happen , that this was close to impossible .
and i can only tell you that as a scientist , i grew up in southern brazil in the mid- ' 60s watching a few crazy guys telling -lsb- us -rsb- that they would go to the moon .
and i was five years old , and i never understood why nasa did n't hire captain kirk and spock to do the job ; after all , they were very proficient - but just seeing that as a kid made me believe , as my grandmother used to tell me , that " impossible is just the possible that someone has not put in enough effort to make it come true . "
so they told me that it 's impossible to make someone walk .
i think i 'm going to follow my grandmother 's advice .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so i 'm going to talk to you about you about the political chemistry of oil spills and why this is an incredibly important , long , oily , hot summer , and why we need to keep ourselves from getting distracted .
but before i talk about the political chemistry , i actually need to talk about the chemistry of oil .
this is a photograph from when i visited prudhoe bay in alaska in 2002 to watch the minerals management service testing their ability to burn oil spills in ice .
and what you see here is , you see a little bit of crude oil , you see some ice cubes , and you see two sandwich baggies of napalm .
the napalm is burning there quite nicely .
and the thing is , is that oil is really an abstraction for us as the american consumer .
we 're four percent of the world 's population ; we use 25 percent of the world 's oil production .
and we do n't really understand what oil is , until you check out its molecules , and you do n't really understand that until you see this stuff burn .
so this is what happens as that burn gets going .
it takes off . it 's a big woosh .
i highly recommend that you get a chance to see crude oil burn someday , because you will never need to hear another poli sci lecture on the geopolitics of oil again .
it 'll just bake your retinas .
so there it is ; the retinas are baking .
let me tell you a little bit about this chemistry of oil .
oil is a stew of hydrocarbon molecules .
it starts of with the very small ones , which are one carbon , four hydrogen - that 's methane - it just floats off .
then there 's all sorts of intermediate ones with middle amounts of carbon .
you 've probably heard of benzene rings ; they 're very carcinogenic .
and it goes all the way over to these big , thick , galumphy ones that have hundreds of carbons , and they have thousands of hydrogens , and they have vanadium and heavy metals and sulfur and all kinds of craziness hanging off the sides of them .
those are called the asphaltenes ; they 're an ingredient in asphalt .
they 're very important in oil spills .
let me tell you a little bit about the chemistry of oil in water .
it is this chemistry that makes oil so disastrous .
oil does n't sink , it floats .
if it sank , it would be a whole different story as far as an oil spill .
and the other thing it does is it spreads out the moment it hits the water .
it spreads out to be really thin , so you have a hard time corralling it .
the next thing that happens is the light ends evaporate , and some of the toxic things float into the water column and kill fish eggs and smaller fish and things like that , and shrimp .
and then the asphaltenes - and this is the crucial thing - the asphaltenes get whipped by the waves into a frothy emulsion , something like mayonnaise .
it triples the amount of oily , messy goo that you have in the water , and it makes it very hard to handle .
it also makes it very viscous .
when the prestige sank off the coast of spain , there were big , floating cushions the size of sofa cushions of emulsified oil , with the consistency , or the viscosity , of chewing gum .
it 's incredibly hard to clean up .
and every single oil is different when it hits water .
when the chemistry of the oil and water also hits our politics , it 's absolutely explosive .
for the first time , american consumers will kind of see the oil supply chain in front of themselves .
they have a " eureka ! " moment , when we suddenly understand oil in a different context .
so i 'm going to talk just a little bit about the origin of these politics , because it 's really crucial to understanding why this summer is so important , why we need to stay focused .
nobody gets up in the morning and thinks , " wow ! i 'm going to go buy some three-carbon-to-12-carbon molecules to put in my tank and drive happily to work . "
no , they think , " ugh . i have to go buy gas .
i 'm so angry about it . the oil companies are ripping me off .
they set the prices , and i do n't even know .
i am helpless over this . "
and this is what happens to us at the gas pump - and actually , gas pumps are specifically designed to diffuse that anger .
you might notice that many gas pumps , including this one , are designed to look like atms .
i 've talked to engineers . that 's specifically to diffuse our anger , because supposedly we feel good about atms .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that shows you how bad it is .
but actually , i mean , this feeling of helplessness comes in because most americans actually feel that oil prices are the result of a conspiracy , not of the vicissitudes of the world oil market .
and the thing is , too , is that we also feel very helpless about the amount that we consume , which is somewhat reasonable , because in fact , we have designed this system where , if you want to get a job , it 's much more important to have a car that runs , to have a job and keep a job , than to have a ged .
and that 's actually very perverse .
now there 's another perverse thing about the way we buy gas , which is that we 'd rather be doing anything else .
this is bp 's gas station in downtown los angeles .
it is green . it is a shrine to greenishness .
" now , " you think , " why would something so lame work on people so smart ? "
well , the reason is , is because , when we 're buying gas , we 're very invested in this sort of cognitive dissonance .
i mean , we 're angry at the one hand and we want to be somewhere else .
we do n't want to be buying oil ; we want to be doing something green .
and we get kind of in on our own con .
i mean - and this is funny , it looks funny here .
but in fact , that 's why the slogan " beyond petroleum " worked .
but it 's an inherent part of our energy policy , which is we do n't talk about reducing the amount of oil that we use .
we talk about energy independence . we talk about hydrogen cars .
we talk about biofuels that have n't been invented yet .
and so , cognitive dissonance is part and parcel of the way that we deal with oil , and it 's really important to dealing with this oil spill .
okay , so the politics of oil are very moral in the united states .
the oil industry is like a huge , gigantic octopus of engineering and finance and everything else , but we actually see it in very moral terms .
this is an early-on photograph - you can see , we had these gushers .
early journalists looked at these spills , and they said , " this is a filthy industry . "
but they also saw in it that people were getting rich for doing nothing .
they were n't farmers , they were just getting rich for stuff coming out of the ground .
it 's the " beverly hillbillies , " basically .
but in the beginning , this was seen as a very morally problematic thing , long before it became funny .
and then , of course , there was john d. rockefeller .
and the thing about john d. is that he went into this chaotic wild-east of oil industry , and he rationalized it into a vertically integrated company , a multinational .
it was terrifying ; you think walmart is a terrifying business model now , imagine what this looked like in the 1860s or 1870s .
and it also the kind of root of how we see oil as a conspiracy .
but what 's really amazing is that ida tarbell , the journalist , went in and did a big exposé of rockefeller and actually got the whole antitrust laws put in place .
but in many ways , that image of the conspiracy still sticks with us .
and here 's one of the things that ida tarbell said - she said , " he has a thin nose like a thorn .
there were no lips .
there were puffs under the little colorless eyes with creases running from them . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- okay , so that guy is actually still with us .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i mean , this is a very pervasive - this is part of our dna .
and then there 's this guy , okay .
so , you might be wondering why it is that , every time we have high oil prices or an oil spill , we call these ceos down to washington , and we sort of pepper them with questions in public and we try to shame them .
and this is something that we 've been doing since 1974 , when we first asked them , " why are there these obscene profits ? "
and we 've sort of personalized the whole oil industry into these ceos .
and we take it as , you know - we look at it on a moral level , rather than looking at it on a legal and financial level .
and so i 'm not saying these guys are n't liable to answer questions - i 'm just saying that , when you focus on whether they are or are not a bunch of greedy bastards , you do n't actually get around to the point of making laws that are either going to either change the way they operate , or you 're going to get around to really reducing the amount of oil and reducing our dependence on oil .
so i 'm saying this is kind of a distraction .
but it makes for good theater , and it 's powerfully cathartic as you probably saw last week .
so the thing about water oil spills is that they are very politically galvanizing .
i mean , these pictures - this is from the santa barbara spill .
you have these pictures of birds .
they really influence people .
when the santa barbara spill happened in 1969 , it formed the environmental movement in its modern form .
it started earth day .
it also put in place the national environmental policy act , the clean air act , the clean water act .
everything that we are really stemmed from this period .
i think it 's important to kind of look at these pictures of the birds and understand what happens to us .
here we are normally ; we 're standing at the gas pump , and we 're feeling kind of helpless .
we look at these pictures and we understand , for the first time , our role in this supply chain .
we connect the dots in the supply chain .
and we have this kind of - as voters , we have kind of a " eureka ! " moment .
this is why these moments of these oil spills are so important .
but it 's also really important that we do n't get distracted by the theater or the morals of it .
we actually need to go in and work on the roots of the problem .
one of the things that happened with the two previous oil spills was that we really worked on some of the symptoms .
we were very reactive , as opposed to being proactive about what happened .
and so what we did was , actually , we made moratoriums on the east and west coasts on drilling .
we stopped drilling in anwr , but we did n't actually reduce the amount of oil that we consumed .
in fact , it 's continued to increase .
the only thing that really reduces the amount of oil that we consume is much higher prices .
as you can see , our own production has fallen off as our reservoirs have gotten old and expensive to drill out .
we only have two percent of the world 's oil reserves ; 65 percent of them are in the persian gulf .
one of the things that 's happened because of this is that , since 1969 , the country of nigeria , or the part of nigeria that pumps oil , which is the delta - which is two times the size of maryland - has had thousands of oil spills a year .
i mean , we 've essentially been exporting oil spills when we import oil from places without tight environmental regulations .
that has been the equivalent of an exxon valdez spill every year since 1969 .
and we can wrap our heads around the spills , because that 's what we see here , but in fact , these guys actually live in a war zone .
there 's a thousand battle-related deaths a year in this area twice the size of maryland , and it 's all related to the oil .
and these guys , i mean , if they were in the u.s. , they might be actually here in this room .
they have degrees in political science , degrees in business - they 're entrepreneurs . they do n't actually want to be doing what they 're doing .
and it 's sort of one of the other groups of people who pay a price for us .
the other thing that we 've done , as we 've continued to increase demand , is that we kind of play a shell game with the costs .
one of the places we put in a big oil project in chad , with exxon .
so the u.s. taxpayer paid for it ; the world bank , exxon paid for it .
we put it in . there was a tremendous banditry problem .
i was there in 2003 .
we were driving along this dark , dark road , and the guy in the green stepped out , and i was just like , " ahhh ! this is it . "
and then the guy in the exxon uniform stepped out , and we realized it was okay .
they have their own private sort of army around them at the oil fields .
but at the same time , chad has become much more unstable , and we are not paying for that price at the pump .
we pay for it in our taxes on april 15th .
we do the same thing with the price of policing the persian gulf and keeping the shipping lanes open .
this is 1988 - we actually bombed two iranian oil platforms that year .
that was the beginning of an escalating u.s. involvement there that we do not pay for at the pump .
we pay for it on april 15th , and we ca n't even calculate the cost of this involvement .
the other place that is sort of supporting our dependence on oil and our increased consumption is the gulf of mexico , which was not part of the moratoriums .
now what 's happened in the gulf of mexico - as you can see , this is the minerals management diagram of wells for gas and oil .
it 's become this intense industrialized zone .
it does n't have the same resonance for us that the arctic national wildlife refuge has , but it should , i mean , it 's a bird sanctuary .
also , every time you buy gasoline in the united states , half of it is actually being refined along the coast , because the gulf actually has about 50 percent of our refining capacity and a lot of our marine terminals as well .
so the people of the gulf have essentially been subsidizing the rest of us through a less-clean environment .
and finally , american families also pay a price for oil .
now on the one hand , the price at the pump is not really very high when you consider the actual cost of the oil , but on the other hand , the fact that people have no other transit options means that they pay a large amount of their income into just getting back and forth to work , generally in a fairly crummy car .
if you look at people who make $ 50,000 a year , they have two kids , they might have three jobs or more , and then they have to really commute .
they 're actually spending more on their car and fuel than they are on taxes or on health care .
and the same thing happens at the 50th percentile , around 80,000 .
gasoline costs are a tremendous drain on the american economy , but they 're also a drain on individual families and it 's kind of terrifying to think about what happens when prices get higher .
so , what i 'm going to talk to you about now is : what do we have to do this time ?
what are the laws ? what do we have to do to keep ourselves focused ?
one thing is - we need to stay away from the theater .
we need to stay away from the moratoriums .
we need to focus really back again on the molecules .
the moratoriums are fine , but we do need to focus on the molecules on the oil .
one of the things that we also need to do , is we need to try to not kind of fool ourselves into thinking that you can have a green world , before you reduce the amount of oil that we use .
we need to focus on reducing the oil .
what you see in this top drawing is a schematic of how petroleum gets used in the u.s. economy .
it comes in on the side - the useful stuff is the dark gray , and the un-useful stuff , which is called the rejected energy - the waste , goes up to the top .
now you can see that the waste far outweighs the actually useful amount .
and one of the things that we need to do is , not only fix the fuel efficiency of our vehicles and make them much more efficient , but we also need to fix the economy in general .
we need to remove the perverse incentives to use more fuel .
for example , we have an insurance system where the person who drives 20,000 miles a year pays the same insurance as somebody who drives 3,000 .
we actually encourage people to drive more .
we have policies that reward sprawl - we have all kinds of policies .
we need to have more mobility choices .
we need to make the gas price better reflect the real cost of oil .
and we need to shift subsidies from the oil industry , which is at least 10 billion dollars a year , into something that allows middle-class people to find better ways to commute .
whether that 's getting a much more efficient car and also kind of building markets for new cars and new fuels down the road , this is where we need to be .
we need to kind of rationalize this whole thing , and you can find more about this policy .
it 's called strong , which is " secure transportation reducing oil needs gradually , " and the idea is instead of being helpless , we need to be more strong .
they 're up at newamerica.net.
what 's important about these is that we try to move from feeling helpless at the pump , to actually being active and to really sort of thinking about who we are , having kind of that special moment , where we connect the dots actually at the pump .
now supposedly , oil taxes are the third rail of american politics - the no-fly zone .
i actually - i agree that a dollar a gallon on oil is probably too much , but i think that if we started this year with three cents a gallon on gasoline , and upped it to six cents next year , nine cents the following year , all the way up to 30 cents by 2020 , that we could actually significantly reduce our gasoline consumption , and at the same time we would give people time to prepare , time to respond , and we would be raising money and raising consciousness at the same time .
let me give you a little sense of how this would work .
this is a gas receipt , hypothetically , for a year from now .
the first thing that you have on the tax is - you have a tax for a stronger america - 33 cents .
so you 're not helpless at the pump .
and the second thing that you have is a kind of warning sign , very similar to what you would find on a cigarette pack .
and what it says is , " the national academy of sciences estimates that every gallon of gas you burn in your car creates 29 cents in health care costs . "
that 's a lot .
and so this - you can see that you 're paying considerably less than the health care costs on the tax .
and also , the hope is that you start to be connected to the whole greater system .
and at the same time , you have a number that you can call to get more information on commuting , or a low-interest loan on a different kind of car , or whatever it is you 're going to need to actually reduce your gasoline dependence .
with this whole sort of suite of policies , we could actually reduce our gasoline consumption - or our oil consumption - by 20 percent by 2020 .
so , three million barrels a day .
but in order to do this , one of the things we really need to do , is we need to remember we are people of the hydrocarbon .
we need to keep or minds on the molecules and not get distracted by the theater , not get distracted by the cognitive dissonance of the green possibilities that are out there .
we need to kind of get down and do the gritty work of reducing our dependence upon this fuel and these molecules .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- time flies .
it 's actually almost 20 years ago when i wanted to reframe the way we use information , the way we work together : i invented the world wide web .
now , 20 years on , at ted , i want to ask your help in a new reframing .
so going back to 1989 , i wrote a memo suggesting the global hypertext system .
nobody really did anything with it , pretty much .
but 18 months later - this is how innovation happens - 18 months later , my boss said i could do it on the side , as a sort of a play project , kick the tires of a new computer we 'd got .
and so he gave me the time to code it up .
so i basically roughed out what html should look like : hypertext protocol , http ; the idea of urls , these names for things which started with http .
i wrote the code and put it out there .
why did i do it ?
well , it was basically frustration .
i was frustrated - i was working as a software engineer in this huge , very exciting lab , lots of people coming from all over the world .
they brought all sorts of different computers with them .
they had all sorts of different data formats , all sorts , all kinds of documentation systems .
so that , in all that diversity , if i wanted to figure out how to build something out of a bit of this and a bit of this , everything i looked into , i had to connect to some new machine , i had to learn to run some new program , i would find the information i wanted in some new data format .
and these were all incompatible .
it was just very frustrating .
the frustration was all this unlocked potential .
in fact , on all these discs there were documents .
so if you just imagined them all being part of some big , virtual documentation system in the sky , say on the internet , then life would be so much easier .
well , once you 've had an idea like that it kind of gets under your skin and even if people do n't read your memo - actually he did , it was found after he died , his copy .
he had written , " vague , but exciting , " in pencil , in the corner .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but in general it was difficult - it was really difficult to explain what the web was like .
it 's difficult to explain to people now that it was difficult then .
but then - ok , when ted started , there was no web so things like " click " did n't have the same meaning .
i can show somebody a piece of hypertext , a page which has got links , and we click on the link and bing - there 'll be another hypertext page .
not impressive .
you know , we 've seen that - we 've got things on hypertext on cd-roms .
what was difficult was to get them to imagine : so , imagine that that link could have gone to virtually any document you could imagine .
alright , that is the leap that was very difficult for people to make .
well , some people did .
so yeah , it was difficult to explain , but there was a grassroots movement .
and that is what has made it most fun .
that has been the most exciting thing , not the technology , not the things people have done with it , but actually the community , the spirit of all these people getting together , sending the emails .
that 's what it was like then .
do you know what ? it 's funny , but right now it 's kind of like that again .
i asked everybody , more or less , to put their documents - i said , " could you put your documents on this web thing ? "
and you did .
thanks .
it 's been a blast , has n't it ?
i mean , it has been quite interesting because we 've found out that the things that happen with the web really sort of blow us away .
they 're much more than we 'd originally imagined when we put together the little , initial website that we started off with .
now , i want you to put your data on the web .
turns out that there is still huge unlocked potential .
there is still a huge frustration that people have because we have n't got data on the web as data .
what do you mean , " data " ? what 's the difference - documents , data ?
well , documents you read , ok ?
more or less , you read them , you can follow links from them , and that 's it .
data - you can do all kinds of stuff with a computer .
who was here or has otherwise seen hans rosling 's talk ?
one of the great - yes a lot of people have seen it - one of the great ted talks .
hans put up this presentation in which he showed , for various different countries , in various different colors - he showed income levels on one axis and he showed infant mortality , and he shot this thing animated through time .
so , he 'd taken this data and made a presentation which just shattered a lot of myths that people had about the economics in the developing world .
he put up a slide a little bit like this .
it had underground all the data ok , data is brown and boxy and boring , and that 's how we think of it , is n't it ?
because data you ca n't naturally use by itself but in fact , data drives a huge amount of what happens in our lives and it happens because somebody takes that data and does something with it .
in this case , hans had put the data together he had found from all kinds of united nations websites and things .
he had put it together , combined it into something more interesting than the original pieces and then he 'd put it into this software , which i think his son developed , originally , and produces this wonderful presentation .
and hans made a point of saying , " look , it 's really important to have a lot of data . "
and i was happy to see that at the party last night that he was still saying , very forcibly , " it 's really important to have a lot of data . "
so i want us now to think about not just two pieces of data being connected , or six like he did , but i want to think about a world where everybody has put data on the web and so virtually everything you can imagine is on the web and then calling that linked data .
the technology is linked data , and it 's extremely simple .
if you want to put something on the web there are three rules : first thing is that those http names - those things that start with " http : " - we 're using them not just for documents now , we 're using them for things that the documents are about .
we 're using them for people , we 're using them for places , we 're using them for your products , we 're using them for events .
all kinds of conceptual things , they have names now that start with http .
second rule , if i take one of these http names and i look it up and i do the web thing with it and i fetch the data using the http protocol from the web , i will get back some data in a standard format which is kind of useful data that somebody might like to know about that thing , about that event .
who 's at the event ? whatever it is about that person , where they were born , things like that .
so the second rule is i get important information back .
third rule is that when i get back that information it 's not just got somebody 's height and weight and when they were born , it 's got relationships .
data is relationships .
interestingly , data is relationships .
this person was born in berlin ; berlin is in germany .
and when it has relationships , whenever it expresses a relationship then the other thing that it 's related to is given one of those names that starts http .
so , i can go ahead and look that thing up .
so i look up a person - i can look up then the city where they were born ; then i can look up the region it 's in , and the town it 's in , and the population of it , and so on .
so i can browse this stuff .
so that 's it , really .
that is linked data .
i wrote an article entitled " linked data " a couple of years ago and soon after that , things started to happen .
the idea of linked data is that we get lots and lots and lots of these boxes that hans had , and we get lots and lots and lots of things sprouting .
it 's not just a whole lot of other plants .
it 's not just a root supplying a plant , but for each of those plants , whatever it is - a presentation , an analysis , somebody 's looking for patterns in the data - they get to look at all the data and they get it connected together , and the really important thing about data is the more things you have to connect together , the more powerful it is .
so , linked data .
the meme went out there .
and , pretty soon chris bizer at the freie universitat in berlin who was one of the first people to put interesting things up , he noticed that wikipedia - you know wikipedia , the online encyclopedia with lots and lots of interesting documents in it .
well , in those documents , there are little squares , little boxes .
and in most information boxes , there 's data .
so he wrote a program to take the data , extract it from wikipedia , and put it into a blob of linked data on the web , which he called dbpedia .
dbpedia is represented by the blue blob in the middle of this slide and if you actually go and look up berlin , you 'll find that there are other blobs of data which also have stuff about berlin , and they 're linked together .
so if you pull the data from dbpedia about berlin , you 'll end up pulling up these other things as well .
and the exciting thing is it 's starting to grow .
this is just the grassroots stuff again , ok ?
let 's think about data for a bit .
data comes in fact in lots and lots of different forms .
think of the diversity of the web . it 's a really important thing that the web allows you to put all kinds of data up there .
so it is with data . i could talk about all kinds of data .
we could talk about government data , enterprise data is really important , there 's scientific data , there 's personal data , there 's weather data , there 's data about events , there 's data about talks , and there 's news and there 's all kinds of stuff .
i 'm just going to mention a few of them so that you get the idea of the diversity of it , so that you also see how much unlocked potential .
let 's start with government data .
barack obama said in a speech , that he - american government data would be available on the internet in accessible formats .
and i hope that they will put it up as linked data .
that 's important . why is it important ?
not just for transparency , yeah transparency in government is important , but that data - this is the data from all the government departments think about how much of that data is about how life is lived in america .
it 's actual useful . it 's got value .
i can use it in my company .
i could use it as a kid to do my homework .
so we 're talking about making the place , making the world run better by making this data available .
in fact if you 're responsible - if you know about some data in a government department , often you find that these people , they 're very tempted to keep it - hans calls it database hugging .
you hug your database , you do n't want to let it go until you 've made a beautiful website for it .
well , i 'd like to suggest that rather - yes , make a beautiful website , who am i to say do n't make a beautiful website ?
make a beautiful website , but first give us the unadulterated data , we want the data .
we want unadulterated data .
ok , we have to ask for raw data now .
and i 'm going to ask you to practice that , ok ?
can you say " raw " ?
audience : raw .
tim berners-lee : can you say " data " ?
audience : data .
tbl : can you say " now " ?
audience : now !
tbl : alright , " raw data now " !
audience : raw data now !
practice that . it 's important because you have no idea the number of excuses people come up with to hang onto their data and not give it to you , even though you 've paid for it as a taxpayer .
and it 's not just america . it 's all over the world .
and it 's not just governments , of course - it 's enterprises as well .
so i 'm just going to mention a few other thoughts on data .
here we are at ted , and all the time we are very conscious of the huge challenges that human society has right now - curing cancer , understanding the brain for alzheimer 's , understanding the economy to make it a little bit more stable , understanding how the world works .
the people who are going to solve those - the scientists - they have half-formed ideas in their head , they try to communicate those over the web .
but a lot of the state of knowledge of the human race at the moment is on databases , often sitting in their computers , and actually , currently not shared .
in fact , i 'll just go into one area - if you 're looking at alzheimer 's , for example , drug discovery - there is a whole lot of linked data which is just coming out because scientists in that field realize this is a great way of getting out of those silos , because they had their genomics data in one database in one building , and they had their protein data in another .
now , they are sticking it onto - linked data - and now they can ask the sort of question , that you probably would n't ask , i would n't ask - they would .
what proteins are involved in signal transduction and also related to pyramidal neurons ?
well , you take that mouthful and you put it into google .
of course , there 's no page on the web which has answered that question because nobody has asked that question before .
you get 223,000 hits - no results you can use .
you ask the linked data - which they 've now put together - 32 hits , each of which is a protein which has those properties and you can look at .
the power of being able to ask those questions , as a scientist - questions which actually bridge across different disciplines - is really a complete sea change .
it 's very very important .
scientists are totally stymied at the moment - the power of the data that other scientists have collected is locked up and we need to get it unlocked so we can tackle those huge problems .
now if i go on like this , you 'll think that all the data comes from huge institutions and has nothing to do with you .
but , that 's not true .
in fact , data is about our lives .
you just - you log on to your social networking site , your favorite one , you say , " this is my friend . "
bing ! relationship . data .
you say , " this photograph , it 's about - it depicts this person . " bing ! that 's data . data , data , data .
every time you do things on the social networking site , the social networking site is taking data and using it - re-purposing it - and using it to make other people 's lives more interesting on the site .
but , when you go to another linked data site - and let 's say this is one about travel , and you say , " i want to send this photo to all the people in that group , " you ca n't get over the walls .
the economist wrote an article about it , and lots of people have blogged about it - tremendous frustration .
the way to break down the silos is to get inter-operability between social networking sites .
we need to do that with linked data .
one last type of data i 'll talk about , maybe it 's the most exciting .
before i came down here , i looked it up on openstreetmap the openstreetmap 's a map , but it 's also a wiki .
zoom in and that square thing is a theater - which we 're in right now - the terrace theater . it did n't have a name on it .
so i could go into edit mode , i could select the theater , i could add down at the bottom the name , and i could save it back .
and now if you go back to the openstreetmap. org , and you find this place , you will find that the terrace theater has got a name .
i did that . me !
i did that to the map . i just did that !
i put that up on there . hey , you know what ?
if i - that street map is all about everybody doing their bit and it creates an incredible resource because everybody else does theirs .
and that is what linked data is all about .
it 's about people doing their bit to produce a little bit , and it all connecting .
that 's how linked data works .
you do your bit . everybody else does theirs .
you may not have lots of data which you have yourself to put on there but you know to demand it .
and we 've practiced that .
so , linked data - it 's huge .
i 've only told you a very small number of things there are data in every aspect of our lives , every aspect of work and pleasure , and it 's not just about the number of places where data comes , it 's about connecting it together .
and when you connect data together , you get power in a way that does n't happen just with the web , with documents .
you get this really huge power out of it .
so , we 're at the stage now where we have to do this - the people who think it 's a great idea .
and all the people - and i think there 's a lot of people at ted who do things because - even though there 's not an immediate return on the investment because it will only really pay off when everybody else has done it - they 'll do it because they 're the sort of person who just does things which would be good if everybody else did them .
ok , so it 's called linked data .
i want you to make it .
i want you to demand it .
and i think it 's an idea worth spreading .
thanks .
-lrb- applause -rrb- how can i speak in 10 minutes about the bonds of women over three generations , about how the astonishing strength of those bonds took hold in the life of a four-year-old girl huddled with her young sister , her mother and her grandmother for five days and nights in a small boat in the china sea more than 30 years ago , bonds that took hold in the life of that small girl and never let go - that small girl now living in san francisco and speaking to you today ?
this is not a finished story .
it is a jigsaw puzzle still being put together .
let me tell you about some of the pieces .
imagine the first piece : a man burning his life 's work .
he is a poet , a playwright , a man whose whole life had been balanced on the single hope of his country 's unity and freedom .
imagine him as the communists enter saigon , confronting the fact that his life had been a complete waste .
words , for so long his friends , now mocked him .
he retreated into silence .
he died broken by history .
he is my grandfather .
i never knew him in real life .
but our lives are much more than our memories .
my grandmother never let me forget his life .
my duty was not to allow it to have been in vain , and my lesson was to learn that , yes , history tried to crush us , but we endured .
the next piece of the jigsaw is of a boat in the early dawn slipping silently out to sea .
my mother , mai , was 18 when her father died - already in an arranged marriage , already with two small girls .
for her , life had distilled itself into one task : the escape of her family and a new life in australia .
it was inconceivable to her that she would not succeed .
so after a four-year saga that defies fiction , a boat slipped out to sea disguised as a fishing vessel .
all the adults knew the risks .
the greatest fear was of pirates , rape and death .
like most adults on the boat , my mother carried a small bottle of poison .
if we were captured , first my sister and i , then she and my grandmother would drink .
my first memories are from the boat - the steady beat of the engine , the bow dipping into each wave , the vast and empty horizon .
i do n't remember the pirates who came many times , but were bluffed by the bravado of the men on our boat , or the engine dying and failing to start for six hours .
but i do remember the lights on the oil rig off the malaysian coast and the young man who collapsed and died , the journey 's end too much for him , and the first apple i tasted , given to me by the men on the rig .
no apple has ever tasted the same .
after three months in a refugee camp , we landed in melbourne .
and the next piece of the jigsaw is about four women across three generations shaping a new life together .
we settled in footscray , a working-class suburb whose demographic is layers of immigrants .
unlike the settled middle-class suburbs , whose existence i was oblivious of , there was no sense of entitlement in footscray .
the smells from shop doors were from the rest of the world .
and the snippets of halting english were exchanged between people who had one thing in common , they were starting again .
my mother worked on farms , then on a car assembly line , working six days , double shifts .
somehow she found time to study english and gain it qualifications .
we were poor .
all the dollars were allocated and extra tuition in english and mathematics was budgeted for regardless of what missed out , which was usually new clothes ; they were always secondhand .
two pairs of stockings for school , each to hide the holes in the other .
a school uniform down to the ankles , because it had to last for six years .
and there were rare but searing chants of " slit-eye " and the occasional graffiti : " asian , go home . "
go home to where ?
something stiffened inside me .
there was a gathering of resolve and a quiet voice saying , " i will bypass you . "
my mother , my sister and i slept in the same bed .
my mother was exhausted each night , but we told one another about our day and listened to the movements of my grandmother around the house .
my mother suffered from nightmares all about the boat .
and my job was to stay awake until her nightmares came so i could wake her .
she opened a computer store then studied to be a beautician and opened another business .
and the women came with their stories about men who could not make the transition , angry and inflexible , and troubled children caught between two worlds .
grants and sponsors were sought .
centers were established .
i lived in parallel worlds .
in one , i was the classic asian student , relentless in the demands that i made on myself .
in the other , i was enmeshed in lives that were precarious , tragically scarred by violence , drug abuse and isolation .
but so many over the years were helped .
and for that work , when i was a final year law student , i was chosen as the young australian of the year .
and i was catapulted from one piece of the jigsaw to another , and their edges did n't fit .
tan le , anonymous footscray resident , was now tan le , refugee and social activist , invited to speak in venues she had never heard of and into homes whose existence she could never have imagined .
i did n't know the protocols .
i did n't know how to use the cutlery .
i did n't know how to talk about wine .
i did n't know how to talk about anything .
i wanted to retreat to the routines and comfort of life in an unsung suburb - a grandmother , a mother and two daughters ending each day as they had for almost 20 years , telling one another the story of their day and falling asleep , the three of us still in the same bed .
i told my mother i could n't do it .
she reminded me that i was now the same age she had been when we boarded the boat .
no had never been an option .
" just do it , " she said , " and do n't be what you 're not . "
so i spoke out on youth unemployment and education and the neglect of the marginalized and the disenfranchised .
and the more candidly i spoke , the more i was asked to speak .
i met people from all walks of life , so many of them doing the thing they loved , living on the frontiers of possibility .
and even though i finished my degree , i realized i could not settle into a career in law .
there had to be another piece of the jigsaw .
and i realized at the same time that it is okay to be an outsider , a recent arrival , new on the scene - and not just okay , but something to be thankful for , perhaps a gift from the boat .
because being an insider can so easily mean collapsing the horizons , can so easily mean accepting the presumptions of your province .
i have stepped outside my comfort zone enough now to know that , yes , the world does fall apart , but not in the way that you fear .
possibilities that would not have been allowed were outrageously encouraged .
there was an energy there , an implacable optimism , a strange mixture of humility and daring .
so i followed my hunches .
i gathered around me a small team of people for whom the label " it ca n't be done " was an irresistible challenge .
for a year we were penniless .
at the end of each day , i made a huge pot of soup which we all shared .
we worked well into each night .
most of our ideas were crazy , but a few were brilliant , and we broke through .
i made the decision to move to the u.s.
after only one trip .
my hunches again .
three months later i had relocated , and the adventure has continued .
before i close though , let me tell you about my grandmother .
she grew up at a time when confucianism was the social norm and the local mandarin was the person who mattered .
life had n't changed for centuries .
her father died soon after she was born .
her mother raised her alone .
at 17 she became the second wife of a mandarin whose mother beat her .
with no support from her husband , she caused a sensation by taking him to court and prosecuting her own case , and a far greater sensation when she won .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- " it ca n't be done " was shown to be wrong .
i was taking a shower in a hotel room in sydney the moment she died 600 miles away in melbourne .
i looked through the shower screen and saw her standing on the other side .
i knew she had come to say goodbye .
my mother phoned minutes later .
a few days later , we went to a buddhist temple in footscray and sat around her casket .
we told her stories and assured her that we were still with her .
at midnight the monk came and told us he had to close the casket .
my mother asked us to feel her hand .
she asked the monk , " why is it that her hand is so warm and the rest of her is so cold ? "
" because you have been holding it since this morning , " he said .
" you have not let it go . "
if there is a sinew in our family , it runs through the women .
given who we were and how life had shaped us , we can now see that the men who might have come into our lives would have thwarted us .
defeat would have come too easily .
now i would like to have my own children , and i wonder about the boat .
who could ever wish it on their own ?
yet i am afraid of privilege , of ease , of entitlement .
can i give them a bow in their lives , dipping bravely into each wave , the unperturbed and steady beat of the engine , the vast horizon that guarantees nothing ?
i do n't know .
but if i could give it and still see them safely through , i would .
-lrb- applause -rrb- trevor neilson : and also , tan 's mother is here today in the fourth or fifth row .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so i grew up in limpopo , on the border of limpopo and mpumalanga , a little town called motetema .
water and electricity supply are as unpredictable as the weather , and growing up in these tough situations , at the age of 17 , i was relaxing with a couple of friends of mine in winter , and we were sunbathing .
the limpopo sun gets really hot in winter .
so as we were sunbathing , my best friend next to me says , " man , why does n't somebody invent something that you can just put on your skin and then you do n't have to bathe ? "
and i sat , and i was like , " man , i would buy that , eh ? "
so i went home , and i did a little research , and i found some very shocking statistics .
over 2.5 billion people in the world today do not have proper access to water and sanitation .
four hundred and fifty million of them are in africa , and five million of them are in south africa .
various diseases thrive in this environment , the most drastic of which is called trachoma .
trachoma is an infection of the eye due to dirt can leave you permanently blind .
the disease leaves eight million people permanently blind each and every year . the shocking part about it is that to avoid being infected with trachoma , all you have to do is wash your face : no medicine , no pills , no injections .
so after seeing these shocking statistics , i thought to myself , " okay , even if i 'm not just doing it for myself and the fact that i do n't want to bathe , i at least need to do it to try to save the world . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- so with my trusty little steed , my nokia 6234 cell phone - i did n't have a laptop , i did n't have internet much , except for the 20-rand-an-hour internet cafe - i did research on wikipedia , on google , about lotions , creams , the compositions , the melting points , the toxicities - i did high school science - and i wrote down a little formula on a piece of paper ,
and it looked like the kfc special spice , you know ?
so i was like , okay , so we 've got the formula ready .
now we need to get this thing into practice .
fast forward four years later , after having written a 40-page business plan on the cell phone , having written my patent on the cell phone , i 'm the youngest patent-holder in the country , and - -lrb- " no more bathing ! " -rrb- - i ca n't say any more than that . -lrb- laughter -rrb- i had invented drybath , the world 's first bath-substituting lotion .
you literally put it on your skin , and you do n't have to bathe .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so after having tried to make it work in high school with the limited resources i had , i went to university , met a few people , got it into practice , and we have a fully functioning product that 's ready to go to the market . it 's actually available on the market .
so we learned a few lessons in commercializing and making drybath available .
one of the things we learned was that poor communities do n't buy products in bulk .
they buy products on demand . a person in alex does n't buy a box of cigarettes . they buy one cigarette each day , even though it 's more expensive .
so we packaged drybath in these innovative little sachets .
you just snap them in half , and you squeeze it out .
and the cool part is , one sachet substitutes one bath for five rand .
after creating that model , we also learned a lot in terms of implementing the product .
we realized that even rich kids from the suburbs really want drybath . -lrb- laughter -rrb- at least once a week .
anyway , we realized that we could save 80 million liters of water on average each time they skipped a bath , and also we would save two hours a day for kids who are in rural areas , two hours more for school , two hours more for homework , two hours more to just be a kid .
after seeing that global impact , we narrowed it down to our key value proposition , which was cleanliness and convenience .
drybath is a rich man 's convenience and a poor man 's lifesaver .
having put the product into practice , we are actually now on the verge of selling the product onto a multinational to take it to the retail market , and one question i have for the audience today is , on the gravel roads of limpopo , with an allowance of 50 rand a week , i came up with a way for the world not to bathe .
what 's stopping you ? -lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm not done yet . i 'm not done yet .
and another key thing that i learned a lot throughout this whole process , last year google named me as one of the brightest young minds in the world .
i 'm also currently the best student entrepreneur in the world , the first african to get that accolade , and one thing that really puzzles me is , i did all of this just because i did n't want to bathe . thank you .
-lrb- applause . -rrb- the hindus say , " nada brahma , " one translation of which is , " the world is sound . "
and in a way , that 's true , because everything is vibrating .
in fact , all of you as you sit here right now are vibrating .
every part of your body is vibrating at different frequencies .
so you are , in fact , a chord - each of you an individual chord .
one definition of health may be that that chord is in complete harmony .
your ears ca n't hear that chord ; they can actually hear amazing things . your ears can hear 10 octaves .
incidentally , we see just one octave .
your ears are always on - you have no ear lids .
they work even when you sleep .
the smallest sound you can perceive moves your eardrum just four atomic diameters .
the loudest sound you can hear is a trillion times more powerful than that .
ears are made not for hearing , but for listening .
listening is an active skill , whereas hearing is passive , listening is something that we have to work at - it 's a relationship with sound .
and yet it 's a skill that none of us are taught .
for example , have you ever considered that there are listening positions , places you can listen from ?
here are two of them .
reductive listening is listening " for . "
it reduces everything down to what 's relevant and it discards everything that 's not relevant .
men typically listen reductively .
so he 's saying , " i 've got this problem . "
he 's saying , " here 's your solution . thanks very much . next . "
that 's the way we talk , right guys ?
expansive listening , on the other hand , is listening " with , " not listening " for . "
it 's got no destination in mind - it 's just enjoying the journey .
women typically listen expansively .
if you look at these two , eye contact , facing each other , possibly both talking at the same time .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- men , if you get nothing else out of this talk , practice expansive listening , and you can transform your relationships .
the trouble with listening is that so much of what we hear is noise , surrounding us all the time .
noise like this , according to the european union , is reducing the health and the quality of life of 25 percent of the population of europe .
two percent of the population of europe - that 's 16 million people - are having their sleep devastated by noise like that .
noise kills 200,000 people a year in europe .
it 's a really big problem .
now , when you were little , if you had noise and you did n't want to hear it , you 'd stick your fingers in your ears and hum .
these days , you can do a similar thing , it just looks a bit cooler .
it looks a bit like this .
the trouble with widespread headphone use is it brings three really big health issues .
the first really big health issue is a word that murray schafer coined : " schizophonia . "
it 's a dislocation between what you see and what you hear .
so , we 're inviting into our lives the voices of people who are not present with us .
i think there 's something deeply unhealthy about living all the time in schizophonia .
the second problem that comes with headphone abuse is compression .
we squash music to fit it into our pocket and there is a cost attached to this .
listen to this - this is an uncompressed piece of music .
-lrb- music -rrb- and now the same piece of music with 98 percent of the data removed .
-lrb- music -rrb- i do hope that some of you at least can hear the difference between those two .
there is a cost of compression .
it makes you tired and irritable to have to make up all of that data .
you 're having to imagine it .
it 's not good for you in the long run .
the third problem with headphones is this : deafness - noise-induced hearing disorder .
ten million americans already have this for one reason or another , but really worryingly , 16 percent - roughly one in six - of american teenagers suffer from noise-induced hearing disorder as a result of headphone abuse .
one study at an american university found that 61 percent of college freshmen had damaged hearing as a result of headphone abuse .
we may be raising an entire generation of deaf people .
now that 's a really serious problem .
i 'll give you three quick tips to protect your ears and pass these on to your children , please .
professional hearing protectors are great ; i use some all the time .
if you 're going to use headphones , buy the best ones you can afford because quality means you do n't have to have it so loud .
if you ca n't hear somebody talking to you in a loud voice , it 's too loud .
and thirdly , if you 're in bad sound , it 's fine to put your fingers in your ears or just move away from it .
protect your ears in that way .
let 's move away from bad sound and look at some friends that i urge you to seek out .
wwb : wind , water , birds - stochastic natural sounds composed of lots of individual random events , all of it very healthy , all of it sound that we evolved to over the years .
seek those sounds out ; they 're good for you and so it this .
silence is beautiful .
the elizabethans described language as decorated silence .
i urge you to move away from silence with intention and to design soundscapes just like works of art .
have a foreground , a background , all in beautiful proportion .
it 's fun to get into designing with sound .
if you ca n't do it yourself , get a professional to do it for you .
sound design is the future , and i think it 's the way we 're going to change the way the world sounds .
i 'm going to just run quickly through eight modalities , eight ways sound can improve health .
first , ultrasound : we 're very familiar with it from physical therapy ; it 's also now being used to treat cancer .
lithotripsy - saving thousands of people a year from the scalpel by pulverizing stones with high-intensity sound .
sound healing is a wonderful modality .
it 's been around for thousands of years .
i do urge you to explore this .
there are great things being done there , treating now autism , dementia and other conditions .
and music , of course . just listening to music is good for you , if it 's music that 's made with good intention , made with love , generally .
devotional music , good - mozart , good .
there are all sorts of types of music that are very healthy .
and four modalities where you need to take some action and get involved .
first of all , listen consciously .
i hope that that after this talk you 'll be doing that .
it 's a whole new dimension to your life and it 's wonderful to have that dimension .
secondly , get in touch with making some sound - create sound .
the voice is the instrument we all play , and yet how many of us are trained in using our voice ? get trained ; learn to sing , learn to play an instrument .
musicians have bigger brains - it 's true .
you can do this in groups as well .
it 's a fantastic antidote to schizophonia ; to make music and sound in a group of people , whichever style you enjoy particularly .
and let 's take a stewarding role for the sound around us .
protect your ears ? yes , absolutely .
design soundscapes to be beautiful around you at home and at work .
and let 's start to speak up when people are assailing us with the noise that i played you early on .
so i 'm going to leave you with seven things you can do right now to improve your health with sound .
my vision is of a world that sounds beautiful and if we all start doing these things , we will take a very big step in that direction .
so i urge you to take that path .
i 'm leaving you with a little more birdsong , which is very good for you .
i wish you sound health .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so , i 'd like to spend a few minutes with you folks today imagining what our planet might look like in a thousand years .
but before i do that , i need to talk to you about synthetic materials like plastics , which require huge amounts of energy to create and , because of their disposal issues , are slowly poisoning our planet .
i also want to tell you and share with you how my team and i have been using mushrooms over the last three years .
not like that . -lrb- laughter -rrb- we 're using mushrooms to create an entirely new class of materials , which perform a lot like plastics during their use , but are made from crop waste and are totally compostable at the end of their lives .
-lrb- cheering -rrb- but first , i need to talk to you about what i consider one of the most egregious offenders in the disposable plastics category .
this is a material you all know is styrofoam , but i like to think of it as toxic white stuff .
in a single cubic foot of this material - about what would come around your computer or large television - you have the same energy content of about a liter and a half of petrol .
yet , after just a few weeks of use , you 'll throw this material in the trash .
and this is n't just found in packaging .
20 billion dollars of this material is produced every year , in everything from building materials to surfboards to coffee cups to table tops .
and that 's not the only place it 's found .
the epa estimates , in the united states , by volume , this material occupies 25 percent of our landfills .
even worse is when it finds its way into our natural environment - on the side of the road or next to a river .
if it 's not picked up by a human , like me and you , it 'll stay there for thousands and thousands of years .
perhaps even worse is when it finds its way into our oceans , like in the great plastic gyre , where these materials are being mechanically broken into smaller and smaller bits , but they 're not really going away .
they 're not biologically compatible .
they 're basically fouling up earth 's respiratory and circulatory systems .
and because these materials are so prolific , because they 're found in so many places , there 's one other place you 'll find this material , styrene , which is made from benzene , a known carcinogen .
you 'll find it inside of you .
so , for all these reasons , i think we need better materials , and there are three key principles we can use to guide these materials .
the first is feedstocks .
today , we use a single feedstock , petroleum , to heat our homes , power our cars and make most of the materials you see around you .
we recognize this is a finite resource , and it 's simply crazy to do this , to put a liter and a half of petrol in the trash every time you get a package .
second of all , we should really strive to use far less energy in creating these materials .
i say far less , because 10 percent is n't going to cut it .
we should be talking about half , a quarter , one-tenth the energy content .
and lastly , and i think perhaps most importantly , we should be creating materials that fit into what i call nature 's recycling system .
this recycling system has been in place for the last billion years .
i fit into it , you fit into it , and a hundred years tops , my body can return to the earth with no preprocessing .
yet that packaging i got in the mail yesterday is going to last for thousands of years .
this is crazy .
but nature provides us with a really good model here .
when a tree 's done using its leaves - its solar collectors , these amazing molecular photon capturing devices - at the end of a season , it does n't pack them up , take them to the leaf reprocessing center and have them melted down to form new leaves .
it just drops them , the shortest distance possible , to the forest floor , where they 're actually upcycled into next year 's topsoil .
and this gets us back to the mushrooms .
because in nature , mushrooms are the recycling system .
and what we 've discovered is , by using a part of the mushroom you 've probably never seen - analogous to its root structure ; it 's called mycelium - we can actually grow materials with many of the same properties of conventional synthetics .
now , mycelium is an amazing material , because it 's a self-assembling material .
it actually takes things we would consider waste - things like seed husks or woody biomass - and can transform them into a chitinous polymer , which you can form into almost any shape .
in our process , we basically use it as a glue .
and by using mycelium as a glue , you can mold things just like you do in the plastic industry , and you can create materials with many different properties , materials that are insulating , fire-resistant , moisture-resistant , vapor-resistant - materials that can absorb impacts , that can absorb acoustical impacts .
but these materials are grown from agricultural byproducts , not petroleum .
and because they 're made of natural materials , they are 100 percent compostable in you own backyard .
so i 'd like to share with you the four basic steps required to make these materials .
the first is selecting a feedstock , preferably something that 's regional , that 's in your area , right - local manufacturing .
the next is actually taking this feedstock and putting in a tool , physically filling an enclosure , a mold , in whatever shape you want to get .
then you actually grow the mycelium through these particles , and that 's where the magic happens , because the organism is doing the work in this process , not the equipment .
the final step is , of course , the product , whether it 's a packaging material , a table top , or building block .
our vision is local manufacturing , like the local food movement , for production .
so we 've created formulations for all around the world using regional byproducts .
if you 're in china , you might use a rice husk or a cottonseed hull .
if you 're in northern europe or north america , you can use things like buckwheat husks or oat hulls .
we then process these husks with some basic equipment .
and i want to share with you a quick video from our facility that gives you a sense of how this looks at scale .
so what you 're seeing here is actually cotton hulls from texas , in this case .
it 's a waste product .
and what they 're doing in our equipment is going through a continuous system , which cleans , cooks , cools and pasteurizes these materials , while also continuously inoculating them with our mycelium .
this gives us a continuous stream of material that we can put into almost any shape , though today we 're making corner blocks .
and it 's when this lid goes on the part , that the magic really starts .
because the manufacturing process is our organism .
it 'll actually begin to digest these wastes and , over the next five days , assemble them into biocomposites .
our entire facility is comprised of thousands and thousands and thousands of these tools sitting indoors in the dark , quietly self-assembling materials - and everything from building materials to , in this case , a packaging corner block .
so i 've said a number of times that we grow materials .
and it 's kind of hard to picture how that happens .
so my team has taken five days-worth of growth , a typical growth cycle for us , and condensed it into a 15-second time lapse .
and i want you to really watch closely these little white dots on the screen , because , over the five-day period , what they do is extend out and through this material , using the energy that 's contained in these seed husks to build this chitinous polymer matrix .
this matrix self-assembles , growing through and around the particles , making millions and millions of tiny fibers .
and what parts of the seed husk we do n't digest , actually become part of the final , physical composite .
so in front of your eyes , this part just self-assembled .
it actually takes a little longer . it takes five days .
but it 's much faster than conventional farming .
the last step , of course , is application .
in this case , we 've grown a corner block .
a major fortune 500 furniture maker uses these corner blocks to protect their tables in shipment .
they used to use a plastic packaging buffer , but we were able to give them the exact same physical performance with our grown material .
best of all , when it gets to the customer , it 's not trash .
they can actually put this in their natural ecosystem without any processing , and it 's going to improve the local soil .
so , why mycelium ?
the first reason is local open feedstocks .
you want to be able to do this anywhere in the world and not worry about peak rice hull or peak cottonseed hulls , because you have multiple choices .
the next is self-assembly , because the organism is actually doing most of the work in this process .
you do n't need a lot of equipment to set up a production facility .
so you can have lots of small facilities spread all across the world .
biological yield is really important .
and because 100 percent of what we put in the tool become the final product , even the parts that are n't digested become part of the structure , we 're getting incredible yield rates .
natural polymers , well ... i think that 's what 's most important , because these polymers have been tried and tested in our ecosystem for the last billion years , in everything from mushrooms to crustaceans .
they 're not going to clog up earth 's ecosystems . they work great .
and while , today , we can practically guarantee that yesterday 's packaging is going to be here in 10,000 years , what i want to guarantee is that in 10,000 years , our descendants , our children 's children , will be living happily and in harmony with a healthy earth .
and i think that can be some really good news .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- over the last two decades , india has become a global hub for software development and offshoring of back office services , as we call it , and what we were interested in finding out was that because of this huge industry that has started over the last two decades in india , offshoring software development and back office services , there 's been a flight of white collar jobs from the developed world to india .
when this is combined with the loss of manufacturing jobs to china , it has , you know , led to considerable angst amongst the western populations .
in fact , if you look at polls , they show a declining trend for support for free trade in the west .
now , the western elites , however , have said this fear is misplaced .
for example , if you have read - i suspect many of you have done so - read the book by thomas friedman called " the world is flat , " he said , basically , in his book that , you know , this fear for free trade is wrong because it assumes , it 's based on a mistaken assumption that everything that can be invented has been invented .
in fact , he says , it 's innovation that will keep the west ahead of the developing world , with the more sophisticated , innovative tasks being done in the developed world , and the less sophisticated , shall we say , drudge work being done in the developing world .
now , what we were trying to understand was , is this true ?
could india become a source , or a global hub , of innovation , just like it 's become a global hub for back office services and software development ?
and for the last four years , my coauthor phanish puranam and i spent investigating this topic .
initially , or , you know , as people would say , you know , in fact the more aggressive people who are supporting the western innovative model , say , " where are the indian googles , ipods and viagras , if the indians are so bloody smart ? " -lrb- laughter -rrb- so initially , when we started our research , we went and met several executives , and we asked them , " what do you think ? will india go from being a favored destination for software services and back office services to a destination for innovation ? "
they laughed . they dismissed us .
they said , " you know what ? indians do n't do innovation . "
the more polite ones said , " well , you know , indians make good software programmers and accountants , but they ca n't do the creative stuff . "
sometimes , it took a more , took a veneer of sophistication , and people said , " you know , it 's nothing to do with indians .
it 's really the rule-based , regimented education system in india that is responsible for killing all creativity . "
they said , instead , if you want to see real creativity , go to silicon valley , and look at companies like google , microsoft , intel .
so we started examining the r & amp ; d and innovation labs of silicon valley .
well , interestingly , what you find there is , usually you are introduced to the head of the innovation lab or the r & amp ; d center as they may call it , and more often than not , it 's an indian . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so i immediately said , " well , but you could not have been educated in india , right ?
you must have gotten your education here . "
it turned out , in every single case , they came out of the indian educational system .
so we realized that maybe we had the wrong question , and the right question is , really , can indians based out of india do innovative work ?
so off we went to india . we made , i think , about a dozen trips to bangalore , mumbai , gurgaon , delhi , hyderabad , you name it , to examine what is the level of corporate innovation in these cities .
and what we found was , as we progressed in our research , was , that we were asking really the wrong question .
when you ask , " where are the indian googles , ipods and viagras ? " you are taking a particular perspective on innovation , which is innovation for end users , visible innovation .
instead , innovation , if you remember , some of you may have read the famous economist schumpeter , he said , " innovation is novelty in how value is created and distributed . "
it could be new products and services , but it could also be new ways of producing products .
it could also be novel ways of organizing firms and industries .
once you take this , there 's no reason to restrict innovation , the beneficiaries of innovation , just to end users .
when you take this broader conceptualization of innovation , what we found was , india is well represented in innovation , but the innovation that is being done in india is of a form we did not anticipate , and what we did was we called it " invisible innovation . "
and specifically , there are four types of invisible innovation that are coming out of india .
the first type of invisible innovation out of india is what we call innovation for business customers , which is led by the multinational corporations , which have - in the last two decades , there have been 750 r & amp ; d centers set up in india by multinational companies employing more than 400,000 professionals .
now , when you consider the fact that , historically , the r & amp ; d center of a multinational company was always in the headquarters , or in the country of origin of that multinational company , to have 750 r & amp ; d centers of multinational corporations in india is truly a remarkable figure .
when we went and talked to the people in those innovation centers and asked them what are they working on , they said , " we are working on global products . "
they were not working on localizing global products for india , which is the usual role of a local r & amp ; d.
they were working on truly global products , and companies like microsoft , google , astrazeneca , general electric , philips , have already answered in the affirmative the question that from their bangalore and hyderabad r & amp ; d centers they are able to produce products and services for the world .
but of course , as an end user , you do n't see that , because you only see the name of the company , not where it was developed .
the other thing we were told then was , " yes , but , you know , the kind of work that is coming out of the indian r & amp ; d center can not be compared to the kind of work that is coming out of the u.s. r & amp ; d centers . "
so my coauthor phanish puranam , who happens to be one of the smartest people i know , said he 's going to do a study .
what he did was he looked at those companies that had an r & amp ; d center in usa and in india , and then he looked at a patent that was filed out of the u.s. and a similar patent filed out of the same company 's subsidiary in india , so he 's now comparing the patents of r & amp ; d centers in the u.s. with r & amp ; d centers in india of the same company to find out what is the quality of the patents filed out of the indian centers and how do they compare with the quality of the patents filed out of the u.s. centers ?
interestingly , what he finds is - and by the way , the way we look at the quality of a patent is what we call forward citations : how many times does a future patent reference the older patent ? - he finds something very interesting .
what we find is that the data says that the number of forward citations of a patent filed out of a u.s. r & amp ; d subsidiary is identical to the number of forward citations of a patent filed by an indian subsidiary of the same company within that company .
so within the company , there 's no difference in the forward citation rates of their indian subsidiaries versus their u.s. subsidiaries .
so that 's the first kind of invisible innovation coming out of india .
the second kind of invisible innovation coming out of india is what we call outsourcing innovation to indian companies , where many companies today are contracting indian companies to do a major part of their product development work for their global products which are going to be sold to the entire world .
for example , in the pharma industry , a lot of the molecules are being developed , but you see a major part of that work is being sent to india .
for example , xcl technologies , they developed two of the mission critical systems for the new boeing 787 dreamliner , one to avoid collisions in the sky , and another to allow landing in zero visibility .
but of course , when you climb onto the boeing 787 , you are not going to know that this is invisible innovation out of india .
the third kind of invisible innovation coming out of india is what we call process innovations , because of an injection of intelligence by indian firms .
process innovation is different from product innovation .
it 's about how do you create a new product or develop a new product or manufacture a new product , but not a new product itself ?
only in india do millions of young people dream of working in a call center .
what happens - you know , it 's a dead end job in the west , what high school dropouts do .
what happens when you put hundreds of thousands of smart , young , ambitious kids on a call center job ?
very quickly , they get bored , and they start innovating , and they start telling the boss how to do this job better , and out of this process innovation comes product innovations , which are then marketed around the world .
for example , 24/7 customer , traditional call center company , used to be a traditional call center company . today they 're developing analytical tools to do predictive modeling so that before you pick up the phone , you can guess or predict what this phone call is about .
it 's because of an injection of intelligence into a process which was considered dead for a long time in the west .
and the last kind of innovation , invisible innovation coming out of india is what we call management innovation .
it 's not a new product or a new process but a new way to organize work , and the most significant management innovation to come out of india , invented by the indian offshoring industry is what we call the global delivery model .
what the global delivery model allows is , it allows you to take previously geographically core-located tasks , break them up into parts , send them around the world where the expertise and the cost structure exists , and then specify the means for reintegrating them .
without that , you could not have any of the other invisible innovations today .
so , what i 'm trying to say is , what we are finding in our research is , that if products for end users is the visible tip of the innovation iceberg , india is well represented in the invisible , large , submerged portion of the innovation iceberg .
now , this has , of course , some implications , and so we developed three implications of this research .
the first is what we called sinking skill ladder , and now i 'm going to go back to where i started my conversation with you , which was about the flight of jobs .
now , of course , when we first , as a multinational company , decide to outsource jobs to india in the r & amp ; d , what we are going to do is we are going to outsource the bottom rung of the ladder to india , the least sophisticated jobs , just like tom friedman would predict .
now , what happens is , when you outsource the bottom rung of the ladder to india for innovation and for r & amp ; d work , at some stage in the very near future you are going to have to confront a problem , which is where does the next step of the ladder people come from within your company ?
so you have two choices then : either you bring the people from india into the developed world to take positions in the next step of the ladder - immigration - or you say , there 's so many people in the bottom step of the ladder waiting to take the next position in india , why do n't we move the next step to india ?
what we are trying to say is that once you outsource the bottom end of the ladder , you - it 's a self-perpetuating act , because of the sinking skill ladder , and the sinking skill ladder is simply the point that you ca n't be an investment banker without having been an analyst once .
you ca n't be a professor without having been a student .
you ca n't be a consultant without having been a research associate .
so , if you outsource the least sophisticated jobs , at some stage , the next step of the ladder has to follow .
the second thing we bring up is what we call the browning of the tmt , the top management teams .
if the r & amp ; d talent is going to be based out of india and china , and the largest growth markets are going to be based out of india and china , you have to confront the problem that your top management of the future is going to have to come out of india and china , because that 's where the product leadership is , that 's where the important market leadership is .
right ? and the last thing we point out in this slide , which is , you know , that to this story , there 's one caveat .
india has the youngest growing population in the world .
this demographic dividend is incredible , but paradoxically , there 's also the mirage of mighty labor pools .
indian institutes and educational system , with a few exceptions , are incapable of producing students in the quantity and quality needed to keep this innovation engine going , so companies are finding innovative ways to overcome this , but in the end it does not absolve the government of the responsibility for creating this educational structure .
so finally , i want to conclude by showing you the profile of one company , ibm .
as many of you know , ibm has always been considered for the last hundred years to be one of the most innovative companies .
in fact , if you look at the number of patents filed over history , i think they are in the top or the top two or three companies in the world of all patents filed in the usa as a private company .
here is the profile of employees of ibm over the last decade .
in 2003 , they had 300,000 employees , or 330,000 employees , out of which , 135,000 were in america , 9,000 were in india .
in 2009 , they had 400,000 employees , by which time the u.s. employees had moved to 105,000 , whereas the indian employees had gone to 100,000 .
well , in 2010 , they decided they 're not going to reveal this data anymore , so i had to make some estimates based on various sources .
here are my best guesses . okay ? i 'm not saying this is the exact number , it 's my best guess .
it gives you a sense of the trend .
there are 433,000 people now at ibm , out of which 98,000 are remaining in the u.s. , and 150,000 are in india .
so you tell me , is ibm an american company , or an indian company ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- ladies and gentlemen , thank you very much . -lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm actually here to make a challenge to people .
i know there have been many challenges made to people .
the one i 'm going to make is that it is time for us to reclaim what peace really means .
peace is not " kumbaya , my lord . "
peace is not the dove and the rainbow - as lovely as they are .
when i see the symbols of the rainbow and the dove , i think of personal serenity .
i think of meditation .
i do not think about what i consider to be peace , which is sustainable peace with justice and equality .
it is a sustainable peace in which the majority of people on this planet have access to enough resources to live dignified lives , where these people have enough access to education and health care , so that they can live in freedom from want and freedom from fear .
this is called human security .
and i am not a complete pacifist like some of my really , really heavy-duty , non-violent friends , like mairead mcguire .
i understand that humans to use a nice word , because i promised my mom i 'd stop using the f-bomb in public .
and i 'm trying harder and harder .
mom , i 'm really trying .
we need a little bit of police ; we need a little bit of military , but for defense .
we need to redefine what makes us secure in this world .
it is not arming our country to the teeth .
it is not getting other countries to arm themselves to the teeth with the weapons that we produce and we sell them .
it is using that money more rationally to make the countries of the world secure , to make the people of the world secure .
i was thinking about the recent ongoings in congress , where the president is offering to try to get the start vote .
i certainly support the start vote .
but he 's offering 84 billion dollars for the modernizing of nuclear weapons .
do you know the figure that the u.n. talks about for fulfilling the millennium development goals is 80 billion dollars ?
just that little bit of money , which to me , i wish it was in my bank account - it 's not , but ...
in global terms , it 's a little bit of money .
but it 's going to modernize weapons we do not need and will not be gotten rid of in our lifetime , unless we get up off our ...
and take action to make it happen , unless we begin to believe that all of the things that we 've been hearing about in these last two days are elements of what come together to make human security .
it is saving the tigers .
it is stopping the tar sands .
it is having access to medical equipment that can actually tell who does have cancer .
it is all of those things .
it is using our money for all of those things .
it is about action .
i was in hiroshima a couple of weeks ago , and his holiness - we 're sitting there in front of thousands of people in the city , and there were about eight of us nobel laureates .
and he 's a bad guy . he 's like a bad kid in church .
we 're staring at everybody , waiting our turn to speak , and he leans over to me , and he says , " jody , i 'm a buddhist monk . "
i said , " yes , your holiness .
your robe gives it away . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- he said , " you know that i kind of like meditation , and i pray . "
i said , " that 's good . that 's good .
we need that in the world .
i do n't follow that , but that 's cool . "
and he says , " but i have become skeptical .
i do not believe that meditation and prayer will change this world .
i think what we need is action . "
his holiness , in his robes , is my new action hero .
i spoke with aung sun suu kyi a couple of days ago .
as most of you know , she 's a hero for democracy in her country , burma .
you probably also know that she has spent 15 of the last 20 years imprisoned for her efforts to bring about democracy .
she was just released a couple of weeks ago , and we 're very concerned to see how long she will be free , because she is already out in the streets in rangoon , agitating for change .
she is already out in the streets , working with the party to try to rebuild it .
but i talked to her for a range of issues .
but one thing that i want to say , because it 's similar to what his holiness said .
she said , " you know , we have a long road to go to finally get democracy in my country .
but i do n't believe in hope without endeavor .
i do n't believe in the hope of change , unless we take action to make it so . "
here 's another woman hero of mine .
she 's my friend , dr. shirin ebadi , the first muslim woman to receive the nobel peace prize .
she has been in exile you ask her where she lives - where does she live in exile ?
she says the airports of the world .
she is traveling because she was out of the country at the time of the elections .
and instead of going home , she conferred with all the other women that she works with , who said to her , " stay out . we need you out .
we need to be able to talk to you out there , so that you can give the message of what 's happening here . "
a year and a half - she 's out speaking on behalf of the other women in her country .
wangari maathai - 2004 peace laureate .
they call her the " tree lady , " but she 's more than the tree lady .
working for peace is very creative .
it 's hard work every day .
when she was planting those trees , i do n't think most people understand that , at the same time , she was using the action of getting people together to plant those trees to talk about how to overcome the authoritarian government in her country .
people could not gather without getting busted and taken to jail .
but if they were together planting trees for the environment , it was okay - creativity .
but it 's not just iconic women like shirin , like aung sun suu kyi , like wangari maathai - it is other women in the world who are also struggling together to change this world .
the women 's league of burma , 11 individual organizations of burmese women came together because there 's strength in numbers .
working together is what changes our world .
the million signatures campaign of women inside burma working together to change human rights , to bring democracy to that country .
when one is arrested and taken to prison , another one comes out and joins the movement , recognizing that if they work together , they will ultimately bring change in their own country .
mairead mcguire in the middle , betty williams on the right-hand side - bringing peace to northern ireland .
i 'll tell you the quick story .
an ira driver was shot , and his car plowed into people on the side of the street .
there was a mother and three children .
the children were killed on the spot .
it was mairead 's sister .
instead of giving in to grief , depression , defeat in the face of that violence , mairead hooked up with betty - a staunch protestant and a staunch catholic - and they took to the streets to say , " no more violence . "
and they were able to get tens of thousands of , primarily , women , some men , in the streets to bring about change .
and they have been part of what brought peace to northern ireland , and they 're still working on it , because there 's still a lot more to do .
this is rigoberta menchu tum .
she also received the peace prize .
she is now running for president .
she is educating the indigenous people of her country about what it means to be a democracy , about how you bring democracy to the country , about educating , about how to vote - but that democracy is not just about voting ; it 's about being an active citizen .
that 's what i got stuck doing - the landmine campaign .
one of the things that made this campaign work is because we grew from two ngos to thousands in 90 countries around the world , working together in common cause to ban landmines .
some of the people who worked in our campaign could only work maybe an hour a month .
they could maybe volunteer that much .
there were others , like myself , who were full-time .
but it was the actions , together , of all of us that brought about that change .
in my view , what we need today is people getting up and taking action to reclaim the meaning of peace .
it 's not a dirty word .
it 's hard work every single day .
and if each of us who cares about the different things we care about got up off our butts and volunteered as much time as we could , we would change this world , we would save this world .
and we ca n't wait for the other guy . we have to do it ourselves .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- by 2010 , detroit had become the poster child for an american city in crisis .
there was a housing collapse , an auto industry collapse , and the population had plummeted by 25 percent between 2000 and 2010 , and many people were beginning to write it off , as it had topped the list of american shrinking cities .
by 2010 , i had also been asked by the kresge foundation and the city of detroit to join them in leading a citywide planning process for the city to create a shared vision for its future .
i come to this work as an architect and an urban planner , and i 've spent my career working in other contested cities , like chicago , my hometown ; harlem , which is my current home ; washington , d.c. ; and newark , new jersey .
all of these cities , to me , still had a number of unresolved issues related to urban justice , issues of equity , inclusion and access .
now by 2010 , as well , popular design magazines were also beginning to take a closer look at cities like detroit , and devoting whole issues to " fixing the city . "
i was asked by a good friend , fred bernstein , to do an interview for the october issue of architect magazine , and he and i kind of had a good chuckle when we saw the magazine released with the title , " can this planner save detroit ? "
so i 'm smiling with a little bit of embarrassment right now , because obviously , it 's completely absurd that a single person , let alone a planner , could save a city .
but i 'm also smiling because i thought it represented a sense of hopefulness that our profession could play a role in helping the city to think about how it would recover from its severe crisis .
so i 'd like to spend a little bit of time this afternoon and tell you a little bit about our process for fixing the city , a little bit about detroit , and i want to do that through the voices of detroiters .
so we began our process in september of 2010 .
it 's just after a special mayoral election , and word has gotten out that there is going to be this citywide planning process , which brings a lot of anxiety and fears among detroiters .
we had planned to hold a number of community meetings in rooms like this to introduce the planning process , and people came out from all over the city , including areas that were stable neighborhoods , as well as areas that were beginning to see a lot of vacancy .
and most of our audience was representative of the 82 percent african-american population in the city at that time .
so obviously , we have a q & a portion of our program , and people line up to mics to ask questions .
many of them step very firmly to the mic , put their hands across their chest , and go , " i know you people are trying to move me out of my house , right ? "
so that question is really powerful , and it was certainly powerful to us in the moment , when you connect it to the stories that some detroiters had , and actually a lot of african-americans ' families have had that are living in midwestern cities like detroit .
many of them told us the stories about how they came to own their home through their grandparents or great-grandparents , who were one of 1.6 million people who migrated from the rural south to the industrial north , as depicted in this painting by jacob lawrence , " the great migration . "
they came to detroit for a better way of life .
many found work in the automobile industry , the ford motor company , as depicted in this mural by diego rivera in the detroit institute of art .
the fruits of their labors would afford them a home , for many the first piece of property that they would ever know , and a community with other first-time african-american home buyers .
the first couple of decades of their life in the north is quite well , up until about 1950 , which coincides with the city 's peak population at 1.8 million people .
now it 's at this time that detroit begins to see a second kind of migration , a migration to the suburbs .
between 1950 and 2000 , the region grows by 30 percent .
but this time , the migration leaves african-americans in place , as families and businesses flee the city , leaving the city pretty desolate of people as well as jobs .
during that same period , between 1950 and 2000 , 2010 , the city loses 60 percent of its population , and today it hovers at above 700,000 .
the audience members who come and talk to us that night tell us the stories of what it 's like to live in a city with such depleted population .
many tell us that they 're one of only a few homes on their block that are occupied , and that they can see several abandoned homes from where they sit on their porches .
citywide , there are 80,000 vacant homes .
they can also see vacant property .
they 're beginning to see illegal activities on these properties , like illegal dumping , and they know that because the city has lost so much population , their costs for water , electricity , gas are rising , because there are not enough people to pay property taxes to help support the services that they need .
citywide , there are about 100,000 vacant parcels .
now , to quickly give you all a sense of a scale , because i know that sounds like a big number , but i do n't think you quite understand until you look at the city map .
so the city is 139 square miles .
you can fit boston , san francisco , and the island of manhattan within its footprint .
so if we take all of that vacant and abandoned property and we smush it together , it looks like about 20 square miles , and that 's roughly equivalent to the size of the island we 're sitting on today , manhattan , at 22 square miles .
so it 's a lot of vacancy .
now some of our audience members also tell us about some of the positive things that are happening in their communities , and many of them are banding together to take control of some of the vacant lots , and they 're starting community gardens , which are creating a great sense of community stewardship , but they 're very , very clear to tell us that this is not enough , that they want to see their neighborhoods return to the way that their grandparents had found them .
now there 's been a lot of speculation since 2010 about what to do with the vacant property , and a lot of that speculation has been around community gardening , or what we call urban agriculture .
so many people would say to us , " what if you just take all that vacant land and you could make it farmland ?
it can provide fresh foods , and it can put detroiters back to work too . "
when i hear that story , i always imagine the folks from the great migration rolling over in their graves , because you can imagine that they did n't sacrifice moving from the south to the north to create a better life for their families , only to see their great-grandchildren return to an agrarian lifestyle , especially in a city where they came with little less than a high school education or even a grammar school education and were able to afford the basic elements of the american dream : steady work and a home that they owned .
now , there 's a third wave of migration happening in detroit : a new ascendant of cultural entrepreneurs .
these folks see that same vacant land and those same abandoned homes as opportunity for new , entrepreneurial ideas and profit , so much so that former models can move to detroit , buy property , start successful businesses and restaurants , and become successful community activists in their neighborhood , bringing about very positive change .
similarly , we have small manufacturing companies making conscious decisions to relocate to the city .
this company , shinola , which is a luxury watch and bicycle company , deliberately chose to relocate to detroit , and they quote themselves by saying they were drawn to the global brand of detroit 's innovation .
and they also knew that they can tap into a workforce that was still very skilled in how to make things .
now we have community stewardship happening in neighborhoods , we have cultural entrepreneurs making decisions to move to the city and create enterprises , and we have businesses relocating , and this is all in the context of what is no secret to us all , a city that 's under the control of an emergency manager , and just this july filed for chapter 9 bankruptcy .
so 2010 , we started this process , and by 2013 , we released detroit future city , which was our strategic plan to guide the city into a better and more prosperous and more sustainable existence - not what it was , but what it could be , looking at new ways of economic growth , new forms of land use , more sustainable and denser neighborhoods , a reconfigured infrastructure and city service system , and a heightened capacity for civic leaders to take action and implement change .
three key imperatives were really important to our work .
one was that the city itself was n't necessarily too large , but the economy was too small .
there are only 27 jobs per 100 people in detroit , very different from a denver or an atlanta or a philadelphia that are anywhere between 35 to 70 jobs per 100 people .
secondly , there had to be an acceptance that we were not going to be able to use all of this vacant land in the way that we had before and maybe for some time to come .
it was n't going to be our traditional residential neighborhoods as we had before , and urban agriculture , while a very productive and successful intervention happening in detroit , was not the only answer , that what we had to do is look at these areas where we had significant vacancy but still had a significant number of population of what could be new , productive , innovative , and entrepreneurial uses that could stabilize those communities , where still nearly 300,000 residents lived .
so we came up with one neighborhood typology - there are several - called a live-make neighborhood , where folks could reappropriate abandoned structures and turn them into entrepreneurial enterprises , with a specific emphasis on looking at the , again , majority 82 percent african-american population .
so they , too , could take businesses that they maybe were doing out of their home and grow them to more prosperous industries and actually acquire property so they were actually property owners as well as business owners in the communities with which they resided .
then we also wanted to look at other ways of using land in addition to growing food and transforming landscape into much more productive uses , so that it could be used for storm water management , for example , by using surface lakes and retention ponds , that created neighborhood amenities , places of recreation , and actually helped to elevate adjacent property levels .
or we could use it as research plots , where we can use it to remediate contaminated soils , or we could use it to generate energy .
so the descendants of the great migration could either become precision watchmakers at shinola , like willie h. , who was featured in one of their ads last year , or they can actually grow a business that would service companies like shinola .
the good news is , there is a future for the next generation of detroiters , both those there now and those that want to come .
so no thank you , mayor menino , who recently was quoted as saying , " i 'd blow up the place and start over . "
there are very important people , business and land assets in detroit , and there are real opportunities there .
so while detroit might not be what it was , detroit will not die .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i would like to talk today about what i think is one of the greatest adventures human beings have embarked upon , which is the quest to understand the universe and our place in it .
my own interest in this subject , and my passion for it , began rather accidentally .
i had bought a copy of this book , " the universe and dr. einstein " - a used paperback from a secondhand bookstore in seattle .
a few years after that , in bangalore , i was finding it hard to fall asleep one night , and i picked up this book , thinking it would put me to sleep in 10 minutes .
and as it happened , i read it from midnight to five in the morning in one shot .
and i was left with this intense feeling of awe and exhilaration at the universe and our own ability to understand as much as we do .
and that feeling has n't left me yet .
that feeling was the trigger for me to actually change my career - from being a software engineer to become a science writer - so that i could partake in the joy of science , and also the joy of communicating it to others .
and that feeling also led me to a pilgrimage of sorts , to go literally to the ends of the earth to see telescopes , detectors , instruments that people are building , or have built , in order to probe the cosmos in greater and greater detail .
so it took me from places like chile - the atacama desert in chile - to siberia , to underground mines in the japanese alps , in northern america , all the way to antarctica and even to the south pole .
and today i would like to share with you some images , some stories of these trips .
i have been basically spending the last few years documenting the efforts of some extremely intrepid men and women who are putting , literally at times , their lives at stake working in some very remote and very hostile places so that they may gather the faintest signals from the cosmos in order for us to understand this universe .
and i first begin with a pie chart - and i promise this is the only pie chart in the whole presentation - but it sets up the state of our knowledge of the cosmos .
all the theories in physics that we have today properly explain what is called normal matter - the stuff that we 're all made of - and that 's four percent of the universe .
astronomers and cosmologists and physicists think that there is something called dark matter in the universe , which makes up 23 percent of the universe , and something called dark energy , which permeates the fabric of space-time , that makes up another 73 percent .
so if you look at this pie chart , 96 percent of the universe , at this point in our exploration of it , is unknown or not well understood .
and most of the experiments , telescopes that i went to see are in some way addressing this question , these two twin mysteries of dark matter and dark energy .
i will take you first to an underground mine in northern minnesota where people are looking for something called dark matter .
and the idea here is that they are looking for a sign of a dark matter particle hitting one of their detectors .
and the reason why they have to go underground is that , if you did this experiment on the surface of the earth , the same experiment would be swamped by signals that could be created by things like cosmic rays , ambient radio activity , even our own bodies . you might not believe it , but even our own bodies are radioactive enough to disturb this experiment .
so they go deep inside mines to find a kind of environmental silence that will allow them to hear the ping of a dark matter particle hitting their detector .
and i went to see one of these experiments , and this is actually - you can barely see it , and the reason for that is it 's entirely dark in there - this is a cavern that was left behind by the miners who left this mine in 1960 .
and physicists came and started using it sometime in the 1980s .
and the miners in the early part of the last century worked , literally , in candlelight .
and today , you would see this inside the mine , half a mile underground .
this is one of the largest underground labs in the world .
and , among other things , they 're looking for dark matter .
there is another way to search for dark matter , which is indirectly .
if dark matter exists in our universe , in our galaxy , then these particles should be smashing together and producing other particles that we know about - one of them being neutrinos .
and neutrinos you can detect by the signature they leave when they hit water molecules .
when a neutrino hits a water molecule it emits a kind of blue light , a flash of blue light , and by looking for this blue light , you can essentially understand something about the neutrino and then , indirectly , something about the dark matter that might have created this neutrino .
but you need very , very large volumes of water in order to do this .
you need something like tens of megatons of water - almost a gigaton of water - in order to have any chance of catching this neutrino .
and where in the world would you find such water ?
well the russians have a tank in their own backyard .
this is lake baikal .
it is the largest lake in the world . it 's 800 km long .
it 's about 40 to 50 km wide in most places , and one to two kilometers deep .
and what the russians are doing is they 're building these detectors and immersing them about a kilometer beneath the surface of the lake so that they can watch for these flashes of blue light .
and this is the scene that greeted me when i landed there .
this is lake baikal in the peak of the siberian winter .
the lake is entirely frozen .
and the line of black dots that you see in the background , that 's the ice camp where the physicists are working .
the reason why they have to work in winter is because they do n't have the money to work in summer and spring , which , if they did that , they would need ships and submersibles to do their work .
so they wait until winter - the lake is completely frozen over - and they use this meter-thick ice as a platform on which to establish their ice camp and do their work .
so this is the russians working on the ice in the peak of the siberian winter .
they have to drill holes in the ice , dive down into the water - cold , cold water - to get hold of the instrument , bring it up , do any repairs and maintenance that they need to do , put it back and get out before the ice melts .
because that phase of solid ice lasts for two months and it 's full of cracks .
and you have to imagine , there 's an entire sea-like lake underneath , moving .
i still do n't understand this one russian man working in his bare chest , but that tells you how hard he was working .
and these people , a handful of people , have been working for 20 years , looking for particles that may or may not exist .
and they have dedicated their lives to it .
and just to give you an idea , they have spent 20 million over 20 years .
it 's very harsh conditions .
they work on a shoestring budget .
the toilets there are literally holes in the ground covered with a wooden shack .
and it 's that basic , but they do this every year .
from siberia to the atacama desert in chile , to see something called the very large telescope .
the very large telescope is one of these things that astronomers do - they name their telescopes rather unimaginatively .
i can tell you for a fact , that the next one that they 're planning is called the extremely large telescope .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and you would n't believe it , but the one after that is going to be called the overwhelmingly large telescope .
but nonetheless , it 's an extraordinary piece of engineering .
these are four 8.2 meter telescopes .
and these telescopes , among other things , they 're being used to study how the expansion of the universe is changing with time .
and the more you understand that , the better you would understand what this dark energy that the universe is made of is all about .
and one piece of engineering that i want to leave you with as regards this telescope is the mirror .
each mirror , there are four of them , is made of a single piece of glass , a monolithic piece of high-tech ceramic , that has been ground down and polished to such accuracy that the only way to understand what that is is -lsb- to -rsb- imagine a city like paris , with all its buildings and the eiffel tower , if you grind down paris to that kind of accuracy , you would be left with bumps that are one millimeter high .
and that 's the kind of polishing that these mirrors have endured .
an extraordinary set of telescopes .
here 's another view of the same .
the reason why you have to build these telescopes in places like the atacama desert is because of the high altitude desert .
the dry air is really good for telescopes , and also , the cloud cover is below the summit of these mountains so that the telescopes have about 300 days of clear skies .
finally , i want to take you to antarctica .
i want to spend most of my time on this part of the world .
this is cosmology 's final frontier .
some of the most amazing experiments , some of the most extreme experiments , are being done in antarctica .
i was there to view something called a long-duration balloon flight , which basically takes telescopes and instruments all the way to the upper atmosphere , the upper stratosphere , 40 km up .
and that 's where they do their experiments , and then the balloon , the payload , is brought down .
so this is us landing on the ross ice shelf in antarctica .
that 's an american c-17 cargo plane that flew us from new zealand to mcmurdo in antarctica .
and here we are about to board our bus .
and i do n't know if you can read the lettering , but it says , " ivan the terribus . "
and that 's taking us to mcmurdo .
and this is the scene that greets you in mcmurdo .
and you barely might be able to make out this hut here .
this hut was built by robert falcon scott and his men when they first came to antarctica on their first expedition to go to the south pole .
because it 's so cold , the entire contents of that hut is still as they left it , with the remnants of the last meal they cooked still there .
it 's an extraordinary place .
this is mcmurdo itself . about a thousand people work here in summer , and about 200 in winter when it 's completely dark for six months .
i was here to see the launch of this particular type of instrument .
this is a cosmic ray experiment that has been launched all the way to the upper-stratosphere to an altitude of 40 km .
what i want you to imagine is this is two tons in weight .
so you 're using a balloon to carry something that is two tons all the way to an altitude of 40 km .
and the engineers , the technicians , the physicists have all got to assemble on the ross ice shelf , because antarctica - i wo n't go into the reasons why - but it 's one of the most favorable places for doing these balloon launches , except for the weather .
the weather , as you can imagine , this is summer , and you 're standing on 200 ft of ice .
and there 's a volcano behind , which has glaciers at the very top .
and what they have to do is they have to assemble the entire balloon - the fabric , parachute and everything - on the ice and then fill it up with helium .
and that process takes about two hours .
and the weather can change as they 're putting together this whole assembly .
for instance , here they are laying down the balloon fabric behind , which is eventually going to be filled up with helium .
those two trucks you see at the very end carry 12 tanks each of compressed helium .
now , in case the weather changes before the launch , they have to actually pack everything back up into their boxes and take it out back to mcmurdo station .
and this particular balloon , because it has to launch two tons of weight , is an extremely huge balloon .
the fabric alone weighs two tons .
in order to minimize the weight , it 's very thin , it 's as thin as a sandwich wrapper .
and if they have to pack it back , they have to put it into boxes and stamp on it so that it fits into the box again - except , when they did it first , it would have been done in texas .
here , they ca n't do it with the kind shoes they 're wearing , so they have to take their shoes off , get barefoot into the boxes , in this cold , and do that kind of work .
that 's the kind of dedication these people have .
here 's the balloon being filled up with helium , and you can see it 's a gorgeous sight .
here 's a scene that shows you the balloon and the payload end-to-end .
so the balloon is being filled up with helium on the left-hand side , and the fabric actually runs all the way to the middle where there 's a piece of electronics and explosives being connected to a parachute , and then the parachute is then connected to the payload .
and remember , all this wiring is being done by people in extreme cold , in sub-zero temperatures .
they 're wearing about 15 kg of clothing and stuff , but they have to take their gloves off in order to do that .
and i would like to share with you a launch .
-lrb- video -rrb- radio : okay , release the balloon , release the balloon , release the balloon .
anil ananthaswamy : and i 'll finally like to leave you with two images .
this is an observatory in the himalayas , in ladakh in india .
and the thing i want you to look at here is the telescope on the right-hand side .
and on the far left there is a 400 year-old buddhist monastery .
this is a close-up of the buddhist monastery .
and i was struck by the juxtaposition of these two enormous disciplines that humanity has .
one is exploring the cosmos on the outside , and the other one is exploring our interior being .
and both require silence of some sort .
and what struck me was every place that i went to to see these telescopes , the astronomers and cosmologists are in search of a certain kind of silence , whether it 's silence from radio pollution or light pollution or whatever .
and it was very obvious that , if we destroy these silent places on earth , we will be stuck on a planet without the ability to look outwards , because we will not be able to understand the signals that come from outer space .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- mountain biking in israel is something that i do with great passion and commitment .
and when i 'm on my bike , i feel that i connect with the profound beauty of israel , and i feel that i 'm united with this country 's history and biblical law .
and also , for me , biking is a matter of empowerment .
when i reach the summit of a steep mountain in the middle of nowhere , i feel young , invincible , eternal .
it 's as if i 'm connecting with some legacy or with some energy far greater than myself .
you can see my fellow riders at the end of the picture , looking at me with some concern .
and here is another picture of them .
unfortunately , i can not show their faces , neither can i disclose their true names , and that 's because my fellow riders are juvenile inmates , offenders spending time in a correction facility about 20 minutes ' ride from here - well , like everything in israel .
and i 've been riding with these kids once a week , every tuesday , rain or shine , for the last four years and by now , they 've become a very big part of my life .
this story began four years ago .
the correction facility where they are locked up happens to be right in the middle of one of my usual trips , and it 's surrounded by barbed wires and electric gates and armed guards .
so on one of these rides , i talked my way into the compound and went to see the warden .
i told the warden that i wanted to start a mountain biking club in this place and that basically i wanted to take the kids from here to there .
and i told him , " let 's find a way in which i 'll be able to take out 10 kids once a week to ride with in the summer in the country . "
and the warden was quite amused , and he told me he thought that i was a nut and he told me , " this place is a correction facility . these guys are serious offenders .
they are supposed to be locked up .
they are n't supposed to be out at large . "
and yet , we began to talk about it , and one thing led to another .
and i ca n't see myself going into a state prison in new jersey and making such a proposition , but this being israel , the warden somehow made it happen .
and so two months later , we found ourselves " at large " - myself , 10 juvenile inmates and a wonderful fellow named russ , who became a very good friend of mine and my partner in this project .
and in the next few weeks , i had the tremendous pleasure of introducing these kids to the world of total freedom , a world consisting of magnificent vistas like these - everything you see here is obviously in israel - as well as close encounters with all sorts of small creatures coming in all sorts of sizes , colors , shapes , forms and so on .
in spite of all this splendor , the beginning was extremely frustrating .
every small obstacle , every slight uphill , would cause these fellows to stop in their tracks and give up .
so we had a lot of this going on .
i found out that they had a very hard time dealing with frustration and difficulties - not because they were physically unfit .
but that 's one reason why they ended up where they were .
and i became increasingly more and more agitated , because i was there not only to be with them , but also to ride and create a team and i did n't know what to do .
now , let me give you an example .
we 're going downhill in some rocky terrain , and the front tire of alex gets caught in one of these crevasses here .
so he crashes down , and he gets slightly injured , but this does not prevent him from jumping up and then starting to jump up and down on his bike and curse violently .
then he throws his helmet in the air .
his backpack goes ballistic in some other direction .
and then he runs to the nearest tree and starts to break branches and throw rocks and curse like i 've never heard .
and i 'm just standing there , watching this scene with a complete disbelief , not knowing what to do .
i 'm used to algorithms and data structures and super motivated students , and nothing in my background prepared me to deal with a raging , violent adolescent in the middle of nowhere .
and you have to realize that these incidents did not happen in convenient locations .
they happened in places like this , in the judean desert , 20 kilometers away from the nearest road .
and what you do n't see in this picture is that somewhere between these riders there , there 's a teenager sitting on a rock , saying , " i 'm not moving from here . forget it .
i 've had it . "
well , that 's a problem because one way or another , you have to get this guy moving because it 's getting dark soon and dangerous .
it took me several such incidents to figure out what i was supposed to do .
at the beginning , it was a disaster .
i tried harsh words and threats and they took me nowhere .
that 's what they had all their lives .
and at some point i found out , when a kid like this gets into a fit , the best thing that you can possibly do is stay as close as possible to this kid , which is difficult , because what you really want to do is go away .
but that 's what he had all his life , people walking away from him .
so what you have to do is stay close and try to reach in and pet his shoulder or give him a piece of chocolate .
so i would say , " alex , i know that it 's terribly difficult .
why do n't you rest for a few minutes and then we 'll go on . "
" go away you maniac-psychopath .
why would you bring us to this goddamn place ? "
and i would say , " relax , alex .
here 's a piece of chocolate . "
and alex would go , " arrrrggg ! "
because you have to understand that on these rides we are constantly hungry - and after the rides also .
and who is this guy , alex , to begin with ?
he 's a 17-year-old .
when he was eight , someone put him on a boat in odessa and sent him , shipped him to israel on his own .
and he ended up in south tel aviv and did not have the good luck to be picked up by a -lsb- unclear -rsb- and roamed the streets and became a prominent gang member .
and he spent the last 10 years of his life in two places only , the slums and the state prison , where he spent the last two years before he ended up sitting on this rock there .
and so this kid was probably abused , abandoned , ignored , betrayed by almost every adult along the way .
so , for such a kid , when an adult that he learns to respect stays close to him and does n't walk away from him in any situation , irrespective of how he behaves , it 's a tremendous healing experience .
it 's an act of unconditional acceptance , something that he never had .
i want to say a few words about vision .
when i started this program four years ago , i had this original plan of creating a team of winning underdogs .
i had an image of lance armstrong in my mind .
and it took me exactly two months of complete frustration to realize that this vision was misplaced , and that there was another vision supremely more important and more readily available .
it all of a sudden dawned on me , in this project , that the purpose of these rides should actually be to expose the kids to one thing only : love .
love to the country , to the uphill and the downhill , to all the incredible creatures that surround us - the animals , the plants , the insects - love and respect to other fellow members in your team , in your biking team , and most importantly , love and respect to yourself , which is something that they badly miss .
together with the kids , i also went through a remarkable transformation .
now , i come from a cutthroat world of science and high technology .
i used to think that reason and logic and relentless drive were the only ways to make things happen .
and before i worked with the kids , anything that i did with them , or anything that i did with myself , was supposed to be perfect , ideal , optimal , but after working with them for some time , i discovered the great virtues of empathy and flexibility and being able to start with some vision , and if the vision does n't work , well nothing happened .
all you have to do is play with it , change it a little bit , and come up with something that does help , that does work .
so right now , i feel more like these are my principles , and if you do n't like them , i have others .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- and one of these principles is focus .
before each ride we sit together with the kids , and we give them one word to think about during the ride .
you have to focus their attention on something because so many things happen .
so these are words like " teamwork " or " endurance " or even complicated concepts like " resource allocation " or " perspective , " a word that they do n't understand .
you know , perspective is one of these critically important life-coping strategies that mountain biking can really teach you .
i tell kids when they struggle through some uphill and feel like they can not take it anymore , it really helps to ignore the immediate obstacles and raise your head and look around and see how the vista around you grows .
it literally propels you upwards .
that 's what perspective is all about .
or you can also look back in time and realize that you 've already conquered steeper mountains before .
and that 's how they develop self-esteem .
now , let me give you an example of how it works .
you stand with your bike at the beginning of february .
it 's very cold , and you 're standing in one of these rainy days , and it 's drizzling and cold and chilly , and you 're standing in , let 's say , yokneam .
and you look up at the sky through a hole in the clouds you see the monastery at the top of the muhraka - that 's where you 're supposed to climb now - and you say , " there 's no way that i could possibly get there . "
and yet , two hours later you find yourself standing on the roof of this monastery , smeared with mud , blood and sweat .
and you look down at yokneam ; everything is so small and tiny .
and you say , " hey , alex . look at this parking lot where we started .
it 's that big .
i ca n't believe that i did it . "
and that 's the point when you start loving yourself .
and so we talked about these special words that we teach them .
and at the end of each ride , we sit together and share moments in which those special words of the day popped up and made a difference , and these discussions can be extremely inspiring .
in one of them , one of the kids once said , " when we were riding on this ridge overlooking the dead sea - and he 's talking about this spot here - " i was reminded of the day when i left my village in ethiopia and went away together with my brother .
we walked 120 kilometers until we reached sudan .
this was the first place where we got some water and supplies . "
and he goes on saying , and everyone looks at him like a hero , probably for the first time in his life .
and he says - because i also have volunteers riding with me , adults , who are sitting there listening to him - and he says , " and this was just the beginning of our ordeal until we ended up in israel .
and only now , " he says , " i 'm beginning to understand where i am , and i actually like it . "
now i remember , when he said it , i felt goosebumps on my body , because he said it overlooking the moab mountains here in the background .
that 's where joshua descended and crossed the jordan and led the people of israel into the land of canaan 3,000 years ago in this final leg of the journey from africa .
and so , perspective and context and history play key roles in the way i plan my rides with the kids .
we visit kibbutzim that were established by holocaust survivors .
we explore ruins of palestinian villages , and we discuss how they became ruins .
and we go through numerous remnants of jewish settlements , nabatic settlements , canaanite settlements - three- , four , five-thousand years old .
and through this tapestry , which is the history of this country , the kids acquire what is probably the most important value in education , and that is the understanding that life is complex , and there 's no black and white .
and by appreciating complexity , they become more tolerant , and tolerance leads to hope .
i ride with these kids once a week , every tuesday .
here 's a picture i took last tuesday - less than a week ago - and i ride with them tomorrow also .
in every one of these rides i always end up standing in one of these incredible locations , taking in this incredible landscape around me , and i feel blessed and fortunate that i 'm alive , and that i sense every fiber in my aching body .
and i feel blessed and fortunate that 15 years ago i had the courage to resign my tenured position at nyu and return to my home country where i can do these incredible rides with this group of troubled kids coming from ethiopia and morocco and russia .
and i feel blessed and fortunate that every week , every tuesday - and actually every friday also - i can once again celebrate in the marrow of my bones the very essence of living in israel on the edge .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i would like to talk to you about a story about a small town kid .
i do n't know his name , but i do know his story .
he lives in a small village in southern somalia .
his village is near mogadishu .
drought drives the small village into poverty and to the brink of starvation .
with nothing left for him there , he leaves for the big city , in this case , mogadishu , the capital of somalia .
when he arrives , there are no opportunities , no jobs , no way forward .
he ends up living in a tent city on the outskirts of mogadishu .
maybe a year passes , nothing .
one day , he 's approached by a gentleman who offers to take him to lunch , then to dinner , to breakfast .
he meets this dynamic group of people , and they give him a break .
he 's given a bit of money to buy himself some new clothes , money to send back home to his family .
he is introduced to this young woman .
he eventually gets married .
he starts this new life .
he has a purpose in life .
one beautiful day in mogadishu , under an azure blue sky , a car bomb goes off .
that small town kid with the big city dreams was the suicide bomber , and that dynamic group of people were al shabaab , a terrorist organization linked to al qaeda .
so how does the story of a small town kid just trying to make it big in the city end up with him blowing himself up ?
he was waiting .
he was waiting for an opportunity , waiting to begin his future , waiting for a way forward , and this was the first thing that came along .
this was the first thing that pulled him out of what we call waithood .
and his story repeats itself in urban centers around the world .
it is the story of the disenfranchised , unemployed urban youth who sparks riots in johannesburg , sparks riots in london , who reaches out for something other than waithood .
for young people , the promise of the city , the big city dream is that of opportunity , of jobs , of wealth , but young people are not sharing in the prosperity of their cities .
often it 's youth who suffer from the highest unemployment rates .
by 2030 , three out of five people living in cities will be under the age of 18 .
if we do not include young people in the growth of our cities , if we do not provide them opportunities , the story of waithood , the gateway to terrorism , to violence , to gangs , will be the story of cities 2.0 .
and in my city of birth , mogadishu , 70 percent of young people suffer from unemployment .
70 percent do n't work , do n't go to school .
they pretty much do nothing .
i went back to mogadishu last month , and i went to visit madina hospital , the hospital i was born in .
i remember standing in front of that bullet-ridden hospital thinking , what if i had never left ?
what if i had been forced into that same state of waithood ?
would i have become a terrorist ?
i 'm not really sure about the answer .
my reason for being in mogadishu that month was actually to host a youth leadership and entrepreneurship summit .
i brought together about 90 young somali leaders .
we sat down and brainstormed on solutions to the biggest challenges facing their city .
one of the young men in the room was aden .
he went to university in mogadishu , graduated .
there were no jobs , no opportunities .
i remember him telling me , because he was a college graduate , unemployed , frustrated , that he was the perfect target for al shabaab and other terrorist organizations , to be recruited .
they sought people like him out .
but his story takes a different route .
in mogadishu , the biggest barrier to getting from point a to point b are the roads .
twenty-three years of civil war have completely destroyed the road system , and a motorbike can be the easiest way to get around .
aden saw an opportunity and seized it .
he started a motorbike company .
he began renting out motorbikes to local residents who could n't normally afford them .
he bought 10 bikes , with the help of family and friends , and his dream is to eventually expand to several hundred within the next three years .
how is this story different ?
what makes his story different ?
i believe it is his ability to identify and seize a new opportunity .
it 's entrepreneurship , and i believe entrepreneurship can be the most powerful tool against waithood .
it empowers young people to be the creators of the very economic opportunities they are so desperately seeking .
and you can train young people to be entrepreneurs .
i want to talk to you about a young man who attended one of my meetings , mohamed mohamoud , a florist .
he was helping me train some of the young people at the summit in entrepreneurship and how to be innovative and how to create a culture of entrepreneurship .
he 's actually the first florist mogadishu has seen in over 22 years , and until recently , until mohamed came along , if you wanted flowers at your wedding , you used plastic bouquets shipped from abroad .
if you asked someone , " when was the last time you saw fresh flowers ? "
for many who grew up under civil war , the answer would be , " never . "
so mohamed saw an opportunity .
he started a landscaping and design floral company .
he created a farm right outside of mogadishu , and started growing tulips and lilies , which he said could survive the harsh mogadishu climate .
and he began delivering flowers to weddings , creating gardens at homes and businesses around the city , and he 's now working on creating mogadishu 's first public park in 22 years .
there 's no public park in mogadishu .
he wants to create a space where families , young people , can come together , and , as he says , smell the proverbial roses .
and he does n't grow roses because they use too much water , by the way .
so the first step is to inspire young people , and in that room , mohamed 's presence had a really profound impact on the youth in that room .
they had never really thought about starting up a business .
they 've thought about working for an ngo , working for the government , but his story , his innovation , really had a strong impact on them .
he forced them to look at their city as a place of opportunity .
he empowered them to believe that they could be entrepreneurs , that they could be change makers .
by the end of the day , they were coming up with innovative solutions to some of the biggest challenges facing their city .
they came up with entrepreneurial solutions to local problems .
so inspiring young people and creating a culture of entrepreneurship is a really great step , but young people need capital to make their ideas a reality .
they need expertise and mentorship to guide them in developing and launching their businesses .
connect young people with the resources they need , provide them the support they need to go from ideation to creation , and you will create catalysts for urban growth .
for me , entrepreneurship is more than just starting up a business .
it 's about creating a social impact .
mohamed is not simply selling flowers .
i believe he is selling hope .
his peace park , and that 's what he calls it , when it 's created , will actually transform the way people see their city .
aden hired street kids to help rent out and maintain those bikes for him .
he gave them the opportunity to escape the paralysis of waithood .
these young entrepreneurs are having a tremendous impact in their cities .
so my suggestion is , turn youth into entrepreneurs , incubate and nurture their inherent innovation , and you will have more stories of flowers and peace parks than of car bombs and waithood .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- just a few minutes ago , i took this picture about 10 blocks from here .
this is the grand cafe here in oxford .
i took this picture because this turns out to be the first coffeehouse to open in england in 1650 .
that 's its great claim to fame , and i wanted to show it to you , not because i want to give you the kind of starbucks tour of historic england , but rather because the english coffeehouse was crucial to the development and spread of one of the great intellectual flowerings of the last 500 years , what we now call the enlightenment .
and the coffeehouse played such a big role in the birth of the enlightenment , in part , because of what people were drinking there .
because , before the spread of coffee and tea through british culture , what people drank - both elite and mass folks drank - day-in and day-out , from dawn until dusk was alcohol .
alcohol was the daytime beverage of choice .
you would drink a little beer with breakfast and have a little wine at lunch , a little gin - particularly around 1650 - and top it off with a little beer and wine at the end of the day .
that was the healthy choice - right - because the water was n't safe to drink .
and so , effectively until the rise of the coffeehouse , you had an entire population that was effectively drunk all day .
and you can imagine what that would be like , right , in your own life - and i know this is true of some of you - if you were drinking all day , and then you switched from a depressant to a stimulant in your life , you would have better ideas .
you would be sharper and more alert .
and so it 's not an accident that a great flowering of innovation happened as england switched to tea and coffee .
but the other thing that makes the coffeehouse important is the architecture of the space .
it was a space where people would get together from different backgrounds , different fields of expertise , and share .
it was a space , as matt ridley talked about , where ideas could have sex .
this was their conjugal bed , in a sense - ideas would get together there .
and an astonishing number of innovations from this period have a coffeehouse somewhere in their story .
i 've been spending a lot of time thinking about coffeehouses for the last five years , because i 've been kind of on this quest to investigate this question of where good ideas come from .
what are the environments that lead to unusual levels of innovation , unusual levels of creativity ?
what 's the kind of environmental - what is the space of creativity ?
and what i 've done is i 've looked at both environments like the coffeehouse ; i 've looked at media environments , like the world wide web , that have been extraordinarily innovative ; i 've gone back to the history of the first cities ; i 've even gone to biological environments , like coral reefs and rainforests , that involve unusual levels of biological innovation ; and what i 've been looking for is shared patterns , kind of signature behavior that shows up again and again in all of these environments .
are there recurring patterns that we can learn from , that we can take and kind of apply to our own lives , or our own organizations , or our own environments to make them more creative and innovative ?
and i think i 've found a few .
but what you have to do to make sense of this and to really understand these principles is you have to do away with a lot of the way in which our conventional metaphors and language steers us towards certain concepts of idea-creation .
we have this very rich vocabulary to describe moments of inspiration .
we have the kind of the flash of insight , the stroke of insight , we have epiphanies , we have " eureka ! " moments , we have the lightbulb moments , right ?
all of these concepts , as kind of rhetorically florid as they are , share this basic assumption , which is that an idea is a single thing , it 's something that happens often in a wonderful illuminating moment .
but in fact , what i would argue and what you really need to kind of begin with is this idea that an idea is a network on the most elemental level .
i mean , this is what is happening inside your brain .
an idea - a new idea - is a new network of neurons firing in sync with each other inside your brain .
it 's a new configuration that has never formed before .
and the question is : how do you get your brain into environments where these new networks are going to be more likely to form ?
and it turns out that , in fact , the kind of network patterns of the outside world mimic a lot of the network patterns of the internal world of the human brain .
so the metaphor i 'd like the use i can take from a story of a great idea that 's quite recent - a lot more recent than the 1650s .
a wonderful guy named timothy prestero , who has a company called ... an organization called design that matters .
they decided to tackle this really pressing problem of , you know , the terrible problems we have with infant mortality rates in the developing world .
one of the things that 's very frustrating about this is that we know , by getting modern neonatal incubators into any context , if we can keep premature babies warm , basically - it 's very simple - we can halve infant mortality rates in those environments .
so , the technology is there .
these are standard in all the industrialized worlds .
the problem is , if you buy a $ 40,000 incubator , and you send it off to a mid-sized village in africa , it will work great for a year or two years , and then something will go wrong and it will break , and it will remain broken forever , because you do n't have a whole system of spare parts , and you do n't have the on-the-ground expertise to fix this $ 40,000 piece of equipment .
and so you end up having this problem where you spend all this money getting aid and all these advanced electronics to these countries , and then it ends up being useless .
so what prestero and his team decided to do is to look around and see : what are the abundant resources in these developing world contexts ?
and what they noticed was they do n't have a lot of dvrs , they do n't have a lot of microwaves , but they seem to do a pretty good job of keeping their cars on the road .
there 's a toyota forerunner on the street in all these places .
they seem to have the expertise to keep cars working .
so they started to think , " could we build a neonatal incubator that 's built entirely out of automobile parts ? "
and this is what they ended up coming with .
it 's called a " neonurture device . "
from the outside , it looks like a normal little thing you 'd find in a modern , western hospital .
in the inside , it 's all car parts .
it 's got a fan , it 's got headlights for warmth , it 's got door chimes for alarm - it runs off a car battery .
and so all you need is the spare parts from your toyota and the ability to fix a headlight , and you can repair this thing .
now , that 's a great idea , but what i 'd like to say is that , in fact , this is a great metaphor for the way that ideas happen .
we like to think our breakthrough ideas , you know , are like that $ 40,000 , brand new incubator , state-of-the-art technology , but more often than not , they 're cobbled together from whatever parts that happen to be around nearby .
we take ideas from other people , from people we 've learned from , from people we run into in the coffee shop , and we stitch them together into new forms and we create something new .
that 's really where innovation happens .
and that means that we have to change some of our models of what innovation and deep thinking really looks like , right .
i mean , this is one vision of it .
another is newton and the apple , when newton was at cambridge .
this is a statue from oxford .
you know , you 're sitting there thinking a deep thought , and the apple falls from the tree , and you have the theory of gravity .
in fact , the spaces that have historically led to innovation tend to look like this , right .
this is hogarth 's famous painting of a kind of political dinner at a tavern , but this is what the coffee shops looked like back then .
this is the kind of chaotic environment where ideas were likely to come together , where people were likely to have new , interesting , unpredictable collisions - people from different backgrounds .
so , if we 're trying to build organizations that are more innovative , we have to build spaces that - strangely enough - look a little bit more like this .
this is what your office should look like , is part of my message here .
and one of the problems with this is that people are actually - when you research this field - people are notoriously unreliable , when they actually kind of self-report on where they have their own good ideas , or their history of their best ideas .
and a few years ago , a wonderful researcher named kevin dunbar decided to go around and basically do the big brother approach to figuring out where good ideas come from .
he went to a bunch of science labs around the world and videotaped everyone as they were doing every little bit of their job .
so when they were sitting in front of the microscope , when they were talking to their colleague at the water cooler , and all these things .
and he recorded all of these conversations and tried to figure out where the most important ideas , where they happened .
and when we think about the classic image of the scientist in the lab , we have this image - you know , they 're pouring over the microscope , and they see something in the tissue sample .
and " oh , eureka , " they 've got the idea .
what happened actually when dunbar kind of looked at the tape is that , in fact , almost all of the important breakthrough ideas did not happen alone in the lab , in front of the microscope .
they happened at the conference table at the weekly lab meeting , when everybody got together and shared their kind of latest data and findings , oftentimes when people shared the mistakes they were having , the error , the noise in the signal they were discovering .
and something about that environment - and i 've started calling it the " liquid network , " where you have lots of different ideas that are together , different backgrounds , different interests , jostling with each other , bouncing off each other - that environment is , in fact , the environment that leads to innovation .
the other problem that people have is they like to condense their stories of innovation down to kind of shorter time frames .
so they want to tell the story of the " eureka ! " moment .
they want to say , " there i was , i was standing there and i had it all suddenly clear in my head . "
but in fact , if you go back and look at the historical record , it turns out that a lot of important ideas have very long incubation periods - i call this the " slow hunch . "
we 've heard a lot recently about hunch and instinct and blink-like sudden moments of clarity , but in fact , a lot of great ideas linger on , sometimes for decades , in the back of people 's minds .
they have a feeling that there 's an interesting problem , but they do n't quite have the tools yet to discover them .
they spend all this time working on certain problems , but there 's another thing lingering there that they 're interested in , but they ca n't quite solve .
darwin is a great example of this .
darwin himself , in his autobiography , tells the story of coming up with the idea for natural selection as a classic " eureka ! " moment .
he 's in his study , it 's october of 1838 , and he 's reading malthus , actually , on population .
and all of a sudden , the basic algorithm of natural selection kind of pops into his head and he says , " ah , at last , i had a theory with which to work . "
that 's in his autobiography .
about a decade or two ago , a wonderful scholar named howard gruber went back and looked at darwin 's notebooks from this period .
and darwin kept these copious notebooks where he wrote down every little idea he had , every little hunch .
and what gruber found was that darwin had the full theory of natural selection for months and months and months before he had his alleged epiphany , reading malthus in october of 1838 .
there are passages where you can read it , and you think you 're reading from a darwin textbook , from the period before he has this epiphany .
and so what you realize is that darwin , in a sense , had the idea , he had the concept , but was unable of fully thinking it yet .
and that is actually how great ideas often happen ; they fade into view over long periods of time .
now the challenge for all of us is : how do you create environments that allow these ideas to have this kind of long half-life , right ?
it 's hard to go to your boss and say , " i have an excellent idea for our organization .
it will be useful in 2020 .
could you just give me some time to do that ? "
now a couple of companies - like google - they have innovation time off , 20 percent time , where , in a sense , those are hunch-cultivating mechanisms in an organization .
but that 's a key thing .
and the other thing is to allow those hunches to connect with other people 's hunches ; that 's what often happens .
you have half of an idea , somebody else has the other half , and if you 're in the right environment , they turn into something larger than the sum of their parts .
so , in a sense , we often talk about the value of protecting intellectual property , you know , building barricades , having secretive r & d labs , patenting everything that we have , so that those ideas will remain valuable , and people will be incentivized to come up with more ideas , and the culture will be more innovative .
but i think there 's a case to be made that we should spend at least as much time , if not more , valuing the premise of connecting ideas and not just protecting them .
and i 'll leave you with this story , which i think captures a lot of these values , and it 's just wonderful kind of tale of innovation and how it happens in unlikely ways .
it 's october of 1957 , and sputnik has just launched , and we 're in laurel maryland , at the applied physics lab associated with johns hopkins university .
and it 's monday morning , and the news has just broken about this satellite that 's now orbiting the planet .
and of course , this is nerd heaven , right ?
there are all these physics geeks who are there thinking , " oh my gosh ! this is incredible . i ca n't believe this has happened . "
and two of them , two 20-something researchers at the apl are there at the cafeteria table having an informal conversation with a bunch of their colleagues .
and these two guys are named guier and weiffenbach .
and they start talking , and one of them says , " hey , has anybody tried to listen for this thing ?
there 's this , you know , man-made satellite up there in outer space that 's obviously broadcasting some kind of signal .
we could probably hear it , if we tune in . "
and so they ask around to a couple of their colleagues , and everybody 's like , " no , i had n't thought of doing that .
that 's an interesting idea . "
and it turns out weiffenbach is kind of an expert in microwave reception , and he 's got a little antennae set up with an amplifier in his office .
and so guier and weiffenbach go back to weiffenbach 's office , and they start kind of noodling around - hacking , as we might call it now .
and after a couple of hours , they actually start picking up the signal , because the soviets made sputnik very easy to track .
it was right at 20 mhz , so you could pick it up really easily , because they were afraid that people would think it was a hoax , basically .
so they made it really easy to find it .
so these two guys are sitting there listening to this signal , and people start kind of coming into the office and saying , " wow , that 's pretty cool . can i hear ? wow , that 's great . "
and before long , they think , " well jeez , this is kind of historic .
we may be the first people in the united states to be listening to this .
we should record it . "
and so they bring in this big , clunky analog tape recorder and they start recording these little bleep , bleeps .
and they start writing the kind of date stamp , time stamps for each little bleep that they record .
and they they start thinking , " well gosh , you know , we 're noticing small little frequency variations here .
we could probably calculate the speed that the satellite is traveling , if we do a little basic math here using the doppler effect . "
and then they played around with it a little bit more , and they talked to a couple of their colleagues who had other kind of specialties .
and they said , " jeez , you know , we think we could actually take a look at the slope of the doppler effect to figure out the points at which the satellite is closest to our antennae and the points at which it 's farthest away .
that 's pretty cool . "
and eventually , they get permission - this is all a little side project that had n't been officially part of their job description .
they get permission to use the new , you know , univac computer that takes up an entire room that they 'd just gotten at the apl .
they run some more of the numbers , and at the end of about three or four weeks , turns out they have mapped the exact trajectory of this satellite around the earth , just from listening to this one little signal , over lunch one morning .
a couple weeks later their boss , frank mcclure , pulls them into the room and says , " hey , you guys , i have to ask you something about that project you were working on .
you 've figured out an unknown location of a satellite orbiting the planet from a known location on the ground .
could you go the other way ?
could you figure out an unknown location on the ground , if you knew the location of the satellite ? "
and they thought about it and they said , " well , i guess maybe you could . let 's run the numbers here . "
so they went back , and they thought about it .
and they came back and said , " actually , it 'll be easier . "
and he said , " oh , that 's great .
because see , i have these new nuclear submarines that i 'm building .
and it 's really hard to figure out how to get your missile so that it will land right on top of moscow , if you do n't know where the submarine is in the middle of the pacific ocean .
so we 're thinking , we could throw up a bunch of satellites and use it to track our submarines and figure out their location in the middle of the ocean .
could you work on that problem ? "
and that 's how gps was born .
30 years later , ronald reagan actually opened it up and made it an open platform that anybody could kind of build upon and anybody could come along and build new technology that would create and innovate on top of this open platform , left it open for anyone to do pretty much anything they wanted with it .
and now , i guarantee you certainly half of this room , if not more , has a device sitting in their pocket right now that is talking to one of these satellites in outer space .
and i bet you one of you , if not more , has used said device and said satellite system to locate a nearby coffeehouse somewhere in the last - -lrb- laughter -rrb- in the last day or last week , right ?
-lrb- applause -rrb- and that , i think , is a great case study , a great lesson in the power , the marvelous , kind of unplanned emergent , unpredictable power of open innovative systems .
when you build them right , they will be led to completely new directions that the creators never even dreamed of .
i mean , here you have these guys who basically thought they were just following this hunch , this little passion that had developed , then they thought they were fighting the cold war , and then it turns out they 're just helping somebody find a soy latte .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that is how innovation happens .
chance favors the connected mind .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- do you know that we have 1.4 million cellular radio masts deployed worldwide ?
and these are base stations .
and we also have more than five billion of these devices here .
these are cellular mobile phones .
and with these mobile phones , we transmit more than 600 terabytes of data every month .
this is a 6 with 14 zeroes - a very large number .
and wireless communications has become a utility like electricity and water .
we use it everyday . we use it in our everyday lives now - in our private lives , in our business lives .
and we even have to be asked sometimes , very kindly , to switch off the mobile phone at events like this for good reasons .
and it 's this importance why i decided to look into the issues that this technology has , because it 's so fundamental to our lives .
and one of the issues is capacity .
the way we transmit wireless data is by using electromagnetic waves - in particular , radio waves .
and radio waves are limited .
they are scarce ; they are expensive ; and we only have a certain range of it .
and it 's this limitation that does n't cope with the demand of wireless data transmissions and the number of bytes and data which are transmitted every month .
and we are simply running out of spectrum .
there 's another problem .
that is efficiency .
these 1.4 million cellular radio masts , or base stations , consume a lot of energy .
and mind you , most of the energy is not used to transmit the radio waves , it is used to cool the base stations .
then the efficiency of such a base station is only at about five percent .
and that creates a big problem .
then there 's another issue that you 're all aware of .
you have to switch off your mobile phone during flights .
in hospitals , they are security issues .
and security is another issue .
these radio waves penetrate through walls .
they can be intercepted , and somebody can make use of your network if he has bad intentions .
so these are the main four issues .
but on the other hand , we have 14 billion of these : light bulbs , light .
and light is part of the electromagnetic spectrum .
so let 's look at this in the context of the entire electromagnetic spectrum , where we have gamma rays .
you do n't want to get close to gamma rays , it could be dangerous .
x-rays , useful when you go to hospitals .
then there 's ultraviolet light .
it 's good for a nice suntan , but otherwise dangerous for the human body .
infrared - due to eye safety regulations , can be only used with low power .
and then we have the radio waves , they have the issues i 've just mentioned .
and in the middle there , we have this visible light spectrum .
it 's light , and light has been around for many millions of years .
and in fact , it has created us , has created life , has created all the stuff of life .
so it 's inherently safe to use .
and would n't it be great to use that for wireless communications ?
not only that , i compared -lsb- it to -rsb- the entire spectrum .
i compared the radio waves spectrum - the size of it - with the size of the visible light spectrum .
and guess what ?
we have 10,000 times more of that spectrum , which is there for us to use .
so not only do we have this huge amount of spectrum , let 's compare that with a number i 've just mentioned .
we have 1.4 million expensively deployed , and multiply that by 10,000 , then you end up at 14 billion .
14 billion is the number of light bulbs installed already .
so we have the infrastructure there .
look at the ceiling , you see all these light bulbs .
go to the main floor , you see these light bulbs .
can we use them for communications ?
yes .
what do we need to do ?
the one thing we need to do is we have to replace these inefficient incandescent light bulbs , florescent lights , with this new technology of led , led light bulbs .
an led is a semiconductor . it 's an electronic device .
and it has a very nice acute property .
its intensity can be modulated at very high speeds , and it can be switched off at very high speeds .
and this is a fundamental basic property that we exploit with our technology .
so let 's show how we do that .
let 's go to the closest neighbor to the visible light spectrum - go to remote controls .
you all know remote controls have an infrared led - basically you switch on the led , and if it 's off , you switch it off .
and it creates a simple , low-speed data stream in 10,000 bits per second , 20,000 bits per second .
not usable for a youtube video .
what we have done is we have developed a technology with which we can furthermore replace the remote control of our light bulb .
we transmit with our technology , not only a single data stream , we transmit thousands of data streams in parallel , at even higher speeds .
and the technology we have developed - it 's called sim ofdm .
and it 's spacial modulation - these are the only technical terms , i 'm not going into details - but this is how we enabled that light source to transmit data .
you will say , " okay , this is nice - a slide created in 10 minutes . "
but not only that .
what we 've done and i 'm showing for the first time in public this visible light demonstrator .
and what we have here is no ordinary desk lamp .
we fit in an led light bulb , worth three u.s. dollars , put in our signal processing technology .
and then what we have here is a little hole .
and the light goes through that hole .
there 's a receiver .
the receiver will convert these little , subtle changes in the amplitude that we create there into an electrical signal .
and that signal is then converted back to a high-speed data stream .
in the future we hope that we can integrate this little hole into these smart phones .
and not only integrate a photo detector here , but maybe use the camera inside .
so what happens when i switch on that light ?
as you would expect , it 's a light , a desk lamp .
put your book beneath it and you can read .
it 's illuminating the space .
but at the same time , you see this video coming up here .
and that 's a video , a high-definition video that is transmitted through that light beam .
you 're critical .
you think , " ha , ha , ha .
this is a smart academic doing a little bit of tricks here . "
but let me do this .
-lrb- applause -rrb- once again .
still do n't believe ?
it is this light that transmits this high-definition video in a split stream .
and if you look at the light , it is illuminating as you would expect .
you do n't notice with your human eye .
you do n't notice the subtle changes in the amplitude it 's serving the purpose of illumination , but at the same time , we are able to transmit this data .
and you see , even light from the ceiling comes down here to the receiver .
it can ignore that constant light , because all the receiver 's interested in are subtle changes .
you also have a critical question now , and you say , " okay , do i have to have the light on all the time to have this working ? "
and the answer is yes .
but , you can dim down the light to a level that it appears to be off .
and you are still able to transmit data - that 's possible .
so i 've mentioned to you the four challenges .
capacity : we have 10,000 times more spectrum , 10,000 times more leds installed already in the infrastructure there .
you would agree with me , hopefully , there 's no issue of capacity anymore .
efficiency : this is data through illumination - it 's first of all an illumination device .
and if you do the energy budget , the data transmission comes for free - highly energy efficient .
i do n't mention the high energy efficiency of these led light bulbs .
if the whole world would deploy them , you would save hundreds of power plants .
that 's aside .
and then i 've mentioned the availability .
you will agree with me that we have lights in the hospital .
you need to see what to do .
you have lights in an aircraft .
so it 's everywhere in a day there is light .
look around . everywhere . look at your smart phone .
it has a flashlight , an led flashlight .
these are potential sources for high-speed data transmission .
and then there 's security .
you would agree with me that light does n't penetrate through walls .
so no one , if i have a light here , if i have secure data , no one on the other side of this room through that wall would be able to read that data .
and there 's only data where there is light .
so if i do n't want that receiver to receive the data , then what i could do , turn it away .
so the data goes in that direction , not there anymore .
now we can in fact see where the data is going to .
so for me , the applications of it , to me , are beyond imagination at the moment .
we have had a century of very nice , smart application developers .
and you only have to notice , where we have light , there is a potential way to transmit data .
but i can give you a few examples .
well you may see the impact already now .
this is a remote operated vehicle beneath the ocean .
and they use light to illuminate space down there .
and this light can be used to transmit wireless data that these things -lsb- use -rsb- to communicate with each other .
intrinsically safe environments like this petrochemical plant - you ca n't use rf , it may generate antenna sparks , but you can use light - you see plenty of light there .
in hospitals , for new medical instruments ; in streets for traffic control .
cars have led-based headlights , led-based back lights , and cars can communicate with each other and prevent accidents traffic lights can communicate to the car and so on .
and then you have these millions of street lamps deployed around the world .
and every street lamp could be a free access point .
we call it , in fact , a li-fi , light-fidelity .
and then we have these aircraft cabins .
there are hundreds of lights in an aircraft cabin , and each of these lights could be a potential transmitter of wireless data .
so you could enjoy your most favorite ted video on your long flight back home .
online life . so that is a vision , i think , that is possible .
so , all we would need to do is to fit a small microchip to every potential illumination device .
and this would then combine two basic functionalities : illumination and wireless data transmission .
and it 's this symbiosis that i personally believe could solve the four essential problems that face us in wireless communication these days .
and in the future , you would not only have 14 billion light bulbs , you may have 14 billion li-fis deployed worldwide - for a cleaner , a greener , and even a brighter future .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- good morning everyone . first of all , it 's been fantastic being here over these past few days .
and secondly , i feel it 's a great honor to kind of wind up this extraordinary gathering of people , these amazing talks that we 've had .
i feel that i 've fitted in , in many ways , to some of the things that i 've heard .
i came directly here from the deep , deep tropical rainforest in ecuador , where i was out - you could only get there by a plane - with indigenous people with paint on their faces and parrot feathers on their headdresses , where these people are fighting to try and keep the oil companies , and keep the roads , out of their forests .
they 're fighting to develop their own way of living within the forest in a world that 's clean , a world that is n't contaminated , a world that is n't polluted .
and what was so amazing to me , and what fits right in with what we 're all talking about here at ted , is that there , right in the middle of this rainforest , was some solar panels - the first in that part of ecuador - and that was mainly to bring water up by pump so that the women would n't have to go down .
the water was cleaned , but because they got a lot of batteries , they were able to store a lot of electricity .
so every house - and there were , i think , eight houses in this little community - could have light for , i think it was about half an hour each evening .
and there is the chief , in all his regal finery , with a laptop computer .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and this man , he has been outside , but he 's gone back , and he was saying , " you know , we have suddenly jumped into a whole new era , and we did n't even know about the white man 50 years ago , and now here we are with laptop computers , and there are some things we want to learn from the modern world .
we want to know about health care .
we want to know about what other people do - we 're interested in it .
and we want to learn other languages .
we want to know english and french and perhaps chinese , and we 're good at languages . "
so there he is with his little laptop computer , but fighting against the might of the pressures - because of the debt , the foreign debt of ecuador - fighting the pressure of world bank , imf , and of course the people who want to exploit the forests and take out the oil .
and so , coming directly from there to here .
but , of course , my real field of expertise lies in an even different kind of civilization - i ca n't really call it a civilization .
a different way of life , a different being .
we 've talked earlier - this wonderful talk by wade davis about the different cultures of the humans around the world - but the world is not composed only of human beings ; there are also other animal beings .
and i propose to bring into this ted conference , as i always do around the world , the voice of the animal kingdom .
too often we just see a few slides , or a bit of film , but these beings have voices that mean something .
and so , i want to give you a greeting , as from a chimpanzee in the forests of tanzania - ooh , ooh , ooh , ooh , ooh , ooh , ooh , ooh , ooh , ooh , ooh , ooh , ooh , ooh , ooh !
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 've been studying chimpanzees in tanzania since 1960 .
during that time , there have been modern technologies that have really transformed the way that field biologists do their work .
for example , for the first time , a few years ago , by simply collecting little fecal samples we were able to have them analyzed - to have dna profiling done - so for the first time , we actually know which male chimps are the fathers of each individual infant .
because the chimps have a very promiscuous mating society .
so this opens up a whole new avenue of research .
and we use gsi - geographic whatever it is , gsi - to determine the range of the chimps .
and we 're using - you can see that i 'm not really into this kind of stuff - but we 're using satellite imagery to look at the deforestation in the area .
and of course , there 's developments in infrared , so you can watch animals at night , and equipment for recording by video , and tape recording is getting lighter and better .
so in many , many ways , we can do things today that we could n't do when i began in 1960 .
especially when chimpanzees , and other animals with large brains , are studied in captivity , modern technology is helping us to search for the upper levels of cognition in some of these non-human animals .
so that we know today , they 're capable of performances that would have been thought absolutely impossible by science when i began .
i think the chimpanzee in captivity who is the most skilled in intellectual performance is one called ai in japan - her name means love - and she has a wonderfully sensitive partner working with her .
she loves her computer - she 'll leave her big group , and her running water , and her trees and everything .
and she 'll come in to sit at this computer - it 's like a video game for a kid ; she 's hooked .
she 's 28 , by the way , and she does things with her computer screen and a touch pad that she can do faster than most humans .
she does very complex tasks , and i have n't got time to go into them , but the amazing thing about this female is she does n't like making mistakes .
if she has a bad run , and her score is n't good , she 'll come and reach up and tap on the glass - because she ca n't see the experimenter - which is asking to have another go .
and her concentration - she 's already concentrated hard for 20 minutes or so , and now she wants to do it all over again , just for the satisfaction of having done it better .
and the food is not important - she does get a tiny reward , like one raisin for a correct response - but she will do it for nothing , if you tell her beforehand .
so here we are , a chimpanzee using a computer .
chimpanzees , gorillas , orangutans also learn human sign language .
but the point is that when i was first in gombe in 1960 - i remember so well , so vividly , as though it was yesterday - the first time , when i was going through the vegetation , the chimpanzees were still running away from me , for the most part , although some were a little bit acclimatized - and i saw this dark shape , hunched over a termite mound , and i peered with my binoculars .
it was , fortunately , one adult male whom i 'd named david greybeard - and by the way , science at that time was telling me that i should n't name the chimps ; they should all have numbers ; that was more scientific .
anyway , david greybeard - and i saw that he was picking little pieces of grass and using them to fish termites from their underground nest .
and not only that - he would sometimes pick a leafy twig and strip the leaves - modifying an object to make it suitable for a specific purpose - the beginning of tool-making .
the reason this was so exciting and such a breakthrough is at that time , it was thought that humans , and only humans , used and made tools .
when i was at school , we were defined as man , the toolmaker .
so that when louis leakey , my mentor , heard this news , he said , " ah , we must now redefine ' man , ' redefine ' tool , ' or accept chimpanzees as humans . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we now know that at gombe alone , there are nine different ways in which chimpanzees use different objects for different purposes .
moreover , we know that in different parts of africa , wherever chimps have been studied , there are completely different tool-using behaviors .
and because it seems that these patterns are passed from one generation to the next , through observation , imitation and practice - that is a definition of human culture .
what we find is that over these 40-odd years that i and others have been studying chimpanzees and the other great apes , and , as i say , other mammals with complex brains and social systems , we have found that after all , there is n't a sharp line dividing humans from the rest of the animal kingdom .
it 's a very wuzzy line .
it 's getting wuzzier all the time as we find animals doing things that we , in our arrogance , used to think was just human .
the chimps - there 's no time to discuss their fascinating lives - but they have this long childhood , five years of suckling and sleeping with the mother , and then another three , four or five years of emotional dependence on her , even when the next child is born .
the importance of learning in that time , when behavior is flexible - and there 's an awful lot to learn in chimpanzee society .
the long-term affectionate supportive bonds that develop throughout this long childhood with the mother , with the brothers and sisters , and which can last through a lifetime , which may be up to 60 years .
they can actually live longer than 60 in captivity , so we 've only done 40 years in the wild so far .
and we find chimps are capable of true compassion and altruism .
we find in their non-verbal communication - this is very rich - they have a lot of sounds , which they use in different circumstances , but they also use touch , posture , gesture , and what do they do ?
they kiss ; they embrace ; they hold hands .
they pat one another on the back ; they swagger ; they shake their fist - the kind of things that we do , and they do them in the same kind of context .
they have very sophisticated cooperation .
sometimes they hunt - not that often , but when they hunt , they show sophisticated cooperation , and they share the prey .
we find that they show emotions , similar to - maybe sometimes the same - as those that we describe in ourselves as happiness , sadness , fear , despair .
they know mental as well as physical suffering .
and i do n't have time to go into the information that will prove some of these things to you , save to say that there are very bright students , in the best universities , studying emotions in animals , studying personalities in animals .
we know that chimpanzees and some other creatures can recognize themselves in mirrors - " self " as opposed to " other . "
they have a sense of humor , and these are the kind of things which traditionally have been thought of as human prerogatives .
but this teaches us a new respect - and it 's a new respect not only for the chimpanzees , i suggest , but some of the other amazing animals with whom we share this planet .
once we 're prepared to admit that after all , we 're not the only beings with personalities , minds and above all feelings , and then we start to think about ways we use and abuse so many other sentient , sapient creatures on this planet , it really gives cause for deep shame , at least for me .
so , the sad thing is that these chimpanzees - who 've perhaps taught us , more than any other creature , a little humility - are in the wild , disappearing very fast .
they 're disappearing for the reasons that all of you in this room know only too well .
the deforestation , the growth of human populations , needing more land .
they 're disappearing because some timber companies go in with clear-cutting .
they 're disappearing in the heart of their range in africa because the big multinational logging companies have come in and made roads - as they want to do in ecuador and other parts where the forests remain untouched - to take out oil or timber .
and this has led in congo basin , and other parts of the world , to what is known as the bush-meat trade .
this means that although for hundreds , perhaps thousands of years , people have lived in those forests , or whatever habitat it is , in harmony with their world , just killing the animals they need for themselves and their families - now , suddenly , because of the roads , the hunters can go in from the towns .
they shoot everything , every single thing that moves that 's bigger than a small rat ; they sun-dry it or smoke it .
and now they 've got transport ; they take it on the logging trucks or the mining trucks into the towns where they sell it .
and people will pay more for bush-meat , as it 's called , than for domestic meat - it 's culturally preferred .
and it 's not sustainable , and the huge logging camps in the forest are now demanding meat , so the pygmy hunters in the congo basin who 've lived there with their wonderful way of living for so many hundreds of years are now corrupted .
they 're given weapons ; they shoot for the logging camps ; they get money .
their culture is being destroyed , along with the animals upon whom they depend .
so , when the logging camp moves , there 's nothing left .
we talked already about the loss of human cultural diversity , and i 've seen it happening with my own eyes .
and the grim picture in africa - i love africa , and what do we see in africa ?
we see deforestation ; we see the desert spreading ; we see massive hunger ; we see disease and we see population growth in areas where there are more people living on a certain piece of land than the land can possibly support , and they 're too poor to buy food from elsewhere .
were the people that we heard about yesterday , on the easter island , who cut down their last tree - were they stupid ?
did n't they know what was happening ?
of course , but if you 've seen the crippling poverty in some of these parts of the world it is n't a question of " let 's leave the tree for tomorrow . "
" how am i going to feed my family today ?
maybe i can get just a few dollars from this last tree which will keep us going a little bit longer , and then we 'll pray that something will happen to save us from the inevitable end . "
so , this is a pretty grim picture .
the one thing we have , which makes us so different from chimpanzees or other living creatures , is this sophisticated spoken language - a language with which we can tell children about things that are n't here .
we can talk about the distant past , plan for the distant future , discuss ideas with each other , so that the ideas can grow from the accumulated wisdom of a group .
we can do it by talking to each other ; we can do it through video ; we can do it through the written word .
and we are abusing this great power we have to be wise stewards , and we 're destroying the world .
in the developed world , in a way , it 's worse , because we have so much access to knowledge of the stupidity of what we 're doing .
do you know , we 're bringing little babies into a world where , in many places , the water is poisoning them ?
and the air is harming them , and the food that 's grown from the contaminated land is poisoning them .
and that 's not just in the far-away developing world ; that 's everywhere .
do you know we all have about 50 chemicals in our bodies we did n't have about 50 years ago ?
and so many of these diseases , like asthma and certain kinds of cancers , are on the increase around places where our filthy toxic waste is dumped .
we 're harming ourselves around the world , as well as harming the animals , as well as harming nature herself - mother nature , that brought us into being ; mother nature , where i believe we need to spend time , where there 's trees and flowers and birds for our good psychological development .
and yet , there are hundreds and hundreds of children in the developed world who never see nature , because they 're growing up in concrete and all they know is virtual reality , with no opportunity to go and lie in the sun , or in the forest , with the dappled sun-specks coming down from the canopy above .
as i was traveling around the world , you know , i had to leave the forest - that 's where i love to be .
i had to leave these fascinating chimpanzees for my students and field staff to continue studying because , finding they dwindled from about two million 100 years ago to about 150,000 now , i knew i had to leave the forest to do what i could to raise awareness around the world .
and the more i talked about the chimpanzees ' plight , the more i realized the fact that everything 's interconnected , and the problems of the developing world so often stem from the greed of the developed world , and everything was joining together , and making - not sense , hope lies in sense , you said - it 's making a nonsense .
how can we do it ?
somebody said that yesterday .
and as i was traveling around , i kept meeting young people who 'd lost hope .
they were feeling despair , they were feeling , " well , it does n't matter what we do ; eat , drink and be merry , for tomorrow we die .
everything is hopeless - we 're always being told so by the media . "
and then i met some who were angry , and anger that can turn to violence , and we 're all familiar with that .
and i have three little grandchildren , and when some of these students would say to me at high school or university , they 'd say , " we 're angry , " or " we 're filled with despair , because we feel you 've compromised our future , and there 's nothing we can do about it . "
and i looked in the eyes of my little grandchildren , and think how much we 've harmed this planet since i was their age .
i feel this deep shame , and that 's why in 1991 in tanzania , i started a program that 's called roots and shoots .
there 's little brochures all around outside , and if any of you have anything to do with children and care about their future , i beg that you pick up that brochure .
and roots and shoots is a program for hope .
roots make a firm foundation .
shoots seem tiny , but to reach the sun they can break through brick walls .
see the brick walls as all the problems that we 've inflicted on this planet .
then , you see , it is a message of hope .
hundreds and thousands of young people around the world can break through , and can make this a better world .
and the most important message of roots and shoots is that every single individual makes a difference .
every individual has a role to play .
every one of us impacts the world around us everyday , and you scientists know that you ca n't actually - even if you stay in bed all day , you 're breathing oxygen and giving out co2 , and probably going to the loo , and things like that - you 're making a difference in the world .
so , the roots and shoots program involves youth in three kinds of projects .
and these are projects to make the world around them a better place .
one project to show care and concern for your own human community .
one for animals , including domestic animals - and i have to say , i learned everything i know about animal behavior even before i got to gombe and the chimps from my dog , rusty , who was my childhood companion .
and the third kind of project : something for the local environment .
so what the kids do depends first of all , how old are they - and we go now from pre-school right through university .
it 's going to depend whether they 're inner-city or rural .
it 's going to depend if they 're wealthy or impoverished .
it 's going to depend which part , say , of america they 're in .
we 're in every state now , and the problems in florida are different from the problems in new york .
it 's going to depend on which country they 're in - and we 're already in 60-plus countries , with about 5,000 active groups - and there are groups all over the place that i keep hearing about that i 've never even heard of , because the kids are taking the program and spreading it themselves .
why ?
because they 're buying into it , and they 're the ones who get to decide what they 're going to do .
it is n't something that their parents tell them , or their teachers tell them .
that 's effective , but if they decide themselves , " we want to clean this river and put the fish back that used to be there .
we want to clear away the toxic soil from this area and have an organic garden .
we want to go and spend time with the old people and hear their stories and record their oral histories .
we want to go and work in a dog shelter .
we want to learn about animals . we want ... " you know , it goes on and on , and this is very hopeful for me .
as i travel around the world 300 days a year , everywhere there 's a group of roots and shoots of different ages .
everywhere there are children with shining eyes saying , " look at the difference we 've made . "
and now comes the technology into it , because with this new way of communicating electronically these kids can communicate with each other around the world .
and if anyone is interested to help us , we 've got so many ideas but we need help - we need help to create the right kind of system that will help these young people to communicate their excitement .
but also - and this is so important - to communicate their despair , to say , " we 've tried this and it does n't work , and what shall we do ? "
and then , lo and behold , there 's another group answering these kids who may be in america , or maybe this is a group in israel , saying , " yeah , you did it a little bit wrong . this is how you should do it . "
the philosophy is very simple .
we do not believe in violence .
no violence , no bombs , no guns .
that 's not the way to solve problems .
violence leads to violence , at least in my view .
so how do we solve ?
the tools for solving the problems are knowledge and understanding .
know the facts , but see how they fit in the big picture .
hard work and persistence - do n't give up - and love and compassion leading to respect for all life .
how many more minutes ? two , one ?
chris anderson : one - one to two .
jane goodall : two , two , i 'm going to take two .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- are you going to come and drag me off ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- anyway - so basically , roots and shoots is beginning to change young people 's lives .
it 's what i 'm devoting most of my energy to .
and i believe that a group like this can have a very major impact , not just because you can share technology with us , but because so many of you have children .
and if you take this program out , and give it to your children , they have such a good opportunity to go out and do good , because they 've got parents like you .
and it 's been so clear how much you all care about trying to make this world a better place .
it 's very encouraging .
but the kids do ask me - and this wo n't take more than two minutes , i promise - the kids say , " dr. jane , do you really have hope for the future ?
you travel , you see all these horrible things happening . "
firstly , the human brain - i do n't need to say anything about that .
now that we know what the problems are around the world , human brains like yours are rising to solve those problems .
and we 've talked a lot about that .
secondly , the resilience of nature .
we can destroy a river , and we can bring it back to life .
we can see a whole area desolated , and it can be brought back to bloom again , with time or a little help .
and thirdly , the last speaker talked about - or the speaker before last , talked about the indomitable human spirit .
we are surrounded by the most amazing people who do things that seem to be absolutely impossible .
nelson mandela - i take a little piece of limestone from robben island prison , where he labored for 27 years , and came out with so little bitterness , he could lead his people from the horror of apartheid without a bloodbath .
even after the 11th of september - and i was in new york and i felt the fear - nevertheless , there was so much human courage , so much love and so much compassion .
and then as i went around the country after that and felt the fear - the fear that was leading to people feeling they could n't worry about the environment any more , in case they seemed not to be patriotic - and i was trying to encourage them , somebody came up with a little quotation from mahatma gandhi , " if you look back through human history , you see that every evil regime has been overcome by good . "
and just after that a woman brought me this little bell , and i want to end on this note .
she said , " if you 're talking about hope and peace , ring this .
this bell is made from metal from a defused landmine , from the killing fields of pol pot - one of the most evil regimes in human history - where people are now beginning to put their lives back together after the regime has crumbled .
so , yes , there is hope , and where is the hope ?
is it out there with the politicians ?
it 's in our hands .
it 's in your hands and my hands and those of our children .
it 's really up to us .
we 're the ones who can make a difference .
if we lead lives where we consciously leave the lightest possible ecological footprints , if we buy the things that are ethical for us to buy and do n't buy the things that are not , we can change the world overnight .
thank you .
so i am a pediatric cancer doctor and stem-cell researcher at stanford university where my clinical focus has been bone marrow transplantation .
now , inspired by jill bolte taylor last year , i did n't bring a human brain , but i did bring a liter of bone marrow .
and bone marrow is actually what we use to save the lives of tens of thousands of patients , most of whom have advanced malignancies like leukemia and lymphoma and some other diseases .
so , a few years ago , i 'm doing my transplant fellowship at stanford .
i 'm in the operating room . we have bob here , who is a volunteer donor .
we 're sending his marrow across the country to save the life of a child with leukemia .
so actually how do we harvest this bone marrow ?
well we have a whole o.r. team , general anesthesia , nurses , and another doctor across from me .
bob 's on the table , and we take this sort of small needle , you know , not too big .
and the way we do this is we basically place this through the soft tissue , and kind of punch it into the hard bone , into the tuchus - that 's a technical term - and aspirate about 10 mls of bone marrow out , each time , with a syringe .
and hand it off to the nurse . she squirts it into a tin .
hands it back to me . and we do that again and again .
about 200 times usually .
and by the end of this my arm is sore , i 've got a callus on my hand , let alone bob , whose rear end looks something more like this , like swiss cheese .
so i 'm thinking , you know , this procedure has n't changed in about 40 years .
and there is probably a better way to do this .
so i thought of a minimally invasive approach , and a new device that we call the marrow miner .
this is it .
and the marrow miner , the way it works is shown here .
our standard see-through patient .
instead of entering the bone dozens of times , we enter just once , into the front of the hip or the back of the hip .
and we have a flexible , powered catheter with a special wire loop tip that stays inside the crunchy part of the marrow and follows the contours of the hip , as it moves around .
so it enables you to very rapidly aspirate , or suck out , rich bone marrow very quickly through one hole .
we can do multiple passes through that same entry .
no robots required .
and , so , very quickly , bob can just get one puncture , local anesthesia , and do this harvest as an outpatient .
so i did a few prototypes . i got a small little grant at stanford .
and played around with this a little bit .
and our team members developed this technology .
and eventually we got two large animals , and pig studies .
and we found , to our surprise , that we not only got bone marrow out , but we got 10 times the stem cell activity in the marrow from the marrow miner , compared to the normal device .
this device was just fda approved in the last year .
here is a live patient . you can see it following the flexible curves around .
there will be two passes here , in the same patient , from the same hole .
this was done under local anesthesia , as an outpatient .
and we got , again , about three to six times more stem cells than the standard approach done on the same patient .
so why should you care ? bone marrow is a very rich source of adult stem cells .
you all know about embryonic stem cells .
they 've got great potential but have n't yet entered clinical trials .
adult stem cells are throughout our body , including the blood-forming stem cells in our bone marrow , which we 've been using as a form of stem-cell therapy for over 40 years .
in the last decade there 's been an explosion of use of bone marrow stem cells to treat the patient 's other diseases such as heart disease , vascular disease , orthopedics , tissue engineering , even in neurology to treat parkinson 's and diabetes .
we 've just come out , we 're commercializing , this year , generation 2.0 of the marrow miner .
the hope is that this gets more stem cells out , which translates to better outcomes .
it may encourage more people to sign up to be potential live-saving bone marrow donors .
it may even enable you to bank your own marrow stem cells , when you 're younger and healthier , to use in the future should you need it .
and ultimately - and here 's a picture of our bone marrow transplant survivors , who come together for a reunion each year at stanford .
hopefully this technology will let us have more of these survivors in the future .
thanks .
-lrb- applause -rrb- good morning . so magic is an excellent way for staying ahead of the reality curve , to make possible today what science will make a reality tomorrow .
as a cyber-magician , i combine elements of illusion and science to give us a feel of how future technologies might be experienced .
you 've probably all heard of google 's project glass .
it 's new technology . you look through them and the world you see is augmented with data : names of places , monuments , buildings , maybe one day even the names of the strangers that pass you on the street .
so these are my illusion glasses .
they 're a little bigger . they 're a prototype .
and when you look through them , you get a glimpse into the mind of the cyber-illusionist .
let me show you what i mean .
all we need is a playing card . any card will do .
like this . and let me mark it so we can recognize it when we see it again .
all right . very significant mark .
and let 's put it back into the deck , somewhere in the middle , and let 's get started .
-lrb- music -rrb- voice : system ready . acquiring image .
marco tempest : for those of you who do n't play cards , a deck of cards is made up of four different suits : hearts , clubs , diamonds and spades .
the cards are amongst the oldest of symbols , and have been interpreted in many different ways .
now , some say that the four suits represent the four seasons .
winter is like magic . it 's a time of change , when warmth turns to cold , water turns to snow , and then it all disappears .
there are 13 cards in each suit . -lrb- music -rrb- voice : each card represents a phase of the 13 lunar cycles .
mt : so over here is low tide , and over here is high tide , and in the middle is the moon .
voice : the moon is one of the most potent symbols of magic .
mt : there are two colors in a deck of cards .
there is the color red and the color black , representing the constant change from day to night .
voice : marco , i did not know you could do that . -lrb- laughter -rrb- mt : and is it a coincidence that there are 52 cards in a deck of cards , just as there are 52 weeks in a year ?
-lrb- music -rrb- voice : if you total all the spots on a deck of cards , the result is 365 .
mt : oh , 365 , the number of days in a year , the number of days between each birthday .
make a wish . -lrb- blowing noise -rrb- voice : do n't tell , or it wo n't come true .
mt : well , as a matter of fact , it was on my sixth birthday that i received my first deck of cards , and ever since that day , i have traveled around the world performing magic for boys and girls , men and women , husbands and wives , even kings and queens . -lrb- applause -rrb- voice : and who are these ? mt : ah , mischief-makers . watch .
wake up .
joker : whoa.mt : are you ready for your party piece ?
joker : ready ! mt : let me see what you 've got .
joker : presenting my pogo stick.mt : ah . watch out .
joker : whoa , whoa , whoa , oh ! -lrb- music -rrb- mt : but today , i am performing for a different kind of audience .
i 'm performing for you .
voice : signed card detected.mt : well , sometimes people ask me how do you become a magician ? is it a 9-to-5 job ?
of course not ! you 've got to practice 24/7 .
i do n't literally mean 24 hours , seven days a week .
24/7 is a little bit of an exaggeration , but it does take practice . now , some people will say , well , magic , that must be the work of some evil supernatural force . -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- whoa .
well , to this , i just say , no no .
actually , in german , it 's nein nein . -lrb- laughter -rrb- magic is n't that intense . i have to warn you , though , if you ever play with someone who deals cards like this , do n't play for money .
-lrb- music -rrb- voice : why not ? that 's a very good hand .
the odds of getting it are 4,165 to one .
mt : yeah , but i guess my hand is better . we beat the odds .
voice : i think you got your birthday wish.mt : and that actually leaves me with the last , and most important card of all : the one with this very significant mark on it .
and unlike anything else we 've just seen , virtual or not.voice : signed card detected .
digital mt : this is without a question the real thing .
mt : bye bye . -lrb- music -rrb- thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you very much . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- to most of you , this is a device to buy , sell , play games , watch videos .
i think it might be a lifeline .
i think actually it might be able to save more lives than penicillin .
texting : i know i say texting and a lot of you think sexting , a lot of you think about the lewd photos that you see - hopefully not your kids sending to somebody else - or trying to translate the abbreviations lol , lmao , hmu .
i can help you with those later .
but the parents in the room know that texting is actually the best way to communicate with your kids .
it might be the only way to communicate with your kids .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the average teenager sends 3,339 text messages a month , unless she 's a girl , then it 's closer to 4,000 .
and the secret is she opens every single one .
texting has a 100 percent open rate .
now the parents are really alarmed .
it 's a 100 percent open rate even if she does n't respond to you when you ask her when she 's coming home for dinner .
i promise she read that text .
and this is n't some suburban iphone-using teen phenomenon .
texting actually overindexes for minority and urban youth .
i know this because at dosomething.org , which is the largest organization for teenagers and social change in america , about six months ago we pivoted and started focusing on text messaging .
we 're now texting out to about 200,000 kids a week about doing our campaigns to make their schools more green or to work on homeless issues and things like that .
we 're finding it 11 times more powerful than email .
we 've also found an unintended consequence .
we 've been getting text messages back like these .
" i do n't want to go to school today .
the boys call me faggot . "
" i was cutting , my parents found out , and so i stopped .
but i just started again an hour ago . "
or , " he wo n't stop raping me .
he told me not to tell anyone .
it 's my dad . are you there ? "
that last one 's an actual text message that we received .
and yeah , we 're there .
i will not forget the day we got that text message .
and so it was that day that we decided we needed to build a crisis text hotline .
because this is n't what we do .
we do social change .
kids are just sending us these text messages because texting is so familiar and comfortable to them and there 's nowhere else to turn that they 're sending them to us .
so think about it , a text hotline ; it 's pretty powerful .
it 's fast , it 's pretty private .
no one hears you in a stall , you 're just texting quietly .
it 's real time .
we can help millions of teens with counseling and referrals .
that 's great .
but the thing that really makes this awesome is the data .
because i 'm not really comfortable just helping that girl with counseling and referrals .
i want to prevent this shit from happening .
so think about a cop .
there 's something in new york city .
the police did it . it used to be just guess work , police work .
and then they started crime mapping .
and so they started following and watching petty thefts , summonses , all kinds of things - charting the future essentially .
and they found things like , when you see crystal meth on the street , if you add police presence , you can curb the otherwise inevitable spate of assaults and robberies that would happen .
in fact , the year after the nypd put compstat in place , the murder rate fell 60 percent .
so think about the data from a crisis text line .
there is no census on bullying and dating abuse and eating disorders and cutting and rape - no census .
maybe there 's some studies , some longitudinal studies , that cost lots of money and took lots of time .
or maybe there 's some anecdotal evidence .
imagine having real time data on every one of those issues .
you could inform legislation .
you could inform school policy .
you could say to a principal , " you 're having a problem every thursday at three o 'clock .
what 's going on in your school ? "
you could see the immediate impact of legislation or a hateful speech that somebody gives in a school assembly and see what happens as a result .
this is really , to me , the power of texting and the power of data .
because while people are talking about data , making it possible for facebook to mine my friend from the third grade , or target to know when it 's time for me to buy more diapers , or some dude to build a better baseball team , i 'm actually really excited about the power of data and the power of texting to help that kid go to school , to help that girl stop cutting in the bathroom and absolutely to help that girl whose father 's raping her .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so , when i was in art school , i developed a shake in my hand , and this was the straightest line i could draw .
now in hindsight , it was actually good for some things , like mixing a can of paint or shaking a polaroid , but at the time this was really doomsday .
this was the destruction of my dream of becoming an artist .
the shake developed out of , really , a single-minded pursuit of pointillism , just years of making tiny , tiny dots .
and eventually these dots went from being perfectly round to looking more like tadpoles , because of the shake .
so to compensate , i 'd hold the pen tighter , and this progressively made the shake worse , so i 'd hold the pen tighter still .
and this became a vicious cycle that ended up causing so much pain and joint issues , i had trouble holding anything .
and after spending all my life wanting to do art , i left art school , and then i left art completely .
but after a few years , i just could n't stay away from art , and i decided to go to a neurologist about the shake and discovered i had permanent nerve damage .
and he actually took one look at my squiggly line , and said , " well , why do n't you just embrace the shake ? "
so i did . i went home , i grabbed a pencil , and i just started letting my hand shake and shake .
i was making all these scribble pictures .
and even though it was n't the kind of art that i was ultimately passionate about , it felt great .
and more importantly , once i embraced the shake , i realized i could still make art .
i just had to find a different approach to making the art that i wanted .
now , i still enjoyed the fragmentation of pointillism , seeing these little tiny dots come together to make this unified whole .
so i began experimenting with other ways to fragment images where the shake would n't affect the work , like dipping my feet in paint and walking on a canvas , or , in a 3d structure consisting of two-by-fours , creating a 2d image by burning it with a blowtorch .
i discovered that , if i worked on a larger scale and with bigger materials , my hand really would n't hurt , and after having gone from a single approach to art , i ended up having an approach to creativity that completely changed my artistic horizons .
this was the first time i 'd encountered this idea that embracing a limitation could actually drive creativity .
at the time , i was finishing up school , and i was so excited to get a real job and finally afford new art supplies .
i had this horrible little set of tools , and i felt like i could do so much more with the supplies i thought an artist was supposed to have .
i actually did n't even have a regular pair of scissors .
i was using these metal shears until i stole a pair from the office that i worked at .
so i got out of school , i got a job , i got a paycheck , i got myself to the art store , and i just went nuts buying supplies .
and then when i got home , i sat down and i set myself to task to really try to create something just completely outside of the box .
but i sat there for hours , and nothing came to mind .
the same thing the next day , and then the next , quickly slipping into a creative slump .
and i was in a dark place for a long time , unable to create .
and it did n't make any sense , because i was finally able to support my art , and yet i was creatively blank .
but as i searched around in the darkness , i realized i was actually paralyzed by all of the choices that i never had before .
and it was then that i thought back to my jittery hands .
embrace the shake .
and i realized , if i ever wanted my creativity back , i had to quit trying so hard to think outside of the box and get back into it .
i wondered , could you become more creative , then , by looking for limitations ?
what if i could only create with a dollar 's worth of supplies ?
at this point , i was spending a lot of my evenings in - well , i guess i still spend a lot of my evenings in starbucks - but i know you can ask for an extra cup if you want one , so i decided to ask for 50 .
surprisingly , they just handed them right over , and then with some pencils i already had , i made this project for only 80 cents .
it really became a moment of clarification for me that we need to first be limited in order to become limitless .
i took this approach of thinking inside the box to my canvas , and wondered what if , instead of painting on a canvas , i could only paint on my chest ?
so i painted 30 images , one layer at a time , one on top of another , with each picture representing an influence in my life .
or what if , instead of painting with a brush , i could only paint with karate chops ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- so i 'd dip my hands in paint , and i just attacked the canvas , and i actually hit so hard that i bruised a joint in my pinkie and it was stuck straight for a couple of weeks .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- or , what if instead of relying on myself , i had to rely on other people to create the content for the art ?
so for six days , i lived in front of a webcam .
i slept on the floor and i ate takeout , and i asked people to call me and share a story with me about a life-changing moment .
their stories became the art as i wrote them onto the revolving canvas .
-lrb- applause -rrb- or what if instead of making art to display , i had to destroy it ?
this seemed like the ultimate limitation , being an artist without art .
this destruction idea turned into a yearlong project that i called goodbye art , where each and every piece of art had to be destroyed after its creation .
in the beginning of goodbye art , i focused on forced destruction , like this image of jimi hendrix , made with over 7,000 matches .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- then i opened it up to creating art that was destroyed naturally .
i looked for temporary materials , like spitting out food - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - sidewalk chalk and even frozen wine .
the last iteration of destruction was to try to produce something that did n't actually exist in the first place .
so i organized candles on a table , i lit them , and then blew them out , then repeated this process over and over with the same set of candles , then assembled the videos into the larger image .
so the end image was never visible as a physical whole .
it was destroyed before it ever existed .
in the course of this goodbye art series , i created 23 different pieces with nothing left to physically display .
what i thought would be the ultimate limitation actually turned out to be the ultimate liberation , as each time i created , the destruction brought me back to a neutral place where i felt refreshed and ready to start the next project .
it did not happen overnight .
there were times when my projects failed to get off the ground , or , even worse , after spending tons of time on them the end image was kind of embarrassing .
but having committed to the process , i continued on , and something really surprising came out of this .
as i destroyed each project , i was learning to let go , let go of outcomes , let go of failures , and let go of imperfections .
and in return , i found a process of creating art that 's perpetual and unencumbered by results .
i found myself in a state of constant creation , thinking only of what 's next and coming up with more ideas than ever .
when i think back to my three years away from art , away from my dream , just going through the motions , instead of trying to find a different way to continue that dream , i just quit , i gave up .
and what if i did n't embrace the shake ?
because embracing the shake for me was n't just about art and having art skills .
it turned out to be about life , and having life skills .
because ultimately , most of what we do takes place here , inside the box , with limited resources .
learning to be creative within the confines of our limitations is the best hope we have to transform ourselves and , collectively , transform our world .
looking at limitations as a source of creativity changed the course of my life .
now , when i run into a barrier or i find myself creatively stumped , i sometimes still struggle , but i continue to show up for the process and try to remind myself of the possibilities , like using hundreds of real , live worms to make an image , using a pushpin to tattoo a banana , or painting a picture with hamburger grease .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- one of my most recent endeavors is to try to translate the habits of creativity that i 've learned into something others can replicate .
limitations may be the most unlikely of places to harness creativity , but perhaps one of the best ways to get ourselves out of ruts , rethink categories and challenge accepted norms .
and instead of telling each other to seize the day , maybe we can remind ourselves every day to seize the limitation .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this is a sculpture i made , which is a way of , kind of , freeing a form into an object that has different degrees of freedom .
so , it can balance on a point .
this is a bronze ball , an aluminum arm here , and then this wooden disk .
and the wooden disk was really thought about as something that you 'd want to hold on to , and that would glide easily through your hands .
the aluminum is because it 's very light .
the bronze is nice hard , durable material that could roll on the ground .
inside of the bronze ball there 's a lead weight that is free-swinging on an axle that 's on two bearings that pass in between , across it , like this , that counterbalance this weight .
so it allows it to roll .
and the sphere has that balance property that it always sort of stays still and looks the same from every direction .
but if you put something on top of it , it disbalances it . and so it would tip over .
but in this case because the interior is free-swinging in relation to the sphere , it can stand up on one point .
and then there was a second level to this object , which is that it - i wanted it to convey some proportions that i was interested in , which is the diameter of the moon and the diameter of the earth in proportion to each other .
i was exploring , really early on , wanting to make things float in the air .
and i thought up a lot of ideas .
this is sculpture that i made that - it 's magnetically levitated .
the thing is , is that it 's slightly dangerous .
normally it 's sort of cordoned off when it 's in a museum .
but it 's uh - let 's see if i can manipulate it a little bit without , um - oops .
so this is just floating , floating on a permanent magnetic field , which stabilizes it in all directions .
except there is a slight tether here , which keeps it from going over the top of its field .
it 's sort of surfing on a magnetic field at the crest of a wave .
and that 's what supports the object and keeps it stable .
i think we could roll the tape , admin .
i have a sort of a collection of videos that i took of different installations , which i could narrate .
this is a sculpture of the sun and the earth , in proportion .
representing that eight and a half minutes that it takes light and gravity to connect the two .
so here is the earth . it 's a little less than a millimeter that was turned of solid bronze .
and here is a similar sculpture .
that 's the sun at that end .
and then in a series of 55 balls , it reduces , proportionately - each ball and the spaces between them reduce proportionately , until they get down to this little earth .
this is in a sculpture park in taejon .
this one is about the moon and then the distance to the earth , in proportion also .
this is a little stone ball , floating .
as you can see the little tether , that it 's also magnetically levitated .
and then this is the first part of - this is 109 spheres , since the sun is 109 times the diameter of the earth .
and so this is the size of the sun .
and then each of these little spheres is the size of the earth in proportion to the sun .
it 's made up of 16 concentric shells . each one has 92 spheres .
this is in the courtyard of a twelfth-century alchemist .
i was thinking that the sun is kind of the ultimate alchemist . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so this , again , is on the subject - a slice from the equator of the earth .
and then the moon in the center , and it 's floating . and this is in france .
this is in sapporo .
it 's balancing on a shaft and a ball , right at the center of gravity , or just slightly above the center of gravity , which means that the lower half of the object is just a little bit more weighty .
so you can see it rotating here .
it weighs about a ton or over a ton .
it 's made of stainless steel , quite thick .
but it 's being balanced like that in equilibrium .
it 's susceptible to motion by the air currents .
this is another species of work that i do .
these are these arrays . these spheres are all suspended , but they have magnets horizontally in them that make them all like compasses .
so all the red sides , for example , face one direction : south .
and the blue side , the compliment , faces the other way .
so as you turn around you 're seeing different colors .
this is based on the structure of a diamond .
it was a diamond cell structure was the point of departure .
and then there were kind of large spaces in the hollows between the atoms .
and so i placed one more element of each one of them .
these were white spheres .
then i had video projectors that were projecting intermittently onto the spheres .
so they would catch parts of the images , and make sort of three-dimensional color volumes , as you walk through it , through the object .
this is something i did of a tactile communication system .
it was the idea of isolating the tactile component of sculpture , and then putting it into a communication system .
this is an idea of moving a sculpture , a ball , that would be directed around the room by a computer .
this is a clock i designed .
it has buckminster fuller 's dymaxion map edited here .
it turns once per day in synchrony with the earth .
and then , this is like projects that are harder to build .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this has a diamond-bottomed lake .
so it 's a floating island with water , fresh water , that can fly from place to place .
this would be grown , i suppose , with nanotechnology in the future sometime .
in the course of doing my work i sort of have a broad range of interests .
and some of it is just the idea of creating media - media as a sculpture , something that would keep the sculpture fresh and ever-changing , by just creating the media that the sculpture is made of .
and i had a lot of - always interested in the concept of a crystal ball .
and the idea that you could see things inside of a crystal ball and predict the future - or a television set , where it 's sort of like a magic box where anything can appear .
i had thought about , a long time ago , in the late ' 60s - when i was just starting out , i was under the influence of thinking about buckminster fuller 's grand project for an electric globe across from the united nations - and other things that were happening , the space program at that time , and whole earth catalog , things like that .
i was thinking about mass produced spherical television sets that could be linked to orbiting camera satellites .
so if we could roll the next film here .
this has evolved over the years in a lot of different iterations .
but this the current version of it , is a flying airship that is about 35 meters in diameter , about 110 feet in diameter .
the whole surface of it is covered with 60 million diodes , red , blue , and green , that allow you to have a high-resolution picture , visible in daylight .
i came with a plan .
i brought it to paul maccready 's company aerovironment to do a feasibility study , and they analyzed it , and came up with a lot of innovative ideas about how to propel it .
so we have a physical plan of how to make this actually happen .
this is the control room inside of the ship .
the idea of this air genie is , it 's something that can just transform and become anything .
it 's like a traveling show .
it has speakers on it . and it has cameras over the surface of it .
so it can see its environment , and then it can mimic its environment and disappear .
here the legs are retracting .
the cabin is open or closed , as you like .
it weighs about 20 tons .
it has on-board generators .
it can generate about a million kilowatts , in order to be bright enough to be visible in daylight .
the idea of it is to make a kind of a traveling show .
it really would be dedicated to the arts and to interacting .
there would be on board a crew of artists , musicians , that would allow the thing to become actually kind of a conscious object that would respond to the moment , and to interact as an entity that was aware , that could communicate .
it 's completely silent and nonpolluting .
it has electric motors with a novel propulsion system .
it could be interacted with large crowds in different ways .
primarily i would be interested in how it would interact with , say , going to a college campus , and then being used as a way of talking about the earth sciences , the world , the situation of the globe .
the default image on the object would probably be a high-resolution earth image .
but then one could interact with that and show plate tectonics or global warming issues , or migrations - all of the things that we 're concerned with today .
and then at night the idea is that it would be used as kind of a rave situation , where the people could cut loose , and the music and the lights , and everything .
so it could land in a park , for example .
or this could represent a college green .
and then it would have a corresponding website that would show the itinerary of this .
and so interacting with the same kind of imagery .
it would also be able to be an open code , so people could interact with it .
it would be forum for people 's ideas about what they would like to see on a giant screen of this type .
so that 's pretty much it .
okay . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- when i go to parties , it does n't usually take very long for people to find out that i 'm a scientist and i study sex .
and then i get asked questions .
and the questions usually have a very particular format .
they start with the phrase , " a friend told me , " and then they end with the phrase , " is this true ? "
and most of the time i 'm glad to say that i can answer them , but sometimes i have to say , " i 'm really sorry , but i do n't know because i 'm not that kind of a doctor . "
that is , i 'm not a clinician , i 'm a comparative biologist who studies anatomy .
and my job is to look at lots of different species of animals and try to figure out how their tissues and organs work when everything 's going right , rather than trying to figure out how to fix things when they go wrong , like so many of you .
and what i do is i look for similarities and differences in the solutions that they 've evolved for fundamental biological problems .
so today i 'm here to argue that this is not at all an esoteric ivory tower activity that we find at our universities , but that broad study across species , tissue types and organ systems can produce insights that have direct implications for human health .
and this is true both of my recent project on sex differences in the brain , and my more mature work on the anatomy and function of penises .
and now you know why i 'm fun at parties .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so today i 'm going to give you an example drawn from my penis study to show you how knowledge drawn from studies of one organ system provided insights into a very different one .
now i 'm sure as everyone in the audience already knows - i did have to explain it to my nine-year-old late last week - penises are structures that transfer sperm from one individual to another .
and the slide behind me barely scratches the surface of how widespread they are in animals .
there 's an enormous amount of anatomical variation .
you find muscular tubes , modified legs , modified fins , as well as the mammalian fleshy , inflatable cylinder that we 're all familiar with - or at least half of you are .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i think we see this tremendous variation because it 's a really effective solution to a very basic biological problem , and that is getting sperm in a position to meet up with eggs and form zygotes .
now the penis is n't actually required for internal fertiliztion , but when internal fertilization evolves , penises often follow .
and the question i get when i start talking about this most often is , " what made you interested in this subject ? "
and the answer is skeletons .
you would n't think that skeletons and penises have very much to do with one another .
and that 's because we tend to think of skeletons as stiff lever systems that produce speed or power .
and my first forays into biological research , doing dinosaur paleontology as an undergraduate , were really squarely in that realm .
but when i went to graduate school to study biomechanics , i really wanted to find a dissertation project that would expand our knowledge of skeletal function .
i tried a bunch of different stuff .
a lot of it did n't pan out .
but then one day i started thinking about the mammalian penis .
and it 's really an odd sort of structure .
before it can be used for internal fertilization , its mechanical behavior has to change in a really dramatic fashion .
most of the time it 's a flexible organ .
it 's easy to bend .
but before it 's brought into use during copulation it has to become rigid , it has to become difficult to bend .
and moreover , it has to work .
a reproductive system that fails to function produces an individual that has no offspring , and that individual is then kicked out of the gene pool .
and so i thought , " here 's a problem that just cries out for a skeletal system - not one like this one , but one like this one - because , functionally , a skeleton is any system that supports tissue and transmits forces .
and i already knew that animals like this earthworm , indeed most animals , do n't support their tissues by draping them over bones .
instead they 're more like reinforced water balloons .
they use a skeleton that we call a hydrostatic skeleton .
and a hydrostatic skeleton uses two elements .
the skeletal support comes from an interaction between a pressurized fluid and a surrounding wall of tissue that 's held in tension and reinforced with fibrous proteins .
and the interaction is crucial .
without both elements you have no support .
if you have fluid with no wall to surround it and keep pressure up , you have a puddle .
and if you have just the wall with no fluid inside of it to put the wall in tension , you 've got a little wet rag .
when you look at a penis in cross section , it has a lot of the hallmarks of a hydrostatic skeleton .
it has a central space of spongy erectile tissue that fills with fluid - in this case blood - surrounded by a wall of tissue that 's rich in a stiff structural protein called collagen .
but at the time when i started this project , the best explanation i could find for penal erection was that the wall surrounded these spongy tissues , and the spongy tissues filled with blood and pressure rose and voila ! it became erect .
and that explained to me expansion - made sense : more fluid , you get tissues that expand - but it did n't actually explain erection .
because there was no mechanism in this explanation for making this structure hard to bend .
and no one had systematically looked at the wall tissue .
so i thought , wall tissue 's important in skeletons .
it has to be part of the explanation .
and this was the point at which my graduate adviser said , " whoa ! hold on . slow down . "
because after about six months of me talking about this , i think he finally figured out that i was really serious about the penis thing .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so he sat me down , and he warned me .
he was like , " be careful going down this path .
i 'm not sure this project 's going to pan out . "
because he was afraid i was walking into a trap .
i was taking on a socially embarrassing question with an answer that he thought might not be particularly interesting .
and that was because every hydrostatic skeleton that we had found in nature up to that point had the same basic elements .
it had the central fluid , it had the surrounding wall , and the reinforcing fibers in the wall were arranged in crossed helices around the long axis of the skeleton .
so the image behind me shows a piece of tissue in one of these cross helical skeletons cut so that you 're looking at the surface of the wall .
the arrow shows you the long axis .
and you can see two layers of fibers , one in blue and one in yellow , arranged in left-handed and right-handed angles .
and if you were n't just looking at a little section of the fibers , those fibers would be going in helices around the long axis of the skeleton - something like a chinese finger trap , where you stick your fingers in and they get stuck .
and these skeletons have a particular set of behaviors , which i 'm going to demonstrate in a film .
it 's a model skeleton that i made out of a piece of cloth that i wrapped around an inflated balloon .
the cloth 's cut on the bias .
so you can see that the fibers wrap in helices , and those fibers can reorient as the skeleton moves , which means the skeleton 's flexible .
it lengthens , shortens and bends really easily in response to internal or external forces .
now my adviser 's concern was what if the penile wall tissue is just the same as any other hydrostatic skeleton .
what are you going to contribute ?
what new thing are you contributing to our knowledge of biology ?
and i thought , " yeah , he does have a really good point here . "
so i spent a long , long time thinking about it .
and one thing kept bothering me , and that 's , when they 're functioning , penises do n't wiggle .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so something interesting had to be going on .
so i went ahead , collected wall tissue , prepared it so it was erect , sectioned it , put it on slides and then stuck it under the microscope to have a look , fully expecting to see crossed helices of collagen of some variety .
but instead i saw this .
there 's an outer layer and an inner layer .
the arrow shows you the long axis of the skeleton .
i was really surprised at this .
everyone i showed it was really surprised at this .
why was everyone surprised at this ?
that 's because we knew theoretically that there was another way of arranging fibers in a hydrostatic skeleton , and that was with fibers at zero degrees and 90 degrees to the long axis of the structure .
the thing is , no one had ever seen it before in nature .
and now i was looking at one .
those fibers in that particular orientation give the skeleton a very , very different behavior .
i 'm going to show a model made out of exactly the same materials .
so it 'll be made of the same cotton cloth , same balloon , same internal pressure .
but the only difference is that the fibers are arranged differently .
and you 'll see that , unlike the cross helical model , this model resists extension and contraction and resists bending .
now what that tells us is that wall tissues are doing so much more than just covering the vascular tissues .
they 're an integral part of the penile skeleton .
if the wall around the erectile tissue was n't there , if it was n't reinforced in this way , the shape would change , but the inflated penis would not resist bending , and erection simply would n't work .
it 's an observation with obvious medical applications in humans as well , but it 's also relevant in a broad sense , i think , to the design of prosthetics , soft robots , basically anything where changes of shape and stiffness are important .
so to sum up : twenty years ago , i had a college adviser tell me , when i went to the college and said , " i 'm kind of interested in anatomy , " they said , " anatomy 's a dead science . "
he could n't have been more wrong .
i really believe that we still have a lot to learn about the normal structure and function of our bodies .
not just about its genetics and molecular biology , but up here in the meat end of the scale .
we 've got limits on our time .
we often focus on one disease , one model , one problem , but my experience suggests that we should take the time to apply ideas broadly between systems and just see where it takes us .
after all , if ideas about invertebrate skeletons can give us insights about mammalian reproductive systems , there could be lots of other wild and productive connections lurking out there just waiting to be found .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- what you have here is an electronic cigarette .
it 's something that 's , since it was invented a year or two ago , has given me untold happiness .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- a little bit of it , i think , is the nicotine , but there 's something much bigger than that .
which is ever since , in the u.k. , they banned smoking in public places , i 've never enjoyed a drinks party ever again .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and the reason , i only worked out just the other day , which is when you go to a drinks party and you stand up and you hold a glass of red wine and you talk endlessly to people , you do n't actually want to spend all the time talking .
it 's really , really tiring .
sometimes you just want to stand there silently , alone with your thoughts .
sometimes you just want to stand in the corner and stare out of the window .
now the problem is , when you ca n't smoke , if you stand and stare out of the window on your own , you 're an antisocial , friendless idiot .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- if you stand and stare out of the window on your own with a cigarette , you 're a fucking philosopher .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so the power of reframing things can not be overstated .
what we have is exactly the same thing , the same activity , but one of them makes you feel great and the other one , with just a small change of posture , makes you feel terrible .
and i think one of the problems with classical economics is it 's absolutely preoccupied with reality .
and reality is n't a particularly good guide to human happiness .
why , for example , are pensioners much happier than the young unemployed ?
both of them , after all , are in exactly the same stage of life .
you both have too much time on your hands and not much money .
but pensioners are reportedly very , very happy , whereas the unemployed are extraordinarily unhappy and depressed .
the reason , i think , is that the pensioners believe they 've chosen to be pensioners , whereas the young unemployed feel it 's been thrust upon them .
in england the upper middle classes have actually solved this problem perfectly , because they 've re-branded unemployment .
if you 're an upper-middle-class english person , you call unemployment " a year off . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and that 's because having a son who 's unemployed in manchester is really quite embarrassing , but having a son who 's unemployed in thailand is really viewed as quite an accomplishment .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but actually the power to re-brand things - to understand that actually our experiences , costs , things do n't actually much depend on what they really are , but on how we view them - i genuinely think ca n't be overstated .
there 's an experiment i think daniel pink refers to where you put two dogs in a box and the box has an electric floor .
every now and then an electric shock is applied to the floor , which pains the dogs .
the only difference is one of the dogs has a small button in its half of the box .
and when it nuzzles the button , the electric shock stops .
the other dog does n't have the button .
it 's exposed to exactly the same level of pain as the dog in the first box , but it has no control over the circumstances .
generally the first dog can be relatively content .
the second dog lapses into complete depression .
the circumstances of our lives may actually matter less to our happiness than the sense of control we feel over our lives .
it 's an interesting question .
we ask the question - the whole debate in the western world is about the level of taxation .
but i think there 's another debate to be asked , which is the level of control we have over our tax money .
that what costs us 10 pounds in one context can be a curse .
what costs us 10 pounds in a different context we may actually welcome .
you know , pay 20,000 pounds in tax toward health and you 're merely feeling a mug .
pay 20,000 pounds to endow a hospital ward and you 're called a philanthropist .
i 'm probably in the wrong country to talk about willingness to pay tax .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i 'll give you one in return . how you frame things really matters .
do you call it the bailout of greece or the bailout of a load of stupid banks which lent to greece ?
because they are actually the same thing .
what you call them actually affects how you react to them , viscerally and morally .
i think psychological value is great to be absolutely honest .
one of my great friends , a professor called nick chater , who 's the professor of decision sciences in london , believes that we should spend far less time looking into humanity 's hidden depths and spend much more time exploring the hidden shallows .
i think that 's true actually .
i think impressions have an insane effect on what we think and what we do .
but what we do n't have is a really good model of human psychology .
at least pre-kahneman perhaps , we did n't have a really good model of human psychology to put alongside models of engineering , of neoclassical economics .
so people who believed in psychological solutions did n't have a model .
we did n't have a framework .
this is what warren buffett 's business partner charlie munger calls " a latticework on which to hang your ideas . "
engineers , economists , classical economists all had a very , very robust existing latticework on which practically every idea could be hung .
we merely have a collection of random individual insights without an overall model .
and what that means is that in looking at solutions , we 've probably given too much priority to what i call technical engineering solutions , newtonian solutions , and not nearly enough to the psychological ones .
you know my example of the eurostar .
six million pounds spent to reduce the journey time between paris and london by about 40 minutes .
for 0.01 percent of this money you could have put wifi on the trains , which would n't have reduced the duration of the journey , but would have improved its enjoyment and its usefullness far more .
for maybe 10 percent of the money , you could have paid all of the world 's top male and female supermodels to walk up and down the train handing out free chateau petrus to all the passengers .
you 'd still have five -lsb- million -rsb- pounds in change , and people would ask for the trains to be slowed down .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- why were we not given the chance to solve that problem psychologically ?
i think it 's because there 's an imbalance , an asymmetry , in the way we treat creative , emotionally-driven psychological ideas versus the way we treat rational , numerical , spreadsheet-driven ideas .
if you 're a creative person , i think quite rightly , you have to share all your ideas for approval with people much more rational than you .
you have to go in and you have to have a cost-benefit analysis , a feasibility study , an roi study and so forth .
and i think that 's probably right .
but this does not apply the other way around .
people who have an existing framework , an economic framework , an engineering framework , feel that actually logic is its own answer .
what they do n't say is , " well the numbers all seem to add up , but before i present this idea , i 'll go and show it to some really crazy people to see if they can come up with something better . "
and so we , artificially i think , prioritize what i 'd call mechanistic ideas over psychological ideas .
an example of a great psychological idea : the single best improvement in passenger satisfaction on the london underground per pound spent came when they did n't add any extra trains nor change the frequency of the trains , they put dot matrix display board on the platforms .
because the nature of a wait is not just dependent on its numerical quality , its duration , but on the level of uncertainty you experience during that wait .
waiting seven minutes for a train with a countdown clock is less frustrating and irritating than waiting four minutes , knuckle-biting going , " when 's this train going to damn well arrive ? "
here 's a beautiful example of a psychological solution deployed in korea .
red traffic lights have a countdown delay .
it 's proven to reduce the accident rate in experiments .
why ? because road rage , impatience and general irritation are massively reduced when you can actually see the time you have to wait .
in china , not really understanding the principle behind this , they applied the same principle to green traffic lights .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- which is n't a great idea .
you 're 200 yards away , you realize you 've got five seconds to go , you floor it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the koreans , very assiduously , did test both .
the accident rate goes down when you apply this to red traffic lights ; it goes up when you apply it to green traffic lights .
this is all i 'm asking for really in human decision making , is the consideration of these three things .
i 'm not asking for the complete primacy of one over the other .
i 'm merely saying that when you solve problems , you should look at all three of these equally and you should seek as far as possible to find solutions which sit in the sweet spot in the middle .
if you actually look at a great business , you 'll nearly always see all of these three things coming into play .
really , really successful businesses - google is great , great technological success , but it 's also based on a very good psychological insight : people believe something that only does one thing is better at that thing than something that does that thing and something else .
it 's an innate thing called goal dilution .
ayelet fishbach has written a paper about this .
everybody else at the time of google , more or less , was trying to be a portal .
yes , there 's a search function , but you also have weather , sports scores , bits of news .
google understood that if you 're just a search engine , people assume you 're a very , very good search engine .
all of you know this actually from when you go in to buy a television .
and in the shabbier end of the row of flat screen tvs you can see are these rather despised things called combined tv and dvd players .
and we have no knowledge whatsoever of the quality of those things , but we look at a combined tv and dvd player and we go , " uck .
it 's probably a bit of a crap telly and a bit rubbish as a dvd player . "
so we walk out of the shops with one of each .
google is as much a psychological success as it is a technological one .
i propose that we can use psychology to solve problems that we did n't even realize were problems at all .
this is my suggestion for getting people to finish their course of antibiotics .
do n't give them 24 white pills .
give them 18 white pills and six blue ones and tell them to take the white pills first and then take the blue ones .
it 's called chunking .
the likelihood that people will get to the end is much greater when there is a milestone somewhere in the middle .
one of the great mistakes , i think , of economics is it fails to understand that what something is , whether it 's retirement , unemployment , cost , is a function , not only of its amount , but also its meaning .
this is a toll crossing in britain .
quite often queues happen at the tolls .
sometimes you get very , very severe queues .
you could apply the same principle actually , if you like , to the security lanes in airports .
what would happen if you could actually pay twice as much money to cross the bridge , but go through a lane that 's an express lane ?
it 's not an unreasonable thing to do . it 's an economically efficient thing to do .
time means more to some people than others .
if you 're waiting trying to get to a job interview , you 'd patently pay a couple of pounds more to go through the fast lane .
if you 're on the way to visit your mother in-law , you 'd probably prefer to stay on the left .
the only problem is if you introduce this economically efficient solution , people hate it .
because they think you 're deliberately creating delays at the bridge in order to maximize your revenue , and " why on earth should i pay to subsidize your imcompetence ? "
on the other hand , change the frame slightly and create charitable yield management , so the extra money you get goes not to the bridge company , it goes to charity , and the mental willingness to pay completely changes .
you have a relatively economically efficient solution , but one that actually meets with public approval and even a small degree of affection , rather than being seen as bastardy .
so where economists make the fundamental mistake is they think that money is money .
actually my pain experienced in paying five pounds is not just proportionate to the amount , but where i think that money is going .
and i think understanding that could revolutionize tax policy .
it could revolutionize the public services .
it could really change things quite significantly .
here 's a guy you all need to study .
he 's an austrian school economist who was first active in the first half of the 20th century in vienna .
what was interesting about the austrian school is they actually grew up alongside freud .
and so they 're predominantly interested in psychology .
they believed that there was a discipline called praxeology , which is a prior discipline to the study of economics .
praxeology is the study of human choice , action and decision making .
i think they 're right .
i think the danger we have in today 's world is we have the study of economics considers itself to be a prior discipline to the study of human psychology .
but as charlie munger says , " if economics is n't behavioral , i do n't know what the hell is . "
von mises , interestingly , believes economics is just a subset of psychology .
i think he just refers to economics as " the study of human praxeology under conditions of scarcity . "
but von mises , among many other things , i think uses an analogy which is probably the best justification and explanation for the value of marketing , the value of perceived value and the fact that we should actually treat it as being absolutely equivalent to any other kind of value .
we tend to , all of us - even those of us who work in marketing - to think of value in two ways .
there 's the real value , which is when you make something in a factory and provide a service , and then there 's a kind of dubious value , which you create by changing the way people look at things .
von mises completely rejected this distinction .
and he used this following analogy .
he referred actually to strange economists called the french physiocrats , who believed that the only true value was what you extracted from the land .
so if you 're a shepherd or a quarryman or a farmer , you created true value .
if however , you bought some wool from the shepherd and charged a premium for converting it into a hat , you were n't actually creating value , you were exploiting the shepherd .
now von mises said that modern economists make exactly the same mistake with regard to advertising and marketing .
he says , if you run a restaurant , there is no healthy distinction to be made between the value you create by cooking the food and the value you create by sweeping the floor .
one of them creates , perhaps , the primary product - the thing we think we 're paying for - the other one creates a context within which we can enjoy and appreciate that product .
and the idea that one of them should actually have priority over the other is fundamentally wrong .
try this quick thought experiment .
imagine a restaurant that serves michelin-starred food , but actually where the restaurant smells of sewage and there 's human feces on the floor .
the best thing you can do there to create value is not actually to improve the food still further , it 's to get rid of the smell and clean up the floor .
and it 's vital we understand this .
if that seems like some strange , abstruse thing , in the u.k. , the post office had a 98 percent success rate at delivering first-class mail the next day .
they decided this was n't good enough and they wanted to get it up to 99 .
the effort to do that almost broke the organization .
if at the same time you 'd gone and asked people , " what percentage of first-class mail arrives the next day ? "
the average answer , or the modal answer would have been 50 to 60 percent .
now if your perception is much worse than your reality , what on earth are you doing trying to change the reality ?
that 's like trying to improve the food in a restaurant that stinks .
what you need to do is first of all tell people that 98 percent of mail gets there the next day , first-class mail .
that 's pretty good .
i would argue , in britain there 's a much better frame of reference , which is to tell people that more first-class mail arrives the next day in the u.k. than in germany .
because generally in britain if you want to make us happy about something , just tell us we do it better than the germans .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- choose your frame of reference and the perceived value and therefore the actual value is completely tranformed .
it has to be said of the germans that the germans and the french are doing a brilliant job of creating a united europe .
the only thing they do n't expect is they 're uniting europe through a shared mild hatred of the french and germans .
but i 'm british , that 's the way we like it .
what you also notice is that in any case our perception is leaky .
we ca n't tell the difference between the quality of the food and the environment in which we consume it .
all of you will have seen this phenomenon if you have your car washed or valeted .
when you drive away , your car feels as if it drives better .
and the reason for this , unless my car valet mysteriously is changing the oil and performing work which i 'm not paying him for and i 'm unaware of , is because perception is in any case leaky .
analgesics that are branded are more effective at reducing pain than analgesics that are not branded .
i do n't just mean through reported pain reduction , actual measured pain reduction .
and so perception actually is leaky in any case .
so if you do something that 's perceptually bad in one respect , you can damage the other .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm a storyteller .
that 's what i do in life - telling stories , writing novels - and today i would like to tell you a few stories about the art of storytelling and also some supernatural creatures called the djinni .
but before i go there , please allow me to share with you glimpses of my personal story .
i will do so with the help of words , of course , but also a geometrical shape , the circle , so throughout my talk , you will come across several circles .
i was born in strasbourg , france to turkish parents .
shortly after , my parents got separated , and i came to turkey with my mom .
from then on , i was raised as a single child by a single mother .
now in the early 1970s , in ankara , that was a bit unusual .
our neighborhood was full of large families , where fathers were the heads of households , so i grew up seeing my mother as a divorcee in a patriarchal environment .
in fact , i grew up observing two different kinds of womanhood .
on the one hand was my mother , a well-educated , secular , modern , westernized , turkish woman .
on the other hand was my grandmother , who also took care of me and was more spiritual , less educated and definitely less rational .
this was a woman who read coffee grounds to see the future and melted lead into mysterious shapes to fend off the evil eye .
many people visited my grandmother , people with severe acne on their faces or warts on their hands .
each time , my grandmother would utter some words in arabic , take a red apple and stab it with as many rose thorns as the number of warts she wanted to remove .
then one by one , she would encircle these thorns with dark ink .
a week later , the patient would come back for a follow-up examination .
now , i 'm aware that i should not be saying such things in front of an audience of scholars and scientists , but the truth is , of all the people who visited my grandmother for their skin conditions , i did not see anyone go back unhappy or unhealed .
i asked her how she did this . was it the power of praying ?
in response she said , " yes , praying is effective , but also beware of the power of circles . "
from her , i learned , amongst many other things , one very precious lesson - that if you want to destroy something in this life , be it an acne , a blemish or the human soul , all you need to do is to surround it with thick walls .
it will dry up inside .
now we all live in some kind of a social and cultural circle .
we all do .
we 're born into a certain family , nation , class .
but if we have no connection whatsoever with the worlds beyond the one we take for granted , then we too run the risk of drying up inside .
our imagination might shrink ; our hearts might dwindle , and our humanness might wither if we stay for too long inside our cultural cocoons .
our friends , neighbors , colleagues , family - if all the people in our inner circle resemble us , it means we are surrounded with our mirror image .
now one other thing women like my grandma do in turkey is to cover mirrors with velvet or to hang them on the walls with their backs facing out .
it 's an old eastern tradition based on the knowledge that it 's not healthy for a human being to spend too much time staring at his own reflection .
ironically , -lsb- living in -rsb- communities of the like-minded is one of the greatest dangers of today 's globalized world .
and it 's happening everywhere , among liberals and conservatives , agnostics and believers , the rich and the poor , east and west alike .
we tend to form clusters based on similarity , and then we produce stereotypes about other clusters of people .
in my opinion , one way of transcending these cultural ghettos is through the art of storytelling .
stories can not demolish frontiers , but they can punch holes in our mental walls .
and through those holes , we can get a glimpse of the other , and sometimes even like what we see .
i started writing fiction at the age of eight .
my mother came home one day with a turquoise notebook and asked me if i 'd be interested in keeping a personal journal .
in retrospect , i think she was slightly worried about my sanity .
i was constantly telling stories at home , which was good , except i told this to imaginary friends around me , which was not so good .
i was an introverted child , to the point of communicating with colored crayons and apologizing to objects when i bumped into them , so my mother thought it might do me good to write down my day-to-day experiences and emotions .
what she did n't know was that i thought my life was terribly boring , and the last thing i wanted to do was to write about myself .
instead , i began to write about people other than me and things that never really happened .
and thus began my life-long passion for writing fiction .
so from the very beginning , fiction for me was less of an autobiographical manifestation than a transcendental journey into other lives , other possibilities .
and please bear with me : i 'll draw a circle and come back to this point .
now one other thing happened around this same time .
my mother became a diplomat .
so from this small , superstitious , middle-class neighborhood of my grandmother , i was zoomed into this posh , international school -lsb- in madrid -rsb- , where i was the only turk .
it was here that i had my first encounter with what i call the " representative foreigner . "
in our classroom , there were children from all nationalities , yet this diversity did not necessarily lead to a cosmopolitan , egalitarian classroom democracy .
instead , it generated an atmosphere in which each child was seen - not as an individual on his own , but as the representative of something larger .
we were like a miniature united nations , which was fun , except whenever something negative , with regards to a nation or a religion , took place .
the child who represented it was mocked , ridiculed and bullied endlessly .
and i should know , because during the time i attended that school , a military takeover happened in my country , a gunman of my nationality nearly killed the pope , and turkey got zero points in -lsb- the -rsb- eurovision song contest .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i skipped school often and dreamed of becoming a sailor during those days .
i also had my first taste of cultural stereotypes there .
the other children asked me about the movie " midnight express , " which i had not seen ; they inquired how many cigarettes a day i smoked , because they thought all turks were heavy smokers , and they wondered at what age i would start covering my hair .
i came to learn that these were the three main stereotypes about my country : politics , cigarettes and the veil .
after spain , we went to jordan , germany and ankara again .
everywhere i went , i felt like my imagination was the only suitcase i could take with me .
stories gave me a sense of center , continuity and coherence , the three big cs that i otherwise lacked .
in my mid-twenties , i moved to istanbul , the city i adore .
i lived in a very vibrant , diverse neighborhood where i wrote several of my novels .
i was in istanbul when the earthquake hit in 1999 .
when i ran out of the building at three in the morning , i saw something that stopped me in my tracks .
there was the local grocer there - a grumpy , old man who did n't sell alcohol and did n't speak to marginals .
he was sitting next to a transvestite with a long black wig and mascara running down her cheeks .
i watched the man open a pack of cigarettes with trembling hands and offer one to her , and that is the image of the night of the earthquake in my mind today - a conservative grocer and a crying transvestite smoking together on the sidewalk .
in the face of death and destruction , our mundane differences evaporated , and we all became one even if for a few hours .
but i 've always believed that stories , too , have a similar effect on us .
i 'm not saying that fiction has the magnitude of an earthquake , but when we are reading a good novel , we leave our small , cozy apartments behind , go out into the night alone and start getting to know people we had never met before and perhaps had even been biased against .
shortly after , i went to a women 's college in boston , then michigan .
i experienced this , not so much as a geographical shift , as a linguistic one .
i started writing fiction in english .
i 'm not an immigrant , refugee or exile - they ask me why i do this - but the commute between languages gives me the chance to recreate myself .
i love writing in turkish , which to me is very poetic and very emotional , and i love writing in english , which to me is very mathematical and cerebral .
so i feel connected to each language in a different way .
for me , like millions of other people around the world today , english is an acquired language .
when you 're a latecomer to a language , what happens is you live there with a continuous and perpetual frustration .
as latecomers , we always want to say more , you know , crack better jokes , say better things , but we end up saying less because there 's a gap between the mind and the tongue .
and that gap is very intimidating .
but if we manage not to be frightened by it , it 's also stimulating .
and this is what i discovered in boston - that frustration was very stimulating .
at this stage , my grandmother , who had been watching the course of my life with increasing anxiety , started to include in her daily prayers that i urgently get married so that i could settle down once and for all .
and because god loves her , i did get married .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but instead of settling down , i went to arizona .
and since my husband is in istanbul , i started commuting between arizona and istanbul - the two places on the surface of earth that could n't be more different .
i guess one part of me has always been a nomad , physically and spiritually .
stories accompany me , keeping my pieces and memories together , like an existential glue .
yet as much as i love stories , recently , i 've also begun to think that they lose their magic if and when a story is seen as more than a story .
and this is a subject that i would love to think about together .
when my first novel written in english came out in america , i heard an interesting remark from a literary critic .
" i liked your book , " he said , " but i wish you had written it differently . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i asked him what he meant by that .
he said , " well , look at it . there 's so many spanish , american , hispanic characters in it , but there 's only one turkish character and it 's a man . "
now the novel took place on a university campus in boston , so to me , it was normal that there be more international characters in it than turkish characters , but i understood what my critic was looking for .
and i also understood that i would keep disappointing him .
he wanted to see the manifestation of my identity .
he was looking for a turkish woman in the book because i happened to be one .
we often talk about how stories change the world , but we should also see how the world of identity politics affects the way stories are being circulated , read and reviewed .
many authors feel this pressure , but non-western authors feel it more heavily .
if you 're a woman writer from the muslim world , like me , then you are expected to write the stories of muslim women and , preferably , the unhappy stories of unhappy muslim women .
you 're expected to write informative , poignant and characteristic stories and leave the experimental and avant-garde to your western colleagues .
what i experienced as a child in that school in madrid is happening in the literary world today .
writers are not seen as creative individuals on their own , but as the representatives of their respective cultures : a few authors from china , a few from turkey , a few from nigeria .
we 're all thought to have something very distinctive , if not peculiar .
the writer and commuter james baldwin gave an interview in 1984 in which he was repeatedly asked about his homosexuality .
when the interviewer tried to pigeonhole him as a gay writer , baldwin stopped and said , " but do n't you see ? there 's nothing in me that is not in everybody else , and nothing in everybody else that is not in me . "
when identity politics tries to put labels on us , it is our freedom of imagination that is in danger .
there 's a fuzzy category called multicultural literature in which all authors from outside the western world are lumped together .
i never forget my first multicultural reading , in harvard square about 10 years ago .
we were three writers , one from the philippines , one turkish and one indonesian - like a joke , you know .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and the reason why we were brought together was not because we shared an artistic style or a literary taste .
it was only because of our passports .
multicultural writers are expected to tell real stories , not so much the imaginary .
a function is attributed to fiction .
in this way , not only the writers themselves , but also their fictional characters become the representatives of something larger .
but i must quickly add that this tendency to see a story as more than a story does not solely come from the west .
it comes from everywhere .
and i experienced this firsthand when i was put on trial in 2005 for the words my fictional characters uttered in a novel .
i had intended to write a constructive , multi-layered novel about an armenian and a turkish family through the eyes of women .
my micro story became a macro issue when i was prosecuted .
some people criticized , others praised me for writing about the turkish-armenian conflict .
but there were times when i wanted to remind both sides that this was fiction .
it was just a story .
and when i say , " just a story , " i 'm not trying to belittle my work .
i want to love and celebrate fiction for what it is , not as a means to an end .
writers are entitled to their political opinions , and there are good political novels out there , but the language of fiction is not the language of daily politics .
chekhov said , " the solution to a problem and the correct way of posing the question are two completely separate things .
and only the latter is an artist 's responsibility . "
identity politics divides us . fiction connects .
one is interested in sweeping generalizations .
the other , in nuances .
one draws boundaries .
the other recognizes no frontiers .
identity politics is made of solid bricks .
fiction is flowing water .
in the ottoman times , there were itinerant storytellers called " meddah . "
they would go to coffee houses , where they would tell a story in front of an audience , often improvising .
with each new person in the story , the meddah would change his voice , impersonating that character .
everybody could go and listen , you know - ordinary people , even the sultan , muslims and non-muslims .
stories cut across all boundaries , like " the tales of nasreddin hodja , " which were very popular throughout the middle east , north africa , the balkans and asia .
today , stories continue to transcend borders .
when palestinian and israeli politicians talk , they usually do n't listen to each other , but a palestinian reader still reads a novel by a jewish author , and vice versa , connecting and empathizing with the narrator .
literature has to take us beyond .
if it can not take us there , it is not good literature .
books have saved the introverted , timid child that i was - that i once was .
but i 'm also aware of the danger of fetishizing them .
when the poet and mystic , rumi , met his spiritual companion , shams of tabriz , one of the first things the latter did was to toss rumi 's books into water and watch the letters dissolve .
the sufis say , " knowledge that takes you not beyond yourself is far worse than ignorance . "
the problem with today 's cultural ghettos is not lack of knowledge - we know a lot about each other , or so we think - but knowledge that takes us not beyond ourselves : it makes us elitist , distant and disconnected .
there 's a metaphor which i love : living like a drawing compass .
as you know , one leg of the compass is static , rooted in a place .
meanwhile , the other leg draws a wide circle , constantly moving .
like that , my fiction as well .
one part of it is rooted in istanbul , with strong turkish roots , but the other part travels the world , connecting to different cultures .
in that sense , i like to think of my fiction as both local and universal , both from here and everywhere .
now those of you who have been to istanbul have probably seen topkapi palace , which was the residence of ottoman sultans for more than 400 years .
in the palace , just outside the quarters of the favorite concubines , there 's an area called the gathering place of the djinn .
it 's between buildings .
i 'm intrigued by this concept .
we usually distrust those areas that fall in between things .
we see them as the domain of supernatural creatures like the djinn , who are made of smokeless fire and are the symbol of elusiveness .
but my point is perhaps that elusive space is what writers and artists need most .
when i write fiction i cherish elusiveness and changeability .
i like not knowing what will happen 10 pages later .
i like it when my characters surprise me .
i might write about a muslim woman in one novel , and perhaps it will be a very happy story , and in my next book , i might write about a handsome , gay professor in norway .
as long as it comes from our hearts , we can write about anything and everything .
audre lorde once said , " the white fathers taught us to say , ' i think , therefore i am . " ' she suggested , " i feel , therefore i am free . "
i think it was a wonderful paradigm shift .
and yet , why is it that , in creative writing courses today , the very first thing we teach students is " write what you know " ?
perhaps that 's not the right way to start at all .
imaginative literature is not necessarily about writing who we are or what we know or what our identity is about .
we should teach young people and ourselves to expand our hearts and write what we can feel .
we should get out of our cultural ghetto and go visit the next one and the next .
in the end , stories move like whirling dervishes , drawing circles beyond circles .
they connect all humanity , regardless of identity politics , and that is the good news .
and i would like to finish with an old sufi poem : " come , let us be friends for once ; let us make life easy on us ; let us be lovers and loved ones ; the earth shall be left to no one . "
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm going to tell you about an affliction i suffer from .
and i have a funny feeling that quite a few of you suffer from it as well .
when i 'm walking around an art gallery , rooms and rooms full of paintings , after about 15 or 20 minutes , i realize i 'm not thinking about the paintings .
i 'm not connecting to them .
instead , i 'm thinking about that cup of coffee i desperately need to wake me up .
i 'm suffering from gallery fatigue .
how many of you out there suffer from - yes . ha ha , ha ha !
now , sometimes you might last longer than 20 minutes , or even shorter , but i think we all suffer from it . and do you have the accompanying guilt ?
for me , i look at the paintings on the wall and i think , somebody has decided to put them there , thinks they 're good enough to be on that wall , but i do n't always see it .
in fact , most of the time i do n't see it .
and i leave feeling actually unhappy .
i feel guilty and unhappy with myself , rather than thinking there 's something wrong with the painting , i think there 's something wrong with me .
and that 's not a good experience , to leave a gallery like that .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the thing is , i think we should give ourselves a break .
if you think about going into a restaurant , when you look at the menu , are you expected to order every single thing on the menu ?
no ! you select .
if you go into a department store to buy a shirt , are you going to try on every single shirt and want every single shirt ?
of course not , you can be selective . it 's expected .
how come , then , it 's not so expected to be selective when we go to an art gallery ?
why are we supposed to have a connection with every single painting ?
well i 'm trying to take a different approach .
and there 's two things i do : when i go into a gallery , first of all , i go quite fast , and i look at everything , and i pinpoint the ones that make me slow down for some reason or other .
i do n't even know why they make me slow down , but something pulls me like a magnet and then i ignore all the others , and i just go to that painting .
so it 's the first thing i do is , i do my own curation .
i choose a painting . it might just be one painting in 50 .
and then the second thing i do is i stand in front of that painting , and i tell myself a story about it .
why a story ? well , i think that we are wired , our dna tells us to tell stories .
we tell stories all the time about everything , and i think we do it because the world is kind of a crazy , chaotic place , and sometimes stories , we 're trying to make sense of the world a little bit , trying to bring some order to it .
why not apply that to our looking at paintings ?
so i now have this sort of restaurant menu visiting of art galleries .
there are three paintings i 'm going to show you now that are paintings that made me stop in my tracks and want to tell stories about them .
the first one needs little introduction - " girl with a pearl earring " by johannes vermeer , 17th-century dutch painter .
this is the most glorious painting .
i first saw it when i was 19 , and i immediately went out and got a poster of it , and in fact i still have that poster . 30 years later it 's hanging in my house .
it 's accompanied me everywhere i 've gone , i never tire of looking at her .
what made me stop in my tracks about her to begin with was just the gorgeous colors he uses and the light falling on her face .
but i think what 's kept me still coming back year after year is another thing , and that is the look on her face , the conflicted look on her face .
i ca n't tell if she 's happy or sad , and i change my mind all the time .
so that keeps me coming back .
one day , 16 years after i had this poster on my wall , i lay in bed and looked at her , and i suddenly thought , i wonder what the painter did to her to make her look like that .
and it was the first time i 'd ever thought that the expression on her face is actually reflecting how she feels about him .
always before i 'd thought of it as a portrait of a girl .
now i began to think of it as a portrait of a relationship .
and i thought , well , what is that relationship ?
so i went to find out . i did some research and discovered , we have no idea who she is .
in fact , we do n't know who any of the models in any of vermeer 's paintings are , and we know very little about vermeer himself .
which made me go , " yippee ! "
i can do whatever i want , i can come up with whatever story i want to .
so here 's how i came up with the story .
first of all , i thought , i 've got to get her into the house .
how does vermeer know her ?
well , there 've been suggestions that she is his 12-year-old daughter .
the daughter at the time was 12 when he painted the painting .
and i thought , no , it 's a very intimate look , but it 's not a look a daughter gives her father .
for one thing , in dutch painting of the time , if a woman 's mouth was open , it was indicating sexual availability .
it would have been inappropriate for vermeer to paint his daughter like that .
so it 's not his daughter , but it 's somebody close to him , physically close to him .
well , who else would be in the house ?
a servant , a lovely servant .
so , she 's in the house .
how do we get her into the studio ?
we do n't know very much about vermeer , but the little bits that we do know , one thing we know is that he married a catholic woman , they lived with her mother in a house where he had his own room where he - his studio . he also had 11 children .
it would have been a chaotic , noisy household .
and if you 've seen vermeer 's paintings before , you know that they 're incredibly calm and quiet .
how does a painter paint such calm , quiet paintings with 11 kids around ?
well , he compartmentalizes his life .
he gets to his studio , and he says , " nobody comes in here .
not the wife , not the kids . okay , the maid can come in and clean . "
she 's in the studio . he 's got her in the studio , they 're together .
and he decides to paint her .
he has her wear very plain clothes .
now , all of the women , or most of the women in vermeer 's other paintings wore velvet , silk , fur , very sumptuous materials .
this is very plain ; the only thing that is n't plain is her pearl earring .
now , if she 's a servant , there is no way she could afford a pair of pearl earrings .
so those are not her pearl earrings . whose are they ?
we happen to know , there 's a list of catharina , the wife 's clothes .
amongst them a yellow coat with white fur , a yellow and black bodice , and you see these clothes on lots of other paintings , different women in the paintings , vermeer 's paintings .
so clearly , her clothes were lent to various different women .
it 's not such a leap of faith to take that that pearl earring actually belongs to his wife .
so we 've got all the elements for our story .
she 's in the studio with him for a long time .
these paintings took a long time to make .
they would have spent the time alone , all that time .
she 's wearing his wife 's pearl earring .
she 's gorgeous . she obviously loves him . she 's conflicted .
and does the wife know ? maybe not .
and if she does n't , well - that 's the story .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the next painting i 'm going to talk about is called " boy building a house of cards " by chardin .
he 's an 18th-century french painter best known for his still lifes , but he did occasionally paint people .
and in fact , he painted four versions of this painting , different boys building houses of cards , all concentrated .
i like this version the best , because some of the boys are older and some are younger , and to me , this one , like goldilocks 's porridge , is just right .
he 's not quite a child , and he 's not quite a man .
he 's absolutely balanced between innocence and experience , and that made me stop in my tracks in front of this painting .
and i looked at his face . it 's like a vermeer painting a bit .
the light comes in from the left , his face is bathed in this glowing light . it 's right in the center of the painting , and you look at it , and i found that when i was looking at it , i was standing there going , " look at me . please look at me . "
and he did n't look at me . he was still looking at his cards , and that 's one of the seductive elements of this painting is , he 's so focused on what he 's doing that he does n't look at us .
and that is , to me , the sign of a masterpiece , of a painting when there 's a lack of resolution .
he 's never going to look at me .
so i was thinking of a story where , if i 'm in this position , who could be there looking at him ?
not the painter , i do n't want to think about the painter .
i 'm thinking of an older version of himself .
he 's a man , a servant , an older servant looking at this younger servant , saying , " look at me . i want to warn you about what you 're about to go through . please look at me . "
and he never does .
and that lack of resolution , the lack of resolution in " girl with a pearl earring " - we do n't know if she 's happy or sad .
i 've written an entire novel about her , and i still do n't know if she 's happy or sad .
again and again , back to the painting , looking for the answer , looking for the story to fill in that gap .
and we may make a story , and it satisfies us momentarily , but not really , and we come back again and again .
the last painting i 'm going to talk about is called " anonymous " by anonymous . -lrb- laughter -rrb- this is a tudor portrait bought by the national portrait gallery .
they thought it was a man named sir thomas overbury , and then they discovered that it was n't him , and they have no idea who it is .
now , in the national portrait gallery , if you do n't know the biography of the painting , it 's kind of useless to you .
they ca n't hang it on the wall , because they do n't know who he is .
so unfortunately , this orphan spends most of his time in storage , along with quite a number of other orphans , some of them some beautiful paintings .
this painting made me stop in my tracks for three reasons : one is the disconnection between his mouth that 's smiling and his eyes that are wistful .
he 's not happy , and why is n't he happy ?
the second thing that really attracted me were his bright red cheeks .
he is blushing . he 's blushing for his portrait being made !
this must be a guy who blushes all the time .
what is he thinking about that 's making him blush ?
the third thing that made me stop in my tracks is his absolutely gorgeous doublet .
silk , gray , those beautiful buttons .
and you know what it makes me think of , is it 's sort of snug and puffy ; it 's like a duvet spread over a bed .
i kept thinking of beds and red cheeks , and of course i kept thinking of sex when i looked at him , and i thought , is that what he 's thinking about ?
and i thought , if i 'm going to make a story , what 's the last thing i 'm going to put in there ?
well , what would a tudor gentleman be preoccupied with ?
and i thought , well , henry viii , okay .
he 'd be preoccupied with his inheritance , with his heir .
who is going to inherit his name and his fortune ?
you put all those together , and you 've got your story to fill in that gap that makes you keep coming back .
now , here 's the story .
it 's short .
" rosy " i am still wearing the white brocade doublet caroline gave me .
it has a plain high collar , detachable sleeves and intricate buttons of twisted silk thread , set close together so that the fit is snug .
the doublet makes me think of a coverlet on the vast bed .
perhaps that was the intention .
i first wore it at an elaborate dinner her parents held in our honor .
i knew even before i stood up to speak that my cheeks were inflamed .
i have always flushed easily , from physical exertion , from wine , from high emotion .
as a boy , i was teased by my sisters and by schoolboys , but not by george .
only george could call me rosy .
i would not allow anyone else .
he managed to make the word tender .
when i made the announcement , george did not turn rosy , but went pale as my doublet .
he should not have been surprised .
it has been a common assumption that i would one day marry his cousin .
but it is difficult to hear the words aloud .
i know , i could barely utter them .
afterwards , i found george on the terrace overlooking the kitchen garden .
despite drinking steadily all afternoon , he was still pale .
we stood together and watched the maids cut lettuces .
" what do you think of my doublet ? " i asked .
he glanced at me . " that collar looks to be strangling you . "
" we will still see each other , " i insisted .
" we can still hunt and play cards and attend court .
nothing need change . "
george did not speak .
" i am 23 years old . it is time for me to marry and produce an heir . it is expected of me . "
george drained another glass of claret and turned to me .
" congratulations on your upcoming nuptials , james .
i 'm sure you 'll be content together . "
he never used my nickname again .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- ♫ i think i 'm ready to do my thing ♫ ♫ i think i 'm ready to take my chances ♫ ♫ i 've been dining out and all stressed out ♫ ♫ due to the circumstances . see ? ♫ ♫ i gotta get up , get up , get up , get up ♫ ♫ wake up , wake up , wake up , wake up ♫ ♫ i see what you 're saying ♫ ♫ we sent a demo to the world , they said it sounds like take 6 ♫ ♫ i said " hold on , wait a minute , i 'll be back with the remix " ♫ ♫ they looking at us funny , we ca n't make any money ♫
♫ it took us years to figure out that we was dealing with dummies ♫ ♫ they did n't understand the sound from the bronx , that 's the boogie down ♫ ♫ to huntsville , alabama , there 's no circles in my planner , so ♫ ♫ it was time to make the product , so we hooked up with townsend ♫ ♫ made a deal with john neal , on the road sold ten thousand ♫ ♫ wba , that means a trip to nashville ♫ ♫ festplatte showed up and said them boys are naturals ♫ ♫ can you hear what they were hearing ? see what they were seeing ? ♫
♫ from bronx to berlin , we took the tour european ♫ ♫ all vocal yeah , we widit , call the album " what is it ? " ♫ ♫ with sarah connor , set the goal for number one and we hit it ♫ ♫ but now it 's kev , sim , drew , stew , time for a new day ♫ ♫ ring the alarm , hit ' em on skype or a two-way ♫ ♫ sung by the words , we ready to fly ! ♫ ♫ fly baby ! time to leave that nest ♫ ♫ fly baby ! this ai n't no time to rest ♫
♫ come on fly baby , we got work to do ♫ ♫ here we go , spread my wings and ... ♫ ♫ fly baby ! time to leave that nest ♫ ♫ fly baby ! this ai n't no time to rest . come on ♫ ♫ fly baby ! we got work to do ♫ ♫ here we go . spread my wings and fly . one more time ♫ ♫ fly baby ! time to leave that nest ♫ ♫ fly baby ! this ai n't no time to rest ♫ ♫ fly baby ! we got work to do ♫ ♫ here we go , spread my wings and ... ♫
♫ fly baby ! fly baby fly ♫ ♫ fly baby ! fly baby high ♫ ♫ fly baby ! up to the sky ♫ ♫ spread my wings and fly ♫ instrumental !
♫ we 're ready to fly ! ♫ -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- gabriel garcía márquez is one of my favorite writers , for his storytelling , but even more , i think , for the beauty and precision of his prose .
and whether it 's the opening line from " one hundred years of solitude " or the fantastical stream of consciousness in " autumn of the patriarch , " where the words rush by , page after page of unpunctuated imagery sweeping the reader along like some wild river twisting through a primal south american jungle , reading márquez is a visceral experience .
which struck me as particularly remarkable during one session with the novel when i realized that i was being swept along on this remarkable , vivid journey in translation .
now i was a comparative literature major in college , which is like an english major , only instead of being stuck studying chaucer for three months , we got to read great literature in translation from around the world .
and as great as these books were , you could always tell that you were getting close to the full effect .
but not so with márquez who once praised his translator 's versions as being better than his own , which is an astonishing compliment .
so when i heard that the translator , gregory rabassa , had written his own book on the subject , i could n't wait to read it .
it 's called apropos of the italian adage that i lifted from his forward , " if this be treason . "
and it 's a charming read .
it 's highly recommended for anyone who 's interested in the translator 's art .
but the reason that i mention it is that early on , rabassa offers this elegantly simple insight : " every act of communication is an act of translation . "
now maybe that 's been obvious to all of you for a long time , but for me , as often as i 'd encountered that exact difficulty on a daily basis , i had never seen the inherent challenge of communication in so crystalline a light .
ever since i can remember thinking consciously about such things , communication has been my central passion .
even as a child , i remember thinking that what i really wanted most in life was to be able to understand everything and then to communicate it to everyone else .
so no ego problems .
it 's funny , my wife , daisy , whose family is littered with schizophrenics - and i mean littered with them - once said to me , " chris , i already have a brother who thinks he 's god .
i do n't need a husband who wants to be . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- anyway , as i plunged through my 20s ever more aware of how unobtainable the first part of my childhood ambition was , it was that second part , being able to successfully communicate to others whatever knowledge i was gaining , where the futility of my quest really set in .
time after time , whenever i set out to share some great truth with a soon-to-be grateful recipient , it had the opposite effect .
interestingly , when your opening line of communication is , " hey , listen up , because i 'm about to drop some serious knowledge on you , " it 's amazing how quickly you 'll discover both ice and the firing squad .
finally , after about 10 years of alienating friends and strangers alike , i finally got it , a new personal truth all my own , that if i was going to ever communicate well with other people the ideas that i was gaining , i 'd better find a different way of going about it .
and that 's when i discovered comedy .
now comedy travels along a distinct wavelength from other forms of language .
if i had to place it on an arbitrary spectrum , i 'd say it falls somewhere between poetry and lies .
and i 'm not talking about all comedy here , because , clearly , there 's plenty of humor that colors safely within the lines of what we already think and feel .
what i want to talk about is the unique ability that the best comedy and satire has at circumventing our ingrained perspectives - comedy as the philosopher 's stone .
it takes the base metal of our conventional wisdom and transforms it through ridicule into a different way of seeing and ultimately being in the world .
because that 's what i take from the theme of this conference : gained in translation .
that it 's about communication that does n't just produce greater understanding within the individual , but leads to real change .
which in my experience means communication that manages to speak to and expand our concept of self-interest .
now i 'm big on speaking to people 's self-interest because we 're all wired for that .
it 's part of our survival package , and that 's why it 's become so important for us , and that 's why we 're always listening at that level .
and also because that 's where , in terms of our own self-interest , we finally begin to grasp our ability to respond , our responsibility now as to what i mean by the best comedy and satire , i mean work that comes first and foremost from a place of honesty and integrity .
now if you think back on tina fey 's impersonations on saturday night live of the newly nominated vice presidential candidate sarah palin , they were devastating .
fey demonstrated far more effectively than any political pundit the candidate 's fundamental lack of seriousness , cementing an impression that the majority of the american public still holds today .
and the key detail of this is that fey 's scripts were n't written by her and they were n't written by the snl writers .
they were lifted verbatim from palin 's own remarks .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- here was a palin impersonator quoting palin word for word .
now that 's honesty and integrity , and it 's also why fey 's performances left such a lasting impression .
on the other side of the political spectrum , the first time that i heard rush limbaugh refer to presidential hopeful john edwards as the breck girl i knew that he 'd made a direct hit .
now it 's not often that i 'm going to associate the words honesty and integrity with limbaugh , but it 's really hard to argue with that punchline .
the description perfectly captured edwards ' personal vanity .
and guess what ?
that ended up being the exact personality trait that was at the core of the scandal that ended his political career .
now the daily show with john stewart is by far the most - -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's by far the most well-documented example of the effectiveness of this kind of comedy .
survey after survey , from pew research to the annenberg center for public policy , has found that daily show viewers are better informed about current events than the viewers of all major network and cable news shows .
-lrb- applause -rrb- now whether this says more about the conflict between integrity and profitability of corporate journalism than it does about the attentiveness of stewart 's viewers , the larger point remains that stewart 's material is always grounded in a commitment to the facts - not because his intent is to inform . it 's not .
his intent is to be funny .
it just so happens that stewart 's brand of funny does n't work unless the facts are true .
and the result is great comedy that 's also an information delivery system that scores markedly higher in both credibility and retention than the professional news media .
now this is doubly ironic when you consider that what gives comedy its edge at reaching around people 's walls is the way that it uses deliberate misdirection .
a great piece of comedy is a verbal magic trick , where you think it 's going over here and then all of a sudden you 're transported over here .
and there 's this mental delight that 's followed by the physical response of laughter , which , not coincidentally , releases endorphins in the brain .
and just like that , you 've been seduced into a different way of looking at something because the endorphins have brought down your defenses .
this is the exact opposite of the way that anger and fear and panic , all of the flight-or-fight responses , operate .
flight-or-fight releases adrenalin , which throws our walls up sky-high .
and the comedy comes along , dealing with a lot of the same areas where our defenses are the strongest - race , religion , politics , sexuality - only by approaching them through humor instead of adrenalin , we get endorphins and the alchemy of laughter turns our walls into windows , revealing a fresh and unexpected point of view .
now let me give you an example from my act .
i have some material about the so-called radical gay agenda , which starts off by asking , how radical is the gay agenda ?
because from what i can tell , the three things gay americans seem to want most are to join the military , get married and start a family .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- three things i 've tried to avoid my entire life .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- have at it you radical bastards . the field is yours .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and that 's followed by these lines about gay adoption : what is the problem with gay adoption ?
why is this remotely controversial ?
if you have a baby and you think that baby 's gay , you should be allowed to put it up for adoption .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you have given birth to an abomination .
remove it from your household .
now by taking the biblical epithet " abomination " and attaching it to the ultimate image of innocence , a baby , this joke short circuits the emotional wiring behind the debate and it leaves the audience with the opportunity , through their laughter , to question its validity .
misdirection is n't the only trick that comedy has up its sleeve .
economy of language is another real strong suit of great comedy .
there are few phrases that pack a more concentrated dose of subject and symbol than the perfect punchline .
bill hicks - and if you do n't know his work , you should really google him - hicks had a routine about getting into one of those childhood bragging contests on the playground , where finally the other kid says to him , " huh ? well my dad can beat up your dad , " to which hicks replies , " really ? how soon ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's an entire childhood in three words .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- not to mention what it reveals about the adult who 's speaking them .
and one last powerful attribute that comedy has as communication is that it 's inherently viral .
people ca n't wait to pass along that new great joke .
and this is n't some new phenomenon of our wired world .
comedy has been crossing country with remarkable speed way before the internet , social media , even cable tv .
back in 1980 when comedian richard pryor accidentally set himself on fire during a freebasing accident , i was in los angeles the day after it happened and then i was in washington d.c. two days after that .
and i heard the exact same punchline on both coasts - something about the ignited negro college fund .
clearly , it did n't come out of a tonight show monologue .
and my guess here - and i have no research on this - is that if you really were to look back at it and if you could research it , you 'd find out that comedy is the second oldest viral profession .
first there were drums and then knock-knock jokes .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but it 's when you put all of these elements together - when you get the viral appeal of a great joke with a powerful punchline that 's crafted from honesty and integrity , it can have a real world impact at changing a conversation .
now i have a close friend , joel pett , who 's the editorial cartoonist for the lexington herald-leader .
and he used to be the usa today monday morning guy .
i was visiting with joel the weekend before the copenhagen conference on climate change opened in december of 2009 .
and joel was explaining to me that , because usa today was one of america 's four papers of record , it would be scanned by virtually everyone in attendance at the conference , which meant that , if he hit it out of the park with his cartoon on monday , the opening day of the conference , it could get passed around at the highest level among actual decision-makers .
so we started talking about climate change .
and it turned out that joel and i were both bothered by the same thing , which was how so much of the debate was still focused on the science and how complete it was or was n't , which , to both of us , seems somewhat intentionally off point .
because first of all , there 's this false premise that such a thing as complete science exists .
now governor perry of my newly-adopted state of texas was pushing this same line this past summer at the beginning of his oops-fated campaign for the republican presidential nomination , proclaiming over and over that the science was n't complete at the same time that 250 out of 254 counties in the state of texas were on fire .
and perry 's policy solution was to ask the people of texas to pray for rain .
personally , i was praying for four more fires so we could finally complete the damn science .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but back in 2009 , the question joel and i kept turning over and over was why this late in the game so much energy was being spent talking about the science when the policies necessary to address climate change were unequivocally beneficial for humanity in the long run regardless of the science .
so we tossed it back and forth until joel came up with this .
cartoon : " what if it 's a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you 've got to love that idea .
-lrb- applause -rrb- how about that ? how about we create a better world for nothing ?
not for god , not for country , not for profit - just as a basic metric for global decision-making .
and this cartoon hit the bull 's eye .
shortly after the conference was over , joel got a request for a signed copy from the head of the epa in washington whose wall it now hangs on .
and not long after that , he got another request for a copy from the head of the epa in california who used it as part of her presentation at an international conference on climate change in sacramento last year .
and it did n't stop there .
to date , joel 's gotten requests from over 40 environmental groups , in the united states , canada and europe .
and earlier this year , he got a request from the green party in australia who used it in their campaign where it became part of the debate that resulted in the australian parliament adopting the most rigorous carbon tax regime of any country in the world .
-lrb- applause -rrb- that is a lot of punch for 14 words .
so my suggestion to those of you out here who are seriously focused on creating a better world is to take a little bit of time each day and practice thinking funny , because you might just find the question that you 've been looking for .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- both myself and my brother belong to the under 30 demographic , which pat said makes 70 percent , but according to our statistics it makes 60 percent of the region 's population .
qatar is no exception to the region .
it 's a very young nation led by young people .
we have been reminiscing about the latest technologies and the ipods , and for me the abaya , my traditional dress that i 'm wearing today .
now this is not a religious garment , nor is it a religious statement .
instead , it 's a diverse cultural statement that we choose to wear .
now i remember a few years ago , a journalist asked dr. sheikha , who 's sitting here , president of qatar university - who , by the way , is a woman - he asked her whether she thought the abaya hindered or infringed her freedom in any way .
her answer was quite the contrary .
instead , she felt more free , more free because she could wear whatever she wanted under the abaya .
she could come to work in her pajamas and nobody would care .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- not that you do ; i 'm just saying .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- my point is here , people have a choice - just like the indian lady could wear her sari or the japanese woman could wear her kimono .
we are changing our culture from within , but at the same time we are reconnecting with our traditions .
we know that modernization is happening .
and yes , qatar wants to be a modern nation .
but at the same time we are reconnecting and reasserting our arab heritage .
it 's important for us to grow organically .
and we continuously make the conscious decision to reach that balance .
in fact , research has shown that the more the world is flat , if i use tom friedman 's analogy , or global , the more and more people are wanting to be different .
and for us young people , they 're looking to become individuals and find their differences amongst themselves .
which is why i prefer the richard wilk analogy of globalizing the local and localizing the global .
we do n't want to be all the same , but we want to respect each other and understand each other .
and therefore tradition becomes more important , not less important .
life necessitates a universal world , however , we believe in the security of having a local identity .
and this is what the leaders of this region we 're trying to be part of this global village , but at the same time we 're revising ourselves through our cultural institutions and cultural development .
i 'm a representation of that phenomenon .
and i think a lot of people in this room , i can see a lot of you are in the same position as myself .
and i 'm sure , although we ca n't see the people in washington , they are in the same position .
we 're continuously trying to straddle different worlds , different cultures and trying to meet the challenges of a different expectation from ourselves and from others .
so i want to ask a question : what should culture in the 21st century look like ?
in a time where the world is becoming personalized , when the mobile phone , the burger , the telephone , everything has its own personal identity , how should we perceive ourselves and how should we perceive others ?
how does that impact our desert culture ?
i 'm not sure of how many of you in washington are aware of the cultural developments happening in the region and , the more recent , museum of islamic art opened in qatar in 2008 .
i myself am personalizing these cultural developments , but i also understand that this has to be done organically .
yes , we do have all the resources that we need in order to develop new cultural institutions , but what i think is more important is that we are very fortunate to have visionary leaders who understand that this ca n't happen from outside , it has to come from within .
and guess what ?
you might be surprised to know that most people in the gulf who are leading these cultural initiatives happen to be women .
i want to ask you , why do you think this is ?
is it because it 's a soft option ; we have nothing else to do ?
no , i do n't think so .
i think that women in this part of the world realize that culture is an important component to connect people both locally and regionally .
it 's a natural component for bringing people together , discussing ideas - in the same way we 're doing here at ted .
we 're here , we 're part of a community , sharing out ideas and discussing them .
art becomes a very important part of our national identity .
the existential and social and political impact an artist has on his nation 's development of cultural identity is very important .
you know , art and culture is big business .
ask me .
ask the chairpersons and ceos of sotheby 's and christie 's .
ask charles saatchi about great art .
they make a lot of money .
so i think women in our society are becoming leaders , because they realize that for their future generations , it 's very important to maintain our cultural identities .
why else do greeks demand the return of the elgin marbles ?
and why is there an uproar when a private collector tries to sell his collection to a foreign museum ?
why does it take me months on end to get an export license from london or new york in order to get pieces into my country ?
in few hours , shirin neshat , my friend from iran who 's a very important artist for us will be talking to you .
she lives in new york city , but she does n't try to be a western artist .
instead , she tries to engage in a very important dialogue about her culture , nation and heritage .
she does that through important visual forms of photography and film .
in the same way , qatar is trying to grow its national museums through an organic process from within .
our mission is of cultural integration and independence .
we do n't want to have what there is in the west .
we do n't want their collections .
we want to build our own identities , our own fabric , create an open dialogue so that we share our ideas and share yours with us .
in a few days , we will be opening the arab museum of modern art .
we have done extensive research to ensure that arab and muslim artists , and arabs who are not muslims - not all arabs are muslims , by the way - but we make sure that they are represented in this new institution .
this institution is government-backed and it has been the case for the past three decades .
we will open the museum in a few days , and i welcome all of you to get on qatar airways and come and join us .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now this museum is just as important to us as the west .
some of you might have heard of the algerian artist baya mahieddine , but i doubt a lot of people know that this artist worked in picasso 's studio in paris in the 1930s .
for me it was a new discovery .
and i think with time , in the years to come we 'll be learning a lot about our picassos , our legers and our cezannes .
we do have artists , but unfortunately we have not discovered them yet .
now visual expression is just one form of culture integration .
we have realized that recently more and more people are using the means of youtube and social networking to express their stories , share their photos and tell their own stories through their own voices .
in a similar way , we have created the doha film institute .
now the doha film institute is an organization to teach people about film and filmmaking .
last year we did n't have one qatari woman filmmaker .
today i am proud to say we have trained and educated over 66 qatari women filmmakers to edit , tell their own stories in their own voices .
-lrb- applause -rrb- now if you 'll allow me , i would love to share a one-minute film that has proven to show that a 60-sec film can be as powerful as a haiku in telling a big picture .
and this is one of our filmmakers ' products .
-lrb- video -rrb- boy : hey listen ! did you know that the stocks are up ?
who are you playing ?
girl : uncle khaled . here , put on the headscarf .
khaled : why would i want to put it on ?
girl : do as you 're told , young girl .
boy : no , you play mom and i play dad . -lrb- girl : but it 's my game . -rrb- play by yourself then .
girl : women ! one word and they get upset .
useless .
thank you . thank you !
-lrb- applause -rrb- sm : going back to straddling between east and west , last month we had our second doha tribeca film festival here in doha .
the doha tribeca film festival was held at our new cultural hub , katara .
it attracted 42,000 people , and we showcased 51 films .
now the doha tribeca film festival is not an imported festival , but rather an important festival between the cities of new york and doha .
it 's important for two things .
first , it allows us to showcase our arab filmmakers and voices to one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world , new york city .
at the same time , we are inviting them to come and explore our part of the world .
they 're learning our culture , our language , our heritage and realizing we 're just as different and just the same as each other .
now over and over again , people have said , " let 's build bridges , " and frankly , i want to do more than that .
i would like break the walls of ignorance between east and west - no , not the soft option that we have discussed before , but rather the soft power that joseph nye has spoken about before .
culture 's a very important tool to bring people together .
we should not underestimate it .
" know thyself , " that is the journey of self-expression and self-realization that we are traveling .
now i do n't pretend to have all the answers , but i know that me as an individual and we as a nation welcome this community of ideas worth spreading .
this is a very interesting journey .
i welcome you on board for us to engage and discuss new ideas of how to bring people together through cultural initiatives and discussions .
familiarity destroys and trumps fear . try it .
ladies and gentlemen , thank you very much . shokran .
-lrb- applause -rrb- tom green : that 's a 4chan thing .
these kids on the internet , they have this group of kids and they like to say funny words like " barrel roll . "
it 's a video game move from " star fox . "
" star fox 20 " ? -lrb- assistant : " star fox 64 . " -rrb- tom green : yeah . and they 've been dogging me for a year .
i got to tell you , it 's driving me nuts , actually .
sometimes i wake up in the middle of the night and i scream , " 4chan ! "
christopher poole : when i was 15 , i found this website called futaba channel .
and it was a japanese forum and imageboard .
that format of forum , at that time , was not well-known outside of japan .
and so what i did is i took it , i translated it into english , and i stuck it up for my friends to use .
now , six and a half years later , over seven million people are using it , contributing over 700,000 posts per day .
and we 've gone from one board to 48 boards .
this is what it looks like .
so , what 's unique about the site is that it 's anonymous , and it has no memory .
there 's no archive , there are no barriers , there 's no registration .
these things that we 're used to with forums do n't exist on 4chan .
and that 's led to this discussion that 's completely raw , completely unfiltered .
what the site 's known for , because it has this environment , is it 's fostered the creation of a lot of internet phenomena , viral videos and whatnot , known as " memes . "
two of the largest memes that have come out of this site some of you might be familiar with are these lolcats - just silly pictures of cats with text .
and this resonates with millions of people , apparently , because there are tens of thousands of these , and there is a whole blogging empire now dedicated to pictures like these .
and rick astley 's kind of rebirth these past two years ...
rickroll was this bait and switch , really simple , classic bait and switch .
somebody says they 're linking to something interesting , and you get an ' 80s pop song . that 's all it was .
and it got big enough to the point where there was a float last year at the macy 's thanksgiving day parade , and rick astley pops out , and rickrolls millions of people on television .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- there are thousands of memes that come out of the site .
there are a handful that have escaped into the mainstream , the ones i 've just shown you , but every day , every month , people are producing thousands of these .
so does a site like this have rules ?
we do ; they 're the codified rules that i 've come up with , which are more-or-less ignored by the community .
and so they 've come up with their own set of rules , the " rules of the internet . "
and so there are three that i want to show you specifically .
rule one is you do n't talk about / b / .
two is you do not talk about / b / .
and this one 's kind of interesting : " if it exists , there is porn of it . no exceptions . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i will spare you that slide .
i assure you , it is very true .
/ b / is the first board we started with , and it is , in many ways , the beating heart of the website .
it is where a third of all the traffic is going .
and / b / is known for , more than anything , not just the memes they 've created , but the exploits .
and chris just touched on one of those a second ago , and that was the time 100 poll .
so somebody at time , at the magazine , thought it would be fun to nominate me for this thing they did last year .
and so they placed me on it , and the internet got wind of it . my community decided they wanted me to win it .
i did n't instruct them to do it ; they just decided that that 's what they wanted .
and so , you know , 390 percent approval rating ai n't so bad .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so they broke that poll .
and i ended up on top .
i ended up at this really fancy party .
but that 's not what 's interesting about this .
it 's that they were n't putting me at the top of this list ; they were actually - it got so sophisticated to the point where they gamed all of the top 21 places to spell " marblecake . also , the game . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the amount of time and effort that went into that is absolutely incredible .
and " marble cake " is significant because it is the channel that this group called anonymous organized .
anonymous is this group of people that protested , very famously , scientology .
the story is , scientology had this embarrassing video of tom cruise . it went up online .
they got it taken offline and managed to piss off part of the internet .
and so these people , over 7,000 people , less than one month later , organized in a hundred cities around the globe and - this is l.a. - protested the church of scientology , and they have continued to do so , now , two full years after the fact .
they are still protesting .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so we 've got this activist group that 's this grassroots group that 's come out of the site .
and last , i 'm going to show you the example , the story of dusty the cat .
dusty is the name that we 've given to this cat .
this young man posted a video of him abusing his cat on youtube .
and , you know , this did n't sit well with people , and so there was this outpouring of support for people to do something about this .
so what they did is they - i mean , they put csi to shame here - the internet detectives came out .
they matched , they found his myspace .
they took the youtube video and they mashed everything in the video .
within 24 hours , they had his name , and within 48 hours , he was arrested .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and so , what i think is really intriguing about a community like 4chan is just that it 's this open place .
as i said , it 's raw , it 's unfiltered .
and sites like it are kind of going the way of the dinosaur right now .
they 're endangered because we 're moving towards social networking .
we 're moving towards persistent identity .
we 're moving towards , you know , a lack of privacy , really .
we 're sacrificing a lot of that , and i think in doing so , moving towards those things , we 're losing something valuable .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : thank you .
got a couple questions for you .
but if i ask them , is the ted website going to go down ?
cp : you 're lucky that this is not being streamed to them live right now .
ca : well , you never know . some of them - we 've got people in 75 countries out there watching .
do n't tell .
but seriously , this issue on anonymity is - i mean , you made the case there .
but anonymity basically allows people to say anything , all the rules gone .
you 've had to wrestle with issues like child pornography .
and i 'm just curious whether you sometimes lie awake in the night worrying that you 've opened pandora 's box .
cp : yes and no .
i mean , for as much good that kind of comes out of this environment , there is plenty of bad .
there are plenty of downsides .
but i think that the greater good is being served here by just allowing people - there are very few places , now , where you can go and not have identity , to be completely anonymous and say whatever you 'd like .
and saying whatever you like , i think , is powerful .
doing whatever you like is now crossing a line .
but i think it 's important to have these places .
when i get emails , people say , " thank you for giving me this place , this outlet , where i can come after work and be myself . "
ca : but words , saying things , you know , can be constructive ; it can be really damaging .
and if you cut the link between what is said and any attribution back to you , i mean , surely there are huge risks with that .
cp : there are , certainly .
but - ca : tell me about what - i mean , i think you asked the board what you might say at ted , right ?
cp : yeah , i posted a thread on sunday .
and within 24 hours , it had over 12,000 responses .
and the thing is , i did n't make it into that presentation because i ca n't read to you anything that they said , more or less .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- 99 percent of it is just , would have been , you know , bleeped out .
but there were some good things that came out of that too .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- love and peace were mentioned .
ca : love and peace were mentioned , kind of with quote marks around them , right ?
cp : cats and dogs were mentioned too .
ca : and that content is all off the board now .
right , it 's gone ? or is it still up there ?
cp : i stuck that thread so it lasted a few days .
it went up to about 16,000 posts , and now it has been taken off .
ca : okay , well .
now , i 'm not sure i would have necessarily recommended everyone at ted to go and check it out anyway .
chris , you yourself ? i mean , you 're a figure of some intrigue .
you 've got this surprising semi-underground influence , but it 's not making you a lot of money , yet .
what 's the commercial picture here ?
cp : the commercial picture is that there really is n't much of one , i guess .
the site has adult content on it .
i mean , obviously , it 's got some very offensive , obscene content on it , just in terms of language alone .
and when you 've got that , you 've pretty much sacrificed any hope of making lots of money .
ca : but you still live at home , right ?
cp : i actually moved out recently .
ca : that 's very cool .
-lrb- applause -rrb- cp : i got out of mom 's , and i 'm back in school right now .
ca : but what conversations did you or do you have with your mother about 4chan ?
cp : at first , very kind of pained , awkward conversations .
the content is not dinner table conversation in the least .
but my parents - i think part of why they kind of are able to appreciate it is because they do n't understand it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ca : and they were probably pleased to see you on top of the time poll .
cp : yeah . they still did n't know what to think of that though .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ca : and so , in 10 years ' time , what do you picture yourself doing ?
cp : that 's a good question .
as i said , i just went back to school , and i am considering majoring in urban studies and then going on to urban planning , kind of taking whatever i 've learned from online communities and trying to adapt that to a physical community .
ca : chris , thank you . absolutely fascinating . thank you for coming to ted .
when i was a student here in oxford in the 1970s , the future of the world was bleak .
the population explosion was unstoppable .
global famine was inevitable .
a cancer epidemic caused by chemicals in the environment was going to shorten our lives .
the acid rain was falling on the forests .
the desert was advancing by a mile or two a year .
the oil was running out , and a nuclear winter would finish us off .
none of those things happened , -lrb- laughter -rrb- and astonishingly , if you look at what actually happened in my lifetime , the average per-capita income of the average person on the planet , in real terms , adjusted for inflation , has tripled .
lifespan is up by 30 percent in my lifetime .
child mortality is down by two-thirds .
per-capita food production is up by a third .
and all this at a time when the population has doubled .
how did we achieve that , whether you think it 's a good thing or not ?
how did we achieve that ?
how did we become the only species that becomes more prosperous as it becomes more populous ?
the size of the blob in this graph represents the size of the population , and the level of the graph represents gdp per capita .
i think to answer that question you need to understand how human beings bring together their brains and enable their ideas to combine and recombine , to meet and , indeed , to mate .
in other words , you need to understand how ideas have sex .
i want you to imagine how we got from making objects like this to making objects like this .
these are both real objects .
one is an acheulean hand axe from half a million years ago of the kind made by homo erectus .
the other is obviously a computer mouse .
they 're both exactly the same size and shape to an uncanny degree .
i 've tried to work out which is bigger , and it 's almost impossible .
and that 's because they 're both designed to fit the human hand .
they 're both technologies . in the end , their similarity is not that interesting .
it just tells you they were both designed to fit the human hand .
the differences are what interest me , because the one on the left was made to a pretty unvarying design for about a million years - from one-and-a-half million years ago to half a million years ago .
homo erectus made the same tool for 30,000 generations .
of course there were a few changes , but tools changed slower than skeletons in those days .
there was no progress , no innovation .
it 's an extraordinary phenomenon , but it 's true .
whereas the object on the right is obsolete after five years .
and there 's another difference too , which is the object on the left is made from one substance .
the object on the right is made from a confection of different substances , from silicon and metal and plastic and so on .
and more than that , it 's a confection of different ideas , the idea of plastic , the idea of a laser , the idea of transistors .
they 've all been combined together in this technology .
and it 's this combination , this cumulative technology , that intrigues me , because i think it 's the secret to understanding what 's happening in the world .
my body 's an accumulation of ideas too : the idea of skin cells , the idea of brain cells , the idea of liver cells .
they 've come together .
how does evolution do cumulative , combinatorial things ?
well , it uses sexual reproduction .
in an asexual species , if you get two different mutations in different creatures , a green one and a red one , then one has to be better than the other .
one goes extinct for the other to survive .
but if you have a sexual species , then it 's possible for an individual to inherit both mutations from different lineages .
so what sex does is it enables the individual to draw upon the genetic innovations of the whole species .
it 's not confined to its own lineage .
what 's the process that 's having the same effect in cultural evolution as sex is having in biological evolution ?
and i think the answer is exchange , the habit of exchanging one thing for another .
it 's a unique human feature .
no other animal does it .
you can teach them in the laboratory to do a little bit of exchange - and indeed there 's reciprocity in other animals - but the exchange of one object for another never happens .
as adam smith said , " no man ever saw a dog make a fair exchange of a bone with another dog . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you can have culture without exchange .
you can have , as it were , asexual culture .
chimpanzees , killer whales , these kinds of creatures , they have culture .
they teach each other traditions which are handed down from parent to offspring .
in this case , chimpanzees teaching each other how to crack nuts with rocks .
but the difference is that these cultures never expand , never grow , never accumulate , never become combinatorial , and the reason is because there is no sex , as it were , there is no exchange of ideas .
chimpanzee troops have different cultures in different troops .
there 's no exchange of ideas between them .
and why does exchange raise living standards ?
well , the answer came from david ricardo in 1817 .
and here is a stone age version of his story , although he told it in terms of trade between countries .
adam takes four hours to make a spear and three hours to make an axe .
oz takes one hour to make a spear and two hours to make an axe .
so oz is better at both spears and axes than adam .
he does n't need adam .
he can make his own spears and axes .
well no , because if you think about it , if oz makes two spears and adam make two axes , and then they trade , then they will each have saved an hour of work .
and the more they do this , the more true it 's going to be , because the more they do this , the better adam is going to get at making axes and the better oz is going to get at making spears .
so the gains from trade are only going to grow .
and this is one of the beauties of exchange , is it actually creates the momentum for more specialization , which creates the momentum for more exchange and so on .
adam and oz both saved an hour of time .
that is prosperity , the saving of time in satisfying your needs .
ask yourself how long you would have to work to provide for yourself an hour of reading light this evening to read a book by .
if you had to start from scratch , let 's say you go out into the countryside .
you find a sheep . you kill it . you get the fat out of it .
you render it down . you make a candle , etc. etc .
how long is it going to take you ? quite a long time .
how long do you actually have to work to earn an hour of reading light if you 're on the average wage in britain today ?
and the answer is about half a second .
back in 1950 , you would have had to work for eight seconds on the average wage to acquire that much light .
and that 's seven and a half seconds of prosperity that you 've gained since 1950 , as it were , because that 's seven and a half seconds in which you can do something else , or you can acquire another good or service .
and back in 1880 , it would have been 15 minutes to earn that amount of light on the average wage .
back in 1800 , you 'd have had to work six hours to earn a candle that could burn for an hour .
in other words , the average person on the average wage could not afford a candle in 1800 .
go back to this image of the axe and the mouse , and ask yourself : " who made them and for who ? "
the stone axe was made by someone for himself .
it was self-sufficiency .
we call that poverty these days .
but the object on the right was made for me by other people .
how many other people ?
tens ? hundreds ? thousands ?
you know , i think it 's probably millions .
because you 've got to include the man who grew the coffee , which was brewed for the man who was on the oil rig , who was drilling for oil , which was going to be made into the plastic , etc .
they were all working for me , to make a mouse for me .
and that 's the way society works .
that 's what we 've achieved as a species .
in the old days , if you were rich , you literally had people working for you .
that 's how you got to be rich ; you employed them .
louis xiv had a lot of people working for him .
they made his silly outfits , like this , -lrb- laughter -rrb- and they did his silly hairstyles , or whatever .
he had 498 people to prepare his dinner every night .
but a modern tourist going around the palace of versailles and looking at louis xiv 's pictures , he has 498 people doing his dinner tonight too .
they 're in bistros and cafes and restaurants and shops all over paris , and they 're all ready to serve you at an hour 's notice with an excellent meal that 's probably got higher quality than louis xiv even had .
and that 's what we 've done , because we 're all working for each other .
we 're able to draw upon specialization and exchange to raise each other 's living standards .
now , you do get other animals working for each other too .
ants are a classic example ; workers work for queens and queens work for workers .
but there 's a big difference , which is that it only happens within the colony .
there 's no working for each other across the colonies .
and the reason for that is because there 's a reproductive division of labor .
that is to say , they specialize with respect to reproduction .
the queen does it all .
in our species , we do n't like doing that .
it 's the one thing we insist on doing for ourselves , is reproduction .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- even in england , we do n't leave reproduction to the queen .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so when did this habit start ?
and how long has it been going on ? and what does it mean ?
well , i think , probably , the oldest version of this is probably the sexual division of labor .
but i 've got no evidence for that .
it just looks like the first thing we did was work male for female and female for male .
in all hunter-gatherer societies today , there 's a foraging division of labor between , on the whole , hunting males and gathering females .
it is n't always quite that simple , but there 's a distinction between specialized roles for males and females .
and the beauty of this system is that it benefits both sides .
the woman knows that , in the hadzas ' case here - digging roots to share with men in exchange for meat - she knows that all she has to do to get access to protein is to dig some extra roots and trade them for meat .
and she does n't have to go on an exhausting hunt and try and kill a warthog .
and the man knows that he does n't have to do any digging to get roots .
all he has to do is make sure that when he kills a warthog it 's big enough to share some .
and so both sides raise each other 's standards of living through the sexual division of labor .
when did this happen ? we do n't know , but it 's possible that neanderthals did n't do this .
they were a highly cooperative species .
they were a highly intelligent species .
their brains on average , by the end , were bigger than yours and mine in this room today .
they were imaginative . they buried their dead .
they had language , probably , because we know they had the foxp2 gene of the same kind as us , which was discovered here in oxford .
and so it looks like they probably had linguistic skills .
they were brilliant people . i 'm not dissing the neanderthals .
but there 's no evidence of a sexual division of labor .
there 's no evidence of gathering behavior by females .
it looks like the females were cooperative hunters with the men .
and the other thing there 's no evidence for is exchange between groups , because the objects that you find in neanderthal remains , the tools they made , are always made from local materials .
for example , in the caucasus there 's a site where you find local neanderthal tools .
they 're always made from local chert .
in the same valley there are modern human remains from about the same date , 30,000 years ago , and some of those are from local chert , but more - but many of them are made from obsidian from a long way away .
and when human beings began moving objects around like this , it was evidence that they were exchanging between groups .
trade is 10 times as old as farming .
people forget that . people think of trade as a modern thing .
exchange between groups has been going on for a hundred thousand years .
and the earliest evidence for it crops up somewhere between 80 and 120,000 years ago in africa , when you see obsidian and jasper and other things moving long distances in ethiopia .
you also see seashells - as discovered by a team here in oxford - moving 125 miles inland from the mediterranean in algeria .
and that 's evidence that people have started exchanging between groups .
and that will have led to specialization .
how do you know that long-distance movement means trade rather than migration ?
well , you look at modern hunter gatherers like aboriginals , who quarried for stone axes at a place called mount isa , which was a quarry owned by the kalkadoon tribe .
they traded them with their neighbors for things like stingray barbs , and the consequence was that stone axes ended up over a large part of australia .
so long-distance movement of tools is a sign of trade , not migration .
what happens when you cut people off from exchange , from the ability to exchange and specialize ?
and the answer is that not only do you slow down technological progress , you can actually throw it into reverse .
an example is tasmania .
when the sea level rose and tasmania became an island 10,000 years ago , the people on it not only experienced slower progress than people on the mainland , they actually experienced regress .
they gave up the ability to make stone tools and fishing equipment and clothing because the population of about 4,000 people was simply not large enough to maintain the specialized skills necessary to keep the technology they had .
it 's as if the people in this room were plonked on a desert island .
how many of the things in our pockets could we continue to make after 10,000 years ?
it did n't happen in tierra del fuego - similar island , similar people .
the reason : because tierra del fuego is separated from south america by a much narrower straight , and there was trading contact across that straight throughout 10,000 years .
the tasmanians were isolated .
go back to this image again and ask yourself , not only who made it and for who , but who knew how to make it .
in the case of the stone axe , the man who made it knew how to make it .
but who knows how to make a computer mouse ?
nobody , literally nobody .
there is nobody on the planet who knows how to make a computer mouse .
i mean this quite seriously .
the president of the computer mouse company does n't know .
he just knows how to run a company .
the person on the assembly line does n't know because he does n't know how to drill an oil well to get oil out to make plastic , and so on .
we all know little bits , but none of us knows the whole .
i am of course quoting from a famous essay by leonard read , the economist in the 1950s , called " i , pencil " in which he wrote about how a pencil came to be made , and how nobody knows even how to make a pencil , because the people who assemble it do n't know how to mine graphite , and they do n't know how to fell trees and that kind of thing .
and what we 've done in human society , through exchange and specialization , is we 've created the ability to do things that we do n't even understand .
it 's not the same with language .
with language we have to transfer ideas that we understand with each other .
but with technology , we can actually do things that are beyond our capabilities .
we 've gone beyond the capacity of the human mind to an extraordinary degree .
and by the way , that 's one of the reasons that i 'm not interested in the debate about i.q. , about whether some groups have higher i.q.s than other groups .
it 's completely irrelevant .
what 's relevant to a society is how well people are communicating their ideas , and how well they 're cooperating , not how clever the individuals are .
so we 've created something called the collective brain .
we 're just the nodes in the network .
we 're the neurons in this brain .
it 's the interchange of ideas , the meeting and mating of ideas between them , that is causing technological progress , incrementally , bit by bit .
however , bad things happen .
and in the future , as we go forward , we will , of course , experience terrible things .
there will be wars ; there will be depressions ; there will be natural disasters .
awful things will happen in this century , i 'm absolutely sure .
but i 'm also sure that , because of the connections people are making , and the ability of ideas to meet and to mate as never before , i 'm also sure that technology will advance , and therefore living standards will advance .
because through the cloud , through crowd sourcing , through the bottom-up world that we 've created , where not just the elites but everybody is able to have their ideas and make them meet and mate , we are surely accelerating the rate of innovation .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- space , we all know what it looks like .
we 've been surrounded by images of space our whole lives , from the speculative images of science fiction to the inspirational visions of artists to the increasingly beautiful pictures made possible by complex technologies .
but whilst we have an overwhelmingly vivid visual understanding of space , we have no sense of what space sounds like .
and indeed , most people associate space with silence .
but the story of how we came to understand the universe is just as much a story of listening as it is by looking .
and yet despite this , hardly any of us have ever heard space .
how many of you here could describe the sound of a single planet or star ?
well in case you 've ever wondered , this is what the sun sounds like .
-lrb- static -rrb- -lrb- crackling -rrb- -lrb- static -rrb- -lrb- crackling -rrb- this is the planet jupiter .
-lrb- soft crackling -rrb- and this is the space probe cassini pirouetting through the ice rings of saturn .
-lrb- crackling -rrb- this is a a highly condensed clump of neutral matter , spinning in the distant universe .
-lrb- tapping -rrb- so my artistic practice is all about listening to the weird and wonderful noises emitted by the magnificent celestial objects that make up our universe .
and you may wonder , how do we know what these sounds are ?
how can we tell the difference between the sound of the sun and the sound of a pulsar ?
well the answer is the science of radio astronomy .
radio astronomers study radio waves from space using sensitive antennas and receivers , which give them precise information about what an astronomical object is and where it is in our night sky .
and just like the signals that we send and receive here on earth , we can convert these transmissions into sound using simple analog techniques .
and therefore , it 's through listening that we 've come to uncover some of the universe 's most important secrets - its scale , what it 's made of and even how old it is .
so today , i 'm going to tell you a short story of the history of the universe through listening .
it 's punctuated by three quick anecdotes , which show how accidental encounters with strange noises gave us some of the most important information we have about space .
now this story does n't start with vast telescopes or futuristic spacecraft , but a rather more humble technology - and in fact , the very medium which gave us the telecommunications revolution that we 're all part of today : the telephone .
it 's 1876 , it 's in boston , and this is alexander graham bell who was working with thomas watson on the invention of the telephone .
a key part of their technical set up was a half-mile long length of wire , which was thrown across the rooftops of several houses in boston .
the line carried the telephone signals that would later make bell a household name .
but like any long length of charged wire , it also inadvertently became an antenna .
thomas watson spent hours listening to the strange crackles and hisses and chirps and whistles that his accidental antenna detected .
now you have to remember , this is 10 years before heinrich hertz proved the existence of radio waves - 15 years before nikola tesla 's four-tuned circuit - nearly 20 years before marconi 's first broadcast .
so thomas watson was n't listening to us .
we did n't have the technology to transmit .
so what were these strange noises ?
watson was in fact listening to very low-frequency radio emissions caused by nature .
some of the crackles and pops were lightning , but the eerie whistles and curiously melodious chirps had a rather more exotic origin .
using the very first telephone , watson was in fact dialed into the heavens .
as he correctly guessed , some of these sounds were caused by activity on the surface of the sun .
it was a solar wind interacting with our ionosphere that he was listening to - a phenomena which we can see at the extreme northern and southern latitudes of our planet as the aurora .
so whilst inventing the technology that would usher in the telecommunications revolution , watson had discovered that the star at the center of our solar system emitted powerful radio waves .
he had accidentally been the first person to tune in to them .
fast-forward 50 years , and bell and watson 's technology has completely transformed global communications .
but going from slinging some wire across rooftops in boston to laying thousands and thousands of miles of cable on the atlantic ocean seabed is no easy matter .
and so before long , bell were looking to new technologies to optimize their revolution .
radio could carry sound without wires .
but the medium is lossy - it 's subject to a lot of noise and interference .
so bell employed an engineer to study those noises , to try and find out where they came from , with a view towards building the perfect hardware codec , which would get rid of them so they could think about using radio for the purposes of telephony .
most of the noises that the engineer , karl jansky , investigated were fairly prosaic in origin .
they turned out to be lightning or sources of electrical power .
but there was one persistent noise that jansky could n't identify , and it seemed to appear in his radio headset four minutes earlier each day .
now any astronomer will tell you , this is the telltale sign of something that does n't originate from earth .
jansky had made a historic discovery , that celestial objects could emit radio waves as well as light waves .
fifty years on from watson 's accidental encounter with the sun , jansky 's careful listening ushered in a new age of space exploration : the radio astronomy age .
over the next few years , astronomers connected up their antennas to loudspeakers and learned about our radio sky , about jupiter and the sun , by listening .
let 's jump ahead again .
it 's 1964 , and we 're back at bell labs .
and once again , two scientists have got a problem with noise .
arno penzias and robert wilson were using the horn antenna at bell 's holmdel laboratory to study the milky way with extraordinary precision .
they were really listening to the galaxy in high fidelity .
there was a glitch in their soundtrack .
a mysterious persistent noise was disrupting their research .
it was in the microwave range , and it appeared to be coming from all directions simultaneously .
now this did n't make any sense , and like any reasonable engineer or scientist , they assumed that the problem must be the technology itself , it must be the dish .
there were pigeons roosting in the dish .
and so perhaps once they cleaned up the pigeon droppings , get the disk kind of operational again , normal operations would resume .
but the noise did n't disappear .
the mysterious noise that penzias and wilson were listening to turned out to be the oldest and most significant sound that anyone had ever heard .
it was cosmic radiation left over from the very birth of the universe .
this was the first experimental evidence that the big bang existed and the universe was born at a precise moment some 14.7 billion years ago .
so our story ends at the beginning - the beginning of all things , the big bang .
this is the noise that penzias and wilson heard - the oldest sound that you 're ever going to hear , the cosmic microwave background radiation left over from the big bang .
-lrb- fuzz -rrb- thanks .
-lrb- applause -rrb- now , extinction is a different kind of death .
it 's bigger .
we did n't really realize that until 1914 , when the last passenger pigeon , a female named martha , died at the cincinnati zoo .
this had been the most abundant bird in the world that 'd been in north america for six million years .
suddenly it was n't here at all .
flocks that were a mile wide and 400 miles long used to darken the sun .
aldo leopold said this was a biological storm , a feathered tempest .
and indeed it was a keystone species that enriched the entire eastern deciduous forest , from the mississippi to the atlantic , from canada down to the gulf .
but it went from five billion birds to zero in just a couple decades .
what happened ?
well , commercial hunting happened .
these birds were hunted for meat that was sold by the ton , and it was easy to do because when those big flocks came down to the ground , they were so dense that hundreds of hunters and netters could show up and slaughter them by the tens of thousands .
it was the cheapest source of protein in america .
by the end of the century , there was nothing left but these beautiful skins in museum specimen drawers .
there 's an upside to the story .
this made people realize that the same thing was about to happen to the american bison , and so these birds saved the buffalos .
but a lot of other animals were n't saved .
the carolina parakeet was a parrot that lit up backyards everywhere .
it was hunted to death for its feathers .
there was a bird that people liked on the east coast called the heath hen .
it was loved . they tried to protect it . it died anyway .
a local newspaper spelled out , " there is no survivor , there is no future , there is no life to be recreated in this form ever again . "
there 's a sense of deep tragedy that goes with these things , and it happened to lots of birds that people loved .
it happened to lots of mammals .
another keystone species is a famous animal called the european aurochs .
there was sort of a movie made about it recently .
and the aurochs was like the bison .
this was an animal that basically kept the forest mixed with grasslands across the entire europe and asian continent , from spain to korea .
the documentation of this animal goes back to the lascaux cave paintings .
the extinctions still go on .
there 's an ibex in spain called the bucardo .
it went extinct in 2000 .
there was a marvelous animal , a marsupial wolf called the thylacine in tasmania , south of australia , called the tasmanian tiger .
it was hunted until there were just a few left to die in zoos .
a little bit of film was shot .
sorrow , anger , mourning .
do n't mourn . organize .
what if you could find out that , using the dna in museum specimens , fossils maybe up to 200,000 years old could be used to bring species back , what would you do ? where would you start ?
well , you 'd start by finding out if the biotech is really there .
i started with my wife , ryan phelan , who ran a biotech business called dna direct , and through her , one of her colleagues , george church , one of the leading genetic engineers who turned out to be also obsessed with passenger pigeons and a lot of confidence that methodologies he was working on might actually do the deed .
so he and ryan organized and hosted a meeting at the wyss institute in harvard bringing together specialists on passenger pigeons , conservation ornithologists , bioethicists , and fortunately passenger pigeon dna had already been sequenced by a molecular biologist named beth shapiro .
all she needed from those specimens at the smithsonian was a little bit of toe pad tissue , because down in there is what is called ancient dna .
it 's dna which is pretty badly fragmented , but with good techniques now , you can basically reassemble the whole genome .
then the question is , can you reassemble , with that genome , the whole bird ?
george church thinks you can .
so in his book , " regenesis , " which i recommend , he has a chapter on the science of bringing back extinct species , and he has a machine called the multiplex automated genome engineering machine .
it 's kind of like an evolution machine .
you try combinations of genes that you write at the cell level and then in organs on a chip , and the ones that win , that you can then put into a living organism . it 'll work .
the precision of this , one of george 's famous unreadable slides , nevertheless points out that there 's a level of precision here right down to the individual base pair .
the passenger pigeon has 1.3 billion base pairs in its genome .
so what you 're getting is the capability now of replacing one gene with another variation of that gene .
it 's called an allele .
well that 's what happens in normal hybridization anyway .
so this is a form of synthetic hybridization of the genome of an extinct species with the genome of its closest living relative .
now along the way , george points out that his technology , the technology of synthetic biology , is currently accelerating at four times the rate of moore 's law .
it 's been doing that since 2005 , and it 's likely to continue .
okay , the closest living relative of the passenger pigeon is the band-tailed pigeon . they 're abundant . there 's some around here .
genetically , the band-tailed pigeon already is mostly living passenger pigeon .
there 's just some bits that are band-tailed pigeon .
if you replace those bits with passenger pigeon bits , you 've got the extinct bird back , cooing at you .
now , there 's work to do .
you have to figure out exactly what genes matter .
so there 's genes for the short tail in the band-tailed pigeon , genes for the long tail in the passenger pigeon , and so on with the red eye , peach-colored breast , flocking , and so on .
add them all up and the result wo n't be perfect .
but it should be be perfect enough , because nature does n't do perfect either .
so this meeting in boston led to three things .
first off , ryan and i decided to create a nonprofit called revive and restore that would push de-extinction generally and try to have it go in a responsible way , and we would push ahead with the passenger pigeon .
another direct result was a young grad student named ben novak , who had been obsessed with passenger pigeons since he was 14 and had also learned how to work with ancient dna , himself sequenced the passenger pigeon , using money from his family and friends .
we hired him full-time .
now , this photograph i took of him last year at the smithsonian , he 's looking down at martha , the last passenger pigeon alive .
so if he 's successful , she wo n't be the last .
the third result of the boston meeting was the realization that there are scientists all over the world working on various forms of de-extinction , but they 'd never met each other .
and national geographic got interested because national geographic has the theory that the last century , discovery was basically finding things , and in this century , discovery is basically making things .
de-extinction falls in that category .
so they hosted and funded this meeting . and 35 scientists , they were conservation biologists and molecular biologists , basically meeting to see if they had work to do together .
some of these conservation biologists are pretty radical .
there 's three of them who are not just re-creating ancient species , they 're recreating extinct ecosystems in northern siberia , in the netherlands , and in hawaii .
henri , from the netherlands , with a dutch last name i wo n't try to pronounce , is working on the aurochs .
the aurochs is the ancestor of all domestic cattle , and so basically its genome is alive , it 's just unevenly distributed .
so what they 're doing is working with seven breeds of primitive , hardy-looking cattle like that maremmana primitivo on the top there to rebuild , over time , with selective back-breeding , the aurochs .
now , re-wilding is moving faster in korea than it is in america , and so the plan is , with these re-wilded areas all over europe , they will introduce the aurochs to do its old job , its old ecological role , of clearing the somewhat barren , closed-canopy forest so that it has these biodiverse meadows in it .
another amazing story came from alberto fernández-arias .
alberto worked with the bucardo in spain .
the last bucardo was a female named celia who was still alive , but then they captured her , they got a little bit of tissue from her ear , they cryopreserved it in liquid nitrogen , released her back into the wild , but a few months later , she was found dead under a fallen tree .
they took the dna from that ear , they planted it as a cloned egg in a goat , the pregnancy came to term , and a live baby bucardo was born .
it was the first de-extinction in history .
-lrb- applause -rrb- it was short-lived .
sometimes interspecies clones have respiration problems .
this one had a malformed lung and died after 10 minutes , but alberto was confident that cloning has moved along well since then , and this will move ahead , and eventually there will be a population of bucardos back in the mountains in northern spain .
cryopreservation pioneer of great depth is oliver ryder .
at the san diego zoo , his frozen zoo has collected the tissues from over 1,000 species over the last 35 years .
now , when it 's frozen that deep , minus 196 degrees celsius , the cells are intact and the dna is intact .
they 're basically viable cells , so someone like bob lanza at advanced cell technology took some of that tissue from an endangered animal called the javan banteng , put it in a cow , the cow went to term , and what was born was a live , healthy baby javan banteng , who thrived and is still alive .
the most exciting thing for bob lanza is the ability now to take any kind of cell with induced pluripotent stem cells and turn it into germ cells , like sperm and eggs .
so now we go to mike mcgrew who is a scientist at roslin institute in scotland , and mike 's doing miracles with birds .
so he 'll take , say , falcon skin cells , fibroblast , turn it into induced pluripotent stem cells .
since it 's so pluripotent , it can become germ plasm .
he then has a way to put the germ plasm into the embryo of a chicken egg so that that chicken will have , basically , the gonads of a falcon .
you get a male and a female each of those , and out of them comes falcons .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- real falcons out of slightly doctored chickens .
ben novak was the youngest scientist at the meeting .
he showed how all of this can be put together .
the sequence of events : he 'll put together the genomes of the band-tailed pigeon and the passenger pigeon , he 'll take the techniques of george church and get passenger pigeon dna , the techniques of robert lanza and michael mcgrew , get that dna into chicken gonads , and out of the chicken gonads get passenger pigeon eggs , squabs , and now you 're getting a population of passenger pigeons .
it does raise the question of , they 're not going to have passenger pigeon parents to teach them how to be a passenger pigeon .
so what do you do about that ?
well birds are pretty hard-wired , as it happens , so most of that is already in their dna , but to supplement it , part of ben 's idea is to use homing pigeons to help train the young passenger pigeons how to flock and how to find their way to their old nesting grounds and feeding grounds .
there were some conservationists , really famous conservationists like stanley temple , who is one of the founders of conservation biology , and kate jones from the iucn , which does the red list .
they 're excited about all this , but they 're also concerned that it might be competitive with the extremely important efforts to protect endangered species that are still alive , that have n't gone extinct yet .
you see , you want to work on protecting the animals out there .
you want to work on getting the market for ivory in asia down so you 're not using 25,000 elephants a year .
but at the same time , conservation biologists are realizing that bad news bums people out .
and so the red list is really important , keep track of what 's endangered and critically endangered , and so on .
but they 're about to create what they call a green list , and the green list will have species that are doing fine , thank you , species that were endangered , like the bald eagle , but they 're much better off now , thanks to everybody 's good work , and protected areas around the world that are very , very well managed .
so basically , they 're learning how to build on good news .
and they see reviving extinct species as the kind of good news you might be able to build on .
here 's a couple related examples .
captive breeding will be a major part of bringing back these species .
the california condor was down to 22 birds in 1987 .
everybody thought is was finished .
thanks to captive breeding at the san diego zoo , there 's 405 of them now , 226 are out in the wild .
that technology will be used on de-extincted animals .
another success story is the mountain gorilla in central africa .
in 1981 , dian fossey was sure they were going extinct .
there were just 254 left .
now there are 880 . they 're increasing in population by three percent a year .
the secret is , they have an eco-tourism program , which is absolutely brilliant .
so this photograph was taken last month by ryan with an iphone .
that 's how comfortable these wild gorillas are with visitors .
another interesting project , though it 's going to need some help , is the northern white rhinoceros .
there 's no breeding pairs left .
but this is the kind of thing that a wide variety of dna for this animal is available in the frozen zoo .
a bit of cloning , you can get them back .
these have been private meetings so far .
i think it 's time for the subject to go public .
what do people think about it ?
you know , do you want extinct species back ?
do you want extinct species back ?
-lrb- applause -rrb- tinker bell is going to come fluttering down .
it is a tinker bell moment , because what are people excited about with this ?
what are they concerned about ?
we 're also going to push ahead with the passenger pigeon .
so ben novak , even as we speak , is joining the group that beth shapiro has at uc santa cruz .
they 're going to work on the genomes of the passenger pigeon and the band-tailed pigeon .
as that data matures , they 'll send it to george church , who will work his magic , get passenger pigeon dna out of that .
we 'll get help from bob lanza and mike mcgrew to get that into germ plasm that can go into chickens that can produce passenger pigeon squabs that can be raised by band-tailed pigeon parents , and then from then on , it 's passenger pigeons all the way , maybe for the next six million years .
you can do the same thing , as the costs come down , for the carolina parakeet , for the great auk , for the heath hen , for the ivory-billed woodpecker , for the eskimo curlew , for the caribbean monk seal , for the woolly mammoth .
because the fact is , humans have made a huge hole in nature in the last 10,000 years .
we have the ability now , and maybe the moral obligation , to repair some of the damage .
most of that we 'll do by expanding and protecting wildlands , by expanding and protecting the populations of endangered species .
but some species that we killed off totally we could consider bringing back to a world that misses them .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : thank you .
i 've got a question .
so , this is an emotional topic . some people stand .
i suspect there are some people out there sitting , kind of asking tormented questions , almost , about , well , wait , wait , wait , wait , wait , wait a minute , there 's something wrong with mankind interfering in nature in this way .
there 's going to be unintended consequences .
you 're going to uncork some sort of pandora 's box of who-knows-what . do they have a point ?
stewart brand : well , the earlier point is we interfered in a big way by making these animals go extinct , and many of them were keystone species , and we changed the whole ecosystem they were in by letting them go .
now , there 's the shifting baseline problem , which is , so when these things come back , they might replace some birds that are there that people really know and love .
i think that 's , you know , part of how it 'll work .
this is a long , slow process - one of the things i like about it , it 's multi-generation .
we will get woolly mammoths back .
ca : well it feels like both the conversation and the potential here are pretty thrilling .
thank you so much for presenting . sb : thank you .
ca : thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- in the ocean , what is the common point between oil , plastic and radioactivity ?
on the top line , this is the bp oil spill : billions of barrels of oil gushing in the gulf of mexico .
the middle line is millions of tons of plastic debris accumulating in our ocean , and the third line is radioactive material leaking from fukushima nuclear power plant in the pacific ocean .
well , the three big problems have in common that they are man-made problems but they are controlled by natural forces .
this should make us feel very , terribly awful as much as it should make us feel hopeful , because if we have the power to create these problems , we may as well have the power to remediate these problems .
but what about natural forces ?
well , that 's exactly what i want to talk about today , is how we can use these natural forces to remediate these man-made problems .
when the bp oil spill happened , i was working at mit , and i was in charge of developing an oil spill-cleaning technology .
and i had a chance to go in the gulf of mexico and meet some fishermen and see the terrible conditions in which they were working .
more than 700 of these boats , which are fishermen boats repurposed with oil absorbent in white and oil containment in orange , were used , but they only collected three percent of the oil on the surface , and the health of the cleaners were very deeply affected .
i was working on a very interesting technology at mit , but it was a very long-term view of how to develop technology , and it was going to be a very expensive technology , and also it would be patented .
so i wanted to develop something that we could develop very fast , that would be cheap , and that would be open-source , so , because oil spills are not only happening in the gulf of mexico , and that would be using renewable energy .
so i quit my dream job , and i moved to new orleans , and i kept on studying how the oil spill was happening .
currently , what they were doing is that they were using these small fishing boats , and they were cleaning clean lines in an ocean of dirt .
if you 're using the exact same amount of surface of oil absorbent , but you 're just paying attention to natural patterns , and if you 're going up the winds , you can collect a lot more material .
if you 're multiplying the rig , so you multiply how many layers of absorbent you 're using , you can collect a lot more .
but it 's extremely difficult to move oil absorbent against the winds , the surface currents and the waves .
these are enormous forces .
so the very simple idea was to use the ancient technique of sailing and tacking of the wind to capture or intercept the oil that is drifting down the wind .
so this did n't require any invention .
we just took a simple sailing boat and we tried to pull something long and heavy , but as we tacked back and forth , what we lost was two things : we were losing pulling power and direction .
and so , i thought , what about if we just take the rudder from the back of the boat to the front , would we have better control ?
so i built this small sailing robot with the rudder at the front , and i was trying to pull something very long and heavy , so that 's a four-meter-long object just to pull , and i was surprised with just a 14-centimeter rudder , i could control four meters of absorbent .
then i was so happy that i kept playing with the robot , and so you see the robot has a front rudder here .
normally it 's at the back .
and , playing , i realized that the maneuverability of this was really amazing , and i could avoid an obstacle at the very last second , more maneuverable than a normal boat .
then i started publishing online , and some friends from korea , they started being interested in this , and we made a boat which has a front rudder and a back rudder , so we started interacting with this , and it was slightly better , although it was very small and a bit off balance , but then we thought , what if we have more than two points of control ?
what if the entire boat becomes a point of control ?
what if the entire boat changes shape ?
so - -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you very much . -lrb- applause -rrb- and so that 's the beginning of protei , and that 's the first boat in history that completely changed the shape of the hull in order to control it , and the properties of sailing that we get are very superior compared to a normal boat .
when we 're turning , we have the feeling of surfing , and the way it 's going up-wind , it 's very efficient .
this is low speed , low wind speed , and the maneuverability is very increased , and here i 'm going to do a small jibe , and look at the position of the sail .
what 's happening is that , because the boat changes shape , the position of the front sail and the main sail are different to the wind .
we 're catching wind from both sides .
and this is exactly what we 're looking -lsb- for -rsb- if we want to pull something long and heavy .
we do n't want to lose pulling power , nor direction .
so , i wanted to know if this was possible to put this at an industrial level , so we made a large boat with a large sail , and with a very light hull , inflatable , very small footprint , so we have a very big size and power ratio .
after this , we wanted to see if we could implement this and automate the system , so we used the same system but we added a structure to it so we could activate the machine .
so , we used the same bladder-inflated system , and we took it for testing .
so this is happening in the netherlands .
we tried in the water without any skin or ballast just to see how it works .
and then we mounted a camera for controlling it , but quickly we saw that we would need a lot more weight at the bottom , so we had to take it back to the lab , and then we built a skin around it , we put batteries , remote controllers , and then we put it in the water and then we let it go in the water and see how well it would work , so let some rope out , and hope it 's going to work , and it worked okay , but we still have a long way .
our small prototype has given us good insight that it 's working very well , but we still need to work a lot more on this .
so what we are doing is an accelerated evolution of sailing technology .
we went from a back rudder to a front rudder to two rudders to multiple rudders to the whole boat changing shape , and the more we are moving forward , and the more the design looks simple and cute . -lrb- laughter -rrb- but i wanted to show you a fish because - in fact , it 's very different from a fish .
a fish will move because - by changing like this , but our boat is propelled by the wind still , and the hull controls the trajectory .
so i brought to you for the first time on the ted stage protei number eight . it 's not the last one , but it 's a good one for making demos .
so the first thing as i show you in the video is that we may be able to control the trajectory of a sailing boat better , or we may be able to never be in irons , so never facing the wind , we always can catch the wind from both sides .
but new properties of a sailing boat .
so if you 're looking at the boat from this side , this might remind you of an airplane profile .
an airplane , when you 're moving in this direction , starts to lift , and that 's how it takes off .
now , if you 're taking the same system , and you 're putting vertical , you 're bending , and if you 're moving this way forward , your instinct will tell you that you might go this way , but if you 're moving fast enough , you might create what we call lateral lift , so we could get further or closer to the wind .
other property is this : a normal sailing boat has a centerboard here and a rudder at the back , and these two things are what creates most resistance and turbulence behind the boat , but because this does n't have either a centerboard or a rudder , we hope that if we keep working on this hull design we can improve and have less resistance .
the other thing is , most boats , when they reach a certain speed , and they are going on waves , they start to hit and slap on the surface of the water , and a lot of the energy moving forward is lost .
but if we 're going with the flow , if we pay attention to natural patterns instead of trying to be strong , but if you 're going with the flow , we may absorb a lot of environmental noises , so the wave energy , to actually save some energy to move forward .
so we may have developed the technology which is very efficient for pulling something long and heavy , but the idea is , what is the purpose of technology if it does n't reach the right hands ?
normal technology or innovation happens like this : somebody has an interesting idea , some other scientist or engineer , they take it to the next level , they make a theory about it and maybe they patent it , and then some industry will make a contract of exclusivity to manufacture and sell it , and then , eventually , a buyer will buy it , and we hope that they are going to use -lsb- it -rsb- for a good purpose .
what we really want is that this innovation happens continuously . the inventor and engineers and also the manufacturers and everybody works at the same time , but this would be sterile if this was happening in a parallel and uncrossed process .
what you really want is not a sequential , not parallel development .
you want to have a network of innovation .
you want everybody , like we 're doing now , to work at the same time , and that can only happen if these people all together decide to share the information , and that 's exactly what open hardware is about .
it 's to replace competition by collaboration .
it 's to transform any new product into a new market .
so what is open hardware ?
essentially , open hardware is a license .
it 's just an intellectual property setup .
it means that everybody is free to use , modify and distribute , and in exchange we only ask for two things : the name is credited - the name of the project - and also the people who make improvement , they share back with the community .
so it 's a very simple condition .
and i started this project alone in a garage in new orleans , but quickly after i wanted to publish and share this information , so i made a kickstarter , which is a crowd-fundraising platform , and in about one month we fundraised 30,000 dollars .
with this money , i hired a team of young engineers from all over the world , and we rented a factory in rotterdam in the netherlands .
we were peer-learning , we were engineering , we were making things , prototyping , but most importantly we were trying our prototypes in the water as often as possible , to fail as quickly as possible , to learn from .
this is a proud member of protei from korea , and on the right side , this is a multiple-masts design proposed by a team in mexico .
this idea really appealed to gabriella levine in new york , and so she decided to prototype this idea that she saw , and she documented every step of the process , and she published it on instructables , which is a website for sharing inventions .
less than one week after , this is a team in eindhoven , it 's a school of engineering .
they made it , but they eventually published a simplified design .
they also made it into an instructable , and in less than one week , they had almost 10,000 views , and they got many new friends .
we 're working on also simpler technology , not that complex , with younger people and also older people , like this dinosaur is from mexico . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so protei is now an international network of innovation for selling technology using this shape-shifting hull .
and what puts us together is that we have a common , at least , global understanding of what the word " business " is , or what it should be .
this is how most work today .
business as usual is saying , what 's most important is to make lots of profit , and you 'll be using technology for that , and people will be your work force , instrumentalized , and environment is usually the last priority .
it will be just a way to , say , greenwash your audience and , say , increase your price tag .
what we 're trying to do , or what we believe , because this is how we believe the world really works , is that without the environment you have nothing .
we have the people so we need to protect each other , yes , and we 're a technology company , and profit is necessary to make this happen . -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you very much . -lrb- applause -rrb- if we have the courage to understand or accept that this actually how the world really works , and this is the order of priority that we need to choose , then it makes obvious why we need to choose open hardware for developing environmental technology , because we need to share information .
what 's next for us ?
so , this small machine that you 've seen , we 're hoping to make small toys like one-meter remote control protei that you can upgrade - so replace the remote control parts by androids , so the mobile phone , and arduino micro-controller , so you could be controlling this from your mobile phone , your tablet .
then what we want to do is create six-meter versions so we can test the maximum performance of these machines , so we can go at very , very high speed .
so imagine yourself .
you are laying down in a flexible torpedo , sailing at high speed , controlling the shape of the hull with your legs and controlling the sail with your arms .
so that 's what we 're looking for developing . -lrb- applause -rrb- and we replace the human being - to go , for example , for measuring radioactivity , you do n't want a human to be sailing those robots - with batteries , motors , micro-controllers and sensors .
this is what our teammates , we dream of at night .
we hope that we can sometime clean up oil spills , or we can gather or collect plastic in the ocean , or we can have swarms of our machines controlled by multi-player video game engines to control many of these machines , to monitor coral reefs or to monitor fisheries .
our hope is that we can use open hardware technology to better understand and protect our oceans .
thank you very much . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- up until now , our communication with machines has always been limited to conscious and direct forms .
whether it 's something simple like turning on the lights with a switch , or even as complex as programming robotics , we have always had to give a command to a machine , or even a series of commands , in order for it to do something for us .
communication between people , on the other hand , is far more complex and a lot more interesting because we take into account so much more than what is explicitly expressed .
we observe facial expressions , body language , and we can intuit feelings and emotions from our dialogue with one another .
this actually forms a large part of our decision-making process .
our vision is to introduce this whole new realm of human interaction so that computers can understand not only what you direct it to do , but it can also respond to your facial expressions and emotional experiences .
and what better way to do this than by interpreting the signals naturally produced by our brain , our center for control and experience .
well , it sounds like a pretty good idea , but this task , as bruno mentioned , is n't an easy one for two main reasons : first , the detection algorithms .
our brain is made up of billions of active neurons , around 170,000 km of combined axon length .
when these neurons interact , the chemical reaction emits an electrical impulse , which can be measured .
the majority of our functional brain is distributed over the outer surface layer of the brain , and to increase the area that 's available for mental capacity , the brain surface is highly folded .
now this cortical folding presents a significant challenge for interpreting surface electrical impulses .
each individual 's cortex is folded differently , very much like a fingerprint .
so even though a signal may come from the same functional part of the brain , by the time the structure has been folded , its physical location is very different between individuals , even identical twins .
there is no longer any consistency in the surface signals .
our breakthrough was to create an algorithm that unfolds the cortex , so that we can map the signals closer to its source , and therefore making it capable of working across a mass population .
the second challenge is the actual device for observing brainwaves .
eeg measurements typically involve a hairnet with an array of sensors , like the one that you can see here in the photo .
a technician will put the electrodes onto the scalp using a conductive gel or paste and usually after a procedure of preparing the scalp by light abrasion .
now this is quite time consuming and is n't the most comfortable process .
and on top of that , these systems actually cost in the tens of thousands of dollars .
so with that , i 'd like to invite onstage evan grant , who is one of last year 's speakers , who 's kindly agreed to help me to demonstrate what we 've been able to develop .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so the device that you see is a 14-channel , high-fidelity eeg acquisition system .
it does n't require any scalp preparation , no conductive gel or paste .
it only takes a few minutes to put on and for the signals to settle .
it 's also wireless , so it gives you the freedom to move around .
and compared to the tens of thousands of dollars for a traditional eeg system , this headset only costs a few hundred dollars .
now on to the detection algorithms .
so facial expressions - as i mentioned before in emotional experiences - are actually designed to work out of the box with some sensitivity adjustments available for personalization .
but with the limited time we have available , i 'd like to show you the cognitive suite , which is the ability for you to basically move virtual objects with your mind .
now , evan is new to this system , so what we have to do first is create a new profile for him .
he 's obviously not joanne - so we 'll " add user . "
evan . okay .
so the first thing we need to do with the cognitive suite is to start with training a neutral signal .
with neutral , there 's nothing in particular that evan needs to do .
he just hangs out . he 's relaxed .
and the idea is to establish a baseline or normal state for his brain , because every brain is different .
it takes eight seconds to do this , and now that that 's done , we can choose a movement-based action .
so evan , choose something that you can visualize clearly in your mind .
evan grant : let 's do " pull . "
tan le : okay , so let 's choose " pull . "
so the idea here now is that evan needs to imagine the object coming forward into the screen , and there 's a progress bar that will scroll across the screen while he 's doing that .
the first time , nothing will happen , because the system has no idea how he thinks about " pull . "
but maintain that thought for the entire duration of the eight seconds .
so : one , two , three , go .
okay .
so once we accept this , the cube is live .
so let 's see if evan can actually try and imagine pulling .
ah , good job !
-lrb- applause -rrb- that 's really amazing .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so we have a little bit of time available , so i 'm going to ask evan to do a really difficult task .
and this one is difficult because it 's all about being able to visualize something that does n't exist in our physical world .
this is " disappear . "
so what you want to do - at least with movement-based actions , we do that all the time , so you can visualize it .
but with " disappear , " there 's really no analogies - so evan , what you want to do here is to imagine the cube slowly fading out , okay .
same sort of drill . so : one , two , three , go .
okay . let 's try that .
oh , my goodness . he 's just too good .
eg : losing concentration .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- tl : but we can see that it actually works , even though you can only hold it for a little bit of time .
as i said , it 's a very difficult process to imagine this .
and the great thing about it is that we 've only given the software one instance of how he thinks about " disappear . "
as there is a machine learning algorithm in this - -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
good job . good job .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you , evan , you 're a wonderful , wonderful example of the technology .
so , as you can see , before , there is a leveling system built into this software so that as evan , or any user , becomes more familiar with the system , they can continue to add more and more detections , so that the system begins to differentiate between different distinct thoughts .
and once you 've trained up the detections , these thoughts can be assigned or mapped to any computing platform , application or device .
so i 'd like to show you a few examples , because there are many possible applications for this new interface .
in games and virtual worlds , for example , your facial expressions can naturally and intuitively be used to control an avatar or virtual character .
obviously , you can experience the fantasy of magic and control the world with your mind .
and also , colors , lighting , sound and effects can dynamically respond to your emotional state to heighten the experience that you 're having , in real time .
and moving on to some applications developed by developers and researchers around the world , with robots and simple machines , for example - in this case , flying a toy helicopter simply by thinking " lift " with your mind .
the technology can also be applied to real world applications - in this example , a smart home .
you know , from the user interface of the control system to opening curtains or closing curtains .
and of course , also to the lighting - turning them on or off .
and finally , to real life-changing applications , such as being able to control an electric wheelchair .
in this example , facial expressions are mapped to the movement commands .
man : now blink right to go right .
now blink left to turn back left .
now smile to go straight .
tl : we really - thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- we are really only scratching the surface of what is possible today , and with the community 's input , and also with the involvement of developers and researchers from around the world , we hope that you can help us to shape where the technology goes from here . thank you so much .
one year ago , i rented a car in jerusalem to go find a man i 'd never met but who had changed my life .
i did n't have a phone number to call to say i was coming .
i did n't have an exact address , but i knew his name , abed , i knew that he lived in a town of 15,000 , kfar kara , and i knew that , 21 years before , just outside this holy city , he broke my neck .
and so , on an overcast morning in january , i headed north off in a silver chevy to find a man and some peace .
the road dropped and i exited jerusalem .
i then rounded the very bend where his blue truck , heavy with four tons of floor tiles , had borne down with great speed onto the back left corner of the minibus where i sat .
i was then 19 years old .
i 'd grown five inches and done some 20,000 pushups in eight months , and the night before the crash , i delighted in my new body , playing basketball with friends into the wee hours of a may morning .
i palmed the ball in my large right hand , and when that hand reached the rim , i felt invincible .
i was off in the bus to get the pizza i 'd won on the court .
i did n't see abed coming .
from my seat , i was looking up at a stone town on a hilltop , bright in the noontime sun , when from behind there was a great bang , as loud and violent as a bomb .
my head snapped back over my red seat .
my eardrum blew . my shoes flew off .
i flew too , my head bobbing on broken bones , and when i landed , i was a quadriplegic .
over the coming months , i learned to breathe on my own , then to sit and to stand and to walk , but my body was now divided vertically .
i was a hemiplegic , and back home in new york , i used a wheelchair for four years , all through college .
college ended and i returned to jerusalem for a year .
there i rose from my chair for good , i leaned on my cane , and i looked back , finding all from my fellow passengers in the bus to photographs of the crash , and when i saw this photograph , i did n't see a bloody and unmoving body .
i saw the healthy bulk of a left deltoid , and i mourned that it was lost , mourned all i had not yet done , but was now impossible .
it was then i read the testimony that abed gave the morning after the crash , of driving down the right lane of a highway toward jerusalem .
reading his words , i welled with anger .
it was the first time i 'd felt anger toward this man , and it came from magical thinking .
on this xeroxed piece of paper , the crash had not yet happened .
abed could still turn his wheel left so that i would see him whoosh by out my window and i would remain whole .
" be careful , abed , look out . slow down . "
but abed did not slow , and on that xeroxed piece of paper , my neck again broke , and again , i was left without anger .
i decided to find abed , and when i finally did , he responded to my hebrew hello which such nonchalance , it seemed he 'd been awaiting my phone call .
and maybe he had .
i did n't mention to abed his prior driving record - 27 violations by the age of 25 , the last , his not shifting his truck into a low gear on that may day - and i did n't mention my prior record - the quadriplegia and the catheters , the insecurity and the loss - and when abed went on about how hurt he was in the crash , i did n't say that i knew from the police report that he 'd escaped serious injury .
i said i wanted to meet .
abed said that i should call back in a few weeks , and when i did , and a recording told me that his number was disconnected , i let abed and the crash go .
many years passed .
i walked with my cane and my ankle brace and a backpack on trips in six continents .
i pitched overhand in a weekly softball game that i started in central park , and home in new york , i became a journalist and an author , typing hundreds of thousands of words with one finger .
a friend pointed out to me that all of my big stories mirrored my own , each centering on a life that had changed in an instant , owing , if not to a crash , then to an inheritance , a swing of the bat , a click of the shutter , an arrest .
each of us had a before and an after .
i 'd been working through my lot after all .
still , abed was far from my mind , when last year , i returned to israel to write of the crash , and the book i then wrote , " half-life , " was nearly complete when i recognized that i still wanted to meet abed , and finally i understood why : to hear this man say two words : " i 'm sorry . "
people apologize for less .
and so i got a cop to confirm that abed still lived somewhere in his same town , and i was now driving to it with a potted yellow rose in the back seat , when suddenly flowers seemed a ridiculous offering .
but what to get the man who broke your fucking neck ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i pulled into the town of abu ghosh , and bought a brick of turkish delight : pistachios glued in rosewater . better .
back on highway 1 , i envisioned what awaited .
abed would hug me . abed would spit at me .
abed would say , " i 'm sorry . "
i then began to wonder , as i had many times before , how my life would have been different had this man not injured me , had my genes been fed a different helping of experience .
who was i ?
was i who i had been before the crash , before this road divided my life like the spine of an open book ?
was i what had been done to me ?
were all of us the results of things done to us , done for us , the infidelity of a parent or spouse , money inherited ?
were we instead our bodies , their inborn endowments and deficits ?
it seemed that we could be nothing more than genes and experience , but how to tease out the one from the other ?
as yeats put that same universal question , " o body swayed to music , o brightening glance , how can we know the dancer from the dance ? "
i 'd been driving for an hour when i looked in my rearview mirror and saw my own brightening glance .
the light my eyes had carried for as long as they had been blue .
the predispositions and impulses that had propelled me as a toddler to try and slip over a boat into a chicago lake , that had propelled me as a teen to jump into wild cape cod bay after a hurricane .
but i also saw in my reflection that , had abed not injured me , i would now , in all likelihood , be a doctor and a husband and a father .
i would be less mindful of time and of death , and , oh , i would not be disabled , would not suffer the thousand slings and arrows of my fortune .
the frequent furl of five fingers , the chips in my teeth come from biting at all the many things a solitary hand can not open .
the dancer and the dance were hopelessly entwined .
it was approaching 11 when i exited right toward afula , and passed a large quarry and was soon in kfar kara .
i felt a pang of nerves .
but chopin was on the radio , seven beautiful mazurkas , and i pulled into a lot by a gas station to listen and to calm .
i 'd been told that in an arab town , one need only mention the name of a local and it will be recognized .
and i was mentioning abed and myself , noting deliberately that i was here in peace , to the people in this town , when i met mohamed outside a post office at noon .
he listened to me .
you know , it was most often when speaking to people that i wondered where i ended and my disability began , for many people told me what they told no one else .
many cried .
and one day , after a woman i met on the street did the same and i later asked her why , she told me that , best she could tell , her tears had had something to do with my being happy and strong , but vulnerable too .
i listened to her words . i suppose they were true .
i was me , but i was now me despite a limp , and that , i suppose , was what now made me , me .
anyway , mohamed told me what perhaps he would not have told another stranger .
he led me to a house of cream stucco , then drove off .
and as i sat contemplating what to say , a woman approached in a black shawl and black robe .
i stepped from my car and said " shalom , " and identified myself , and she told me that her husband abed would be home from work in four hours .
her hebrew was not good , and she later confessed that she thought that i had come to install the internet .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i drove off and returned at 4:30 , thankful to the minaret up the road that helped me find my way back .
and as i approached the front door , abed saw me , my jeans and flannel and cane , and i saw abed , an average-looking man of average size .
he wore black and white : slippers over socks , pilling sweatpants , a piebald sweater , a striped ski cap pulled down to his forehead .
he 'd been expecting me . mohamed had phoned .
and so at once , we shook hands , and smiled , and i gave him my gift , and he told me i was a guest in his home , and we sat beside one another on a fabric couch .
it was then that abed resumed at once the tale of woe he had begun over the phone 16 years before .
he 'd just had surgery on his eyes , he said .
he had problems with his side and his legs too , and , oh , he 'd lost his teeth in the crash .
did i wish to see him remove them ?
abed then rose and turned on the tv so that i would n't be alone when he left the room , and returned with polaroids of the crash and his old driver 's license .
" i was handsome , " he said .
we looked down at his laminated mug .
abed had been less handsome than substantial , with thick black hair and a full face and a wide neck .
it was this youth who on may 16 , 1990 , had broken two necks including mine , and bruised one brain and taken one life .
twenty-one years later , he was now thinner than his wife , his skin slack on his face , and looking at abed looking at his young self , i remembered looking at that photograph of my young self after the crash , and recognized his longing .
" the crash changed both of our lives , " i said .
abed then showed me a picture of his mashed truck , and said that the crash was the fault of a bus driver in the left lane who did not let him pass .
i did not want to recap the crash with abed .
i 'd hoped for something simpler : to exchange a turkish dessert for two words and be on my way .
and so i did n't point out that in his own testimony the morning after the crash , abed did not even mention the bus driver .
no , i was quiet . i was quiet because i had not come for truth .
i had come for remorse .
and so i now went looking for remorse and threw truth under the bus .
" i understand , " i said , " that the crash was not your fault , but does it make you sad that others suffered ? "
abed spoke three quick words .
" yes , i suffered . "
abed then told me why he 'd suffered .
he 'd lived an unholy life before the crash , and so god had ordained the crash , but now , he said , he was religious , and god was pleased .
it was then that god intervened : news on the tv of a car wreck that hours before had killed three people up north .
we looked up at the wreckage .
" strange , " i said .
" strange , " he agreed .
i had the thought that there , on route 804 , there were perpetrators and victims , dyads bound by a crash .
some , as had abed , would forget the date .
some , as had i , would remember .
the report finished and abed spoke .
" it is a pity , " he said , " that the police in this country are not tough enough on bad drivers . "
i was baffled .
abed had said something remarkable .
did it point up the degree to which he 'd absolved himself of the crash ?
was it evidence of guilt , an assertion that he should have been put away longer ?
he 'd served six months in prison , lost his truck license for a decade .
i forgot my discretion .
" um , abed , " i said , " i thought you had a few driving issues before the crash . "
" well , " he said , " i once went 60 in a 40 . "
and so 27 violations - driving through a red light , driving at excessive speed , driving on the wrong side of a barrier , and finally , riding his brakes down that hill - reduced to one .
and it was then i understood that no matter how stark the reality , the human being fits it into a narrative that is palatable .
the goat becomes the hero . the perpetrator becomes the victim .
it was then i understood that abed would never apologize .
abed and i sat with our coffee .
we 'd spent 90 minutes together , and he was now known to me .
he was not a particularly bad man or a particularly good man .
he was a limited man who 'd found it within himself to be kind to me .
with a nod to jewish custom , he told me that i should live to be 120 years old .
but it was hard for me to relate to one who had so completely washed his hands of his own calamitous doing , to one whose life was so unexamined that he said he thought two people had died in the crash .
there was much i wished to say to abed .
i wished to tell him that , were he to acknowledge my disability , it would be okay , for people are wrong to marvel at those like me who smile as we limp .
people do n't know that they have lived through worse , that problems of the heart hit with a force greater than a runaway truck , that problems of the mind are greater still , more injurious , than a hundred broken necks .
i wished to tell him that what makes most of us who we are most of all is not our minds and not our bodies and not what happens to us , but how we respond to what happens to us .
" this , " wrote the psychiatrist viktor frankl , " is the last of the human freedoms : to choose one 's attitude in any given set of circumstances . "
i wished to tell him that not only paralyzers and paralyzees must evolve , reconcile to reality , but we all must - the aging and the anxious and the divorced and the balding and the bankrupt and everyone .
i wished to tell him that one does not have to say that a bad thing is good , that a crash is from god and so a crash is good , a broken neck is good .
one can say that a bad thing sucks , but that this natural world still has many glories .
i wished to tell him that , in the end , our mandate is clear : we have to rise above bad fortune .
we have to be in the good and enjoy the good , study and work and adventure and friendship - oh , friendship - and community and love .
but most of all , i wished to tell him what herman melville wrote , that " truly to enjoy bodily warmth , some small part of you must be cold , for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast . "
yes , contrast .
if you are mindful of what you do not have , you may be truly mindful of what you do have , and if the gods are kind , you may truly enjoy what you have .
that is the one singular gift you may receive if you suffer in any existential way .
you know death , and so may wake each morning pulsing with ready life .
some part of you is cold , and so another part may truly enjoy what it is to be warm , or even to be cold .
when one morning , years after the crash , i stepped onto stone and the underside of my left foot felt the flash of cold , nerves at last awake , it was exhilarating , a gust of snow .
but i did n't say these things to abed .
i told him only that he had killed one man , not two .
i told him the name of that man .
and then i said , " goodbye . "
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thanks a lot .
-lrb- applause -rrb- my story is a little bit about war .
it 's about disillusionment .
it 's about death .
and it 's about rediscovering idealism in all of that wreckage .
and perhaps also , there 's a lesson about how to deal with our screwed-up , fragmenting and dangerous world of the 21st century .
i do n't believe in straightforward narratives .
i do n't believe in a life or history written as decision " a " led to consequence " b " led to consequence " c " - these neat narratives that we 're presented with , and that perhaps we encourage in each other .
i believe in randomness , and one of the reasons i believe that is because me becoming a diplomat was random .
i 'm colorblind .
i was born unable to see most colors .
this is why i wear gray and black most of the time , and i have to take my wife with me to chose clothes .
and i 'd always wanted to be a fighter pilot when i was a boy .
i loved watching planes barrel over our holiday home in the countryside .
and it was my boyhood dream to be a fighter pilot .
and i did the tests in the royal air force to become a pilot , and sure enough , i failed .
i could n't see all the blinking different lights , so i had to choose another career , and this was in fact relatively easy for me , because i had an abiding passion all the way through my childhood , which was international relations .
as a child , i read the newspaper thoroughly .
i was fascinated by the cold war , by the inf negotiations over intermediate-range nuclear missiles , the proxy war between the soviet union and the u.s.
in angola or afghanistan .
these things really interested me .
and so i decided quite at an early age i wanted to be a diplomat .
and i , one day , i announced this to my parents - and my father denies this story to this day - i said , " daddy , i want to be a diplomat . "
and he turned to me , and he said , " carne , you have to be very clever to be a diplomat . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and my ambition was sealed .
in 1989 , i entered the british foreign service .
that year , 5,000 people applied to become a diplomat , and 20 of us succeeded .
and as those numbers suggest , i was inducted into an elite and fascinating and exhilarating world .
being a diplomat , then and now , is an incredible job , and i loved every minute of it - i enjoyed the status of it .
i bought myself a nice suit and wore leather-soled shoes and reveled in this amazing access i had to world events .
i traveled to the gaza strip .
i headed the middle east peace process section in the british foreign ministry .
i became a speechwriter for the british foreign secretary .
i met yasser arafat .
i negotiated with saddam 's diplomats at the u.n.
later , i traveled to kabul and served in afghanistan after the fall of the taliban .
and i would travel in a c-130 transport and go and visit warlords in mountain hideaways and negotiate with them about how we were going to eradicate al qaeda from afghanistan , surrounded by my special forces escort , who , themselves , had to have an escort of a platoon of royal marines , because it was so dangerous .
and that was exciting - that was fun .
it was really interesting .
and it 's a great cadre of people , incredibly close-knit community of people .
and the pinnacle of my career , as it turned out , was when i was posted to new york .
i 'd already served in germany , norway , various other places , but i was posted to new york to serve on the u.n. security council for the british delegation .
and my responsibility was the middle east , which was my specialty .
and there , i dealt with things like the middle east peace process , the lockerbie issue - we can talk about that later , if you wish - but above all , my responsibility was iraq and its weapons of mass destruction and the sanctions we placed on iraq to oblige it to disarm itself of these weapons .
i was the chief british negotiator on the subject , and i was steeped in the issue .
and anyway , my tour - it was kind of a very exciting time .
i mean it was very dramatic diplomacy .
we went through several wars during my time in new york .
i negotiated for my country the resolution in the security council of the 12th of september 2001 condemning the attacks of the day before , which were , of course , deeply present to us actually living in new york at the time .
so it was kind of the best of time , worst of times kind of experience .
i lived the high-life .
although i worked very long hours , i lived in a penthouse in union square .
i was a single british diplomat in new york city ; you can imagine what that might have meant .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i had a good time .
but in 2002 , when my tour came to an end , i decided i was n't going to go back to the job that was waiting for me in london .
i decided to take a sabbatical , in fact , at the new school , bruce .
in some inchoate , inarticulate way i realized that there was something wrong with my work , with me .
i was exhausted , and i was also disillusioned in a way i could n't quite put my finger on .
and i decided to take some time out from work .
the foreign office was very generous .
you could take these special unpaid leave , as they called them , and yet remain part of the diplomatic service , but not actually do any work .
it was nice .
and eventually , i decided to take a secondment to join the u.n. in kosovo , which was then under u.n. administration .
and two things happened in kosovo , which kind of , again , shows the randomness of life , because these things turned out to be two of the pivots of my life and helped to deliver me to the next stage .
but they were random things .
one was that , in the summer of 2004 , the british government , somewhat reluctantly , decided to have an official inquiry into the use of intelligence on wmd in the run up to the iraq war , a very limited subject .
and i testified to that inquiry in secret .
i had been steeped in the intelligence on iraq and its wmd , and my testimony to the inquiry said three things : that the government exaggerated the intelligence , which was very clear in all the years i 'd read it .
and indeed , our own internal assessment was very clear that iraq 's wmd did not pose a threat to its neighbors , let alone to us .
secondly , the government had ignored all available alternatives to war , which in some ways was a more discreditable thing still .
the third reason , i wo n't go into .
but anyway , i gave that testimony , and that presented me with a crisis .
what was i going to do ?
this testimony was deeply critical of my colleagues , of my ministers , who had , in my view had perpetrated a war on a falsehood .
and so i was in crisis .
and this was n't a pretty thing .
i moaned about it , i hesitated , i went on and on and on to my long-suffering wife , and eventually i decided to resign from the british foreign service .
i felt - there 's a scene in the al pacino movie " the insider , " which you may know , where he goes back to cbs after they 've let him down over the tobacco guy , and he goes , " you know , i just ca n't do this anymore . something 's broken . "
and it was like that for me . i love that movie .
i felt just something 's broken .
i ca n't actually sit with my foreign minister or my prime minister again with a smile on my face and do what i used to do gladly for them .
so took a running leap and jumped over the edge of a cliff .
and it was a very , very uncomfortable , unpleasant feeling .
and i started to fall .
and today , that fall has n't stopped ; i 'm still falling .
but , in a way , i 've got used to the sensation of it .
and in a way , i kind of like the sensation of it a lot better than i like actually standing on top of the cliff , wondering what to do .
a second thing happened in kosovo , which kind of - i need a quick gulp of water , forgive me .
a second thing happened in kosovo , which kind of delivered the answer , which i could n't really answer , which is , " what do i do with my life ? "
i love diplomacy - i have no career - i expected my entire life to be a diplomat , to be serving my country .
i wanted to be an ambassador , and my mentors , my heroes , people who got to the top of my profession , and here i was throwing it all away .
a lot of my friends were still in it .
my pension was in it .
and i gave it up .
and what was i going to do ?
and that year , in kosovo , this terrible , terrible thing happened , which i saw .
in march 2004 , there were terrible riots all over the province - as it then was - of kosovo .
18 people were killed .
it was anarchy .
and it 's a very horrible thing to see anarchy , to know that the police and the military - there were lots of military troops there - actually ca n't stop that rampaging mob who 's coming down the street .
and the only way that rampaging mob coming down the street will stop is when they decide to stop and when they 've had enough burning and killing .
and that is not a very nice feeling to see , and i saw it .
and i went through it . i went through those mobs .
and with my albanian friends , we tried to stop it , but we failed .
and that riot taught me something , which is n't immediately obvious and it 's kind of a complicated story .
but one of the reasons that riot took place - those riots , which went on for several days , took place - was because the kosovo people were disenfranchised from their own future .
there were diplomatic negotiations about the future of kosovo going on then , and the kosovo government , let alone the kosovo people , were not actually participating in those talks .
there was this whole fancy diplomatic system , this negotiation process about the future of kosovo , and the kosovars were n't part of it .
and funnily enough , they were frustrated about that .
those riots were part of the manifestation of that frustration .
it was n't the only reason , and life is not simple , one reason narratives .
it was a complicated thing , and i 'm not pretending it was more simple than it was .
but that was one of the reasons .
and that kind of gave me the inspiration - or rather to be precise , it gave my wife the inspiration .
she said , " why do n't you advise the kosovars ?
why do n't you advise their government on their diplomacy ? "
and the kosovars were not allowed a diplomatic service .
they were not allowed diplomats .
they were not allowed a foreign office to help them deal with this immensely complicated process , which became known as the final status process of kosovo .
and so that was the idea .
that was the origin of the thing that became independent diplomat , the world 's first diplomatic advisory group and a non-profit to boot .
and it began when i flew back from london after my time at the u.n. in kosovo .
i flew back and had dinner with the kosovo prime minister and said to him , " look , i 'm proposing that i come and advise you on the diplomacy .
i know this stuff . it 's what i do . why do n't i come and help you ? "
and he raised his glass of raki to me and said , " yes , carne . come . "
and i came to kosovo and advised the kosovo government .
independent diplomat ended up advising three successive kosovo prime ministers and the multi-party negotiation team of kosovo .
and kosovo became independent .
independent diplomat is now established in five diplomatic centers around the world , and we 're advising seven or eight different countries , or political groups , depending on how you wish to define them - and i 'm not big on definitions .
we 're advising the northern cypriots on how to reunify their island .
we 're advising the burmese opposition , the government of southern sudan , which - you heard it here first - is going to be a new country within the next few years .
we 're advising the polisario front of the western sahara , who are fighting to get their country back from moroccan occupation after 34 years of dispossession .
we 're advising various island states in the climate change negotiations , which is suppose to culminate in copenhagen .
there 's a bit of randomness here too because , when i was beginning independent diplomat , i went to a party in the house of lords , which is a ridiculous place , but i was holding my drink like this , and i bumped into this guy who was standing behind me .
and we started talking , and he said - i told him what i was doing , and i told him rather grandly i was going to establish independent diplomat in new york .
at that time there was just me - and me and my wife were moving back to new york .
and he said , " why do n't you see my colleagues in new york ? "
and it turned out he worked for an innovation company called ? what if ! , which some of you have probably heard of .
and one thing led to another , and i ended up having a desk in ? what if ! in new york , when i started independent diplomat .
and watching ? what if !
develop new flavors of chewing gum for wrigley or new flavors for coke actually helped me innovate new strategies for the kosovars and for the saharawis of the western sahara .
and i began to realize that there are different ways of doing diplomacy - that diplomacy , like business , is a business of solving problems , and yet the word innovation does n't exist in diplomacy ; it 's all zero sum games and realpolitik and ancient institutions that have been there for generations and do things the same way they 've always done things .
and independent diplomat , today , tries to incorporate some of the things i learned at ? what if ! .
we all sit in one office and shout at each other across the office .
we all work on little laptops and try to move desks to change the way we think .
and we use naive experts who may know nothing about the countries we 're dealing with , but may know something about something else to try to inject new thinking into the problems that we try to address for our clients .
it 's not easy , because our clients , by definition , are having a difficult time , diplomatically .
there are , i do n't know , some lessons from all of this , personal and political - and in a way , they 're the same thing .
the personal one is falling off a cliff is actually a good thing , and i recommend it .
and it 's a good thing to do at least once in your life just to tear everything up and jump .
the second thing is a bigger lesson about the world today .
independent diplomat is part of a trend which is emerging and evident across the world , which is that the world is fragmenting .
states mean less than they used to , and the power of the state is declining .
that means the power of others things is rising .
those other things are called non-state actors .
they may be corporations , they may be mafiosi , they may be nice ngos , they may anything , any number of things .
we are living in a more complicated and fragmented world .
if governments are less able to affect the problems that affect us in the world , then that means , who is left to deal with them , who has to take greater responsibility to deal with them ?
us .
if they ca n't do it , who 's left to deal with it ?
we have no choice but to embrace that reality .
what this means is it 's no longer good enough to say that international relations , or global affairs , or chaos in somalia , or what 's going on in burma is none of your business , and that you can leave it to governments to get on with .
i can connect any one of you by six degrees of separation to the al-shabaab militia in somalia .
ask me how later , particularly if you eat fish , interestingly enough , but that connection is there .
we are all intimately connected .
and this is n't just tom friedman , it 's actually provable in case after case after case .
what that means is , instead of asking your politicians to do things , you have to look to yourself to do things .
and independent diplomat is a kind of example of this in a sort of loose way .
there are n't neat examples , but one example is this : the way the world is changing is embodied in what 's going on at the place i used to work - the u.n. security council .
the u.n. was established in 1945 .
its charter is basically designed to stop conflicts between states - interstate conflict .
today , 80 percent of the agenda of the u.n. security council is about conflicts within states , involving non-state parties - guerillas , separatists , terrorists , if you want to call them that , people who are not normal governments , who are not normal states .
that is the state of the world today .
when i realized this , and when i look back on my time at the security council and what happened with the kosovars , and i realize that often the people who were most directly affected by what we were doing in the security council were n't actually there , were n't actually invited to give their views to the security council , i thought , this is wrong .
something 's got to be done about this .
so i started off in a traditional mode .
me and my colleagues at independent diplomat went around the u.n. security council .
we went around 70 u.n. member states - the kazaks , the ethiopians , the israelis - you name them , we went to see them - the secretary general , all of them , and said , " this is all wrong .
this is terrible that you do n't consult these people who are actually affected .
you 've got to institutionalize a system where you actually invite the kosovars to come and tell you what they think .
this will allow you to tell me - you can tell them what you think .
it 'll be great . you can have an exchange .
you can actually incorporate these people 's views into your decisions , which means your decisions will be more effective and durable . "
super-logical , you would think .
i mean , incredibly logical . so obvious , anybody could get it .
and of course , everybody got it . everybody went , " yes , of course , you 're absolutely right .
come back to us in maybe six months . "
and of course , nothing happened - nobody did anything .
the security council does its business in exactly the same way today that it did x number of years ago , when i was there 10 years ago .
so we looked at that observation of basically failure and thought , what can we do about it .
and i thought , i 'm buggered if i 'm going to spend the rest of my life lobbying for these crummy governments to do what needs to be done .
so what we 're going to do is we 're actually going to set up these meetings ourselves .
so now , independent diplomat is in the process of setting up meetings between the u.n. security council and the parties to the disputes that are on the agenda of the security council .
so we will be bringing darfuri rebel groups , the northern cypriots and the southern cypriots , rebels from aceh , and awful long laundry list of chaotic conflicts around the world .
and we will be trying to bring the parties to new york to sit down in a quiet room in a private setting with no press and actually explain what they want to the members of the u. n. security council , and for the members of the u.n. security council to explain to them what they want .
so there 's actually a conversation , which has never before happened .
and of course , describing all this , any of you who know politics will think this is incredibly difficult , and i entirely agree with you .
the chances of failure are very high , but it certainly wo n't happen if we do n't try to make it happen .
and my politics has changed fundamentally from when i was a diplomat to what i am today , and i think that outputs is what matters , not process , not technology , frankly , so much either .
preach technology to all the twittering members of all the iranian demonstrations who are now in political prison in tehran , where ahmadinejad remains in power .
technology has not delivered political change in iran .
you 've got to look at the outputs , and you got to say to yourself , " what can i do to produce that particular output ? "
that is the politics of the 21st century , and in a way , independent diplomat embodies that fragmentation , that change , that is happening to all of us .
that 's my story . thanks .
pat mitchell : what is the story of this pin ?
madeleine albright : this is " breaking the glass ceiling . "
pm : oh .
that was well chosen , i would say , for tedwomen .
ma : most of the time i spend when i get up in the morning is trying to figure out what is going to happen .
and none of this pin stuff would have happened if it had n't been for saddam hussein .
i 'll tell you what happened .
i went to the united nations as an ambassador , and it was after the gulf war , and i was an instructed ambassador .
and the cease-fire had been translated into a series of sanctions resolutions , and my instructions were to say perfectly terrible things about saddam hussein constantly , which he deserved - he had invaded another country .
and so all of a sudden , a poem appeared in the papers in baghdad comparing me to many things , but among them an " unparalleled serpent . "
and so i happened to have a snake pin .
so i wore it when we talked about iraq .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and when i went out to meet the press , they zeroed in , said , " why are you wearing that snake pin ? "
i said , " because saddam hussein compared me to an unparalleled serpent . "
and then i thought , well this is fun .
so i went out and i bought a lot of pins that would , in fact , reflect what i thought we were going to do on any given day .
so that 's how it all started .
pm : so how large is the collection ?
ma : pretty big .
it 's now traveling .
at the moment it 's in indianapolis , but it was at the smithsonian .
and it goes with a book that says , " read my pins . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- pm : so is this a good idea .
i remember when you were the first woman as secretary of state , and there was a lot of conversation always about what you were wearing , how you looked - the thing that happens to a lot of women , especially if they 're the first in a position .
so how do you feel about that - the whole - ma : well , it 's pretty irritating actually because nobody ever describes what a man is wearing .
but people did pay attention to what clothes i had .
what was interesting was that , before i went up to new york as u.n. ambassador , i talked to jeane kirkpatrick , who 'd been ambassador before me , and she said , " you 've got to get rid of your professor clothes .
go out and look like a diplomat . "
so that did give me a lot of opportunities to go shopping .
but still , there were all kinds of questions about - " did you wear a hat ? " " how short was your skirt ? "
and one of the things - if you remember condoleezza rice was at some event and she wore boots , and she got criticized over that .
and no guy ever gets criticized . but that 's the least of it .
pm : it is , for all of us , men and women , finding our ways of defining our roles , and doing them in ways that make a difference in the world and shape the future .
how did you handle that balance between being the tough diplomatic and strong voice of this country to the rest of the world and also how you felt about yourself as a mother , a grandmother , nurturing ...
and so how did you handle that ?
ma : well the interesting part was i was asked what it was like to be the first woman secretary of state a few minutes after i 'd been named .
and i said , " well i 've been a woman for 60 years , but i 've only been secretary of state for a few minutes . "
so it evolved .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but basically i love being a woman .
and so what happened - and i think there will probably be some people in the audience that will identify with this - i went to my first meeting , first at the u.n. , and that 's when this all started , because that is a very male organization .
and i 'm sitting there - there are 15 members of the security council - so 14 men sat there staring at me , and i thought - well you know how we all are .
you want to get the feeling of the room , and " do people like me ? "
and " will i really say something intelligent ? "
and all of a sudden i thought , " well , wait a minute .
i am sitting behind a sign that says ' the united states , ' and if i do n't speak today then the voice of the united states will not be heard , " and it was the first time that i had that feeling that i had to step out of myself in my normal , reluctant female mode and decide that i had to speak on behalf of our country .
and so that happened more at various times , but i really think that there was a great advantage in many ways to being a woman .
i think we are a lot better at personal relationships , and then have the capability obviously of telling it like it is when it 's necessary .
but i have to tell you , i have my youngest granddaughter , when she turned seven last year , said to her mother , my daughter , " so what 's the big deal about grandma maddie being secretary of state ?
only girls are secretary of state . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- pm : because in her lifetime - ma : that would be so .
pm : what a change that is .
as you travel now all over the world , which you do frequently , how do you assess this global narrative around the story of women and girls ?
where are we ?
ma : i think we 're slowly changing , but obviously there are whole pockets in countries where nothing is different .
and therefore it means that we have to remember that , while many of us have had huge opportunities - and pat , you have been a real leader in your field - is that there are a lot of women that are not capable of worrying and taking care of themselves and understanding that women have to help other women .
and so what i have felt - and i have looked at this from a national security issue - when i was secretary of state , i decided that women 's issues had to be central to american foreign policy , not just because i 'm a feminist , but because i believe that societies are better off when women are politically and economically empowered , that values are passed down , the health situation is better , education is better , there is greater economic prosperity .
so i think that it behooves us - those of us that live in various countries where we do have economic and political voice - that we need to help other women .
and i really dedicated myself to that , both at the u.n. and then as secretary of state .
pm : and did you get pushback from making that a central tenant of foreign policy ?
ma : from some people .
i think that they thought that it was a soft issue .
the bottom line that i decided was actually women 's issues are the hardest issues , because they are the ones that have to do with life and death in so many aspects , and because , as i said , it is really central to the way that we think about things .
now for instance , some of the wars that took place when i was in office , a lot of them , the women were the main victims of it .
for instance , when i started , there were wars in the balkans .
the women in bosnia were being raped .
we then managed to set up a war crimes tribunal to deal specifically with those kinds of issues .
and by the way , one of the things that i did at that stage was , i had just arrived at the u.n. , and when i was there , there were 183 countries in the u.n.
now there are 192 .
but it was one of the first times that i did n't have to cook lunch myself .
so i said to my assistant , " invite the other women permanent representatives . "
and i thought when i 'd get to my apartment i get there , and there are six other women , out of 183 .
so the countries that had women representatives were canada , kazakhstan , philippines , trinidad tobago , jamaica , lichtenstein and me .
so being an american , i decided to set up a caucus .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and so we set it up , and we called ourselves the g7 .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- pm : is that " girl 7 ? " ma : girl 7 .
and we lobbied on behalf of women 's issues .
so we managed to get two women judges on this war crimes tribunal .
and then what happened was that they were able to declare that rape was a weapon of war , that it was against humanity .
-lrb- applause -rrb- pm : so when you look around the world and you see that , in many cases - certainly in the western world - women are evolving into more leadership positions , and even other places some barriers are being brought down , but there 's still so much violence , still so many problems , and yet we hear there are more women at the negotiating tables .
now you were at those negotiating tables when they were n't , when there was maybe you - one voice , maybe one or two others .
do you believe , and can you tell us why , there is going to be a significant shift in things like violence and peace and conflict and resolution on a sustainable basis ?
ma : well i do think , when there are more women , that the tone of the conversation changes , and also the goals of the conversation change .
but it does n't mean that the whole world would be a lot better if it were totally run by women .
if you think that , you 've forgotten high school .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but the bottom line is that there is a way , when there are more women at the table , that there 's an attempt to develop some understanding .
so for instance , what i did when i went to burundi , we 'd got tutsi and hutu women together to talk about some of the problems that had taken place in rwanda .
and so i think the capability of women to put themselves - i think we 're better about putting ourselves into the other guy 's shoes and having more empathy .
i think it helps in terms of the support if there are other women in the room .
when i was secretary of state , there were only 13 other women foreign ministers .
and so it was nice when one of them would show up .
for instance , she is now the president of finland , but tarja halonen was the foreign minister of finland and , at a certain stage , head of the european union .
and it was really terrific .
because one of the things i think you 'll understand .
we went to a meeting , and the men in my delegation , when i would say , " well i feel we should do something about this , " and they 'd say , " what do you mean , you feel ? "
and so then tarja was sitting across the table from me .
and all of a sudden we were talking about arms control , and she said , " well i feel we should do this . "
and my male colleagues kind of got it all of a sudden .
but i think it really does help to have a critical mass of women in a series of foreign policy positions .
the other thing that i think is really important : a lot of national security policy is n't just about foreign policy , but it 's about budgets , military budgets , and how the debts of countries work out .
so if you have women in a variety of foreign policy posts , they can support each other when there are budget decisions being made in their own countries .
pm : so how do we get this balance we 're looking for , then , in the world ?
more women 's voices at the table ?
more men who believe that the balance is best ?
ma : well i think one of the things - i 'm chairman of the board of an organization called the national democratic institute that works to support women candidates .
i think that we need to help in other countries to train women to be in political office , to figure out how they can in fact develop political voices .
i think we also need to be supportive when businesses are being created and just make sure that women help each other .
now i have a saying that i feel very strongly about , because i am of a certain age where , when i started in my career , believe it or not , there were other women who criticized me : " why are n't you in the carpool line ? "
or " are n't your children suffering because you 're not there all the time ? "
and i think we have a tendency to make each other feel guilty .
in fact , i think " guilt " is every woman 's middle name .
and so i think what needs to happen is we need to help each other .
and my motto is that there 's a special place in hell for women who do n't help each other .
-lrb- applause -rrb- pm : well secretary albright , i guess you 'll be going to heaven .
thank you for joining us today .
ma : thank you all . thanks pat .
-lrb- applause -rrb- early visions of wireless power actually were thought of by nikola tesla basically about 100 years ago .
the thought that you would n't want to transfer electric power wirelessly , no one ever thought of that .
they thought , " who would use it if you did n't ? "
and so , in fact , he actually set about doing a variety of things .
built the tesla coil . this tower was built on long island back at the beginning of the 1900s .
and the idea was , it was supposed to be able to transfer power anywhere on earth .
we 'll never know if this stuff worked . actually , i think the federal bureau of investigation took it down for security purposes , sometime in the early 1900s .
but the one thing that did come out of electricity is that we love this stuff so much .
i mean , think about how much we love this .
if you just walk outside , there are trillions of dollars that have been invested in infrastructure around the world , putting up wires to get power from where it 's created to where it 's used .
the other thing is , we love batteries .
and for those of us that have an environmental element to us , there is something like 40 billion disposable batteries built every year for power that , generally speaking , is used within a few inches or a few feet of where there is very inexpensive power .
so , before i got here , i thought , " you know , i am from north america .
we do have a little bit of a reputation in the united states . "
so i thought i 'd better look it up first .
so definition number six is the north american definition of the word " suck . "
wires suck , they really do .
think about it . whether that 's you in that picture or something under your desk .
the other thing is , batteries suck too .
and they really , really do .
do you ever wonder what happens to this stuff ?
40 billion of these things built .
this is what happens .
they fall apart , they disintegrate , and they end up here .
so when you talk about expensive power , the cost per kilowatt-hour to supply battery power to something is on the order of two to three hundred pounds .
think about that .
the most expensive grid power in the world is thousandths of that .
so fortunately , one of the other definitions of " suck " that was in there , it does create a vacuum .
and nature really does abhor a vacuum .
what happened back a few years ago was a group of theoretical physicists at mit actually came up with this concept of transferring power over distance .
basically they were able to light a 60 watt light bulb at a distance of about two meters .
it got about 50 percent of the efficiency - by the way , that 's still a couple thousand times more efficient than a battery would be , to do the same thing .
but were able to light that , and do it very successfully .
this was actually the experiment . so you can see the coils were somewhat larger .
the light bulb was a fairly simple task , from their standpoint .
this all came from a professor waking up at night to the third night in a row that his wife 's cellphone was beeping because it was running out of battery power .
and he was thinking , " with all the electricity that 's out there in the walls , why could n't some of that just come into the phone so i could get some sleep ? "
and he actually came up with this concept of resonant energy transfer .
but inside a standard transformer are two coils of wire .
and those two coils of wire are really , really close to each other , and actually do transfer power magnetically and wirelessly , only over a very short distance .
what dr. soljacic figured out how to do was separate the coils in a transformer to a greater distance than the size of those transformers using this technology , which is not dissimilar from the way an opera singer shatters a glass on the other side of the room .
it 's a resonant phenomenon for which he actually received a macarthur fellowship award , which is nicknamed the genius award , last september , for his discovery .
so how does it work ?
imagine a coil . for those of you that are engineers , there 's a capacitor attached to it too .
and if you can cause that coil to resonate , what will happen is it will pulse at alternating current frequencies - at a fairly high frequency , by the way .
and if you can bring another device close enough to the source , that will only work at exactly that frequency , you can actually get them to do what 's called strongly couple , and transfer magnetic energy between them .
and then what you do is , you start out with electricity , turn it into magnetic field , take that magnetic field , turn it back into electricity , and then you can use it .
number one question i get asked .
i mean , people are worried about cellphones being safe .
you know . what about safety ?
the first thing is this is not a " radiative " technology .
it does n't radiate .
there are n't electric fields here . it 's a magnetic field .
it stays within either what we call the source , or within the device .
and actually , the magnetic fields we 're using are basically about the same as the earth 's magnetic field .
we live in a magnetic field .
and the other thing that 's pretty cool about the technology is that it only transfers energy to things that work at exactly the same frequency .
and it 's virtually impossible in nature to make that happen .
then finally we have governmental bodies everywhere that will regulate everything we do .
they 've pretty much set field exposure limits , which all of the things in the stuff i 'll show you today sort of sit underneath those guidelines .
mobile electronics .
home electronics .
those cords under your desk , i bet everybody here has something that looks like that or those batteries .
there are industrial applications .
and then finally , electric vehicles .
these electric cars are beautiful .
but who is going to want to plug them in ?
imagine driving into your garage - we 've built a system to do this - you drive into your garage , and the car charges itself , because there is a mat on the floor that 's plugged into the wall .
and it actually causes your car to charge safely and efficiently .
then there 's all kinds of other applications . implanted medical devices , where people do n't have to die of infections anymore if you can seal the thing up .
credit cards , robot vacuum cleaners .
so what i 'd like to do is take a couple minutes and show you , actually , how it works .
and what i 'm going to do is to show you pretty much what 's here .
you 've got a coil .
that coil is connected to an r.f. amplifier that creates a high-frequency oscillating magnetic field .
we put one on the back of the television set .
by the way , i do make it look a little bit easier than it is .
there 's lots of electronics and secret sauce and all kinds of intellectual property that go into it .
but then what 's going to happen is , it will create a field .
it will cause one to get created on the other side .
and if the demo gods are willing , in about 10 seconds or so we should see it .
the 10 seconds actually are because we - i do n't know if any of you have ever thought about plugging a t.v. in when you use just a cord .
generally , you have to go over and hit the button . so i thought we put a little computer in it that has to wake up to tell it to do that .
so , i 'll plug that in .
it creates a magnetic field here .
it causes one to be created out here .
and as i said , in sort of about 10 seconds we should start to see ...
this is a commercially - -lrb- applause -rrb- available color television set .
imagine , you get one of these things . you want to hang them on the wall .
how many people want to hang them on the wall ?
think about it . you do n't want those ugly cords coming down .
imagine if you can get rid of it .
the other thing i wanted to talk about was safety .
so , there is nothing going on . i 'm okay .
and i 'll do it again , just for safety 's sake .
almost immediately , though , people ask , " how small can you make this ? can you make this small enough ? "
because remember dr. soljacic 's original idea was his wife 's cellphone beeping .
so , i wanted to show you something .
we 're an equal opportunity designer of this sort of thing .
this a google g1 .
you know , it 's the latest thing that 's come out .
it runs the android operating system .
i think i heard somebody talk about that before .
it 's odd . it has a battery .
it also has coiled electronics that witricity has put into the back of it .
and if i can get the camera - okay , great - you 'll see , as i get sort of close ...
you 're looking at a cellphone powered completely wirelessly .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and i know some of you are apple aficionados .
so , you know they do n't make it easy at apple to get inside their phones .
so we put a little sleeve on the back , but we should be able to get this guy to wake up too .
and those of you that have an iphone recognize the green center .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and nokia as well .
you 'll see that what we did there is put a little thing in the back , to do that , and it probably beeps , actually , as it goes on as well .
but they typically use it to light up the screen .
so , imagine these things could go ... they could go in your ceiling .
they could go in the floor . they could go , actually , underneath your desktop .
so that when you walk in or you come in from home , if you carry a purse , it works in your purse .
you never have to worry about plugging these things in again .
and think of what that would do for you .
so i think in closing , sort of in the immortal visions of the new yorker magazine , i thought i 'd put up one more slide .
and for those of you who ca n't read it , it says , " it does appear to be some kind of wireless technology . "
so , thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i have a very difficult task .
i 'm a spectroscopist .
i have to talk about astronomy without showing you any single image of nebulae or galaxies , etc .
because my job is spectroscopy .
i never deal with images .
but i 'll try to convince you that spectroscopy is actually something which can change this world .
spectroscopy can probably answer the question , " is there anybody out there ? "
are we alone ? seti .
it 's not very fun to do spectroscopy .
one of my colleagues in bulgaria , nevena markova , spent about 20 years studying these profiles .
and she published 42 articles just dedicated to the subject .
can you imagine ? day and night , thinking , observing , the same star for 20 years is incredible .
but we are crazy . we do these things .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i 'm not that far .
i spent about eight months working on these profiles .
because i 've noticed a very small symmetry in the profile of one of the planet host stars .
and i thought , well maybe there is lithium-6 in this star , which is an indication that this star has swallowed a planet .
because apparently you ca n't have this fragile isotope of lithium-6 in the atmospheres of sun-like stars .
but you have it in planets and asteroids .
so if you engulf planet or large number of asteroids , you will have this lithium-6 isotope in the spectrum of the star .
so i invested more than eight months just studying the profile of this star .
and actually it 's amazing , because i got phone calls from many reporters asking , " have you actually seen the planet going into a star ? "
because they thought that if you are having a telescope , you are an astronomer so what you are doing is actually looking in a telescope .
and you might have seen the planet going into a star .
and i was saying , " no , excuse me .
what i see is this one . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's just incredible . because nobody understood really .
i bet that there were very few people who really understood what i 'm talking about .
because this is the indication that the planet went into the star .
it 's amazing .
the power of spectroscopy was actually realized by pink floyd already in 1973 .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- because they actually said that you can get any color you like in a spectrum .
and all you need is time and money to make your spectrograph .
this is the number one high resolution , most precise spectrograph on this planet , called harps , which is actually used to detect extrasolar planets and sound waves in the atmospheres of stars .
how we get spectra ?
i 'm sure most of you know from school physics that it 's basically splitting a white light into colors .
and if you have a liquid hot mass , it will produce something which we call a continuous spectrum .
a hot gas is producing emission lines only , no continuum .
and if you place a cool gas in front of a hot source , you will see certain patterns which we call absorption lines .
which is used actually to identify chemical elements in a cool matter , which is absorbing exactly at those frequencies .
now , what we can do with the spectra ?
we can actually study line-of-sight velocities of cosmic objects .
and we can also study chemical composition and physical parameters of stars , galaxies , nebulae .
a star is the most simple object .
in the core , we have thermonuclear reactions going on , creating chemical elements .
and we have a cool atmosphere .
it 's cool for me .
cool in my terms is three or four or five thousand degrees .
my colleagues in infra-red astronomy call minus 200 kelvin is cool for them .
but you know , everything is relative .
so for me 5,000 degrees is pretty cool .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this is the spectrum of the sun - 24,000 spectral lines , and about 15 percent of these lines is not yet identified .
it is amazing . so we are in the 21st century , and we still can not properly understand the spectrum of the sun .
sometimes we have to deal with just one tiny , weak spectral line to measure the composition of that chemical element in the atmosphere .
for instance , you see the spectral line of the gold is the only spectral line in the spectrum of the sun .
and we use this weak feature to measure the composition of gold in the atmosphere of the sun .
and now this is a work in progress .
we have been dealing with a similarly very weak feature , which belongs to osmium .
it 's a heavy element produced in thermonuclear explosions of supernovae .
it 's the only place where you can produce , actually , osmium .
just comparing the composition of osmium in one of the planet host stars , we want to understand why there is so much of this element .
perhaps we even think that maybe supernova explosions trigger formations of planets and stars .
it can be an indication .
the other day , my colleague from berkeley , gibor basri , emailed me a very interesting spectrum , asking me , " can you have a look at this ? "
and i could n't sleep , next two weeks , when i saw the huge amount of oxygen and other elements in the spectrum of the stars .
i knew that there is nothing like that observed in the galaxy .
it was incredible . the only conclusion we could make from this is clear evidence that there was a supernova explosion in this system , which polluted the atmosphere of this star .
and later a black hole was formed in a binary system , which is still there with a mass of about five solar masses .
this was considered as first evidence that actually black holes come from supernovae explosions .
my colleagues , comparing composition of chemical elements in different galactic stars , actually discovered alien stars in our galaxy .
it 's amazing that you can go so far simply studying the chemical composition of stars .
they actually said that one of the stars you see in the spectra is an alien . it comes from a different galaxy .
there is interaction of galaxies . we know this .
and sometimes they just capture stars .
you 've heard about solar flares .
we were very surprised to discover a super flare , a flare which is thousands of millions of times more powerful than those we see in the sun .
in one of the binary stars in our galaxy called fh leo , we discovered the super flare .
and later we went to study the spectral stars to see is there anything strange with these objects .
and we found that everything is normal .
these stars are normal like the sun . age , everything was normal .
so this is a mystery .
it 's one of the mysteries we still have , super flares .
and there are six or seven similar cases reported in the literature .
now to go ahead with this , we really need to understand chemical evolution of the universe .
it 's very complicated . i do n't really want you to try to understand what is here .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but it 's to show you how complicated is the whole story of the production of chemical elements .
you have two channels - the massive stars and low-mass stars - producing and recycling matter and chemical elements in the universe .
and doing this for 14 billion years , we end up with this picture , which is a very important graph , showing relative abundances of chemical elements in sun-like stars and in the interstellar medium .
so which means that it 's really impossible to find an object where you find about 10 times more sulfur than silicon , five times more calcium than oxygen . it 's just impossible .
and if you find one , i will say that this is something related to seti , because naturally you ca n't do it .
doppler effect is something very important from fundamental physics .
and this is related to the change of the frequency of a moving source .
the doppler effect is used to discover extrasolar planets .
the precision which we need to discover a jupiter-like planet around a sun-like star is something like 28.4 meters per second .
and we need nine centimeters per second to detect an earth-like planet .
this can be done with the future spectrographs .
i , myself , i 'm actually involved in the team which is developing a codex , high resolution , future generation spectrograph for the 42 meter e-elt telescope .
and this is going to be an instrument to detect earth-like planets around sun-like stars .
it is an amazing tool called astroseismology where we can detect sound waves in the atmospheres of stars .
this is the sound of an alpha cen .
we can detect sound waves in the atmospheres of sun-like stars .
those waves have frequencies in infrasound domain , the sound actually nobody knows , domain .
coming back to the most important question , " is there anybody out there ? "
this is closely related to tectonic and volcanic activity of planets .
connection between life and radioactive nuclei is straightforward .
no life without tectonic activity , without volcanic activity .
and we know very well that geothermal energy is mostly produced by decay of uranium , thorium , and potassium .
how to measure , if we have planets where the amount of those elements is small , so those planets are tectonically dead , there can not be life .
if there is too much uranium or potassium or thorium , probably , again , there would be no life .
because can you imagine everything boiling ?
it 's too much energy on a planet .
now , we have been measuring abundance of thorium in one of the stars with extrasolar planets .
it 's exactly the same game . a very tiny feature .
we are actually trying to measure this profile and to detect thorium .
it 's very tough . it 's very tough .
and you have to , first you have to convince yourself .
then you have to convince your colleagues .
and then you have to convince the whole world that you have actually detected something like this in the atmosphere of an extrasolar planet host star somewhere in 100 parsec away from here .
it 's really difficult .
but if you want to know about a life on extrasolar planets , you have to do this job .
because you have to know how much of radioactive element you have in those systems .
the one way to discover about aliens is to tune your radio telescope and listen to the signals .
if you receive something interesting , well that 's what seti does actually , what seti has been doing for many years .
i think the most promising way is to go for biomarkers .
you can see the spectrum of the earth , this earthshine spectrum , and that is a very clear signal .
the slope which is coming , which we call a red edge , is a detection of vegetated area .
it 's amazing that we can detect vegetation from a spectrum .
now imagine doing this test for other planets .
now very recently , very recently , i 'm talking about last six , seven , eight months , water , methane , carbon dioxide have been detected in the spectrum of a planet outside the solar system .
it 's amazing . so this is the power of spectroscopy .
you can actually go and detect and study a chemical composition of planets far , far , far from solar system .
we have to detect oxygen or ozone to make sure that we have all necessary conditions to have life .
cosmic miracles are something which can be related to seti .
now imagine an object , amazing object , or something which we can not explain when we just stand up and say , " look , we give up . physics does n't work . "
so it 's something which you can always refer to seti and say , " well , somebody must be doing this , somehow . "
and with the known physics etc , it 's something actually which has been pointed out by frank drake , many years ago , and shklovsky .
if you see , in the spectrum of a planet host star , if you see strange chemical elements , it can be a signal from a civilization which is there and they want to signal about it .
they want to actually signal their presence through these spectral lines , in the spectrum of a star , in different ways .
there can be different ways doing this .
one is , for instance , technetium is a radioactive element with a decay time of 4.2 million years .
if you suddenly observe technetium in a sun-like star , you can be sure that somebody has put this element in the atmosphere , because in a natural way it is impossible to do this .
now we are reviewing the spectra of about 300 stars with extrasolar planets .
and we are doing this job since 2000 and it 's a very heavy project .
we have been working very hard .
and we have some interesting cases , candidates , so on , things which we ca n't really explain .
and i hope in the near future we can confirm this .
so the main question : " are we alone ? "
i think it will not come from ufos .
it will not come from radio signals .
i think it will come from a spectrum like this .
it is the spectrum of a planet like earth , showing a presence of nitrogen dioxide , as a clear signal of life , and oxygen and ozone .
if , one day , and i think it will be within 15 years from now , or 20 years .
if we discover a spectrum like this we can be sure that there is life on that planet .
in about five years we will discover planets like earth , around sun-like stars , the same distance as the earth from the sun .
it will take about five years .
and then we will need another 10 , 15 years with space projects to get the spectra of earth-like planets like the one i showed you .
and if we see the nitrogen dioxide and oxygen , i think we have the perfect e.t.
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- my story actually began when i was four years old and my family moved to a new neighborhood in our hometown of savannah , georgia .
and this was the 1960s when actually all the streets in this neighborhood were named after confederate war generals .
we lived on robert e. lee boulevard .
and when i was five , my parents gave me an orange schwinn sting-ray bicycle .
it had a swooping banana seat and those ape hanger handlebars that made the rider look like an orangutan .
that 's why they were called ape hangers .
they were actually modeled on hotrod motorcycles of the 1960s , which i 'm sure my mom did n't know .
and one day i was exploring this cul-de-sac hidden away a few streets away .
and i came back , and i wanted to turn around and get back to that street more quickly , so i decided to turn around in this big street that intersected our neighborhood , and wham ! i was hit by a passing sedan .
my mangled body flew in one direction , my mangled bike flew in the other .
and i lay on the pavement stretching over that yellow line , and one of my neighbors came running over .
" andy , andy , how are you doing ? " she said , using the name of my older brother .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " i 'm bruce , " i said , and promptly passed out .
i broke my left femur that day - it 's the largest bone in your body - and spent the next two months in a body cast that went from my chin to the tip of my toe to my right knee , and a steel bar went from my right knee to my left ankle .
and for the next 38 years , that accident was the only medically interesting thing that ever happened to me .
in fact , i made a living by walking .
i traveled around the world , entered different cultures , wrote a series of books about my travels , including " walking the bible . "
i hosted a television show by that name on pbs .
i was , for all the world , the " walking guy . "
until , in may 2008 , a routine visit to my doctor and a routine blood test produced evidence in the form of an alkaline phosphatase number that something might be wrong with my bones .
and my doctor , on a whim , sent me to get a full-body bone scan , which showed that there was some growth in my left leg .
that sent me to an x-ray , then to an mri .
and one afternoon , i got a call from my doctor .
" the tumor in your leg is not consistent with a benign tumor . "
i stopped walking , and it took my mind a second to convert that double negative into a much more horrifying negative .
i have cancer .
and to think that the tumor was in the same bone , in the same place in my body as the accident 38 years earlier - it seemed like too much of a coincidence .
so that afternoon , i went back to my house , and my three year-old identical twin daughters , eden and tybee feiler , came running to meet me .
they 'd just turned three , and they were into all things pink and purple .
in fact , we called them pinkalicious and purplicious - although i must say , our favorite nickname occurred on their birthday , april 15th .
when they were born at 6:14 and 6:46 on april 15 , 2005 , our otherwise grim , humorless doctor looked at his watch , and was like , " hmm , april 15th - tax day .
early filer and late filer . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the next day i came to see him . i was like , " doctor , that was a really good joke . "
and he was like , " you 're the writer , kid . "
anyway - so they had just turned three , and they came and they were doing this dance they had just made up where they were twirling faster and faster until they tumbled to the ground , laughing with all the glee in the world .
i crumbled .
i kept imagining all the walks i might not take with them , the art projects i might not mess up , the boyfriends i might not scowl at , the aisles i might not walk down .
would they wonder who i was , i thought .
would they yearn for my approval , my love , my voice ?
a few days later , i woke with an idea of how i might give them that voice .
i would reach out to six men from all parts of my life and ask them to be present in the passages of my daughters ' lives .
" i believe my girls will have plenty of opportunities in their lives , " i wrote these men .
" they 'll have loving families and welcoming homes , but they may not have me .
they may not have their dad .
will you help be their dad ? "
and i said to myself i would call this group of men " the council of dads . "
now as soon as i had this idea , i decided i would n't tell my wife . okay .
she 's a very upbeat , naturally excited person .
there 's this idea in this culture - i do n't have to tell you - that you sort of " happy " your way through a problem .
we should focus on the positive .
my wife , as i said , she grew up outside of boston .
she 's got a big smile . she 's got a big personality .
she 's got big hair - although , she told me recently , i ca n't say she has big hair , because if i say she has big hair , people will think she 's from texas .
and it 's apparently okay to marry a boy from georgia , but not to have hair from texas .
and actually , in her defense , if she were here right now , she would point out that , when we got married in georgia , there were three questions on the marriage certificate license , the third of which was , " are you related ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i said , " look , in georgia at least we want to know .
in arkansas they do n't even ask . "
what i did n't tell her is , if she said , " yes , " you could jump .
you do n't need the 30-day waiting period .
because you do n't need the get-to-know-you session at that point .
so i was n't going to tell her about this idea , but the next day i could n't control myself , i told her .
and she loved the idea , but she quickly started rejecting my nominees .
she was like , " well , i love him , but i would never ask him for advice . "
so it turned out that starting a council of dads was a very efficient way to find out what my wife really thought of my friends .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so we decided that we needed a set of rules , and we came up with a number .
and the first one was no family , only friends .
we thought our family would already be there .
second , men only .
we were trying to fill the dad-space in the girls ' lives .
and then third , sort of a dad for every side .
we kind of went through my personality and tried to get a dad who represented each different thing .
so what happened was i wrote a letter to each of these men .
and rather than send it , i decided to read it to them in person .
linda , my wife , joked that it was like having six different marriage proposals .
i sort of friend-married each of these guys .
and the first of these guys was jeff schumlin .
now jeff led this trip i took to europe when i graduated from high school in the early 1980s .
and on that first day we were in this youth hostel in a castle .
and i snuck out behind , and there was a moat , a fence and a field of cows .
and jeff came up beside me and said , " so , have you ever been cow tipping ? "
i was like , " cow tipping ?
he was like , " yeah . cows sleep standing up .
so if you approach them from behind , down wind , you can push them over and they go thud in the mud . "
so before i had a chance to determine whether this was right or not , we had jumped the moat , we had climbed the fence , we were tiptoeing through the dung and approaching some poor , dozing cow .
so a few weeks after my diagnosis , we went up to vermont , and i decided to put jeff as the first person in the council of dads .
and we went to this apple orchard , and i read him this letter .
" will you help be their dad ? "
and i got to the end - he was crying and i was crying - and then he looked at me , and he said , " yes . "
i was like , " yes ? "
i kind of had forgotten there was a question at the heart of my letter .
and frankly , although i keep getting asked this , it never occurred to me that anybody would turn me down under the circumstances .
and then i asked him a question , which i ended up asking to all the dads and ended up really encouraging me to write this story down in a book .
and that was , " what 's the one piece of advice you would give to my girls ? "
and jeff 's advice was , " be a traveller , not a tourist .
get off the bus . seek out what 's different .
approach the cow . "
" so it 's 10 years from now , " i said , " and my daughters are about to take their first trip abroad , and i 'm not here .
what would you tell them ? "
he said , " i would approach this journey as a young child might approach a mud puddle .
you can bend over and look at your reflection in the mirror and maybe run your finger and make a small ripple , or you can jump in and thrash around and see what it feels like , what it smells like . "
and as he talked he had that glint in his eye that i first saw back in holland - the glint that says , " let 's go cow tipping , " even though we never did tip the cow , even though no one tips the cow , even though cows do n't sleep standing up .
he said , " i want to see you back here girls , at the end of this experience , covered in mud . "
two weeks after my diagnosis , a biopsy confirmed i had a seven-inch osteosarcoma in my left femur .
six hundred americans a year get an osteosarcoma .
eighty-five percent are under 21 .
only a hundred adults a year get one of these diseases .
twenty years ago , doctors would have cut off my leg and hoped , and there was a 15 percent survival rate .
and then in the 1980 's , they determined that one particular cocktail of chemo could be effective , and within weeks i had started that regimen .
and since we are in a medical room , i went through four and a half months of chemo .
actually i had cisplatin , doxorubicin and very high-dose methotrexate .
and then i had a 15-hour surgery in which my surgeon , dr. john healey at memorial sloan-kettering hospital in new york , took out my left femur and replaced it with titanium .
and if you did see the sanjay special , you saw these enormous screws that they screwed into my pelvis .
then he took my fibula from my calf , cut it out and then relocated it to my thigh , where it now lives .
and what he actually did was he de-vascularized it from my calf and re-vascularized it in my thigh and then connected it to the good parts of my knee and my hip .
and then he took out a third of my quadriceps muscle .
this is a surgery so rare only two human beings have survived it before me .
and my reward for surviving it was to go back for four more months of chemo .
it was , as we said in my house , a lost year .
because in those opening weeks , we all had nightmares .
and one night i had a nightmare that i was walking through my house , sat at my desk and saw photographs of someone else 's children sitting on my desk .
and i remember a particular one night that , when you told that story of - i do n't know where you are dr. nuland - of william sloane coffin - it made me think of it .
because i was in the hospital after , i think it was my fourth round of chemo when my numbers went to zero , and i had basically no immune system .
and they put me in an infectious disease ward at the hospital .
and anybody who came to see me had to cover themselves in a mask and cover all of the extraneous parts of their body .
and one night i got a call from my mother-in-law that my daughters , at that time three and a half , were missing me and feeling my absence .
and i hung up the phone , and i put my face in my hands , and i screamed this silent scream .
and what you said , dr. nuland - i do n't know where you are - made me think of this today .
because the thought that came to my mind was that the feeling that i had was like a primal scream .
and what was so striking - and one of the messages i want to leave you here with today - is the experience .
as i became less and less human - and at this moment in my life , i was probably 30 pounds less than i am right now .
of course , i had no hair and no immune system .
they were actually putting blood inside my body .
at that moment i was less and less human , i was also , at the same time , maybe the most human i 've ever been .
and what was so striking about that time was , instead of repulsing people , i was actually proving to be a magnet for people .
people were incredibly drawn .
when my wife and i had kids , we thought it would be all-hands-on-deck .
instead , it was everybody running the other way .
and when i had cancer , we thought it 'd be everybody running the other way .
instead , it was all-hands-on-deck .
and when people came to me , rather than being incredibly turned off by what they saw - i was like a living ghost - they were incredibly moved to talk about what was going on in their own lives .
cancer , i found , is a passport to intimacy .
it is an invitation , maybe even a mandate , to enter the most vital arenas of human life , the most sensitive and the most frightening , the ones that we never want to go to , but when we do go there , we feel incredibly transformed when we do .
and this also happened to my girls as they began to see , and , we thought , maybe became an ounce more compassionate .
one day , my daughter tybee , tybee came to me , and she said , " i have so much love for you in my body , daddy , i ca n't stop giving you hugs and kisses .
and when i have no more love left , i just drink milk , because that 's where love comes from . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and one night my daughter eden came to me .
and as i lifted my leg out of bed , she reached for my crutches and handed them to me .
in fact , if i cling to one memory of this year , it would be walking down a darkened hallway with five spongy fingers grasping the handle underneath my hand .
i did n't need the crutch anymore , i was walking on air .
and one of the profound things that happened was this act of actually connecting to all these people .
and it made me think - and i 'll just note for the record - one word that i 've only heard once actually was when we were all doing tony robbins yoga yesterday - the one word that has not been mentioned in this seminar actually is the word " friend . "
and yet from everything we 've been talking about - compliance , or addiction , or weight loss - we now know that community is important , and yet it 's one thing we do n't actually bring in .
and there was something incredibly profound about sitting down with my closest friends and telling them what they meant to me .
and one of the things that i learned is that over time , particularly men , who used to be non-communicative , are becoming more and more communicative .
and that particularly happened - there was one in my life - is this council of dads that linda said , what we were talking about , it 's like what the moms talk about at school drop-off .
and no one captures this modern manhood to me more than david black .
now david is my literary agent .
he 's about five-foot three and a half on a good day , standing fully upright in cowboy boots .
and on kind of the manly-male front , he answers the phone - i can say this i guess because you 've done it here - he answers the phone , " yo , motherfucker . "
he gives boring speeches about obscure bottles of wine , and on his 50th birthday he bought a convertible sports car - although , like a lot of men , he 's impatient ; he bought it on his 49th .
but like a lot of modern men , he hugs , he bakes , he leaves work early to coach little league .
someone asked me if he cried when i asked him to be in the council of dads .
i was like , " david cries when you invite him to take a walk . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but he 's a literary agent , which means he 's a broker of dreams in a world where most dreams do n't come true .
and this is what we wanted him to capture - what it means to have setbacks and then aspirations .
and i said , " what 's the most valuable thing you can give to a dreamer ? "
and he said , " a belief in themselves . "
" but when i came to see you , " i said , " i did n't believe in myself .
i was at a wall . "
he said , " i do n't see the wall , " and i 'm telling you the same , do n't see the wall .
you may encounter one from time to time , but you 've got to find a way to get over it , around it , or through it .
but whatever you do , do n't succumb to it .
do n't give in to the wall .
my home is not far from the brooklyn bridge , and during the year and a half i was on crutches , it became a sort of symbol to me .
so one day near the end of my journey , i said , " come on girls , let 's take a walk across the brooklyn bridge . "
we set out on crutches .
i was on crutches , my wife was next to me , my girls were doing these rockstar poses up ahead .
and because walking was one of the first things i lost , i spent most of that year thinking about this most elemental of human acts .
walking upright , we are told , is the threshold of what made us human .
and yet , for the four million years humans have been walking upright , the act is essentially unchanged .
as my physical therapist likes to say , " every step is a tragedy waiting to happen . "
you nearly fall with one leg , then you catch yourself with the other .
and the biggest consequence of walking on crutches - as i did for a year and a half - is that you walk slower .
you hurry , you get where you 're going , but you get there alone .
you go slow , you get where you 're going , but you get there with this community you built along the way .
at the risk of admission , i was never nicer than the year i was on crutches .
200 years ago , a new type of pedestrian appeared in paris .
he was called a " flaneur , " one who wanders the arcades .
and it was the custom of those flaneurs to show they were men of leisure by taking turtles for walks and letting the reptile set the pace .
and i just love this ode to slow moving .
and it 's become my own motto for my girls .
take a walk with a turtle .
behold the world in pause .
and this idea of pausing may be the single biggest lesson i took from my journey .
there 's a quote from moses on the side of the liberty bell , and it comes from a passage in the book of leviticus , that every seven years you should let the land lay fallow .
and every seven sets of seven years , the land gets an extra year of rest during which time all families are reunited and people surrounded with the ones they love .
that 50th year is called the jubilee year , and it 's the origin of that term .
and though i 'm shy of 50 , it captures my own experience .
my lost year was my jubilee year .
by laying fallow , i planted the seeds for a healthier future and was reunited with the ones i love .
come the one year anniversary of my journey , i went to see my surgeon , dr. john healey - and by the way , healey , great name for a doctor .
he 's the president of the international society of limb salvage , which is the least euphemistic term i 've ever heard .
and i said , " dr. healey , if my daughters come to you one day and say , ' what should i learn from my daddy 's story ? ' what would you tell them ? "
he said , " i would tell them what i know , and that is everybody dies , but not everybody lives .
i want you to live . "
i wrote a letter to my girls that appears at the end of my book , " the council of dads , " and i listed these lessons , a few of which you 've heard here today : approach the cow , pack your flipflops , do n't see the wall , live the questions , harvest miracles .
as i looked at this list - to me it was sort of like a psalm book of living - i realized , we may have done it for our girls , but it really changed us .
and that is , the secret of the council of dads , is that my wife and i did this in an attempt to help our daughters , but it really changed us .
so i stand here today as you see now , walking without crutches or a cane .
and last week i had my 18-month scans .
and as you all know , anybody with cancer has to get follow-up scans .
in my case it 's quarterly .
and all the collective minds in this room , i dare say , can never find a solution for scan-xiety .
as i was going there , i was wondering , what would i say depending on what happened here .
i got good news that day , and i stand here today cancer-free , walking without aid and hobbling forward .
and i just want to mention briefly in passing - i 'm past my time limit - but i just want to briefly mention in passing that one of the nice things that can come out of a conference like this is , at a similar meeting , back in the spring , anne wojcicki heard about our story and very quickly - in a span of three weeks - put the full resources of 23andme , and we announced an initiative in july to get to decode the genome of anybody , a living person with a heart tissue , bone sarcoma .
and she told me last night , in the three months since we 've done it , we 've gotten 300 people who 've contributed to this program .
and the epidemiologists here will tell you , that 's half the number of people who get the disease in one year in the united states .
so if you go to 23andme , or if you go to councilofdads.com , you can click on a link .
and we encourage anybody to join this effort .
but i 'll just close what i 've been talking about by leaving you with this message : may you find an excuse to reach out to some long-lost pal , or to that college roommate , or to some person you may have turned away from .
may you find a mud puddle to jump in someplace , or find a way to get over , around , or through any wall that stands between you and one of your dreams .
and every now and then , find a friend , find a turtle , and take a long , slow walk .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- if you really want to understand the problem that we 're facing with the oceans , you have to think about the biology at the same time you think about the physics .
we ca n't solve the problems unless we start studying the ocean in a very much more interdisciplinary way .
so i 'm going to demonstrate that through discussion of some of the climate change things that are going on in the ocean .
we 'll look at sea level rise .
we 'll look at ocean warming .
and then the last thing on the list there , ocean acidification - if you were to ask me , you know , " what do you worry about the most ?
what frightens you ? "
for me , it 's ocean acidification .
and this has come onto the stage pretty recently .
so i will spend a little time at the end .
i was in copenhagen in december like a number of you in this room .
and i think we all found it , simultaneously , an eye-opening and a very frustrating experience .
i sat in this large negotiation hall , at one point , for three or four hours , without hearing the word " oceans " one time .
it really was n't on the radar screen .
the nations that brought it up when we had the speeches of the national leaders - it tended to be the leaders of the small island states , the low-lying island states .
and by this weird quirk of alphabetical order of the nations , a lot of the low-lying states , like kiribati and nauru , they were seated at the very end of these immensely long rows .
you know , they were marginalized in the negotiation room .
one of the problems is coming up with the right target .
it 's not clear what the target should be .
and how can you figure out how to fix something if you do n't have a clear target ?
now , you 've heard about " two degrees " : that we should limit temperature rise to no more than two degrees .
but there 's not a lot of science behind that number .
we 've also talked about concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere .
should it be 450 ? should it be 400 ?
there 's not a lot of science behind that one either .
most of the science that is behind these numbers , these potential targets , is based on studies on land .
and i would say , for the people that work in the ocean and think about what the targets should be , we would argue that they must be much lower .
you know , from an oceanic perspective , 450 is way too high .
now there 's compelling evidence that it really needs to be 350 .
we are , right now , at 390 parts per million of co2 in the atmosphere .
we 're not going to put the brakes on in time to stop at 450 , so we 've got to accept we 're going to do an overshoot , and the discussion as we go forward has to focus on how far the overshoot goes and what 's the pathway back to 350 .
now , why is this so complicated ?
why do n't we know some of these things a little bit better ?
well , the problem is that we 've got very complicated forces in the climate system .
there 's all kinds of natural causes of climate change .
there 's air-sea interactions .
here in galapagos , we 're affected by el ninos and la nina .
but the entire planet warms up when there 's a big el nino .
volcanoes eject aerosols into the atmosphere .
that changes our climate .
the ocean contains most of the exchangeable heat on the planet .
so anything that influences how ocean surface waters mix with the deep water changes the ocean of the planet .
and we know the solar output 's not constant through time .
so those are all natural causes of climate change .
and then we have the human-induced causes of climate change as well .
we 're changing the characteristics of the surface of the land , the reflectivity .
we inject our own aerosols into the atmosphere , and we have trace gases , and not just carbon dioxide - it 's methane , ozone , oxides of sulfur and nitrogen .
so here 's the thing . it sounds like a simple question .
is co2 produced by man 's activities causing the planet to warm up ?
but to answer that question , to make a clear attribution to carbon dioxide , you have to know something about all of these other agents of change .
but the fact is we do know a lot about all of those things .
you know , thousands of scientists have been working on understanding all of these man-made causes and the natural causes .
and we 've got it worked out , and we can say , " yes , co2 is causing the planet to warm up now . "
now , we have many ways to study natural variability .
i 'll show you a few examples of this now .
this is the ship that i spent the last three months on in the antarctic .
it 's a scientific drilling vessel .
we go out for months at a time and drill into the sea bed to recover sediments that tell us stories of climate change , right .
like one of the ways to understand our greenhouse future is to drill down in time to the last period where we had co2 double what it is today .
and so that 's what we 've done with this ship .
this was - this is south of the antarctic circle .
it looks downright tropical there .
one day where we had calm seas and sun , which was the reason i could get off the ship .
most of the time it looked like this .
we had a waves up to 50 ft .
and winds averaging about 40 knots for most of the voyage and up to 70 or 80 knots .
so that trip just ended , and i ca n't show you too many results from that right now , but we 'll go back one more year , to another drilling expedition i 've been involved in .
this was led by ross powell and tim naish .
it 's the andrill project .
and we made the very first bore hole through the largest floating ice shelf on the planet .
this is a crazy thing , this big drill rig wrapped in a blanket to keep everybody warm , drilling at temperatures of minus 40 .
and we drilled in the ross sea .
that 's the ross sea ice shelf on the right there .
so , this huge floating ice shelf the size of alaska comes from west antarctica .
now , west antarctica is the part of the continent where the ice is grounded on sea floor as much as 2,000 meters deep .
so that ice sheet is partly floating , and it 's exposed to the ocean , to the ocean heat .
this is the part of antarctica that we worry about .
because it 's partly floating , you can imagine , is sea level rises a little bit , the ice lifts off the bed , and then it can break off and float north .
when that ice melts , sea level rises by six meters .
so we drill back in time to see how often that 's happened , and exactly how fast that ice can melt .
here 's the cartoon on the left there .
we drilled through a hundred meters of floating ice shelf then through 900 meters of water and then 1,300 meters into the sea floor .
so it 's the deepest geological bore hole ever drilled .
it took about 10 years to put this project together .
and here 's what we found .
now , there 's 40 scientists working on this project , and people are doing all kinds of really complicated and expensive analyses .
but it turns out , you know , the thing that told the best story was this simple visual description .
you know , we saw this in the core samples as they came up .
we saw these alternations between sediments that look like this - there 's gravel and cobbles in there and a bunch of sand .
that 's the kind of material in the deep sea .
it can only get there if it 's carried out by ice .
so we know there 's an ice shelf overhead .
and that alternates with a sediment that looks like this .
this is absolutely beautiful stuff .
this sediment is 100 percent made up of the shells of microscopic plants .
and these plants need sunlight , so we know when we find that sediment there 's no ice overhead .
and we saw about 35 alternations between open water and ice-covered water , between gravels and these plant sediments .
so what that means is , what it tells us is that the ross sea region , this ice shelf , melted back and formed anew about 35 times .
and this is in the past four million years .
this was completely unexpected .
nobody imagined that the west antarctic ice sheet was this dynamic .
in fact , the lore for many years has been , " the ice formed many tens of millions of years ago , and it 's been there ever since . "
and now we know that in our recent past it melted back and formed again , and sea level went up and down , six meters at a time .
what caused it ?
well , we 're pretty sure that it 's very small changes in the amount of sunlight reaching antarctica , just caused by natural changes in the orbit of the earth .
but here 's the key thing : you know , the other thing we found out is that the ice sheet passed a threshold , that the planet warmed up enough - and the number 's about one degree to one and a half degrees centigrade - the planet warmed up enough that it became ...
that ice sheet became very dynamic and was very easily melted .
and you know what ?
we 've actually changed the temperature in the last century just the right amount .
so many of us are convinced now that west antarctica , the west antarctic ice sheet , is starting to melt .
we do expect to see a sea-level rise on the order of one to two meters by the end of this century .
and it could be larger than that .
this is a serious consequence for nations like kiribati , you know , where the average elevation is about a little over a meter above sea level .
okay , the second story takes place here in galapagos .
this is a bleached coral , coral that died during the 1982- ' 83 el nino .
this is from champion island .
it 's about a meter tall pavona clavus colony .
and it 's covered with algae . that 's what happens .
when these things die , immediately , organisms come in and encrust and live on that dead surface .
and so , when a coral colony is killed by an el nino event , it leaves this indelible record .
you can go then and study corals and figure out how often do you see this .
so one of the things thought of in the ' 80s was to go back and take cores of coral heads throughout the galapagos and find out how often was there a devastating event .
and just so you know , 1982- ' 83 , that el nino killed 95 percent of all the corals here in galapagos .
then there was similar mortality in ' 97- ' 98 .
and what we found after drilling back in time two to 400 years was that these were unique events .
we saw no other mass mortality events .
so these events in our recent past really are unique .
so they 're either just truly monster el ninos , or they 're just very strong el ninos that occurred against a backdrop of global warming .
either case , it 's bad news for the corals of the galapagos islands .
here 's how we sample the corals .
this is actually easter island . look at this monster .
this coral is eight meters tall , right .
and it been growing for about 600 years .
now , sylvia earle turned me on to this exact same coral .
and she was diving here with john lauret - i think it was 1994 - and collected a little nugget and sent it to me .
and we started working on it , and we figured out we could tell the temperature of the ancient ocean from analyzing a coral like this .
so we have a diamond drill .
we 're not killing the colony ; we 're taking a small core sample out of the top .
the core comes up as these cylindrical tubes of limestone .
and that material then we take back to the lab and analyze it .
you can see some of the coral cores there on the right .
so we 've done that all over the eastern pacific .
we 're starting to do it in the western pacific as well .
i 'll take you back here to the galapagos islands .
and we 've been working at this fascinating uplift here in urbina bay .
that the place where , during an earthquake in 1954 , this marine terrace was lifted up out of the ocean very quickly , and it was lifted up about six to seven meters .
and so now you can walk through a coral reef without getting wet .
if you go on the ground there , it looks like this , and this is the grandaddy coral .
it 's 11 meters in diameter , and we know that it started growing in the year 1584 .
imagine that .
and that coral was growing happily in those shallow waters , until 1954 , when the earthquake happened .
now the reason we know it 's 1584 is that these corals have growth bands .
when you cut them , slice those cores in half and x-ray them , you see these light and dark bands .
each one of those is a year .
we know these corals grow about a centimeter and a half a year .
and we just count on down to the bottom .
then their other attribute is that they have this great chemistry .
we can analyze the carbonate that makes up the coral , and there 's a whole bunch of things we can do .
but in this case , we measured the different isotopes of oxygen .
their ratio tells us the water temperature .
in this example here , we had monitored this reef in galapagos with temperature recorders , so we know the temperature of the water the coral 's growing in .
then after we harvest a coral , we measure this ratio , and now you can see , those curves match perfectly .
in this case , at these islands , you know , corals are instrumental-quality recorders of change in the water .
and of course , our thermometers only take us back 50 years or so here .
the coral can take us back hundreds and thousands of years .
so , what we do : it 's not just my group ; there 's maybe 30 groups worldwide doing this .
but we get these instrumental- and near-instrumental-quality records of temperature change that go back hundreds of years , here 's a synthetic diagram .
there 's a whole family of curves here .
but what 's happening : we 're looking at the last thousand years of temperature on the planet .
and there 's five or six different compilations there , but each one of those compilations reflects input from hundreds of these kinds of records from corals .
we do similar things with ice cores .
we work with tree rings .
and that 's how we discover what is truly natural and how different is the last century , right ?
and i chose this one because it 's complicated and messy looking , right .
this is as messy as it gets .
you can see there 's some signals there .
some of the records show lower temperatures than others .
some of them show greater variability .
but they all tell us what the natural variability is .
some of them are from the northern hemisphere ; some are from the entire globe .
but here 's what we can say : what 's natural in the last thousand years is that the planet was cooling down .
it was cooling down until about 1900 or so .
and there is natural variability caused by the sun , caused by el ninos .
a century-scale , decadal-scale variability , and we know the magnitude ; it 's about two-tenths to four-tenths of a degree centigrade .
but then at the very end is where we have the instrumental record in black .
and there 's the temperature up there in 2009 .
you know , we 've warmed the globe about a degree centigrade in the last century , and there 's nothing that resembles what we 've seen in the last century .
you know , that 's the strength of our argument , that we are doing something that 's truly different .
so i 'll close with a short discussion of ocean acidification .
i like it as a component of global change to talk about , because , even if you are a hard-bitten global warming skeptic , and i talk to that community fairly often , you can not deny the simple physics of co2 dissolving in the ocean .
you know , we 're pumping out lots of co2 into the atmosphere , from fossil fuels , from cement production .
right now , about a third of that carbon dioxide is dissolving straight into the sea , right ?
and as it does so , it makes the ocean more acidic .
so , you can not argue with that .
that is what 's happening right now , and it 's a very different issue than the global warming issue .
it has many consequences .
there 's consequences for carbonate organisms .
there are many organisms that build their shells out of calcium carbonate - plants and animals both .
the main framework material of coral reefs is calcium carbonate .
that material is more soluble in acidic fluid .
so one of the things we 're seeing is organisms are having to spend more metabolic energy to build and maintain their shells .
at some point , as this transience , as this co2 uptake in the ocean continues , that material 's actually going to start to dissolve .
and on coral reefs , where some of the main framework organisms disappear , we will see a major loss of marine biodiversity .
but it 's not just the carbonate producers that are affected .
there 's many physiological processes that are influenced by the acidity of the ocean .
so many reactions involving enzymes and proteins are sensitive to the acid content of the ocean .
so , all of these things - greater metabolic demands , reduced reproductive success , changes in respiration and metabolism .
you know , these are things that we have good physiological reasons to expect to see stressed caused by this transience .
so we figured out some pretty interesting ways to track co2 levels in the atmosphere , we used to do it just with ice cores , but in this case , we 're going back 20 million years .
and we take samples of the sediment , and it tells us the co2 level of the ocean , and therefore the co2 level of the atmosphere .
and here 's the thing : you have to go back about 15 million years to find a time when co2 levels were about what they are today .
you have to go back about 30 million years to find a time when co2 levels were double what they are today .
now , what that means is that all of the organisms that live in the sea have evolved in this chemostatted ocean , that 's the reason that they 're not able to respond or adapt to this rapid acidification that 's going on right now .
so , charlie veron came up with this statement last year : " the prospect of ocean acidification may well be the most serious of all of the predicted outcomes of anthropogenic co2 release . "
and i think that may very well be true , so i 'll close with this .
you know , we do need the protected areas , absolutely , but for the sake of the oceans , we have to cap or limit co2 emissions as soon as possible .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- has anyone ever been to aspen , colorado ?
it 's not a joke yet ; those are n't the jokes .
is this thing off ?
i went to aspen recently and stumbled into this song .
♫ black men go to aspen ♫ ♫ and rent colorful chalets . ♫ ♫ giggle at the questions ♫ ♫ their mere presence seems to raise . ♫ ♫ get taken for men ♫ ♫ we do n't resemble in the least . ♫ " are you ... ? "
" no . "
♫ it 's a winter wonderland ♫ ♫ in the belly of the beast . ♫ ♫ and black men ski . ♫ ♫ black men ski . ♫ ♫ black men send back sushi ♫ ♫ with a scorned yakuza 's flair . ♫ ♫ we make postmodern art ♫ ♫ with bacon grease ♫ ♫ and hot combed hair . ♫ ♫ we secretly play beethoven ♫ ♫ inside our bassmobiles . ♫ ♫ we can tell you how cool looks ♫ ♫ but can not show you how it feels ♫ ♫ when black men ski . ♫ ♫ when black men ski . ♫ ♫ black men now are students ♫
♫ of gay sensibility . ♫ ♫ we wear ironic t-shirts ♫ ♫ drenched in code unknown to thee . ♫ ♫ we get baptized in walden pond ♫ ♫ amongst a searing mob ♫ ♫ because the cleansing blood of jesus ♫ ♫ could not do a thorough job . ♫ ♫ black men ski . ♫ ♫ black men ski . ♫ ♫ chinese guys can jump real high ♫ ♫ and germans cook soul food . ♫ ♫ white boys rap and hippies nap ♫ ♫ their dreads up to look rude . ♫ ♫ jazz is now suburban ♫ ♫ it 's marsalisly clean . ♫
♫ and now we 've got viagra ♫ ♫ everyone 's a sex machine . ♫ ♫ so black men ski . ♫ what else can we do ?
♫ black men ski . ♫ ♫ black men ski . ♫ ♫ black men ski . ♫ ♫ some kids i 'll describe as friends ♫ ♫ say i am race-obsessed . ♫ ♫ the luxury of your opinion ♫ ♫ shows that you are blessed . ♫ ♫ see , i have poems about sunsets ♫ ♫ flowers and the rain . ♫ ♫ i 've read them to policemen ♫ ♫ but it was all in vain . ♫ ♫ so black men ski . ♫ ♫ black men ski ... ♫ elegantly .
♫ black men ski . ♫ ♫ black men ski . ♫ we 're 25 , 26 years after the advent of the macintosh , which was an astoundingly seminal event in the history of human-machine interface and in computation in general .
it fundamentally changed the way that people thought about computation , thought about computers , how they used them and who and how many people were able to use them .
it was such a radical change , in fact , that the early macintosh development team in ' 82 , ' 83 , ' 84 had to write an entirely new operating system from the ground up .
now , this is an interesting little message , and it 's a lesson that has since , i think , been forgotten or lost or something , and that is , namely , that the os is the interface .
the interface is the os .
it 's like the land and the king -lrb- i.e. arthur -rrb- they 're inseparable , they are one .
and to write a new operating system was not a capricious matter .
it was n't just a matter of tuning up some graphics routines .
there were no graphics routines . there were no mouse drivers .
so it was a necessity .
but in the quarter-century since then , we 've seen all of the fundamental supporting technologies go berserk .
so memory capacity and disk capacity have been multiplied by something between 10,000 and a million .
same thing for processor speeds .
networks , we did n't have networks at all at the time of the macintosh 's introduction , and that has become the single most salient aspect of how we live with computers .
and , of course , graphics : today 84 dollars and 97 cents at best buy buys you more graphics power than you could have gotten for a million bucks from sgi only a decade ago .
so we 've got that incredible ramp-up .
then , on the side , we 've got the web and , increasingly , the cloud , which is fantastic , but also - in the regard in which an interface is fundamental - kind of a distraction .
so we 've forgotten to invent new interfaces .
certainly we 've seen in recent years a lot of change in that regard , and people are starting to wake up about that .
so what happens next ? where do we go from there ?
the problem , as we see it , has to do with a single , simple word : " space , " or a single , simple phrase : " real world geometry . "
computers and the programming languages that we talk to them in , that we teach them in , are hideously insensate when it comes to space .
they do n't understand real world space .
it 's a funny thing because the rest of us occupy it quite frequently and quite well .
they also do n't understand time , but that 's a matter for a separate talk .
so what happens if you start to explain space to them ?
one thing you might get is something like the luminous room .
the luminous room is a system in which it 's considered that input and output spaces are co-located .
that 's a strangely simple , and yet unexplored idea , right ?
when you use a mouse , your hand is down here on the mouse pad .
it 's not even on the same plane as what you 're talking about : the pixels are up on the display .
so here was a room in which all the walls , floors , ceilings , pets , potted plants , whatever was in there , were capable , not only of display but of sensing as well .
and that means input and output are in the same space enabling stuff like this .
that 's a digital storage in a physical container .
the contract is the same as with real word objects in real world containers .
has to come back out , whatever you put in .
this little design experiment that was a small office here knew a few other tricks as well .
if you presented it with a chess board , it tried to figure out what you might mean by that .
and if there was nothing for them to do , the chess pieces eventually got bored and hopped away .
the academics who were overseeing this work thought that that was too frivolous , so we built deadly serious applications like this optics prototyping workbench in which a toothpaste cap on a cardboard box becomes a laser .
the beam splitters and lenses are represented by physical objects , and the system projects down the laser beam path .
so you 've got an interface that has no interface .
you operate the world as you operate the real world , which is to say , with your hands .
similarly , a digital wind tunnel with digital wind flowing from right to left - not that remarkable in a sense ; we did n't invent the mathematics .
but if you displayed that on a crt or flat panel display , it would be meaningless to hold up an arbitrary object , a real world object in that .
here , the real world merges with the simulation .
and finally , to pull out all the stops , this is a system called urp , for urban planners , in which we give architects and urban planners back the models that we confiscated when we insisted that they use cad systems .
and we make the machine meet them half way .
it projects down digital shadows , as you see here .
and if you introduce tools like this inverse clock , then you can control the sun 's position in the sky .
that 's 8 a.m. shadows .
they get a little shorter at 9 a.m.
there you are , swinging the sun around .
short shadows at noon and so forth .
and we built up a series of tools like this .
there are inter-shadowing studies that children can operate , even though they do n't know anything about urban planning : to move a building , you simply reach out your hand and you move the building .
a material wand makes the building into a sort of frank gehry thing that reflects light in all directions .
are you blinding passers by and motorists on the freeways ?
a zoning tool connects distant structures , a building and a roadway .
are you going to get sued by the zoning commission ? and so forth .
now , if these ideas seem familiar or perhaps even a little dated , that 's great ; they should seem familiar .
this work is 15 years old .
this stuff was undertaken at mit and the media lab under the incredible direction of professor hiroshi ishii , director of the tangible media group .
but it was that work that was seen by alex mcdowell , one of the world 's legendary production designers .
but alex was preparing a little , sort of obscure , indie , arthouse film called " minority report " for steven spielberg , and invited us to come out from mit and design the interfaces that would appear in that film .
and the great thing about it was that alex was so dedicated to the idea of verisimilitude , the idea that the putative 2054 that we were painting in the film be believable , that he allowed us to take on that design work as if it were an r & d effort .
and the result is sort of gratifyingly perpetual .
people still reference those sequences in " minority report " when they talk about new ui design .
so this led full circle , in a strange way , to build these ideas into what we believe is the necessary future of human machine interface : the spatial operating environment , we call it .
so here we have a bunch of stuff , some images .
and , using a hand , we can actually exercise six degrees of freedom , six degrees of navigational control .
and it 's fun to fly through mr. beckett 's eye .
and you can come back out through the scary orangutan .
and that 's all well and good .
let 's do something a little more difficult .
here , we have a whole bunch of disparate images .
we can fly around them .
so navigation is a fundamental issue .
you have to be able to navigate in 3d .
much of what we want computers to help us with in the first place is inherently spatial .
and the part that is n't spatial can often be spatialized to allow our wetware to make greater sense of it .
now we can distribute this stuff in many different ways .
so we can throw it out like that . let 's reset it .
we can organize it this way .
and , of course , it 's not just about navigation , but about manipulation as well .
so if we do n't like stuff , or we 're intensely curious about ernst haeckel 's scientific falsifications , we can pull them out like that .
and then if it 's time for analysis , we can pull back a little bit and ask for a different distribution .
let 's just come down a bit and fly around .
so that 's a different way to look at stuff .
if you 're of a more analytical nature then you might want , actually , to look at this as a color histogram .
so now we 've got the stuff color-sorted , angle maps onto color .
and now , if we want to select stuff , 3d , space , the idea that we 're tracking hands in real space becomes really important because we can reach in , not in 2d , not in fake 2d , but in actual 3d .
here are some selection planes .
and we 'll perform this boolean operation because we really love yellow and tapirs on green grass .
so , from there to the world of real work .
here 's a logistics system , a small piece of one that we 're currently building .
there 're a lot of elements .
and one thing that 's very important is to combine traditional tabular data with three-dimensional and geospatial information .
so here 's a familiar place .
and we 'll bring this back here for a second .
maybe select a little bit of that .
and bring out this graph .
and we should , now , be able to fly in here and have a closer look .
these are logistics elements that are scattered across the united states .
one thing that three-dimensional interactions and the general idea of imbuing computation with space affords you is a final destruction of that unfortunate one-to-one pairing between human beings and computers .
that 's the old way , that 's the old mantra : one machine , one human , one mouse , one screen .
well , that does n't really cut it anymore .
in the real world , we have people who collaborate ; we have people who have to work together , and we have many different displays .
and we might want to look at these various images .
we might want to ask for some help .
the author of this new pointing device is sitting over there , so i can pull this from there to there .
these are unrelated machines , right ?
so the computation is space soluble and network soluble .
so i 'm going to leave that over there because i have a question for paul .
paul is the designer of this wand , and maybe its easiest for him to come over here and tell me in person what 's going on .
so let me get some of these out of the way .
let 's pull this apart : i 'll go ahead and explode it .
kevin , can you help ?
let me see if i can help us find the circuit board .
mind you , it 's a sort of gratuitous field-stripping exercise , but we do it in the lab all the time .
all right .
so collaborative work , whether it 's immediately co-located or distant and distinct , is always important .
and again , that stuff needs to be undertaken in the context of space .
and finally , i 'd like to leave you with a glimpse that takes us back to the world of imagery .
this is a system called tamper , which is a slightly whimsical look at what the future of editing and media manipulation systems might be .
we at oblong believe that media should be accessible in much more fine-grained form .
so we have a large number of movies stuck inside here .
and let 's just pick out a few elements .
we can zip through them as a possibility .
we can grab elements off the front , where upon they reanimate , come to life , and drag them down onto the table here .
we 'll go over to jacques tati here and grab our blue friend and put him down on the table as well .
we may need more than one .
and we probably need , well , we probably need a cowboy to be quite honest .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- yeah , let 's take that one .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you see , cowboys and french farce people do n't go well together , and the system knows that .
let me leave with one final thought , and that is that one of the greatest english language writers of the last three decades suggested that great art is always a gift .
and he was n't talking about whether the novel costs 24.95 -lsb- dollars -rsb- , or whether you have to spring 70 million bucks to buy the stolen vermeer ; he was talking about the circumstances of its creation and of its existence .
and i think that it 's time that we asked for the same from technology .
technology is capable of expressing and being imbued with a certain generosity , and we need to demand that , in fact .
for some of this kind of technology , ground center is a combination of design , which is crucially important .
we ca n't have advances in technology any longer unless design is integrated from the very start .
and , as well , as of efficacy , agency .
we 're , as human beings , the creatures that create , and we should make sure that our machines aid us in that task and are built in that same image .
so i will leave you with that . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : so to ask the obvious question - actually this is from bill gates - when ? -lrb- john underkoffler : when ? -rrb- ca : when real ? when for us , not just in a lab and on a stage ?
can it be for every man , or is this just for corporations and movie producers ?
ju : no , it has to be for every human being .
that 's our goal entirely .
we wo n't have succeeded unless we take that next big step .
i mean it 's been 25 years .
can there really be only one interface ? there ca n't .
ca : but does that mean that , at your desk or in your home , you need projectors , cameras ?
you know , how can it work ?
ju : no , this stuff will be built into the bezel of every display .
it 'll be built into architecture .
the gloves go away in a matter of months or years .
so this is the inevitability about it .
ca : so , in your mind , five years time , someone can buy this as part of a standard computer interface ?
ju : i think in five years time when you buy a computer , you 'll get this .
ca : well that 's cool .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the world has a habit of surprising us as to how these things are actually used .
what do you think , what in your mind is the first killer app for this ?
ju : that 's a good question , and we ask ourselves that every day .
at the moment , our early-adopter customers - and these systems are deployed out in the real world - do all the big data intensive , data heavy problems with it .
so , whether it 's logistics and supply chain management or natural gas and resource extraction , financial services , pharmaceuticals , bioinformatics , those are the topics right now , but that 's not a killer app .
and i understand what you 're asking .
ca : c 'mon , c 'mon . martial arts , games . c 'mon .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- john , thank you for making science-fiction real .
ju : it 's been a great pleasure .
thank you to you all .
-lrb- applause -rrb- can any of you remember what you wanted to be when you were 17 ?
do you know what i wanted to be ?
i wanted to be a biker chick .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i wanted to race cars , and i wanted to be a cowgirl , and i wanted to be mowgli from " the jungle book . "
because they were all about being free , the wind in your hair - just to be free .
and on my seventeenth birthday , my parents , knowing how much i loved speed , gave me one driving lesson for my seventeenth birthday .
not that we could have afforded i drive , but to give me the dream of driving .
and on my seventeenth birthday , i accompanied my little sister in complete innocence , as i always had all my life - my visually impaired sister - to go to see an eye specialist .
because big sisters are always supposed to support their little sisters .
and my little sister wanted to be a pilot - god help her .
so i used to get my eyes tested just for fun .
and on my seventeenth birthday , after my fake eye exam , the eye specialist just noticed it happened to be my birthday .
and he said , " so what are you going to do to celebrate ? "
and i took that driving lesson , and i said , " i 'm going to learn how to drive . "
and then there was a silence - one of those awful silences when you know something 's wrong .
and he turned to my mother , and he said , " you have n't told her yet ? "
on my seventeenth birthday , as janis ian would best say , i learned the truth at 17 .
i am , and have been since birth , legally blind .
and you know , how on earth did i get to 17 and not know that ?
well , if anybody says country music is n't powerful , let me tell you this : i got there because my father 's passion for johnny cash and a song , " a boy named sue . "
i 'm the eldest of three . i was born in 1971 .
and very shortly after my birth , my parents found out i had a condition called ocular albinism .
and what the hell does that mean to you ?
so let me just tell you , the great part of all of this ?
i ca n't see this clock and i ca n't see the timing , so holy god , woohoo ! -lrb- laughter -rrb- i might buy some more time .
but more importantly , let me tell you - i 'm going to come up really close here . do n't freak out , pat .
hey .
see this hand ?
beyond this hand is a world of vaseline .
every man in this room , even you , steve , is george clooney .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and every woman , you are so beautiful .
and when i want to look beautiful , i step three feet away from the mirror , and i do n't have to see these lines etched in my face from all the squinting i 've done all my life from all the dark lights .
the really strange part is that , at three and a half , just before i was going to school , my parents made a bizarre , unusual and incredibly brave decision .
no special needs schools .
no labels .
no limitations .
my ability and my potential .
and they decided to tell me that i could see .
so just like johnny cash 's sue , a boy given a girl 's name , i would grow up and learn from experience how to be tough and how to survive , when they were no longer there to protect me , or just take it all away .
but more significantly , they gave me the ability to believe , totally , to believe that i could .
and so when i heard that eye specialist tell me all the things , a big fat " no , " everybody imagines i was devastated .
and do n't get me wrong , because when i first heard it - aside from the fact that i thought he was insane - i got that thump in my chest , just that " huh ? "
but very quickly i recovered . it was like that .
the first thing i thought about was my mom , who was crying over beside me .
and i swear to god , i walked out of his office , " i will drive . i will drive .
you 're mad . i 'll drive . i know i can drive . "
and with the same dogged determination that my father had bred into me since i was such a child - he taught me how to sail , knowing i could never see where i was going , i could never see the shore , and i could n't see the sails , and i could n't see the destination .
but he told me to believe and feel the wind in my face .
and that wind in my face made me believe that he was mad and i would drive .
and for the next 11 years , i swore nobody would ever find out that i could n't see , because i did n't want to be a failure , and i did n't want to be weak .
and i believed i could do it .
so i rammed through life as only a casey can do .
and i was an archeologist , and then i broke things .
and then i managed a restaurant , and then i slipped on things .
and then i was a masseuse . and then i was a landscape gardener .
and then i went to business school .
and you know , disabled people are hugely educated .
and then i went in and i got a global consulting job with accenture .
and they did n't even know .
and it 's extraordinary how far belief can take you .
in 1999 , two and a half years into that job , something happened .
wonderfully , my eyes decided , enough .
and temporarily , very unexpectedly , they dropped .
and i 'm in one of the most competitive environments in the world , where you work hard , play hard , you gotta be the best , you gotta be the best .
and two years in , i really could see very little .
and i found myself in front of an hr manager in 1999 , saying something i never imagined that i would say .
i was 28 years old .
i had built a persona all around what i could and could n't do .
and i simply said , " i 'm sorry .
i ca n't see , and i need help . "
asking for help can be incredibly difficult .
and you all know what it is . you do n't need to have a disability to know that .
we all know how hard it is to admit weakness and failure .
and it 's frightening , is n't it ?
but all that belief had fueled me so long .
and can i tell you , operating in the sighted world when you ca n't see , it 's kind of difficult - it really is .
can i tell you , airports are a disaster .
oh , for the love of god .
and please , any designers out there ?
ok , designers , please put up your hands , even though i ca n't even see you .
i always end up in the gents ' toilets .
and there 's nothing wrong with my sense of smell .
but can i just tell you , the little sign for a gents ' toilet or a ladies ' toilet is determined by a triangle .
have you ever tried to see that if you have vaseline in front of your eyes ?
it 's such a small thing , right ?
and you know how exhausting it can be to try to be perfect when you 're not , or to be somebody that you are n't ?
and so after admitting i could n't see to hr , they sent me off to an eye specialist .
and i had no idea that this man was going to change my life .
but before i got to him , i was so lost .
i had no idea who i was anymore .
and that eye specialist , he did n't bother testing my eyes .
god no , it was therapy .
and he asked me several questions , of which many were , " why ?
why are you fighting so hard not to be yourself ?
and do you love what you do , caroline ? "
and you know , when you go to a global consulting firm , they put a chip in your head , and you 're like , " i love accenture . i love accenture . i love my job . i love accenture .
i love accenture . i love accenture . i love my job . i love accenture . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- to leave would be failure .
and he said , " do you love it ? "
i could n't even speak i was so choked up .
i just was so - how do i tell him ?
and then he said to me , " what did you want to be when you were little ? "
now listen , i was n't going to say to him , " well , i wanted to race cars and motorbikes . "
hardly appropriate at this moment in time .
he thought i was mad enough anyway .
and as i left his office , he called me back and he said , " i think it 's time .
i think it 's time to stop fighting and do something different . "
and that door closed .
and that silence just outside a doctor 's office , that many of us know .
and my chest ached .
and i had no idea where i was going . i had no idea .
but i did know the game was up .
and i went home , and , because the pain in my chest ached so much , i thought , " i 'll go out for a run . "
really not a very sensible thing to do .
and i went on a run that i know so well .
i know this run so well , by the back of my hand .
i always run it perfectly fine .
i count the steps and the lampposts and all those things that visually impaired people have a tendency to have a lot of meetings with .
and there was a rock that i always missed .
and i 'd never fallen on it , never .
and there i was crying away , and smash , bash on my rock .
broken , fallen over on this rock in the middle of march in 2000 , typical irish weather on a wednesday - gray , snot , tears everywhere , ridiculously self-pitying .
and i was floored , and i was broken , and i was angry .
and i did n't know what to do .
and i sat there for quite some time going , " how am i going to get off this rock and go home ?
because who am i going to be ?
what am i going to be ? "
and i thought about my dad , and i thought , " good god , i 'm so not sue now . "
and i kept thinking over and over in my mind , what had happened ? where did it go wrong ? why did n't i understand ?
and you know , the extraordinary part of it is i just simply had no answers .
i had lost my belief .
look where my belief had brought me to .
and now i had lost it . and now i really could n't see .
i was crumpled .
and then i remember thinking about that eye specialist asking me , " what do you want to be ? what do you want to be ?
what did you want to be when you were little ? do you love what you do ?
do something different . what do you want to be ?
do something different . what do you want to be ? "
and really slowly , slowly , slowly , it happened .
and it did happen this way .
and then the minute it came , it blew up in my head and bashed in my heart - something different .
" well , how about mowgli from ' the jungle book ' ?
you do n't get more different than that . "
and the moment , and i mean the moment , the moment that hit me , i swear to god , it was like woo hoo ! you know - something to believe in .
and nobody can tell me no .
yes , you can say i ca n't be an archeologist .
but you ca n't tell me , no , i ca n't be mowgli , because guess what ?
nobody 's ever done it before , so i 'm going to go do it .
and it does n't matter whether i 'm a boy or a girl , i 'm just going to scoot .
and so i got off that rock , and , oh my god , did i run home .
and i sprinted home , and i did n't fall , and i did n't crash .
and i ran up the stairs , and there was one of my favorite books of all time , " travels on my elephant " by mark shand - i do n't know if any of you know it .
and i grabbed this book off , and i 'm sitting on the couch going , " i know what i 'm going to do .
i know how to be mowgli .
i 'm going to go across india on the back of an elephant .
i 'm going to be an elephant handler . "
and i had no idea how i was going to be an elephant handler .
from global management consultant to elephant handler .
i had no idea how . i had no idea how you hire an elephant , get an elephant .
i did n't speak hindi . i 'd never been to india . had n't a clue .
but i knew i would .
because , when you make a decision at the right time and the right place , god , that universe makes it happen for you .
nine months later , after that day on snot rock , i had the only blind date in my life with a seven and a half foot elephant called kanchi .
and together we would trek a thousand kilometers across india .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the most powerful thing of all , it 's not that i did n't achieve before then . oh my god , i did .
but you know , i was believing in the wrong thing .
because i was n't believing in me , really me , all the bits of me - all the bits of all of us .
do you know how much of us all pretend to be somebody we 're not ?
and you know what , when you really believe in yourself and everything about you , it 's extraordinary what happens .
and you know what , that trip , that thousand kilometers , it raised enough money for 6,000 cataract eye operations .
six thousand people got to see because of that .
when i came home off that elephant , do you know what the most amazing part was ?
i chucked in my job at accenture .
i left , and i became a social entrepreneur , and i set up an organization with mark shand called elephant family , which deals with asian elephant conservation .
and i set up kanchi , because my organization was always going to be named after my elephant , because disability is like the elephant in the room .
and i wanted to make you see it in a positive way - no charity , no pity .
but i wanted to work only and truly with business and media leadership to totally reframe disability in a way that was exciting and possible .
it was extraordinary .
that 's what i wanted to do .
and i never thought about noes anymore , or not seeing , or any of that kind of nothing .
it just seemed that it was possible .
and you know , the oddest part is , when i was on my way traveling here to ted , i 'll be honest , i was petrified .
and i speak , but this is an amazing audience , and what am i doing here ?
but as i was traveling here , you 'll be very happy to know , i did use my white symbol stick cane , because it 's really good to skip queues in the airport .
and i got my way here being happily proud that i could n't see .
and the one thing is that a really good friend of mine , he texted me on the way over , knowing i was scared .
even though i present confident , i was scared .
he said , " be you . "
and so here i am .
this is me , all of me .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and i have learned , you know what , cars and motorbikes and elephants , that 's not freedom .
being absolutely true to yourself is freedom .
and i never needed eyes to see - never .
i simply needed vision and belief .
and if you truly believe - and i mean believe from the bottom of your heart - you can make change happen .
and we need to make it happen , because every single one of us - woman , man , gay , straight , disabled , perfect , normal , whatever - everyone of us must be the very best of ourselves .
i no longer want anybody to be invisible .
we all have to be included .
and stop with the labels , the limiting .
losing of labels , because we are not jam jars .
we are extraordinary , different , wonderful people .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- my students often ask me , " what is sociology ? "
and i tell them , " it 's the study of the way in which human beings are shaped by things that they do n't see . "
and they say , " so how can i be a sociologist ?
how can i understand those invisible forces ? "
and i say , " empathy .
start with empathy .
it all begins with empathy .
take yourself out of your shoes , put yourself into the shoes of another person . "
here , i 'll give you an example .
so i imagine my life : if a hundred years ago china had been the most powerful nation in the world and they came to the united states in search of coal , and they found it , and , in fact , they found lots of it right here .
and pretty soon , they began shipping that coal , ton by ton , rail car by rail car , boatload by boatload , back to china and elsewhere around the world .
and they got fabulously wealthy in doing so .
and they built beautiful cities all powered on that coal .
and back here in the united states , we saw economic despair , deprivation .
this is what i saw .
i saw people struggling to get by , not knowing what was what and what was next .
and then i asked myself the question .
i say , " how 's it possible that we could be so poor here in the united states , because the coal is such a wealthy resource , it 's so much money ? "
and i realized , because the chinese ingratiated themselves with a small ruling class here in the united states who stole all of that money and all of that wealth for themselves .
and the rest of us , the vast majority of us , struggle to get by .
and the chinese gave this small ruling elite loads of military weapons and sophisticated technology in order to ensure that people like me would not speak out against this relationship .
does this sound familiar ?
and they did things like train americans to help protect the coal .
and everywhere , were symbols of the chinese - everywhere , a constant reminder .
and back in china , what do they say in china ?
nothing . they do n't talk about us . they do n't talk about the coal .
if you ask them , they 'll say , " well , you know the coal , we need the coal .
i mean , come on , i 'm not going to turn down my thermostat .
you ca n't expect that . "
and so i get angry , and i get pissed , as do lots of average people .
and we fight back , and it gets really ugly .
and the chinese respond in a very ugly way .
and before we know it , they send in the tanks and then send in the troops , and lots of people are dying , and it 's a very , very difficult situation .
can you imagine what you would feel if you were in my shoes ?
can you imagine walking out of this building and seeing a tank sitting out there or a truck full of soldiers ?
and just imagine what you would feel .
because you know why they 're here , and you know what they 're doing here .
and you just feel the anger and you feel the fear .
if you can , that 's empathy - that 's empathy .
you 've left your shoes , and you 've stood in mine .
and you 've got to feel that .
okay , so that 's the warm up .
that 's the warm up .
now we 're going to have the real radical experiment .
and so for the remainder of my talk , what i want you to do is put yourselves in the shoes of an ordinary arab muslim living in the middle east - in particular , in iraq .
and so to help you , perhaps you 're a member of this middle class family in baghdad - and what you want is the best for your kids .
you want your kids to have a better life .
and you watch the news , you pay attention , you read the newspaper , you go down to the coffee shop with your friends , and you read the newspapers from around the world .
and sometimes you even watch satellite , cnn , from the united states .
so you have a sense of what the americans are thinking .
but really , you just want a better life for yourself .
that 's what you want .
you 're arab muslim living in iraq .
you want a better life for yourself .
so here , let me help you .
let me help you with some things that you might be thinking .
number one : this incursion into your land these past 20 years , and before , the reason anyone is interested in your land , and particularly the united states , it 's oil .
it 's all about oil ; you know that , everybody knows that .
people here back in the united states know it 's about oil .
it 's because somebody else has a design for your resource .
it 's your resource ; it 's not somebody else 's .
it 's your land ; it 's your resource .
somebody else has a design for it .
and you know why they have a design ?
you know why they have their eyes set on it ?
because they have an entire economic system that 's dependent on that oil - foreign oil , oil from other parts of the world that they do n't own .
and what else do you think about these people ?
the americans , they 're rich .
come on , they live in big houses , they have big cars , they all have blond hair , blue eyes , they 're happy .
you think that . it 's not true , of course , but that 's the media impression , and that 's like what you get .
and they have big cities , and the cities are all dependent on oil .
and back home , what do you see ?
poverty , despair , struggle .
look , you do n't live in a wealthy country .
this is iraq .
this is what you see .
you see people struggling to get by .
i mean , it 's not easy ; you see a lot of poverty .
and you feel something about this .
these people have designs for your resource , and this is what you see ?
something else you see that you talk about - americans do n't talk about this , but you do .
there 's this thing , this militarization of the world , and it 's centered right in the united states .
and the united states is responsible for almost one half of the world 's military spending - and you feel it ; you see it every day .
it 's part of your life .
and you talk about it with your friends .
you read about it .
and back when saddam hussein was in power , the americans did n't care about his crimes .
when he was gassing the kurds and gassing iran , they did n't care about it .
when oil was at stake , somehow , suddenly , things mattered .
and what you see , something else , the united states , the hub of democracy around the world , they do n't seem to really be supporting democratic countries all around the world .
there are a lot of countries , oil-producing countries , that are n't very democratic , but supported by the united states .
that 's odd .
oh , these incursions , these two wars , the 10 years of sanctions , the eight years of occupation , the insurgency that 's been unleashed on your people , of civilian deaths , all because of oil .
you ca n't help but think that .
you talk about it .
it 's in the forefront of your mind always .
you say , " how is that possible ? "
and this man , he 's every man - your grandfather , your uncle , your father , your son , your neighbor , your professor , your student .
once a life of happiness and joy and suddenly , pain and sorrow .
everyone in your country has been touched by the violence , the bloodshed , the pain , the horror , everybody .
not a single person in your country has not been touched .
but there 's something else .
there 's something else about these people , these americans who are there .
there 's something else about them that you see - they do n't see themselves .
and what do you see ? they 're christians .
they 're christians .
they worship the christian god , they have crosses , they carry bibles .
their bibles have a little insignia that says " u.s. army " on them .
and their leaders , their leaders : before they send their sons and daughters off to war in your country - and you know the reason - before they send them off , they go to a christian church , and they pray to their christian god , and they ask for protection and guidance from that god .
why ?
well , obviously , when people die in the war , they are muslims , they are iraqis - they 're not americans .
you do n't want americans to die . protect our troops .
and you feel something about that - of course you do .
and they do wonderful things .
you read about it , you hear about it .
they 're there to build schools and help people , and that 's what they want to do .
they do wonderful things , but they also do the bad things , and you ca n't tell the difference .
and this guy , you get a guy like lt. gen. william boykin .
i mean , here 's a guy who says that your god is a false god .
your god 's an idol ; his god is the true god .
the solution to the problem in the middle east , according to him , is to convert you all to christianity - just get rid of your religion .
and you know that . americans do n't read about this guy .
they do n't know anything about him , but you do .
you pass it around . you pass his words around .
i mean this is serious . you 're afraid .
he was one of the leading commanders in the second invasion of iraq .
and you 're thinking , " god , if this guy is saying that , then all the soldiers must be saying that . "
and this word here , george bush called this war a crusade .
man , the americans , they 're just like , " ah , crusade .
whatever . i do n't know . "
you know what it means .
it 's a holy war against muslims .
look , invade , subdue them , take their resources .
if they wo n't submit , kill them .
that 's what this is about .
and you 're thinking , " my god , these christians are coming to kill us . "
this is frightening .
you feel frightened . of course you feel frightened .
and this man , terry jones : i mean here 's a guy who wants to burn korans , right ?
and the americans : " ah , he 's a knucklehead .
he 's a former hotel manager ; he 's got three-dozen members of his church . "
they laugh him off . you do n't laugh him off .
because in the context of everything else , all the pieces fit .
i mean , of course , this is how americans take it , so people all over the middle east , not just in your country , are protesting .
" he wants to burn korans , our holy book .
these christians , who are these christians ?
they 're so evil , they 're so mean - this is what they 're about . "
this is what you 're thinking as an arab muslim , as an iraqi .
of course you 're going to think this .
and then your cousin says , " hey cuz , check out this website .
you 've got to see this - bible boot camp .
these christians are nuts .
they 're training their little kids to be soldiers for jesus .
and they take these little kids and they run them through these things till they teach them how to say , " sir , yes , sir , " and things like grenade toss and weapons care and maintenance .
and go to the website .
it says " u.s. army " right on it .
i mean , these christians , they 're nuts . how would they do this to their little kids ? "
and you 're reading this website .
and of course , christians back in the united states , or anybody , says , " ah , this is some little , tiny church in the middle of nowhere . "
you do n't know that .
for you , this is like all christians .
it 's all over the web , bible boot camp .
and look at this : they even teach their kids - they train them in the same way the u.s. marines train .
is n't that interesting .
and it scares you , and it frightens you .
so these guys , you see them .
you see , i , sam richards , i know who these guys are .
they 're my students , my friends .
i know what they 're thinking : " you do n't know . "
when you see them , they 're something else , they 're something else .
that 's what they are to you .
we do n't see it that way in the united states , but you see it that way .
so here .
of course , you got it wrong .
you 're generalizing . it 's wrong .
you do n't understand the americans .
it 's not a christian invasion .
we 're not just there for oil ; we 're there for lots of reasons .
you have it wrong . you 've missed it .
and of course , most of you do n't support the insurgency ; you do n't support killing americans ; you do n't support the terrorists .
of course you do n't . very few people do .
but some of you do .
and this is a perspective .
okay , so now , here 's what we 're going to do .
step outside of your shoes that you 're in right now and step back into your normal shoes .
so everyone 's back in the room , okay .
now here comes the radical experiment .
so we 're all back home .
this photo : this woman , man , i feel her .
i feel her .
she 's my sister , my wife , my cousin , my neighbor .
she 's anybody to me .
these guys standing there , everybody in the photo , i feel this photo , man .
so here 's what i want you to do .
let 's go back to my first example of the chinese .
so i want you to go there .
so it 's all about coal , and the chinese are here in the united states .
and what i want you to do is picture her as a chinese woman receiving a chinese flag because her loved one has died in america in the coal uprising .
and the soldiers are chinese , and everybody else is chinese .
as an american , how do you feel about this picture ?
what do you think about that scene ?
okay , try this . bring it back .
this is the scene here .
it 's an american , american soldiers , american woman who lost her loved one in the middle east - in iraq or afghanistan .
now , put yourself in the shoes , go back to the shoes of an arab muslim living in iraq .
what are you feeling and thinking about this photo , about this woman ?
okay , now follow me on this , because i 'm taking a big risk here .
and so i 'm going to invite you to take a risk with me .
these gentlemen here , they 're insurgents .
they were caught by the american soldiers , trying to kill americans .
and maybe they succeeded . maybe they succeeded .
put yourself in the shoes of the americans who caught them .
can you feel the rage ?
can you feel that you just want to take these guys and wring their necks ?
can you go there ?
it should n't be that difficult .
you just - oh , man .
now , put yourself in their shoes .
are they brutal killers or patriotic defenders ?
which one ?
can you feel their anger , their fear , their rage at what has happened in their country ?
can you imagine that maybe one of them in the morning bent down to their child and hugged their child and said , " dear , i 'll be back later .
i 'm going out to defend your freedom , your lives .
i 'm going out to look out for us , the future of our country . "
can you imagine that ?
can you imagine saying that ?
can you go there ?
what do you think they 're feeling ?
you see , that 's empathy .
it 's also understanding .
now , you might ask , " okay , sam , so why do you do this sort of thing ?
why would you use this example of all examples ? "
and i say , because ... because .
you 're allowed to hate these people .
you 're allowed to just hate them with every fiber of your being .
and if i can get you to step into their shoes and walk an inch , one tiny inch , then imagine the kind of sociological analysis that you can do in all other aspects of your life .
you can walk a mile when it comes to understanding why that person 's driving 40 miles per hour in the passing lane , or your teenage son , or your neighbor who annoys you by cutting his lawn on sunday mornings .
whatever it is , you can go so far .
and this is what i tell my students : step outside of your tiny , little world .
step inside of the tiny , little world of somebody else .
and then do it again and do it again and do it again .
and suddenly all these tiny , little worlds , they come together in this complex web .
and they build a big , complex world .
and suddenly , without realizing it , you 're seeing the world differently .
everything has changed .
everything in your life has changed .
and that 's , of course , what this is about .
attend to other lives , other visions .
listen to other people , enlighten ourselves .
i 'm not saying that i support the terrorists in iraq , but as a sociologist , what i am saying is i understand .
and now perhaps - perhaps - you do too .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- about 75 years ago , my grandfather , a young man , walked into a tent that was converted into a movie theater like that , and he fell hopelessly in love with the woman he saw on the silver screen : none other than mae west , the heartthrob of the ' 30s , and he could never forget her .
in fact , when he had his daughter many years later , he wanted to name her after mae west , but can you imagine an indian child name mae west ?
the indian family said , no way !
so when my twin brother kaesava was born , he decided to tinker with the spelling of keshava 's name .
he said , if mae west can be m-a-e , why ca n't keshava be k-a-e ?
so he changed kaesava 's spelling .
now kaesava had a baby boy called rehan a couple of weeks ago .
he decided to spell , or , rather , misspell raehan with an a-e .
you know , my grandfather died many years ago when i was little , but his love for mae west lives on as a misspelling in the dna of his progeny .
that for me is successful legacy . -lrb- laughs -rrb- you know , as for me , my wife and i have our own crazy legacy project .
we actually sit every few years , argue , disagree , fight , and actually come up with our very own 200-year plan .
our friends think we 're mad .
our parents think we 're cuckoo .
because , you know , we both come from families that really look up to humility and wisdom , but we both like to live larger than life .
i believe in the concept of a raja yogi : be a dude before you can become an ascetic .
this is me being a rock star , even if it 's in my own house .
you know ?
so when netra and i sat down to make our first plan 10 years ago , we said we want the focus of this plan to go way beyond ourselves .
what do we mean by beyond ourselves ?
well 200 years , we calculated , is at the end of our direct contact with the world .
there 's nobody i 'll meet in my life will ever live beyond 200 years , so we thought that 's a perfect place where we should situate our plan and let our imagination take flight .
you know , i never really believed in legacy . what am i going to leave behind ? i 'm an artist .
until i made a cartoon about 9/11 .
it caused so much trouble for me .
i was so upset .
you know , a cartoon that was meant to be a cartoon of the week ended up staying so much longer .
now i 'm in the business of creating art that will definitely even outlive me , and i think about what i want to leave behind through those paintings .
you know , the 9/11 cartoon upset me so much that i decided i 'll never cartoon again .
i said , i 'm never going to make any honest public commentary again .
but of course i continued creating artwork that was honest and raw , because i forgot about how people reacted to my work .
you know , sometimes forgetting is so important to remain idealistic .
perhaps loss of memory is so crucial for our survival as human beings .
one of the most important things in my 200-year plan that netra and i write is what to forget about ourselves .
you know , we carry so much baggage , from our parents , from our society , from so many people - fears , insecurities - and our 200-year plan really lists all our childhood problems that we have to expire .
we actually put an expiry date on all our childhood problems .
the latest date i put was , i said , i am going to expire my fear of my leftist , feminist mother-in-law , and this today is the date ! -lrb- laughs -rrb- she 's watching . -lrb- laughter -rrb- anyway , you know , i really make decisions all the time about how i want to remember myself , and that 's the most important kind of decisions i make .
and this directly translates into my paintings .
but like my friends , i can do that really well on facebook , pinterest , twitter , flickr , youtube .
name it , i 'm on it .
i 've started outsourcing my memory to the digital world , you know ? but that comes with a problem .
it 's so easy to think of technology as a metaphor for memory , but our brains are not perfect storage devices like technology .
we only remember what we want to . at least i do .
and i rather think of our brains as biased curators of our memory , you know ? and if technology is not a metaphor for memory , what is it ?
netra and i use our technology as a tool in our 200-year plan to really curate our digital legacy .
that is a picture of my mother , and she recently got a facebook account .
you know where this is going .
and i 've been very supportive until this picture shows up on my facebook page . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and i actually untagged myself first , then i picked up the phone . i said , " mom , you will never put a picture of me in a bikini ever again . "
and she said , " why ? you look so cute , darling . " i said , " you just do n't understand . "
maybe we are among the first generation that really understands this digital curating of ourselves .
maybe we are the first to even actively record our lives .
you know , whether you agree with , you know , legacy or not , we are actually leaving behind digital traces all the time .
so netra and i really wanted to use our 200-year plan to curate this digital legacy , and not only digital legacy but we believe in curating the legacy of my past and future .
how , you may ask ?
well , when i think of the future , i never see myself moving forward in time . i actually see time moving backward towards me .
i can actually visualize my future approaching .
i can dodge what i do n't want and pull in what i want .
it 's like a video game obstacle course . and i 've gotten better and better at doing this . even when i make a painting , i actually imagine i 'm behind the painting , it already exists , and someone 's looking at it , and i see whether they 're feeling it from their gut .
are they feeling it from their heart , or is it just a cerebral thing ?
and it really informs my painting .
even when i do an art show , i really think about , what should people walk away with ?
i remember when i was 19 , i did , i wanted to do my first art exhibition , and i wanted the whole world to know about it .
i did n't know ted then , but what i did was i closed my eyes tight , and i started dreaming . i could imagine people coming in , dressed up , looking beautiful , my paintings with all the light , and in my visualization i actually saw a very famous actress launching my show , giving credibility to me .
and i woke up from my visualization and i said , who was that ? i could n't tell if it was shabana azmi or rekha , two very famous indian actresses , like the meryl streeps of india .
as it turned out , next morning i wrote a letter to both of them , and shabana azmi replied , and came and launched my very first show 12 years ago .
and what a bang it started my career with ! you know , when we think of time in this way , we can curate not only the future but also the past .
this is a picture of my family , and that is netra , my wife .
she 's the co-creator of my 200-year plan .
netra 's a high school history teacher . i love netra , but i hate history .
i keep saying , " nets , you live in the past while i 'll create the future , and when i 'm done , you can study about it . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- she gave me an indulgent smile , and as punishment , she said , " tomorrow i 'm teaching a class on indian history , and you are sitting in it , and i 'm grading you . "
i 'm like , " oh , god . " i went .
i actually went and sat in on her class . she started by giving students primary source documents from india , pakistan , from britain , and i said , " wow . " then she asked them to separate fact from bias .
i said , " wow , " again .
then she said , " choose your facts and biases and create an image of your own story of dignity . "
history as an imaging tool ?
i was so inspired .
i went and created my own version of indian history .
i actually included stories from my grandmother .
she used to work for the telephone exchange , and she used to actually overhear conversations between nehru and edwina mountbatten .
and she used to hear all kinds of things she should n't have heard . but , you know , i include things like that .
this is my version of indian history .
you know , if this is so , it occurred to me that maybe , just maybe , the primary objective of our brains is to serve our dignity .
go tell facebook to figure that out !
netra and i do n't write our 200-year plan for someone else to come and execute it in 150 years . imagine receiving a parcel saying , from the past , okay now you 're supposed to spend the rest of your life doing all of this . no .
we actually write it only to set our attitudes right .
you know , i used to believe that education is the most important tool to leave a meaningful legacy .
education is great .
it really teaches us who we are , and helps us contextualize ourselves in the world , but it 's really my creativity that 's taught me that i can be much more than what my education told me i am .
i 'd like to make the argument that creativity is the most important tool we have .
it lets us create who we are , and curate what is to come .
i like to think - thank you .
i like to think of myself as a storyteller , where my past and my future are only stories , my stories , waiting to be told and retold . i hope all of you one day get a chance to share and write your own 200-year story .
thank you so much .
shukran ! -lrb- applause -rrb- good morning .
i 've come here to share with you an experiment of how to get rid of one form of human suffering .
it really is a story of dr. venkataswamy .
his mission and his message is about the aravind eye care system .
i think first it 's important for us to recognize what it is to be blind .
-lrb- music -rrb- woman : everywhere i went looking for work , they said no , what use do we have for a blind woman ?
i could n't thread a needle or see the lice in my hair .
if an ant fell into my rice , i could n't see that either .
thulasiraj ravilla : becoming blind is a big part of it , but i think it also deprives the person of their livelihood , their dignity , their independence , and their status in the family .
so she is just one amongst the millions who are blind .
and the irony is that they do n't need to be .
a simple , well-proven surgery can restore sight to millions , and something even simpler , a pair of glasses , can make millions more see .
if we add to that the many of us here now who are more productive because they have a pair of glasses , then almost one in five indians will require eye care , a staggering 200 million people .
today , we 're reaching not even 10 percent of them .
so this is the context in which aravind came into existence about 30 years back as a post-retirement project of dr. v.
he started this with no money .
he had to mortgage all his life savings to make a bank loan .
and over time , we have grown into a network of five hospitals , predominately in the state of tamil nadu and puducherry , and then we added several , what we call vision centers as a hub-and-spoke model .
and then more recently we started managing hospitals in other parts of the country and also setting up hospitals in other parts of the world as well .
the last three decades , we have done about three-and-a-half million surgeries , a vast majority of them for the poor people .
now , each year we perform about 300,000 surgeries .
a typical day at aravind , we would do about a thousand surgeries , maybe see about 6,000 patients , send out teams into the villages to examine , bring back patients , lots of telemedicine consultations , and , on top of that , do a lot of training , both for doctors and technicians who will become the future staff of aravind .
and then doing this day-in and day-out , and doing it well , requires a lot of inspiration and a lot of hard work .
and i think this was possible thanks to the building blocks put in place by dr. v. , a value system , an efficient delivery process , and fostering the culture of innovation .
-lrb- music -rrb- dr. v : i used to sit with the ordinary village man because i am from a village , and suddenly you turn around and seem to be in contact with his inner being , you seem to be one with him .
here is a soul which has got all the simplicity of confidence .
doctor , whatever you say , i accept it .
an implicit faith in you and then you respond to it .
here is an old lady who has got so much faith in me , i must do my best for her .
when we grow in spiritual consciousness , we identify ourselves with all that is in the world , so there is no exploitation .
it is ourselves we are helping .
it is ourselves we are healing .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this helped us build a very ethical and very highly patient-centric organization and systems that support it .
but on a practical level , you also have to deliver services efficiently , and , odd as it may seem , the inspiration came from mcdonald 's .
dr. v : see , mcdonald 's ' concept is simple .
they feel they can train people all over the world , irrespective of different religions , cultures , all those things , to produce a product in the same way and deliver it in the same manner in hundreds of places .
larry brilliant : he kept talking about mcdonalds and hamburgers , and none of it made any sense to us .
he wanted to create a franchise , a mechanism of delivery of eye care with the efficiency of mcdonald 's .
dr. v : supposing i 'm able to produce eye care , techniques , methods , all in the same way , and make it available in every corner of the world .
the problem of blindness is gone .
tr : if you think about it , i think the eyeball is the same , as american or african , the problem is the same , the treatment is the same .
and yet , why should there be so much variation in quality and in service , and that was the fundamental principle that we followed when we designed the delivery systems .
and , of course , the challenge was that it 's a huge problem , we are talking of millions of people , very little resource to deal with it , and then lots of logistics and affordability issues .
and then so , one had to constantly innovate .
and one of the early innovations , which still continues , is to create ownership in the community to the problem , and then engage with them as a partner , and here is one such event .
here a community camp just organized by the community themselves , where they find a place , organize volunteers , and then we 'll do our part . you know , check their vision , and then you have doctors who you find out what the problem is and then determine what further testing should be done , and then those tests are done by technicians who check for glasses , or check for glaucoma .
and then , with all these results , the doctor makes a final diagnosis , and then prescribes a line of treatment , and if they need a pair of glasses , they are available right there at the camp site , usually under a tree .
but they get glasses in the frames of their choice , and that 's very important because i think glasses , in addition to helping people see , is also a fashion statement , and they 're willing to pay for it .
so they get it in about 20 minutes and those who require surgery , are counseled , and then there are buses waiting , which will transport them to the base hospital .
and if it was not for this kind of logistics and support , many people like this would probably never get services , and certainly not when they most need it .
they receive surgery the following day , and then they will stay for a day or two , and then they are put back on the buses to be taken back to where they came from , and where their families will be waiting to take them back home .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and this happens several thousand times each year .
it may sound impressive that we 're seeing lots of patients , very efficient process , but we looked at , are we solving the problem ?
we did a study , a scientifically designed process , and then , to our dismay , we found this was only reaching seven percent of those in need , and we 're not adequately addressing more , bigger problems .
so we had to do something different , so we set up what we call primary eye care centers , vision centers .
these are truly paperless offices with completely electronic medical records and so on .
they receive comprehensive eye exams .
we kind of changed the simple digital camera into a retinal camera , and then every patient gets their teleconsultation with a doctor .
the effect of this has been that , within the first year , we really had a 40 percent penetration in the market that it served , which is over 50,000 people .
and the second year went up to 75 percent .
so i think we have a process by which we can really penetrate into the market and reach everyone who needs it , and in this process of using technology , make sure that most do n't need to come to the base hospital .
and how much will they pay for this ?
we fixed the pricing , taking into account what they would save in bus fare in coming to a city , so they pay about 20 rupees , and that 's good for three consultations .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the other challenge was , how do you give high-tech or more advanced treatment and care ?
we designed a van with a vsat , which sends out images of patients to the base hospital where it is diagnosed , and then as the patient is waiting , the report goes back to the patient , it gets printed out , the patient gets it , and then gets a consultation about what they should be doing - i mean , go see a doctor or come back after six months , and then this happens as a way of bridging the technology competence .
so the impact of all this has been essentially one of growing the market , because it focused on the non-customer , and then by reaching the unreached , we 're able to significantly grow the market .
the other aspect is how do you deal with this efficiently when you have very few ophthalmologists ?
so what is in this video is a surgeon operating , and then you see on the other side , another patient is getting ready .
so , as they finish the surgery , they just swing the microscope over , the tables are placed so that their distance is just right , we 're able to more than quadruple the productivity of the surgeon .
and then to support the surgeon , we require a certain workforce .
and then we focused on village girls that we recruited , and then they really are the backbone of the organization .
they do almost all of the skill-based routine tasks .
they do one thing at a time . they do it extremely well .
with the result we have very high productivity , very high quality at very , very low cost .
so , putting all this together , what really happened was the productivity of our staff was significantly higher than anyone else .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this is a very busy table , but what this really is conveying is that , when it comes to quality , we have put in very good quality-assurance systems .
as a result , our complications are significantly lower than what has been reported in the united kingdom , and you do n't see those kind of numbers very often .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so the final part of the puzzle is , how do you make all this work financially , especially when the people ca n't pay for it ?
so what we did was , we gave away a lot of it for free , and then those who pay , i mean , they paid local market rates , nothing more , and often much less .
and we were helped by the market inefficiency .
i think that has been a big savior , even now .
and , of course , one needs the mindset to be wanting to give away what you have as a surplus .
the result has been , over the years , the expenditure has increased with volumes .
the revenues increase at a higher level , giving us a healthy margin while you 're treating a large number of people for free .
i think in absolute terms , last year we earned about 20-odd million dollars , spent about 13 million , with over a 40 percent ebita .
-lrb- applause -rrb- but this really requires going beyond what we do , or what we have done , if you really want to achieve solving this problem of blindness .
and what we did was a couple of very counter-intuitive things .
we created competition for ourselves , and then we made eye care affordable by making low-cost consumables .
we proactively and systematically promoted these practices to many hospitals in india , many in our own backyards and then in other parts of the world as well .
the impact of this has been that these hospitals , in the second year after our consultation , are double their output and then achieve financial recovery as well .
the other part was how do you address this increase in cost of technology ?
there was a time when we failed to negotiate the -lsb- intra-ocular lens -rsb- prices to be at affordable levels , so we set up a manufacturing unit .
and then , over time , we were able to bring down the cost significantly to about two percent of what it used to be when we started out .
today , we believe we have about seven percent of the global market , and they 're used in about 120-odd countries .
to conclude , i mean , what we do , does it have a broader relevance , or is it just india or developing countries ?
so to address this , we studied uk versus aravind .
what it shows is that we do roughly about 60 percent of the volume of what the uk does , near a half-million surgeries as a whole country .
and we do about 300,000 .
and then we train about 50 ophthalmologists against the 70 trained by them , comparable quality , both in training and in patient care .
so we 're really comparing apples to apples .
we looked at cost .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so , i think it is simple to say just because the u.k. is n't india the difference is happening .
i think there is more to it .
i mean , i think one has to look at other aspects as well .
maybe there is - the solution to the cost could be in productivity , maybe in efficiency , in the clinical process , or in how much they pay for the lenses or consumables , or regulations , their defensive practice .
so , i think decoding this can probably bring answers to most developed countries including the u.s. , and maybe obama 's ratings can go up again .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- another insight , which , again , i want to leave with you , in conditions where the problem is very large , which cuts across all economic strata , where we have a good solution , i think the process i described , you know , productivity , quality , patient-centered care , can give an answer , and there are many which fit this paradigm .
you take dentistry , hearing aid , maternity and so on .
there are many where this paradigm can now play , but i think probably one of the most challenging things is on the softer side .
now , how do you create compassion ?
now , how do you make people own the problem , want to do something about it ?
there are a bit harder issues .
and i 'm sure people in this crowd can probably find the solutions to these .
so i want to end my talk leaving this thought and challenge to you .
dr. v : when you grow in spiritual consciousness , we identify with all that is in the world so there is no exploitation .
it is ourselves we are helping .
it is ourselves we are healing .
tr : thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'd like to apologize , first of all , to all of you because i have no form of powerpoint presentation .
so what i 'm going to do is , every now and again , i will make this gesture , and in a moment of powerpoint democracy , you can imagine what you 'd like to see .
i do a radio show .
the radio show is called " the infinite monkey cage . "
it 's about science , it 's about rationalism .
so therefore , we get a lot of complaints every single week - complaints including one we get very often , which is to say the very title , " infinite monkey cage , " celebrates the idea of vivisection .
we have made it quite clear to these people that an infinite monkey cage is roomy .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we also had someone else who said , " ' the infinite monkey cage ' idea is ridiculous .
an infinite number of monkeys could never write the works of shakespeare .
we know this because they did an experiment . "
yes , they gave 12 monkeys a typewriter for a week , and after a week , they only used it as a bathroom .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so the main element though , the main complaint we get - and one that i find most worrying - is that people say , " oh , why do you insist on ruining the magic ?
you bring in science , and it ruins the magic . "
now i 'm an arts graduate ; i love myth and magic and existentialism and self-loathing .
that 's what i do .
but i also do n't understand how it does ruin the magic .
all of the magic , i think , that may well be taken away by science is then replaced by something as wonderful .
astrology , for instance : like many rationalists , i 'm a pisces .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now astrology - we remove the banal idea that your life could be predicted ; that you 'll , perhaps today , meet a lucky man who 's wearing a hat .
that is gone .
but if we want to look at the sky and see predictions , we still can .
we can see predictions of galaxies forming , of galaxies colliding into each other , of new solar systems .
this is a wonderful thing .
if the sun could one day - and indeed the earth , in fact - if the earth could read its own astrological , astronomical chart , one day it would say , " not a good day for making plans .
you 'll been engulfed by a red giant . "
and that to me as well , that if you think i 'm worried about losing worlds , well many worlds theory - one of the most beautiful , fascinating , sometimes terrifying ideas from the quantum interpretation - is a wonderful thing .
that every person here , every decision that you 've made today , every decision you 've made in your life , you 've not really made that decision , but in fact , every single permutation of those decisions is made , each one going off into a new universe .
that is a wonderful idea .
if you ever think that your life is rubbish , always remember there 's another you that 's made much worse decisions than that .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- if you ever think , " ah , i want to end it all , " do n't end it all .
remember that in the majority of universes , you do n't even exist in the first place .
this to me , in its own strange way , is very , very comforting .
now reincarnation , that 's another thing gone - the afterlife .
but it 's not gone .
science actually says we will live forever .
well , there is one proviso .
we wo n't actually live forever . you wo n't live forever .
your consciousness , the you-ness of you , the me-ness of me - that gets this one go .
but every single thing that makes us , every atom in us , has already created a myriad of different things and will go on to create a myriad of new things .
we have been mountains and apples and pulsars and other people 's knees .
who knows , maybe one of your atoms was once napoleon 's knee .
that is a good thing .
unlike the occupants of the universe , the universe itself is not wasteful .
we are all totally recyclable .
and when we die , we do n't even have to be placed in different refuse sacs .
this is a wonderful thing .
understanding , to me , does not remove the wonder and the joy .
for instance , my wife could turn to me and she may say , " why do you love me ? "
and i can with all honesty look her in the eye and say , " because our pheromones matched our olfactory receptors . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- though i 'll probably also say something about her hair and personality as well .
and that is a wonderful thing there .
love does not die because of that thing .
pain does n't go away either .
this is a terrible thing , even though i understand pain .
if someone punches me - and because of my personality , this is recently a regular occurrence - i understand where the pain comes from .
it is basically momentum to energy where the four-vector is constant - that 's what it is .
but at no point can i react and go , " ha ! is that the best momentum-to-energy fourth vector constant you 've got ? "
no , i just spit out a tooth .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and that is all of these different things - the love for my child .
i have a son . his name is archie .
i 'm very lucky , because he 's better than all the other children .
now i know you do n't think that .
you may well have your own children and think , " oh no , my child 's best . "
that 's the wonderful thing about evolution - the predilection to believe that our child is best .
now in many ways , that 's just a survival thing .
the fact we see here is the vehicle for our genes , and therefore we love it .
but we do n't notice that bit ; we just unconditionally love .
that is a wonderful thing .
though i should say that my son is best and is better than your children .
i 've done some tests .
and all of these things to me give such joy and excitement and wonder .
even quantum mechanics can give you an excuse for bad housework , for instance .
perhaps you 've been at home for a week on your own .
you house is in a terrible state .
your partner is about to return .
you think , what should i do ?
do nothing .
all you have to do is , when she walks in , using a quantum interpretation , say , " i 'm so sorry .
i stopped observing the house for a moment , and when i started observing again , everything had happened . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's the strong anthropic principle of vacuuming .
for me , it 's a very , very important thing .
even on my journey up here - the joy that i have on my journey up here every single time .
if you actually think , you remove the myth and there is still something wonderful .
i 'm sitting on a train .
every time i breathe in , i 'm breathing in a million-billion-billion atoms of oxygen .
i 'm sitting on a chair .
even though i know the chair is made of atoms and therefore actually in many ways empty space , i find it comfortable .
i look out the window , and i realize that every single time we stop and i look out that window , framed in that window , wherever we are , i am observing more life than there is in the rest of the known universe beyond the planet earth .
if you go to the safari parks on saturn or jupiter , you will be disappointed .
and i realize i 'm observing this with the brain , the human brain , the most complex thing in the known universe .
that , to me , is an incredible thing .
and do you know what , that might be enough .
steven weinberg , the nobel laureate , once said , " the more the universe seems comprehensible , the more it seems pointless . "
now for some people , that seems to lead to an idea of nihilism .
but for me , it does n't . that is a wonderful thing .
i 'm glad the universe is pointless .
it means if i get to the end of my life , the universe ca n't turn to me and go , " what have you been doing , you idiot ?
that 's not the point . "
i can make my own purpose .
you can make your own purpose .
we have the individual power to go , " this is what i want to do . "
and in a pointless universe , that , to me , is a wonderful thing .
i have chosen to make silly jokes about quantum mechanics and the copenhagen interpretation .
you , i imagine , can do much better things with your time .
thank you very much . goodbye .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i want you now to imagine a wearable robot that gives you superhuman abilities , or another one that takes wheelchair users up standing and walking again .
we at berkeley bionics call these robots exoskeletons .
these are nothing else than something that you put on in the morning , and it will give you extra strength , and it will further enhance your speed , and it will help you , for instance , to manage your balance .
it is actually the true integration of the man and the machine .
but not only that - it will integrate and network you to the universe and other devices out there .
this is just not some blue sky thinking .
to show you now what we are working on by starting out talking about the american soldier , that on average does carry about 100 lbs. on their backs , and they are being asked to carry more equipment .
obviously , this is resulting in some major complications - back injuries , 30 percent of them - chronic back injuries .
so we thought we would look at this challenge and create an exoskeleton that would help deal with this issue .
so let me now introduce to you hulc - or the human universal load carrier .
soldier : with the hulc exoskeleton , i can carry 200 lbs. over varied terrain for many hours .
its flexible design allows for deep squats , crawls and high-agility movements .
it senses what i want to do , where i want to go , and then augments my strength and endurance .
eythor bender : we are ready with our industry partner to introduce this device , this new exoskeleton this year .
so this is for real .
now let 's turn our heads towards the wheelchair users , something that i 'm particularly passionate about .
there are 68 million people estimated to be in wheelchairs worldwide .
this is about one percent of the total population .
and that 's actually a conservative estimate .
we are talking here about , oftentimes , very young individuals with spinal cord injuries , that in the prime of their life - 20s , 30s , 40s - hit a wall and the wheelchair 's the only option .
but it is also the aging population that is multiplying in numbers .
and the only option , pretty much - when it 's stroke or other complications - is the wheelchair .
and that is actually for the last 500 years , since its very successful introduction , i must say .
so we thought we would start writing a brand new chapter of mobility .
let me now introduce you to elegs that is worn by amanda boxtel that 19 years ago was spinal cord injured , and as a result of that she has not been able to walk for 19 years until now .
-lrb- applause -rrb- amanda boxtel : thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- eb : amanda is wearing our elegs set .
it has sensors .
it 's completely non-invasive , sensors in the crutches that send signals back to our onboard computer that is sitting here at her back .
there are battery packs here as well that power motors that are sitting at her hips , as well as her knee joints , that move her forward in this kind of smooth and very natural gait .
ab : i was 24 years old and at the top of my game when a freak summersault while downhill skiing paralyzed me .
in a split second , i lost all sensation and movement below my pelvis .
not long afterwards , a doctor strode into my hospital room , and he said , " amanda , you 'll never walk again . "
and that was 19 yeas ago .
he robbed every ounce of hope from my being .
adaptive technology has since enabled me to learn how to downhill ski again , to rock climb and even handcycle .
but nothing has been invented that enables me to walk , until now .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- eb : as you can see , we have the technology , we have the platforms to sit down and have discussions with you .
it 's in our hands , and we have all the potential here to change the lives of future generations - not only for the soldiers , or for amanda here and all the wheelchair users , but for everyone .
ab : thanks .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so what i want to try to do is tell a quick story about a 404 page and a lesson that was learned as a result of it .
but to start it probably helps to have an understanding of what a 404 page actually is .
the 404 page is that .
it 's that broken experience on the web .
it 's effectively the default page when you ask a website for something and it ca n't find it .
and it serves you the 404 page .
it 's inherently a feeling of being broken when you go through it .
and i just want you to think a little bit about , remember for yourself , it 's annoying when you hit this thing .
because it 's the feeling of a broken relationship .
and that 's where it 's actually also interesting to think about , where does 404 come from ?
it 's from a family of errors actually - a whole set of relationship errors , which , when i started digging into them , it looks almost like a checklist for a sex therapist or a couples couselor .
you sort of get down there to the bottom and things get really dicey .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- yes .
but these things are everywhere .
they 're on sites big , they 're on sites small .
this is a global experience .
what a 404 page tells you is that you fell through the cracks .
and that 's not a good experience when you 're used to experiences like this .
you can get on your kinect and you can have unicorns dancing and rainbows spraying out of your mobile phone .
a 404 page is not what you 're looking for .
you get that , and it 's like a slap in the face .
trying to think about how a 404 felt , and it would be like if you went to starbucks and there 's the guy behind the counter and you 're over there and there 's no skim milk .
and you say , " hey , could you bring the skim milk ? "
and they walk out from behind the counter and they 've got no pants on .
and you 're like , " oh , i did n't want to see that . "
that 's the 404 feeling .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i mean , i 've heard about that .
so where this comes into play and why this is important is i head up a technology incubator , and we had eight startups sitting around there .
and those startups are focused on what they are , not what they 're not , until one day athletepath , which is a website that focuses on services for extreme athletes , found this video .
-lrb- video -rrb- guy : joey !
crowd : whoa !
renny gleeson : you just ... no , he 's not okay .
they took that video and they embedded it in their 404 page and it was like a light bulb went off for everybody in the place .
because finally there was a page that actually felt like what it felt like to hit a 404 .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so this turned into a contest .
dailypath that offers inspiration put inspiration on their 404 page .
stayhound , which helps you find pet sitters through your social network , commiserated with your pet .
each one of them found this .
it turned into a 24-hour contest .
at 4:04 the next day , we gave out $ 404 in cash .
and what they learned was that those little things , done right , actually matter , and that well-designed moments can build brands .
so you take a look out in the real world , and the fun thing is you can actually hack these yourself .
you can type in an url and put in a 404 and these will pop .
this is one that commiserates with you .
this is one that blames you .
this is one that i loved .
this is an error page , but what if this error page was also an opportunity ?
so it was a moment in time where all of these startups had to sit and think and got really excited about what they could be .
because back to the whole relationship issue , what they figured out through this exercise was that a simple mistake can tell me what you 're not , or it can remind me of why i should love you .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- images like this , from the auschwitz concentration camp , have been seared into our consciousness during the twentieth century and have given us a new understanding of who we are , where we 've come from and the times we live in .
during the twentieth century , we witnessed the atrocities of stalin , hitler , mao , pol pot , rwanda and other genocides , and even though the twenty-first century is only seven years old , we have already witnessed an ongoing genocide in darfur and the daily horrors of iraq .
this has led to a common understanding of our situation , namely that modernity has brought us terrible violence , and perhaps that native peoples lived in a state of harmony that we have departed from , to our peril .
here is an example from an op-ed on thanksgiving , in the boston globe a couple of years ago , where the writer wrote , " the indian life was a difficult one , but there were no employment problems , community harmony was strong , substance abuse unknown , crime nearly non-existent , what warfare there was between tribes was largely ritualistic and seldom resulted in indiscriminate or wholesale slaughter . " now , you 're all familiar with this treacle .
we teach it to our children . we hear it on television and in storybooks . now , the original title of this session was , " everything you know is wrong , " and i 'm going to present evidence that this particular part of our common understanding is wrong , that , in fact , our ancestors were far more violent than we are , that violence has been in decline for long stretches of time , and that today we are probably living in the most peaceful time in our species ' existence .
now , in the decade of darfur and iraq , a statement like that might seem somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene . but i 'm going to try to convince you that that is the correct picture . the decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon . you can see it over millennia , over centuries , over decades and over years , although there seems to have been a tipping point at the onset of the age of reason in the sixteenth century . one sees it all over the world , although not homogeneously .
it 's especially evident in the west , beginning with england and holland around the time of the enlightenment .
let me take you on a journey of several powers of 10 - from the millennium scale to the year scale - to try to persuade you of this . until 10,000 years ago , all humans lived as hunter-gatherers , without permanent settlements or government . and this is the state that 's commonly thought to be one of primordial harmony . but the archaeologist lawrence keeley , looking at casualty rates among contemporary hunter-gatherers , which is our best source of evidence about this way of life , has shown a rather different conclusion .
here is a graph that he put together showing the percentage of male deaths due to warfare in a number of foraging , or hunting and gathering societies .
the red bars correspond to the likelihood that a man will die at the hands of another man , as opposed to passing away of natural causes , in a variety of foraging societies in the new guinea highlands and the amazon rainforest .
and they range from a rate of almost a 60 percent chance that a man will die at the hands of another man to , in the case of the gebusi , only a 15 percent chance . the tiny , little blue bar in the lower left-hand corner plots the corresponding statistic from united states and europe in the twentieth century , and includes all the deaths of both world wars . if the death rate in tribal warfare had prevailed during the 20th century , there would have been two billion deaths rather than 100 million .
also at the millennium scale , we can look at the way of life of early civilizations such as the ones described in the bible . and in this supposed source of our moral values , one can read descriptions of what was expected in warfare , such as the following from numbers 31 : " and they warred against the midianites as the lord commanded moses , and they slew all the males . and moses said unto them , ' have you saved all the women alive ? now , therefore , kill every male among the little ones and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him , but all the women children that have not know a man
by lying with him keep alive for yourselves . " ' in other words , kill the men ; kill the children ; if you see any virgins , then you can keep them alive so that you can rape them .
you can find four or five passages in the bible of this ilk .
also in the bible , one sees that the death penalty was the accepted punishment for crimes such as homosexuality , adultery , blasphemy , idolatry , talking back to your parents - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - and picking up sticks on the sabbath .
well , let 's click the zoom lens down one order of magnitude , and look at the century scale .
although we do n't have statistics for warfare throughout the middle ages to modern times , we know just from conventional history - the evidence was under our nose all along that there has been a reduction in socially sanctioned forms of violence .
for example , any social history will reveal that mutilation and torture were routine forms of criminal punishment . the kind of infraction today that would give you a fine , in those days would result in your tongue being cut out , your ears being cut off , you being blinded , a hand being chopped off and so on .
there were numerous ingenious forms of sadistic capital punishment : burning at the stake , disemboweling , breaking on the wheel , being pulled apart by horses and so on .
the death penalty was a sanction for a long list of non-violent crimes : criticizing the king , stealing a loaf of bread . slavery , of course , was the preferred labor-saving device , and cruelty was a popular form of entertainment . perhaps the most vivid example was the practice of cat burning , in which a cat was hoisted on a stage and lowered in a sling into a fire , and the spectators shrieked in laughter as the cat , howling in pain , was burned to death .
what about one-on-one murder ? well , there , there are good statistics , because many municipalities recorded the cause of death .
the criminologist manuel eisner scoured all of the historical records across europe for homicide rates in any village , hamlet , town , county that he could find , and he supplemented them with national data , when nations started keeping statistics .
he plotted on a logarithmic scale , going from 100 deaths per 100,000 people per year , which was approximately the rate of homicide in the middle ages . and the figure plummets down to less than one homicide per 100,000 people per year in seven or eight european countries . then , there is a slight uptick in the 1960s . the people who said that rock ' n ' roll would lead to the decline of moral values actually had a grain of truth to that .
but there was a decline from at least two orders of magnitude in homicide from the middle ages to the present , and the elbow occurred in the early sixteenth century .
let 's click down now to the decade scale .
according to non-governmental organizations that keep such statistics , since 1945 , in europe and the americas , there has been a steep decline in interstate wars , in deadly ethnic riots or pogroms , and in military coups , even in south america . worldwide , there 's been a steep decline in deaths in interstate wars . the yellow bars here show the number of deaths per war per year from 1950 to the present .
and , as you can see , the death rate goes down from 65,000 deaths per conflict per year in the 1950s to less than 2,000 deaths per conflict per year in this decade , as horrific as it is .
even in the year scale , one can see a decline of violence .
since the end of the cold war , there have been fewer civil wars , fewer genocides - indeed , a 90 percent reduction since post-world war ii highs - and even a reversal of the 1960s uptick in homicide and violent crime .
this is from the fbi uniform crime statistics . you can see that there is a fairly low rate of violence in the ' 50s and the ' 60s , then it soared upward for several decades , and began a precipitous decline , starting in the 1990s , so that it went back to the level that was last enjoyed in 1960 .
president clinton , if you 're here , thank you .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so the question is , why are so many people so wrong about something so important ? i think there are a number of reasons .
one of them is we have better reporting . the associated press is a better chronicler of wars over the surface of the earth than sixteenth-century monks were .
there 's a cognitive illusion . we cognitive psychologists know that the easier it is to recall specific instances of something , the higher the probability that you assign to it .
things that we read about in the paper with gory footage burn into memory more than reports of a lot more people dying in their beds of old age . there are dynamics in the opinion and advocacy markets : no one ever attracted observers , advocates and donors by saying things just seem to be getting better and better .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- there 's guilt about our treatment of native peoples in modern intellectual life , and an unwillingness to acknowledge there could be anything good about western culture .
and of course , our change in standards can outpace the change in behavior . one of the reasons violence went down is that people got sick of the carnage and cruelty in their time .
that 's a process that seems to be continuing , but if it outstrips behavior by the standards of the day , things always look more barbaric than they would have been by historic standards . so today , we get exercised - and rightly so - if a handful of murderers get executed by lethal injection in texas after a 15-year appeal process . we do n't consider that a couple of hundred years ago , they may have been burned at the stake for criticizing the king after a trial that lasted 10 minutes , and indeed , that that would have been repeated over and over again . today , we look at capital punishment
as evidence of how low our behavior can sink , rather than how high our standards have risen .
well , why has violence declined ? no one really knows , but i have read four explanations , all of which , i think , have some grain of plausibility . the first is , maybe thomas hobbes got it right . he was the one who said that life in a state of nature was " solitary , poor , nasty , brutish and short . " not because , he argued , humans have some primordial thirst for blood or aggressive instinct or territorial imperative , but because of the logic of anarchy . in a state of anarchy , there 's a constant temptation to invade your neighbors preemptively , before they invade you . more recently , thomas schelling
gives the analogy of a homeowner who hears a rustling in the basement . being a good american , he has a pistol in the nightstand , pulls out his gun , and walks down the stairs .
and what does he see but a burglar with a gun in his hand .
now , each one of them is thinking , " i do n't really want to kill that guy , but he 's about to kill me .
maybe i had better shoot him , before he shoots me , especially since , even if he does n't want to kill me , he 's probably worrying right now that i might kill him before he kills me . " and so on .
hunter-gatherer peoples explicitly go through this train of thought , and will often raid their neighbors out of fear of being raided first .
now , one way of dealing with this problem is by deterrence .
you do n't strike first , but you have a publicly announced policy that you will retaliate savagely if you are invaded .
the only thing is that it 's liable to having its bluff called , and therefore can only work if it 's credible . to make it credible , you must avenge all insults and settle all scores , which leads to the cycles of bloody vendetta .
life becomes an episode of " the sopranos . " hobbes ' solution , the " leviathan , " was that if authority for the legitimate use of violence was vested in a single democratic agency - a leviathan - then such a state can reduce the temptation of attack , because any kind of aggression will be punished , leaving its profitability as zero . that would remove the temptation to invade preemptively , out of fear of them attacking you first .
it removes the need for a hair trigger for retaliation to make your deterrent threat credible . and therefore , it would lead to a state of peace . eisner - the man who plotted the homicide rates that you failed to see in the earlier slide - argued that the timing of the decline of homicide in europe coincided with the rise of centralized states .
so that 's a bit of a support for the leviathan theory .
also supporting it is the fact that we today see eruptions of violence in zones of anarchy , in failed states , collapsed empires , frontier regions , mafias , street gangs and so on .
the second explanation is that in many times and places , there is a widespread sentiment that life is cheap .
in earlier times , when suffering and early death were common in one 's own life , one has fewer compunctions about inflicting them on others . and as technology and economic efficiency make life longer and more pleasant , one puts a higher value on life in general .
this was an argument from the political scientist james payne .
a third explanation invokes the concept of a nonzero-sum game , and was worked out in the book " nonzero " by the journalist robert wright . wright points out that in certain circumstances , cooperation or non-violence can benefit both parties in an interaction , such as gains in trade when two parties trade their surpluses and both come out ahead , or when two parties lay down their arms and split the so-called peace dividend that results in them not having to fight the whole time .
wright argues that technology has increased the number of positive-sum games that humans tend to be embroiled in , by allowing the trade of goods , services and ideas over longer distances and among larger groups of people .
the result is that other people become more valuable alive than dead , and violence declines for selfish reasons . as wright put it , " among the many reasons that i think that we should not bomb the japanese is that they built my mini-van . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the fourth explanation is captured in the title of a book called " the expanding circle , " by the philosopher peter singer , who argues that evolution bequeathed humans with a sense of empathy , an ability to treat other peoples ' interests as comparable to one 's own . unfortunately , by default we apply it only to a very narrow circle of friends and family .
people outside that circle are treated as sub-human , and can be exploited with impunity . but , over history , the circle has expanded . one can see , in historical record , it expanding from the village , to the clan , to the tribe , to the nation , to other races , to both sexes , and , in singer 's own arguments , something that we should extend to other sentient species . the question is , if this has happened , what has powered that expansion ?
and there are a number of possibilities , such as increasing circles of reciprocity in the sense that robert wright argues for .
the logic of the golden rule - the more you think about and interact with other people , the more you realize that it is untenable to privilege your interests over theirs , at least not if you want them to listen to you . you ca n't say that my interests are special compared to yours , anymore than you can say that the particular spot that i 'm standing on is a unique part of the universe because i happen to be standing on it that very minute .
it may also be powered by cosmopolitanism , by histories , and journalism , and memoirs , and realistic fiction , and travel , and literacy , which allows you to project yourself into the lives of other people that formerly you may have treated as sub-human , and also to realize the accidental contingency of your own station in life , the sense that " there but for fortune go i. "
whatever its causes , the decline of violence , i think , has profound implications . it should force us to ask not just , why is there war ? but also , why is there peace ? not just , what are we doing wrong ? but also , what have we been doing right ?
because we have been doing something right , and it sure would be good to find out what it is .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- .
chris anderson : i loved that talk . i think a lot of people here in the room would say that that expansion of - that you were talking about , that peter singer talks about , is also driven by , just by technology , by greater visibility of the other , and the sense that the world is therefore getting smaller . i mean , is that also a grain of truth ?
steven pinker : very much . it would fit both in wright 's theory , that it allows us to enjoy the benefits of cooperation over larger and larger circles . but also , i think it helps us imagine what it 's like to be someone else . i think when you read these horrific tortures that were common in the middle ages , you think , how could they possibly have done it , how could they have not have empathized with the person that they 're disemboweling ? but clearly , as far as they 're concerned , this is just an alien being that does not have feelings akin to their own . anything , i think ,
that makes it easier to imagine trading places with someone else means that it increases your moral consideration to that other person .
ca : well , steve , i would love every news media owner to hear that talk at some point in the next year . i think it 's really important . thank you so much .
sp : my pleasure .
i would like to tell you all that you are all actually cyborgs , but not the cyborgs that you think .
you 're not robocop , and you 're not terminator , but you 're cyborgs every time you look at a computer screen or use one of your cell phone devices .
so what 's a good definition for cyborg ?
well , traditional definition is " an organism to which exogenous components have been added for the purpose of adapting to new environments . "
that came from a 1960 paper on space travel , because , if you think about it , space is pretty awkward .
people are n't supposed to be there .
but humans are curious , and they like to add things to their bodies so they can go to the alps one day and then become a fish in the sea the next .
so let 's look at the concept of traditional anthropology .
somebody goes to another country , says , " how fascinating these people are , how interesting their tools are , how curious their culture is . "
and then they write a paper , and maybe a few other anthropologists read it , and we think it 's very exotic .
well , what 's happening is that we 've suddenly found a new species .
i , as a cyborg anthropologist , have suddenly said , " oh , wow . now suddenly we 're a new form of homo sapiens , and look at these fascinating cultures , and look at these curious rituals that everybody 's doing around this technology .
they 're clicking on things and staring at screens . "
now there 's a reason why i study this , versus traditional anthropology .
and the reason is that tool use , in the beginning - for thousands and thousands of years , everything has been a physical modification of self .
it has helped us to extend our physical selves , go faster , hit things harder , and there 's been a limit on that .
but now what we 're looking at is not an extension of the physical self , but an extension of the mental self , and because of that , we 're able to travel faster , communicate differently .
and the other thing that happens is that we 're all carrying around little mary poppins technology .
we can put anything we want into it , and it does n't get heavier , and then we can take anything out .
what does the inside of your computer actually look like ?
well , if you print it out , it looks like a thousand pounds of material that you 're carrying around all the time .
and if you actually lose that information , it means that you suddenly have this loss in your mind , that you suddenly feel like something 's missing , except you are n't able to see it , so it feels like a very strange emotion .
the other thing that happens is that you have a second self .
whether you like it or not , you 're starting to show up online , and people are interacting with your second self when you 're not there .
and so you have to be careful about leaving your front lawn open , which is basically your facebook wall , so that people do n't write on it in the middle of the night - because it 's very much the equivalent .
and suddenly we have to start to maintain our second self .
you have to present yourself in digital life in a similar way that you would in your analog life .
so , in the same way that you wake up , take a shower and get dressed , you have to learn to do that for your digital self .
and the problem is that a lot of people now , especially adolescents , have to go through two adolescences .
they have to go through their primary one , that 's already awkward , and then they go through their second self 's adolescence , and that 's even more awkward because there 's an actual history of what they 've gone through online .
and anybody coming in new to technology is an adolescent online right now , and so it 's very awkward , and it 's very difficult for them to do those things .
so when i was little , my dad would sit me down at night and he would say , " i 'm going to teach you about time and space in the future . "
and i said , " great . "
and he said one day , " what 's the shortest distance between two points ? "
and i said , " well , that 's a straight line . you told me that yesterday . "
i thought i was very clever .
he said , " no , no , no . here 's a better way . "
he took a piece of paper , drew a and b on one side and the other and folded them together so where a and b touched .
and he said , " that is the shortest distance between two points . "
and i said , " dad , dad , dad , how do you do that ? "
he said , " well , you just bend time and space , it takes an awful lot of energy , and that 's just how you do it . "
and i said , " i want to do that . "
and he said , " well , okay . "
and so , when i went to sleep for the next 10 or 20 years , i was thinking at night , " i want to be the first person to create a wormhole , to make things accelerate faster .
and i want to make a time machine . "
i was always sending messages to my future self using tape recorders .
but then what i realized when i went to college is that technology does n't just get adopted because it works .
it gets adopted because people use it and it 's made for humans .
so i started studying anthropology .
and when i was writing my thesis on cell phones , i realized that everyone was carrying around wormholes in their pockets .
they were n't physically transporting themselves ; they were mentally transporting themselves .
they would click on a button , and they would be connected as a to b immediately .
and i thought , " oh , wow . i found it . this is great . "
so over time , time and space have compressed because of this .
you can stand on one side of the world , whisper something and be heard on the other .
one of the other ideas that comes around is that you have a different type of time on every single device that you use .
every single browser tab gives you a different type of time .
and because of that , you start to dig around for your external memories - where did you leave them ?
so now we 're all these paleontologists that are digging for things that we 've lost on our external brains that we 're carrying around in our pockets .
and that incites a sort of panic architecture - " oh no , where 's this thing ? "
we 're all " i love lucy " on a great assembly line of information , and we ca n't keep up .
and so what happens is , when we bring all that into the social space , we end up checking our phones all the time .
so we have this thing called ambient intimacy .
it 's not that we 're always connected to everybody , but at anytime we can connect to anyone we want .
and if you were able to print out everybody in your cell phone , the room would be very crowded .
these are the people that you have access to right now , in general - all of these people , all of your friends and family that you can connect to .
and so there are some psychological effects that happen with this .
one i 'm really worried about is that people are n't taking time for mental reflection anymore , and that they are n't slowing down and stopping , being around all those people in the room all the time that are trying to compete for their attention on the simultaneous time interfaces , paleontology and panic architecture .
they 're not just sitting there .
and really , when you have no external input , that is a time when there is a creation of self , when you can do long-term planning , when you can try and figure out who you really are .
and then , once you do that , you can figure out how to present your second self in a legitimate way , instead of just dealing with everything as it comes in - and oh , i have to do this , and i have to do this , and i have to do this .
and so this is very important .
i 'm really worried that , especially kids today , they 're not going to be dealing with this down-time , that they have an instantaneous button-clicking culture , and that everything comes to them , and that they become very excited about it and very addicted to it .
so if you think about it , the world has n't stopped either .
it has its own external prosthetic devices , and these devices are helping us all to communicate and interact with each other .
but when you actually visualize it , all the connections that we 're doing right now - this is an image of the mapping of the internet - it does n't look technological .
it actually looks very organic .
this is the first time in the entire history of humanity that we 've connected in this way .
and it 's not that machines are taking over .
it 's that they 're helping us to be more human , helping us to connect with each other .
the most successful technology gets out of the way and helps us live our lives .
and really , it ends up being more human than technology , because we 're co-creating each other all the time .
and so this is the important point that i like to study : that things are beautiful , that it 's still a human connection - it 's just done in a different way .
we 're just increasing our humanness and our ability to connect with each other , regardless of geography .
so that 's why i study cyborg anthropology .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- yeah , so a couple of years ago i was turning 60 , and i do n't like being 60 .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i started grappling with this existential angst of what little i had done with my life .
it was n't the resume of breaking this record here , it was more like , who had i become ?
how had i spent my valuable time ?
how could this have gone by like lightning ?
and i could n't forgive myself for the countless , countless hours i had lost in negative thought - all the time i had spent beating myself up for losing my marriage and not stopping the sexual abuse when i was a kid and career moves and this and this and this .
just why , why did n't i do it better ? why ? why ? why ?
and then my mother died at 82 .
and so i starting thinking , not only am i not happy with the past , now i 'm getting choked with , " i 've only got 22 years left . "
what am i going to do with this short amount of time that 's just fleeting ?
and i 'm not in the present whatsoever .
and i decided the remedy to all this malaise was going to be for me to chase an elevated dream , an extreme dream , something that would require utter conviction and unwavering passion , something that would make me be my best self in every aspect of my life , every minute of every day , because the dream was so big that i could n't get there without that kind of behavior and that kind of conviction .
and i decided , it was an old dream that was lingering , that was from so many years ago , three decades ago - the only sort of world class swim i had tried and failed at back in my 20s - was going from cuba to florida .
it was deep in my imagination .
no one 's ever done it without a shark cage .
it 's daunting .
it 's more than a hundred miles across a difficult passage of ocean .
it 's probably , at my speed , at my age - for anybody 's speed at anybody 's age - going to take 60 , maybe 70 , hours of continuous swimming , never getting out on the boat .
and i started to train .
i had n't swum for 31 years , not a stroke .
and i had kept in good shape , but swimming 's a whole different animal .
this picture is supposed to be me during training .
it 's a smiling face .
and when you 're training for this sport , you are not smiling .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's an arduous , difficult sport , and i do n't remember smiling at any time during this sport .
as i said , i respect other sports , and i compare this sport sometimes to cycling and to mountain climbing and other of the expedition type events , but this is a sensory deprivation , a physical duress .
and when i started in with the eight hours and the 10 hours and the 12 hours and the 14 hours and the 15 hours and the 24-hour swims , i knew i had it , because i was making it through these .
and when i said i 'm going to go out and do a 15-hour swim , and we 're coming into the dock after a long day and it 's now night , and we come in and it 's 14 hours and 58 minutes and i can touch the dock and we 're done , the trainer says , " that 's great .
it 's 14 hours 58 minutes . who cares the last two minutes ? "
i say , " no , it 's got to be 15 hours , " and i swim another minute out and another minute back to make the 15 hours .
and i put together an expedition .
it 's not that i did n't have help , but honestly , i sort of led , i was the team leader .
and to get the government permissions , you read in the paper , you think it 's easy to get into cuba everyday ?
try going in with an armada like we had of 50 people and five boats and cnn 's crew , etc .
the navigation is difficult .
there 's a big river called the gulf stream that runs across and it 's not going in the direction you are .
it 's going to the east and you 'd like to go north .
it 's tricky .
and there 's dehydration .
and there 's hypothermia .
and there are sharks .
and there are all kinds of problems .
and i gathered together , honestly , the world 's leading experts in every possible way .
and a month ago , the 23rd of september , i stood on that shore and i looked across to that long , long faraway horizon and i asked myself , do you have it ?
are your shoulders ready ?
and they were . they were prepared .
no stone left unturned .
was the mind ready ?
you know , you 're swimming with the fogged goggles , you 're swimming at 60 strokes a minute , so you 're never really focused on anything , you do n't see well .
you 've got tight bathing caps over your ears trying to keep the heat of the head , because it 's where the hypothermia starts , and so you do n't hear very well .
you 're really left alone with your own thoughts .
and i had all kinds of counting systems ready there in english , followed by german , followed by spanish , followed by french .
you save the french for last .
and i had songs , i had a playlist in my head - not through headphones , in my own head - of 65 songs .
and i could n't wait to get into the dark in the middle of the night , because that 's when neil young comes out .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and it 's odd , is n't it ?
you 'd think you 'd be singing leonard cohen 's " hallelujah " out in the majesty of the ocean , not songs about heroin addiction in new york city .
but no , for some reason i could n't wait to get into the dark of the night and be singing , ♫ " a heard you knocking at my cellar door ♫ ♫ i love you baby and i want some more ♫ ♫ ooh , ooh , the damage done " ♫ -lrb- applause -rrb- the night before i started , i finished stephen hawking 's " the grand design . "
and i could n't wait to trip the mind fantastic .
about the 50th hour , i was going to start thinking about the edge of the universe .
is there an edge ?
is this an envelope we 're living inside of , or no , does it go onto infinity in both time and space ?
and there 's nothing like swimming for 50 hours in the ocean that gets you thinking about things like this .
i could n't wait to prove the athlete i am , that nobody else in the world can do this swim .
and i knew i could do it .
and when i jumped into that water , i yelled in my mother 's french , " courage ! "
and i started swimming , and , oh my god , it was glassy .
and we knew it , all 50 people on the boat , we all knew this was it , this was our time .
and i reminded myself a couple hours in , you know , the sport is sort of a microcosm of life itself .
first of all , you 're going to hit obstacles .
and even though you 're feeling great at any one moment , do n't take it for granted , be ready , because there 's going to be pain , there 's going to be suffering .
it 's not going to feel this good all the way across .
and i was thinking of the hypothermia and maybe some shoulder pain and all the other things - the vomiting that comes from being in the saltwater .
you 're immersed in the liquid .
your body does n't like the saltwater .
after a couple of days , three days , you tend to rebel in a lot of physical ways .
but no , two hours in , wham ! never in my life ...
i knew there were portuguese men o ' war , all kinds of moon jellies , all kinds of things , but the box jellyfish from the southern oceans is not supposed to be in these waters .
and i was on fire - excruciating , excruciating pain .
i do n't know if you can still see the red line here and up the arm .
evidently , a piece this big of tentacle has a hundred-thousand little barbs on it and each barb is not just stinging your skin , it 's sending a venom .
the most venomous animal that lives in the ocean is the box jellyfish .
and every one of those barbs is sending that venom into this central nervous system .
so first i feel like boiling hot oil , i 've been dipped in .
and i 'm yelling out , " fire ! fire ! fire ! fire !
help me ! somebody help me ! "
and the next thing is paralysis .
i feel it in the back and then i feel it in the chest up here , and i ca n't breathe .
and now i 'm not swimming with a nice long stroke , i 'm sort of crabbing it this way .
then come convulsions .
a young man on our boat is an emt . he dives in to try to help me .
he 's stung .
they drag him out on the boat , and he 's - evidently , i did n't see any of this - but lying on the boat and giving himself epinephrine shots and crying out .
he 's 29 years old , very well-built , lean , he 's six-foot , five , weighs 265 lbs . , and he is down .
and he is crying and he 's yelling to my trainer who 's trying to help me .
and he 's saying , " bonnie , i think i 'm going to die .
my breath is down to three breaths a minute .
i need help , and i ca n't help diana . "
so that was at eight o 'clock at night .
the doctor , medical team from university of miami arrived at five in the morning .
so i swam through the night , and at dawn they got there and they started with prednisone shots .
i did n't get out , but was in the water taking prednisone shots , taking xanax , oxygen to the face .
it was like an icu unit in the water .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i guess the story is that even navy seals who are stung by the box jelly , they 're done .
they either die or they quickly get to a hospital .
and i swam through the night and i swam through the next day .
and the next night at dusk , again , wham !
the box jelly again - all across the neck , all across here .
and this time , i do n't like it , i did n't want to give into it , but there 's a difference between a non-stop swim and a staged swim .
and i gave in to the staged swim .
and they got me out and they started again with the epinephrine and the prednisone and with the oxygen and with everything they had on board .
and i got back in .
and i swam through that night and into the next day .
and at 41 hours , this body could n't make it .
the devastation of those stings had taken the respiratory system down so that i could n't make the progress i wanted .
and the dream was crushed .
and how odd is this intelligent person who put this together and got all these world experts together .
and i knew about the jellyfish , but i was sort of cavalier .
a lot of athletes have this , you know , sort of invincibility .
they should worry about me . i do n't worry about them .
i 'll just swim right through them .
we 've got benadryl on board . if i get stung , i 'll just grin and bear it .
well there was no grin and bearing this .
as a matter of fact , the best advice i got was from an elementary school class in the caribbean .
and i was telling these kids , 120 of them - they were all in the school on the gymnasium floor - and i was telling them about the jellyfish and how they 're gelatinous and you ca n't see them at night especially .
and they have these long 30 to 40 to 50-ft. tentacles .
and they do this wrapping .
and they can send the poison into the system .
and a little kid from the back was like this .
and i said , " what 's your name ? " " henry . "
" henry , what 's your question ? "
he said , " well , i did n't have a question so much as i had a suggestion . "
he said , " you know those guys who really believe in what they believe in and so they wear bombs ? "
and i said , " well it 's odd that you 've learned of this as a noble kind of pursuit , but yeah , i know those guys . "
he said , " that 's what you need .
you need like a school of fish that would swim in front of you like this . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " and when the jellyfish come and they wrap their tentacles around the fish , they 're going to be busy with them , and you 'll just scoot around . "
i said , " oh , it 's like a suicide army . "
he said , " that 's what i 'm talking about . that 's what you need . "
and little did i know , that you should listen to eight year-olds .
and so i started that swim in a bathing suit like normal , and , no joke , this is it ; it came from the shark divers .
i finished the swim like this .
i was swimming with this thing on .
that 's how scared of the jellyfish i was .
so now what do i do ?
i would n't mind if every one of you came up on this stage tonight and told us how you 've gotten over the big disappointments of your lives .
because we 've all had them , have n't we ?
we 've all had a heartache .
and so my journey now in the face of this defeat .
and i can look at the journey , not just the destination .
i can feel proud . i can stand here in front of you tonight and say i was courageous .
yeah .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
and with all sincerity , i can say , i am glad i lived those two years of my life that way , because my goal to not suffer regrets anymore , i got there with that goal .
when you live that way , when you live with that kind of passion , there 's no time , there 's no time for regrets , you 're just moving forward .
and i want to live every day of the rest of my life that way , swim or no swim .
but the difference in accepting this particular defeat is that sometimes , if cancer has won , if there 's death and we have no choice , then grace and acceptance are necessary .
but that ocean 's still there .
this hope is still alive .
and i do n't want to be the crazy woman who does it for years and years and years , and tries and fails and tries and fails and tries and fails , but i can swim from cuba to florida , and i will swim from cuba to florida .
thank you .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and so , what after that ?
are you going to swim the atlantic ?
no , that 's the last swim .
it 's the only swim i 'm interested in .
but i 'm ready .
and by the way , a reporter called me the other day and he said he looked on wikipedia and he said he saw my birthday was august 22nd 1949 , and for some odd reason in wikipedia , they had my death date too .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- he said , " did you know you 're going to die the same place you were born , new york city , and it 's going to be in january of ' 35 ? "
i said , " nope . i did n't know . "
and now i 'm going to live to 85 .
i have three more years than i thought .
and so i ask myself , i 'm starting to ask myself now , even before this extreme dream gets achieved for me , i 'm asking myself , and maybe i can ask you tonight too , to paraphrase the poet mary oliver , she says , " so what is it , what is it you 're doing , with this one wild and precious life of yours ? "
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you . thank you .
thank you . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- live it large . live it large .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i was afraid of womanhood .
not that i 'm not afraid now , but i 've learned to pretend .
i 've learned to be flexible .
in fact , i 've developed some interesting tools to help me deal with this fear .
let me explain .
back in the ' 50s and ' 60s , when i was growing up , little girls were supposed to be kind and thoughtful and pretty and gentle and soft , and we were supposed to fit into roles that were sort of shadowy - really not quite clear what we were supposed to be .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- there were plenty of role models all around us .
we had our mothers , our aunts , our cousins , our sisters , and of course , the ever-present media bombarding us with images and words , telling us how to be .
now my mother was different .
she was a homemaker , but she and i did n't go out and do girlie things together , and she did n't buy me pink outfits .
instead , she knew what i needed , and she bought me a book of cartoons .
and i just ate it up .
i drew , and i drew , and since i knew that humor was acceptable in my family , i could draw , do what i wanted to do , and not have to perform , not have to speak - i was very shy - and i could still get approval .
i was launched as a cartoonist .
now when we 're young , we do n't always know . we know there are rules out there , but we do n't always know - we do n't perform them right , even though we are imprinted at birth with these things , and we 're told what the most important color in the world is .
we 're told what shape we 're supposed to be in .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we 're told what to wear - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - and how to do our hair - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - and how to behave .
now the rules that i 'm talking about are constantly being monitored by the culture .
we 're being corrected , and the primary policemen are women , because we are the carriers of the tradition .
we pass it down from generation to generation .
not only that - we always have this vague notion that something 's expected of us .
and on top of all off these rules , they keep changing .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we do n't know what 's going on half the time , so it puts us in a very tenuous position .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now if you do n't like these rules , and many of us do n't - i know i did n't , and i still do n't , even though i follow them half the time , not quite aware that i 'm following them - what better way than to change them -lsb- than -rsb- with humor ?
humor relies on the traditions of a society .
it takes what we know , and it twists it .
it takes the codes of behavior and the codes of dress , and it makes it unexpected , and that 's what elicits a laugh .
now what if you put together women and humor ?
i think you can get change .
because women are on the ground floor , and we know the traditions so well , we can bring a different voice to the table .
now i started drawing in the middle of a lot of chaos .
i grew up not far from here in washington d.c.
during the civil rights movement , the assassinations , the watergate hearings and then the feminist movement , and i think i was drawing , trying to figure out what was going on .
and then also my family was in chaos , and i drew to try to bring my family together - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - try to bring my family together with laughter .
it did n't work .
my parents got divorced , and my sister was arrested .
but i found my place .
i found that i did n't have to wear high heels , i did n't have to wear pink , and i could feel like i fit in .
now when i was a little older , in my 20s , i realized there are not many women in cartooning .
and i thought , " well , maybe i can break the little glass ceiling of cartooning , " and so i did . i became a cartoonist .
and then i thought - in my 40s i started thinking , " well , why do n't i do something ?
i always loved political cartoons , so why do n't i do something with the content of my cartoons to make people think about the stupid rules that we 're following as well as laugh ? "
now my perspective is a particularly - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - my perspective is a particularly american perspective .
i ca n't help it . i live here .
even though i 've traveled a lot , i still think like an american woman .
but i believe that the rules that i 'm talking about are universal , of course - that each culture has its different codes of behavior and dress and traditions , and each woman has to deal with these same things that we do here in the u.s.
consequently , we have .
women , because we 're on the ground , we know the tradition .
we have amazing antennae .
now my work lately has been to collaborate with international cartoonists , which i so enjoy , and it 's given me a greater appreciation for the power of cartoons to get at the truth , to get at the issues quickly and succinctly .
and not only that , it can get to the viewer through not only the intellect , but through the heart .
my work also has allowed me to collaborate with women cartoonists from across the world - countries such as saudi arabia , iran , turkey , argentina , france - and we have sat together and laughed and talked and shared our difficulties .
and these women are working so hard to get their voices heard in some very difficult circumstances .
but i feel blessed to be able to work with them .
and we talk about how women have such strong perceptions , because of our tenuous position and our role as tradition-keepers , that we can have the great potential to be change-agents .
and i think , i truly believe , that we can change this thing one laugh at a time .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 've actually been waiting by the phone and in fact , in 2000 , i was ready to talk about ebay , but no call .
in 2003 , i was ready to do a talk about the skoll foundation and social entrepreneurship . no call .
in 2004 , i started participant productions and we had a really good first year , and no call .
and finally , i get a call last year , and then i have to go up after j.j. abrams .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you 've got a cruel sense of humor , ted .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- when i first moved to hollywood from silicon valley , i had some misgivings .
but i found that there were some advantages to being in hollywood .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and , in fact , some advantages to owning your own media company .
and i also found that hollywood and silicon valley have a lot more in common than i would have dreamed .
hollywood has its sex symbols , and the valley has its sex symbols .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- hollywood has its rivalries , and the valley has its rivalries .
hollywood gathers around power tables , and the valley gathers around power tables .
so it turned out there was a lot more in common than i would have dreamed .
but i 'm actually here today to tell a story .
and part of it is a personal story . when chris invited me to speak , he said , people think of you as a bit of an enigma , and they want to know what drives you a bit .
and what really drives me is a vision of the future that i think we all share .
it 's a world of peace and prosperity and sustainability .
and when we heard a lot of the presentations over the last couple of days , ed wilson and the pictures of james nachtwey , i think we all realized how far we have to go to get to this new version of humanity that i like to call " humanity 2.0 . "
and it 's also something that resides in each of us , to close what i think are the two big calamities in the world today .
one is the gap in opportunity - this gap that president clinton last night called uneven , unfair and unsustainable - and , out of that , comes poverty and illiteracy and disease and all these evils that we see around us .
but perhaps the other , bigger gap is what we call the hope gap .
and someone , at some point , came up with this very bad idea that an ordinary individual could n't make a difference in the world .
and i think that 's just a horrible thing .
and so chapter one really begins today , with all of us , because within each of us is the power to equal those opportunity gaps and to close the hope gaps .
and if the men and women of ted ca n't make a difference in the world , i do n't know who can .
and for me , a lot of this started when i was younger and my family used to go camping in upstate new york .
and there really was n't much to do there for the summer , except get beaten up by my sister or read books .
and so i used to read authors like james michener and james clavell and ayn rand .
and their stories made the world seem a very small and interconnected place .
and it struck me that if i could write stories that were about this world as being small and interconnected , that maybe i could get people interested in the issues that affected us all , and maybe engage them to make a difference .
i did n't think that was necessarily the best way to make a living , so i decided to go on a path to become financially independent , so i could write these stories as quickly as i could .
i then had a bit of a wake-up call when i was 14 .
and my dad came home one day and announced that he had cancer , and it looked pretty bad .
and what he said was , he was n't so much afraid that he might die , but that he had n't done the things that he wanted to with his life .
and knock on wood , he 's still alive today , many years later .
but for a young man that made a real impression on me , that one never knows how much time one really has .
so i set out in a hurry . i studied engineering .
i started a couple of businesses that i thought would be the ticket to financial freedom .
one of those businesses was a computer rental business called micros on the move , which is very well named , because people kept stealing the computers .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i figured i needed to learn a little bit more about business , so i went to stanford business school and studied there .
and while i was there , i made friends with a fellow named pierre omidyar , who is here today . and pierre , i apologize for this . this is a photo from the old days .
and just after i 'd graduated , pierre came to me with this idea to help people buy and sell things online with each other .
and with the wisdom of my stanford degree , i said , " pierre , what a stupid idea . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and needless to say , i was right .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but right after that , pierre - in ' 96 , pierre and i left our full-time jobs to build ebay as a company . and the rest of that story , you know .
the company went public two years later and is today one of the best known companies in the world .
hundreds of millions of people use it in hundreds of countries , and so on .
but for me , personally , it was a real change .
i went from living in a house with five guys in palo alto and living off their leftovers , to all of a sudden having all kinds of resources .
and i wanted to figure out how i could take the blessing of these resources and share it with the world .
and around that time , i met john gardner , who is a remarkable man .
he was the architect of the great society programs under lyndon johnson in the 1960s .
and i asked him what he felt was the best thing i could do , or anyone could do , to make a difference in the long-term issues facing humanity .
and john said , " bet on good people doing good things .
bet on good people doing good things . "
and that really resonated with me .
i started a foundation to bet on these good people doing good things .
these leading , innovative , nonprofit folks , who are using business skills in a very leveraged way to solve social problems .
people today we call social entrepreneurs .
and to put a face on it , people like muhammad yunus , who started the grameen bank , has lifted 100 million people plus out of poverty around the world , won the nobel peace prize .
but there 's also a lot of people that you do n't know .
folks like ann cotton , who started a group called camfed in africa , because she felt girls ' education was lagging .
and she started it about 10 years ago , and today , she educates over a quarter million african girls .
and somebody like dr. victoria hale , who started the world 's first nonprofit pharmaceutical company , and whose first drug will be fighting visceral leishmaniasis , also known as black fever .
and by 2010 , she hopes to eliminate this disease , which is really a scourge in the developing world .
and so this is one way to bet on good people doing good things .
and a lot of this comes together in a philosophy of change that i find really is powerful .
it 's what we call , " invest , connect and celebrate . "
and invest : if you see good people doing good things , invest in them . invest in their organizations , or in business . invest in these folks .
connecting them together through conferences - like a ted - brings so many powerful connections , or through the world forum on social entrepreneurship that my foundation does at oxford every year .
and celebrate them : tell their stories , because not only are there good people doing good work , but their stories can help close these gaps of hope .
and it was this last part of the mission , the celebrate part , that really got me back to thinking when i was a kid and wanted to tell stories to get people involved in the issues that affect us all .
and a light bulb went off , which was , first , that i did n't actually have to do the writing myself , i could find writers .
and then the next light bulb was , better than just writing , what about film and tv , to get out to people in a big way ?
and i thought about the films that inspired me , films like " gandhi " and " schindler 's list . "
and i wondered who was doing these kinds of films today .
and there really was n't a specific company that was focused on the public interest .
so , in 2003 , i started to make my way around los angeles to talk about the idea of a pro-social media company and i was met with a lot of encouragement .
one of the lines of encouragement that i heard over and over was , " the streets of hollywood are littered with the carcasses of people like you , who think you 're going to come to this town and make movies . "
and then of course , there was the other adage .
" the surest way to become a millionaire is to start by being a billionaire and go into the movie business . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- undeterred , in january of 2004 , i started participant productions with the vision to be a global media company focused on the public interest .
and our mission is to produce entertainment that creates and inspires social change .
and we do n't just want people to see our movies and say , that was fun , and forget about it .
we want them to actually get involved in the issues .
in 2005 , we launched our first slate of films , " murder ball , " " north country , " " syriana " and " good night and good luck . "
and much to my surprise , they were noticed .
we ended up with 11 oscar nominations for these films .
and it turned out to be a pretty good year for this guy .
perhaps more importantly , tens of thousands of people joined the advocacy programs and the activism programs that we created to go around the movies .
and we had an online component of that , our community sect called participate.net.
but with our social sector partners , like the aclu and pbs and the sierra club and the nrdc , once people saw the film , there was actually something they could do to make a difference .
one of these films in particular , called " north country , " was actually kind of a box office disaster .
but it was a film that starred charlize theron and it was about women 's rights , women 's empowerment , domestic violence and so on .
and we released the film at the same time that the congress was debating the renewal of the violence against women act .
and with screenings on the hill , and discussions , and with our social sector partners , like the national organization of women , the film was widely credited with influencing the successful renewal of the act .
and that to me , spoke volumes , because it 's - the film started about a true-life story about a woman who was harassed , sued her employer , led to a landmark case that led to the equal opportunity act , and the violence against women act and others .
and then the movie about this person doing these things , then led to this greater renewal .
and so again , it goes back to betting on good people doing good things .
speaking of which , our fellow tedster , al - i first saw al do his slide show presentation on global warming in may of 2005 .
at that point , i thought i knew something about global warming .
i thought it was a 30 to 50 year problem .
and after we saw his slide show , it became clear that it was much more urgent .
and so right afterwards , i met backstage with al , and with lawrence bender , who was there , and laurie david , and davis guggenheim , who was running documentaries for participant at the time .
and with al 's blessing , we decided on the spot to turn it into a film , because we felt that we could get the message out there far more quickly than having al go around the world , speaking to audiences of 100 or 200 at a time .
and you know , there 's another adage in hollywood , that nobody knows nothing about anything .
and i really thought this was going to be a straight-to-pbs charitable initiative .
and so it was a great shock to all of us when the film really captured the public interest , and today is mandatory viewing in schools in england and scotland , and most of scandinavia .
we 've sent 50,000 dvds to high school teachers in the u.s.
and it 's really changed the debate on global warming .
it was also a pretty good year for this guy .
we now call al the george clooney of global warming .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and for participant , this is just the start .
everything we do looks at the major issues in the world .
and we have 10 films in production right now , and dozens others in development .
i 'll quickly talk about a few coming up .
one is " charlie wilson 's war , " with tom hanks and julia roberts .
and it 's the true story of congressman charlie wilson , and how he funded the taliban to fight the russians in afghanistan .
and we 're also doing a movie called " the kite runner , " based on the book " the kite runner , " also about afghanistan .
and we think once people see these films , they 'll have a much better understanding of that part of the world and the middle east in general .
we premiered a film called " the chicago 10 " at sundance this year .
it 's based on the protesters at the democratic convention in 1968 , abby hoffman and crew , and , again , a story about a small group of individuals who did make change in the world .
and a documentary that we 're doing on jimmy carter and his mid-east peace efforts over the years .
and in particular , we 've been following him on his recent book tour , which , as many of you know , has been very non-controversial - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - which is really bad for getting people to come see a movie .
in closing , i 'd like to say that everybody has the opportunity to make change in their own way .
and all the people in this room have done so through their business lives , or their philanthropic work , or their other interests .
and one thing that i 've learned is that there 's never one right way to make change .
one can do it as a tech person , or as a finance person , or a nonprofit person , or as an entertainment person , but every one of us is all of those things and more .
and i believe if we do these things , we can close the opportunity gaps , we can close the hope gaps .
and i can imagine , if we do this , the headlines in 10 years might read something like these : " new aids cases in africa fall to zero , " " u.s. imports its last barrel of oil " - -lrb- applause -rrb- - " israelis and palestinians celebrate 10 years of peaceful coexistence . "
-lrb- applause -rrb- and i like this one , " snow has returned to kilimanjaro . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and finally , an ebay listing for one well-traveled slide show , now obsolete , museum piece . please contact al gore .
and i believe that , working together , we can make all of these things happen .
and i want to thank you all for having me here today .
it 's been a real honor . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- oh , thank you .
there 's currently over a thousand tedtalks on the ted website .
and i guess many of you here think that this is quite fantastic - except for me . i do n't agree with this .
i think we have a situation here .
because if you think about it , 1,000 tedtalks , that 's over 1,000 ideas worth spreading .
how on earth are you going to spread a thousand ideas ?
even if you just try to get all of those ideas into your head by watching all those thousand ted videos , it would actually currently take you over 250 hours to do so .
and i did a little calculation of this .
the damage to the economy for each one who does this is around $ 15,000 .
so having seen this danger to the economy , i thought , we need to find a solution to this problem .
here 's my approach to it all .
if you look at the current situation , you have a thousand tedtalks .
each of those tedtalks has an average length of about 2,300 words .
now take this together and you end up with 2.3 million words of tedtalks , which is about three bibles-worth of content .
the obvious question here is , does a tedtalk really need 2,300 words ?
is n't there something shorter ?
i mean , if you have an idea worth spreading , surely you can put it into something shorter than 2,300 words .
the only question is , how short can you get ?
what 's the minimum amount of words you would need to do a tedtalk ?
while i was pondering this question , i came across this urban legend about ernest hemingway , who allegedly said that these six words here : " for sale : baby shoes , never worn , " were the best novel he had ever written .
and i also encountered a project called six-word memoirs where people were asked , take your whole life and please sum this up into six words , such as these here : " found true love , married someone else . "
or " living in existential vacuum ; it sucks . "
i actually like that one .
so if a novel can be put into six words and a whole memoir can be put into six words , you do n't need more than six words for a tedtalk .
we could have been done by lunch here .
i mean ...
and if you did this for all thousand tedtalks , you would get from 2.3 million words down to 6,000 .
so i thought this was quite worthwhile .
so i started asking all my friends , please take your favorite tedtalk and put that into six words .
so here are some of the results that i received . i think they 're quite nice .
for example , dan pink 's talk on motivation , which was pretty good if you have n't seen it : " drop carrot . drop stick . bring meaning . "
it 's what he 's basically talking about in those 18 and a half minutes .
or some even included references to the speakers , such as nathan myhrvold 's speaking style , or the one of tim ferriss , which might be considered a bit strenuous at times .
the challenge here is , if i try to systematically do this , i would probably end up with a lot of summaries , but not with many friends in the end .
so i had to find a different method , preferably involving total strangers .
and luckily there 's a website for that called mechanical turk , which is a website where you can post tasks that you do n't want to do yourself , such as " please summarize this text for me in six words . "
and i did n't allow any low-cost countries to work on this , but i found out i could get a six-word summary for just 10 cents , which i think is a pretty good price .
even then , unfortunately , it 's not possible to summarize each tedtalk individually .
because if you do the math , you have a thousand tedtalks , the pay 10 cents each ; you have to do more than one summary for each of those talks , because some of them will probably be , or are , really bad .
so i would end up paying hundreds of dollars .
so i thought of a different way by thinking , well , the talks revolve around certain themes .
so what if i do n't let people summarize individual tedtalks to six words , but give them 10 tedtalks at the same time and say , " please do a six-word summary for that one . "
i would cut my costs by 90 percent .
so for $ 60 , i could summarize a thousand tedtalks into just 600 summaries , which would actually be quite nice .
now some of you might actually right now be thinking , it 's downright crazy to have 10 tedtalks summarized into just six words .
but it 's actually not , because there 's an example by statistics professor , hans rosling .
i guess many of you have seen one or more of his talks .
he 's got eight talks online , and those talks can basically be summed up into just four words , because that 's all he 's basically showing us , our intuition is really bad .
he always proves us wrong .
so people on the internet , some did n't do so well .
i mean , when i asked them to summarize the 10 tedtalks at the same time , some took the easy route out .
they just had some general comment .
there were others , and i found this quite cheeky .
they used their six words to talk back to me and ask me if i 'd been too much on google lately .
and finally also , i never understood this , some people really came up with their own version of the truth .
i do n't know any tedtalk that contains this .
but , oh well . in the end , however , and this is really amazing , for each of those 10 tedtalk clusters that i submitted , i actually received meaningful summaries .
here are some of my favorites .
for example , for all the tedtalks around food , someone summed this up into : " food shaping body , brains and environment , " which i think is pretty good .
or happiness : " striving toward happiness = moving toward unhappiness . "
so here i was .
i had started out with a thousand tedtalks and i had 600 six-word summaries for those .
actually it sounded nice in the beginning , but when you look at 600 summaries , it 's quite a lot .
it 's a huge list .
so i thought , i probably have to take this one step further here and create summaries of the summaries - and this is exactly what i did .
so i took the 600 summaries that i had , put them into nine groups according to the ratings that the talks had originally received on ted.com and asked people to do summaries of those .
again , there were some misunderstandings .
for example , when i had a cluster of all the beautiful talks , someone thought i was just trying to find the ultimate pick-up line .
but in the end , amazingly , again , people were able to do it .
for example , all the courageous tedtalks : " people dying , " or " people suffering , " was also one , " with easy solutions around . "
or the recipe for the ultimate jaw-dropping tedtalk : " flickr photos of intergalactic classical composer . "
i mean that 's the essence of it all .
now i had my nine groups , but , i mean , it 's already quite a reduction .
but of course , once you are that far , you 're not really satisfied .
i wanted to go all the way , all the way down the distillery , starting out with a thousand tedtalks .
i wanted to have a thousand tedtalks summarized into just six words - which would be a 99.9997 percent reduction in content .
and i would only pay $ 99.50 - so stay even below a hundred dollars for it .
so i had 50 overall summaries done .
this time i paid 25 cents because i thought the task was a bit harder .
and unfortunately when i first received the answers - and here you 'll see six of the answers - i was a bit disappointed .
because i think you 'll agree , they all summarize some aspect of ted , but to me they felt a bit bland , or they just had a certain aspect of ted in them .
so i was almost ready to give up when one night i played around with these sentences and found out that there 's actually a beautiful solution in here .
so here it is , a crowd-sourced , six-word summary of a thousand tedtalks at the value of $ 99.50 : " why the worry ? i 'd rather wonder . "
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i have all my life wondered what " mind-boggling " meant .
after two days here , i declare myself boggled , and enormously impressed , and feel that you are one of the great hopes - not just for american achievement in science and technology , but for the whole world .
i 've come , however , on a special mission on behalf of my constituency , which are the 10-to-the-18th-power - that 's a million trillion - insects and other small creatures , and to make a plea for them .
if we were to wipe out insects alone , just that group alone , on this planet - which we are trying hard to do - the rest of life and humanity with it would mostly disappear from the land .
and within a few months .
now , how did i come to this particular position of advocacy ?
as a little boy , and through my teenage years , i became increasingly fascinated by the diversity of life .
i had a butterfly period , a snake period , a bird period , a fish period , a cave period and finally and definitively , an ant period .
by my college years , i was a devoted myrmecologist , but my attention and research continued to make journeys across the great variety of life on earth in general - including all that it means to us as a species , how little we understand it and how pressing a danger that our activities have created for it .
out of that broader study has emerged a concern and an ambition , crystallized in the wish that i 'm about to make to you .
my choice is the culmination of a lifetime commitment that began with growing up on the gulf coast of alabama , on the florida peninsula .
as far back as i can remember , i was enchanted by the natural beauty of that region and the almost tropical exuberance of the plants and animals that grow there .
one day when i was only seven years old and fishing , i pulled a " pinfish , " they 're called , with sharp dorsal spines , up too hard and fast , and i blinded myself in one eye .
i later discovered i was also hard of hearing , possibly congenitally , in the upper registers .
so in planning to be a professional naturalist - i never considered anything else in my entire life - i found that i was lousy at bird watching and could n't track frog calls either .
so i turned to the teeming small creatures that can be held between the thumb and forefinger : the little things that compose the foundation of our ecosystems , the little things , as i like to say , who run the world .
in so doing , i reached a frontier of biology so strange , so rich , that it seemed as though it exists on another planet .
in fact , we live on a mostly unexplored planet .
the great majority of organisms on earth remain unknown to science .
in the last 30 years , thanks to explorations in remote parts of the world and advances in technology , biologists have , for example , added a full one-third of the known frog and other amphibian species , to bring the current total to 5,400 , and more continue to pour in .
two new kinds of whales have been discovered , along with two new antelopes , dozens of monkey species and a new kind of elephant - and even a distinct kind of gorilla .
at the extreme opposite end of the size scale , the class of marine bacteria , the prochlorococci - that will be on the final exam - although discovered only in 1988 , are now recognized as likely the most abundant organisms on earth , and moreover , responsible for a large part of the photosynthesis that occurs in the ocean .
these bacteria were not uncovered sooner because they are also among the smallest of all earth 's organisms - so minute that they can not be seen with conventional optical microscopy .
yet life in the sea may depend on these tiny creatures .
these examples are just the first glimpse of our ignorance of life on this planet .
consider the fungi - including mushrooms , rusts , molds and many disease-causing organisms .
60,000 species are known to science , but more than 1.5 million have been estimated to exist .
consider the nematode roundworm , the most abundant of all animals .
four out of five animals on earth are nematode worms - if all solid materials except nematode worms were to be eliminated , you could still see the ghostly outline of most of it in nematode worms .
about 16,000 species of nematode worms have been discovered and diagnosed by scientists ; there could be hundreds of thousands of them , even millions , still unknown .
this vast domain of hidden biodiversity is increased still further by the dark matter of the biological world of bacteria , which within just the last several years still were known from only about 6,000 species of bacteria worldwide .
but that number of bacteria species can be found in one gram of soil , just a little handful of soil , in the 10 billion bacteria that would be there .
it 's been estimated that a single ton of soil - fertile soil - contains approximately four million species of bacteria , all unknown .
so the question is : what are they all doing ?
the fact is , we do n't know .
we are living on a planet with a lot of activities , with reference to our living environment , done by faith and guess alone .
our lives depend upon these creatures .
to take an example close to home : there are over 500 species of bacteria now known - friendly bacteria - living symbiotically in your mouth and throat probably necessary to your health for holding off pathogenic bacteria .
at this point i think we have a little impressionistic film that was made especially for this occasion .
and i 'd like to show it .
assisted in this by billie holiday .
-lrb- video -rrb- and that may be just the beginning !
the viruses , those quasi-organisms among which are the prophages , the gene weavers that promote the continued evolution in the lives of the bacteria , are a virtually unknown frontier of modern biology , a world unto themselves .
what constitutes a viral species is still unresolved , although they 're obviously of enormous importance to us .
but this much we can say : the variety of genes on the planet in viruses exceeds , or is likely to exceed , that in all of the rest of life combined .
nowadays , in addressing microbial biodiversity , scientists are like explorers in a rowboat launched onto the pacific ocean .
but that is changing rapidly with the aid of new genomic technology .
already it is possible to sequence the entire genetic code of a bacterium in under four hours .
soon we will be in a position to go forth in the field with sequencers on our backs - to hunt bacteria in tiny crevices of the habitat 's surface in the way you go watching for birds with binoculars .
what will we find as we map the living world , as , finally , we get this underway seriously ?
as we move past the relatively gigantic mammals , birds , frogs and plants to the more elusive insects and other small invertebrates and then beyond to the countless millions of organisms in the invisible living world enveloped and living within humanity ?
already what were thought to be bacteria for generations have been found to compose , instead , two great domains of microorganisms : true bacteria and one-celled organisms the archaea , which are closer than other bacteria to the eukaryota , the group that we belong to .
some serious biologists , and i count myself among them , have begun to wonder that among the enormous and still unknown diversity of microorganisms , one might - just might - find aliens among them .
true aliens , stocks that arrived from outer space .
they 've had billions of years to do it , but especially during the earliest period of biological evolution on this planet .
we do know that some bacterial species that have earthly origin are capable of almost unimaginable extremes of temperature and other harsh changes in environment , including hard radiation strong enough and maintained long enough to crack the pyrex vessels around the growing population of bacteria .
there may be a temptation to treat the biosphere holistically and the species that compose it as a great flux of entities hardly worth distinguishing one from the other .
but each of these species , even the tiniest prochlorococci , are masterpieces of evolution .
each has persisted for thousands to millions of years .
each is exquisitely adapted to the environment in which it lives , interlocked with other species to form ecosystems upon which our own lives depend in ways we have not begun even to imagine .
we will destroy these ecosystems and the species composing them at the peril of our own existence - and unfortunately we are destroying them with ingenuity and ceaseless energy .
my own epiphany as a conservationist came in 1953 , while a harvard graduate student , searching for rare ants found in the mountain forests of cuba , ants that shine in the sunlight - metallic green or metallic blue , according to species , and one species , i discovered , metallic gold .
i found my magical ants , but only after a tough climb into the mountains where the last of the native cuban forests hung on , and were then - and still are - being cut back .
i realized then that these species and a large part of the other unique , marvelous animals and plants on that island - and this is true of practically every part of the world - which took millions of years to evolve , are in the process of disappearing forever .
and so it is everywhere one looks .
the human juggernaut is permanently eroding earth 's ancient biosphere by a combination of forces that can be summarized by the acronym " hippo , " the animal hippo .
h is for habitat destruction , including climate change forced by greenhouse gases .
i is for the invasive species like the fire ants , the zebra mussels , broom grasses and pathogenic bacteria and viruses that are flooding every country , and at an exponential rate - that 's the i.
the p , the first one in " hippo , " is for pollution .
the second is for continued population , human population expansion .
and the final letter is o , for over-harvesting - driving species into extinction by excessive hunting and fishing .
the hippo juggernaut we have created , if unabated , is destined - according to the best estimates of ongoing biodiversity research - to reduce half of earth 's still surviving animal and plant species to extinction or critical endangerment by the end of the century .
human-forced climate change alone - again , if unabated - could eliminate a quarter of surviving species during the next five decades .
what will we and all future generations lose if much of the living environment is thus degraded ?
huge potential sources of scientific information yet to be gathered , much of our environmental stability and new kinds of pharmaceuticals and new products of unimaginable strength and value - all thrown away .
the loss will inflict a heavy price in wealth , security and yes , spirituality for all time to come , because previous cataclysms of this kind - the last one , that ended the age of dinosaurs - took , normally , five to 10 million years to repair .
sadly , our knowledge of biodiversity is so incomplete that we are at risk of losing a great deal of it before it is even discovered .
for example , even in the united states , the 200,000 species known currently actually has been found to be only partial in coverage ; it is mostly unknown to us in basic biology .
only about 15 percent of the known species have been studied well enough to evaluate their status .
of the 15 percent evaluated , 20 percent are classified as " in peril , " that is , in danger of extinction .
that 's in the united states .
we are , in short , flying blind into our environmental future .
we urgently need to change this .
we need to have the biosphere properly explored so that we can understand and competently manage it .
we need to settle down before we wreck the planet .
and we need that knowledge .
this should be a big science project equivalent to the human genome project .
it should be thought of as a biological moonshot with a timetable .
so this brings me to my wish for tedsters , and to anyone else around the world who hears this talk .
i wish we will work together to help create the key tools that we need to inspire preservation of earth 's biodiversity .
and let us call it the " encyclopedia of life . "
what is the " encyclopedia of life ? " a concept that has already taken hold and is beginning to spread and be looked at seriously ?
it is an encyclopedia that lives on the internet and is contributed to by thousands of scientists around the world .
amateurs can do it also .
it has an indefinitely expandable page for each species .
it makes all key information about life on earth accessible to anyone , on demand , anywhere in the world .
i 've written about this idea before , and i know there are people in this room who have expended significant effort on it in the past .
but what excites me is that since i first put forward this particular idea in that form , science has advanced .
technology has moved forward .
today , the practicalities of making such an encyclopedia , regardless of the magnitude of the information put into it , are within reach .
indeed , in the past year , a group of influential scientific institutions have begun mobilizing to realize this dream .
i wish you would help them .
working together , we can make this real .
the encyclopedia will quickly pay for itself in practical applications .
it will address transcendent qualities in the human consciousness , and sense of human need .
it will transform the science of biology in ways of obvious benefit to humanity .
and most of all , it can inspire a new generation of biologists to continue the quest that started , for me personally , 60 years ago : to search for life , to understand it and finally , above all , to preserve it .
that is my wish . thank you .
from all outward appearances , john had everything going for him .
he had just signed the contract to sell his new york apartment at a six-figure profit , and he 'd only owned it for five years .
the school where he graduated from with his master 's had just offered him a teaching appointment , which meant not only a salary , but benefits for the first time in ages .
and yet , despite everything going really well for john , he was struggling , fighting addiction and a gripping depression .
on the night of june 11th , 2003 , he climbed up to the edge of the fence on the manhattan bridge and he leaped to the treacherous waters below .
remarkably - no , miraculously - he lived .
the fall shattered his right arm , broke every rib that he had , punctured his lung , and he drifted in and out of consciousness as he drifted down the east river , under the brooklyn bridge and out into the pathway of the staten island ferry , where passengers on the ferry heard his cries of pain , contacted the boat 's captain who contacted the coast guard who fished him out of the east river and took him to bellevue hospital .
and that 's actually where our story begins .
because once john committed himself to putting his life back together - first physically , then emotionally , and then spiritually - he found that there were very few resources available to someone who has attempted to end their life in the way that he did .
research shows that 19 out of 20 people who attempt suicide will fail .
but the people who fail are 37 times more likely to succeed the second time .
this truly is an at-risk population with very few resources to support them .
and what happens when people try to assemble themselves back into life , because of our taboos around suicide , we 're not sure what to say , and so quite often we say nothing .
and that furthers the isolation that people like john found themselves in .
i know john 's story very well because i 'm john .
and this is , today , the first time in any sort of public setting i 've ever acknowledged the journey that i have been on .
but after having lost a beloved teacher in 2006 and a good friend last year to suicide , and sitting last year at tedactive , i knew that i needed to step out of my silence and past my taboos to talk about an idea worth spreading - and that is that people who have made the difficult choice to come back to life need more resources and need our help .
as the trevor project says , it gets better .
it gets way better .
and i 'm choosing to come out of a totally different kind of closet today to encourage you , to urge you , that if you are someone who has contemplated or attempted suicide , or you know somebody who has , talk about it ; get help .
it 's a conversation worth having and an idea worth spreading .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm here to talk to you about how globalized we are , how globalized we are n't , and why it 's important to actually be accurate in making those kinds of assessments .
and the leading point of view on this , whether measured by number of books sold , mentions in media , or surveys that i 've run with groups ranging from my students to delegates to the world trade organization , is this view that national borders really do n't matter very much anymore , cross-border integration is close to complete , and we live in one world .
and what 's interesting about this view is , again , it 's a view that 's held by pro-globalizers like tom friedman , from whose book this quote is obviously excerpted , but it 's also held by anti-globalizers , who see this giant globalization tsunami that 's about to wreck all our lives if it has n't already done so .
the other thing i would add is that this is not a new view .
i 'm a little bit of an amateur historian , so i 've spent some time going back , trying to see the first mention of this kind of thing . and the best , earliest quote that i could find was one from david livingstone , writing in the 1850s about how the railroad , the steam ship , and the telegraph were integrating east africa perfectly with the rest of the world .
now clearly , david livingstone was a little bit ahead of his time , but it does seem useful to ask ourselves , " just how global are we ? "
before we think about where we go from here .
so the best way i 've found of trying to get people to take seriously the idea that the world may not be flat , may not even be close to flat , is with some data .
so one of the things i 've been doing over the last few years is really compiling data on things that could either happen within national borders or across national borders , and i 've looked at the cross-border component as a percentage of the total .
i 'm not going to present all the data that i have here today , but let me just give you a few data points .
i 'm going to talk a little bit about one kind of information flow , one kind of flow of people , one kind of flow of capital , and , of course , trade in products and services .
so let 's start off with plain old telephone service .
of all the voice-calling minutes in the world last year , what percentage do you think were accounted for by cross-border phone calls ?
pick a percentage in your own mind .
the answer turns out to be two percent .
if you include internet telephony , you might be able to push this number up to six or seven percent , but it 's nowhere near what people tend to estimate .
or let 's turn to people moving across borders .
one particular thing we might look at , in terms of long-term flows of people , is what percentage of the world 's population is accounted for by first-generation immigrants ?
again , please pick a percentage .
turns out to be a little bit higher .
it 's actually about three percent .
or think of investment . take all the real investment that went on in the world in 2010 .
what percentage of that was accounted for by foreign direct investment ?
not quite ten percent .
and then finally , the one statistic that i suspect many of the people in this room have seen : the export-to-gdp ratio .
if you look at the official statistics , they typically indicate a little bit above 30 percent .
however , there 's a big problem with the official statistics , in that if , for instance , a japanese component supplier ships something to china to be put into an ipod , and then the ipod gets shipped to the u.s. , that component ends up getting counted multiple times .
so nobody knows how bad this bias with the official statistics actually is , so i thought i would ask the person who 's spearheading the effort to generate data on this , pascal lamy , the director of the world trade organization , what his best guess would be of exports as a percentage of gdp , without the double- and triple-counting , and it 's actually probably a bit under 20 percent , rather than the 30 percent-plus numbers that we 're talking about .
so it 's very clear that if you look at these numbers or all the other numbers that i talk about in my book , " world 3.0 , " that we 're very , very far from the no-border effect benchmark , which would imply internationalization levels of the order of 85 , 90 , 95 percent .
so clearly , apocalyptically-minded authors have overstated the case .
but it 's not just the apocalyptics , as i think of them , who are prone to this kind of overstatement .
i 've also spent some time surveying audiences in different parts of the world on what they actually guess these numbers to be .
let me share with you the results of a survey that harvard business review was kind enough to run of its readership as to what people 's guesses along these dimensions actually were .
so a couple of observations stand out for me from this slide .
first of all , there is a suggestion of some error .
okay . -lrb- laughter -rrb- second , these are pretty large errors . for four quantities whose average value is less than 10 percent , you have people guessing three , four times that level .
even though i 'm an economist , i find that a pretty large error .
and third , this is not just confined to the readers of the harvard business review .
i 've run several dozen such surveys in different parts of the world , and in all cases except one , where a group actually underestimated the trade-to-gdp ratio , people have this tendency towards overestimation , and so i thought it important to give a name to this , and that 's what i refer to as globaloney , the difference between the dark blue bars and the light gray bars .
especially because , i suspect , some of you may still be a little bit skeptical of the claims , i think it 's important to just spend a little bit of time thinking about why we might be prone to globaloney .
a couple of different reasons come to mind .
first of all , there 's a real dearth of data in the debate .
let me give you an example . when i first published some of these data a few years ago in a magazine called foreign policy , one of the people who wrote in , not entirely in agreement , was tom friedman . and since my article was titled " why the world is n't flat , " that was n't too surprising . -lrb- laughter -rrb- what was very surprising to me was tom 's critique , which was , " ghemawat 's data are narrow . "
and this caused me to scratch my head , because as i went back through his several-hundred-page book , i could n't find a single figure , chart , table , reference or footnote .
so my point is , i have n't presented a lot of data here to convince you that i 'm right , but i would urge you to go away and look for your own data to try and actually assess whether some of these hand-me-down insights that we 've been bombarded with actually are correct .
so dearth of data in the debate is one reason .
a second reason has to do with peer pressure .
i remember , i decided to write my " why the world is n't flat " article , because i was being interviewed on tv in mumbai , and the interviewer 's first question to me was , " professor ghemawat , why do you still believe that the world is round ? " and i started laughing , because i had n't come across that formulation before . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and as i was laughing , i was thinking , i really need a more coherent response , especially on national tv . i 'd better write something about this . -lrb- laughter -rrb- but what i ca n't quite capture for you was the pity and disbelief with which the interviewer asked her question .
the perspective was , here is this poor professor .
he 's clearly been in a cave for the last 20,000 years .
he really has no idea as to what 's actually going on in the world .
so try this out with your friends and acquaintances , if you like . you 'll find that it 's very cool to talk about the world being one , etc .
if you raise questions about that formulation , you really are considered a bit of an antique .
and then the final reason , which i mention , especially to a ted audience , with some trepidation , has to do with what i call " techno-trances . "
if you listen to techno music for long periods of time , it does things to your brainwave activity . -lrb- laughter -rrb- something similar seems to happen with exaggerated conceptions of how technology is going to overpower in the very immediate run all cultural barriers , all political barriers , all geographic barriers , because at this point i know you are n't allowed to ask me questions , but when i get to this point in my lecture with my students , hands go up , and people ask me , " yeah , but what about facebook ? "
and i got this question often enough that i thought i 'd better do some research on facebook .
because , in some sense , it 's the ideal kind of technology to think about . theoretically , it makes it as easy to form friendships halfway around the world as opposed to right next door .
what percentage of people 's friends on facebook are actually located in countries other than where people we 're analyzing are based ?
the answer is probably somewhere between 10 to 15 percent .
non-negligible , so we do n't live in an entirely local or national world , but very , very far from the 95 percent level that you would expect , and the reason 's very simple .
we do n't , or i hope we do n't , form friendships at random on facebook . the technology is overlaid on a pre-existing matrix of relationships that we have , and those relationships are what the technology does n't quite displace . those relationships are why we get far fewer than 95 percent of our friends being located in countries other than where we are .
so does all this matter ? or is globaloney just a harmless way of getting people to pay more attention to globalization-related issues ?
i want to suggest that actually , globaloney can be very harmful to your health .
first of all , recognizing that the glass is only 10 to 20 percent full is critical to seeing that there might be potential for additional gains from additional integration , whereas if we thought we were already there , there would be no particular point to pushing harder .
it 's a little bit like , we would n't be having a conference on radical openness if we already thought we were totally open to all the kinds of influences that are being talked about at this conference .
so being accurate about how limited globalization levels are is critical to even being able to notice that there might be room for something more , something that would contribute further to global welfare .
which brings me to my second point .
avoiding overstatement is also very helpful because it reduces and in some cases even reverses some of the fears that people have about globalization .
so i actually spend most of my " world 3.0 " book working through a litany of market failures and fears that people have that they worry globalization is going to exacerbate .
i 'm obviously not going to be able to do that for you today , so let me just present to you two headlines as an illustration of what i have in mind .
think of france and the current debate about immigration .
when you ask people in france what percentage of the french population is immigrants , the answer is about 24 percent . that 's their guess .
maybe realizing that the number is just eight percent might help cool some of the superheated rhetoric that we see around the immigration issue .
or to take an even more striking example , when the chicago council on foreign relations did a survey of americans , asking them to guess what percentage of the federal budget went to foreign aid , the guess was 30 percent , which is slightly in excess of the actual level - -lrb- " actually about ... 1 % " -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- - of u.s. governmental commitments to federal aid .
the reassuring thing about this particular survey was , when it was pointed out to people how far their estimates were from the actual data , some of them - not all of them - seemed to become more willing to consider increases in foreign aid .
so foreign aid is actually a great way of sort of wrapping up here , because if you think about it , what i 've been talking about today is this notion - very uncontroversial amongst economists - that most things are very home-biased .
" foreign aid is the most aid to poor people , " is about the most home-biased thing you can find .
if you look at the oecd countries and how much they spend per domestic poor person , and compare it with how much they spend per poor person in poor countries , the ratio - branko milanovic at the world bank did the calculations - turns out to be about 30,000 to one .
now of course , some of us , if we truly are cosmopolitan , would like to see that ratio being brought down to one-is-to-one .
i 'd like to make the suggestion that we do n't need to aim for that to make substantial progress from where we are .
if we simply brought that ratio down to 15,000 to one , we would be meeting those aid targets that were agreed at the rio summit 20 years ago that the summit that ended last week made no further progress on .
so in summary , while radical openness is great , given how closed we are , even incremental openness could make things dramatically better . thank you very much . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- my favorite topic is shortcuts .
the master of shortcuts - it 's , of course , nature .
but i will demonstrate different ways to get rid of difficulties and go to the point , to find an answer probably much quicker than arthur did . so , first , we violate the common sense , the logic . all of you , if you hold your hand like this , 90 degrees - all of you . not you .
all of you , right ? palm up .
if you do this , the common , the logic says you must turn the wrist .
do you agree ?
good .
but i will first teach you a method , how you can do it without moving the wrist , and then the shortcut .
you can do it immediately , right ?
hold the hand like this , palm up .
do n't move the wrist . the wrist is - i does n't speak very many , but i do the best , what i are .
right-molded you say , with iron ?
that was a joke , actually , and i - ok .
hold the hand palm up . do this , do n't move the wrist .
over the heart , do n't move the wrist .
forward , do n't move the wrist .
up , do n't move the wrist . over the heart , do n't move the wrist .
and forward . yeah .
now - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - logic , logically , you have got to this position from this , without moving the wrist .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , the shortcut .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but it was six moves . now with one move .
i start here , palm down , you can follow .
and then look at me .
yeah ! -lrb- laughter -rrb- one move . ok .
so , that was the warming up .
now , i need an assistant .
i talked to a nice girl before , zoe .
she has left . no ! a big hand .
-lrb- applause -rrb- good . nice . and you can sit over there .
one item here was water , right ?
and i will give my tribute to water .
i think it 's enough with water for me . the other guys can talk about - cheers .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- beer has about - there 's a lot of water in beer .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , now i will demonstrate different ways of memorizing , control cards and so on .
and i think i 'll take off this one .
i work with a special i work with precision - oh , sorry - control and a very powerful ...
memory system , right ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , if - i have studied the poker . i like to gamble .
officially , i do n't gamble but ...
so , if we are - if we have five person , and i will do a five-handed poker game .
now i will interact . so a different person all the time , so not the same person can answer .
so we have an agreement .
which one shall have a good poker hand ?
which number ? one , two , three , four or five ? -lrb- audience : three . -rrb- lennart green : three - good .
and here , i had a mat here to make it a little - the critical moment is - sorry .
if a card shark gathers the cards together , immediately when he - before he deals the card . now , so i think , number three , i have arranged them in a full house .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- with queens and - it 's ok - queens and tens .
that 's a challenge . i like this .
i will explain later . one , two , three , four , five .
i start with three queens .
so here you see the contrast when i treat the cards .
and two tens .
yeah . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- but also the other hand is good , if all the other guys have good hands too .
so these guys have actually a stronger hand - three aces and two kings .
this guy beats them with four of a kind , or deuce - deuce .
no reaction ? that with even - ok , and this .
these look in order , i 'm probably - hopefully - yeah . three , four , five , six , seven and ...
but , of course , i will have the winning hand .
ten , jack , queen , king , ace .
yeah . so , good .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so the hand that looks so good from the beginning , number three , at the end was actually the lowest hand .
such life . right ?
so , please mix them .
now , if you are interested , i will demonstrate some underground techniques .
yes ?
i work with kind of estimation , shuffle tracking - ah , good .
impressive . thank you .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , first , the first term is estimation .
here , i can estimate exactly how many cards are put between my royal flush .
of course , i can count the cards , but this is much quicker .
right ? you agree .
so here i have , actually - i know exactly where the cards are .
so here , i can make a bet , and this is actually one of the points where i get my money .
so here : 10 , jack , queen , king , ace .
ok .
-lrb- applause -rrb- next is a term - i do it quick . i call this stealing .
so here , i think i know about where the cards are .
i will spread the cards and you 'll say stop , when i point to them , right . point , say stop .
zoe : stop .
lg : here - you see some are missing ?
and that 's the stealing cards , which i did .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ok .
now , another term called shuffle tracking .
shuffle tracking means i keep track of the cards , even if another person shuffles .
this is a little risky .
so - because if you look , now , i can still see it .
you agree ? but if you square - square , and shuffle , and then a cut .
so here , to follow my cards , i must look at the shuffle from the begin - ah , we are started together . it 's ok , it 's ok .
come to - no , no , no , no .
i 'm joking , yeah ?
any style - yeah , good .
here i have to calculate , but actually , i do n't like to calculate .
i work direct with the right brain .
if you pass the left brain , you have to take care of logic and common sense .
direct in the right brain , that 's much better . and so - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - arthur benjamin did a little of the same thing .
and if you work with , in the right atmosphere , with humor , you have - that 's the password to the cosmic bank of knowledge , where you can find any solution of any problem .
ok . now , i drop the cards , and you say stop anyway , right ?
not at the last card .
zoe : stop . lg : yeah .
when i 'm sober , i do this much quicker , but we will check .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ah , not in order , it - that was a mistake .
no , i 'm kidding .
-lrb- applause -rrb- no , now and then i put in a mistake , just to emphasize how difficult it is .
right ?
yeah , last night i forgot that . that was a mistake .
but now i 'm glad i remember it .
so , this deck is bought here . sorry .
i have a little pad to make it a little softer .
this deck is bought here in america .
it 's called " bicycle . " and this deck is very flexible , but not so many people know , if you check , if you press at the right spots , you see how thin and flexible this deck is , right ?
now , you can carry this in your wallet , so ...
you do n't see it , make no reaction ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , but here , and - is the camera getting too much ? no .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- yeah ? -lrb- audience : it 's getting too much . -rrb- lg : pardon ? but then , when we will have it back , you do this .
but not too much .
then you have to push it down again .
here , please . if you push these heaps - everyone see - push them together so they are really interlaced , right ? yeah , good .
perfect .
just push them through , good . thank you .
and then , i will demonstrate a thing from russian satellite , stealen - stolen , probably copied from america but we will see .
here - shortcuts . i talk about shortcuts .
now i go very quick through the deck and try to find some pattern .
the new chaos theory is already old , right ?
but you know , i think you are familiar with fractals - the mandelbrot spirals and all these things .
and it 's much easier to memorize cards in a pattern way , and not concentrate . if you concentrate and calculate , then you go to - then it 's the left brain . but if you just look and talk in another language ...
yeah , great .
i think i have it .
so now , different persons , older , tap .
please name any card , anyone .
-lrb- audience : jack of spades . -rrb- lg : jack of spades .
jack of spades .
i think jack of spades is number 12 from the top .
one , two , three , four , five , six , seven , eight , nine , 10 , 11 , 12 . yes , right .
so - oh , jack of spades .
you said spades ? -lrb- audience : yes . -rrb- lg : ah .
my fault . do n't applaud , this was clubs .
so , jack of spades .
i think ...
23 - 24 , sorry , 24 .
one , two , three , four , five , six , seven , eight , nine , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 - ah , 25 , yes .
it 's the last .
now , i do it quicker , better .
ok . another person . oh , i forgot , i should n't shuffle but i think - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - actually , my technique is to peek , all the time .
when i lift the heap , i peek .
you see , yeah , perfect .
three , four , five , six . then i calculate - yeah , good .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- another person , another card . -lrb- audience : seven of diamonds . -rrb- lg : seven of diamonds . perfect , my favorite , yeah , seven .
so i will do it quick , very quick , but in slow motion , so you can follow .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- seven of ? -lrb- audience : diamonds . -rrb- lg : diamonds , good . i start here .
good , thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the thing i did - i peeked .
i know where the card were , then i chose it . so another person , another card .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- another person .
-lrb- audience : ten of diamonds . -rrb- lg : pardon ?
-lrb- audience : ten of diamonds . -rrb- lg : ten of diamonds , yeah .
i think i do it the same way . i like to , so i know where it is .
ten of diamonds .
but now i do it the regular speed , right ?
ten of diamonds .
good .
maybe you will cut ? lift .
excellent .
so , thank you . another person , another card .
-lrb- audience : five of clubs . -rrb- lg : pardon ? -lrb- audience : five of clubs . -rrb- lg : five of clubs . it 's not the same person , even if it 's the same spot .
we can take some over there later . so now , i will drop the cards .
and you 'll say stop , anywhere . got it ?
five of clubs .
not the last . yes , that 's difficult to find a card here .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we do it again .
the person who said five of clubs say stop , when the cards are in the air , right ?
-lrb- audience : stop . -rrb- lg : very good .
ok .
-lrb- applause -rrb- ok , i had to use a little force there .
i think we save five of clubs .
and now a card with a contrast of five of clubs .
-lrb- audience : queen of hearts . -rrb- lg : queen of hearts , yeah .
excellent . i love that card .
here , i will do the most difficult thing .
for example , you are sitting in las vegas , and you 're betting , and you let the other guys peek this card by mistake . feel , it 's just the regular , one card .
and now , when i lift this card , it shall be your card . what was your card ?
-lrb- audience : queen of hearts . -rrb- lg : queen of ? queen of hearts .
so that 's a tough challenge , right ?
so here , i grab - you know this ? five of clubs ...
and queen of hearts . yes !
this is a tough one , because here i must take advantage of - i switch it with the five of clubs .
so , now a false count .
which card shall i use ? queen or five ?
zoe : the queen . lg : queen , yes .
so , i use the queen , and here 's five of clubs .
the false count - and the number one , two , three , four , five , six , seven , eight - you say the same card all the time .
eight , nine , 10 .
this is a kind of optical deal , right ?
when i put one card at a table - look , it 's not one card . it 's - look , it 's a bunch of cards that gives this impression .
yeah .
now some hard stuff .
i think we keep the queen here , yes .
now , to the satellites things .
this - oh sorry , do n't look at the beam . my fault .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this is high-frequency laser , and it 's enough with a fraction of a second to destroy the retina completely .
right , sorry , my - i should have mentioned that , yeah .
but you can relax , because it takes half an hour before it works , so you have plenty of time to see my whole performance .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , i put the laser here , and - now , when i deal the cards in the laser , i know where they are but - yes ?
did the camera got it ?
no ?
they did n't ?
what happened ?
-lrb- audience : it disappeared . -rrb- lg : ok , i 'll take another group .
do the cameras see the cards now ?
no ? -lrb- audience : no , they 're all gone . -rrb- lg : but you see the hand .
ah , good , good , good . but now .
so now , that was the reason , right ?
you see the cards ? yes .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- yeah , good .
now - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - one guy laughed . so now , to find the queen , do it this way : take back the other one , take back the queen .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- yeah , interesting , but a little dangerous .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i liked it . now , a little more difficult .
name - anyone , name , please , any suit .
-lrb- audience : spades . -rrb- lg : spades ? spades , good .
so here , here i have to peek , lots of cards .
i think there are lots of - i do n't know how many - but 10 , 15 spades in a deck , at least , right ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so every time i lift the heap , i peek , right .
then i arrange them so i can get them quick .
perfect , excellent .
so i start with the ace - yeah , ace . ah , yeah - spades ?
same mistake as before , right ?
so - i arrange the spades - the clubs .
i try to do this right here . first , i take the spades .
you see , i do n't work with prestige , so always do mistakes .
it does n't matter to me .
and now and then , i get some extra sympathy points , right ?
one , two , three , four - yes , the camera got it ? five , six , seven , eight - ah - nine , 10 , the jack , jack of spades , queen of - i like that laugh , yeah ! good . queen .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- wait , wait , wait - please take any card .
grab any one . quick , quick , good .
and we switch this to the king .
ace of diamonds .
and now , look , ace of diamonds will guide .
so i find ...
king of spades .
there was the place . and here is king of spades , correct ?
yeah ? ok .
-lrb- applause -rrb- now , a little more difficult thing .
maybe you think i have the cards in order already , so you help me to shuffle again .
another suit , please .
-lrb- audience : armani . -rrb- lg : pardon ? -lrb- audience : armani . -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- lg : it was after the blindfold .
i like this guy , yeah .
ok . that should be my end effect , but ok .
armani - who said armani ? you ?
i drop the cards and you - which size ?
which size ? it 's a piece of cake . i like challenges .
which size ?
-lrb- audience : extra large . -rrb- lg : extra large , ok .
say stop . -lrb- audience : stop . -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- lg : yeah , armani . ok .
-lrb- applause -rrb- ah , this is tough .
ok , a suit . i had clubs before , spades .
another suit . -lrb- audience : diamonds . -rrb- lg : diamonds , perfect .
so , in this case , i try to locate diamonds . i look at the cards , and ok .
we try . yeah . you help me .
if i drop the card face up , like this , you reverse it . zoe : ok .
lg : ok , now .
do with both hands , and quick . yes , good , good .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i think we have it now . yeah , good , good .
so here , diamonds , hearts - no , diamonds . good , good .
stop . do you see the pattern ?
no ? now ?
yes , yes , ok .
i work with pattern .
oh sorry , i dropped one .
maybe it 's important - yeah - nine of diamonds , ok .
so now - i always ask , why do i put myself in this position ?
i have to figure out so many outs , when i miss some cards , but i love it . so now , i will do it . i will try to find the diamonds , but i will do it the hard way .
it 's too easy to do it right away , right ?
i think i will do it ...
blindfolded .
at this distance , it works immediately .
aargh !
-lrb- laughter -rrb- duct tape .
i look - shake the cards , so i do n't .
go ahead . yeah , good . i like the empathy .
empathy .
but it was - did you hear ?
it was women 's voice . hear the guy - yeah , more , more , more .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- yeah , good . yeah .
you can take the nostril too , because some guys think - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - some guys think i can peek through the nostril , so do more . go , go .
right ? good .
satisfied ?
looks good , like batman . ow !
-lrb- laughter -rrb- no , with dignity and elegance , right ?
but i like her , yeah . i said , be a little tough .
and it was ok . one more ?
the last .
ok .
all right .
now you must agree that i 'm - i must rely on other senses , right ?
i work with vibration .
so , what was the card ?
diamonds . ah , i memorized hearts .
so now i have to improvise again .
maybe i 'll stand up . half .
diamonds - i 'll start with ace of diamonds .
just kidding , warming up - king of hearts .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i give you a diamonds , so they - so you put them here , in a nice row , right . and you can see , yeah ? good .
ace of diamonds , yes ? zoe : yeah .
lg : good . good . two - -lrb- applause -rrb- - thank you .
i never ever miss two . this is interesting .
always i 've found two , but the wrong color . spades , sorry .
and the deck is a gift to you after , so let the skepticals here , in this , examine them , right ? remind me . it 's a gift .
two - and it was two of spades , right ?
sorry , two of diamonds . i 'll do it quick now .
three - three of diamonds . yes !
four - i like challenges , yes .
yeah , good .
chris anderson : you 're peeking .
lg : pardon ?
ca : you 're peeking . you just got to - this is a request from the lady in the back .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- okay .
try that .
lg : yeah . also listen .
ok , now .
this is maybe a little tough .
we will try .
yes ? good ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ok . so , how many cards ? five ? zoe : four .
lg : four . is five the next card ?
zoe : five of diamonds , yeah .
lg : it 's not here ? zoe : it 's not there .
lg : oh .
so here , all the cards are face down - you agree ? -lrb- audience : yes . -rrb- lg : yes ? you see that in the screen ?
and this is face up , and it 's not at the bottom here .
so next card will be - was it five ?
zoe : five . lg : yeah - i will reverse it face up here .
yes ? zoe : yeah .
lg : six - six with the thumb .
seven .
yeah , i do this . i know where it is , because i peeked before and then i do this .
right ?
eight .
if - and then nine , right ?
yeah .
yesterday - the day before yesterday , i was in vegas , and i used this actually .
nine ? yeah ? correct ?
no ? yes ! ah , good , good .
ten - once again , i love this jonny wayne move .
yeah . jack - you -lsb- unclear -rsb- with jack ?
jack of diamonds , correct ? -lrb- audience : no . -rrb- lg : yes ?
and queen ! queen , with misdirection .
misdirection . -lrb- applause -rrb- yeah ?
and then , king , after exactly five seconds .
yeah . five . five seconds .
one , two , three , four - mmm !
check it .
yes ?
ca : king of diamonds . lg : ah !
good . oh .
touch me , feel - ah , ah , you know !
ca : ladies and gentlemen , lennart green ! lg : okay , thank you .
i worked on a film called " apollo 13 , " and when i worked on this film , i discovered something about how our brains work , and how our brains work is that , when we 're sort of infused with either enthusiasm or awe or fondness or whatever , it changes and alters our perception of things .
it changes what we see . it changes what we remember .
and as an experiment , because i dauntingly create a task for myself of recreating a saturn v launch for this particular movie , because i put it out there , i felt a little nervous about it , so i need to do an experiment and bring a group of people like this in a projection room and play this stock footage , and when i played this stock footage , i simply wanted to find out what people remembered , what was memorable about it ?
what should i actually try to replicate ?
what should i try to emulate to some degree ?
so this is the footage that i was showing everybody .
and what i discovered is , because of the nature of the footage and the fact that we 're doing this film , there was an emotion that was built into it and our collective memories of what this launch meant to us and all these various things .
when i showed it , and i asked , immediately after the screening was over , what they thought of it , what was your memorable shots , they changed them .
they were - had camera moves on them .
they had all kinds of things . shots were combined , and i was just really curious , i mean , what the hell were you looking at just a few minutes ago and how come , how 'd you come up with this sort of description ?
and what i discovered is , what i should do is not actually replicate what they saw , is replicate what they remembered .
so this is our footage of the launch , based on , basically , taking notes , asking people what they thought , and then the combination of all the different shots and all the different things put together created their sort of collective consciousness of what they remembered it looked like , but not what it really looked like .
so this is what we created for " apollo 13 . "
-lrb- launch noises -rrb- so literally what you 're seeing now is the confluence of a bunch of different people , a bunch of different memories , including my own , of taking a little bit of liberty with the subject matter .
i basically shot everything with short lenses , which means that you 're very close to the action , but framed it very similarly to the long lens shots which gives you a sense of distance , so i was basically was setting up something that would remind you of something you have n't really quite seen before . -lrb- music -rrb- and then i 'm going to show you exactly what it is that you were reacting to when you were reacting to it .
-lrb- music -rrb- tom hanks : hello , houston , this is odyssey .
it 's good to see you again . -lrb- cheers -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- rob legato : i pretend they 're clapping for me .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so now i 'm in a parking lot . basically it 's a tin can , and i 'm basically recreating the launch with fire extinguishers , fire , i have wax that i threw in front of the lens to look like ice , and so basically if you believed any of the stuff that i just showed you , what you were reacting to , what you 're emoting to , is something that 's a total falsehood , and i found that really kind of fascinating .
and in this particular case , this is the climax of the movie , and , you know , the weight of achieving it was simply take a model , throw it out of a helicopter , and shoot it .
and that 's simply what i did .
that 's me shooting , and i 'm a fairly mediocre operator , so i got that nice sense of verisimilitude , of a kind of , you know , following the rocket all the way down , and giving that little sort of edge , i was desperately trying to keep it in frame . so then i come up to the next thing .
we had a nasa consultant who was actually an astronaut , who was actually on some of the missions , of apollo 15 , and he was there to basically double check my science .
and , i guess somebody thought they needed to do that .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i do n't know why , but they thought they did .
so we were , he 's a hero , he 's an astronaut , and we 're all sort of excited , and , you know , i gave myself the liberty of saying , you know , some of the shots i did did n't really suck that bad .
and so maybe , you know , we were feeling kind of a little good about it , so i brought him in here , and he needed to really check and see what we were doing , and basically give us our a plus report card , and so i showed him some shots we were working on , and waiting for the reaction that you hope for , which is what i got . -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- launch noises -rrb- so i showed him these two shots , and then he basically told me what he thought .
-lrb- " that 's wrong " -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- okay . -lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's what you dream about .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so what i got from him is , he turned to me and said , " you would never , ever design a rocket like that .
you would never have a rocket go up while the gantry arms are going out . can you imagine the tragedy that could possibly happen with that ?
you would never , ever design a rocket like that . "
and he was looking at me . it 's like , yeah , i do n't know if you noticed , but i 'm the guy out in the parking lot recreating one of america 's finest moments with fire extinguishers .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i 'm not going to argue with you . you 're an astronaut , a hero , and i 'm from new jersey , so - -lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'm just going to show you some footage .
i 'm just going to show you some footage , and tell me what you think .
and then i did kind of get the reaction i was hoping for .
so i showed him this , and this is actual footage that he was on . this is apollo 15 . this was his mission .
so i showed him this , and the reaction i got was interesting .
-lrb- " that 's wrong too . " -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- so , and what happened was , i mean , what i sort of intuned in that is that he remembered it differently .
he remembered that was a perfectly safe sort of gantry system , perfectly safe rocket launch , because he 's sitting in a rocket that has , like , a hundred thousand pounds of thrust , built by the lowest bidder .
he was hoping it was going to work out okay .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so he twisted his memory around .
now , ron howard ran into buzz aldrin , who was not on the movie , so he had no idea that we were faking any of this footage , and he just responded as he would respond , and i 'll run this .
ron howard : buzz aldrin came up to me and said , " hey , that launch footage , i saw some shots i 'd never seen before . did you guys , what vault did you find that stuff in ? " and i said , " well , no vault , buzz , we generated all that from scratch . "
and he said , " huh , that 's pretty good . can we use it ? "
-lrb- explosion -rrb- -lrb- " sure " -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- rl : i think he 's a great american .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , " titanic " was , if you do n't know the story , does n't end well .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- jim cameron actually photographed the real titanic .
so he basically set up , or basically shattered the suspension of disbelief , because what he photographed was the real thing , a mir sub going down , or actually two mir subs going down to the real wreck , and he created this very haunting footage .
it 's really beautiful , and it conjures up all these various different emotions , but he could n't photograph everything , and to tell the story , i had to fill in the gaps , which is now rather daunting , because now i have to recreate back to back what really happened and i had , i 'm the only one who could really blow it at that point .
so this is the footage he photographed , and it was pretty moving and pretty awe-inspiring .
so i 'm going to just let it run , so you kind of absorb this sort of thing , and i 'll describe my sort of reactions when i was looking at it for the very first time .
i got the feeling that my brain wanted to basically see it come back to life .
i automatically wanted to see this ship , this magnificent ship , basically in all its glory , and conversely , i wanted to see it not in all its glory , basically go back to what it looks like .
so i conjured up an effect that i 'm later going to show you what i tried to do , which is kind of the heart of the movie , for me , and so that 's why i wanted to do the movie , that 's why i wanted to create the sort of things i created .
and i 'll show you , you know , another thing that i found interesting is what we really were emoting to when you take a look at it .
so here 's the behind the scenes , a couple of little shots here .
so , when you saw my footage , you were seeing this : basically , a bunch of guys flipping a ship upside down , and the little mir subs are actually about the size of small footballs , and shot in smoke .
jim went three miles went down , and i went about three miles away from the studio and photographed this in a garage .
and so , but what you 're emoting to , or what you 're looking at , had the same feeling , the same haunting quality , that jim 's footage had , so i found it so fascinating that our brains sort of , once you believe something 's real , you transfer everything that you feel about it , this quality you have , and it 's totally artificial .
it 's totally make-believe , yet it 's not to you , and i found that that was a very interesting thing to explore and use , and it caused me to create the next effect that i 'll show you , which is this sort of magic transition , and all i was really attempting to do is basically have the audience cue the effect , so it became a seamless experience for them , that i was n't showing you my sort of interpretation , i was showing you what you wanted to see .
and the very next shot , right after this - so you can see what i was doing .
so basically , if there 's two subs in the same shot , i shot it , because where 's the camera coming from ?
and when jim shot it , it was only one sub , because he was photographing from the other , and i do n't remember if i did this or jim did this .
i 'll give it to jim , because he could use the pat on the back .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- okay . so now the titanic transition .
so this is what i was referring to where i wanted to basically magically transplant from one state of the titanic to the other . so i 'll just play the shot once . -lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- and what i was hoping for is that it just melts in front of you .
gloria stuart : that was the last time titanic ever saw daylight .
rl : so , what i did is basically i had another screening room experience where i was basically tracking where i was looking , or where we were looking , and of course you 're looking at the two people on the bow of the ship , and then at some point , i 'm changing the periphery of the shot , i 'm changing , it 's becoming the rusted wreck , and then i would run it every day , and then i would find exactly the moment that i stopped looking at them and start noticing the rest of it , and the moment my eye shifted , we just marked it to the frame .
the moment my eye shifted , i immediately started to change them , so now somehow you missed where it started and where it stopped .
and so i 'll just show it one more time .
-lrb- music -rrb- and it 's literally done by using what our brains naturally do for us , which is , as soon as you shift your attention , something changes , and then i left the little scarf going , because it really wanted to be a ghostly shot , really wanted to feel like they were still on the wreck , essentially . that 's where they were buried forever .
or something like that . i just made that up .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it was , incidentally , the last time i ever saw daylight .
it was a long film to work on . -lrb- laughter -rrb- now , " hugo " was another interesting movie , because the movie itself is about film illusions .
it 's about how our brain is tricked into seeing a persistence of vision that creates a motion picture , and one of the things i had to do is , we - sasha baron cohen is a very clever , very smart guy , comedian , wanted to basically do an homage to the kind of the buster keaton sort of slapstick things , and he wanted his leg brace to get caught on a moving train .
very dangerous , very impossible to do , and particularly on our stage , because there literally is no way to actually move this train , because it fits so snugly into our set .
so let me show you the scene , and then i basically used the trick that was identified by sergei eisenstein , which is , if you have a camera that 's moving with a moving object , what is not moving appears to be moving , and what is moving appears to be stopped , so what you 're actually seeing now is the train is not moving at all , and what is actually moving is the floor .
so this is the shot . that 's a little video of what you 're looking at there , which is our little test , so that 's actually what you 're seeing , and i thought it was sort of an interesting thing , because it was , part of the homage of the movie itself is coming up with this sort of genius trick which i ca n't take credit for .
i 'd love to but i ca n't , because it was invented like in 1910 or something like that , is i told marty , and it 's kind of one of those mind things that it 's really hard to really get until you actually see it work , and i said , you know , what i was going to do , and he said , " so , let me see if i can get this straight . the thing with the wheels ?
that does n't move . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- " and the thing without the wheels , that moves . "
precisely . -lrb- laughter -rrb- brings me to the next , and final - marty 's not going to see this , is he ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- this is n't viewed outside of - -lrb- laughter -rrb- the next illustration is something that , there 's like all one shot theory . it 's a very elegant way of telling a story , especially if you 're following somebody on a journey , and that journey basically tells something about their personality in a very concise way , and what we wanted to do based on the shot in " goodfellas , " which is one of the great shots ever , a martin scorsese film , of basically following henry hill through what it feels like to be a gangster walk
going through the copacabana and being treated in a special way .
he was the master of his universe , and we wanted hugo to feel the same way , so we created this shot .
-lrb- music -rrb- that 's hugo . -lrb- music -rrb- and we felt that if we could basically move the camera with him , we would feel what it feels like to be this boy who is basically the master of his universe , and his universe is , you know , behind the scenes in the bowels of this particular train station that only he can actually navigate through and do it this way , and we had to make it feel that this is his normal , everyday sort of life , so the idea of doing it as one shot was very important , and of course , in shooting in 3d , which is basically
it 's a huge camera that 's hanging off of a giant stick , so to recreate a steadycam shot was the task , and make it feel kind of like what the reaction you got when you saw the " goodfellas " shot .
so what you 're now going to see is how we actually did it .
it 's actually five separate sets shot at five different times with two different boys .
the one on the left is where the shot ends , and the shot on the right is where it takes over , and now we switch boys , so it went from asa butterfield , who 's the star of the show , to his stand-in . -lrb- music -rrb- i would n't say his stunt double . there 's a crazy rig that we built for this . -lrb- music -rrb- and so this is , and now this is set number three we 're into , and then we 're going to go into , basically the very last moment of the shot is actually the steadycam shot . everything else was shot on cranes and various things like that , and it literally was done
over five different sets , two different boys , different times , and it all had to feel like it was all one shot , and what was sort of great for me was it was probably the best-reviewed shot i 've ever worked on , and , you know , i was kind of proud of it when i was done , which is , you should never really be proud of stuff , i guess .
so i was kind of proud of it , and i went to a friend of mine , and said , " you know , this is , you know , kind of the best-reviewed shot i 've ever worked on .
what do you think was the reason ? "
and he said , " because no one knows you had anything to do with it . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , all i can say is , thank you , and that 's my presentation for you . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson asked me if i could put the last 25 years of anti-poverty campaigning into 10 minutes for ted .
that 's an englishman asking an irishman to be succinct .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i said , " chris , that would take a miracle . "
he said , " bono , would n't that be a good use of your messianic complex ? "
so , yeah .
then i thought , let 's go even further than 25 years .
let 's go back before christ , three millennia , to a time when , at least in my head , the journey for justice , the march against inequality and poverty really began .
three thousand years ago , civilization just getting started on the banks of the nile , some slaves , jewish shepherds in this instance , smelling of sheep shit , i guess , proclaimed to the pharaoh , sitting high on his throne , " we , your majesty-ness , are equal to you . "
and the pharaoh replies , " oh , no .
you , your miserableness , have got to be kidding . "
and they say , " no , no , that 's what it says here in our holy book . "
cut to our century , same country , same pyramids , another people spreading the same idea of equality with a different book .
this time it 's called the facebook .
crowds are gathered in tahrir square .
they turn a social network from virtual to actual , and kind of rebooted the 21st century .
not to undersell how messy and ugly the aftermath of the arab spring has been , neither to oversell the role of technology , but these things have given a sense of what 's possible when the age-old model of power , the pyramid , gets turned upside down , putting the people on top and the pharaohs of today on the bottom , as it were .
it 's also shown us that something as powerful as information and the sharing of it can challenge inequality , because facts , like people , want to be free , and when they 're free , liberty is usually around the corner , even for the poorest of the poor - facts that can challenge cynicism and the apathy that leads to inertia , facts that tell us what 's working and , more importantly , what 's not , so we can fix it , facts that if we hear them and heed them could help us meet the challenge that nelson mandela made back in 2005 , when he asked us to be that great generation
that overcomes that most awful offense to humanity , extreme poverty , facts that build a powerful momentum .
so i thought , forget the rock opera , forget the bombast , my usual tricks .
the only thing singing today would be the facts , for i have truly embraced by inner nerd .
so exit the rock star .
enter the evidence-based activist , the factivist .
because what the facts are telling us is that the long , slow journey , humanity 's long , slow journey of equality , is actually speeding up .
look at what 's been achieved .
look at the pictures these data sets print .
since the year 2000 , since the turn of the millennium , there are eight million more aids patients getting life-saving antiretroviral drugs .
malaria : there are eight countries in sub-saharan africa that have their death rates cut by 75 percent .
for kids under five , child mortality , kids under five , it 's down by 2.65 million a year .
that 's a rate of 7,256 children 's lives saved each day .
wow . wow . -lrb- applause -rrb- let 's just stop for a second , actually , and think about that .
have you read anything anywhere in the last week that is remotely as important as that number ? wow .
great news . it drives me nuts that most people do n't seem to know this news .
seven thousand kids a day . here 's two of them .
this is michael and benedicta , and they 're alive thanks in large part to dr. patricia asamoah - she 's amazing - and the global fund , which all of you financially support , whether you know it or not .
and the global fund provides antiretroviral drugs that stop mothers from passing hiv to their kids .
this fantastic news did n't happen by itself .
it was fought for , it was campaigned for , it was innovated for .
and this great news gives birth to even more great news , because the historic trend is this .
the number of people living in back-breaking , soul-crushing extreme poverty has declined from 43 percent of the world 's population in 1990 to 33 percent by 2000 and then to 21 percent by 2010 .
give it up for that . -lrb- applause -rrb- halved . halved .
now , the rate is still too high - still too many people unnecessarily losing their lives .
there 's still work to do .
but it 's heart-stopping . it 's mind-blowing stuff .
and if you live on less than $ 1.25 a day , if you live in that kind of poverty , this is not just data .
this is everything .
if you 're a parent who wants the best for your kids - and i am - this rapid transition is a route out of despair and into hope .
and guess what ? if the trajectory continues , look where the amount of people living on $ 1.25 a day gets to by 2030 .
ca n't be true , can it ?
that 's what the data is telling us . if the trajectory continues , we get to , wow , the zero zone .
for number-crunchers like us , that is the erogenous zone , and it 's fair to say that i am , by now , sexually aroused by the collating of data .
so virtual elimination of extreme poverty , as defined by people living on less than $ 1.25 a day , adjusted , of course , for inflation from a 1990 baseline .
we do love a good baseline .
that 's amazing .
now i know that some of you think this progress is all in asia or latin america or model countries like brazil - and who does n't love a brazilian model ? - but look at sub-saharan africa .
there 's a collection of 10 countries , some call them the lions , who in the last decade have had a combination of 100 percent debt cancellation , a tripling of aid , a tenfold increase in fdi - that 's foreign direct investment - which has unlocked a quadrupling of domestic resources - that 's local money - which , when spent wisely - that 's good governance - cut childhood mortality by a third , doubled education completion rates , and they , too , halved extreme poverty , and at this rate , these 10 get to zero too .
so the pride of lions is the proof of concept .
there are all kinds of benefits to this .
for a start , you wo n't have to listen to an insufferable little jumped-up jesus like myself .
how about that ? -lrb- applause -rrb- and 2028 , 2030 ? it 's just around the corner .
i mean , it 's about three rolling stones farewell concerts away .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i hope . i 'm hoping .
makes us look really young .
so why are n't we jumping up and down about this ?
well , the opportunity is real , but so is the jeopardy .
we ca n't get this done until we really accept that we can get this done .
look at this graph .
it 's called inertia . it 's how we screw it up .
and the next one is really beautiful .
it 's called momentum .
and it 's how we can bend the arc of history down towards zero , just doing the things that we know work .
so inertia versus momentum .
there is jeopardy , and of course , the closer you get , it gets harder .
we know the obstacles that are in our way right now , in difficult times .
in fact , today in your capital , in difficult times , some who mind the nation 's purse want to cut life-saving programs like the global fund .
but you can do something about that .
you can tell politicians that these cuts -lsb- can cost -rsb- lives .
right now today , in oslo as it happens , oil companies are fighting to keep secret their payments to governments for extracting oil in developing countries .
you can do something about that too .
you can join the one campaign , and leaders like mo ibrahim , the telecom entrepreneur .
we 're pushing for laws that make sure that at least some of the wealth under the ground ends up in the hands of the people living above it .
and right now , we know that the biggest disease of all is not a disease . it 's corruption .
but there 's a vaccine for that too .
it 's called transparency , open data sets , something the ted community is really on it .
daylight , you could call it , transparency .
and technology is really turbocharging this .
it 's getting harder to hide if you 're doing bad stuff .
so let me tell you about the u-report , which i 'm really excited about . it 's 150,000 millennials all across uganda , young people armed with 2g phones , an sms social network exposing government corruption and demanding to know what 's in the budget and how their money is being spent .
this is exciting stuff .
look , once you have these tools , you ca n't not use them .
once you have this knowledge , you ca n't un-know it .
you ca n't delete this data from your brain , but you can delete the cliched image of supplicant , impoverished peoples not taking control of their own lives .
you can erase that , you really can , because it 's not true anymore . -lrb- applause -rrb- it 's transformational .
2030 ? by 2030 , robots , not just serving us guinness , but drinking it .
by the time we get there , every place with a rough semblance of governance might actually be on their way .
so i 'm here to - i guess we 're here to try and infect you with this virtuous , data-based virus , the one we call factivism .
it 's not going to kill you .
in fact , it could save countless lives .
i guess we in the one campaign would love you to be contagious , spread it , share it , pass it on .
by doing so , you will join us and countless others in what i truly believe is the greatest adventure ever taken , the ever-demanding journey of equality .
could we really be the great generation that mandela asked us to be ?
might we answer that clarion call with science , with reason , with facts , and , dare i say it , emotions ?
because as is obvious , factivists have feelings too .
i 'm thinking of wael ghonim , though .
some of you know him . he set up one of the facebook groups behind the tahrir square in cairo .
he got thrown in jail for it , but i have his words tattooed on my brain .
" we are going to win because we do n't understand politics .
we are going to win because we do n't play their dirty games .
we are going to win because we do n't have a party political agenda .
we are going to win because the tears that come from our eyes actually come from our hearts .
we are going to win because we have dreams , and we 're willing to stand up for those dreams . "
wael is right .
we 're going to win if we work together as one , because the power of the people is so much stronger than the people in power .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you so much . -lrb- applause -rrb- i study ants , and that 's because i like to think about how organizations work .
and in particular , how the simple parts of organizations interact to create the behavior of the whole organization .
so , ant colonies are a good example of an organization like that , and there are many others . the web is one .
there are many biological systems like that - brains , cells , developing embryos .
there are about 10,000 species of ants .
they all live in colonies consisting of one or a few queens , and then all the ants you see walking around are sterile female workers .
and all ant colonies have in common that there 's no central control .
nobody tells anybody what to do .
the queen just lays the eggs . there 's no management .
no ant directs the behavior of any other ant .
and i try to figure out how that works .
and i 've been working for the past 20 years on a population of seed-eating ants in southeastern arizona .
here 's my study site . this is really a picture of ants , and the rabbit just happens to be there .
and these ants are called harvester ants because they eat seeds .
this is the nest of the mature colony , and there 's the nest entrance .
and they forage maybe for about 20 meters away , gather up the seeds and bring them back to the nest , and store them .
and every year i go there and make a map of my study site .
this is just a road . and it 's not very big : it 's about 250 meters on one side , 400 on the other .
and every colony has a name , which is a number , which is painted on a rock . and i go there every year and look for all the colonies that were alive the year before , and figure out which ones have died , and put all the new ones on the map .
and by doing this i know how old they all are .
and because of that , i 've been able to study how their behavior changes as the colony gets older and larger .
so i want to tell you about the life cycle of a colony .
ants never make more ants ; colonies make more colonies .
and they do that by each year sending out the reproductives - those are the ones with wings - on a mating flight .
so every year , on the same day - and it 's a mystery exactly how that happens - each colony sends out its virgin , unmated queens with wings , and the males , and they all fly to a common place . and they mate .
and this shows a recently virgin queen . here 's her wings .
and she 's in the process of mating with this male , and there 's another male on top waiting his turn .
often the queens mate more than once .
and after that , the males all die . that 's it for them .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and then the newly mated queens fly off somewhere , drop their wings , dig a hole and go into that hole and start laying eggs .
and they will live for 15 or 20 years , continuing to lay eggs using the sperm from that original mating .
so the queen goes down in there .
she lays eggs , she feeds the larvae - so an ant starts as an egg , then it 's a larva .
she feeds the larvae by regurgitating from her fat reserves .
then , as soon as the ants - the first group of ants - emerge , they 're larvae . then they 're pupae . then they come out as adult ants .
they go out , they get the food , they dig the nest , and the queen never comes out again .
so this is a one-year-old colony - this happens to be 536 .
there 's the nest entrance , there 's a pencil for scale .
so this is the colony founded by a queen the previous summer .
this is a three-year-old colony .
there 's the nest entrance , there 's a pencil for scale .
they make a midden , a pile of refuse - mostly the husks of the seeds that they eat .
this is a five-year-old colony . this is the nest entrance , here 's a pencil for scale .
this is about as big as they get , about a meter across .
and then this is how colony size and numbers of worker ants changes - so this is about 10,000 worker ants - changes as a function of colony age , in years .
so it starts out with zero ants , just the founding queen , and it grows to a size of about 10 or 12 thousand ants when the colony is five .
and it stays that size until the queen dies and there 's nobody to make more ants , when she 's about 15 or 20 years old .
and it 's when they reach this stable size , in numbers of ants , that they start to reproduce .
that is , to send more winged queens and males to that year 's mating flight .
and i know how colony size changes as a function of colony age because i 've dug up colonies of known age and counted all the ants . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so that 's not the most fun part of this research , although it 's interesting .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- really the question that i think about with these ants is what i call task allocation .
that 's not just how is the colony organized , but how does it change what it 's doing ?
how is it that the colony manages to adjust the numbers of workers performing each task as conditions change ?
so , things happen to an ant colony .
when it rains in the summer , it floods in the desert .
there 's a lot of damage to the nest , and extra ants are needed to clean up that mess .
when extra food becomes available - and this is what everybody knows about picnics - then extra ants are allocated to collect the food .
so , with nobody telling anybody what to do , how is it that the colony manages to adjust the numbers of workers performing each task ?
and that 's the process that i call task allocation .
and in harvester ants , i divide the tasks of the ants i see just outside the nest into these four categories : where an ant is foraging , when it 's out along the foraging trail , searching for food or bringing food back .
the patrollers - that 's supposed to be a magnifying glass - are an interesting group that go out early in the morning before the foragers are active .
they somehow choose the direction that the foragers will go , and by coming back - just by making it back - they tell the foragers that it 's safe to go out .
then the nest maintenance workers work inside the nest , and i wanted to say that the nests look a lot like bill lishman 's house .
that is , that there are chambers inside , they line the walls of the chambers with moist soil and it dries to a kind of an adobe-like surface in it .
it also looks very similar to some of the cave dwellings of the hopi people that are in that area .
and the nest maintenance workers do that inside the nest , and then they come out of the nest carrying bits of dry soil in their mandibles .
so you see the nest maintenance workers come out with a bit of sand , put it down , turn around , and go back in .
and finally , the midden workers put some kind of territorial chemical in the garbage .
so what you see the midden workers doing is making a pile of refuse .
on one day , it 'll all be here , and then the next day they 'll move it over there , and then they 'll move it back .
so that 's what the midden workers do .
and these four groups are just the ants outside the nest .
so that 's only about 25 percent of the colony , and they 're the oldest ants .
so , an ant starts out somewhere near the queen .
and when we dig up nests we find they 're about as deep as the colony is wide , so about a meter deep for the big old nests .
and then there 's another long tunnel and a chamber , where we often find the queen , after eight hours of hacking away at the rock with pickaxes .
i do n't think that chamber has evolved because of me and my backhoe and my crew of students with pickaxes , but instead because when there 's flooding , occasionally the colony has to go down deep .
so there 's this whole network of chambers .
the queen 's in there somewhere ; she just lays eggs .
there 's the larvae , and they consume most of the food .
and this is true of most ants - that the ants you see walking around do n't do much eating .
they bring it back and feed it to the larvae .
when the foragers come in with food , they just drop it into the upper chamber , and other ants come up from below , get the food , bring it back , husk the seeds , and pile them up .
there are nest maintenance workers working throughout the nest .
and curiously , and interestingly , it looks as though at any time about half the ants in the colony are just doing nothing .
so , despite what it says in the bible , about , you know , " look to the ant , thou sluggard , " in fact , you could think of those ants as reserves .
that is to say , if something happened - and i 've never seen anything like this happen , but i 've only been looking for 20 years - if something happened , they might all come out if they were needed .
but in fact , mostly they 're just hanging around in there .
and i think it 's a very interesting question - what is there about the way the colony is organized that might give some function to a reserve of ants who are doing nothing ?
and they sort of stand as a buffer in between the ants working deep inside the nest and the ants working outside .
and if you mark ants that are working outside , and dig up a colony , you never see them deep down .
so what 's happening is that the ants work inside the nest when they 're younger .
they somehow get into this reserve .
and then eventually they get recruited to join this exterior workforce .
and once they belong to the ants that work outside , they never go back down .
now ants - most ants , including these , do n't see very well .
they have eyes , they can distinguish between light and dark , but they mostly work by smell .
so just to reinforce that what you might have thought about ant queens is n't true - you know , even if the queen did have the intelligence to send chemical messages through this whole network of chambers to tell the ants outside what to do , there is no way that such messages could make it in time to see the shifts in the allocation of workers that we actually see outside the nest .
so that 's one way that we know the queen is n't directing the behavior of the colony .
so when i first set out to work on task allocation , my first question was , " what 's the relationship between the ants doing different tasks ?
does it matter to the foragers what the nest maintenance workers are doing ?
does it matter to the midden workers what the patrollers are doing ? "
and i was working in the context of a view of ant colonies in which each ant was somehow dedicated to its task from birth and sort of performed independently of the others , knowing its place on the assembly line .
and instead i wanted to ask , " how are the different task groups interdependent ? "
so i did experiments where i changed one thing .
so for example , i created more work for the nest maintenance workers by putting out a pile of toothpicks near the nest entrance , early in the morning when the nest maintenance workers are first active .
this is what it looks like about 20 minutes later .
here it is about 40 minutes later .
and the nest maintenance workers just take all the toothpicks to the outer edge of the nest mound and leave them there .
and what i wanted to know was , " ok , here 's a situation where extra nest maintenance workers were recruited - is this going to have any effect on the workers performing other tasks ? "
then we repeated all those experiments with the ants marked .
so here 's some blue nest maintenance workers .
and lately we 've gotten more sophisticated and we have this three-color system .
and we can mark them individually so we know which ant is which .
we started out with model airplane paint and then we found these wonderful little japanese markers , and they work really well .
well it turns out that yes , the different tasks are interdependent .
so , if i change the numbers performing one task , it changes the numbers performing another .
so for example , if i make a mess that the nest maintenance workers have to clean up , then i see fewer ants out foraging .
and this was true for all the pair-wise combinations of tasks .
and the second result , which was surprising to a lot of people , was that ants actually switch tasks .
the same ant does n't do the same task over and over its whole life .
so for example , if i put out extra food , everybody else - the midden workers stop doing midden work and go get the food , they become foragers .
the nest maintenance workers become foragers .
the patrollers become foragers .
but not every transition is possible . and this shows how it works .
like i just said , if there is more food to collect , the patrollers , the midden workers , the nest maintenance workers will all change to forage .
if there 's more patrolling to do - so i created a disturbance , so extra patrollers were needed - the nest maintenance workers will switch to patrol .
but if more nest maintenance work is needed - for example , if i put out a bunch of toothpicks - then nobody will ever switch back to nest maintenance , they have to get nest maintenance workers from inside the nest .
so foraging acts as a sink , and the ants inside the nest act as a source .
and finally , it looks like each ant is deciding moment to moment whether to be active or not .
so , for example , when there 's extra nest maintenance work to do , it 's not that the foragers switch over . i know that they do n't do that .
but the foragers somehow decide not to come out .
and here was the most intriguing result : the task allocation .
this process changes with colony age , and it changes like this .
when i do these experiments with older colonies - so ones that are five years or older - they 're much more consistent from one time to another and much more homeostatic . the worse things get , the more i hassle them , the more they act like undisturbed colonies .
whereas the young , small colonies - the two-year-old colonies of just 2,000 ants - are much more variable .
and the amazing thing about this is that an ant lives only a year .
it could be this year , or this year .
so , the ants in the older colony that seem to be more stable are not any older than the ants in the younger colony .
it 's not due to the experience of older , wiser ants .
instead , something about the organization must be changing as the colony gets older .
and the obvious thing that 's changing is its size .
so since i 've had this result , i 've spent a lot of time trying to figure out what kinds of decision rules - very simple , local , probably olfactory , chemical rules could an ant could be using , since no ant can assess the global situation - that would have the outcome that i see , these predictable dynamics , in who does what task .
and it would change as the colony gets larger .
and what i 've found out is that ants are using a network of antennal contact .
so anybody who 's ever looked at ants has seen them touch antennae .
they smell with their antennae .
when one ant touches another , it 's smelling it , and it can tell , for example , whether the other ant is a nest mate because ants cover themselves and each other , through grooming , with a layer of grease , which carries a colony-specific odor .
and what we 're learning is that an ant uses the pattern of its antennal contacts , the rate at which it meets ants of other tasks , in deciding what to do .
and so what the message is , is not any message the pattern itself is the message .
and i 'll tell you a little bit more about that .
but first you might be wondering : how is it that an ant can tell , for example , i 'm a forager .
i expect to meet another forager every so often .
but if instead i start to meet a higher number of nest maintenance workers , i 'm less likely to forage .
so it has to know the difference between a forager and a nest maintenance worker .
and we 've learned that , in this species - and i suspect in others as well - these hydrocarbons , this layer of grease on the outside of ants , is different as ants perform different tasks .
and we 've done experiments that show that that 's because the longer an ant stays outside , the more these simple hydrocarbons on its surface change , and so they come to smell different by doing different tasks .
and they can use that task-specific odor in cuticular hydrocarbons - they can use that in their brief antennal contacts to somehow keep track of the rate at which they 're meeting ants of certain tasks .
and we 've just recently demonstrated this by putting extract of hydrocarbons on little glass beads , and dropping the beads gently down into the nest entrance at the right rate .
and it turns out that ants will respond to the right rate of contact with a glass bead with hydrocarbon extract on it , as they would to contact with real ants .
so i want now to show you a bit of film - and this will start out , first of all , showing you the nest entrance .
so the idea is that ants are coming in and out of the nest entrance .
they 've gone out to do different tasks , and the rate at which they meet as they come in and out of the nest entrance determines , or influences , each ant 's decision about whether to go out , and which task to perform .
this is taken through a fiber optics microscope . it 's down inside the nest .
in the beginning you see the ants just kind of engaging with the fiber optics microscope .
but the idea is that the ants are in there , and each ant is experiencing a certain flow of ants past it - a stream of contacts with other ants .
and the pattern of these interactions determines whether the ant comes back out , and what it does when it comes back out .
you can also see this in the ants just outside the nest entrance like these .
each ant , then , as it comes back in , is contacting other ants .
and the ants that are waiting just inside the nest entrance to decide whether to go out on their next trip , are contacting the ants coming in .
so , what 's interesting about this system is that it 's messy .
it 's variable . it 's noisy . and , in particular , in two ways .
the first is that the experience of the ant - of each ant - ca n't be very predictable .
because the rate at which ants come back depends on all the little things that happen to an ant as it goes out and does its task outside .
and the second thing is that an ant 's ability to assess this pattern must be very crude because no ant can do any sophisticated counting .
so , we do a lot of simulation and modeling , and also experimental work , to try to figure out how those two kinds of noise combine to , in the aggregate , produce the predictable behavior of ant colonies .
again , i do n't want to say that this kind of haphazard pattern of interactions produces a factory that works with the precision and efficiency of clockwork .
in fact , if you watch ants at all , you end up trying to help them because they never seem to be doing anything exactly the way that you think that they ought to be doing it .
so it 's not really that out of these haphazard contacts , perfection arises .
but it works pretty well .
ants have been around for several hundred million years .
they cover the earth , except for antarctica .
something that they 're doing is clearly successful enough that this pattern of haphazard contacts , in the aggregate , produces something that allows ants to make a lot more ants .
and one of the things that we 're studying is how natural selection might be acting now to shape this use of interaction patterns - this network of interaction patterns - to perhaps increase the foraging efficiency of ant colonies .
so the one thing , though , that i want you to remember about this is that these patterns of interactions are something that you 'd expect to be closely connected to colony size .
the simplest idea is that when an ant is in a small colony - and an ant in a large colony can use the same rule , like " i expect to meet another forager every three seconds . "
but in a small colony , it 's likely to meet fewer foragers , just because there are fewer other foragers there to meet .
so this is the kind of rule that , as the colony develops and gets older and larger , will produce different behavior in an old colony and a small young one .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm a visual artist , and i 'm also one of the co-founders of the plastic pollution coalition .
i 've been working with plastic bags , which i cut up and sew back together as my primary material for my artwork for the last 20 years .
i turn them into two and three-dimensional pieces and sculptures and installations .
upon working with the plastic , after about the first eight years , some of my work started to fissure and break down into smaller little bits of plastic .
and i thought , " great .
it 's ephemeral just like us . "
upon educating myself a little further about plastics , i actually realized this was a bad thing .
it 's a bad thing that plastic breaks down into smaller little bits , because it 's always still plastic .
and what we 're finding is that a lot of it is in the marine environment .
i then , in the last few years , learned about the pacific garbage patch and the gyre .
and my initial reaction - and i think this is a lot of people 's first reaction to learning about it - is , " oh my god !
we 've got to go out there and clean this thing up . "
so i actually developed a proposal to go out with a cargo ship and two decommissioned fishing trawlers , a crane , a chipping machine and a cold-molding machine .
and my intention was to go out to the gyre , raise awareness about this issue and begin to pick up the plastic , chip it into little bits and cold mold it into bricks that could potentially be used as building materials in underdeveloped communities .
i began talking with people who actually had been out to the gyre and were studying the plastic problem in the marine environment and upon doing so , i realized actually that cleaning it up would be a very small drop in the bucket relative to how much is being generated every day around the world , and that actually i needed to back up and look at the bigger picture .
and the bigger picture is : we need to find a way to turn off the faucet .
we need to cut the spigot of single-use and disposable plastics , which are entering the marine environment every day on a global scale .
so in looking at that , i also realized that i was really angry .
i was n't just concerned about plastic that you 're trying to imagine out in the middle of the pacific ocean - of which i have learned there are now 11 gyres , potentially , of plastic in five major oceans in the world .
it 's not just that gyre of plastic that i 'm concerned about - it 's the gyre of plastic in the supermarket .
i 'd go to the supermarket and all of my food is packaged in plastic .
all of my beverages are packaged in plastic , even at the health food market .
i 'm also concerned about the plastic in the refrigerator , and i 'm concerned about the plastic and the toxins that leach from plastic into us and into our bodies .
so i came together with a group of other people who were all looking at this issue , and we created the plastic pollution coalition .
we have many initiatives that we 're working on , but some of them are very basic .
one is : if 80 to 90 percent of what we 're finding in the ocean - of the marine debris that we 're finding in the ocean - is plastic , then why do n't we call it what it is .
it 's plastic pollution .
recycling - everybody kind of ends their books about being sustainable and greening with the idea of recycling .
you put something in a bin and you do n't have to think about it again .
what is the reality of that ?
in the united states , less than seven percent of our plastics are recycled .
and if you really look into it , particularly when it comes to plastic bottles , most of it is only down-cycled , or incinerated , or shipped to china .
it is down-cycled and turned into lesser things , while a glass bottle can be a glass bottle again or can be used again - a plastic bottle can never be a plastic bottle again .
so this is a big issue for us .
another thing that we 're looking at and asking people to think about is we 've added a fourth r onto the front of the " reduce , reuse , recycle , " three r 's , and that is refuse .
whenever possible , refuse single-use and disposable plastics .
alternatives exist ; some of them are very old-school .
i myself am now collecting these cool pyrex containers and using those instead of glad and tupperware containers to store food in .
and i know that i am doing a service to myself and my family .
it 's very easy to pick up a stainless-steel bottle or a glass bottle , if you 're traveling and you 've forgotten to bring your stainless-steel bottle and fill that up with water or filtered water , versus purchasing plastic bottled water .
i guess what i want to say to everybody here - and i know that you guys know a lot about this issue - is that this is a huge problem in the oceans , but this is a problem that we 've created as consumers and we can solve .
we can solve this by raising awareness of the issue and teaching people to choose alternatives .
so whenever possible , to choose alternatives to single-use plastics .
we can cut the stem - tide the stem of this into our oceans and in doing so , save our oceans , save our planet , save ourselves .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- so , i 'm in chile , in the atacama desert , sitting in a hotel lobby , because that 's the only place that i can get a wi-fi connection , and i have this picture up on my screen , and a woman comes up behind me .
she says , " oh , that 's beautiful .
what is it ? is that jackson pollock ? "
and unfortunately , i can be a little too honest .
i said , " no , it 's - it 's penguin shit . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and , you know , " excuse me ! "
and i could sense that she thought i was speaking synecdochically .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , i said , " no , no , really - it 's penguin shit . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- because i had just been in the falkland islands taking pictures of penguins .
this is a gentoo penguin . and she was still skeptical .
so , literally , a few minutes before that , i downloaded this scientific paper about calculations on avian defecation , which is really quite interesting , because it turns out you can model this as something called " poiseuille flow , " and you can learn an awful lot about the physics of the avian rectum .
actually , technically , it 's not a rectum . it 's called a cloaca .
at this point , she stops me , and she says , " who are you ?
wha - what do you do ? "
and i was stuck , because i did n't have any way to describe what i do .
and so , in some sense , this talk today is my answer to that .
it 's a selection of a random bunch of the stuff that i do .
and it 's very hard for me to make sense of it , so i 'm not sure that you can .
it 's the kind of thing that i sit up late at night thinking about sometimes - often at four in the morning .
so , some people are afraid of what i do .
some people think i am the nerd tony soprano , and in response , i have ordered a bulletproof pocket protector .
i 'm not sure what these people think , because i do n't speak norsk .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but i 'm not thinking " monsteret " is a good thing .
i do n't know , you know ?
so , one of the things that i love to do is travel around the world and look at archaeological sites .
because archaeology gives us an opportunity to study past civilizations , and see where they succeeded and where they failed .
use science to , you know , work backwards and say , " well , really , what were they thinking ? "
and recently , i was in easter island , which is an incredibly beautiful place , and an incredibly mysterious place , because no matter where you go in easter island , you 're struck by these statues , called the moai .
the place is 64 square miles .
they made , so far as we can tell , 900 of them .
why on earth ? and if you have n't read jared diamond 's book , " collapse , " i totally recommend that you do .
he 's got a great chapter about it .
basically , these people committed ecological suicide in order to make more of these .
and somewhere along the line , somebody said , " i know ! let 's cut down the last tree and commit suicide , because we need more identical statues . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and , one thing that is n't a mystery , actually , was when i grew up - because when i was a little kid , i 'd seen these pictures - and i thought , " well , why that look on the face ?
why that brow ? " i mean , it 's such a powerful thing .
where did they get that inspiration ?
and then i met yoyo , who is the native rapa nui-an guide , and if you look at yoyo 's face , you kind of figure out where they got it .
there 's many mysteries , these statues .
everyone wants to know , how did they make them , how did they transport them ?
this woman in the foreground is jo anne van tilberg .
she 's the leading archaeologist working easter island today .
and she has studied the statues for 20-some years , and she has detailed records of every single statue .
the one on the page here is the same that 's up there .
one interesting problem is the stone is n't very hard .
so , this used to be completely smooth .
in fact , in many of the statues , when you excavate them , the backs are totally smooth - almost glass smooth .
but after 1,000 years out in the weather , they look like this .
jo anne and i have just embarked on a project to digitize them all , and we 're going to do a very high-res digitization , first because it 's a way of preserving them .
second , we have these ideas about how you can algorithmically , then , learn a few of the mysteries about them .
how long have they been standing in what positions ?
and maybe , indirectly , get at some of the issues of what caused them to be the way they are .
while i was in easter island , comet mcnaught was there also , so you get a gratuitous picture of a moai with a comet .
i also have an archaeological project going on in egypt .
" going on " is perhaps a little bit strong .
we 're trying to get all of the permissions to get everything all set , to get it going .
so , i 'll talk about it at a future ted .
but there 's some amazing opportunities in egypt as well .
another thing i do is i invent stuff .
in fact , i design nuclear reactors .
not a joke .
this is the conventional nuclear fuel cycle .
the red line is what is done in most nuclear reactors . it 's called the open fuel cycle .
the white lines are what 's called an advance fuel cycle , where you reprocess .
now , this is the normal way it 's done .
it 's got the huge advantage that it does not create carbon pollution .
it has a lot of disadvantages : each one of these steps is extremely expensive , it 's potentially dangerous and they have the interesting property that the step can not be performed in anyone 's backyard , which is a problem .
so , our reactor eliminates these steps , which , if we can actually make it work , is a really cool thing .
now , it 's kind of nuts to work on a new nuclear reactor .
there 's - no reactor 's been even built to an old design , much less a new one , in the united states for 25 years .
it 's the kind of very high-risk , but potentially very high-return thing that we do .
changing into a totally different field , we do a lot of stuff in solid state physics , particularly in an area called metamaterials .
a metamaterial is an artificial material , which manipulates , in this case , electromagnetic radiation , in a way that you could n't otherwise .
so , this device here is an invisibility cloak .
it may not seem that , but if you were a microwave , this is how you would view it .
rays of light - in this case , microwave light - come in , and they just squish around the cell , and they come back the other side .
now , you could do that with mirrors from one angle .
the cool thing is , this does it from all angles .
metamaterials , unfortunately - a , it only works on microwave , and b , it does n't work all that well yet .
but metamaterials are an incredibly exciting field .
it 's - you know , today i 'd like to say it 's a zero billion dollar business , but , in fact , it 's negative .
but some day , some day , maybe it 's going to work .
we do a lot of work in biomedical fields .
in this case , we 're working with a major medical foundation to develop inexpensive ways of diagnosing diseases in developing countries .
so , they say the eyes are the windows of the soul - turns out they 're a window to a whole lot more stuff .
and these happen to be my eyes , by the way .
now , i 'm also very interested in cooking .
while i was at microsoft , i took a leave of absence and went to a chef school in france .
i used to work , also while at microsoft , at a leading restaurant in seattle , so i do a lot of cooking .
i 've been on a team that won the world championship of barbecue .
but barbecue 's interesting , because it 's one of these cult foods like chili , or bouillabaisse .
various parts of the world will have a cult food that people get enormously attached to - there 's tremendous traditions , there 's secrecy .
and i 'm trying to use a very scientific approach .
so , this is my latest cooker , and if this looks more complicated than the nuclear reactor , that 's because it is .
but if you get to play with all those knobs and dials - and of course , really the controller over there does it all on software - you can make some terrific ribs .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this is a high-speed centrifuge .
you should all have one in your kitchen , beside your turbochef .
this subjects food to a force about 50,000 times that of normal gravity , and oh boy , does it clarify chicken stock .
you would not believe it !
i perform a series of ghoulish experiments on food - in this case , trying to calibrate a mathematical model so that one can predict exactly what the internal cooking times are .
it turns out , a , it 's useful , and for a geek like me , it 's fun .
theory is red , black is experiment .
so , i 'm either really good at faking it , or this particular model seems to work .
so , another random thing i do is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence , or seti .
and you may be familiar with the movie " contact , " which sort of popularized that .
it turns out there are real people who go out and search for extraterrestrials in a very scientific way .
in fact , almost everybody in the movie is based on a real character , a real person .
so , the jodie foster character here is actually this woman , jill tarter , and jill has dedicated her life to this .
you know , a lot of people risk their lives in a brief act of heroism , which is kind of cool , but jill has what i call slow heroism .
she is risking her professional life on something that her own calculations show may not work for a thousand years - may not ever .
so , i like to support people that are risking their lives .
after the movie came out , of course , there was a lot of interest in seti .
my kids saw the movie , and afterwards they came to me and they said , " so , dad , so - so - that character - that 's jill , right ? "
i said , " oh , yeah , yeah - absolutely . "
" and that other person , that 's someone - " i said , " yes . "
they said , " well , you know that creepy rich guy in the movie ?
is that you ? "
i said , " well , you know , it 's just a movie ! come on . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , the seti institute , with a little bit of help from me , and a lot of help from paul allen and a variety of other people , is building a dedicated radio telescope in hat creek , california , so they can do this seti work .
now , i travel a lot , and i change cell phones a lot , and the one person who always gets updated on all my cell phones and pagers and everything else is jill , because i really do n't want to miss " the call . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i mean , can you imagine ? e.t. 's phoning home , and i 'm not , like , there ? you know , horrible !
so , i do a lot of work on dinosaurs .
i 'm known to tedsters as the guy that has sex with dinosaurs .
and i resemble that remark .
i 'm going to talk about a different aspect of dinosaurs , which is the finding of them .
now , to find dinosaurs , you hike around in horrible conditions looking for a dinosaur .
it sounds really dumb , but that 's what it is .
it 's horrible conditions , because wherever you have nice weather , plants grow , and you do n't get any erosion , and you do n't see any dinosaurs .
so , you always find dinosaurs in deserts or badlands , areas that have very little plant growth and have flash floods in the spring .
you know , skiers pray for snow ?
paleontologists pray for erosion .
so , you hike around and - this is after you dig them up , they look like this .
you hike around , you see something like this .
now , this is something i found , so look at it very closely here .
you 've got this bentonite clay , which is - sort of swells up and expands .
and there 's some stuff poking out . so , you look at that , and you look up close , and you say , " well , gee , that 's kind of interesting . what are all of these pieces ? "
well , if you look closely , you can recognize , actually , from the shape , that these are skull fragments .
and then when you look at this , you say , " that 's a tooth .
it 's a big tooth . "
it 's about the size of a banana .
it has a big serration on the edge .
this is what tyrannosaurus rex looks like in the ground .
and this is what it 's like to find a tyrannosaurus rex , which i was lucky enough to do a few years ago .
now , this is what tyrannosaurus rex looks like in my living room .
not the same one , actually . this is a cast , which i had bought , and then , after buying the cast , i found my own , and i do n't have room for two .
you know .
so , the thing that 's wonderful for me about finding dinosaurs is that it is both an intellectual thing , because you 're trying to reconstruct the environment of millions of years ago .
it 's something that can inform all sorts of science in unexpected ways .
the study of dinosaurs led to the realization that there 's a problem with asteroid impact , for example .
the study of dinosaurs may , literally , one day save the planet .
study of the ancient climate is very important .
in fact , the mesozoic , when dinosaurs lived , had much higher co2 than today , was much warmer than today , and is one of the interesting proof points for the effects of co2 on climate .
but , besides being intellectually and scientifically interesting , it 's also very different than the other things i do , because you get to hike around in the badlands .
this is actually what most dinosaur research looks like .
this is one of my papers : " a pygostyle from a non-avian theropod . "
it 's not as gripping as dinosaur sex , so we 're not going to go into it further .
now , i 'm also really big on photography .
i travel all over the world taking pictures - some of them good , most of them not .
these days , bits are cheap . unfortunately , that means you 've got to spend more time sorting through them .
here 's a picture i took in the falkland islands of king penguins on a beach .
here 's a picture i took in alaska , a few years ago , of orcas .
i 'd gone up to photograph orcas , and we had looked for a week , and we had n't seen a damn orca .
and the last day , the sun comes out , the orcas come , they 're right by the boat . it 's fantastic .
and i get lots of pictures like this .
then , a little bit later , i start getting some pictures like this .
now , to a human audience , i need to explain that if penthouse magazine had a marine mammal edition , this would be the centerfold .
it 's true .
so , there 's more and more activity near the boat , and all of a sudden somebody shouts , " what 's that in the water ? "
i said , " well , i think that 's what you call a free willy . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- there 's a variety of things you can learn from watching whales have sex .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the first thing you learn is the overwhelming importance of hands .
they do n't have them .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i think paul simon is in the audience , and he has - he may not realize it , but he wrote a song all about whale sex , " slip-slidin ' away . "
that 's kind of what it 's like .
the other interesting thing that i learned about whale sex : they curl their toes too .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so - where do you go putting all of these disparate pieces together ?
you know , there 's a tremendous amount of wisdom in finding a great thing , passion in life , and focusing all your energy on it , and i 've never been able to do that .
i just - you know , because , yes , i 'll focus passion on something , but then there will be something else , and then there 's something else again .
and for a long time i fought this , and i thought , " well , gee , i really ought to buckle down . "
and you know , when i was at microsoft , that was so engrossing , and the whole industry was expanding so much , that it did tend to crowd out most of the other things in my life .
but ultimately , i decided that what i really ought to do is not fight being who i am , but embrace it .
and say , " yeah , you know , i - this whole talk has been a mile wide and an inch deep , but that 's really what works for me . "
and regardless of whether it 's nuclear reactors or metamaterials or whale sex , the common - or lowest common denominator - is me .
that 's it , thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- adrian kohler : well , we 're here today to talk about the evolution of a puppet horse .
basil jones : but actually we 're going to start this evolution with a hyena .
ak : the ancestor of the horse .
okay , we 'll do something with it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- hahahaha .
the hyena is the ancestor of the horse because it was part of a production called " faustus in africa , " a handspring production from 1995 , where it had to play draughts with helen of troy .
this production was directed by south african artist and theater director , william kentridge .
so it needed a very articulate front paw .
but , like all puppets , it has other attributes .
bj : one of them is breath , and it kind of breathes .
ak : haa haa haaa .
bj : breath is really important for us .
it 's the kind of original movement for any puppet for us onstage .
it 's the thing that distinguishes the puppet - ak : oops .
bj : from an actor .
puppets always have to try to be alive .
it 's their kind of ur-story onstage , that desperation to live .
ak : yeah , it 's basically a dead object , as you can see , and it only lives because you make it .
an actor struggles to die onstage , but a puppet has to struggle to live .
and in a way that 's a metaphor for life .
bj : so every moment it 's on the stage , it 's making the struggle .
so we call this a piece of emotional engineering that uses up-to-the-minute 17th century technology - -lrb- laughter -rrb- to turn nouns into verbs .
ak : well actually i prefer to say that it 's an object constructed out of wood and cloth with movement built into it to persuade you to believe that it has life .
bj : okay so .
ak : it has ears that move passively when the head goes .
bj : and it has these bulkheads made out of plywood , covered with fabric - curiously similar , in fact , to the plywood canoes that adrian 's father used to make when he was a boy in their workshop .
ak : in port elizabeth , the village outside port elizabeth in south africa .
bj : his mother was a puppeteer .
and when we met at art school and fell in love in 1971 , i hated puppets .
i really thought they were so beneath me .
i wanted to become an avant-garde artist - and punch and judy was certainly not where i wanted to go .
and , in fact , it took about 10 years to discover the bambara bamana puppets of mali in west africa , where there 's a fabulous tradition of puppetry , to learn a renewed , or a new , respect for this art form .
ak : so in 1981 , i persuaded basil and some friends of mine to form a puppet company .
and 20 years later , miraculously , we collaborated with a company from mali , the sogolon marionette troupe of bamako , where we made a piece about a tall giraffe .
it was just called " tall horse , " which was a life-sized giraffe .
bj : and here again , you see the same structure .
the bulkheads have now turned into hoops of cane , but it 's ultimately the same structure .
it 's got two people inside it on stilts , which give them the height , and somebody in the front who 's using a kind of steering wheel to move that head .
ak : the person in the hind legs is also controlling the tail , a bit like the hyena - same mechanism , just a bit bigger .
and he 's controlling the ear movement .
bj : so this production was seen by tom morris of the national theatre in london .
and just around that time , his mother had said , " have you seen this book by michael morpurgo called ' war horse ' ? "
ak : it 's about a boy who falls in love with a horse .
the horse is sold to the first world war , and he joins up to find his horse .
bj : so tom gave us a call and said , " do you think you could make us a horse for a show to happen at the national theatre ? "
ak : it seemed a lovely idea .
bj : but it had to ride . it had to have a rider .
ak : it had to have a rider , and it had to participate in cavalry charges .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- a play about early 20th century plowing technology and cavalry charges was a little bit of a challenge for the accounting department at the national theatre in london .
but they agreed to go along with it for a while .
so we began with a test .
bj : this is adrian and thys stander , who went on to actually design the cane system for the horse , and our next-door neighbor katherine , riding on a ladder .
the weight is really difficult when it 's up above your head .
ak : and once we put katherine through that particular brand of hell , we knew that we might be able to make a horse , which could be ridden .
so we made a model .
this is a cardboard model , a little bit smaller than the hyena .
you 'll notice that the legs are plywood legs and the canoe structure is still there .
bj : and the two manipulators are inside .
but we did n't realize at the time that we actually needed a third manipulator , because we could n't manipulate the neck from inside and walk the horse at the same time .
ak : we started work on the prototype after the model was approved , and the prototype took a bit longer than we anticipated .
we had to throw out the plywood legs and make new cane ones .
and we had a crate built for it .
it had to be shipped to london .
we were going to test-drive it on the street outside of our house in cape town , and it got to midnight and we had n't done that yet .
bj : so we got a camera , and we posed the puppet in various galloping stances .
and we sent it off to the national theatre , hoping that they believed that we created something that worked .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ak : a month later , we were there in london with this big box and a studio full of people about to work with us .
bj : about 40 people .
ak : we were terrified .
we opened the lid , we took the horse out , and it did work ; it walked and it was able to be ridden .
here i have an 18-second clip of the very first walk of the prototype .
this is in the national theatre studio , the place where they cook new ideas .
it had by no means got the green light yet .
the choreographer , toby sedgwick , invented a beautiful sequence where the baby horse , which was made out of sticks and bits of twigs , grew up into the big horse .
and nick starr , the director of the national theatre , saw that particular moment , he was standing next to me - he nearly wet himself .
and so the show was given the green light .
and we went back to cape town and redesigned the horse completely .
here is the plan .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and here is our factory in cape town where we make horses .
you can see quite a lot of skeletons in the background there .
the horses are completely handmade .
there is very little 20th century technology in them .
we used a bit of laser cutting on the plywood and some of the aluminum pieces .
but because they have to be light and flexible , and each one of them is different , they ca n't be mass-produced , unfortunately .
so here are some half-finished horses ready to be worked in london .
and now we would like to introduce you to joey .
joey boy , you there ?
joey .
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- joey .
joey , come here .
no , no , i have n't got it .
he 's got it ; it 's in his pocket .
bj : joey .
ak : joey , joey , joey , joey .
come here . stand here where people can see you .
move around . come on .
i 'd just like to describe - i wo n't talk too loud . he might get irritated .
here , craig is working the head .
he has bicycle brake cables going down to the head control in his hand .
each one of them operates either an ear , separately , or the head , up and down .
but he also controls the head directly by using his hand .
the ears are obviously a very important emotional indicator of the horse .
when they point right back , the horse is fearful or angry , depending upon what 's going on in front of him , around him .
or , when he 's more relaxed , the head comes down and the ears listen , either side .
horses ' hearing is very important .
it 's almost more important than their eyesight .
over here , tommy 's got what you call the heart position .
he 's working the leg .
you see the string tendon from the hyena , the hyena 's front leg , automatically pulls the hoop up .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- horses are so unpredictable .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the way a hoof comes up with a horse immediately gives you the feeling that it 's a convincing horse action .
the hind legs have got the same action .
bj : and mikey also has , in his fingers , the ability to move the tail from left to right , and up and down with the other hand .
and together , there 's quite a complex possibility of tail expression .
ak : you want to say something about the breathing ?
bj : we had a big challenge with breathing .
adrian thought that he was going to have to split the chest of the puppet in two and make it breathe like that - because that 's how a horse would breathe , with an expanded chest .
but we realized that , if that were to be happening , you would n't , as an audience , see the breath .
so he made a channel in here , and the chest moves up and down in that channel .
so it 's anti-naturalistic really , the up and down movement , but it feels like breath .
and it 's very , very simple because all that happens is that the puppeteer breathes with his knees .
ak : other emotional stuff .
if i were to touch the horse here on his skin , the heart puppeteer can shake the body from inside and get the skin to quiver .
you 'll notice , of course , that the puppet is made out of cane lines .
and i would like you to believe that it was an aesthetic choice , that i was making a three-dimensional drawing of a horse that somehow moves in space .
but of course , it was the cane is light , and the cane is moldable .
and so it was a very practical reason why it was made of cane .
the skin itself is made out of a see-through nylon mesh , which , if the lighting designer wants the horse to almost disappear , she can light the background and the horse becomes ghostlike .
you see the skeletal structure of it .
or if you light it from above , it becomes more solid .
again , that was a practical consideration .
the guys inside the horse have to be able to see out .
they have to be able to act and it 's very much an in-the-moment activity that they 're engaged in .
it 's three heads making one character .
but now we would like you to put joey through some paces .
and plant .
-lrb- whinny -rrb- thank you .
and now just - -lrb- applause -rrb- all the way from sunny california we have zem joaquin who 's going to ride the horse for us .
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- music -rrb- so we would like to stress that the performance you see in the horse is three guys who have studied horse behavior incredibly thoroughly .
bj : not being able to talk to one another while they 're onstage because they 're mic 'd .
the sound that that very large chest makes , of the horse - the whinnying and the nickering and everything - that starts usually with one performer , carries on with a second person and ends with a third .
ak : mikey brett from leicestershire .
-lrb- applause -rrb- mikey brett , craig , leo , zem joaquin and basil and me .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- well , this is such an honor . and it 's wonderful to be in the presence of an organization that is really making a difference in the world .
and i 'm intensely grateful for the opportunity to speak to you today .
and i 'm also rather surprised , because when i look back on my life the last thing i ever wanted to do was write , or be in any way involved in religion .
after i left my convent , i 'd finished with religion , frankly .
i thought that was it .
and for 13 years i kept clear of it . i wanted to be an english literature professor .
and i certainly did n't even want to be a writer , particularly .
but then i suffered a series of career catastrophes , one after the other , and finally found myself in television . -lrb- laughter -rrb- i said that to bill moyers , and he said , " oh , we take anybody . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- and i was doing some rather controversial religious programs .
this went down very well in the u.k. , where religion is extremely unpopular .
and so , for once , for the only time in my life , i was finally in the mainstream .
but i got sent to jerusalem to make a film about early christianity .
and there , for the first time , i encountered the other religious traditions : judaism and islam , the sister religions of christianity .
and while i found i knew nothing about these faiths at all - despite my own intensely religious background , i 'd seen judaism only as a kind of prelude to christianity , and i knew nothing about islam at all .
but in that city , that tortured city , where you see the three faiths jostling so uneasily together , you also become aware of the profound connection between them .
and it has been the study of other religious traditions that brought me back to a sense of what religion can be , and actually enabled me to look at my own faith in a different light .
and i found some astonishing things in the course of my study that had never occurred to me . frankly , in the days when i thought i 'd had it with religion , i just found the whole thing absolutely incredible .
these doctrines seemed unproven , abstract .
and to my astonishment , when i began seriously studying other traditions , i began to realize that belief - which we make such a fuss about today - is only a very recent religious enthusiasm that surfaced only in the west , in about the 17th century .
the word " belief " itself originally meant to love , to prize , to hold dear .
in the 17th century , it narrowed its focus , for reasons that i 'm exploring in a book i 'm writing at the moment , to include - to mean an intellectual assent to a set of propositions , a credo .
" i believe : " it did not mean , " i accept certain creedal articles of faith . "
it meant : " i commit myself . i engage myself . "
indeed , some of the world traditions think very little of religious orthodoxy .
in the quran , religious opinion - religious orthodoxy - is dismissed as " zanna : " self-indulgent guesswork about matters that nobody can be certain of one way or the other , but which makes people quarrelsome and stupidly sectarian . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so if religion is not about believing things , what is it about ?
what i 've found , across the board , is that religion is about behaving differently .
instead of deciding whether or not you believe in god , first you do something .
you behave in a committed way , and then you begin to understand the truths of religion .
and religious doctrines are meant to be summons to action ; you only understand them when you put them into practice .
now , pride of place in this practice is given to compassion .
and it is an arresting fact that right across the board , in every single one of the major world faiths , compassion - the ability to feel with the other in the way we 've been thinking about this evening - is not only the test of any true religiosity , it is also what will bring us into the presence of what jews , christians and muslims call " god " or the " divine . "
it is compassion , says the buddha , which brings you to nirvana .
why ? because in compassion , when we feel with the other , we dethrone ourselves from the center of our world and we put another person there . and once we get rid of ego , then we 're ready to see the divine .
and in particular , every single one of the major world traditions has highlighted - has said - and put at the core of their tradition what 's become known as the golden rule .
first propounded by confucius five centuries before christ : " do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you . "
that , he said , was the central thread which ran through all his teaching and that his disciples should put into practice all day and every day .
and it was - the golden rule would bring them to the transcendent value that he called " ren , " human-heartedness , which was a transcendent experience in itself .
and this is absolutely crucial to the monotheisms , too .
there 's a famous story about the great rabbi , hillel , the older contemporary of jesus .
a pagan came to him and offered to convert to judaism if the rabbi could recite the whole of jewish teaching while he stood on one leg .
hillel stood on one leg and said , " that which is hateful to you , do not do to your neighbor . that is the torah . the rest is commentary .
go and study it . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- and " go and study it " was what he meant .
he said , " in your exegesis , you must make it clear that every single verse of the torah is a commentary , a gloss upon the golden rule . "
the great rabbi meir said that any interpretation of scripture which led to hatred and disdain , or contempt of other people - any people whatsoever - was illegitimate .
saint augustine made exactly the same point .
scripture , he says , " teaches nothing but charity , and we must not leave an interpretation of scripture until we have found a compassionate interpretation of it . "
and this struggle to find compassion in some of these rather rebarbative texts is a good dress rehearsal for doing the same in ordinary life . -lrb- applause -rrb- but now look at our world . and we are living in a world that is - where religion has been hijacked . where terrorists cite quranic verses to justify their atrocities .
where instead of taking jesus ' words , " love your enemies .
do n't judge others , " we have the spectacle of christians endlessly judging other people , endlessly using scripture as a way of arguing with other people , putting other people down . throughout the ages , religion has been used to oppress others , and this is because of human ego , human greed .
we have a talent as a species for messing up wonderful things .
so the traditions also insisted - and this is an important point , i think - that you could not and must not confine your compassion to your own group : your own nation , your own co-religionists , your own fellow countrymen . you must have what one of the chinese sages called " jian ai " : concern for everybody . love your enemies . honor the stranger .
we formed you , says the quran , into tribes and nations so that you may know one another .
and this , again - this universal outreach - is getting subdued in the strident use of religion - abuse of religion - for nefarious gains .
now , i 've lost count of the number of taxi drivers who , when i say to them what i do for a living , inform me that religion has been the cause of all the major world wars in history . wrong .
the causes of our present woes are political .
but , make no mistake about it , religion is a kind of fault line , and when a conflict gets ingrained in a region , religion can get sucked in and become part of the problem . our modernity has been exceedingly violent .
between 1914 and 1945 , 70 million people died in europe alone as a result of armed conflict .
and so many of our institutions , even football , which used to be a pleasant pastime , now causes riots where people even die .
and it 's not surprising that religion , too , has been affected by this violent ethos .
there 's also a great deal , i think , of religious illiteracy around .
people seem to think , now equate religious faith with believing things .
as though that - we call religious people often believers , as though that were the main thing that they do . and very often , secondary goals get pushed into the first place , in place of compassion and the golden rule .
because the golden rule is difficult . i sometimes - when i 'm speaking to congregations about compassion , i sometimes see a mutinous expression crossing some of their faces because a lot of religious people prefer to be right , rather than compassionate . -lrb- laughter -rrb- now - but that 's not the whole story .
since september the 11th , when my work on islam suddenly propelled me into public life , in a way that i 'd never imagined , i 've been able to sort of go all over the world , and finding , everywhere i go , a yearning for change .
i 've just come back from pakistan , where literally thousands of people came to my lectures , because they were yearning , first of all , to hear a friendly western voice .
and especially the young people were coming . and were asking me - the young people were saying , " what can we do ? what can we do to change things ? "
and my hosts in pakistan said , " look , do n't be too polite to us .
tell us where we 're going wrong . let 's talk together about where religion is failing . "
because it seems to me that with - our current situation is so serious at the moment that any ideology that does n't promote a sense of global understanding and global appreciation of each other is failing the test of the time .
and religion , with its wide following ... here in the united states , people may be being religious in a different way , as a report has just shown - but they still want to be religious . it 's only western europe that has retained its secularism , which is now beginning to look rather endearingly old-fashioned .
but people want to be religious , and religion should be made to be a force for harmony in the world , which it can and should be - because of the golden rule .
" do not do to others what you would not have them do to you " : an ethos that should now be applied globally .
we should not treat other nations as we would not wish to be treated ourselves .
and these - whatever our wretched beliefs - is a religious matter , it 's a spiritual matter .
it 's a profound moral matter that engages and should engage us all .
and as i say , there is a hunger for change out there .
here in the united states , i think you see it in this election campaign : a longing for change .
and people in churches all over and mosques all over this continent after september the 11th , coming together locally to create networks of understanding .
with the mosque , with the synagogue , saying , " we must start to speak to one another . "
i think it 's time that we moved beyond the idea of toleration and move toward appreciation of the other .
i 'd - there 's one story i 'd just like to mention .
this comes from " the iliad . " but it tells you what this spirituality should be .
you know the story of " the iliad , " the 10-year war between greece and troy .
in one incident , achilles , the famous warrior of greece , takes his troops out of the war , and the whole war effort suffers . and in the course of the ensuing muddle , his beloved friend , patroclus , is killed - and killed in single combat by one of the trojan princes , hector . and achilles goes mad with grief and rage and revenge , and he mutilates the body . he kills hector , he mutilates his body and then he refuses to give the body back for burial to the family , which means that , in greek ethos , hector 's soul will wander eternally , lost .
and then one night , priam , king of troy , an old man , comes into the greek camp incognito , makes his way to achilles ' tent to ask for the body of his son .
and everybody is shocked when the old man takes off his head covering and shows himself .
and achilles looks at him and thinks of his father . and he starts to weep .
and priam looks at the man who has murdered so many of his sons , and he , too , starts to weep . and the sound of their weeping filled the house .
the greeks believed that weeping together created a bond between people .
and then achilles takes the body of hector , he hands it very tenderly to the father , and the two men look at each other , and see each other as divine .
that is the ethos found , too , in all the religions .
it 's what is meant by overcoming the horror that we feel when we are under threat of our enemies , and beginning to appreciate the other .
it 's of great importance that the word for " holy " in hebrew , applied to god , is " kadosh " : separate , other .
and it is often , perhaps , the very otherness of our enemies which can give us intimations of that utterly mysterious transcendence which is god .
and now , here 's my wish : i wish that you would help with the creation , launch and propagation of a charter for compassion , crafted by a group of inspirational thinkers from the three abrahamic traditions of judaism , christianity and islam , and based on the fundamental principle of the golden rule .
we need to create a movement among all these people that i meet in my travels - you probably meet , too - who want to join up , in some way , and reclaim their faith , which they feel , as i say , has been hijacked .
we need to empower people to remember the compassionate ethos , and to give guidelines . this charter would not be a massive document .
i 'd like to see it - to give guidelines as to how to interpret the scriptures , these texts that are being abused . remember what the rabbis and what augustine said about how scripture should be governed by the principle of charity .
let 's get back to that . and the idea , too , of jews , christians and muslims - these traditions now so often at loggerheads - working together to create a document which we hope will be signed by a thousand , at least , of major religious leaders from all the traditions of the world .
and you are the people . i 'm just a solitary scholar .
despite the idea that i love a good time , which i was rather amazed to see coming up on me - i actually spend a great deal of time alone , studying , and i 'm not very - you 're the people with media knowledge to explain to me how we can get this to everybody , everybody on the planet . i 've had some preliminary talks , and archbishop desmond tutu , for example , is very happy to give his name to this , as is imam feisal rauf , the imam in new york city .
also , i would be working with the alliance of civilizations at the united nations .
i was part of that united nations initiative called the alliance of civilizations , which was asked by kofi annan to diagnose the causes of extremism , and to give practical guidelines to member states about how to avoid the escalation of further extremism .
and the alliance has told me that they are very happy to work with it .
the importance of this is that this is - i can see some of you starting to look worried , because you think it 's a slow and cumbersome body - but what the united nations can do is give us some neutrality , so that this is n't seen as a western or a christian initiative , but that it 's coming , as it were , from the united nations , from the world - who would help with the sort of bureaucracy of this .
and so i do urge you to join me in making - in this charter - to building this charter , launching it and propagating it so that it becomes - i 'd like to see it in every college , every church , every mosque , every synagogue in the world , so that people can look at their tradition , reclaim it , and make religion a source of peace in the world , which it can and should be . thank you very much . -lrb- applause -rrb- when i was little - and by the way , i was little once - my father told me a story about an 18th century watchmaker .
and what this guy had done : he used to produce these fabulously beautiful watches .
and one day , one of his customers came into his workshop and asked him to clean the watch that he 'd bought .
and the guy took it apart , and one of the things he pulled out was one of the balance wheels .
and as he did so , his customer noticed that on the back side of the balance wheel was an engraving , were words .
and he said to the guy , " why have you put stuff on the back that no one will ever see ? "
and the watchmaker turned around and said , " god can see it . "
now i 'm not in the least bit religious , neither was my father , but at that point , i noticed something happening here .
i felt something in this plexus of blood vessels and nerves , and there must be some muscles in there as well somewhere , i guess .
but i felt something .
and it was a physiological response .
and from that point on , from my age at the time , i began to think of things in a different way .
and as i took on my career as a designer , i began to ask myself the simple question : do we actually think beauty , or do we feel it ?
now you probably know the answer to this already .
you probably think , well , i do n't know which one you think it is , but i think it 's about feeling beauty .
and so i then moved on into my design career and began to find some exciting things .
one of the most early work was done in automotive design - some very exciting work was done there .
and during a lot of this work , we found something , or i found something , that really fascinated me , and maybe you can remember it .
do you remember when lights used to just go on and off , click click , when you closed the door in a car ?
and then somebody , i think it was bmw , introduced a light that went out slowly .
remember that ?
i remember it clearly .
do you remember the first time you were in a car and it did that ?
i remember sitting there thinking , this is fantastic .
in fact , i 've never found anybody that does n't like the light that goes out slowly .
i thought , well what the hell 's that about ?
so i started to ask myself questions about it .
and the first was , i 'd ask other people : " do you like it ? " " yes . "
" why ? " and they 'd say , " oh , it feels so natural , " or , " it 's nice . "
i thought , well that 's not good enough .
can we cut down a little bit further , because , as a designer , i need the vocabulary , i need the keyboard , of how this actually works .
and so i did some experiments .
and i suddenly realized that there was something that did exactly that - light to dark in six seconds - exactly that .
do you know what it is ? anyone ?
you see , using this bit , the thinky bit , the slow bit of the brain - using that .
and this is n't a think , it 's a feel .
and would you do me a favor ?
for the next 14 minutes or whatever it is , will you feel stuff ?
i do n't need you to think so much as i want you to feel it .
i felt a sense of relaxation tempered with anticipation .
and that thing that i found was the cinema or the theater .
it 's actually just happened here - light to dark in six seconds .
and when that happens , are you sitting there going , " no , the movie 's about to start , " or are you going , " that 's fantastic . i 'm looking forward to it .
i get a sense of anticipation " ?
now i 'm not a neuroscientist .
i do n't know even if there is something called a conditioned reflex .
but it might be .
because the people i speak to in the northern hemisphere that used to go in the cinema get this .
and some of the people i speak to that have never seen a movie or been to the theater do n't get it in the same way .
everybody likes it , but some like it more than others .
so this leads me to think of this in a different way .
we 're not feeling it . we 're thinking beauty is in the limbic system - if that 's not an outmoded idea .
these are the bits , the pleasure centers , and maybe what i 'm seeing and sensing and feeling is bypassing my thinking .
the wiring from your sensory apparatus to those bits is shorter than the bits that have to pass through the thinky bit , the cortex .
they arrive first .
so how do we make that actually work ?
and how much of that reactive side of it is due to what we already know , or what we 're going to learn , about something ?
this is one of the most beautiful things i know .
it 's a plastic bag .
and when i looked at it first , i thought , no , there 's no beauty in that .
then i found out , post exposure , that this plastic bag if i put it into a filthy puddle or a stream filled with coliforms and all sorts of disgusting stuff , that that filthy water will migrate through the wall of the bag by osmosis and end up inside it as pure , potable drinking water .
and all of a sudden , this plastic bag was extremely beautiful to me .
now i 'm going to ask you again to switch on the emotional bit .
would you mind taking the brain out , and i just want you to feel something .
look at that . what are you feeling about it ?
is it beautiful ? is it exciting ?
i 'm watching your faces very carefully .
there 's some rather bored-looking gentlemen and some slightly engaged-looking ladies who are picking up something off that .
maybe there 's an innocence to it .
now i 'm going to tell you what it is . are you ready ?
this is the last act on this earth of a little girl called heidi , five years old , before she died of cancer to the spine .
it 's the last thing she did , the last physical act .
look at that picture .
look at the innocence . look at the beauty in it .
is it beautiful now ?
stop . stop . how do you feel ?
where are you feeling this ?
i 'm feeling it here . i feel it here .
and i 'm watching your faces , because your faces are telling me something .
the lady over there is actually crying , by the way .
but what are you doing ?
i watch what people do .
i watch faces .
i watch reactions .
because i have to know how people react to things .
and one of the most common faces on something faced with beauty , something stupefyingly delicious , is what i call the omg .
and by the way , there 's no pleasure in that face .
it 's not a " this is wonderful ! "
the eyebrows are doing this , the eyes are defocused , and the mouth is hanging open .
that 's not the expression of joy .
there 's something else in that .
there 's something weird happening .
so pleasure seems to be tempered by a whole series of different things coming in .
poignancy is a word i love as a designer .
it means something triggering a big emotional response , often quite a sad emotional response , but it 's part of what we do .
it is n't just about nice .
and this is the dilemma , this is the paradox , of beauty .
sensorily , we 're taking in all sorts of things - mixtures of things that are good , bad , exciting , frightening - to come up with that sensorial exposure , that sensation of what 's going on .
pathos appears obviously as part of what you just saw in that little girl 's drawing .
and also triumph , this sense of transcendence , this " i never knew that . ah , this is something new . "
and that 's packed in there as well .
and as we assemble these tools , from a design point of view , i get terribly excited about it , because these are things , as we 've already said , they 're arriving at the brain , it would seem , before cognition , before we can manipulate them - electrochemical party tricks .
now what i 'm also interested in is : is it possible to separate intrinsic and extrinsic beauty ?
by that , i mean intrinsically beautiful things , just something that 's exquisitely beautiful , that 's universally beautiful .
very hard to find . maybe you 've got some examples of it .
very hard to find something that , to everybody , is a very beautiful thing , without a certain amount of information packed in there before .
so a lot of it tends to be extrinsic .
it 's mediated by information before the comprehension .
or the information 's added on at the back , like that little girl 's drawing that i showed you .
now when talking about beauty you ca n't get away from the fact that a lot experiments have been done in this way with faces and what have you .
and one of the most tedious ones , i think , was saying that beauty was about symmetry .
well it obviously is n't .
this is a more interesting one where half faces were shown to some people , and then to add them into a list of most beautiful to least beautiful and then exposing a full face .
and they found that it was almost exact coincidence .
so it was n't about symmetry .
in fact , this lady has a particularly asymmetrical face , of which both sides are beautiful .
but they 're both different .
and as a designer , i ca n't help meddling with this , so i pulled it to bits and sort of did stuff like this , and tried to understand what the individual elements were , but feeling it as i go .
now i can feel a sensation of delight and beauty if i look at that eye .
i 'm not getting it off the eyebrow .
and the earhole is n't doing it to me at all .
so i do n't know how much this is helping me , but it 's helping to guide me to the places where the signals are coming off .
and as i say , i 'm not a neuroscientist , but to understand how i can start to assemble things that will very quickly bypass this thinking part and get me to the enjoyable precognitive elements .
anais nin and the talmud have told us time and time again that we see things not as they are , but as we are .
so i 'm going to shamelessly expose something to you , which is beautiful to me .
and this is the f1 mv agusta .
ahhhh .
it is really - i mean , i ca n't express to you how exquisite this object is .
but i also know why it 's exquisite to me , because it 's a palimpsest of things .
it 's masses and masses of layers .
this is just the bit that protrudes into our physical dimension .
it 's something much bigger .
layer after layer of legend , sport , details that resonate .
i mean , if i just go through some of them now - i know about laminar flow when it comes to air-piercing objects , and that does it consummately well , you can see it can .
so that 's getting me excited .
and i feel that here .
this bit , the big secret of automotive design - reflection management .
it 's not about the shapes , it 's how the shapes reflect light .
now that thing , light flickers across it as you move , so it becomes a kinetic object , even though it 's standing still - managed by how brilliantly that 's done on the reflection .
this little relief on the footplate , by the way , to a rider means there 's something going on underneath it - in this case , a drive chain running at 300 miles and hour probably , taking the power from the engine .
i 'm getting terribly excited as my mind and my eyes flick across these things .
titanium lacquer on this .
i ca n't tell you how wonderful this is .
that 's how you stop the nuts coming off at high speed on the wheel .
i 'm really getting into this now .
and of course , a racing bike does n't have a prop stand , but this one , because it 's a road bike , it all goes away and it folds into this little gap .
so it disappears .
and then i ca n't tell you how hard it is to do that radiator , which is curved .
why would you do that ?
because i know we need to bring the wheel farther into the aerodynamics .
so it 's more expensive , but it 's wonderful .
and to cap it all , brand royalty - agusta , count agusta , from the great histories of this stuff .
the bit that you ca n't see is the genius that created this .
massimo tamburini .
they call him " the plumber " in italy , as well as " maestro , " because he actually is engineer and craftsman and sculptor at the same time .
there 's so little compromise on this , you ca n't see it .
but unfortunately , the likes of me and people that are like me have to deal with compromise all the time with beauty .
we have to deal with it .
so i have to work with a supply chain , and i 've got to work with the technologies , and i 've got to work with everything else all the time , and so compromises start to fit into it .
and so look at her .
i 've had to make a bit of a compromise there .
i 've had to move that part across , but only a millimeter .
no one 's noticed , have they yet ?
did you see what i did ?
i moved three things by a millimeter .
pretty ? yes .
beautiful ? maybe lesser .
but then , of course , the consumer says that does n't really matter .
so that 's okay , is n't it ?
another millimeter ?
no one 's going to notice those split lines and changes .
it 's that easy to lose beauty , because beauty 's incredibly difficult to do .
and only a few people can do it .
and a focus group can not do it .
and a team rarely can do it .
it takes a central cortex , if you like , to be able to orchestrate all those elements at the same time .
this is a beautiful water bottle - some of you know of it - done by ross lovegrove , the designer .
this is pretty close to intrinsic beauty . this one , as long as you know what water is like then you can experience this .
it 's lovely because it is an embodiment of something refreshing and delicious .
i might like it more than you like it , because i know how bloody hard it is to do it .
it 's stupefyingly difficult to make something that refracts light like that , that comes out of the tool correctly , that goes down the line without falling over .
underneath this , like the story of the swan , is a million things very difficult to do .
so all hail to that .
it 's a fantastic example , a simple object .
and the one i showed you before was , of course , a massively complex one .
and they 're working in beauty in slightly different ways because of it .
you all , i guess , like me , enjoy watching a ballet dancer dance .
and part of the joy of it is , you know the difficulty .
you also may be taking into account the fact that it 's incredibly painful .
anybody seen a ballet dancer 's toes when they come out of the points ?
while she 's doing these graceful arabesques and plies and what have you , something horrible 's going on down here .
the comprehension of it leads us to a greater and heightened sense of the beauty of what 's actually going on .
now i 'm using microseconds wrongly here , so please ignore me .
but what i have to do now , feeling again , what i 've got to do is to be able to supply enough of these enzymes , of these triggers into something early on in the process , that you pick it up , not through your thinking , but through your feeling .
so we 're going to have a little experiment .
right , are you ready ? i 'm going to show you something for a very , very brief moment .
are you ready ? okay .
did you think that was a bicycle when i showed it to you at the first flash ?
it 's not .
tell me something , did you think it was quick when you first saw it ? yes you did .
did you think it was modern ? yes you did .
that blip , that information , shot into you before that .
and because your brain starter motor began there , now it 's got to deal with it .
and the great thing is , this motorcycle has been styled this way specifically to engender a sense that it 's green technology and it 's good for you and it 's light and it 's all part of the future .
so is that wrong ?
well in this case it is n't , because it 's a very , very ecologically-sound piece of technology .
but you 're a slave of that first flash .
we are slaves to the first few fractions of a second - and that 's where much of my work has to win or lose , on a shelf in a shop .
it wins or loses at that point .
you may see 50 , 100 , 200 things on a shelf as you walk down it , but i have to work within that domain , to ensure that it gets you there first .
and finally , the layer that i love , of knowledge .
some of you , i 'm sure , will be familiar with this .
what 's incredible about this , and the way i love to come back to it , is this is taking something that you hate or bores you , folding clothes , and if you can actually do this - who can actually do this ? anybody try to do this ?
yeah ?
it 's fantastic , is n't it ?
look at that . do you want to see it again ?
no time . it says i have two minutes left , so we ca n't do this .
but just go to the web , youtube , pull it down , " folding t-shirt . "
that 's how underpaid younger-aged people have to fold your t-shirt .
you did n't maybe know it .
but how do you feel about it ?
it feels fantastic when you do it , you look forward to doing it , and when you tell somebody else about it - like you probably have - you look really smart .
the knowledge bubble that sits around the outside , the stuff that costs nothing , because that knowledge is free - bundle that together and where do we come out ?
form follows function ?
only sometimes . only sometimes .
form is function . form is function .
it informs , it tells us , it supplies us answers before we 've even thought about it .
and so i 've stopped using words like " form , " and i 've stopped using words like " function " as a designer .
what i try to pursue now is the emotional functionality of things .
because if i can get that right , i can make them wonderful , and i can make them repeatedly wonderful .
and you know what those products and services are , because you own some of them .
they 're the things that you 'd snatch if the house was on fire .
forming the emotional bond between this thing and you is an electrochemical party trick that happens before you even think about it .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- you may have heard about the koran 's idea of paradise being 72 virgins , and i promise i will come back to those virgins .
but in fact , here in the northwest , we 're living very close to the real koranic idea of paradise , defined 36 times as " gardens watered by running streams . "
since i live on a houseboat on the running stream of lake union , this makes perfect sense to me .
but the thing is , how come it 's news to most people ?
i know many well-intentioned non-muslims who 've begun reading the koran , but given up , disconcerted by its " otherness . "
the historian thomas carlyle considered muhammad one of the world 's greatest heroes , yet even he called the koran " as toilsome reading as i ever undertook , a wearisome , confused jumble . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- part of the problem , i think , is that we imagine that the koran can be read as we usually read a book - as though we can curl up with it on a rainy afternoon with a bowl of popcorn within reach , as though god - and the koran is entirely in the voice of god speaking to muhammad - were just another author on the bestseller list .
yet the fact that so few people do actually read the koran is precisely why it 's so easy to quote - that is , to misquote .
phrases and snippets taken out of context in what i call the " highlighter version , " which is the one favored by both muslim fundamentalists and anti-muslim islamophobes .
so this past spring , as i was gearing up to begin writing a biography of muhammad , i realized i needed to read the koran properly - as properly as i could , that is .
my arabic 's reduced by now to wielding a dictionary , so i took four well-known translations and decided to read them side-by-side , verse-by-verse along with a transliteration and the original seventh-century arabic .
now i did have an advantage .
my last book was about the story behind the shi 'a-sunni split , and for that i 'd worked closely with the earliest islamic histories , so i knew the events to which the koran constantly refers , its frame of reference .
i knew enough , that is , to know that i 'd be a tourist in the koran - an informed one , an experienced one even , but still an outsider , an agnostic jew reading some else 's holy book .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i read slowly .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'd set aside three weeks for this project , and that , i think , is what is meant by " hubris " - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - because it turned out to be three months .
i did resist the temptation to skip to the back where the shorter and more clearly mystical chapters are .
but every time i thought i was beginning to get a handle on the koran - that feeling of " i get it now " - it would slip away overnight , and i 'd come back in the morning wondering if i was n't lost in a strange land , and yet the terrain was very familiar .
the koran declares that it comes to renew the message of the torah and the gospels .
so one-third of it reprises the stories of biblical figures like abraham , moses , joseph , mary , jesus .
god himself was utterly familiar from his earlier manifestation as yahweh - jealously insisting on no other gods .
the presence of camels , mountains , desert wells and springs took me back to the year i spent wandering the sinai desert .
and then there was the language , the rhythmic cadence of it , reminding me of evenings spent listening to bedouin elders recite hours-long narrative poems entirely from memory .
and i began to grasp why it 's said that the koran is really the koran only in arabic .
take the fatihah , the seven-verse opening chapter that is the lord 's prayer and the shema yisrael of islam combined .
it 's just 29 words in arabic , but anywhere from 65 to 72 in translation .
and yet the more you add , the more seems to go missing .
the arabic has an incantatory , almost hypnotic , quality that begs to be heard rather than read , felt more than analyzed .
it wants to be chanted out loud , to sound its music in the ear and on the tongue .
so the koran in english is a kind of shadow of itself , or as arthur arberry called his version , " an interpretation . "
but all is not lost in translation .
as the koran promises , patience is rewarded , and there are many surprises - a degree of environmental awareness , for instance , and of humans as mere stewards of god 's creation , unmatched in the bible .
and where the bible is addressed exclusively to men , using the second and third person masculine , the koran includes women - talking , for instance , of believing men and believing women , honorable men and honorable women .
or take the infamous verse about killing the unbelievers .
yes , it does say that , but in a very specific context : the anticipated conquest of the sanctuary city of mecca where fighting was usually forbidden , and the permission comes hedged about with qualifiers .
not " you must kill unbelievers in mecca , " but you can , you are allowed to , but only after a grace period is over and only if there 's no other pact in place and only if they try to stop you getting to the kaaba , and only if they attack you first .
and even then - god is merciful ; forgiveness is supreme - and so , essentially , better if you do n't .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this was perhaps the biggest surprise - how flexible the koran is , at least in minds that are not fundamentally inflexible .
" some of these verses are definite in meaning , " it says , " and others are ambiguous . "
the perverse at heart will seek out the ambiguities , trying to create discord by pinning down meanings of their own .
only god knows the true meaning .
the phrase " god is subtle " appears again and again , and indeed , the whole of the koran is far more subtle than most of us have been led to believe .
as in , for instance , that little matter of virgins and paradise .
old-fashioned orientalism comes into play here .
the word used four times is houris , rendered as dark-eyed maidens with swelling breasts , or as fair , high-bosomed virgins .
yet all there is in the original arabic is that one word : houris .
not a swelling breast nor a high bosom in sight .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now this may be a way of saying " pure beings " - like in angels - or it may be like the greek kouros or kórē , an eternal youth .
but the truth is nobody really knows , and that 's the point .
because the koran is quite clear when it says that you 'll be " a new creation in paradise " and that you will be " recreated in a form unknown to you , " which seems to me a far more appealing prospect than a virgin .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and that number 72 never appears .
there are no 72 virgins in the koran .
that idea only came into being 300 years later , and most islamic scholars see it as the equivalent of people with wings sitting on clouds and strumming harps .
paradise is quite the opposite .
it 's not virginity ; it 's fecundity .
it 's plenty .
it 's gardens watered by running streams .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this song is one of thomas ' favorites , called " what you do with what you 've got . "
♫ you must know someone like him ♫ ♫ he was tall and strong and lean ♫ ♫ with a body like a greyhound ♫ ♫ and a mind so sharp and keen ♫ ♫ but his heart , just like laurel ♫ ♫ grew twisted around itself ♫ ♫ till almost everything he did ♫ ♫ brought pain to someone else ♫ ♫ it 's not just what you 're born with ♫ ♫ it 's what you choose to bear ♫ ♫ it 's not how big your share is ♫ ♫ it 's how much you can share ♫
♫ it 's not the fights you dreamed of ♫ ♫ it 's those you really fought ♫ ♫ it 's not what you 've been given ♫ ♫ it 's what you do with what you 've got ♫ ♫ what 's the use of two strong legs ♫ ♫ if you only run away ? ♫ ♫ and what 's the use of the finest voice ♫ ♫ if you 've nothing good to say ? ♫ ♫ what 's the use of strength and muscle ♫ ♫ if you only push and shove ? ♫ ♫ and what 's the use of two good ears ♫ ♫ if you ca n't hear those you love ? ♫
♫ what 's the use of two strong legs ♫ ♫ if you only run away ? ♫ ♫ and what 's the use of the finest voice ♫ ♫ if you 've nothing good to say ? ♫ ♫ what 's the use of strength and muscle ♫ ♫ if you only push and shove ? ♫ ♫ and what 's the use of two good ears ♫ ♫ if you ca n't hear those you love ? ♫ ♫ between those who use their neighbors ♫ ♫ and those who use the cane ♫ ♫ between those in constant power ♫ ♫ and those in constant pain ♫
♫ between those who run to glory ♫ ♫ and those who can not run ♫ ♫ tell me which ones are the cripples ♫ ♫ and which ones touch the sun ♫ ♫ which ones touch the sun ♫ ♫ which ones touch the sun ♫ in 1994 , i walked into a prison in cambodia , and i met a 12-year-old boy who had been tortured and was denied access to counsel .
and as i looked into his eyes , i realized that for the hundreds of letters i had written for political prisoners , that i would never have written a letter for him , because he was not a 12-year-old boy who had done something important for anybody .
he was not a political prisoner .
he was a 12-year-old boy who had stolen a bicycle .
what i also realized at that point was that it was not only cambodia , but of the 113 developing countries that torture , 93 of these countries have all passed laws that say you have a right to a lawyer and you have a right not to be tortured .
and what i recognized was that there was an incredible window of opportunity for us as a world community to come together and end torture as an investigative tool .
we often think of torture as being political torture or reserved for just the worst , but , in fact , 95 percent of torture today is not for political prisoners .
it is for people who are in broken-down legal systems , and unfortunately because torture is the cheapest form of investigation - it 's cheaper than having a legal system , cheaper than having a lawyer and early access to counsel - it is what happens most of the time .
i believe today that it is possible for us as a world community , if we make a decision , to come together and end torture as an investigative tool in our lifetime , but it will require three things .
first is the training , empowerment , and connection of defenders worldwide .
the second is insuring that there is systematic early access to counsel .
and the third is commitment .
so in the year 2000 , i began to wonder , what if we came together ?
could we do something for these 93 countries ?
and i founded international bridges to justice which has a specific mission of ending torture as an investigative tool and implementing due process rights in the 93 countries by placing trained lawyers at an early stage in police stations and in courtrooms .
my first experiences , though , did come from cambodia , and at the time i remember first coming to cambodia and there were , in 1994 , still less than 10 attorneys in the country because the khmer rouge had killed them all .
and even 20 years later , there was only 10 lawyers in the country , so consequently you 'd walk into a prison and not only would you meet 12-year-old boys , you 'd meet women and you 'd say , " why are you here ? " women would say , " well i 've been here for 10 years because my husband committed a crime , but they ca n't find him . "
so it 's just a place where there was no rule of law .
the first group of defenders came together and i still remember , as i was training , i said , " okay , what do you do for an investigation ? "
and there was silence in the class , and finally one woman stood up , -lsb- inaudible name -rsb- , and she said " khrew , " which means " teacher . "
she said , " i have defended more than a hundred people , and i 've never had to do any investigation , because they all come with confessions . "
and we talked about , as a class , the fact that number one , the confessions might not be reliable , but number two , we did not want to encourage the police to keep doing this , especially as it was now against the law .
and it took a lot of courage for these defenders to decide that they would begin to stand up and support each other in implementing these laws .
and i still remember the first cases where they came , all 25 together , she would stand up , and they were in the back , and they would support her , and the judges kept saying , " no , no , no , no , we 're going to do things the exact same way we 've been doing them . "
but one day the perfect case came , and it was a woman who was a vegetable seller , she was sitting outside of a house .
she said she actually saw the person run out who she thinks stole whatever the jewelry was , but the police came , they got her , there was nothing on her .
she was pregnant at the time . she had cigarette burns on her . she 'd miscarried .
and when they brought her case to the judge , for the first time he stood up and he said , " yes , there 's no evidence except for your torture confession and you will be released . "
and the defenders began to take cases over and over again and you will see , they have step by step began to change the course of history in cambodia .
but cambodia is not alone .
i used to think , well is it cambodia ?
or is it other countries ?
but it is in so many countries .
in burundi i walked into a prison and it was n't a 12-year-old boy , it was an 8-year-old boy for stealing a mobile phone .
or a woman , i picked up her baby , really cute baby , i said " your baby is so cute . "
it was n't a baby , she was three .
and she said " yeah , but she 's why i 'm here , " because she was accused of stealing two diapers and an iron for her baby and still had been in prison .
and when i walked up to the prison director , i said , " you 've got to let her out .
a judge would let her out . "
and he said , " okay , we can talk about it , but look at my prison . eighty percent of the two thousand people here are without a lawyer . what can we do ? "
so lawyers began to courageously stand up together to organize a system where they can take cases .
but we realized that it 's not only the training of the lawyers , but the connection of the lawyers that makes a difference .
for example , in cambodia , it was that -lsb- inaudible name -rsb- did not go alone but she had 24 lawyers with her who stood up together . and in the same way , in china , they always tell me , " it 's like a fresh wind in the desert when we can come together . "
or in zimbabwe , where i remember innocent , after coming out of a prison where everybody stood up and said , " i 've been here for one year , eight years , 12 years without a lawyer , " he came and we had a training together and he said , " i have heard it said " - because he had heard people mumbling and grumbling - " i have heard it said that we can not help to create justice because we do not have the resources . "
and then he said , " but i want you to know that the lack of resources is never an excuse for injustice . "
and with that , he successfully organized 68 lawyers who have been systematically taking the cases .
the key that we see , though , is training and then early access .
i was recently in egypt , and was inspired to meet with another group of lawyers , and what they told me is that they said , " hey , look , we do n't have police on the streets now . the police are one of the main reasons why we had the revolution . they were torturing everybody all the time . "
and i said , " but there 's been tens of millions of dollars that have recently gone in to the development of the legal system here .
what 's going on ? "
i met with one of the development agencies , and they were training prosecutors and judges , which is the normal bias , as opposed to defenders .
and they showed me a manual which actually was an excellent manual .
i said , " i 'm gonna copy this . "
it had everything in it . lawyers can come at the police station . it was perfect .
prosecutors were perfectly trained .
but i said to them , " i just have one question , which is , by the time that everybody got to the prosecutor 's office , what had happened to them ? "
and after a pause , they said , " they had been tortured . "
so the pieces are , not only the training of the lawyers , but us finding a way to systematically implement early access to counsel , because they are the safeguard in the system for people who are being tortured .
and as i tell you this , i 'm also aware of the fact that it sounds like , " oh , okay , it sounds like we could do it , but can we really do it ? "
because it sounds big .
and there are many reasons why i believe it 's possible .
the first reason is the people on the ground who find ways of creating miracles because of their commitment .
it 's not only innocent , who i told you about in zimbabwe , but defenders all over the world who are looking for these pieces .
we have a program called justicemakers , and we realized there are people that are courageous and want to do things , but how can we support them ?
so it 's an online contest where it 's only five thousand dollars if you come up with and innovative way of implementing justice .
and there are 30 justicemakers throughout the world , from sri lanka to swaziland to the drc , who with five thousand dollars do amazing things , through sms programs , through paralegal programs , through whatever they can do .
and it 's not only these justicemakers , but people we courageously see figure out who their networks are and how they can move it forward .
so in china , for instance , great laws came out where it says police can not torture people or they will be punished .
and i was sitting side by side with one of our very courageous lawyers , and said , " how can we get this out ? how can we make sure that this is implemented ?
this is fantastic . " and he said to me , " well , do you have money ? " and i said , " no . " and he said , " that 's okay , we can still figure it out . "
and on december 4 , he organized three thousand members of the youth communist league , from 14 of the top law schools , who organized themselves , developed posters with the new laws , and went to the police stations and began what he says is a non-violent legal revolution to protect citizen rights .
so i talked about the fact that we need to train and support defenders .
we need to systematically implement early access to counsel .
but the third and most important thing is that we make a commitment to this .
and people often say to me , " you know , this is great , but it 's wildly idealistic .
never going to happen . "
and the reason that i think that those words are interesting is because those were the same kinds of words that were used for people who decided they would end slavery , or end apartheid .
it began with a small group of people who decided they would commit .
now , there 's one of our favorite poems from the defenders , which they share from each other , is : " take courage friends , the road is often long , the path is never clear , and the stakes are very high , but deep down , you are not alone . "
and i believe that if we can come together as a world community to support not only defenders , but also everyone in the system who is looking towards it , we can end torture as an investigative tool .
i end always , because i 'm sure the questions are - and i 'd be happy to talk to you at any point - " but what can i really do ? "
well , i would say this . first of all , you know what you can do . but second of all , i would leave you with the story of vishna , who actually was my inspiration for starting international bridges to justice .
vishna was a 4-year-old boy when i met him who was born in a cambodian prison in kandal province . but because he was born in the prison , everybody loved him , including the guards , so he was the only one who was allowed to come in and out of the bars .
so , you know , there 's bars . and by the time that vishna was getting bigger , which means what gets bigger ? your head gets bigger .
so he would come to the first bar , the second bar and then the third bar , and then really slowly move his head so he could fit through , and come back , third , second , first . and he would grab my pinkie , because what he wanted to do every day is he wanted to go visit .
you know , he never quite made it to all of them every day , but he wanted to visit all 156 prisoners . and i would lift him , and he would put his fingers through .
or if they were dark cells , it was like iron corrugated , and he would put his fingers through .
and most of the prisoners said that he was their greatest joy and their sunshine , and they looked forward to him . and i was like , here 's vishna . he 's a 4-year-old boy .
he was born in a prison with almost nothing , no material goods , but he had a sense of his own heroic journey , which i believe we are all born into . he said , " probably i ca n't do everything .
but i 'm one . i can do something .
and i will do the one thing that i can do . "
so i thank you for having the prophetic imagination to imagine the shaping of a new world with us together , and invite you into this journey with us .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- in 1962 , with rachel carson 's " silent spring , " i think for people like me in the world of the making of things , the canary in the mine was n't singing .
and so the question that we might not have birds became kind of fundamental to those of us wandering around looking for the meadowlarks that seemed to have all disappeared .
and the question was , were the birds singing ?
now , i 'm not a scientist , that 'll be really clear .
but , you know , we 've just come from this discussion of what a bird might be .
what is a bird ?
well , in my world , this is a rubber duck .
it comes in california with a warning - " this product contains chemicals known by the state of california to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm . "
this is a bird .
what kind of culture would produce a product of this kind and then label it and sell it to children ?
i think we have a design problem .
someone heard the six hours of talk that i gave called " the monticello dialogues " on npr , and sent me this as a thank you note - " we realize that design is a signal of intention , but it also has to occur within a world , and we have to understand that world in order to imbue our designs with inherent intelligence , and so as we look back at the basic state of affairs in which we design , we , in a way , need to go to the primordial condition to understand the operating system and the frame conditions of a planet , and i think the exciting part of that is the good news that 's there ,
because the news is the news of abundance , and not the news of limits , and i think as our culture tortures itself now with tyrannies and concerns over limits and fear , we can add this other dimension of abundance that is coherent , driven by the sun , and start to imagine what that would be like to share . "
that was a nice thing to get .
that was one sentence .
henry james would be proud .
this is - i put it down at the bottom , but that was extemporaneous , obviously .
the fundamental issue is that , for me , design is the first signal of human intentions .
so what are our intentions , and what would our intentions be - if we wake up in the morning , we have designs on the world - well , what would our intention be as a species now that we 're the dominant species ?
and it 's not just stewardship and dominion debate , because really , dominion is implicit in stewardship - because how could you dominate something you had killed ?
and stewardship 's implicit in dominion , because you ca n't be steward of something if you ca n't dominate it .
so the question is , what is the first question for designers ?
now , as guardians - let 's say the state , for example , which reserves the right to kill , the right to be duplicitous and so on - the question we 're asking the guardian at this point is are we meant , how are we meant , to secure local societies , create world peace and save the environment ?
but i do n't know that that 's the common debate .
commerce , on the other hand , is relatively quick , essentially creative , highly effective and efficient , and fundamentally honest , because we ca n't exchange value for very long if we do n't trust each other .
so we use the tools of commerce primarily for our work , but the question we bring to it is , how do we love all the children of all species for all time ?
and so we start our designs with that question .
because what we realize today is that modern culture appears to have adopted a strategy of tragedy .
if we come here and say , " well , i did n't intend to cause global warming on the way here , " and we say , " that 's not part of my plan , " then we realize it 's part of our de facto plan .
because it 's the thing that 's happening because we have no other plan .
and i was at the white house for president bush , meeting with every federal department and agency , and i pointed out that they appear to have no plan .
if the end game is global warming , they 're doing great .
if the end game is mercury toxification of our children downwind of coal fire plants as they scuttled the clean air act , then i see that our education programs should be explicitly defined as , " brain death for all children . no child left behind . "
-lrb- applause -rrb- so , the question is , how many federal officials are ready to move to ohio and pennsylvania with their families ?
so if you do n't have an endgame of something delightful , then you 're just moving chess pieces around , if you do n't know you 're taking the king .
so perhaps we could develop a strategy of change , which requires humility . and in my business as an architect , it 's unfortunate the word " humility " and the word " architect " have not appeared in the same paragraph since " the fountainhead . "
so if anybody here has trouble with the concept of design humility , reflect on this - it took us 5,000 years to put wheels on our luggage .
so , as kevin kelly pointed out , there is no endgame .
there is an infinite game , and we 're playing in that infinite game .
and so we call it " cradle to cradle , " and our goal is very simple .
this is what i presented to the white house .
our goal is a delightfully diverse , safe , healthy and just world , with clean air , clean water , soil and power - economically , equitably , ecologically and elegantly enjoyed , period .
-lrb- applause -rrb- what do n't you like about this ?
which part of this do n't you like ?
so we realized we want full diversity , even though it can be difficult to remember what de gaulle said when asked what it was like to be president of france .
he said , " what do you think it 's like trying to run a country with 400 kinds of cheese ? "
but at the same time , we realize that our products are not safe and healthy .
so we 've designed products and we analyzed chemicals down to the parts per million .
this is a baby blanket by pendleton that will give your child nutrition instead of alzheimer 's later in life .
we can ask ourselves , what is justice , and is justice blind , or is justice blindness ?
and at what point did that uniform turn from white to black ?
water has been declared a human right by the united nations .
air quality is an obvious thing to anyone who breathes .
is there anybody here who does n't breathe ?
clean soil is a critical problem - the nitrification , the dead zones in the gulf of mexico .
a fundamental issue that 's not being addressed .
we 've seen the first form of solar energy that 's beat the hegemony of fossil fuels in the form of wind here in the great plains , and so that hegemony is leaving .
and if we remember sheikh yamani when he formed opec , they asked him , " when will we see the end of the age of oil ? "
i do n't know if you remember his answer , but it was , " the stone age did n't end because we ran out of stones . "
we see that companies acting ethically in this world are outperforming those that do n't .
we see the flows of materials in a rather terrifying prospect .
this is a hospital monitor from los angeles , sent to china .
this woman will expose herself to toxic phosphorous , release four pounds of toxic lead into her childrens ' environment , which is from copper .
on the other hand , we see great signs of hope .
here 's dr. venkataswamy in india , who 's figured out how to do mass-produced health .
he has given eyesight to two million people for free .
we see in our material flows that car steels do n't become car steel again because of the contaminants of the coatings - bismuth , antimony , copper and so on .
they become building steel .
on the other hand , we 're working with berkshire hathaway , warren buffett and shaw carpet , the largest carpet company in the world .
we 've developed a carpet that is continuously recyclable , down to the parts per million .
the upper is nylon 6 that can go back to caprolactam , the bottom , a polyolephine - infinitely recyclable thermoplastic .
now if i was a bird , the building on my left is a liability .
the building on my right , which is our corporate campus for the gap with an ancient meadow , is an asset - its nesting grounds .
here 's where i come from . i grew up in hong kong , with six million people in 40 square miles .
during the dry season , we had four hours of water every fourth day .
and the relationship to landscape was that of farmers who have been farming the same piece of ground for 40 centuries .
you ca n't farm the same piece of ground for 40 centuries without understanding nutrient flow .
my childhood summers were in the puget sound of washington , among the first growth and big growth .
my grandfather had been a lumberjack in the olympics , so i have a lot of tree karma i am working off .
i went to yale for graduate school , studied in a building of this style by le corbusier , affectionately known in our business as brutalism .
if we look at the world of architecture , we see with mies ' 1928 tower for berlin , the question might be , " well , where 's the sun ? "
and this might have worked in berlin , but we built it in houston , and the windows are all closed . and with most products appearing not to have been designed for indoor use , this is actually a vertical gas chamber .
when i went to yale , we had the first energy crisis , and i was designing the first solar-heated house in ireland as a student , which i then built - which would give you a sense of my ambition .
and richard meier , who was one of my teachers , kept coming over to my desk to give me criticism , and he would say , " bill , you 've got to understand- - solar energy has nothing to do with architecture . "
i guess he did n't read vitruvius .
in 1984 , we did the first so-called " green office " in america for environmental defense .
we started asking manufacturers what were in their materials .
they said , " they 're proprietary , they 're legal , go away . "
the only indoor quality work done in this country at that time was sponsored by r.j. reynolds tobacco company , and it was to prove there was no danger from secondhand smoke in the workplace .
so , all of a sudden , here i am , graduating from high school in 1969 , and this happens , and we realize that " away " went away .
remember we used to throw things away , and we 'd point to away ?
and yet , noaa has now shown us , for example - you see that little blue thing above hawaii ?
that 's the pacific gyre .
it was recently dragged for plankton by scientists , and they found six times as much plastic as plankton .
when asked , they said , " it 's kind of like a giant toilet that does n't flush . "
perhaps that 's away .
so we 're looking for the design rules of this - this is the highest biodiversity of trees in the world , irian jaya , 259 species of tree , and we described this in the book , " cradle to cradle . "
the book itself is a polymer . it is not a tree .
that 's the name of the first chapter - " this book is not a tree . "
because in poetics , as margaret atwood pointed out , " we write our history on the skin of fish with the blood of bears . "
and with so much polymer , what we really need is technical nutrition , and to use something as elegant as a tree - imagine this design assignment : design something that makes oxygen , sequesters carbon , fixes nitrogen , distills water , accrues solar energy as fuel , makes complex sugars and food , creates microclimates , changes colors with the seasons and self-replicates .
well , why do n't we knock that down and write on it ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , we 're looking at the same criteria as most people - you know , can i afford it ?
does it work ? do i like it ?
we 're adding the jeffersonian agenda , and i come from charlottesville , where i 've had the privilege of living in a house designed by thomas jefferson .
we 're adding life , liberty and the pursuit of happiness .
now if we look at the word " competition , " i 'm sure most of you 've used it .
you know , most people do n't realize it comes from the latin competere , which means strive together .
it means the way olympic athletes train with each other .
they get fit together , and then they compete .
the williams sisters compete - one wins wimbledon .
so we 've been looking at the idea of competition as a way of cooperating in order to get fit together .
and the chinese government has now - i work with the chinese government now - has taken this up .
we 're also looking at survival of the fittest , not in just competition terms in our modern context of destroy the other or beat them to the ground , but really to fit together and build niches and have growth that is good .
now most environmentalists do n't say growth is good , because , in our lexicon , asphalt is two words : assigning blame .
but if we look at asphalt as our growth , then we realize that all we 're doing is destroying the planetary 's fundamental underlying operating system .
so when we see e equals mc squared come along , from a poet 's perspective , we see energy as physics , chemistry as mass , and all of a sudden , you get this biology .
and we have plenty of energy , so we 'll solve that problem , but the biology problem 's tricky , because as we put through all these toxic materials that we disgorge , we will never be able to recover that .
and as francis crick pointed out , nine years after discovering dna with mr. watson , that life itself has to have growth as a precondition - it has to have free energy , sunlight and it needs to be an open system of chemicals .
so we 're asking for human artifice to become a living thing , and we want growth , we want free energy from sunlight and we want an open metabolism for chemicals .
then , the question becomes not growth or no growth , but what do you want to grow ?
so instead of just growing destruction , we want to grow the things that we might enjoy , and someday the fda will allow us to make french cheese .
so therefore , we have these two metabolisms , and i worked with a german chemist , michael braungart , and we 've identified the two fundamental metabolisms .
the biological one i 'm sure you understand , but also the technical one , where we take materials and put them into closed cycles .
we call them biological nutrition and technical nutrition .
technical nutrition will be in an order of magnitude of biological nutrition .
biological nutrition can supply about 500 million humans , which means that if we all wore birkenstocks and cotton , the world would run out of cork and dry up .
so we need materials in closed cycles , but we need to analyze them down to the parts per million for cancer , birth defects , mutagenic effects , disruption of our immune systems , biodegradation , persistence , heavy metal content , knowledge of how we 're making them and their production and so on .
our first product was a textile where we analyzed 8,000 chemicals in the textile industry .
using those intellectual filters , we eliminated -lsb- 7,962 . -rsb- we were left with 38 chemicals .
we have since databased the 4000 most commonly used chemicals in human manufacturing , and we 're releasing this database into the public in six weeks .
so designers all over the world can analyze their products down to the parts per million for human and ecological health .
-lrb- applause -rrb- we 've developed a protocol so that companies can send these same messages all the way through their supply chains , because when we asked most companies we work with - about a trillion dollars - and say , " where does your stuff come from ? " they say , " suppliers . "
" and where does it go ? "
" customers . "
so we need some help there .
so the biological nutrients , the first fabrics - the water coming out was clean enough to drink .
technical nutrients - this is for shaw carpet , infinitely reusable carpet .
here 's nylon going back to caprolactam back to carpet .
biotechnical nutrients - the model u for ford motor , a cradle to cradle car - concept car .
shoes for nike , where the uppers are polyesters , infinitely recyclable , the bottoms are biodegradable soles .
wear your old shoes in , your new shoes out .
there is no finish line .
the idea here of the car is that some of the materials go back to the industry forever , some of the materials go back to soil - it 's all solar-powered .
here 's a building at oberlin college we designed that makes more energy than it needs to operate and purifies its own water .
here 's a building for the gap , where the ancient grasses of san bruno , california , are on the roof .
and this is our project for ford motor company .
it 's the revitalization of the river rouge in dearborn .
this is obviously a color photograph .
these are our tools . these are how we sold it to ford .
we saved ford 35 million dollars doing it this way , day one , which is the equivalent of the ford taurus at a four percent margin of an order for 900 million dollars worth of cars .
here it is . it 's the world 's largest green roof , 10 and a half acres .
this is the roof , saving money , and this is the first species to arrive here . these are killdeer .
they showed up in five days .
and we now have 350-pound auto workers learning bird songs on the internet .
we 're developing now protocols for cities - that 's the home of technical nutrients .
the country - the home of biological . and putting them together .
and so i will finish by showing you a new city we 're designing for the chinese government .
we 're doing 12 cities for china right now , based on cradle to cradle as templates .
our assignment is to develop protocols for the housing for 400 million people in 12 years .
we did a mass energy balance - if they use brick , they will lose all their soil and burn all their coal .
they 'll have cities with no energy and no food .
we signed a memorandum of understanding - here 's madam deng nan , deng xiaoping 's daughter - for china to adopt cradle to cradle .
because if they toxify themselves , being the lowest-cost producer , send it to the lowest-cost distribution - wal-mart - and then we send them all our money , what we 'll discover is that we have what , effectively , when i was a student , was called mutually assured destruction .
now we do it by molecule . these are our cities .
we 're building a new city next to this city ; look at that landscape .
this is the site .
we do n't normally do green fields , but this one is about to be built , so they brought us in to intercede .
this is their plan .
it 's a rubber stamp grid that they laid right on that landscape .
and they brought us in and said , " what would you do ? "
this is what they would end up with , which is another color photograph .
so this is the existing site , so this is what it looks like now , and here 's our proposal .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so the way we approached this is we studied the hydrology very carefully .
we studied the biota , the ancient biota , the current farming and the protocols .
we studied the winds and the sun to make sure everybody in the city will have fresh air , fresh water and direct sunlight in every single apartment at some point during the day .
we then take the parks and lay them out as ecological infrastructure .
we lay out the building areas .
we start to integrate commercial and mixed use so the people all have centers and places to be .
the transportation is all very simple , everybody 's within a five-minute walk of mobility .
we have a 24-hour street , so that there 's always a place that 's alive .
the waste systems all connect .
if you flush a toilet , your feces will go to the sewage treatment plants , which are sold as assets , not liabilities .
because who wants the fertilizer factory that makes natural gas ?
the waters are all taken in to construct the wetlands for habitat restorations .
and then it makes natural gas , which then goes back into the city to power the fuel for the cooking for the city .
so this is - these are fertilizer gas plants .
and then the compost is all taken back to the roofs of the city , where we 've got farming , because what we 've done is lifted up the city , the landscape , into the air to - to restore the native landscape on the roofs of the buildings .
the solar power of all the factory centers and all the industrial zones with their light roofs powers the city .
and this is the concept for the top of the city .
we 've lifted the earth up onto the roofs .
the farmers have little bridges to get from one roof to the next .
we inhabit the city with work / live space on all the ground floors .
and so this is the existing city , and this is the new city .
-lrb- applause -rrb- " give me liberty or give me death . "
when patrick henry , the governor of virginia , said these words in 1775 , he could never have imagined just how much they would come to resonate with american generations to come .
at the time , these words were earmarked and targeted against the british , but over the last 200 years , they 've come to embody what many westerners believe , that freedom is the most cherished value , and that the best systems of politics and economics have freedom embedded in them .
who could blame them ?
over the past hundred years , the combination of liberal democracy and private capitalism has helped to catapult the united states and western countries to new levels of economic development .
in the united states over the past hundred years , incomes have increased 30 times , and hundreds of thousands of people have been moved out of poverty .
meanwhile , american ingenuity and innovation has helped to spur industrialization and also helped in the creation and the building of things like household appliances such as refrigerators and televisions , motor vehicles and even the mobile phones in your pockets .
it 's no surprise , then , that even at the depths of the private capitalism crisis , president obama said , " the question before us is not whether the market is a force for good or ill .
its power to generate wealth and to expand freedom is unmatched . "
thus , there 's understandably a deep-seated presumption among westerners that the whole world will decide to adopt private capitalism as the model of economic growth , liberal democracy , and will continue to prioritize political rights over economic rights .
however , to many who live in the emerging markets , this is an illusion , and even though the universal declaration of human rights , which was signed in 1948 , was unanimously adopted , what it did was to mask a schism that has emerged between developed and developing countries , and the ideological beliefs between political and economic rights .
this schism has only grown wider .
today , many people who live in the emerging markets , where 90 percent of the world 's population lives , believe that the western obsession with political rights is beside the point , and what is actually important is delivering on food , shelter , education and healthcare .
" give me liberty or give me death " is all well and good if you can afford it , but if you 're living on less than one dollar a day , you 're far too busy trying to survive and to provide for your family than to spend your time going around trying to proclaim and defend democracy .
now , i know many people in this room and around the world will think , " well actually , this is hard to grasp , " because private capitalism and liberal democracy are held sacrosanct .
but i ask you today , what would you do if you had to choose ?
what if you had to choose between a roof over your head and the right to vote ?
over the last 10 years , i 've had the privilege to travel to over 60 countries , many of them in the emerging markets , in latin america , asia , and my own continent of africa .
i 've met with presidents , dissidents , policymakers , lawyers , teachers , doctors and the man on the street , and through these conversations , it 's become clear to me that many people in the emerging markets believe that there 's actually a split occurring between what people believe ideologically in terms of politics and economics in the west and that which people believe in the rest of the world .
now , do n't get me wrong .
i 'm not saying people in the emerging markets do n't understand democracy , nor am i saying that they would n't ideally like to pick their presidents or their leaders .
of course they would .
however , i am saying that on balance , they worry more about where their living standard improvements are going to come from , and how it is their governments can deliver for them , than whether or not the government was elected by democracy .
the fact of the matter is that this has become a very poignant question because there is for the first time in a long time a real challenge to the western ideological systems of politics and economics , and this is a system that is embodied by china .
and rather than have private capitalism , they have state capitalism .
instead of liberal democracy , they have de-prioritized the democratic system .
and they have also decided to prioritize economic rights over political rights .
i put it to you today that it is this system that is embodied by china that is gathering momentum amongst people in the emerging markets as the system to follow , because they believe increasingly that it is the system that will promise the best and fastest improvements in living standards in the shortest period of time .
explaining to you first why economically they 've come to this belief .
first of all , it 's china 's economic performance over the past 30 years .
she 's been able to produce record economic growth and meaningfully move many people out of poverty , specifically putting a meaningful dent in poverty by moving over 300 million people out of indigence .
it 's not just in economics , but it 's also in terms of living standards .
we see that in china , 28 percent of people had secondary school access .
today , it 's closer to 82 percent .
so in its totality , economic improvement has been quite significant .
second , china has been able to meaningfully improve its income inequality without changing the political construct .
today , the united states and china are the two leading economies in the world .
they have vastly different political systems and different economic systems , one with private capitalism , another one broadly with state capitalism .
however , these two countries have the identical gini coefficient , which is a measure of income equality .
perhaps what is more disturbing is that china 's income equality has been improving in recent times , whereas that of the united states has been declining .
thirdly , people in the emerging markets look at china 's amazing and legendary infrastructure rollout .
this is not just about china building roads and ports and railways in her own country - she 's been able to build 85,000 kilometers of road network in china and surpass that of the united states - but even if you look to places like africa , china has been able to help tar the distance of cape town to cairo , which is 9,000 miles , or three times the distance of new york to california .
now this is something that people can see and point to .
perhaps it 's no surprise that in a 2007 pew survey , when surveyed , africans in 10 countries said they thought that the chinese were doing amazing things to improve their livelihoods by wide margins , by as much as 98 percent .
finally , china is also providing innovative solutions to age-old social problems that the world faces .
if you travel to mogadishu , mexico city or mumbai , you find that dilapidated infrastructure and logistics continue to be a stumbling block to the delivery of medicine and healthcare in the rural areas .
however , through a network of state-owned enterprises , the chinese have been able to go into these rural areas , using their companies to help deliver on these healthcare solutions .
ladies and gentlemen , it 's no surprise that around the world , people are pointing at what china is doing and saying , " i like that . i want that .
i want to be able to do what china 's doing .
that is the system that seems to work . "
i 'm here to also tell you that there are lots of shifts occurring around what china is doing in the democratic stance .
in particular , there is growing doubt among people in the emerging markets , when people now believe that democracy is no longer to be viewed as a prerequisite for economic growth .
in fact , countries like taiwan , singapore , chile , not just china , have shown that actually , it 's economic growth that is a prerequisite for democracy .
in a recent study , the evidence has shown that income is the greatest determinant of how long a democracy can last .
the study found that if your per capita income is about 1,000 dollars a year , your democracy will last about eight and a half years .
if your per capita income is between 2,000 and 4,000 dollars per year , then you 're likely to only get 33 years of democracy .
and only if your per capita income is above 6,000 dollars a year will you have democracy come hell or high water .
what this is telling us is that we need to first establish a middle class that is able to hold the government accountable .
but perhaps it 's also telling us that we should be worried about going around the world and shoehorning democracy , because ultimately we run the risk of ending up with illiberal democracies , democracies that in some sense could be worse than the authoritarian governments that they seek to replace .
the evidence around illiberal democracies is quite depressing .
freedom house finds that although 50 percent of the world 's countries today are democratic , 70 percent of those countries are illiberal in the sense that people do n't have free speech or freedom of movement .
but also , we 're finding from freedom house in a study that they published last year that freedom has been on the decline every year for the past seven years .
what this says is that for people like me who care about liberal democracy , is we 've got to find a more sustainable way of ensuring that we have a sustainable form of democracy in a liberal way , and that has its roots in economics .
but it also says that as china moves toward being the largest economy in the world , something that is expected to happen by experts in 2016 , that this schism between the political and economic ideologies of the west and the rest is likely to widen .
what might that world look like ?
well , the world could look like more state involvement and state capitalism ; greater protectionisms of nation-states ; but also , as i just pointed out a moment ago , ever-declining political rights and individual rights .
the question that is left for us in general is , what then should the west be doing ?
and i suggest that they have two options .
the west can either compete or cooperate .
if the west chooses to compete with the chinese model , and in effect go around the world and continue to try and push an agenda of private capitalism and liberal democracy , this is basically going against headwinds , but it also would be a natural stance for the west to take because in many ways it is the antithesis of the chinese model of de-prioritizing democracy , and state capitalism .
now the fact of the matter is , if the west decides to compete , it will create a wider schism .
the other option is for the west to cooperate , and by cooperating i mean giving the emerging market countries the flexibility what political and economic system works best for them .
now i 'm sure some of you in the room will be thinking , well , this is like ceding to china , and this is a way , in other words , for the west to take a back seat .
but i put it to you that if the united states and european countries want to remain globally influential , they may have to consider cooperating in the short term in order to compete , and by that , they might have to focus more aggressively on economic outcomes to help create the middle class and therefore be able to hold government accountable and create the democracies that we really want .
instead of going around the world and haranguing countries for engaging with china , the west should be encouraging its own businesses to trade and invest in these regions .
instead of criticizing china for bad behavior , the west should be showing how it is that their own system of politics and economics is the superior one .
and instead of shoehorning democracy around the world , perhaps the west should take a leaf out of its own history book and remember that it takes a lot of patience in order to develop the models and the systems that you have today .
indeed , the supreme court justice stephen breyer reminds us that it took the united states nearly 170 years from the time that the constitution was written for there to be equal rights in the united states .
some people would argue that today there is still no equal rights .
in fact , there are groups who would argue that they still do not have equal rights under the law .
at its very best , the western model speaks for itself .
it 's the model that put food on the table .
it 's the refrigerators .
it put a man on the moon .
but the fact of the matter is , although people back in the day used to point at the western countries and say , " i want that , i like that , " there 's now a new person in town in the form of a country , china .
today , generations are looking at china and saying , " china can produce infrastructure , china can produce economic growth , and we like that . "
because ultimately , the question before us , and the question before seven billion people on the planet is , how can we create prosperity ?
people who care and will pivot towards the model of politics and economics in a very rational way , to those models that will ensure that they can have better living standards in the shortest period of time .
as you leave here today , i would like to leave you with a very personal message , which is what it is that i believe we should be doing as individuals , and this is really about being open-minded , open-minded to the fact that our hopes and dreams of creating prosperity for people around the world , creating and meaningfully putting a dent in poverty for hundreds of millions of people , has to be based in being open-minded , because these systems have good things and they have bad things .
just to illustrate , i went into my annals of myself .
that 's a picture of me .
awww . -lrb- laughter -rrb- i was born and raised in zambia in 1969 .
at the time of my birth , blacks were not issued birth certificates , and that law only changed in 1973 .
this is an affidavit from the zambian government .
i bring this to you to tell you that in 40 years , i 've gone from not being recognized as a human being to standing in front of the illustrious ted crowd today to talk to you about my views .
in this vein , we can increase economic growth .
we can meaningfully put a dent in poverty .
but also , it 's going to require that we look at our assumptions , assumptions and strictures that we 've grown up with around democracy , around private capitalism , around what creates economic growth and reduces poverty and creates freedoms .
we might have to tear those books up and start to look at other options and be open-minded to seek the truth .
ultimately , it 's about transforming the world and making it a better place .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so , a funny thing happened on my way to becoming a brilliant , world-class neuropsychologist : i had a baby .
and that 's not to say i ever went on to become a brilliant , world-class neuropsychologist .
sorry , ted .
but i did go on to be a reasonably astute , arguably world-class worrier .
one of my girlfriends in graduate school , marie , said , " kim , i figured it out .
it 's not that you 're more neurotic than everyone else ; it 's just that you 're more honest about how neurotic you are . "
so in the spirit of full disclosure , i brought some pictures to share .
awwww .
i 'll just say , july .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- zzzzzzip for safety .
water wings - an inch of water .
and then , finally , all suited up for the 90-minute drive to copper mountain .
so you can get kind of a feel for this .
so my baby , vander , is eight years old now .
and , despite being cursed with my athletic inability , he plays soccer .
he 's interested in playing football .
he wants to learn how to ride a unicycle .
so why would i worry ?
because this is what i do . this is what i teach .
it 's what i study . it 's what i treat .
and i know that kids get concussed every year .
in fact , more than four million people sustain a concussion every year , and these data are just among kids under 14 who were seen in emergency rooms .
and so when kids sustain a concussion , we talk about them getting dinged or getting their bell rung , but what is it that we 're really talking about ?
let 's take a look .
all right . " starsky and hutch , " arguably , yes .
so a car accident .
forty miles an hour into a fixed barrier - 35 gs .
a heavy weight boxer punches you straight in the face - 58 gs .
in case you missed it , we 'll look again .
so look to the right-hand side of the screen .
what would you say ?
how many gs ?
close .
seventy-two .
would it be crazy to know , 103 gs .
the average concussive impact is 95 gs .
now , when the kid on the right does n't get up , we know they 've had a concussion .
but how about the kid on the left , or the athlete that leaves the field of play ?
how do we know if he or she has sustained a concussion ?
how do we know that legislation that would require that they be pulled from play , cleared for return to play , applies to them ?
the definition of concussion does n't actually require a loss of consciousness .
it requires only a change in consciousness , and that can be any one of a number of symptoms , including feeling foggy , feeling dizzy , hearing a ringing in your ear , being more impulsive or hostile than usual .
so given all of that and given how darn neurotic i am , how do i get any sleep at all ?
because i know our brains are resilient .
they 're designed to recover from an injury .
if , god forbid , any of us left here tonight and sustained a concussion , most of us would go on to fully recover inside of a couple hours to a couple of weeks .
but kids are more vulnerable to brain injury .
in fact , high school athletes are three times more likely to sustain catastrophic injuries relative even to their college-age peers , and it takes them longer to return to a symptom-free baseline .
after that first injury , their risk for second injury is exponentially greater .
from there , their risk for a third injury , greater still , and so on .
and here 's the really alarming part : we do n't fully understand the long-term impact of multiple injuries .
you guys may be familiar with this research that 's coming out of the nfl .
in a nutshell , this research suggests that among retired nfl players with three or more career concussions , the incidents of early-onset dementing disease is much greater than it is for the general population .
so you 've all seen that - new york times , you 've seen it .
what you may not be familiar with is that this research was spearheaded by nfl wives who said , " is n't it weird that my 46-year-old husband is forever losing his keys ?
is n't it weird that my 47-year-old husband is forever losing the car ?
is n't it weird that my 48-year-old husband is forever losing his way home in the car , from the driveway ? "
so i may have forgotten to mention that my son is an only child .
so it 's going to be really important that he be able to drive me around some day .
so how do we guarantee the safety of our kids ?
how can we 100 percent guarantee the safety of our kids ?
let me tell you what i 've come up with .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- if only .
my little boy 's right there , and he 's like , " she 's not kidding .
she 's totally not kidding . "
so in all seriousness , should my kid play football ?
should your kid play football ? i do n't know .
but i do know there are three things you can do .
the first : study up .
you have to be familiar with the issues we 're talking about today .
there are some great resources out there .
the cdc has a program , heads up .
it 's at cdc.gov.
heads up is specific to concussion in kids .
the second is a resource i 'm personally really proud of .
we 've just rolled this out in the last couple months - co kids with brain injury .
this is a great resource for student athletes , teachers , parents , professionals , athletic and coaching staff .
it 's a great place to start if you have questions .
the second thing is : speak up .
just two weeks ago , a bill introduced by senator kefalas that would have required athletes , kids under 18 , to wear a helmet when they 're riding their bike died in committee .
it died in large part because it lacked constituent buy-in ; it lacked stakeholder traction .
now i 'm not here to tell you what kind of legislation you should or should n't support , but i am going to tell you that , if it matters to you , your legislators need to know that .
speak up also with coaching staff .
ask about what kind of protective equipment is available .
what 's the budget for protective equipment ?
how old it is ?
maybe offer to spearhead a fundraiser to buy new gear - which brings us to suit up .
wear a helmet .
the only way to prevent a bad outcome is to prevent that first injury from happening .
recently , one of my graduate students , tom said , " kim , i 've decided to wear a bike helmet on my way to class . "
and tom knows that that little bit of foam in a bike helmet can reduce the g-force of impact by half .
now i thought that it was because i have this totally compelling helmet crusade , right , this epiphany of tom 's .
as it turns out , it occurred to tom that a $ 20 helmet is a good way to protect a $ 100,000 graduate education .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , should vander play football ?
i ca n't say no , but i can guarantee that every time he leaves the house that kid 's wearing a helmet - like to the car , or at school .
so whether athlete , scholar , over-protected kid , neurotic mom , or otherwise , here 's my baby , vander , reminding you to mind your matter .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so anyway , who am i ?
i usually say to people , when they say , " what do you do ? "
i say , " i do hardware , " because it sort of conveniently encompasses everything i do .
and i recently said that to a venture capitalist casually at some valley event , to which he replied , " how quaint . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i sort of really was dumbstruck .
and i really should have said something smart .
and now i 've had a little bit of time to think about it , i would have said , " well , you know , if we look at the next 100 years and we 've seen all these problems in the last few days , most of the big issues - clean water , clean energy - and they 're interchangeable in some respects - and cleaner , more functional materials - they all look to me to be hardware problems .
this does n't mean we should ignore software , or information , or computation . "
and that 's in fact probably what i 'm going to try and tell you about .
so , this talk is going to be about how do we make things and what are the new ways that we 're going to make things in the future .
now , ted sends you a lot of spam if you 're a speaker about " do this , do that " and you fill out all these forms , and you do n't actually know how they 're going to describe you , and it flashed across my desk that they were going to introduce me as a futurist .
and i 've always been nervous about the term " futurist , " because you seem doomed to failure because you ca n't really predict it .
and i was laughing about this with the very smart colleagues i have , and said , " you know , well , if i have to talk about the future , what is it ? "
and george homsey , a great guy , said , " oh , the future is amazing .
it is so much stranger than you think .
we 're going to reprogram the bacteria in your gut , and we 're going to make your poo smell like peppermint . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , you may think that 's sort of really crazy , but there are some pretty amazing things that are happening that make this possible .
so , this is n't my work , but it 's work of good friends of mine at mit .
this is called the registry of standard biological parts .
this is headed by drew endy and tom knight and a few other very , very bright individuals .
basically , what they 're doing is looking at biology as a programmable system .
literally , think of proteins as subroutines that you can string together to execute a program .
now , this is actually becoming such an interesting idea .
this is a state diagram . that 's an extremely simple computer .
this one is a two-bit counter .
so that 's essentially the computational equivalent of two light switches .
and this is being built by a group of students at zurich for a design competition in biology .
and from the results of the same competition last year , a university of texas team of students programmed bacteria so that they can detect light and switch on and off .
so this is interesting in the sense that you can now do " if-then-for " statements in materials , in structure .
this is a pretty interesting trend , because we used to live in a world where everyone 's said glibly , " form follows function , " but i think i 've sort of grown up in a world - you listened to neil gershenfeld yesterday ; i was in a lab associated with his - where it 's really a world where information defines form and function .
i spent six years thinking about that , but to show you the power of art over science - this is actually one of the cartoons i write . these are called " howtoons . "
i work with a fabulous illustrator called nick dragotta .
took me six years at mit , and about that many pages to describe what i was doing , and it took him one page . and so this is our muse tucker .
he 's an interesting little kid - and his sister , celine - and what he 's doing here is observing the self-assembly of his cheerios in his cereal bowl .
and in fact you can program the self-assembly of things , so he starts chocolate-dipping edges , changing the hydrophobicity and the hydrophylicity .
in theory , if you program those sufficiently , you should be able to do something pretty interesting and make a very complex structure .
in this case , he 's done self-replication of a complex 3d structure .
and that 's what i thought about for a long time , because this is how we currently make things .
this is a silicon wafer , and essentially that 's just a whole bunch of layers of two-dimensional stuff , sort of layered up .
the feature side is - you know , people will say , -lsb- unclear -rsb- down around about 65 nanometers now .
on the right , that 's a radiolara .
that 's a unicellular organism ubiquitous in the oceans .
and that has feature sizes down to about 20 nanometers , and it 's a complex 3d structure .
we could do a lot more with computers and things generally if we knew how to build things this way .
the secret to biology is , it builds computation into the way it makes things . so this little thing here , polymerase , is essentially a supercomputer designed for replicating dna .
and the ribosome here is another little computer that helps in the translation of the proteins .
i thought about this in the sense that it 's great to build in biological materials , but can we do similar things ?
can we get self-replicating-type behavior ?
can we get complex 3d structure automatically assembling in inorganic systems ?
because there are some advantages to inorganic systems , like higher speed semiconductors , etc .
so , this is some of my work on how do you do an autonomously self-replicating system .
and this is sort of babbage 's revenge .
these are little mechanical computers .
these are five-state state machines .
so , that 's about three light switches lined up .
in a neutral state , they wo n't bind at all .
now , if i make a string of these , a bit string , they will be able to replicate .
so we start with white , blue , blue , white .
that encodes ; that will now copy . from one comes two , and then from two comes three .
and so you 've got this sort of replicating system .
it was work actually by lionel penrose , father of roger penrose , the tiles guy .
he did a lot of this work in the ' 60s , and so a lot of this logic theory lay fallow as we went down the digital computer revolution , but it 's now coming back .
so now i 'm going to show you the hands-free , autonomous self-replication .
so we 've tracked in the video the input string , which was green , green , yellow , yellow , green .
we set them off on this air hockey table .
you know , high science uses air hockey tables - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - and if you watch this thing long enough you get dizzy , but what you 're actually seeing is copies of that original string emerging from the parts bin that you have here .
so we 've got autonomous replication of bit strings .
so , why would you want to replicate bit strings ?
well , it turns out biology has this other very interesting meme , that you can take a linear string , which is a convenient thing to copy , and you can fold that into an arbitrarily complex 3d structure .
so i was trying to , you know , take the engineer 's version : can we build a mechanical system in inorganic materials that will do the same thing ?
so what i 'm showing you here is that we can make a 2d shape - the b - assemble from a string of components that follow extremely simple rules .
and the whole point of going with the extremely simple rules here , and the incredibly simple state machines in the previous design , was that you do n't need digital logic to do computation .
and that way you can scale things much smaller than microchips .
so you can literally use these as the tiny components in the assembly process .
so , neil gershenfeld showed you this video on wednesday , i believe , but i 'll show you again .
this is literally the colored sequence of those tiles .
each different color has a different magnetic polarity , and the sequence is uniquely specifying the structure that is coming out .
now , hopefully , those of you who know anything about graph theory can look at that , and that will satisfy you that that can also do arbitrary 3d structure , and in fact , you know , i can now take a dog , carve it up and then reassemble it so it 's a linear string that will fold from a sequence . and now i can actually define that three-dimensional object as a sequence of bits .
so , you know , it 's a pretty interesting world when you start looking at the world a little bit differently .
and the universe is now a compiler .
and so i 'm thinking about , you know , what are the programs for programming the physical universe ?
and how do we think about materials and structure , sort of as an information and computation problem ?
not just where you attach a micro-controller to the end point , but that the structure and the mechanisms are the logic , are the computers .
having totally absorbed this philosophy , i started looking at a lot of problems a little differently .
with the universe as a computer , you can look at this droplet of water as having performed the computations .
you set a couple of boundary conditions , like gravity , the surface tension , density , etc . , and then you press " execute , " and magically , the universe produces you a perfect ball lens .
so , this actually applied to the problem of - so there 's a half a billion to a billion people in the world do n't have access to cheap eyeglasses .
so can you make a machine that could make any prescription lens very quickly on site ?
this is a machine where you literally define a boundary condition .
if it 's circular , you make a spherical lens .
if it 's elliptical , you can make an astigmatic lens .
you then put a membrane on that and you apply pressure - so that 's part of the extra program .
and literally with only those two inputs - so , the shape of your boundary condition and the pressure - you can define an infinite number of lenses that cover the range of human refractive error , from minus 12 to plus eight diopters , up to four diopters of cylinder .
and then literally , you now pour on a monomer .
you know , i 'll do a julia childs here .
this is three minutes of uv light .
and you reverse the pressure on your membrane once you 've cooked it . pop it out .
i 've seen this video , but i still do n't know if it 's going to end right .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so you reverse this . this is a very old movie , so with the new prototypes , actually both surfaces are flexible , but this will show you the point .
now you 've finished the lens , you literally pop it out .
that 's next year 's yves klein , you know , eyeglasses shape .
and you can see that that has a mild prescription of about minus two diopters .
and as i rotate it against this side shot , you 'll see that that has cylinder , and that was programmed in - literally into the physics of the system .
so , this sort of thinking about structure as computation and structure as information leads to other things , like this .
this is something that my people at squid labs are working on at the moment , called " electronic rope . "
so literally , you think about a rope . it has very complex structure in the weave .
and under no load , it 's one structure .
under a different load , it 's a different structure . and you can actually exploit that by putting in a very small number of conducting fibers to actually make it a sensor .
so this is now a rope that knows the load on the rope at any particular point in the rope .
just by thinking about the physics of the world , materials as the computer , you can start to do things like this .
i 'm going to segue a little here .
i guess i 'm just going to casually tell you the types of things that i think about with this .
one thing i 'm really interested about this right now is , how , if you 're really taking this view of the universe as a computer , how do we make things in a very general sense , and how might we share the way we make things in a general sense the same way you share open source hardware ?
and a lot of talks here have espoused the benefits of having lots of people look at problems , share the information and work on those things together .
so , a convenient thing about being a human is you move in linear time , and unless lisa randall changes that , we 'll continue to move in linear time .
so that means anything you do , or anything you make , you produce a sequence of steps - and i think lego in the ' 70s nailed this , and they did it most elegantly .
but they can show you how to build things in sequence .
so , i 'm thinking about , how can we generalize the way we make all sorts of things , so you end up with this sort of guy , right ?
and i think this applies across a very broad - sort of , a lot of concepts .
you know , cameron sinclair yesterday said , " how do i get everyone to collaborate on design globally to do housing for humanity ? "
and if you 've seen amy smith , she talks about how you get students at mit to work with communities in haiti .
and i think we have to sort of redefine and rethink how we define structure and materials and assembly things , so that we can really share the information on how you do those things in a more profound way and build on each other 's source code for structure .
i do n't know exactly how to do this yet , but , you know , it 's something being actively thought about .
so , you know , that leads to questions like , is this a compiler ? is this a sub-routine ?
interesting things like that .
maybe i 'm getting a little too abstract , but you know , this is the sort of - returning to our comic characters - this is sort of the universe , or a different universe view , that i think is going to be very prevalent in the future - from biotech to materials assembly . it was great to hear bill joy .
they 're starting to invest in materials science , but these are the new things in materials science .
how do we put real information and real structure into new ideas , and see the world in a different way ? and it 's not going to be binary code that defines the computers of the universe - it 's sort of an analog computer .
but it 's definitely an interesting new worldview .
i 've gone too far . so that sounds like it 's it .
i 've probably got a couple of minutes of questions , or i can show - i think they also said that i do extreme stuff in the introduction , so i may have to explain that .
so maybe i 'll do that with this short video .
so this is actually a 3,000-square-foot kite , which also happens to be a minimal energy surface .
so returning to the droplet , again , thinking about the universe in a new way .
this is a kite designed by a guy called dave kulp .
and why do you want a 3,000-square-foot kite ?
so that 's a kite the size of your house .
and so you want that to tow boats very fast .
so i 've been working on this a little , also , with a couple of other guys .
but , you know , this is another way to look at the - if you abstract again , this is a structure that is defined by the physics of the universe .
you could just hang it as a bed sheet , but again , the computation of all the physics gives you the aerodynamic shape .
and so you can actually sort of almost double your boat speed with systems like that . so that 's sort of another interesting aspect of the future .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the problem that i want to talk with you about is really the problem of : how does one supply healthcare in a world in which cost is everything ?
how do you do that ?
and the basic paradigm we want to suggest to you , i want to suggest to you , is one in which you say that in order to treat disease you have to first know what you 're treating - that 's diagnostics - and then you have to do something .
so , the program that we 're involved in is something which we call diagnostics for all , or zero-cost diagnostics .
how do you provide medically relevant information at as close as possible to zero cost ? how do you do it ?
let me just give you two examples .
the rigors of military medicine are not so dissimilar from the third world - poor resources , a rigorous environment , a series of problems in lightweight , and things of this kind - and also not so different from the home healthcare and diagnostic system world .
so , the technology that i want to talk about is for the third world , for the developing world , but it has , i think , much broader application , because information is so important in the healthcare system .
so , you see two examples here .
one is a lab that is actually a fairly high-end laboratory in africa .
the second is basically an entrepreneur who is set up and doing who-knows-what in a table in a market .
i do n't know what kind of healthcare is delivered there .
but it 's not really what is probably most efficient .
what is our approach ?
and the way in which one typically approaches a problem of lowering cost , starting from the perspective of the united states , is to take our solution , and then to try to cut cost out of it .
no matter how you do that , you 're not going to start with a 100,000-dollar instrument and bring it down to no-cost . it is n't going to work .
so , the approach that we took was the other way around .
to ask , " what is the cheapest possible stuff that you could make a diagnostic system out of , and get useful information , add function ? " and what we 've chosen is paper .
what you see here is a prototypic device .
it 's about a centimeter on the side .
it 's about the size of a fingernail .
the lines around the edges are a polymer .
it 's made of paper and paper , of course , wicks fluid , as you know , paper , cloth - drop wine on the tablecloth , and the wine wicks all over everything .
put it on your shirt , it ruins the shirt .
that 's what a hydrophilic surface does .
so , in this device the idea is that you drip the bottom end of it in a drop of , in this case , urine .
the fluid wicks its way into those chambers at the top .
the brown color indicates the amount of glucose in the urine , the blue color indicates the amount of protein in the urine .
and the combination of those two is a first order shot at a number of useful things that you want .
so , this is an example of a device made from a simple piece of paper .
now , how simple can you make the production ?
why do we choose paper ?
there 's an example of the same thing on a finger , showing you basically what it looks like .
one reason for using paper is that it 's everywhere .
we have made these kinds of devices using napkins and toilet paper and wraps , and all kinds of stuff .
so , the production capability is there .
the second is , you can put lots and lots of tests in a very small place .
i 'll show you in a moment that the stack of paper there would probably hold something like 100,000 tests , something of that kind .
and then finally , a point that you do n't think of so much in developed world medicine : it eliminates sharps .
and what sharps means is needles , things that stick .
if you 've taken a sample of someone 's blood and the someone might have hepatitis c , you do n't want to make a mistake and stick it in you .
it just - you do n't want to do that .
so , how do you dispose of that ? it 's a problem everywhere .
and here you simply burn it .
so , it 's a sort of a practical approach to starting on things .
now , you say , " if paper is a good idea , other people have surely thought of it . "
and the answer is , of course , yes .
those half of you , roughly , who are women , at some point may have had a pregnancy test .
and the most common of these is in a device that looks like the thing on the left .
it 's something called a lateral flow immunoassay .
in that particular test , urine either , containing a hormone called hcg , does or does not flow across a piece of paper .
and there are two bars . one bar indicates that the test is working , and if the second bar shows up , you 're pregnant .
this is a terrific kind of test in a binary world , and the nice thing about pregnancy is either you are pregnant or you 're not pregnant .
you 're not partially pregnant or thinking about being pregnant or something of that sort .
so , it works very well there , but it does n't work very well when you need more quantitative information .
there are also dipsticks , but if you look at the dipsticks , they 're for another kind of urine analysis .
there are an awful lot of colors and things like that .
what do you actually do about that in a difficult circumstance ?
so , the approach that we started with is to ask : is it really practical to make things of this sort ?
and that problem is now , in a purely engineering way , solved .
and the procedure that we have is simply to start with paper .
you run it through a new kind of printer called a wax printer .
the wax printer does what looks like printing .
it is printing . you put that on , you warm it a little bit , the wax prints through so it absorbs into the paper , and you end up with the device that you want .
the printers cost 800 bucks now .
they 'll make , we estimate that if you were to run them 24 hours a day they 'd make about 10 million tests a year .
so , it 's a solved problem , that particular problem is solved .
and there is an example of the kind of thing that you see .
that 's on a piece of 8 by 12 paper .
that takes about two seconds to make .
and so i regard that as done .
there is a very important issue here , which is that because it 's a printer , a color printer , it prints colors . that 's what color printers do .
i 'll show you in a moment , that 's actually quite useful .
now , the next question that you would like to ask is : what would you like to measure ? what would you like to analyze ?
and the thing which you 'd most like to analyze , we 're a fair distance from .
it 's what 's called " fever of undiagnosed origin . "
someone comes into the clinic , they have a fever , they feel bad . what do they have ?
do they have t.b. ? do they have aids ?
do they have a common cold ?
the triage problem . that 's a hard problem for reasons that i wo n't go through .
there are an awful lot of things that you 'd like to distinguish among .
but then there are a series of things : aids , hepatitis , malaria , tb , others and simpler ones , such as guidance of treatment .
now even that 's more complicated than you think .
a friend of mine works in transcultural psychiatry , and he is interested in the question of why people do and do n't take their meds .
so , dapsone , or something like that , you have to take it for a while .
he has a wonderful story of talking to a villager in india and saying , " have you taken your dapsone ? " " yes . "
" have you taken it every day ? " " yes . "
" have you taken if for a month ? " " yes . "
what the guy actually meant was that he 'd fed a 30-day dose of dapsone to his dog , that morning .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- he was telling the truth . because in a different culture , the dog is a surrogate for you , you know , " today , " " this month , " " since the rainy season " - there are lots of opportunities for misunderstanding , and so an issue here is to , in some cases , to figure out how to deal with matters that seem uninteresting , like compliance .
now , take a look at what a typical test looks like .
prick a finger , you get some blood , about 50 microliters .
that 's about all you 're going to get , because you ca n't use the usual sort of systems .
you ca n't manipulate it very well , although i 'll show something about that in a moment .
so , you take the drop of blood , no further manipulations , you put it on a little device , the device filters out the blood cells , lets the serum go through , and you get a series of colors down in the bottom there .
and the colors indicate " disease " or " normal . "
but even that 's complicated , because to you , to me , colors might indicate " normal , " but , after all , we 're all suffering from probably an excess of education .
what you do about something which requires quantitative analysis ?
and so the solution that we and many other people are thinking about there , and at this point there is a dramatic flourish , and out comes the universal solution to everything these days , which is a cell phone . in this particular case , a camera phone .
they 're everywhere , six billion a month in india .
and the idea is that what one does , is to take the device , you dip it , you develop the color , you take a picture , the picture goes to a central laboratory .
you do n't have to send out a doctor , you send out somebody who can just take the sample , and in the clinic either a doctor , or ideally a computer in this case , does the analysis .
turns out to work actually quite well , particularly when your color printer has printed the color bars that indicate how things work .
so , my view of the health care worker of the future is not a doctor , but is an 18-year-old , otherwise unemployed , who has two things : he has a backpack full of these tests , and a lancet to occasionally take a blood sample , and an ak-47 .
and these are the things that get him through his day .
there 's another very interesting connection here , and that is that what one wants to do is to pass through useful information over what is generally a pretty awful telephone system .
it turns out there 's an enormous amount of information already available on that subject , which is the mars rover problem .
how do you get back an accurate view of the color on mars if you have a really terrible bandwidth to do it with ?
and the answer is not complicated but it 's one which i do n't want to go through here , other than to say that the communication systems for doing this are really pretty well understood .
also , a fact which you may not know is that the compute capability of this thing is not so different from the compute capability of your desktop computer .
this is a fantastic device which is only beginning to be tapped .
i do n't know whether the idea of one computer , one child makes any sense . here 's the computer of the future , because this screen is already there and they 're ubiquitous .
all right now let me show you just a little bit about advanced devices .
and we 'll start by posing a little problem .
what you see here is another centimeter-sized device , and the different colors are different colors of dye .
and you notice something which might strike you as a little bit interesting , which is the yellow seems to disappear , get through the blue , and then get through the red .
how does that happen ? how do you make something flow through something ?
and , of course the answer is , " you do n't . "
you make it flow under and over .
but now the question is : how do you make it flow under and over in a piece of paper ?
the answer is that what you do , and the details are not terribly important here , is to make something more elaborate : you take several different layers of paper , each one containing its own little fluid system , and you separate them by pieces of , literally , double-sided carpet tape , the stuff you use to stick the carpets onto the floor .
and the fluid will flow from one layer into the next .
it distributes itself , flows through further holes , distributes itself .
and what you see , at the lower right-hand side there , is a sample in which a single sample of blood has been put on the top , and it has gone through and distributed itself into these 16 holes on the bottom , in a piece of paper - basically it looks like a chip , two pieces of paper thick .
and in this particular case we were just interested in the replicability of that .
but that is , in principle , the way you solve the " fever of unexplained origin " problem , because each one of those spots then becomes a test for a particular set of markers of disease , and this will work in due course .
here is an example of a slightly more complicated device .
there 's the chip .
you dip in a corner . the fluid goes into the center .
it distributes itself out into these various wells or holes , and turns color , and all done with paper and carpet tape .
so , i think it 's as low-cost as we 're likely to be able to come up and make things .
now , i have one last , two last little stories to tell you , in finishing off this business .
this is one : one of the things that one does occasionally need to do is to separate blood cells from serum .
and the question was , here we do it by taking a sample , we put it in a centrifuge , we spin it , and you get blood cells out . terrific .
what happens if you do n't have an electricity , and a centrifuge , and whatever ?
and we thought for a while of how you might do this and the way , in fact , you do it is what 's shown here .
you get an eggbeater , which is everywhere , and you saw off a blade , and then you take tubing , and you stick it on that . you put the blood in , you spin it - somebody sits there and spins it .
it works really , really well .
and we sat down , we did the physics of eggbeaters and self-aligning tubes and all the rest of that kind of thing , sent it off to a journal .
we were very proud of this , particularly the title , which was " eggbeater as centrifuge . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and we sent it off , and by return mail it came back .
i called up the editor and i said , " what 's going on ? how is this possible ? "
the editor said , with enormous disdain , " i read this .
and we 're not going to publish it , because we only publish science . "
and it 's an important issue because it means that we have to , as a society , think about what we value .
and if it 's just papers and phys. rev. letters , we 've got a problem .
here is another example of something which is - this is a little spectrophotometer .
it measures the absorption of light in a sample the neat thing about this is , you have light source that flickers on and off at about 1,000 hertz , another light source that detects that light at 1,000 hertz , and so you can run this system in broad daylight .
it performs about equivalently to a system that 's in the order of 100,000 dollars .
it costs 50 dollars . we can probably make it for 50 cents , if we put our mind to it .
why does n't somebody do it ? and the answer is , " how do you make a profit in a capitalist system , doing that ? "
interesting problem .
so , let me finish by saying that we 've thought about this as a kind of engineering problem .
and we 've asked : what is the scientific unifying idea here ?
and we 've decided that we should think about this not so much in terms of cost , but in terms of simplicity .
simplicity is a neat word . and you 've got to think about what simplicity means .
i know what it is but i do n't actually know what it means .
so , i actually was interested enough in this to put together several groups of people .
and the most recent involved a couple of people at mit , one of them being an exceptionally bright kid who is one of the very few people i would think of who 's an authentic genius .
we all struggled for an entire day to think about simplicity .
and i want to give you the answer of this deep scientific thought .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , in a sense , you get what you pay for .
thank you very much .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- in 2002 , a group of treatment activists met to discuss the early development of the airplane .
the wright brothers , in the beginning of the last century , had for the first time managed to make one of those devices fly .
they also had taken out numerous patents on essential parts of the airplane .
they were not the only ones .
that was common practice in the industry , and those who held patents on airplanes were defending them fiercely and suing competitors left and right .
this actually was n't so great for the development of the aviation industry , and this was at a time that in particular the u.s. government was interested in ramping up the production of military airplanes .
so there was a bit of a conflict there .
the u.s. government decided to take action , and forced those patent holders to make their patents available to share with others to enable the production of airplanes .
so what has this got to do with this ?
in 2002 , nelson otwoma , a kenyan social scientist , discovered he had hiv and needed access to treatment .
he was told that a cure did not exist .
aids , he heard , was lethal , and treatment was not offered . this was at a time that treatment actually existed in rich countries .
aids had become a chronic disease .
people in our countries here in europe , in north america , were living with hiv , healthy lives .
not so for nelson . he was n't rich enough , and not so for his three-year-old son , who he discovered a year later also had hiv .
nelson decided to become a treatment activist and join up with other groups .
in 2002 , they were facing a different battle .
prices for arvs , the drugs needed to treat hiv , cost about 12,000 -lsb- dollars -rsb- per patient per year .
the patents on those drugs were held by a number of western pharmaceutical companies that were not necessarily willing to make those patents available .
when you have a patent , you can exclude anyone else from making , from producing or making low-cost versions , for example , available of those medications .
clearly this led to patent wars breaking out all over the globe .
luckily , those patents did not exist everywhere .
there were countries that did not recognize pharmaceutical product patents , such as india , and indian pharmaceutical companies started to produce so-called generic versions , low-cost copies of antiretroviral medicines , and make them available in the developing world , and within a year the price had come down from 10,000 dollars per patient per year to 350 dollars per patient per year , and today that same triple pill cocktail is available for 60 dollars per patient per year , and of course that started to have an enormous effect on the number of people who could afford access to those medicines .
treatment programs became possible , funding became available , and the number of people on antiretroviral drugs started to increase very rapidly .
today , eight million people have access to antiretroviral drugs .
thirty-four million are infected with hiv .
never has this number been so high , but actually this is good news , because what it means is people stop dying .
people who have access to these drugs stop dying .
and there 's something else .
they also stop passing on the virus .
this is fairly recent science that has shown that .
what that means is we have the tools to break the back of this epidemic .
so what 's the problem ?
well , things have changed .
first of all , the rules have changed .
today , all countries are obliged to provide patents for pharmaceuticals that last at least 20 years .
this is as a result of the intellectual property rules of the world trade organization .
so what india did is no longer possible .
second , the practice of patent-holding companies have changed .
here you see the patent practices before the world trade organization 's rules , before ' 95 , before antiretroviral drugs .
this is what you see today , and this is in developing countries , so what that means is , unless we do something deliberate and unless we do something now , we will very soon be faced with another drug price crisis , because new drugs are developed , new drugs go to market , but these medicines are patented in a much wider range of countries .
so unless we act , unless we do something today , we will soon be faced -lsb- with -rsb- what some have termed the treatment time bomb .
it is n't only the number of drugs that are patented .
there 's something else that can really scare generic manufacturers away .
this shows you a patent landscape .
this is the landscape of one medicine .
so you can imagine that if you are a generic company about to decide whether to invest in the development of this product , unless you know that the licenses to these patents are actually going to be available , you will probably choose to do something else .
again , deliberate action is needed .
so surely if a patent pool could be established to ramp up the production of military airplanes , we should be able to do something similar to tackle the hiv / aids epidemic .
and we did .
in 2010 , unitaid established the medicines patent pool for hiv .
and this is how it works : patent holders , inventors that develop new medicines patent those inventions , but make those patents available to the medicines patent pool . the medicines patent pool then license those out to whoever needs access to those patents .
that can be generic manufacturers .
it can also be not-for-profit drug development agencies , for example .
those manufacturers can then sell those medicines at much lower cost to people who need access to them , to treatment programs that need access to them .
they pay royalties over the sales to the patent holders , so they are remunerated for sharing their intellectual property .
there is one key difference with the airplane patent pool .
the medicines patent pool is a voluntary mechanism .
the airplane patent holders were not left a choice whether they 'd license their patents or not .
they were forced to do so .
that is something that the medicines patent pool can not do .
it relies on the willingness of pharmaceutical companies to license their patents and make them available for others to use .
today , nelson otwoma is healthy .
he has access to antiretroviral drugs .
his son will soon be 14 years old .
nelson is a member of the expert advisory group of the medicines patent pool , and he told me not so long ago , " ellen , we rely in kenya and in many other countries on the medicines patent pool to make sure that new medicines also become available to us , that new medicines , without delay , become available to us . "
and this is no longer fantasy .
already , i 'll give you an example .
in august of this year , the united states drug agency approved a new four-in-one aids medication .
the company , gilead , that holds the patents , has licensed the intellectual property to the medicines patent pool .
the pool is already working today , two months later , with generic manufacturers to make sure that this product can go to market at low cost where and when it is needed . this is unprecedented .
this has never been done before .
the rule is about a 10-year delay for a new product to go to market in developing countries , if at all .
this has never been seen before .
nelson 's expectations are very high , and quite rightly so . he and his son will need access to the next generation of antiretrovirals and the next , throughout their lifetime , so that he and many others in kenya and other countries can continue to live healthy , active lives .
now we count on the willingness of drug companies to make that happen . we count on those companies that understand that it is in the interest , not only in the interest of the global good , but also in their own interest , to move from conflict to collaboration , and through the medicines patent pool they can make that happen .
they can also choose not to do that , but those that go down that road may end up in a similar situation the wright brothers ended up with early last century , facing forcible measures by government . so they 'd better jump now .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- i want to talk about my investigations into what technology means in our lives - not just our immediate life , but in the cosmic sense , in the kind of long history of the world and our place in the world : what is this stuff ?
what is the significance ?
and so , i want to kind of go through my little story of what i found out .
and one of the first things that i started to investigate was the history of the name of technology .
and in the united states there is a state of the union address given by every president since 1790 .
and each one of those is really kind of summing up the most important things for the united states at that time .
if you search for the word " technology , " it was not used until 1952 .
so , technology was sort of absent from everybody 's thinking until 1952 , which happened to be the year of my birth .
and obviously , technology had existed before then , but we were n't aware of it , and so it was sort of an awakening of this force in our life .
i actually did research to find out the first use of the word " technology . "
it was in 1829 , and it was invented by a guy who was starting a curriculum - a course , bringing together all the kinds of arts and crafts , and industry - and he called it " technology . "
and that 's the very first use of the word .
so , what is this stuff that we 're all consumed by , and bothered by ?
alan kay calls it , " technology is anything that was invented after you were born . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- which is sort of the idea that we normally have about what technology is : it 's all that new stuff .
it 's not roads , or penicillin , or factory tires ; it 's the new stuff .
my friend danny hillis says kind of a similar one , he says , " technology is anything that does n't work yet . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- which is , again , a sense that it 's all new .
but we know that it 's just not new .
it actually goes way back , and what i want to suggest is it goes a long way back .
so , another way to think about technology , what it means , is to imagine a world without technology .
if we were to eliminate every single bit of technology in the world today - and i mean everything , from blades to scrapers to cloth - we as a species would not live very long .
we would die by the billions , and very quickly : the wolves would get us , we would be defenseless , we would be unable to grow enough food , or find enough food .
even the hunter-gatherers used some elementary tools .
and so , they had minimal technology , but they had some technology .
and if we study those hunter-gatherer tribes and the neanderthal , which are very similar to early man , we find out a very curious thing about this world without technology , and this is a kind of a curve of their average age .
there are no neanderthal fossils that are older than 40 years old that we 've ever found , and the average age of most of these hunter-gatherer tribes is 20 to 30 .
there are very few young infants because they die - high mortality rate - and there 's very few old people .
and so the profile is sort of for your average san francisco neighborhood : a lot of young people .
and if you go there , you say , " hey , everybody 's really healthy . "
well , that 's because they 're all young .
and the same thing with the hunter-gatherer tribes and early man is that you did n't live beyond the age of 30 .
so , it was a world without grandparents .
and grandparents are very important , because they are the transmitter of cultural evolution and information .
imagine a world and basically everybody was 20 to 30 years old .
how much learning can you do ?
you ca n't do very much learning in your own life , it 's so short , and there 's nobody to pass on what you do learn .
so , that 's one aspect .
it was a very short life . but at the same time anthropologists know that most hunter-gatherer tribes of the world , with that very little technology , actually did not spend a very long time gathering the food that they needed : three to six hours a day .
some anthropologists call that the original affluent society .
because they had banker hours basically .
so , it was possible to get enough food .
but when the scarcity came when the highs and lows and the droughts came , then people went into starvation .
and that 's why they did n't live very long .
so , what technology brought , through the very simple tools like these stone tools here - even something as small as this - the early bands of humans were actually able to eliminate to extinction about 250 megafauna animals in north america when they first arrived 10,000 years ago .
so , long before the industrial age we 've been affecting the planet on a global scale , with just a small amount of technology .
the other thing that the early man invented was fire .
and fire was used to clear out , and again , affected the ecology of grass and whole continents , and was used in cooking .
it enabled us to actually eat all kinds of things .
it was sort of , in a certain sense , in a mcluhan sense , an external stomach , in the sense that it was cooking food that we could not eat otherwise .
and if we do n't have fire , we actually could not live .
our bodies have adapted to these new diets .
our bodies have changed in the last 10,000 years .
so , with that little bit of technology , humans went from a small band of 10,000 or so - the same number as neanderthals everywhere - and we suddenly exploded . with the invention of language around 50,000 years ago , the number of humans exploded , and very quickly became the dominant species on the planet .
and they migrated into the rest of the world at two kilometers per year until , within several tens of thousands of years , we occupied every single watershed on the planet and became the most dominant species , with a very small amount of technology .
and even at that time , with the introduction of agriculture , 8,000 , 10,000 years ago we started to see climate change .
so , climate change is not a new thing .
what 's new is just the degree of it . even during the agricultural age there was climate change .
and so , already small amounts of technology were transforming the world .
and what this means , and where i 'm going , is that technology has become the most powerful force in the world .
all the things that we see today that are changing our lives , we can always trace back to the introduction of some new technology .
so , it 's a force that is the most powerful force that has been unleashed on this planet , and in such a degree that i think that it 's become our - who we are .
in fact , our humanity , and everything that we think about ourselves is something that we 've invented .
so , we 've invented ourselves . of all the animals that we have domesticated , the most important animal that we 've domesticated has been us . okay ?
so , humanity is our greatest invention .
but of course we 're not done yet .
we 're still inventing , and this is what technology is allowing us to do - it 's continually to reinvent ourselves .
it 's a very , very strong force .
i call this entire thing - us humans as our technology , everything that we 've made , gadgets in our lives - we call that the technium . that 's this world .
my working definition of technology is " anything useful that a human mind makes . "
it 's not just hammers and gadgets , like laptops .
but it 's also law . and of course cities are ways to make things more useful to us .
while this is something that comes from our mind , it also has its roots deeply into the cosmos .
it goes back . the origins and roots of technology go back to the big bang , in this way , in that they are part of this self-organizing thread that starts at the big bang and goes through galaxies and stars , into life , into us .
and the three major phases of the early universe was energy , when the dominant force was energy ; then it became , the dominant force , as it cooled , became matter ; and then , with the invention of life , four billion years ago , the dominant force in our neighborhood became information .
that 's what life is : it 's an information process that was restructuring and making new order .
so , those energy , matter einstein show were equivalent , and now new sciences of quantum computing show that entropy and information and matter and energy are all interrelated , so it 's one long continuum .
you put energy into the right kind of system and out comes wasted heat , entropy and extropy , which is order .
it 's the increased order .
where does this order come from ? its roots go way back .
we actually do n't know .
but we do know that the self-organization trend throughout the universe is long , and it began with things like galaxies ; they maintained their order for billions of years .
stars are basically nuclear fusion machines that self-organize and self-sustain themselves for billions of years , this order against the entropy of the world .
and flowers and plants are the same thing , extended , and technology is basically an extension of life .
one trend that we notice in all those things is that the amount of energy per gram per second that flows through this , is actually increasing .
the amount of energy is increasing through this little sequence .
and that the amount of energy per gram per second that flows through life is actually greater than a star - because of the star 's long lifespan , the energy density in life is actually higher than a star .
and the energy density that we see in the greatest of anywhere in the universe is actually in a pc chip .
there is more energy flowing through , per gram per second , than anything that we have any other experience with .
what i would suggest is that if you want to see where technology is going , we continue that trajectory , and we say " well what 's going to become more energy-dense , that 's where it 's going . " and so what i 've done is , i 've taken the same kinds of things and looked at other aspects of evolutionary life and say , " what are the general trends in evolutionary life ? "
and there are things moving towards greater complexity , moving towards greater diversity , moving towards greater specialization , sentience , ubiquity and most important , evolvability : those very same things are also present in technology .
that 's where technology is going .
in fact , technology is accelerating all the aspects of life , and we can see that happening ; just as there 's diversity in life , there 's more diversity in things we make .
things in life start out being general cell , and they become specialized : you have tissue cells , you have muscle , brain cells . and same things happens with say , a hammer , which is general at first and becomes more specific .
so , i would like to say that while there is six kingdoms of life , we can think of technology basically as a seventh kingdom of life .
it 's a branching off from the human form .
but technology has its own agenda , like anything , like life itself .
for instance , right now , three-quarters of the energy that we use is actually used to feed the technium itself .
in transportation , it 's not to move us , it 's to move the stuff that we make or buy .
i use the word " want . " technology wants .
this is a robot that wants to plug itself in to get more power .
your cat wants more food .
a bacterium , which has no consciousness at all , wants to move towards light .
it has an urge , and technology has an urge .
at the same time , it wants to give us things , and what it gives us is basically progress .
you can take all kinds of curves , and they 're all pointing up .
there 's really no dispute about progress , if we discount the cost of that .
and that 's the thing that bothers most people , is that progress is really real , but we wonder and question : what are the environmental costs of it ?
i did a survey of a number of species of artifacts in my house , and there 's 6,000 . other people have come up with 10,000 .
when king henry of england died , he had 18,000 things in his house , but that was the entire wealth of england .
and with that entire wealth of england , king henry could not buy any antibiotics , he could not buy refrigeration , he could not buy a trip of a thousand miles .
whereas this rickshaw wale in india could save up and buy antibiotics and he could buy refrigeration .
he could buy things that king henry , in all his wealth , could never buy .
that 's what progress is about .
so , technology is selfish ; technology is generous .
that conflict , that tension , will be with us forever , that sometimes it wants to do what it wants to do , and sometimes it 's going to do things for us .
we have confusion about what we should think about a new technology .
right now the default position about when a new technology comes along , is we - people talk about the precautionary principle , which is very common in europe , which says , basically , " do n't do anything . when you meet a new technology , stop , until it can be proven that there 's no harm . "
i think that really leads nowhere .
but a better way is to , what i call proactionary principle , which is : you engage with technology .
you try it out .
you obviously do what the precautionary principle suggests , you try to anticipate it , but after anticipating it , you constantly asses it , not just once , but eternally .
and when it diverts from what you want , we prioritize risk , we evaluate not just the new stuff , but the old stuff .
we fix it , but most importantly , we relocate it .
and what i mean by that is that we find a new job for it .
nuclear energy , fission , is really bad idea for bombs .
but it may be a pretty good idea relocated into sustainable nuclear energy for electricity , instead of burning coal .
when we have a bad idea , the response to a bad idea is not no ideas , it 's not to stop thinking .
the response to a bad idea - like , say , a tungsten light bulb - is a better idea . ok ?
so , better ideas is really - always the response to technology that we do n't like is basically , better technology .
and actually , in a certain sense , technology is a kind of a method for generating better ideas , if you can think about it that way .
so , maybe spraying ddt on crops is a really bad idea .
but ddt sprayed on local homes , there 's nothing better to eliminate malaria , besides insect ddt-impregnated mosquito nets .
but that 's a really good idea ; that 's a good job for technology .
so , our job as humans is to parent our mind children , to find them good friends , to find them a good job .
and so , every technology is sort of a creative force looking for the right job .
that 's actually my son , right here .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- there are no bad technologies , just as there are no bad children .
we do n't say children are neutral , children are positive .
we just have to find them the right place .
and so , what technology gives us , over the long term , over the sort of extended evolution - from the beginning of time , through the invention of the plants and animals , and the evolution of life , the evolution of brains - what that is constantly giving us is increasing differences : it 's increasing diversity , it 's increasing options , it 's increasing choices , opportunities , possibilities and freedoms .
that 's what we get from technology all the time . that 's why people leave villages and go into cities , is because they are always gravitating towards increased choices and possibilities .
and we are aware of the price .
we pay a price for that , but we are aware of it , and generally we will pay the price for increased freedoms , choices and opportunities .
even technology wants clean water .
is technology diametrically opposed to nature ?
because technology is an extension of life , it 's in parallel and aligned with the same things that life wants .
so that i think technology loves biology , if we allow it to .
great movement that is starting billions of years ago is moving through us and it continues to go , and our choice , so to speak , in technology , is really to align ourselves with this force much greater than ourselves .
so , technology is more than just the stuff in your pocket .
it 's more than just gadgets ; it 's more than just things that people invent .
it 's actually part of a very long story , a great story , that began billions of years ago .
and it 's moving through us , this self-organization , and we 're extending and accelerating it , and we can be part of it by aligning the technology that we make with it .
i really appreciate your attention today . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- bass guitar -rrb- -lrb- bass guitar and accordion -rrb- ♫ you 're older than you 've ever been ♫ ♫ and now you 're even older ♫ ♫ and now you 're even older ♫ ♫ and now you 're even older . ♫ ♫ you 're older than you 've even been ♫ ♫ and now you 're even older ♫ ♫ and now you 're older still . ♫ ♫ time ♫ ♫ is marching on ♫ ♫ and time ♫ ♫ is still marching on . ♫ ♫ this day will soon be at an end ♫ ♫ and now it 's even sooner ♫ ♫ and now it 's even sooner ♫
♫ and now it 's even sooner . ♫ ♫ this day will soon be at an end ♫ ♫ and now it 's even sooner ♫ ♫ and now it 's sooner still . ♫ ♫ you 're older than you 've ever been ♫ ♫ and now you 're even older ♫ ♫ and now you 're even older ♫ ♫ and now you 're even older . ♫ ♫ you 're older than you 've ever been ♫ ♫ and now you 're even older ♫ ♫ and now you 're older still . ♫ thank you very much .
good morning everybody .
we are they might be giants .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i am wearing the al gore in-ear monitors he wore on the larry king show and i 'm hearing that transmission and not mine .
but i guess that 's in keeping , so now we 'll just move to the powerpoint presentation , ladies and gentlemen .
this is a brand new song .
in the spirit of ted , we 're bringing you something that has not been released .
john , do you want to introduce the song ?
this is a song about a creature called a hummingbird moth which imitates another creature which imitates yet another creature .
it 's completely fucked up and can only be explained in song .
♫ everyone is crying at the dread hypnotic flying ♫ ♫ of the bee of the bird of the moth . ♫ ♫ you ca n't walk , you ca n't ramble ♫ ♫ ' cause you 're gonna have to scramble ♫ ♫ from the bee of the bird of the moth . ♫ ♫ catbird is a cat ♫ ♫ but he 's got bugness in his veins . ♫ ♫ manhouse lives within himself ♫ ♫ with thoughtful human brains . ♫ ♫ neither one is equal ♫ ♫ to the challenge of the freak we 'll call ♫ ♫ the bee of the bird of the moth . ♫
♫ now the moth ♫ ♫ defeats the mouse and man . ♫ ♫ it 's messing with the plan . ♫ ♫ it ca n't be believed ♫ ♫ ' cause it 's just a hummingbird moth ♫ ♫ who 's acting like the bird ♫ ♫ that thinks it 's a bee . ♫ ♫ got a brand new shipment ♫ ♫ of electrical equipment ♫ ♫ it 's addressed to the bottom of the sea . ♫ ♫ send a tangerine-colored ♫ ♫ nuclear submarine ♫ ♫ with a sticker that says stp . ♫ ♫ windshield wiper washer fluid ♫ ♫ spraying in the air ... ♫ ♫ headlights under head lice ♫
♫ under hats lie everywhere . ♫ ♫ subatomic waves ♫ ♫ to the underwater caves ♫ ♫ of the bee of the bird of the moth . ♫ ♫ now the moth defeats the mouse and man . ♫ ♫ it 's messing with the plan . ♫ ♫ it ca n't be believed ♫ ♫ ' cause it 's just a hummingbird moth ♫ ♫ who 's acting like a bird ♫ ♫ that thinks it 's a bee . ♫ ♫ is it us or is this messed up ? ♫ ♫ everyone 's deforming ♫ ♫ in the presence of the swarming ♫ ♫ of the bee of the bird of the moth . ♫
♫ protozoa , snakes and horses ♫ ♫ have enlisted in the forces ♫ ♫ of the bee of bird of the moth . ♫ ♫ catbug is a cat ♫ ♫ but he 's got bugness in his veins . ♫ ♫ manhouse lives within himself ♫ ♫ with thoughtful human brains . ♫ ♫ neither one is equal ♫ ♫ to the challenge of the freak we 'll call ♫ ♫ the bee of the bird of the moth . ♫ -lrb- applause -rrb- thanks a lot .
thank you very much .
so we are past our 1,000th show .
probably somewhere around 1,500 .
it 's hard to know .
we 've only done two shows in 2007 so far , but our first show was actually the coldest performance we 've ever had .
it was 19 degrees in st. louis about a month ago and i 'm happy to report that this performance you are seeing today is the earliest we have ever performed .
so thank you .
we are cultural test pilots , ladies and gentlemen .
how early can a rock performance begin ?
not all the facts are in about performing at 8.30 in the morning .
i can tell you the 19 degree thing was fantastic .
all right .
so we do n't know that much about the history of violinists but we do know that when we entered the state of new jersey there is an uptick in violence .
this song is called " asbury park . "
it 's based on a real life experience .
♫ i ♫ ♫ i got ♫ ♫ i got kicked ♫ ♫ i got kicked in the head ♫ ♫ backstage at the stone . ♫ ♫ stone pone . ♫ ♫ stone pony . ♫ ♫ i got kicked in the head ♫ ♫ backstage at the stone pony ♫ ♫ where i swore to the guy ♫ ♫ that the guy who took his beer was n't me . ♫ ♫ me got ♫ ♫ me got kicked ♫ ♫ me got kicked in the head ♫ ♫ backstage at the stone . ♫ ♫ stone pone . ♫ ♫ stone pony . ♫ ♫ me got kicked in the head ♫
♫ backstage at the stone pony ♫ ♫ where i swore to the guy ♫ ♫ that the guy who took his beer ♫ ♫ was a guy dressed like me . ♫ ♫ not me ! ♫ ♫ not me ! ♫ ♫ not me ! ♫ thank you .
marty beller on the drums over there .
-lrb- applause -rrb- we want to get in as many songs as possible during our brief time here so this is the one to play .
this song is called " fingertips . "
♫ everything is catching on fire ♫ ♫ yes , everything is catching on fire ♫ ♫ yes , everything is catching on fire . ♫ ♫ fingertips ♫ ♫ fingertips ♫ ♫ fingertips ♫ ♫ i hear the wind blow ♫ ♫ i hear the wind blow ♫ ♫ it seems to say ♫ ♫ hello ♫ ♫ hello ♫ ♫ i 'm the one who loves you so . ♫ ♫ hey , now everybody , now . ♫ ♫ hey , now everybody ♫ ♫ hey , now everybody , now ♫ ♫ who 's that standing ♫ ♫ at the window ? ♫ ♫ i found a new friend ♫ ♫ underneath my pillow . ♫
♫ come on and wreck my car ♫ ♫ come on and wreck my car ♫ ♫ come on and wreck my car ♫ ♫ come on and wreck my car ♫ ♫ are n't you the guy who hit me in the eye ? ♫ ♫ are n't you the guy who hit me in the eye ? ♫ ♫ please pass the milk , please . ♫ ♫ please pass the milk , please . ♫ ♫ please pass the milk , please . ♫ ♫ leave me alone , leave me alone . ♫ ♫ who 's knocking on the wall ? ♫ ♫ all alone , all alone . ♫
♫ all by myself . ♫ ♫ what 's that blue thing doing here ? ♫ ♫ something grabbed ahold of my hand ♫ ♫ i did n't know what had my hand ♫ ♫ but that 's when all my troubles began . ♫ ♫ i do n't understand you ♫ ♫ i do n't understand you ♫ ♫ i can not understand you ♫ ♫ i can not understand you ♫ ♫ i do n't understand the things you say ♫ ♫ i ca n't understand a single word ♫ ♫ i do n't understand you ♫ ♫ i do n't understand you ♫ ♫ i just do n't understand you ♫
♫ i do n't understand you ♫ ♫ i do not understand you ♫ ♫ do n't understand you ♫ ♫ do n't understand you ♫ ♫ i turn around ♫ ♫ see the sound ♫ ♫ turn around and see the thing ♫ ♫ that made the sound . ♫ ♫ mysterious whisper ♫ ♫ mysterious whisper ♫ ♫ mysterious whisper ♫ ♫ mysterious whisper ♫ ♫ the day that love came to play . ♫ ♫ i 'm having a heart attack ♫ ♫ i 'm having a heart attack ♫ ♫ i 'm having a heart attack ♫ ♫ i 'm having a ... ♫ ♫ fingertips ♫
♫ fingertips ♫ ♫ i walk along darkened corridors ♫ ♫ and i walk along darkened corridors ♫ thank you very much - " fingertips . "
-lrb- applause -rrb- ♫ we 're taking calls - from the dead . ♫ ♫ we 're taking calls - from the dead . ♫ ♫ we 're taking phone calls from the dead . ♫ ♫ they 're calling from beyond the grave . ♫ ♫ beyond the grave . ♫ ♫ they have some questions ♫ ♫ and things to share ♫ ♫ from underneath the cold , cold ground . ♫ we 're soliciting phone calls from dead people as a special ted presentation .
we 're taking calls live on stage here at ted in monterey .
and i think we have a caller coming in here .
hello there .
you 're live .
hello . who 's there , please ?
am i on the air ?
hi there .
you 're on with they might be giants .
this is eleanor roosevelt .
hello , eleanor , please ...
i want to talk to ...
please turn off your radio , eleanor .
i wanna talk to randi .
i 've got a question for randi .
what 's your question , please ?
i want to talk to the amazing randi .
do you have a laminated badge , eleanor ?
i want my million dollars .
eleanor , i 'm sorry , do you have a laminated badge ?
no , i do n't have a badge .
well , i think we 're going to stop that part of the show .
here 's a song we like to think of as the future anthem of ted .
it 's actually a children 's song but like so many projects for children it 's really just a trojan horse for adult work .
this song is called " the alphabet ...
of nations ! "
♫ algeria , bulgaria , cambodia , dominica , ♫ ♫ egypt , france , the gambia ♫ ♫ hungary , iran , japan , kazakhstan , ♫ ♫ libya and mongolia . ♫ ♫ norway , oman , pakistan , ♫ ♫ qatar , russia , suriname , ♫ ♫ turkey , uruguay , vietnam , ♫ ♫ west xylophone , yemen , zimbabwe . ♫ ♫ algeria , bulgaria , cambodia , dominica , ♫ ♫ egypt , france , the gambia , ♫ ♫ hungary , iran , japan , kazakhstan , ♫ ♫ libya and mongolia . ♫ ♫ norway , oman , pakistan , ♫ ♫ qatar , russia , suriname , ♫ ♫ turkey , uruguay , vietnam , ♫ ♫ west xylophone , yemen , zimbabwe . ♫ ♫ azerbaijan , bolivia , canada , ♫ ♫ australia , belgium , chad , ♫ ♫ afghanistan , brunei , china , denmark , ♫
♫ ecuador , fiji , guatemala , ♫ ♫ algeria , bulgaria , cambodia , dominica , ♫ ♫ egypt , france , the gambia , ♫ ♫ hungary , iran , japan , kazakhstan , ♫ ♫ libya and mongolia . ♫ ♫ norway , oman , pakistan , ♫ ♫ qatar , russia , suriname , ♫ ♫ turkey , uruguay , vietnam , ♫ ♫ west xylophone , yemen , zimbabwe . ♫ thank you so much .
you 've been a wonderful 8:30 audience .
have a great session .
thank you all .
i think the beautiful malin -lsb- akerman -rsb- put it perfectly .
every man deserves the opportunity to grow a little bit of luxury .
ladies and gentlemen , and more importantly , mo bros and mo sistas - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - for the next 17 minutes , i 'm going to share with you my movember journey , and how , through that journey , we 've redefined charity , we 're redefining the way prostate cancer researchers are working together throughout the world , and i hope , through that process , that i inspire you to create something significant in your life , something significant that will go on and make this world a better place .
so the most common question i get asked , and i 'm going to answer it now so i do n't have to do it over drinks tonight , is how did this come about ?
how did movember start ?
well , normally , a charity starts with the cause , and someone that is directly affected by a cause .
they then go on to create an event , and beyond that , a foundation to support that .
pretty much in every case , that 's how a charity starts .
not so with movember . movember started in a very traditional australian way . it was on a sunday afternoon .
i was with my brother and a mate having a few beers , and i was watching the world go by , had a few more beers , and the conversation turned to ' 70s fashion - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - and how everything manages to come back into style .
and a few more beers , i said , " there has to be some stuff that has n't come back . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- then one more beer and it was , whatever happened to the mustache ?
why has n't that made a comeback ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- so then there was a lot more beers , and then the day ended with a challenge to bring the mustache back . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so in australia , " mo " is slang for mustache , so we renamed the month of november " movember " and created some pretty basic rules , which still stand today .
and they are : start the month clean-shaven , rock a mustache - not a beard , not a goatee , a mustache - for the 30 days of november , and then we agreed that we would come together at the end of the month , have a mustache-themed party , and award a prize for the best , and of course , the worst mustache . -lrb- laughter -rrb- now trust me , when you 're growing a mustache back in 2003 , and there were 30 of us back then , and this was before the ironic hipster mustache movement - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - it created a lot of controversy . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so my boss would n't let me go and see clients .
my girlfriend at the time , who 's no longer my girlfriend - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - hated it .
parents would shuffle kids away from us . -lrb- laughter -rrb- but we came together at the end of the month and we celebrated our journey , and it was a real journey .
and we had a lot of fun , and in 2004 , i said to the guys , " that was so much fun . we need to legitimize this so we can get away with it year on year . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- so we started thinking about that , and we were inspired by the women around us and all they were doing for breast cancer .
and we thought , you know what , there 's nothing for men 's health .
why is that ? why ca n't we combine growing a mustache and doing something for men 's health ?
and i started to research that topic , and discovered prostate cancer is the male equivalent of breast cancer in terms of the number of men that die from it and are diagnosed with it .
but there was nothing for this cause , so we married growing a mustache with prostate cancer , and then we created our tagline , which is , " changing the face of men 's health . "
and that eloquently describes the challenge , changing your appearance for the 30 days , and also the outcome that we 're trying to achieve : getting men engaged in their health , having them have a better understanding about the health risks that they face .
so with that model , i then cold-called the ceo of the prostate cancer foundation .
i said to him , " i 've got the most amazing idea that 's going to transform your organization . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- and i did n't want to share with him the idea over the phone , so i convinced him to meet with me for coffee in melbourne in 2004 .
and we sat down , and i shared with him my vision of getting men growing mustaches across australia , raising awareness for this cause , and funds for his organization . and i needed a partnership to legitimately do that .
and i said , " we 're going to come together at the end , we 're going to have a mustache-themed party , we 're going to have djs , we 're going to celebrate life , and we 're going to change the face of men 's health . "
and he just looked at me and laughed , and he said , he said , " adam , that 's a really novel idea , but we 're an ultraconservative organization .
we ca n't have anything to do with you . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- so i paid for coffee that day - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - and his parting comment as we shook hands was , " listen , if you happen to raise any money out of this , we 'll gladly take it . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- so my lesson that year was persistence .
and we persisted , and we got 450 guys growing mustaches , and together we raised 54,000 dollars , and we donated every cent of that to the prostate cancer foundation of australia , and that represented at the time the single biggest donation they 'd ever received .
so from that day forward , my life has become about a mustache .
every day - this morning , i wake up and go , my life is about a mustache . -lrb- laughter -rrb- essentially , i 'm a mustache farmer . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and my season is november . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so in 2005 , the campaign got more momentum , was more successful in australia and then new zealand , and then in 2006 we came to a pivotal point .
it was consuming so much of our time after hours on weekends that we thought , we either need to close this down or figure a way to fund movember so that i could quit my job and go and spend more time in the organization and take it to the next level .
it 's really interesting when you try and figure a way to fund a fundraising organization built off growing mustaches . -lrb- laughter -rrb- let me tell you that there 's not too many people interested in investing in that , not even the prostate cancer foundation , who we 'd raised about 1.2 million dollars for at that stage .
so again we persisted , and foster 's brewing came to the party and gave us our first ever sponsorship , and that was enough for me to quit my job , i did consulting on the side .
and leading into movember 2006 , we 'd run through all the money from foster 's , we 'd run through all the money i had , and essentially we had no money left , and we 'd convinced all our suppliers - creative agencies , web development agencies , hosting companies , whatnot - to delay their billing until december .
so we 'd racked up at this stage about 600,000 dollars worth of debt . so if movember 2006 did n't happen , the four founders , well , we would 've been broke , we would 've been homeless , sitting on the street with mustaches . -lrb- laughter -rrb- but we thought , you know what , if that 's the worst thing that happens , so what ?
we 're going to have a lot of fun doing it , and it taught us the importance of taking risks and really smart risks .
then in early 2007 , a really interesting thing happened .
we had mo bros from canada , from the u.s. , and from the u.k. emailing us and calling us and saying , hey , there 's nothing for prostate cancer .
bring this campaign to these countries .
so we thought , why not ? let 's do it .
so i cold-called the ceo of prostate cancer canada , and i said to him , " i have this most amazing concept . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " it 's going to transform your organization . i do n't want to tell you about it now , but will you meet with me if i fly all the way to toronto ? " so i flew here , met down on front street east , and we sat in the boardroom , and i said , " right , here 's my vision of getting men growing mustaches all across canada raising awareness and funds for your organization . "
and he looked at me and laughed and said , " adam , sounds like a really novel idea , but we 're an ultraconservative organization . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- i 've heard this before . i know how it goes .
but he said , " we will partner with you , but we 're not going to invest in it . you need to figure a way to bring this campaign across here and make it work . "
so what we did was , we took some of the money that we raised in australia to bring the campaign across to this country , the u.s , and the u.k. , and we did that because we knew , if this was successful , we could raise infinitely more money globally than we could just in australia . and that money fuels research , and that research will get us to a cure .
and we 're not about finding an australian cure or a canadian cure , we 're about finding the cure .
so in 2007 , we brought the campaign across here , and it was , it set the stage for the campaign .
it was n't as successful as we thought it would be .
we were sort of very gung ho with our success in australia and new zealand at that stage .
so that year really taught us the importance of being patient and really understanding the local market before you become so bold as to set lofty targets .
but what i 'm really pleased to say is , in 2010 , movember became a truly global movement .
canada was just pipped to the post in terms of the number one fundraising campaign in the world .
last year we had 450,000 mo bros spread across the world and together we raised 77 million dollars .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and that makes movember now the biggest funder of prostate cancer research and support programs in the world .
and that is an amazing achievement when you think about us growing mustaches . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and for us , we have redefined charity .
our ribbon is a hairy ribbon . -lrb- laughter -rrb- our ambassadors are the mo bros and the mo sistas , and i think that 's been fundamental to our success .
we hand across our brand and our campaign to those people .
we let them embrace it and interpret it in their own way .
so now i live in los angeles , because the prostate cancer foundation of the u.s. is based there , and i always get asked by the media down there , because it 's so celebrity-driven , " who are your celebrity ambassadors ? "
and i say to them , " last year we were fortunate enough to have 450,000 celebrity ambassadors . "
and they go , " what , what do you mean ? "
and it 's like , everything single person , every single mo bro and mo sista that participates in movember is our celebrity ambassador , and that is so , so important and fundamental to our success .
now what i want to share with you is one of my most touching movember moments , and it happened here in toronto last year , at the end of the campaign .
i was out with a team . it was the end of movember .
we 'd had a great campaign , and to be honest , we 'd had our fair share of beer that night , but i said , " you know what , i think we 've got one more bar left in us . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- so we piled into a taxi , and this is our taxi driver , and i was sitting in the back seat , and he turned around and said , " where are you going ? "
and i said , " hang on , that is an amazing mustache . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and he said , " i 'm doing it for movember . " and i said , " so am i. " and i said , " tell me your movember story . "
and he goes , " listen , i know it 's about men 's health , i know it 's about prostate cancer , but this is for breast cancer . "
and i said , " okay , that 's interesting . "
and he goes , " last year , my mom passed away from breast cancer in sri lanka , because we could n't afford proper treatment for her , " and he said , " this mustache is my tribute to my mom . "
and we sort of all choked up in the back of the taxi , and i did n't tell him who i was , because i did n't think it was appropriate , and i just shook his hand and i said , " thank you so much .
your mom would be so proud . "
and from that moment i realized that movember is so much more than a mustache , having a joke .
it 's about each person coming to this platform , embracing it in their own way , and being significant in their own life .
for us now at movember , we really focus on three program areas , and having a true impact : awareness and education , survivor support programs , and research .
now we always focus , naturally , on how much we raise , because it 's a very tangible outcome , but for me , awareness and education is more important than the funds we raise , because i know that is changing and saving lives today , and it 's probably best exampled by a young guy that i met at south by southwest in austin , texas , at the start of the year .
he came up to me and said , " thank you for starting movember . "
and i said , " thank you for doing movember . "
and i looked at him , and i was like , " i 'm pretty sure you ca n't grow a mustache . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- and i said , " what 's your movember story ? "
and he said , " i grew the worst mustache ever . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- " but i went home for thanksgiving dinner , and pretty quickly the conversation around the table turned to what the hell was going on . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- " and we talked - i talked to them about movember , and then after that , my dad came up to me , and at the age of 26 , for the first time ever , i had a conversation with my dad one on one about men 's health . i had a conversation with my dad about prostate cancer , and i learned that my grandfather had prostate cancer and i was able to share with my dad that he was
twice as likely to get that disease , and he did n't know that , and he had n't been getting screened for it . "
so now , that guy is getting screened for prostate cancer .
so those conversations , getting men engaged in this , at whatever age , is so critically important , and in my view so much more important than the funds we raise .
now to the funds we raise , and research , and how we 're redefining research .
we fund prostate cancer foundations now in 13 countries .
we literally fund hundreds if not thousands of institutions and researchers around the world , and when we looked at this more recently , we realized there 's a real lack of collaboration going on even within institutions , let alone nationally , let alone globally , and this is not unique to prostate cancer . this is cancer research the world over .
and so we said , right , we 'd redefined charity . we need to redefine the way these guys operate . how do we do that ?
so what we did was , we created a global action plan , and we 're taking 10 percent of what 's raised in each country now and putting it into a global fund , and we 've got the best prostate cancer scientific minds in the world that look after that fund , and they come together each year and identify the number one priority , and that , last year , was getting a better screening test .
so they identified that as a priority , and then they 've got and recruited now 300 researchers from around the world that are studying that topic , essentially the same topic .
so now we 're funding them to the tune of about five or six million dollars to collaborate and bringing them together , and that 's a unique thing in the cancer world , and we know , through that collaboration , it will accelerate outcomes .
and that 's how we 're redefining the research world .
so , what i know about my movember journey is that , with a really creative idea , with passion , with persistence , and a lot of patience , four mates , four mustaches , can inspire a room full of people , and that room full of people can go on and inspire a city , and that city is melbourne , my home .
and that city can go on and inspire a state , and that state can go on and inspire a nation , and beyond that , you can create a global movement that is changing the face of men 's health .
my name is adam garone , and that 's my story .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- so i want to tell you a story - an encouraging story - about addressing desperation , depression and despair in afghanistan , and what we have learned from it , and how to help people to overcome traumatic experiences and how to help them to regain some confidence in the time ahead - in the future - and how to participate again in everyday life .
so , i am a jungian psychoanalyst , and i went to afghanistan in january 2004 , by chance , on an assignment for medica mondiale .
jung in afghanistan - you get the picture .
afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world , and 70 percent of the people are illiterate .
war and malnutrition kills people together with hope .
you may know this from the media , but what you may not know is that the average age of the afghan people is 17 years old , which means they grow up in such an environment and - i repeat myself - in 30 years of war .
so this translates into ongoing violence , foreign interests , bribery , drugs , ethnic conflicts , bad health , shame , fear and cumulative traumatic experiences .
local and foreign military are supposed to build peace together with the donors and the governmental and non-governmental organizations .
and people had hope , yes , but until they realized their situation worsens every day - either because they are being killed or because , somehow , they are poorer than eight years ago .
one figure for that : 54 percent of the children under the age of five years suffer from malnutrition .
yet , there is hope .
one day a man told me , " my future does not look brilliant , but i want to have a brilliant future for my son . "
this is a picture i took in 2005 , walking on fridays over the hills in kabul , and for me it 's a symbolic picture of an open future for a young generation .
so , doctors prescribe medication .
and donors are supposed to bring peace by building schools and roads .
military collect weapons , and depression stays intact .
why ?
because people do n't have tools to cope with it , to get over it .
so , soon after my arrival , i had confirmed something which i had already known ; that my instruments come from the heart of modern europe , yes .
however , what can wound us and our reaction to those wounds - they are universal .
and the big challenge was how to understand the meaning of the symptom in this specific cultural context .
after a counseling session , a woman said to me , " because you have felt me , i can feel myself again , and i want to participate again in my family life . "
this was very important , because the family is central in afghans ' social system .
no one can survive alone .
and if people feel used , worthless and ashamed , because something horrible has happened to them , then they retreat , and they fall into social isolation , and they do not dare to tell this evil to other people or to their loved ones , because they do not want to burden them .
and very often violence is a way to cope with it .
traumatized people also easily lose control - symptoms are hyper-arousal and memory flashbacks - so people are in a constant fear that those horrible feelings of that traumatic event might come back unexpectedly , suddenly , and they can not control it .
to compensate this loss of inner control , they try to control the outside , very understandably - mostly the family - and unfortunately , this fits very well into the traditional side , regressive side , repressive side , restrictive side of the cultural context .
so , husbands start beating wives , mothers and fathers beat their children , and afterward , they feel awful .
they did not want to do this , it just happened - they lost control .
the desperate try to restore order and normality , and if we are not able to cut this circle of violence , it will be transferred to the next generation without a doubt .
and partly this is already happening .
so everybody needs a sense for the future , and the afghan sense of the future is shattered .
but let me repeat the words of the woman .
" because you have felt me , i can feel myself again . "
so the key here is empathy .
somebody has to be a witness to what has happened to you .
somebody has to feel how you felt .
and somebody has to see you and listen to you .
everybody must be able to know what he or she has experienced is true , and this only goes with another person .
so everybody must be able to say , " this happened to me , and it did this with me , but i 'm able to live with it , to cope with it , and to learn from it .
and i want to engage myself in the bright future for my children and the children of my children , and i will not marry-off my 13 year-old daughter , " - what happens too often in afghanistan .
so something can be done , even in such extreme environments as afghanistan .
and i started thinking about a counseling program .
but , of course , i needed help and funds .
and one evening , i was sitting next to a very nice gentleman in kabul , and he asked what i thought would be good in afghanistan .
and i explained to him quickly , i would train psycho-social counselors , i would open centers , and i explained to him why .
this man gave me his contact details at the end of the evening and said , " if you want to do this , call me . "
at that time , it was the head of caritas germany .
so , i was able to launch a three-year project with caritas germany , and we trained 30 afghan women and men , and we opened 15 counseling centers in kabul .
this was our sign - it 's hand-painted , and we had 45 all over kabul .
eleven thousand people came - more than that .
and 70 percent regained their lives .
this was a very exciting time , developing this with my wonderful afghan team .
and they are working with me up to today .
we developed a culturally-sensitive psycho-social counseling approach .
so , from 2008 up until today , a substantial change and step forward has been taking place .
the european union delegation in kabul came into this and hired me to work inside the ministry of public health , to lobby this approach - we succeeded .
we revised the mental health component of the primary health care services by adding psycho-social care and psycho-social counselors to the system .
this means , certainly , to retrain all health staff .
but for that , we already have the training manuals , which are approved by the ministry and moreover , this approach is now part of the mental health strategy in afghanistan .
so we also have implemented it already in some selected clinics in three provinces , and you are the first to see the results .
we wanted to know if what is being done is effective .
and here you can see the patients all had symptoms of depression , moderate and severe .
and the red line is the treatment as usual - medication with a medical doctor .
and all the symptoms stayed the same or even got worse .
and the green line is treatment with psycho-social counseling only , without medication .
and you can see the symptoms almost completely go away , and the psycho-social stress has dropped significantly , which is explicable , because you can not take away the psycho-social stresses , but you can learn how to cope with them .
so this makes us very happy , because now we also have some evidence that this is working .
so here you see , this is a health facility in northern afghanistan , and every morning it looks like this all over .
and doctors usually have three to six minutes for the patients , but now this will change .
they go to the clinics , because they want to cure their immediate symptoms , and they will find somebody to talk to and discuss these issues and talk about what is burdening them and find solutions , develop their resources , learn tools to solve their family conflicts and gain some confidence in the future .
and i would like to share one short vignette .
one hazara said to his pashtun counselor , " if we were to have met some years ago , then we would have killed each other .
and now you are helping me to regain some confidence in the future . "
and another counselor said to me after the training , " you know , i never knew why i survived the killings in my village , but now i know , because i am part of a nucleus of a new peaceful society in afghanistan . "
so i believe this kept me running .
and this is a really emancipatory and political contribution to peace and reconciliation .
and also - i think - without psycho-social therapy , and without considering this in all humanitarian projects , we can not build-up civil societies .
i thought it was an idea worth spreading , and i think it must be , can be , could be replicated elsewhere .
i thank you for your attention .
-lrb- applause -rrb- when we think of games , there 's all kinds of things .
maybe you 're ticked off , or maybe you 're looking forward to a new game . you 've been up too late playing a game .
all these things happen to me .
but when we think about games , a lot of times we think about stuff like this : first-person shooters , or the big , what we would call aaa games , or maybe you 're a facebook game player .
this is one my partner and i worked on .
maybe you play facebook games , and that 's what we 're making right now . this is a lighter form of game .
maybe you think about the tragically boring board games that hold us hostage in thanksgiving situations .
this would be one of those tragically boring board games that you can figure out .
or maybe you 're in your living room , you know , playing with the wii with the kids , or something like that , and , you know , there 's this whole range of games , and that 's very much what i think about .
i make my living from games . i 've been lucky enough to do this since i was 15 , which also qualifies as i 've never really had a real job .
but we think about games as fun , and that 's completely reasonable , but let 's just think about this .
so this one here , this is the 1980 olympics .
now i do n't know where you guys were , but i was in my living room . it was practically a religious event .
and this is when the americans beat the russians , and this was - yes , it was technically a game .
hockey is a game . but really , was this a game ?
i mean , people cried . i 've never seen my mother cry like that at the end of monopoly .
and so this was just an amazing experience .
or , you know , if anybody here is from boston - so when the boston red sox won the world series after , i believe , 351 years , when they won the world series , it was amazing .
i happened to be living in springfield at the time , and the best part of it was - is that - you would close the women 's door in the bathroom , and i remember seeing " go sox , " and i thought , really ?
or the houses , you 'd come out , because every game , well , i think almost every game , went into overtime , right ?
so we 'd be outside , and all the other lights are on in school , and kids were n't going to school .
but it 's okay , it 's the red sox , right ?
i mean , there 's education , and then there 's the red sox , and we know where they 're stacked .
so this was an amazing experience , and again , yes , it was a game , but they did n't write newspaper articles , people did n't say - you know , really , " i can die now because the red sox won . " and many people did .
so games , it means something more to us .
it absolutely means something more .
so now , just , this is an abrupt transition here .
there was three years where i actually did have a real job , sort of .
i was the head of a college department teaching games , so , again , it was sort of a real job , and now i just got to talk about making as opposed to making them .
and i was at a dinner . part of the job of it , when you 're a chair of a department , is to eat , and i did that very well , and so i 'm out at a dinner with this guy called zig jackson .
so this is zig in this photograph . this is also one of zig 's photographs . he 's a photographer .
and he goes all around the country taking pictures of himself , and you can see here he 's got zig 's indian reservation . and this particular shot , this is one of the more traditional shots . this is a rain dancer .
and this is one of my favorite shots here .
so you can look at this , and maybe you 've even seen things like this . this is an expression of culture , right ?
and this is actually from his degradation series .
and what was most fascinating to me about this series is just , look at that little boy there .
can you imagine ? now let 's , we can see that 's a traditional native american . now i just want to change that guy 's race .
just imagine if that 's a black guy .
so , " honey , come here , let 's get your picture with the black guy . "
right ? like , seriously , nobody would do this .
it baffles the mind . and so zig , being indian , likewise it baffles his mind . his favorite photograph - my favorite photograph of his , which i do n't have in here is indian taking picture of white people taking pictures of indians . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so i happen to be at dinner with this photographer , and he was talking with another photographer about a shooting that had occurred , and it was on an indian reservation . he 'd taken his camera up there to photograph it , but when he got there , he discovered he could n't do it . he just could n't capture the picture . and so they were talking back and forth
about this question . do you take the picture or not ?
and that was fascinating to me as a game designer , because it never occurs to me , like , should i make the game about this difficult topic or not ?
because we just make things that are fun or , you know , will make you feel fear , you know , that visceral excitement .
but every other medium does it .
so this is my kid . this is maezza , and when she was seven years old , she came home from school one day , and like i do every single day , i asked her , " what 'd you do today ? "
so she said , " we talked about the middle passage . "
now , this was a big moment . maezza 's dad is black , and i knew this day was coming . i was n't expecting it at seven . i do n't know why , but i was n't .
anyways , so i asked her , " how do you feel about that ? "
so she proceeded to tell me , and so any of you who are parents will recognize the bingo buzzwords here .
so the ships start in england , they come down from england , they go to africa , they go across the ocean - that 's the middle passage part - they come to america where the slaves are sold , she 's telling me .
but abraham lincoln was elected president , and then he passed the emancipation proclamation , and now they 're free .
pause for about 10 seconds .
" can i play a game , mommy ? "
and i thought , that 's it ? and so , you know , this is the middle passage , this is an incredibly significant event , and she 's treating it like , basically some black people went on a cruise , is more or less how it sounds to her . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and so , to me , i wanted more value in this , so when she asked if she could play a game , i said , " yes . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- and so i happened to have all of these little pieces .
i 'm a game designer , so i have this stuff sitting around my house .
so i said , " yeah , you can play a game , " and i give her a bunch of these , and i tell her to paint them in different families . these are pictures of maezza when she was - god , it still chokes me up seeing these .
so she 's painting her little families .
so then i grab a bunch of them and i put them on a boat .
this was the boat . it was made quickly obviously . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and so the basic gist of it is , i grabbed a bunch of families , and she 's like , " mommy , but you forgot the pink baby and you forgot the blue daddy and you forgot all these other things . "
and she says , " they want to go . " and i said , " honey , no they do n't want to go . this is the middle passage .
nobody wants to go on the middle passage . "
so she gave me a look that only a daughter of a game designer would give a mother , and as we 're going across the ocean , following these rules , she realizes that she 's rolling pretty high , and she says to me , " we 're not going to make it . "
and she realizes , you know , we do n't have enough food , and so she asks what to do , and i say , " well , we can either " - remember , she 's seven - " we can either put some people in the water or we can hope that they do n't get sick and we make it to the other side . "
and she - just the look on her face came over and she said - now mind you this is after a month of - this is black history month , right ?
after a month she says to me , " did this really happen ? "
and i said , " yes . " and so she said , " so , if i came out of the woods " - this is her brother and sister - " if i came out of the woods , avalon and donovan might be gone . " " yes . "
" but i 'd get to see them in america . " " no . "
" but what if i saw them ? you know , could n't we stay together ? " " no . "
" so daddy could be gone . " " yes . "
and she was fascinated by this , and she started to cry , and i started to cry , and her father started to cry , and now we 're all crying . he did n't expect to come home from work to the middle passage , but there it goes . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and so , we made this game , and she got it .
she got it because she spent time with these people .
it was n't abstract stuff in a brochure or in a movie .
and so it was just an incredibly powerful experience .
this is the game , which i 've ended up calling the new world , because i like the phrase .
i do n't think the new world felt too new worldly exciting to the people who were brought over on slave ships .
but when this happened , i saw the whole planet .
i was so excited . it was like , i 'd been making games for 20-some years , and then i decided to do it again .
my history is irish .
so this is a game called síochán leat . it 's " peace be with you . "
it 's the entire history of my family in a single game .
i made another game called train .
i was making a series of six games that covered difficult topics , and if you 're going to cover a difficult topic , this is one you need to cover , and i 'll let you figure out what that 's about on your own .
and i also made a game about the trail of tears .
this is a game with 50,000 individual pieces .
i was crazy when i decided to start it , but i 'm in the middle of it now .
it 's the same thing .
i 'm hoping that i 'll teach culture through these games .
and the one i 'm working on right now , which is - because i 'm right in the middle of it , and these for some reason choke me up like crazy - is a game called mexican kitchen workers .
and originally it was a math problem more or less .
like , here 's the economics of illegal immigration .
and the more i learned about the mexican culture - my partner is mexican - the more i learned that , you know , for all of us , food is a basic need , but , and it is obviously with mexicans too , but it 's much more than that .
it 's an expression of love . it 's an expression of - god , i 'm totally choking up way more than i thought .
i 'll look away from the picture .
it 's an expression of beauty . it 's how they say they love you .
it 's how they say they care , and you ca n't hear somebody talk about their mexican grandmother without saying " food " in the first sentence .
and so to me , this beautiful culture , this beautiful expression is something that i want to capture through games .
and so games , for a change , it changes how we see topics , it changes how our perceptions about those people in topics , and it changes ourselves .
we change as people through games , because we 're involved , and we 're playing , and we 're learning as we do so . thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- my thing with school lunch is , it 's a social justice issue .
i 'm the director of nutrition services for the berkeley unified school district . i have 90 employees and 17 locations , 9,600 kids .
i 'm doing 7,100 meals a day and i 've been doing it for two years , trying to change how we feed kids in america .
and that 's what i want to talk to you a little bit about today .
these are some of my kids with a salad bar .
i put salad bars in all of our schools when i got there .
everyone says it could n't be done .
little kids could n't eat off the salad bar , big kids would spit in it - neither happened .
when i took over this , i tried to really figure out , like , what my vision would be .
how do we really change children 's relationship to food ?
and i 'll tell you why we need to change it , but we absolutely have to change it .
and what i came to understand is , we needed to teach children the symbiotic relationship between a healthy planet , healthy food and healthy kids .
and that if we do n't do that , the antithesis , although we 've heard otherwise , is we 're really going to become extinct , because we 're feeding our children to death .
that 's my premise .
we 're seeing sick kids get sicker and sicker .
and the reason this is happening , by and large , is because of our food system and the way the government commodifies food , the way the government oversees our food , the way the usda puts food on kids ' plates that 's unhealthy , and allows unhealthy food into schools .
and by - tacitly , all of us send our kids , or grandchildren , or nieces , or nephews , to school and tell them to learn , you know , learn what 's in those schools .
and when you feed these kids bad food , that 's what they 're learning . so that 's really what this is all about .
the way we got here is because of big agribusiness .
we now live in a country where most of us do n't decide , by and large , what we eat . we see big businesses , monsanto and dupont , who brought out agent orange and stain-resistant carpet .
they control 90 percent of the commercially produced seeds in our country .
these are - 10 companies control much of what 's in our grocery stores , much of what people eat . and that 's really , really a problem .
so when i started thinking about these issues and how i was going to change what kids ate , i really started focusing on what we would teach them .
and the very first thing was about regional food - trying to eat food from within our region .
and clearly , with what 's going on with fossil fuel usage , or when - as the fossil fuel is going away , as oil hits its peak oil , you know , we really have to start thinking about whether or not we should , or could , be moving food 1,500 miles before we eat it .
so we talked to kids about that , and we really start to feed kids regional food .
and then we talk about organic food .
now , most school districts ca n't really afford organic food , but we , as a nation , have to start thinking about consuming , growing and feeding our children food that 's not chock-full of chemicals .
we ca n't keep feeding our kids pesticides and herbicides and antibiotics and hormones .
we ca n't keep doing that .
you know , it does n't work .
and the results of that are kids getting sick .
one of my big soapboxes right now is antibiotics .
seventy percent of all antibiotics consumed in america is consumed in animal husbandry .
we are feeding our kids antibiotics in beef and other animal protein every day .
seventy percent - it 's unbelievable .
and the result of it is , we have diseases .
we have things like e. coli that we ca n't fix , that we ca n't make kids better when they get sick .
and , you know , certainly antibiotics have been over-prescribed , but it 's an issue in the food supply .
one of my favorite facts is that u.s. agriculture uses 1.2 billion pounds of pesticides every year .
that means every one of us , and our children , consumes what would equal a five-pound bag - those bags you have at home . if i had one here and ripped it open , and that pile i would have on the floor is what we consume and feed our children every year because of what goes into our food supply , because of the way we consume produce in america .
the usda allows these antibiotics , these hormones and these pesticides in our food supply , and the usda paid for this ad in time magazine .
okay , we could talk about rachel carson and ddt , but we know it was n't good for you and me .
and that is what the usda allows in our food supply .
and that has to change , you know .
the usda can not be seen as the be-all and end-all of what we feed our kids and what 's allowed .
we can not believe that they have our best interests at heart .
the antithesis of this whole thing is sustainable food .
that 's what i really try and get people to understand .
i really try and teach it to kids . i think it 's the most important .
it 's consuming food in a way in which we 'll still have a planet , in which kids will grow up to be healthy , and which really tries to mitigate all the negative impacts we 're seeing .
it really is just a new idea .
i mean , people toss around sustainability , but we have to figure out what sustainability is .
in less than 200 years , you know , just in a few generations , we 've gone from being 200 - being 100 percent , 95 percent farmers to less than 2 percent of farmers .
we now live in a country that has more prisoners than farmers - 2.1 million prisoners , 1.9 million farmers .
and we spend 35,000 dollars on average a year keeping a prisoner in prison , and school districts spend 500 dollars a year feeding a child .
it 's no wonder , you know , we have criminals .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and what 's happening is , we 're getting sick .
we 're getting sick and our kids are getting sick .
it is about what we feed them .
what goes in is what we are .
we really are what we eat .
and if we continue down this path , if we continue to feed kids bad food , if we continue not to teach them what good food is , what 's going to happen ? you know , what is going to happen ?
what 's going to happen to our whole medical system ?
what 's going to happen is , we 're going to have kids that have a life less long than our own .
the cdc , the center for disease control , has said , of the children born in the year 2000 - those seven- and eight-year-olds today - one out of every three caucasians , one out of every two african-americans and hispanics are going to have diabetes in their lifetime .
and if that 's not enough , they 've gone on to say , most before they graduate high school .
this means that 40 or 45 percent of all school-aged children could be insulin-dependent within a decade . within a decade .
what 's going to happen ?
well , the cdc has gone further to say that those children born in the year 2000 could be the first generation in our country 's history to die at a younger age than their parents .
and it 's because of what we feed them .
because eight-year-olds do n't get to decide - and if they do , you should be in therapy .
you know , we are responsible for what kids eat .
but oops , maybe they 're responsible for what kids eat .
big companies spend 20 billion dollars a year marketing non-nutrient foods to kids .
20 billion dollars a year . 10,000 ads most kids see .
they spend 500 dollars for every one dollar - 500 dollars marketing foods that kids should n't eat for every one dollar marketing healthy , nutritious food .
the result of which is kids think they 're going to die if they do n't have chicken nuggets .
you know that everybody thinks they should be eating more , and more , and more .
this is the usda portion size , that little , tiny thing .
and the one over there , that 's bigger than my head , is what mcdonald 's and burger king and those big companies think we should eat .
and why can they serve that much ?
why can we have 29-cent big gulps and 99-cent double burgers ?
it 's because of the way the government commodifies food , and the cheap corn and cheap soy that are pushed into our food supply that makes these non-nutrient foods really , really cheap .
which is why i say it 's a social justice issue .
now , i said i 'm doing this in berkeley , and you might think , " oh , berkeley . of course you can do it in berkeley . "
well , this is the food i found 24 months ago .
this is not even food .
this is the stuff we were feeding our kids : extremo burritos , corn dogs , pizza pockets , grilled cheese sandwiches .
everything came in plastic , in cardboard .
the only kitchen tools my staff had was a box cutter .
the only working piece of equipment in my kitchen was a can crusher , because if it did n't come in a can , it came frozen in a box .
the usda allows this .
the usda allows all of this stuff .
in case you ca n't tell , that 's , like , pink danish and some kind of cupcakes .
chicken nuggets , tater tots , chocolate milk with high fructose , canned fruit cocktail - a reimbursable meal .
that 's what the government says is okay to feed our kids .
it ai n't okay . you know what ? it is not okay .
and we , all of us , have to understand that this is about us , that we can make a difference here .
now i do n't know if any of you out there invented chicken nuggets , but i 'm sure you 're rich if you did .
but whoever decided that a chicken should look like a heart , a giraffe , a star ?
well , tyson did , because there 's no chicken in the chicken .
and that they could figure it out , that we could sell this stuff to kids .
you know , what 's wrong with teaching kids that chicken looks like chicken ?
but this is what most schools serve .
in fact , this may be what a lot of parents serve , as opposed to - this is what we try and serve .
we really need to change this whole paradigm with kids and food .
we really have to teach children that chicken is not a giraffe .
you know , that vegetables are actually colorful , that they have flavor , that carrots grow in the ground , that strawberries grow in the ground .
there 's not a strawberry tree or a carrot bush .
you know , we have to change the way we teach kids about these things .
there 's a lot of stuff we can do . there 's a lot of schools doing farm-to-school programs . there 's a lot of schools actually getting fresh food into schools .
now , in berkeley , we 've gone totally fresh .
we have no high-fructose corn syrup , no trans fats , no processed foods .
we 're cooking from scratch every day .
we have 25 percent of our - -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you - 25 percent of our stuff is organic and local . we cook .
those are my hands . i get up at 4 a.m.
every day and go cook the food for the kids , because this is what we need to do .
we ca n't keep serving kids processed crap , full of chemicals , and expect these are going to be healthy citizens .
you 're not going to get the next generation , or the generation after , to be able to think like this if they 're not nourished .
if they 're eating chemicals all the time , they 're not going to be able to think .
they 're not going to be smart .
you know what ? they 're just going to be sick .
now one of the things that - what happened when i went into berkeley is i realized that , you know , this was all pretty amazing to people , very , very different , and i needed to market it .
i came up with these calendars that i sent home to every parent .
and these calendars really started to lay out my program .
now i 'm in charge of all the cooking classes and all the gardening classes in our school district .
so this is a typical menu .
this is what we 're serving this week at the schools .
and you see these recipes on the side ?
those are the recipes that the kids learn in my cooking classes .
they do tastings of these ingredients in the gardening classes .
they also may be growing them . and we serve them in the cafeterias .
if we 're going to change children 's relationship to food , it 's delicious , nutritious food in the cafeterias , hands-on experience - you 're looking in cooking and gardening classes - and academic curriculum to tie it all together .
now you 've probably garnered that i do n't love the usda , and i do n't have any idea what to do with their pyramid , this upside-down pyramid with a rainbow over the top , i do n't know .
you know , run up into the end of the rainbow , i do n't know what you do with it . so , i came up with my own .
this is available on my website in english and spanish , and it 's a visual way to talk to kids about food .
the really tiny hamburger , the really big vegetables .
we have to start changing this .
we have to make kids understand that their food choices make a big difference .
we have cooking classes - we have cooking classrooms in our schools .
and why this is so important is that we now have grown a generation , maybe two , of kids where one out of every four meals is eaten in fast food , one of every four meals is eaten in a car and one out of every last four meals is eaten in front of a tv or computer .
what are kids learning ? where is the family time ?
where is socialization ? where is discussion ?
where is learning to talk ?
you know , we have to change it .
i work with kids a lot . these are kids i work with in harlem .
eatwise - enlightened and aware teens who inspire smart eating .
we have to teach kids that coke and pop tarts are n't breakfast .
we have to teach kids that if they 're on a diet of refined sugar , they go up and down , just like if they 're on a diet of crack .
and we have to pull it all together . we have composting in all of our schools .
we have recycling in all of our schools .
you know , the things that we maybe do at home and think are so important , we have to teach kids about in school .
it has to be so much a part of them that they really get it .
because , you know what , many of us are sort of at the end of our careers , and we need to be giving these kids - these young kids , the next generation - the tools to save themselves and save the planet .
one of the things i do a lot is public-private partnerships .
i work with private companies who are willing to do r & d with me , who are willing to do distribution for me , who are really willing to work to go into schools .
schools are underfunded .
most schools in america spend less than 7,500 dollars a year teaching a child .
that comes down to under five dollars an hour .
most of you spend 10 , 15 dollars an hour for babysitters when you have them .
so we 're spending less than 5 dollars an hour on the educational system .
and if we 're going to change it , and change how we feed kids , we really have to rethink that .
so , public and private partnerships , advocacy groups , working with foundations .
in our school district , the way we afford this is our school district allocates .03 percent of the general fund towards nutrition services . and i think if every school district allocated a half to one percent , we could start to really fix this program .
we really need to change it .
it 's going to take more money .
of course , it 's not all about food ; it 's also about kids getting exercise .
and one of the simple things we can do is put recess before lunch .
it 's sort of this " duh " thing .
you know , if you have kids coming into lunch and all they 're going to do when they get out of lunch is go to have recess , you see them just throw away their lunch so they can run outside .
and then , at one in the afternoon , they 're totally crashing .
these are your children and grandchildren that are totally melting down when you pick them up , because they have n't had lunch .
so if the only thing they 'd have to do after lunch is go to class , believe me , they 're going to sit there and eat their lunch .
we need to - we need to educate .
we need to educate the kids .
we need to educate the staff .
i had 90 employees .
two were supposed to be cooks - none could .
and , you know , i 'm not that better off now .
but we really have to educate .
we have to get academic institutions to start thinking about ways to teach people how to cook again , because , of course , they do n't - because we 've had this processed food in schools and institutions for so long .
we need 40-minute lunches - most schools have 20-minute lunches - and lunches that are time-appropriate .
there was just a big study done , and so many schools are starting lunch at nine and 10 in the morning .
that is not lunchtime .
you know , it 's crazy . it 's crazy what we 're doing .
and just remember , at very least tacitly , this is what we 're teaching children as what they should be doing .
i think if we 're going to fix this , one of the things we have to do is really change how we have oversight over the national school lunch program .
instead of the national school lunch program being under the usda , i think it should be under cdc .
if we started to think about food and how we feed our kids as a health initiative , and we started thinking about food as health , then i think we would n't have corn dogs as lunch .
okay , finance 101 on this , and this - i 'm sort of wrapping it up with this finance piece , because i think this is something we all have to understand .
the national school lunch program spends 8 billion dollars feeding 30 million children a year .
that number probably needs to double .
people say , " oh my god , where are we going to get 8 billion ? "
in this country , we 're spending 110 billion dollars a year on fast food .
we spend 100 billion dollars a year on diet aids .
we spend 50 billion dollars on vegetables , which is why we need all the diet aids .
we spend 200 billion dollars a year on diet-related illness today , with nine percent of our kids having type 2 diabetes .
200 billion .
so you know what , when we talk about needing 8 billion more , it 's not a lot .
that 8 billion comes down to two dollars and 49 cents - that 's what the government allocates for lunch .
most school districts spend two thirds of that on payroll and overhead .
that means we spend less than a dollar a day on food for kids in schools - most schools , 80 to 90 cents . in l.a. , it 's 56 cents .
so we 're spending less than a dollar , ok , on lunch .
now i do n't know about you , but i go to starbucks and pete 's and places like that , and venti latte in san francisco is five dollars .
one gourmet coffee , one , is more - we spend more on than we are spending to feed kids for an entire week in our schools .
you know what ? we should be ashamed .
we , as a country , should be ashamed at that .
the richest country .
in our country , it 's the kids that need it the most , who get this really , really lousy food .
it 's the kids who have parents and grandparents and uncles and aunts that ca n't even afford to pay for school lunch that gets this food .
and those are the same kids who are going to be getting sick .
those are the same kids who we should be taking care of .
we can all make a difference .
that every single one of us , whether we have children , whether we care about children , whether we have nieces or nephews , or anything - that we can make a difference .
whether you sit down and eat a meal with your kids , whether you take your kids , or grandchildren , or nieces and nephews shopping to a farmers ' market . just do tastings with them .
sit down and care .
and on the macro level , we 're in what seems to be a 19-month presidential campaign , and of all the things we 're asking all of these potential leaders , what about asking for the health of our children ?
thank you .
an image is worth more than a thousand words , so i 'm going to start my talk by stop talking and show you a few images that i recently captured .
so by now , my talk is already 6,000 words long , and i feel like i should stop here .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- at the same time , i probably owe you some explanation about the images that you just saw .
what i am trying to do as a photographer , as an artist , is to bring the world of art and science together .
whether it is an image of a soap bubble captured at the very moment where it 's bursting , as you can see in this image , whether it 's a universe made of tiny little beads of oil paint , strange liquids that behave in very peculiar ways , or paint that is modeled by centrifugal forces , i 'm always trying to link those two fields together .
what i find very intriguing about those two is that they both look at the same thing : they are a response to their surroundings .
and yet , they do it in a very different way .
if you look at science on one hand , science is a very rational approach to its surroundings , whereas art on the other hand is usually an emotional approach to its surroundings .
what i am trying to do is i 'm trying to bring those two views into one so that my images both speak to the viewer 's heart but also to the viewer 's brain .
let me demonstrate this based on three projects .
the first one has to do with making sound visible .
now as you may know , sound travels in waves , so if you have a speaker , a speaker actually does nothing else than taking the audio signal , transform it into a vibration , which is then transported through the air , is captured by our ear , and transformed into an audio signal again .
now i was thinking , how can i make those sound waves visible ?
so i came up with the following setup .
i took a speaker , i placed a thin foil of plastic on top of that speaker , and then i added tiny little crystals on top of that speaker .
and now , if i would play a sound through that speaker , it would cause the crystals to move up and down .
now this happens very fast , in the blink of an eye , so , together with lg , we captured this motion with a camera that is able to capture more than 3,000 frames per second .
let me show you what this looks like .
-lrb- music : " teardrop " by massive attack -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- thank you very much .
i agree , it looks pretty amazing .
but i have to tell you a funny story .
i got an indoor sunburn doing this while shooting in los angeles .
now in los angeles , you could get a decent sunburn just on any of the beaches , but i got mine indoors , and what happened is that , if you 're shooting at 3,000 frames per second , you need to have a silly amount of light , lots of lights .
so we had this speaker set up , and we had the camera facing it , and lots of lights pointing at the speaker , and i would set up the speaker , put the tiny little crystals on top of that speaker , and we would do this over and over again , and it was until midday that i realized that i had a completely red face because of the lights pointing at the speaker .
what was so funny about it was that the speaker was only coming from the right side , so the right side of my face was completely red and i looked like the phantom of the opera for the rest of the week .
let me now turn to another project which involves less harmful substances .
has anyone of you heard of ferrofluid ?
ah , some of you have . excellent .
should i skip that part ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ferrofluid has a very strange behavior .
it 's a liquid that is completely black .
it 's got an oily consistency .
and it 's got tiny little particles of metal in it , which makes it magnetic .
so if i now put this liquid into a magnetic field , it would change its appearance .
now i 've got a live demonstration over here to show this to you .
so i 've got a camera pointing down at this plate , and underneath that plate , there is a magnet .
now i 'm going to add some of that ferrofluid to that magnet .
let 's just slightly move it to the right and maybe focus it a little bit more . excellent .
so what you can see now is that the ferrofluid has formed spikes .
this is due to the attraction and the repulsion of the individual particles inside the liquid .
now this looks already quite interesting , but let me now add some watercolors to it .
those are just standard watercolors that you would paint with .
you would n't paint with syringes , but it works just the same .
so what happened now is , when the watercolor was flowing into the structure , the watercolors do not mix with the ferrofluid .
that 's because the ferrofluid itself is hydrophobic .
that means it does n't mix with the water .
and at the same time , it tries to maintain its position above the magnet , and therefore , it creates those amazing-looking structures of channels and tiny little ponds of colorful water paint .
so that was the second project .
let me now turn to the last project , which involves the national beverage of scotland .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this image , and also this one , were made using whiskey .
now you might ask yourself , how did he do that ?
did he drink half a bottle of whiskey and then draw the hallucination he got from being drunk onto paper ?
i can assure you i was fully conscious while i was taking those pictures .
now , whiskey contains 40 percent of alcohol , and alcohol has got some very interesting properties .
maybe you have experienced some of those properties before , but i am talking about the physical properties , not the other ones .
so when i open the bottle , the alcohol molecules would spread in the air , and that 's because alcohol is a very volatile substance .
and at the same time , alcohol is highly flammable .
and it was with those two properties that i was able to create the images that you 're seeing right now .
let me demonstrate this over here .
and what i have here is an empty glass vessel .
it 's got nothing in it .
and now i 'm going to fill it with oxygen and whiskey .
add some more .
now we just wait for a few seconds for the molecules to spread inside the bottle .
and now , let 's set that on fire .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so that 's all that happens .
it goes really fast , and it 's not that impressive .
i could do it again to show it one more time , but some would argue that this is a complete waste of the whiskey , and that i should rather drink it .
but let me show you a slow motion in a completely darkened room of what i just showed you in this live demonstration .
so what happened is that the flame traveled through the glass vessel from top to bottom , burning the mix of the air molecules and the alcohol .
so the images that you saw at the beginning , they are actually a flame stopped in time while it is traveling through the bottle , and you have to imagine it was flipped around 180 degrees .
so that 's how those images were made .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
so , i have now showed you three projects , and you might ask yourself , what is it good for ?
what 's the idea behind it ?
is it just a waste of whiskey ?
is it just some strange materials ?
those three projects , they 're based on very simple scientific phenomena , such as magnetism , the sound waves , or over here , the physical properties of a substance , and what i 'm trying to do is i 'm trying to use these phenomena and show them in a poetic and unseen way , and therefore invite the viewer to pause for a moment and think about all the beauty that is constantly surrounding us .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- we are going to take a quick voyage over the cognitive history of the 20th century , because during that century , our minds have altered dramatically .
as you all know , the cars that people drove in 1900 have altered because the roads are better and because of technology .
and our minds have altered , too .
we 've gone from people who confronted a concrete world and analyzed that world primarily in terms of how much it would benefit them to people who confront a very complex world , and it 's a world where we 've had to develop new mental habits , new habits of mind .
and these include things like clothing that concrete world with classification , introducing abstractions that we try to make logically consistent , and also taking the hypothetical seriously , that is , wondering about what might have been rather than what is .
now , this dramatic change was drawn to my attention through massive i.q. gains over time , and these have been truly massive .
that is , we do n't just get a few more questions right on i.q. tests .
we get far more questions right on i.q. tests than each succeeding generation back to the time that they were invented .
indeed , if you score the people a century ago against modern norms , they would have an average i.q. of 70 .
if you score us against their norms , we would have an average i.q. of 130 .
now this has raised all sorts of questions .
were our immediate ancestors on the verge of mental retardation ?
because 70 is normally the score for mental retardation .
or are we on the verge of all being gifted ?
because 130 is the cutting line for giftedness .
now i 'm going to try and argue for a third alternative that 's much more illuminating than either of those , and to put this into perspective , let 's imagine that a martian came down to earth and found a ruined civilization .
and this martian was an archaeologist , and they found scores , target scores , that people had used for shooting .
and first they looked at 1865 , and they found that in a minute , people had only put one bullet in the bullseye .
and then they found , in 1898 , that they 'd put about five bullets in the bullseye in a minute .
and then about 1918 they put a hundred bullets in the bullseye .
and initially , that archaeologist would be baffled .
they would say , look , these tests were designed to find out how much people were steady of hand , how keen their eyesight was , whether they had control of their weapon .
how could these performances have escalated to this enormous degree ?
well we now know , of course , the answer .
if that martian looked at battlefields , they would find that people had only muskets at the time of the civil war and that they had repeating rifles at the time of the spanish-american war , and then they had machine guns by the time of world war i.
and , in other words , it was the equipment that was in the hands of the average soldier that was responsible , not greater keenness of eye or steadiness of hand .
now what we have to imagine is the mental artillery that we have picked up over those hundred years , and i think again that another thinker will help us here , and that 's luria .
luria looked at people just before they entered the scientific age , and he found that these people were resistant to classifying the concrete world .
they wanted to break it up into little bits that they could use .
he found that they were resistant to deducing the hypothetical , to speculating about what might be , and he found finally that they did n't deal well with abstractions or using logic on those abstractions .
now let me give you a sample of some of his interviews .
he talked to the head man of a person in rural russia .
they 'd only had , as people had in 1900 , about four years of schooling .
and he asked that particular person , what do crows and fish have in common ?
and the fellow said , " absolutely nothing .
you know , i can eat a fish . i ca n't eat a crow .
a crow can peck at a fish .
a fish ca n't do anything to a crow . "
and luria said , " but are n't they both animals ? "
and he said , " of course not .
one 's a fish .
the other is a bird . "
and he was interested , effectively , in what he could do with those concrete objects .
and then luria went to another person , and he said to them , " there are no camels in germany .
hamburg is a city in germany .
are there camels in hamburg ? "
and the fellow said , " well , if it 's large enough , there ought to be camels there . "
and luria said , " but what do my words imply ? "
and he said , " well , maybe it 's a small village , and there 's no room for camels . "
in other words , he was unwilling to treat this as anything but a concrete problem , and he was used to camels being in villages , and he was quite unable to use the hypothetical , to ask himself what if there were no camels in germany .
a third interview was conducted with someone about the north pole .
and luria said , " at the north pole , there is always snow .
wherever there is always snow , the bears are white .
what color are the bears at the north pole ? "
and the response was , " such a thing is to be settled by testimony .
if a wise person came from the north pole and told me the bears were white , i might believe him , but every bear that i have seen is a brown bear . "
now you see again , this person has rejected going beyond the concrete world and analyzing it through everyday experience , and it was important to that person what color bears were - that is , they had to hunt bears .
they were n't willing to engage in this .
one of them said to luria , " how can we solve things that are n't real problems ?
none of these problems are real .
how can we address them ? "
now , these three categories - classification , using logic on abstractions , taking the hypothetical seriously - how much difference do they make in the real world beyond the testing room ?
and let me give you a few illustrations .
first , almost all of us today get a high school diploma .
that is , we 've gone from four to eight years of education to 12 years of formal education , and 52 percent of americans have actually experienced some type of tertiary education .
now , not only do we have much more education , and much of that education is scientific , and you ca n't do science without classifying the world .
you ca n't do science without proposing hypotheses .
you ca n't do science without making it logically consistent .
and even down in grade school , things have changed .
in 1910 , they looked at the examinations that the state of ohio gave to 14-year-olds , and they found that they were all for socially valued concrete information .
they were things like , what are the capitals of the 44 or 45 states that existed at that time ?
when they looked at the exams that the state of ohio gave in 1990 , they were all about abstractions .
they were things like , why is the largest city of a state rarely the capital ?
and you were supposed to think , well , the state legislature was rural-controlled , and they hated the big city , so rather than putting the capital in a big city , they put it in a county seat .
they put it in albany rather than new york .
they put it in harrisburg rather than philadelphia .
and so forth .
so the tenor of education has changed .
we are educating people to take the hypothetical seriously , to use abstractions , and to link them logically .
what about employment ?
well , in 1900 , three percent of americans practiced professions that were cognitively demanding .
only three percent were lawyers or doctors or teachers .
today , 35 percent of americans practice cognitively demanding professions , not only to the professions proper like lawyer or doctor or scientist or lecturer , but many , many sub-professions having to do with being a technician , a computer programmer .
a whole range of professions now make cognitive demands .
and we can only meet the terms of employment in the modern world by being cognitively far more flexible .
and it 's not just that we have many more people in cognitively demanding professions .
the professions have been upgraded .
compare the doctor in 1900 , who really had only a few tricks up his sleeve , with the modern general practitioner or specialist , with years of scientific training .
compare the banker in 1900 , who really just needed a good accountant and to know who was trustworthy in the local community for paying back their mortgage .
well , the merchant bankers who brought the world to their knees may have been morally remiss , but they were cognitively very agile .
they went far beyond that 1900 banker .
they had to look at computer projections for the housing market .
they had to get complicated cdo-squared in order to bundle debt together and make debt look as if it were actually a profitable asset .
they had to prepare a case to get rating agencies to give it a aaa , though in many cases , they had virtually bribed the rating agencies .
and they also , of course , had to get people to accept these so-called assets and pay money for them even though they were highly vulnerable .
or take a farmer today .
i take the farm manager of today as very different from the farmer of 1900 .
so it has n't just been the spread of cognitively demanding professions .
it 's also been the upgrading of tasks like lawyer and doctor and what have you that have made demands on our cognitive faculties .
but i 've talked about education and employment .
some of the habits of mind that we have developed over the 20th century have paid off in unexpected areas .
i 'm primarily a moral philosopher .
i merely have a holiday in psychology , and what interests me in general is moral debate .
now over the last century , in developed nations like america , moral debate has escalated because we take the hypothetical seriously , and we also take universals seriously and look for logical connections .
when i came home in 1955 from university at the time of martin luther king , a lot of people came home at that time and started having arguments with their parents and grandparents .
my father was born in 1885 , and he was mildly racially biased .
as an irishman , he hated the english so much he did n't have much emotion for anyone else .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but he did have a sense that black people were inferior .
and when we said to our parents and grandparents , " how would you feel if tomorrow morning you woke up black ? "
they said that is the dumbest thing you 've ever said .
who have you ever known who woke up in the morning - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - that turned black ?
in other words , they were fixed in the concrete mores and attitudes they had inherited .
they would not take the hypothetical seriously , and without the hypothetical , it 's very difficult to get moral argument off the ground .
you have to say , imagine you were in iran , and imagine that your relatives all suffered from collateral damage even though they had done no wrong .
how would you feel about that ?
and if someone of the older generation says , well , our government takes care of us , and it 's up to their government to take care of them , they 're just not willing to take the hypothetical seriously .
or take an islamic father whose daughter has been raped , and he feels he 's honor-bound to kill her .
well , he 's treating his mores as if they were sticks and stones and rocks that he had inherited , and they 're unmovable in any way by logic .
they 're just inherited mores .
today we would say something like , well , imagine you were knocked unconscious and sodomized .
would you deserve to be killed ?
and he would say , well that 's not in the koran .
that 's not one of the principles i 've got .
well you , today , universalize your principles .
you state them as abstractions and you use logic on them .
if you have a principle such as , people should n't suffer unless they 're guilty of something , then to exclude black people you 've got to make exceptions , do n't you ?
you have to say , well , blackness of skin , you could n't suffer just for that .
it must be that blacks are somehow tainted .
and then we can bring empirical evidence to bear , ca n't we , and say , well how can you consider all blacks tainted when st. augustine was black and thomas sowell is black .
and you can get moral argument off the ground , then , because you 're not treating moral principles as concrete entities .
you 're treating them as universals , to be rendered consistent by logic .
now how did all of this arise out of i.q. tests ?
that 's what initially got me going on cognitive history .
if you look at the i.q. test , you find the gains have been greatest in certain areas .
the similarities subtest of the wechsler is about classification , and we have made enormous gains on that classification subtest .
there are other parts of the i.q. test battery that are about using logic on abstractions .
some of you may have taken raven 's progressive matrices , and it 's all about analogies .
and in 1900 , people could do simple analogies .
that is , if you said to them , cats are like wildcats .
what are dogs like ?
they would say wolves .
but by 1960 , people could attack raven 's on a much more sophisticated level .
if you said , we 've got two squares followed by a triangle , what follows two circles ?
they could say a semicircle .
just as a triangle is half of a square , a semicircle is half of a circle .
by 2010 , college graduates , if you said two circles followed by a semicircle , two sixteens followed by what , they would say eight , because eight is half of 16 .
that is , they had moved so far from the concrete world that they could even ignore the appearance of the symbols that were involved in the question .
now , i should say one thing that 's very disheartening .
we have n't made progress on all fronts .
one of the ways in which we would like to deal with the sophistication of the modern world is through politics , and sadly you can have humane moral principles , you can classify , you can use logic on abstractions , and if you 're ignorant of history and of other countries , you ca n't do politics .
we 've noticed , in a trend among young americans , that they read less history and less literature and less material about foreign lands , and they 're essentially ahistorical .
they live in the bubble of the present .
they do n't know the korean war from the war in vietnam .
they do n't know who was an ally of america in world war ii .
think how different america would be if every american knew that this is the fifth time western armies have gone to afghanistan to put its house in order , and if they had some idea of exactly what had happened on those four previous occasions .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and that is , they had barely left , and there was n't a trace in the sand .
or imagine how different things would be if most americans knew that we had been lied into four of our last six wars .
you know , the spanish did n't sink the battleship maine , the lusitania was not an innocent vessel but was loaded with munitions , the north vietnamese did not attack the seventh fleet , and , of course , saddam hussein hated al qaeda and had nothing to do with it , and yet the administration convinced 45 percent of the people that they were brothers in arms , when he would hang one from the nearest lamppost .
but i do n't want to end on a pessimistic note .
the 20th century has shown enormous cognitive reserves in ordinary people that we have now realized , and the aristocracy was convinced that the average person could n't make it , that they could never share their mindset or their cognitive abilities .
lord curzon once said he saw people bathing in the north sea , and he said , " why did no one tell me what white bodies the lower orders have ? "
as if they were a reptile .
well , dickens was right and he was wrong . -lsb- correction : rudyard kipling -rsb- -lsb- kipling -rsb- said , " the colonel 's lady and judy o 'grady are sisters underneath the skin . "
-lrb- applause -rrb- we all make decisions every day ; we want to know what the right thing is to do - in domains from the financial to the gastronomic to the professional to the romantic .
and surely , if somebody could really tell us how to do exactly the right thing at all possible times , that would be a tremendous gift .
it turns out that , in fact , the world was given this gift in 1738 by a dutch polymath named daniel bernoulli .
and what i want to talk to you about today is what that gift is , and i also want to explain to you why it is that it has n't made a damn bit of difference .
now , this is bernoulli 's gift . this is a direct quote .
and if it looks like greek to you , it 's because , well , it 's greek .
but the simple english translation - much less precise , but it captures the gist of what bernoulli had to say - was this : the expected value of any of our actions - that is , the goodness that we can count on getting - is the product of two simple things : the odds that this action will allow us to gain something , and the value of that gain to us .
in a sense , what bernoulli was saying is , if we can estimate and multiply these two things , we will always know precisely how we should behave .
now , this simple equation , even for those of you who do n't like equations , is something that you 're quite used to .
here 's an example : if i were to tell you , let 's play a little coin toss game , and i 'm going to flip a coin , and if it comes up heads , i 'm going to pay you 10 dollars , but you have to pay four dollars for the privilege of playing with me , most of you would say , sure , i 'll take that bet . because you know that the odds of you winning are one half , the gain if you do is 10 dollars , that multiplies to five , and that 's more than i 'm charging you to play . so , the answer is , yes .
this is what statisticians technically call a damn fine bet .
now , the idea is simple when we 're applying it to coin tosses , but in fact , it 's not very simple in everyday life .
people are horrible at estimating both of these things , and that 's what i want to talk to you about today .
there are two kinds of errors people make when trying to decide what the right thing is to do , and those are errors in estimating the odds that they 're going to succeed , and errors in estimating the value of their own success .
now , let me talk about the first one first .
calculating odds would seem to be something rather easy : there are six sides to a die , two sides to a coin , 52 cards in a deck .
you all know what the likelihood is of pulling the ace of spades or of flipping a heads .
but as it turns out , this is not a very easy idea to apply in everyday life . that 's why americans spend more - i should say , lose more - gambling than on all other forms of entertainment combined .
the reason is , this is n't how people do odds .
the way people figure odds requires that we first talk a bit about pigs .
now , the question i 'm going to put to you is whether you think there are more dogs or pigs on leashes observed in any particular day in oxford .
and of course , you all know that the answer is dogs .
and the way that you know that the answer is dogs is you quickly reviewed in memory the times you 've seen dogs and pigs on leashes .
it was very easy to remember seeing dogs , not so easy to remember pigs . and each one of you assumed that if dogs on leashes came more quickly to your mind , then dogs on leashes are more probable .
that 's not a bad rule of thumb , except when it is .
so , for example , here 's a word puzzle .
are there more four-letter english words with r in the third place or r in the first place ?
well , you check memory very briefly , make a quick scan , and it 's awfully easy to say to yourself , ring , rang , rung , and very hard to say to yourself , pare , park : they come more slowly .
but in fact , there are many more words in the english language with r in the third than the first place .
the reason words with r in the third place come slowly to your mind is n't because they 're improbable , unlikely or infrequent .
it 's because the mind recalls words by their first letter .
you kind of shout out the sound , s - and the word comes .
it 's like the dictionary ; it 's hard to look things up by the third letter .
so , this is an example of how this idea that the quickness with which things come to mind can give you a sense of their probability - how this idea could lead you astray . it 's not just puzzles , though .
for example , when americans are asked to estimate the odds that they will die in a variety of interesting ways - these are estimates of number of deaths per year per 200 million u.s. citizens .
and these are just ordinary people like yourselves who are asked to guess how many people die from tornado , fireworks , asthma , drowning , etc .
compare these to the actual numbers .
now , you see a very interesting pattern here , which is first of all , two things are vastly over-estimated , namely tornadoes and fireworks .
two things are vastly underestimated : dying by drowning and dying by asthma . why ?
when was the last time that you picked up a newspaper and the headline was , " boy dies of asthma ? "
it 's not interesting because it 's so common .
it 's very easy for all of us to bring to mind instances of news stories or newsreels where we 've seen tornadoes devastating cities , or some poor schmuck who 's blown his hands off with a firework on the fourth of july .
drownings and asthma deaths do n't get much coverage .
they do n't come quickly to mind , and as a result , we vastly underestimate them .
indeed , this is kind of like the sesame street game of " which thing does n't belong ? " and you 're right to say it 's the swimming pool that does n't belong , because the swimming pool is the only thing on this slide that 's actually very dangerous .
the way that more of you are likely to die than the combination of all three of the others that you see on the slide .
the lottery is an excellent example , of course - an excellent test-case of people 's ability to compute probabilities .
and economists - forgive me , for those of you who play the lottery - but economists , at least among themselves , refer to the lottery as a stupidity tax , because the odds of getting any payoff by investing your money in a lottery ticket are approximately equivalent to flushing the money directly down the toilet - which , by the way , does n't require that you actually go to the store and buy anything .
why in the world would anybody ever play the lottery ?
well , there are many answers , but one answer surely is , we see a lot of winners . right ? when this couple wins the lottery , or ed mcmahon shows up at your door with this giant check - how the hell do you cash things that size , i do n't know .
we see this on tv ; we read about it in the paper .
when was the last time that you saw extensive interviews with everybody who lost ?
indeed , if we required that television stations run a 30-second interview with each loser every time they interview a winner , the 100 million losers in the last lottery would require nine-and-a-half years of your undivided attention just to watch them say , " me ? i lost . " " me ? i lost . "
now , if you watch nine-and-a-half years of television - no sleep , no potty breaks - and you saw loss after loss after loss , and then at the end there 's 30 seconds of , " and i won , " the likelihood that you would play the lottery is very small .
look , i can prove this to you : here 's a little lottery .
there 's 10 tickets in this lottery .
nine of them have been sold to these individuals .
it costs you a dollar to buy the ticket and , if you win , you get 20 bucks . is this a good bet ?
well , bernoulli tells us it is .
the expected value of this lottery is two dollars ; this is a lottery in which you should invest your money .
and most people say , " ok , i 'll play . "
now , a slightly different version of this lottery : imagine that the nine tickets are all owned by one fat guy named leroy .
leroy has nine tickets ; there 's one left .
do you want it ? most people wo n't play this lottery .
now , you can see the odds of winning have n't changed , but it 's now fantastically easy to imagine who 's going to win .
it 's easy to see leroy getting the check , right ?
you ca n't say to yourself , " i 'm as likely to win as anybody , " because you 're not as likely to win as leroy .
the fact that all those tickets are owned by one guy changes your decision to play , even though it does nothing whatsoever to the odds .
now , estimating odds , as difficult as it may seem , is a piece of cake compared to trying to estimate value : trying to say what something is worth , how much we 'll enjoy it , how much pleasure it will give us .
i want to talk now about errors in value .
how much is this big mac worth ? is it worth 25 dollars ?
most of you have the intuition that it 's not - you would n't pay that for it .
but in fact , to decide whether a big mac is worth 25 dollars requires that you ask one , and only one question , which is : what else can i do with 25 dollars ?
if you 've ever gotten on one of those long-haul flights to australia and realized that they 're not going to serve you any food , but somebody in the row in front of you has just opened the mcdonald 's bag , and the smell of golden arches is wafting over the seat , you think , i ca n't do anything else with this 25 dollars for 16 hours .
i ca n't even set it on fire - they took my cigarette lighter !
suddenly , 25 dollars for a big mac might be a good deal .
on the other hand , if you 're visiting an underdeveloped country , and 25 dollars buys you a gourmet meal , it 's exorbitant for a big mac .
why were you all sure that the answer to the question was no , before i 'd even told you anything about the context ?
because most of you compared the price of this big mac to the price you 're used to paying . rather than asking , " what else can i do with my money , " comparing this investment to other possible investments , you compared to the past .
and this is a systematic error people make .
what you knew is , you paid three dollars in the past ; 25 is outrageous .
this is an error , and i can prove it to you by showing the kinds of irrationalities to which it leads .
for example , this is , of course , one of the most delicious tricks in marketing , is to say something used to be higher , and suddenly it seems like a very good deal .
when people are asked about these two different jobs : a job where you make 60k , then 50k , then 40k , a job where you 're getting a salary cut each year , and one in which you 're getting a salary increase , people like the second job better than the first , despite the fact they 're all told they make much less money . why ?
because they had the sense that declining wages are worse than rising wages , even when the total amount of wages is higher in the declining period . here 's another nice example .
here 's a $ 2,000 hawaiian vacation package ; it 's now on sale for 1,600 .
assuming you wanted to go to hawaii , would you buy this package ?
most people say they would . here 's a slightly different story : $ 2,000 hawaiian vacation package is now on sale for 700 dollars , so you decide to mull it over for a week .
by the time you get to the ticket agency , the best fares are gone - the package now costs 1,500 . would you buy it ? most people say , no .
why ? because it used to cost 700 , and there 's no way i 'm paying 1,500 for something that was 700 last week .
this tendency to compare to the past is causing people to pass up the better deal . in other words , a good deal that used to be a great deal is not nearly as good as an awful deal that was once a horrible deal .
here 's another example of how comparing to the past can befuddle our decisions .
imagine that you 're going to the theater .
you 're on your way to the theater .
in your wallet you have a ticket , for which you paid 20 dollars .
you also have a 20-dollar bill .
when you arrive at the theater , you discover that somewhere along the way you 've lost the ticket .
would you spend your remaining money on replacing it ?
most people answer , no .
now , let 's just change one thing in this scenario .
you 're on your way to the theater , and in your wallet you have two 20-dollar bills .
when you arrive you discover you 've lost one of them .
would you spend your remaining 20 dollars on a ticket ?
well , of course , i went to the theater to see the play .
what does the loss of 20 dollars along the way have to do ?
now , just in case you 're not getting it , here 's a schematic of what happened , ok ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- along the way , you lost something .
in both cases , it was a piece of paper .
in one case , it had a u.s. president on it ; in the other case it did n't .
what the hell difference should it make ?
the difference is that when you lost the ticket you say to yourself , i 'm not paying twice for the same thing .
you compare the cost of the play now - 40 dollars - to the cost that it used to have - 20 dollars - and you say it 's a bad deal .
comparing with the past causes many of the problems that behavioral economists and psychologists identify in people 's attempts to assign value .
but even when we compare with the possible , instead of the past , we still make certain kinds of mistakes .
and i 'm going to show you one or two of them .
one of the things we know about comparison : that when we compare one thing to the other , it changes its value .
so in 1992 , this fellow , george bush , for those of us who were kind of on the liberal side of the political spectrum , did n't seem like such a great guy .
suddenly , we 're almost longing for him to return .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the comparison changes how we evaluate him .
now , retailers knew this long before anybody else did , of course , and they use this wisdom to help you - spare you the undue burden of money .
and so a retailer , if you were to go into a wine shop and you had to buy a bottle of wine , and you see them here for eight , 27 and 33 dollars , what would you do ?
most people do n't want the most expensive , they do n't want the least expensive .
so , they will opt for the item in the middle .
if you 're a smart retailer , then , you will put a very expensive item that nobody will ever buy on the shelf , because suddenly the $ 33 wine does n't look as expensive in comparison .
so i 'm telling you something you already knew : namely , that comparison changes the value of things .
here 's why that 's a problem : the problem is that when you get that $ 33 bottle of wine home , it wo n't matter what it used to be sitting on the shelf next to .
the comparisons we make when we are appraising value , where we 're trying to estimate how much we 'll like things , are not the same comparisons we 'll be making when we consume them .
this problem of shifting comparisons can bedevil our attempts to make rational decisions .
let me just give you an example .
i have to show you something from my own lab , so let me sneak this in .
these are subjects coming to an experiment to be asked the simplest of all questions : how much will you enjoy eating potato chips one minute from now ?
they 're sitting in a room with potato chips in front of them .
for some of the subjects , sitting in the far corner of a room is a box of godiva chocolates , and for others is a can of spam .
in fact , these items that are sitting in the room change how much the subjects think they 're going to enjoy the potato chips .
namely , those who are looking at spam think potato chips are going to be quite tasty ; those who are looking at godiva chocolate think they wo n't be nearly so tasty .
of course , what happens when they eat the potato chips ?
well , look , you did n't need a psychologist to tell you that when you have a mouthful of greasy , salty , crispy , delicious snacks , what 's sitting in the corner of the room makes not a damn bit of difference to your gustatory experience .
nonetheless , their predictions are perverted by a comparison that then does not carry through and change their experience .
you 've all experienced this yourself , even if you 've never come into our lab to eat potato chips . so here 's a question : you want to buy a car stereo .
the dealer near your house sells this particular stereo for 200 dollars , but if you drive across town , you can get it for 100 bucks .
so would you drive to get 50 percent off , saving 100 dollars ?
most people say they would .
they ca n't imagine buying it for twice the price when , with one trip across town , they can get it for half off .
now , let 's imagine instead you wanted to buy a car that had a stereo , and the dealer near your house had it for 31,000 .
but if you drove across town , you could get it for 30,900 .
would you drive to get it ? at this point , 0.003 savings - the 100 dollars .
most people say , no , i 'm going to schlep across town to save 100 bucks on the purchase of a car ?
this kind of thinking drives economists crazy , and it should .
because this 100 dollars that you save - hello ! - does n't know where it came from .
it does n't know what you saved it on .
when you go to buy groceries with it , it does n't go , i 'm the money saved on the car stereo , or , i 'm the dumb money saved on the car . it 's money .
and if a drive across town is worth 100 bucks , it 's worth 100 bucks no matter what you 're saving it on . people do n't think that way .
that 's why they do n't know whether their mutual fund manager is taking 0.1 percent or 0.15 percent of their investment , but they clip coupons to save one dollar off of toothpaste .
now , you can see , this is the problem of shifting comparisons , because what you 're doing is , you 're comparing the 100 bucks to the purchase that you 're making , but when you go to spend that money you wo n't be making that comparison .
you 've all had this experience .
if you 're an american , for example , you 've probably traveled in france .
and at some point you may have met a couple from your own hometown , and you thought , " oh , my god , these people are so warm . they 're so nice to me .
i mean , compared to all these people who hate me when i try to speak their language and hate me more when i do n't , these people are just wonderful . " and so you tour france with them , and then you get home and you invite them over for dinner , and what do you find ?
compared to your regular friends , they are boring and dull , right ? because in this new context , the comparison is very , very different . in fact , you find yourself disliking them enough almost to qualify for french citizenship .
now , you have exactly the same problem when you shop for a stereo .
you go to the stereo store , you see two sets of speakers - these big , boxy , monoliths , and these little , sleek speakers , and you play them , and you go , you know , i do hear a difference : the big ones sound a little better .
and so you buy them , and you bring them home , and you entirely violate the décor of your house .
and the problem , of course , is that this comparison you made in the store is a comparison you 'll never make again .
what are the odds that years later you 'll turn on the stereo and go , " sounds so much better than those little ones , " which you ca n't even remember hearing .
the problem of shifting comparisons is even more difficult when these choices are arrayed over time .
people have a lot of trouble making decisions about things that will happen at different points in time .
and what psychologists and behavioral economists have discovered is that by and large people use two simple rules .
so let me give you one very easy problem , a second very easy problem and then a third , hard , problem .
here 's the first easy problem : you can have 60 dollars now or 50 dollars now . which would you prefer ?
this is what we call a one-item iq test , ok ?
all of us , i hope , prefer more money , and the reason is , we believe more is better than less .
here 's the second problem : you can have 60 dollars today or 60 dollars in a month . which would you prefer ?
again , an easy decision , because we all know that now is better than later .
what 's hard in our decision-making is when these two rules conflict .
for example , when you 're offered 50 dollars now or 60 dollars in a month .
this typifies a lot of situations in life in which you will gain by waiting , but you have to be patient .
what do we know ? what do people do in these kinds of situations ?
well , by and large people are enormously impatient .
that is , they require interest rates in the hundred or thousands of percents in order to delay gratification and wait until next month for the extra 10 dollars .
maybe that is n't so remarkable , but what is remarkable is how easy it is to make this impatience go away by simply changing imagine that you can have 50 dollars in a year - that 's 12 months - or 60 dollars in 13 months .
what do we find now ?
people are gladly willing to wait : as long as they 're waiting 12 , they might as well wait 13 .
what makes this dynamic inconsistency happen ?
comparison . troubling comparison . let me show you .
this is just a graph showing the results that i just suggested you would show if i gave you time to respond , which is , people find that the subjective value of 50 is higher than the subjective value of 60 when they 'll be delivered in now or one month , respectively - a 30-day delay - but they show the reverse pattern when you push the entire decision off into the future a year .
now , why in the world do you get this pattern of results ?
these guys can tell us .
what you see here are two lads , one of them larger than the other : the fireman and the fiddler .
they are going to recede towards the vanishing point in the horizon , and i want you to notice two things .
at no point will the fireman look taller than the fiddler . no point .
however , the difference between them seems to be getting smaller .
first it 's an inch in your view , then it 's a quarter-inch , then a half-inch , and then finally they go off the edge of the earth .
here are the results of what i just showed you .
this is the subjective height - the height you saw of these guys at various points .
and i want you to see that two things are true .
one , the farther away they are , the smaller they look ; and two , the fireman is always bigger than the fiddler .
but watch what happens when we make some of them disappear . right .
at a very close distance , the fiddler looks taller than the fireman , but at a far distance their normal , their true , relations are preserved .
as plato said , what space is to size , time is to value .
these are the results of the hard problem i gave you : 60 now or 50 in a month ?
and these are subjective values , and what you can see is , our two rules are preserved .
people always think more is better than less : 60 is always better than 50 , and they always think now is better than later : the bars on this side are higher than the bars on this side .
watch what happens when we drop some out .
suddenly we have the dynamic inconsistency that puzzled us .
we have the tendency for people to go for 50 dollars now over waiting a month , but not if that decision is far in the future .
notice something interesting that this implies - namely , that when people get to the future , they will change their minds .
that is , as that month 12 approaches , you will say , what was i thinking , waiting an extra month for 60 dollars ?
i 'll take the 50 dollars now .
well , the question with which i 'd like to end is this : if we 're so damn stupid , how did we get to the moon ?
because i could go on for about two hours with evidence of people 's inability to estimate odds and inability to estimate value .
the answer to this question , i think , is an answer you 've already heard in some of the talks , and i dare say you will hear again : namely , that our brains were evolved for a very different world than the one in which we are living .
they were evolved for a world in which people lived in very small groups , rarely met anybody who was terribly different from themselves , had rather short lives in which there were few choices and the highest priority was to eat and mate today .
bernoulli 's gift , bernoulli 's little formula , allows us , it tells us how we should think in a world for which nature never designed us .
that explains why we are so bad at using it , but it also explains why it is so terribly important that we become good , fast .
we are the only species on this planet that has ever held its own fate in its hands .
we have no significant predators , we 're the masters of our physical environment ; the things that normally cause species to become extinct are no longer any threat to us .
the only thing - the only thing - that can destroy us and doom us are our own decisions .
if we 're not here in 10,000 years , it 's going to be because we could not take advantage of the gift given to us by a young dutch fellow in 1738 , because we underestimated the odds of our future pains and overestimated the value of our present pleasures .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : that was remarkable .
we have time for some questions for dan gilbert . one and two .
bill lyell : would you say that this mechanism is in part how terrorism actually works to frighten us , and is there some way that we could counteract that ?
dan gilbert : i actually was consulting recently with the department of homeland security , which generally believes that american security dollars should go to making borders safer .
i tried to point out to them that terrorism was a name based on people 's psychological reaction to a set of events , and that if they were concerned about terrorism they might ask what causes terror and how can we stop people from being terrified , rather than - not rather than , but in addition to stopping the atrocities that we 're all concerned about .
surely the kinds of play that at least american media give to - and forgive me , but in raw numbers these are very tiny accidents .
we already know , for example , in the united states , more people have died as a result of not taking airplanes - because they were scared - and driving on highways , than were killed in 9/11 . ok ?
if i told you that there was a plague that was going to kill 15,000 americans next year , you might be alarmed if you did n't find out it was the flu .
these are small-scale accidents , and we should be wondering whether they should get the kind of play , the kind of coverage , that they do .
surely that causes people to overestimate the likelihood that they 'll be hurt in these various ways , and gives power to the very people who want to frighten us .
ca : dan , i 'd like to hear more on this . so , you 're saying that our response to terror is , i mean , it 's a form of mental bug ?
talk more about it .
dg : it 's out-sized . i mean , look .
if australia disappears tomorrow , terror is probably the right response .
that 's an awful large lot of very nice people . on the other hand , when a bus blows up and 30 people are killed , more people than that were killed by not using their seatbelts in the same country .
is terror the right response ?
ca : what causes the bug ? is it the drama of the event - that it 's so spectacular ?
is it the fact that it 's an intentional attack by , quote , outsiders ?
what is it ?
dg : yes . it 's a number of things , and you hit on several of them .
first , it 's a human agent trying to kill us - it 's not a tree falling on us by accident .
second , these are enemies who may want to strike and hurt us again .
people are being killed for no reason instead of good reason - as if there 's good reason , but sometimes people think there are .
so there are a number of things that together make this seem like a fantastic event , but let 's not play down the fact that newspapers sell when people see something in it they want to read . so there 's a large role here played by the media , who want these things to be as spectacular as they possibly can .
ca : i mean , what would it take to persuade our culture to downplay it ?
dg : well , go to israel . you know , go to israel . and a mall blows up , and then everybody 's unhappy about it , and an hour-and-a-half later - at least when i was there , and i was 150 feet from the mall when it blew up - i went back to my hotel and the wedding that was planned was still going on .
and as the israeli mother said , she said , " we never let them win by stopping weddings . "
i mean , this is a society that has learned - and there are others too - that has learned to live with a certain amount of terrorism and not be quite as upset by it , shall i say , as those of us who have not had many terror attacks .
ca : but is there a rational fear that actually , the reason we 're frightened about this is because we think that the big one is to come ?
dg : yes , of course . so , if we knew that this was the worst attack there would ever be , there might be more and more buses of 30 people - we would probably not be nearly so frightened .
i do n't want to say - please , i 'm going to get quoted somewhere as saying , " terrorism is fine and we should n't be so distressed . "
that 's not my point at all .
what i 'm saying is that , surely , rationally , our distress about things that happen , about threats , should be roughly proportional to the size of those threats and threats to come .
i think in the case of terrorism , it is n't .
and many of the things we 've heard about from our speakers today - how many people do you know got up and said , poverty ! i ca n't believe what poverty is doing to us .
people get up in the morning ; they do n't care about poverty .
it 's not making headlines , it 's not making news , it 's not flashy .
there are no guns going off .
i mean , if you had to solve one of these problems , chris , which would you solve ? terrorism or poverty ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- that 's a tough one .
ca : there 's no question .
poverty , by an order of magnitude , a huge order of magnitude , unless someone can show that there 's , you know , terrorists with a nuke are really likely to come .
the latest i 've read , seen , thought is that it 's incredibly hard for them to do that .
if that turns out to be wrong , we all look silly , but with poverty it 's a bit - dg : even if that were true , still more people die from poverty .
ca : we 've evolved to get all excited about these dramatic attacks . is that because in the past , in the ancient past , we just did n't understand things like disease and systems that cause poverty and so forth , and so it made no sense for us as a species to put any energy into worrying about those things ?
people died ; so be it .
but if you got attacked , that was something you could do something about .
and so we evolved these responses .
is that what happened ?
dg : well , you know , the people who are most skeptical about leaping to evolutionary explanations for everything are the evolutionary psychologists themselves .
my guess is that there 's nothing quite that specific in our evolutionary past . but rather , if you 're looking for an evolutionary explanation , you might say that most organisms are neo-phobic - that is , they 're a little scared of stuff that 's new and different .
and there 's a good reason to be , because old stuff did n't eat you . right ?
any animal you see that you 've seen before is less likely to be a predator than one that you 've never seen before .
so , you know , when a school bus is blown up and we 've never seen this before , our general tendency is to orient towards that which is new and novel is activated .
i do n't think it 's quite as specific a mechanism as the one you alluded to , but maybe a more fundamental one underlying it .
jay walker : you know , economists love to talk about the stupidity of people who buy lottery tickets . but i suspect you 're making the exact same error you 're accusing those people of , which is the error of value .
i know , because i 've interviewed about 1,000 lottery buyers over the years .
it turns out that the value of buying a lottery ticket is not winning .
that 's what you think it is . all right ?
the average lottery buyer buys about 150 tickets a year , so the buyer knows full well that he or she is going to lose , and yet she buys 150 tickets a year . why is that ?
it 's not because she is stupid or he is stupid .
it 's because the anticipation of possibly winning releases serotonin in the brain , and actually provides a good feeling until the drawing indicates you 've lost .
or , to put it another way , for the dollar investment , you can have a much better feeling than flushing the money down the toilet , which you can not have a good feeling from .
now , economists tend to - -lrb- applause -rrb- - economists tend to view the world through their own lenses , which is : this is just a bunch of stupid people .
and as a result , many people look at economists as stupid people .
and so fundamentally , the reason we got to the moon is , we did n't listen to the economists . thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- dg : well , no , it 's a great point . it remains to be seen whether the joy of anticipation is exactly equaled by the amount of disappointment after the lottery . because remember , people who did n't buy tickets do n't feel awful the next day either , even though they do n't feel great during the drawing .
i would disagree that people know they 're not going to win .
i think they think it 's unlikely , but it could happen , which is why they prefer that to the flushing .
but certainly i see your point : that there can be some utility to buying a lottery ticket other than winning .
now , i think there 's many good reasons not to listen to economists .
that is n't one of them , for me , but there 's many others .
ca : last question .
aubrey de grey : my name 's aubrey de grey , from cambridge .
i work on the thing that kills more people than anything else kills - i work on aging - and i 'm interested in doing something about it , as we 'll all hear tomorrow .
i very much resonate with what you 're saying , because it seems to me that the problem with getting people interested in doing anything about aging is that by the time aging is about to kill you it looks like cancer or heart disease or whatever . do you have any advice ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- dg : for you or for them ?
adg : in persuading them .
dg : ah , for you in persuading them .
well , it 's notoriously difficult to get people to be farsighted .
but one thing that psychologists have tried that seems to work is to get people to imagine the future more vividly .
one of the problems with making decisions about the far future and the near future is that we imagine the near future much more vividly than the far future .
to the extent that you can equalize the amount of detail that people put into the mental representations of near and far future , people begin to make decisions about the two in the same way .
so , would you like to have an extra 100,000 dollars when you 're 65 is a question that 's very different than , imagine who you 'll be when you 're 65 : will you be living , what will you look like , how much hair will you have , who will you be living with .
once we have all the details of that imaginary scenario , suddenly we feel like it might be important to save so that that guy has a little retirement money .
but these are tricks around the margins .
i think in general you 're battling a very fundamental human tendency , which is to say , " i 'm here today , and so now is more important than later . "
ca : dan , thank you . members of the audience , that was a fantastic session . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i decided when i was asked to do this that what i really wanted to talk about was my friend richard feynman .
i was one of the fortunate few that really did get to know him and enjoyed his presence .
and i 'm going to tell you the richard feynman that i knew .
i 'm sure there are other people here who could tell you about the richard feynman they knew , and it would probably be a different richard feynman .
richard feynman was a very complex man .
he was a man of many , many parts .
he was , of course , foremost , a very , very , very great scientist .
he was an actor . you saw him act .
i also had the good fortune to be in those lectures , up in the balcony .
they were fantastic .
he was a philosopher ; he was a drum player ; he was a teacher par excellence .
richard feynman was also a showman , an enormous showman .
he was brash , irreverent - he was full of macho , a kind of macho one-upmanship .
he loved intellectual battle .
he had a gargantuan ego .
but the man had somehow a lot of room at the bottom .
and what i mean by that is a lot of room , in my case - i ca n't speak for anybody else - but in my case , a lot of room for another big ego .
well , not as big as his , but fairly big .
i always felt good with dick feynman .
it was always fun to be with him .
he always made me feel smart .
how can somebody like that make you feel smart ?
somehow he did .
he made me feel smart . he made me feel he was smart .
he made me feel we were both smart , and the two of us could solve any problem whatever .
and in fact , we did sometimes do physics together .
we never published a paper together , but we did have a lot of fun .
he loved to win .
with these little macho games we would sometimes play - and he did n't only play them with me , he played them with all sorts of people - he would almost always win .
but when he did n't win , when he lost , he would laugh and seem to have just as much fun as if he had won .
i remember once he told me a story about a joke that the students played on him .
they took him - i think it was for his birthday - they took him for lunch .
they took him for lunch to a sandwich place in pasadena .
it may still exist ; i do n't know .
celebrity sandwiches was their thing .
you could get a marilyn monroe sandwich .
you could get a humphrey bogart sandwich .
the students went there in advance , and they arranged that they would all order feynman sandwiches .
one after another , they came in and ordered feynman sandwiches .
feynman loved this story .
he told me this story , and he was really happy and laughing .
when he finished the story , i said to him , " dick , i wonder what would be the difference between a feynman sandwich and a susskind sandwich . "
and without skipping a beat at all , he said , " well , they 'd be about the same .
the only difference is a susskind sandwich would have a lot more ham , " ham , as in bad actor .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- well , i happened to have been very quick that day , and i said , " yeah , but a lot less baloney . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the truth of the matter is that a feynman sandwich had a load of ham , but absolutely no baloney .
what feynman hated worse than anything else was intellectual pretense - phoniness , false sophistication , jargon .
i remember sometime during the ' 80s , the mid- ' 80s , dick and i and sidney coleman would meet a couple of times up in san francisco at some very rich guy 's house - up in san francisco for dinner .
and the last time the rich guy invited us , he also invited a couple of philosophers .
these guys were philosophers of mind .
their specialty was the philosophy of consciousness .
and they were full of all kinds of jargon .
i 'm trying to remember the words - " monism , " " dualism , " categories all over the place .
i did n't know what those things meant , neither did dick - neither did sydney for that matter .
and what did we talk about ?
well , what do you talk about when you talk about minds ?
one thing , there 's one obvious thing to talk about - can a machine become a mind ?
can you build a machine that thinks like a human being , that is conscious ?
we sat around and we talked about this - we of course never resolved it .
but the trouble with the philosophers is that they were philosophizing when they should have been science-iphizing .
it 's a scientific question after all .
and this was a very , very dangerous thing to do around dick feynman .
feynman let them have it - both barrels , right between the eyes .
it was brutal ; it was funny - ooh , it was funny .
but it was really brutal .
he really popped their balloon .
but the amazing thing was - feynman had to leave a little early .
he was n't feeling too well , so he left a little bit early .
and sidney and i were left there with the two philosophers .
and the amazing thing is these guys were flying .
they were so happy .
they had met the great man ; they had been instructed by the great man ; they had an enormous amount of fun having their faces shoved in the mud , and it was something special .
i realized there was something just extraordinary about feynman , even when he did what he did .
dick , he was my friend . i did call him dick .
dick and i had a certain , a little bit of a rapport .
i think it may have been a special rapport that he and i had .
we liked each other ; we liked the same kind of things .
i also liked the kind of intellectual macho games .
sometimes i would win , mostly he would win , but we both enjoyed them .
and dick became convinced at some point that he and i had some kind of similarity of personality .
i do n't think he was right .
i think the only point of similarity between us is we both like to talk about ourselves .
but he was convinced of this .
and he was curious .
the man was incredibly curious .
and he wanted to understand what it was and why it was that there was this funny connection .
and one day we were walking . we were in france .
we were in les houches .
we were up in the mountains , 1976 .
we were up in the mountains , and feynman said to me , he said , " leonardo . "
the reason he called me leonardo is because we were in europe and he was practicing his french .
and he said , " leonardo , were you closer to your mother or to you father when you were a kid ? "
and i said , " well , my real hero was my father .
he was a working man , had a fifth grade education .
he was a master mechanic , and he taught me how to use tools .
he taught me all sorts of things about mechanical things .
he even taught me the pythagorean theorem .
he did n't call it the hypotenuse , he called it the shortcut distance . "
and feynman 's eyes just opened up .
he went off like a light bulb .
and he said he had had basically exactly the same relationship with his father .
in fact , he had been convinced at one time that , to be a good physicist , that it was very important to have had that kind of relationship with your father .
i apologize for the sexist conversation here , but this is the way it really happened .
he said that he had been absolutely convinced that this was necessary - the necessary part of the growing up of a young physicist .
being dick , he , of course , wanted to check this .
he wanted to go out and do an experiment .
so , well he did .
he went out and did an experiment .
he asked all his friends that he thought were good physicists , " was it your mom or your pop that influenced you ? "
and to a man - they were all men - to a man , every single one of them said , " my mother . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- there went that theory down the trashcan of history .
but he was very excited that he had finally met somebody who had the same experience with my father as he had with his father .
and for some time , he was convinced this was the reason we got along so well .
i do n't know . maybe . who knows ?
but let me tell you a little bit about feynman the physicist .
feynman 's style - no , style is not the right word .
style makes you think of the bow tie he might have worn or the suit he was wearing .
there 's something much deeper than that , but i ca n't think of another word for it .
feynman 's scientific style was always to look for the simplest , most elementary solution to a problem that was possible .
if it was n't possible , you had to use something fancier .
but no doubt part of this was his great joy and pleasure in showing people that he could think more simply than they could .
but he also deeply believed , he truly believed , that if you could n't explain something simply you did n't understand it .
in the 1950s , people were trying to figure out how superfluid helium worked .
there was a theory .
it was due to a russian mathematical physicist , and it was a complicated theory .
i 'll tell you what that theory was soon enough .
it was a terribly complicated theory full of very difficult integrals and formulas and mathematics and so forth .
and it sort of worked , but it did n't work very well .
the only way it worked is when the helium atoms were very , very far apart .
the helium atoms had to be very far apart .
and unfortunately , the helium atoms in liquid helium are right on top of each other .
feynman decided , as a sort of amateur helium physicist , that he would try to figure it out .
he had an idea , a very clear idea .
he would try to figure out what the quantum wave function of this huge number of atoms looked like .
he would try to visualize it , guided by a small number of simple principles .
the small number of simple principles were very , very simple .
the first one was that when helium atoms touch each other , they repel .
the implication of that is that the wave function has to go to zero , it has to vanish when the helium atoms touch each other .
the other fact is that the ground state , the lowest energy state of a quantum system , the wave function is always very smooth - has the minimum number of wiggles .
so he sat down - and i imagine he had nothing more than a simple piece of paper and a pencil - and he tried to write down , and did write down , the simplest function that he could think of which had the boundary conditions that the wave function vanish when things touch and is smooth in between .
he wrote down a simple thing .
it was so simple , in fact , that i suspect a really smart high school student , who did n't even have calculus , could understand what he wrote down .
the thing was that that simple thing that he wrote down explained everything that was known at the time about liquid helium and then some .
i 've always wondered whether the professionals , the real professional helium physicists , were just a little bit embarrassed by this .
they had their super-powerful technique , and they could n't do as well .
incidentally , i 'll tell you what that super-powerful technique was .
it was the technique of feynman diagrams .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- he did it again in 1968 .
in 1968 , in my own university - i was n't there at the time - but in 1968 , they were exploring the structure of the proton .
the proton is obviously made of a whole bunch of little particles .
this was more or less known .
and the way to analyze it was , of course , feynman diagrams .
that 's what feynman diagrams were constructed for - to understand particles .
the experiments that were going on were very simple .
you simply take the proton , and you hit it really sharply with an electron .
this was the thing the feynman diagrams were for .
the only problem was that feynman diagrams are complicated .
they 're difficult integrals .
if you could do all of them , you would have a very precise theory .
but you could n't ; they were just too complicated .
people were trying to do them .
you could do a one loop diagram . do n't worry about one loop .
one loop , two loops - maybe you could do a three loop diagram , but beyond that , you could n't do anything .
feynman said , " forget all of that .
just think of the proton as an assemblage of little particles - a swarm of little particles . "
he called them partons . he called them partons .
he said , " just think of it as a swarm of partons moving real fast . "
because they 're moving real fast , relativity says the internal motions go very slow .
the electron hits it suddenly .
it 's like taking a very sudden snapshot of the proton .
what do you see ?
you see a frozen bunch of partons .
they do n't move , and because they do n't move during the course of the experiment , you do n't have to worry about how they 're moving .
you do n't have to worry about the forces between them .
you just get to think of it as a population of frozen partons .
this was the key to analyzing these experiments .
extremely effective , it really did - somebody said the word revolution is a bad word .
i suppose it is , so i wo n't say revolution - but it certainly evolved very , very deeply our understanding of the proton , and of particles beyond that .
well , i had some more that i was going to tell you about my connection with feynman , what he was like , but i see i have exactly half a minute .
so i think i 'll just finish up by saying i actually do n't think feynman would have liked this event .
i think he would have said , " i do n't need this . "
but how should we honor feynman ?
how should we really honor feynman ?
i think the answer is we should honor feynman by getting as much baloney out of our own sandwiches as we can .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- you all know the truth of what i 'm going to say .
i think the intuition that inequality is divisive and socially corrosive has been around since before the french revolution .
what 's changed is we now can look at the evidence , we can compare societies , more and less equal societies , and see what inequality does .
i 'm going to take you through that data and then explain why the links i 'm going to be showing you exist .
but first , see what a miserable lot we are .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i want to start though with a paradox .
this shows you life expectancy against gross national income - how rich countries are on average .
and you see the countries on the right , like norway and the usa , are twice as rich as israel , greece , portugal on the left .
and it makes no difference to their life expectancy at all .
there 's no suggestion of a relationship there .
but if we look within our societies , there are extraordinary social gradients in health running right across society .
this , again , is life expectancy .
these are small areas of england and wales - the poorest on the right , the richest on the left .
a lot of difference between the poor and the rest of us .
even the people just below the top have less good health than the people at the top .
so income means something very important within our societies , and nothing between them .
the explanation of that paradox is that , within our societies , we 're looking at relative income or social position , social status - where we are in relation to each other and the size of the gaps between us .
and as soon as you 've got that idea , you should immediately wonder : what happens if we widen the differences , or compress them , make the income differences bigger or smaller ?
and that 's what i 'm going to show you .
i 'm not using any hypothetical data .
i 'm taking data from the u.n. - it 's the same as the world bank has - on the scale of income differences in these rich developed market democracies .
the measure we 've used , because it 's easy to understand and you can download it , is how much richer the top 20 percent than the bottom 20 percent in each country .
and you see in the more equal countries on the left - japan , finland , norway , sweden - the top 20 percent are about three and a half , four times as rich as the bottom 20 percent .
but on the more unequal end - u.k. , portugal , usa , singapore - the differences are twice as big .
on that measure , we are twice as unequal as some of the other successful market democracies .
now i 'm going to show you what that does to our societies .
we collected data on problems with social gradients , the kind of problems that are more common at the bottom of the social ladder .
internationally comparable data on life expectancy , on kids ' maths and literacy scores , on infant mortality rates , homicide rates , proportion of the population in prison , teenage birthrates , levels of trust , obesity , mental illness - which in standard diagnostic classification includes drug and alcohol addiction - and social mobility .
we put them all in one index .
they 're all weighted equally .
where a country is is a sort of average score on these things .
and there , you see it in relation to the measure of inequality i 've just shown you , which i shall use over and over again in the data .
the more unequal countries are doing worse on all these kinds of social problems .
it 's an extraordinarily close correlation .
but if you look at that same index of health and social problems in relation to gnp per capita , gross national income , there 's nothing there , no correlation anymore .
we were a little bit worried that people might think we 'd been choosing problems to suit our argument and just manufactured this evidence , so we also did a paper in the british medical journal on the unicef index of child well-being .
it has 40 different components put together by other people .
it contains whether kids can talk to their parents , whether they have books at home , what immunization rates are like , whether there 's bullying at school .
everything goes into it .
here it is in relation to that same measure of inequality .
kids do worse in the more unequal societies .
highly significant relationship .
but once again , if you look at that measure of child well-being , in relation to national income per person , there 's no relationship , no suggestion of a relationship .
what all the data i 've shown you so far says is the same thing .
the average well-being of our societies is not dependent any longer on national income and economic growth .
that 's very important in poorer countries , but not in the rich developed world .
but the differences between us and where we are in relation to each other now matter very much .
i 'm going to show you some of the separate bits of our index .
here , for instance , is trust .
it 's simply the proportion of the population who agree most people can be trusted .
it comes from the world values survey .
you see , at the more unequal end , it 's about 15 percent of the population who feel they can trust others .
but in the more equal societies , it rises to 60 or 65 percent .
and if you look at measures of involvement in community life or social capital , very similar relationships closely related to inequality .
i may say , we did all this work twice .
we did it first on these rich , developed countries , and then as a separate test bed , we repeated it all on the 50 american states - asking just the same question : do the more unequal states do worse on all these kinds of measures ?
so here is trust from a general social survey of the federal government related to inequality .
very similar scatter over a similar range of levels of trust .
same thing is going on .
basically we found that almost anything that 's related to trust internationally is related to trust amongst the 50 states in that separate test bed .
we 're not just talking about a fluke .
this is mental illness .
who put together figures using the same diagnostic interviews on random samples of the population to allow us to compare rates of mental illness in each society .
this is the percent of the population with any mental illness in the preceding year .
and it goes from about eight percent up to three times that - whole societies with three times the level of mental illness of others .
and again , closely related to inequality .
this is violence .
these red dots are american states , and the blue triangles are canadian provinces .
but look at the scale of the differences .
it goes from 15 homicides per million up to 150 .
this is the proportion of the population in prison .
there 's a about a tenfold difference there , log scale up the side .
but it goes from about 40 to 400 people in prison .
that relationship is not mainly driven by more crime .
in some places , that 's part of it .
but most of it is about more punitive sentencing , harsher sentencing .
and the more unequal societies are more likely also to retain the death penalty .
here we have children dropping out of high school .
again , quite big differences .
extraordinarily damaging , if you 're talking about using the talents of the population .
this is social mobility .
it 's actually a measure of mobility based on income .
basically , it 's asking : do rich fathers have rich sons and poor fathers have poor sons , or is there no relationship between the two ?
and at the more unequal end , fathers ' income is much more important - in the u.k. , usa .
and in scandinavian countries , fathers ' income is much less important .
there 's more social mobility .
and as we like to say - and i know there are a lot of americans in the audience here - if americans want to live the american dream , they should go to denmark .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- i 've shown you just a few things in italics here .
i could have shown a number of other problems .
they 're all problems that tend to be more common at the bottom of the social gradient .
but there are endless problems with social gradients that are worse in more unequal countries - not just a little bit worse , but anything from twice as common to 10 times as common .
think of the expense , the human cost of that .
i want to go back though to this graph that i showed you earlier where we put it all together to make two points .
one is that , in graph after graph , we find the countries that do worse , whatever the outcome , seem to be the more unequal ones , and the ones that do well seem to be the nordic countries and japan .
so what we 're looking at is general social disfunction related to inequality .
it 's not just one or two things that go wrong , it 's most things .
the other really important point i want to make on this graph is that , if you look at the bottom , sweden and japan , they 're very different countries in all sorts of ways .
the position of women , how closely they keep to the nuclear family , are on opposite ends of the poles in terms of the rich developed world .
but another really important difference is how they get their greater equality .
sweden has huge differences in earnings , and it narrows the gap through taxation , general welfare state , generous benefits and so on .
japan is rather different though .
it starts off with much smaller differences in earnings before tax .
it has lower taxes .
it has a smaller welfare state .
and in our analysis of the american states , we find rather the same contrast .
there are some states that do well through redistribution , some states that do well because they have smaller income differences before tax .
so we conclude that it does n't much matter how you get your greater equality , as long as you get there somehow .
i am not talking about perfect equality , i 'm talking about what exists in rich developed market democracies .
another really surprising part of this picture is that it 's not just the poor who are affected by inequality .
there seems to be some truth in john donne 's " no man is an island . "
and in a number of studies , it 's possible to compare how people do in more and less equal countries at each level in the social hierarchy .
this is just one example .
some swedes very kindly classified a lot of their infant deaths according to the british register of general socioeconomic classification .
and so it 's anachronistically a classification by fathers ' occupations , so single parents go on their own .
but then where it says " low social class , " that 's unskilled manual occupations .
it goes through towards the skilled manual occupations in the middle , then the junior non-manual , going up high to the professional occupations - doctors , lawyers , directors of larger companies .
you see there that sweden does better than britain all the way across the social hierarchy .
the biggest differences are at the bottom of society .
but even at the top , there seems to be a small benefit to being in a more equal society .
we show that on about five different sets of data covering educational outcomes and health in the united states and internationally .
and that seems to be the general picture - that greater equality makes most difference at the bottom , but has some benefits even at the top .
but i should say a few words about what 's going on .
i think i 'm looking and talking about the psychosocial effects of inequality .
more to do with feelings of superiority and inferiority , of being valued and devalued , respected and disrespected .
and of course , those feelings of the status competition that comes out of that drives the consumerism in our society .
it also leads to status insecurity .
we worry more about how we 're judged and seen by others , whether we 're regarded as attractive , clever , all that kind of thing .
the social-evaluative judgments increase , the fear of those social-evaluative judgments .
interestingly , some parallel work going on in social psychology : some people reviewed 208 different studies in which volunteers had been invited into a psychological laboratory and had their stress hormones , their responses to doing stressful tasks , measured .
and in the review , what they were interested in seeing is what kind of stresses most reliably raise levels of cortisol , the central stress hormone .
and the conclusion was it was tasks that included social-evaluative threat - threats to self-esteem or social status in which others can negatively judge your performance .
those kind of stresses have a very particular effect on the physiology of stress .
now we have been criticized .
of course , there are people who dislike this stuff and people who find it very surprising .
i should tell you though that when people criticize us for picking and choosing data , we never pick and choose data .
we have an absolute rule that if our data source has data for one of the countries we 're looking at , it goes into the analysis .
our data source decides whether it 's reliable data , we do n't .
otherwise that would introduce bias .
what about other countries ?
there are 200 studies of health in relation to income and equality in the academic peer-reviewed journals .
this is n't confined to these countries here , hiding a very simple demonstration .
the same countries , the same measure of inequality , one problem after another .
why do n't we control for other factors ?
well we 've shown you that gnp per capita does n't make any difference .
and of course , others using more sophisticated methods in the literature have controlled for poverty and education and so on .
what about causality ?
correlation in itself does n't prove causality .
we spend a good bit of time .
and indeed , people know the causal links quite well in some of these outcomes .
the big change in our understanding of drivers of chronic health in the rich developed world is how important chronic stress from social sources is affecting the immune system , the cardiovascular system .
or for instance , the reason why violence becomes more common in more unequal societies is because people are sensitive to being looked down on .
i should say that to deal with this , we 've got to deal with the post-tax things and the pre-tax things .
we 've got to constrain income , the bonus culture incomes at the top .
i think we must make our bosses accountable to their employees in any way we can .
i think the take-home message though is that we can improve the real quality of human life by reducing the differences in incomes between us .
suddenly we have a handle on the psychosocial well-being of whole societies , and that 's exciting .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- when my father and i started a company to 3d print human tissues and organs , some people initially thought we were a little crazy .
but since then , much progress has been made , both in our lab and other labs around the world .
and given this , we started getting questions like , " if you can grow human body parts , can you also grow animal products like meat and leather ? "
when someone first suggested this to me , quite frankly i thought they were a little crazy , but what i soon came to realize was that this is not so crazy after all .
what 's crazy is what we do today .
i 'm convinced that in 30 years , when we look back on today and on how we raise and slaughter billions of animals to make our hamburgers and our handbags , we 'll see this as being wasteful and indeed crazy .
did you know that today we maintain a global herd of 60 billion animals to provide our meat , dairy , eggs and leather goods ?
and over the next few decades , as the world 's population expands to 10 billion , this will need to nearly double to 100 billion animals .
but maintaining this herd takes a major toll on our planet .
animals are not just raw materials .
they 're living beings , and already our livestock is one of the largest users of land , fresh water , and one of the biggest producers of greenhouse gases which drive climate change .
on top of this , when you get so many animals so close together , it creates a breeding ground for disease and opportunities for harm and abuse .
clearly , we can not continue on this path which puts the environment , public health , and food security at risk .
there is another way , because essentially , animal products are just collections of tissues , and right now we breed and raise highly complex animals only to create products that are made of relatively simple tissues .
what if , instead of starting with a complex and sentient animal , we started with what the tissues are made of , the basic unit of life , the cell ?
this is biofabrication , where cells themselves can be used to grow biological products like tissues and organs .
already in medicine , biofabrication techniques have been used to grow sophisticated body parts , like ears , windpipes , skin , blood vessels and bone , that have been successfully implanted into patients .
and beyond medicine , biofabrication can be a humane , sustainable and scalable new industry .
and we should begin by reimagining leather .
i emphasize leather because it is so widely used .
it is beautiful , and it has long been a part of our history .
growing leather is also technically simpler than growing other animal products like meat .
it mainly uses one cell type , and it is largely two-dimensional .
it is also less polarizing for consumers and regulators .
until biofabrication is better understood , it is clear that , initially at least , more people would be willing to wear novel materials than would be willing to eat novel foods , no matter how delicious .
in this sense , leather is a gateway material , a beginning for the mainstream biofabrication industry .
if we can succeed here , it brings our other consumer bioproducts like meat closer on the horizon .
now how do we do it ?
to grow leather , we begin by taking cells from an animal , through a simple biopsy .
the animal could be a cow , lamb , or even something more exotic .
this process does no harm , and daisy the cow can live a happy life .
we then isolate the skin cells and multiply them in a cell culture medium .
this takes millions of cells and expands them into billions .
and we then coax these cells to produce collagen , as they would naturally .
this collagen is the stuff between cells .
it 's natural connective tissue .
it 's the extracellular matrix , but in leather , it 's the main building block .
and what we next do is we take the cells and their collagen and we spread them out to form sheets , and then we layer these thin sheets on top of one another , like phyllo pastry , to form thicker sheets , which we then let mature .
and finally , we take this multilayered skin and through a shorter and much less chemical tanning process , we create leather .
and so i 'm very excited to show you , for the first time , the first batch of our cultured leather , fresh from the lab .
this is real , genuine leather , without the animal sacrifice .
it can have all the characteristics of leather because it is made of the same cells , and better yet , there is no hair to remove , no scars or insect 's bites , and no waste .
this leather can be grown in the shape of a wallet , a handbag or a car seat .
it is not limited to the irregular shape of a cow or an alligator .
and because we make this material , we grow this leather from the ground up , we can control its properties in very interesting ways .
this piece of leather is a mere seven tissue layers thick , and as you can see , it is nearly transparent .
and this leather is 21 layers thick and quite opaque .
you do n't have that kind of fine control with conventional leather .
and we can tune this leather for other desirable qualities , like softness , breathability , durability , elasticity and even things like pattern .
we can mimic nature , but in some ways also improve upon it .
this type of leather can do what today 's leather does , but with imagination , probably much more .
what could the future of animal products look like ?
it need not look like this , which is actually the state of the art today .
rather , it could be much more like this .
already , we have been manufacturing with cell cultures for thousands of years , beginning with products like wine , beer and yogurt .
and speaking of food , our cultured food has evolved , and today we prepare cultured food in beautiful , sterile facilities like this .
a brewery is essentially a bioreactor .
it is where cell culture takes place .
imagine that in this facility , instead of brewing beer , we were brewing leather or meat .
imagine touring this facility , learning about how the leather or meat is cultured , seeing the process from beginning to end , and even trying some .
it 's clean , open and educational , and this is in contrast to the hidden , guarded and remote factories where leather and meat is produced today .
perhaps biofabrication is a natural evolution of manufacturing for mankind .
it 's environmentally responsible , efficient and humane .
it allows us to be creative .
we can design new materials , new products , and new facilities .
we need to move past just killing animals as a resource to something more civilized and evolved .
perhaps we are ready for something literally and figuratively more cultured .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- in 1962 , buckminster fuller presented the particularly audacious proposal for the geoscope .
it was a 200-foot diameter geodesic sphere to be suspended over the east river in new york city , in full view of the united nations .
it was a big idea , for sure , and it was one that he felt could truly inform and deeply affect the decision making of this body through animations of global data , trends and other information regarding the globe , on this sphere .
and today , 45 years later , we clearly have no less need for this kind of clarity and perspective , but what we do have is improved technology .
today we do n't need one million light bulbs to create a spherical display .
we can use leds .
leds are smaller , they 're cheaper , they 're longer lasting , they 're more efficient .
most importantly for this , they 're faster .
and this speed , combined with today 's high-performance micro-controllers , allows us to actually simulate , in this piece , over 17,000 leds - using just 64 .
and the way this happens is through the phenomenon of persistence of vision .
but as this ring rotates at about 1,700 rpm - that 's 28 times per second .
the equator 's speed is actually about 60 miles per hour .
there are four on-board micro-controllers that , each time this ring rotates it , as it passes the rear of the display , it picks up a position signal .
and from that , the on-board micro-controllers can extrapolate the position of the ring at all points around the revolution and display arbitrary bitmap images and animations .
but this is really just the beginning .
in addition to higher resolution versions of this display , my father and i are working on a new patent-pending design for a fully volumetric display using the same phenomenon .
it achieves this by rotating leds about two axes .
so as you can see here , this is a , eleven-inch diameter circuit board .
these blocks represent leds .
and so you could see that as this disc rotates about this axis , it will create a disc of light that we can control .
that 's nothing new : that 's a propeller clock ; that 's the rims that you can buy for your car .
but what is new is that , when we rotate this disc about this axis , this disc of light actually becomes a sphere of light .
and so we can control that with micro-controllers and create a fully volumetric , three-dimensional display with just 256 leds .
now this piece is currently in process - due out in may - but what we 've done is we 've put together a small demo , just to show the geometric translation of points into a sphere .
i 've got a little video to show you , but keep in mind that this is with no electronic control , and this is also with only four leds .
this is actually only about 1.5 percent of what the final display will be in may .
so , take a look .
and here you can see it 's rotating about the vertical axis only , creating circles .
and then , as the other axis kicks in , those actually blur into a volume .
and the shutter speed of the camera actually makes it slightly less effective in this case .
but this piece is due out in may .
it 'll be on display at the interactive telecommunications spring show in greenwich village in new york city - that 's open to the public , definitely invite you all to come and attend - it 's a fantastic show .
there are hundreds of student innovators with fantastic projects .
this piece , actually , will be on display down in the sierra simulcast lounge in the breaks between now and the end of the show .
so i 'd love to talk to you all , and invite you to come down and take a closer look .
it 's an honor to be here . thanks very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- as a researcher , every once in a while you encounter something a little disconcerting .
and this is something that changes your understanding of the world around you , and teaches you that you 're very wrong about something that you really believed firmly in .
and these are unfortunate moments , because you go to sleep that night dumber than when you woke up .
so , that 's really the goal of my talk , is to a , communicate that moment to you and b , have you leave this session a little dumber than when you entered .
so , i hope i can really accomplish that .
so , this incident that i 'm going to describe really began with some diarrhea .
now , we 've known for a long time the cause of diarrhea .
that 's why there 's a glass of water up there .
for us , it 's a problem , the people in this room .
for babies , it 's deadly .
they lack nutrients , and diarrhea dehydrates them .
and so , as a result , there is a lot of death , a lot of death .
in india in 1960 , there was a 24 percent child mortality rate , lots of people did n't make it . this is incredibly unfortunate .
one of the big reasons this happened was because of diarrhea .
now , there was a big effort to solve this problem , and there was actually a big solution .
this solution has been called , by some , " potentially the most important medical advance this century . "
now , the solution turned out to be simple .
and what it was was oral rehydration salts .
many of you have probably used this .
it 's brilliant . it 's a way to get sodium and glucose together so that when you add it to water the child is able to absorb it even during situations of diarrhea .
remarkable impact on mortality .
massive solution to the problem .
flash forward : 1960 , 24 percent child mortality has dropped to 6.5 percent today .
still a big number , but a big drop .
it looks like the technological problem is solved .
but if you look , even today there are about 400,000 diarrhea-related deaths in india alone .
what 's going on here ?
well the easy answer is , we just have n't gotten those salts to those people .
that 's actually not true .
if you look in areas where these salts are completely available , the price is low or zero , these deaths still continue abated .
maybe there 's a biological answer .
maybe these are the deaths that simple rehydration alone does n't solve . that 's not true either .
many of these deaths were completely preventable , and this what i want to think of as the disconcerting thing , what i want to call " the last mile " problem .
see , we spent a lot of energy , in many domains - technological , scientific , hard work , creativity , human ingenuity - to crack important social problems with technology solutions .
that 's been the discoveries of the last 2,000 years , that 's mankind moving forward .
but in this case we cracked it , but a big part of the problem still remains .
nine hundred and ninety-nine miles went well , the last mile 's proving incredibly stubborn .
now , that 's for oral rehydration therapy .
maybe this is something unique about diarrhea .
well , it turns out - and this is where things get really disconcerting - it 's not unique to diarrhea .
it 's not even unique to poor people in india .
here 's an example from a variety of contexts .
i 've put a bunch of examples up here .
i 'll start with insulin , diabetes medication in the u.s.
ok , the american population .
on medicaid - if you 're fairly poor you get medicaid , or if you have health insurance - insulin is pretty straightforward .
you get it , either in pill form or you get it as an injection ; you have to take it every day to maintain your blood sugar levels .
massive technological advance : took an incredibly deadly disease , made it solvable .
adherence rates . how many people are taking their insulin every day ?
about on average , a typical person is taking it 75 percent of the time .
as a result , 25,000 people a year go blind , hundreds of thousands lose limbs , every year , for something that 's solvable .
here i have a bunch of other examples , all suffer from the last mile problem .
it 's not just medicine .
here 's another example from technology : agriculture . we think there 's a food problem , so we create new seeds .
we think there 's an income problem , so we create new ways of farming that increase income .
well , look at some old ways , some ways that we 'd already cracked .
intercropping . intercropping really increases income .
sometimes in rice we found incredible increases in yield when you mix different varieties of rice side by side .
some people are doing that , many are not . what 's going on ?
this is the last mile .
the last mile is , everywhere , problematic .
alright , what 's the problem ?
the problem is this little three-pound machine that 's behind your eyes and between your ears .
this machine is really strange , and one of the consequences is that people are weird .
they do lots of inconsistent things .
-lrb- applause -rrb- they do lots of inconsistent things .
and the inconsistencies create , fundamentally , this last mile problem .
see , when we were dealing with our biology , bacteria , the genes , the things inside here , the blood ?
that 's complex , but it 's manageable .
when we 're dealing with people like this ?
the mind is more complex .
that 's not as manageable , and that 's what we 're struggling with .
let me go back to diarrhea for a second .
here 's a question that was asked in the national sample survey , which is a survey asked of many indian women : " your child has diarrhea .
should you increase , maintain or decrease the number of fluids ? "
just so you do n't embarrass yourselves , i 'll give you the right answer : it 's increase .
now , diarrhea 's interesting because it 's been around for thousands of years , ever since humankind really lived side by side enough to have really polluted water .
one roman strategy that was very interesting was that - and it really gave them a comparative advantage - they made sure their soldiers did n't drink even remotely muddied waters .
because if some of your troops get diarrhea they 're not that effective on the battlefield .
so , if you think of roman comparative advantage part of it was the breast shields , the breastplates , but part of it was drinking the right water .
so , here are these women . they 've seen their parents have struggled with diarrhea , they 've struggled with diarrhea , they 've seen lots of deaths . how do they answer this question ?
in india , 35 to 50 percent say " reduce . "
think about what that means for a second .
thirty-five to 50 percent of women forget oral rehydration therapy , they are increasing - they are actually making their child more likely to die through their actions .
how is that possible ?
well , one possibility - i think that 's how most people respond to this - is to say , " that 's just stupid . "
i do n't think that 's stupid .
i think there is something very profoundly right in what these women are doing .
and that is , you do n't put water into a leaky bucket .
so , think of the mental model that goes behind reducing the intake .
just does n't make sense .
now , the model is intuitively right .
it just does n't happen to be right about the world .
but it makes a whole lot of sense at some deep level .
and that , to me , is the fundamental challenge of the last mile .
this first challenge is what i refer to as the persuasion challenge .
convincing people to do something - take oral rehydration therapy , intercrop , whatever it might be - is not an act of information : " let 's give them the data , and when they have data they 'll do the right thing . "
it 's more complex than that .
and if you want to understand how it 's more complex let me start with something kind of interesting .
i 'm going to give you a little math problem , and i want you to just yell out the answer as fast as possible .
a bat and a ball together cost $ 1.10 .
the bat costs a dollar more than the ball .
how much does the ball cost ? quick .
so , somebody out there says , " five . "
a lot of you said , " ten . "
let 's think about 10 for a second .
if the ball costs 10 , the bat costs ...
this is easy , $ 1.10 .
yeah . so , together they would cost $ 1.20 .
so , here you all are , ostensibly educated people .
most of you look smart .
the combination of that produces something that is actually , you got this thing wrong .
how is that possible ? let 's go to something else .
i know algebra can be complicated .
so , let 's dial this back . that 's what ? fifth grade ? fourth grade ?
let 's go back to kindergarten . ok ?
there 's a great show on american television that you have to watch .
it 's called " are you smarter than a fifth grader ? "
i think we 've learned the answer to that here .
let 's move to kindergarten . let 's see if we can beat five-year-olds .
here 's what i 'm going to do : i 'm going to put objects on the screen .
i just want you to name the color of the object .
that 's all it is . ok ?
i want you to do it fast , and say it out loud with me , and do it quickly . i 'll make the first one easy for you .
ready ? black .
now the next ones i want you to do quickly and say it out loud .
ready ? go .
audience : red . green .
yellow . blue . red .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- sendhil mullainathan : that 's pretty good .
almost out of kindergarten .
what is all this telling us ?
you see , what 's going on here , and in the bat and ball problem is that you have some intuitive ways of interacting with the world , some models that you use to understand the world .
these models , like the leaky bucket , work well in most situations .
i suspect most of you - i hope that 's true for the rest of you - actually do pretty well with addition and subtraction in the real world .
i found a problem , a specific problem that actually found an error with that .
diarrhea , and many last mile problems , are like that .
they are situations where the mental model does n't match the reality .
same thing here : you had an intuitive response to this that was very quick .
you read " blue " and you wanted to say " blue , " even though you knew your task was red .
now , i do this stuff because it 's fun .
but it 's more profound than fun .
i 'll give you a good example of how it actually effects persuasion .
bmw is a pretty safe car .
and they are trying to figure out , " safety is good .
i want to advertise safety . how am i going to advertise safety ? "
" i could give people numbers . we do well on crash tests . "
but the truth of the matter is , you look at that car , it does n't look like a volvo , and it does n't look like a hummer .
so , what i want you to think about for a few minutes is : how would you convey safety of the bmw ? okay ?
so now , while you 're thinking about that let 's move to a second task .
the second task is fuel efficiency . okay ?
here 's another puzzle for all of you .
one person walks into a car lot , and they 're thinking about buying this toyota yaris .
they are saying , " this is 35 miles per gallon . i 'm going to do the environmentally right thing , i 'm going to buy the prius , 50 miles per gallon . "
another person walks into the lot , and they 're about to buy a hummer , nine miles per gallon , fully loaded , luxury .
and they say , " you know what ? do i need turbo ? do i need this heavyweight car ? "
i 'm going to do something good for the environment .
i 'm going to take off some of that weight , and i 'm going to buy a hummer that 's 11 miles per gallon . "
which one of these people has done more for the environment ?
see , you have a mental model .
fifty versus 35 , that 's a big move . eleven versus nine ? come on .
turns out , go home and do the math , the nine to 11 is a bigger change . that person has saved more gallons .
why ? because we do n't care about miles per gallon , we care about gallons per mile .
think about how powerful that is if you 're trying to encourage fuel efficiency .
miles per gallon is the way we present things .
if we want to encourage change of behavior , gallons per mile would have far more effectiveness .
researchers have found these type of anomalies .
okay , back to bmw . what should they do ?
the problem bmw faces is this car looks safe .
this car , which is my mini , does n't look that safe .
here was bmw 's brilliant insight , which they embodied into an ad campaign .
they showed a bmw driving down the street .
there 's a truck on the right . boxes fall out of the truck .
the car swerves to avoid it , and therefore does n't get into an accident .
bwm realizes safety , in people 's minds , has two components .
you can be safe because when you 're hit , you survive , or you can be safe because you avoid accidents .
remarkably successful campaign , but notice the power of it .
it harnesses something you already believe .
now , even if i persuaded you to do something , it 's hard sometimes to actually get action as a result .
you all probably intended to wake up , i do n't know , 6:30 , 7 a.m.
this is a battle we all fight every day , along with trying to get to the gym .
now , this is an example of that battle , and makes us realize intentions do n't always translate into action , and so one of the fundamental challenges is how we would actually do that . ok ?
so , let me now talk about the last mile problem .
so far , i 've been pretty negative .
i 've been trying to show you the oddities of human behavior .
and i think maybe i 'm being too negative .
maybe it 's the diarrhea .
maybe the last mile problem really should be thought of as the last mile opportunity .
let 's go back to diabetes .
this is a typical insulin injection .
now , carrying this thing around is complicated .
you gotta carry the bottle , you gotta carry the syringe .
it 's also painful .
now , you may think to yourself , " well , if my eyes depended on it , you know , i would obviously use it every day . "
but the pain , the discomfort , you know , paying attention , remembering to put it in your purse these are the day-to-day of life , and they do pose problems .
here is an innovation , a design innovation .
this is a pen , it 's called an insulin pen , preloaded .
the needle is particularly sharp .
you just gotta carry this thing around .
it 's much easier to use , much less painful .
anywhere between five and 10 percent increase in adherence , just as a result of this .
that 's what i 'm talking about as a last mile opportunity .
you see , we tend to think the problem is solved when we solve the technology problem .
but the human innovation , the human problem still remains , and that 's a great frontier that we have left .
this is n't about the biology of people ; this is now about the brains , the psychology of people , and innovation needs to continue all the way through the last mile .
here 's another example of this .
this is from a company called positive energy .
this is about energy efficiency .
we 're spending a lot of time on fuel cells right now .
what this company does is they send a letter to households that say , " here 's your energy use , here 's your neighbor 's energy use : you 're doing well . " smiley face .
" you 're doing worse . " frown .
and what they find is just this letter , nothing else , has a two to three percent reduction in electricity use .
in terms of carbon offsets , reduced electricity , 900 million dollars per year .
why ? because for free , this is n't a new technology , this is a letter - we 're getting a big bang in behavior .
so , how do we tackle the last mile ?
i think this tells us there is an opportunity .
and i think to tackle it , we need to combine psychology , marketing , art , we 've seen that .
but you know what we need to combine it with ?
we need to combine this with the scientific method .
see what 's really puzzling and frustrating about the last mile , to me , is that the first 999 miles are all about science .
no one would say , " hey , i think this medicine works , go ahead and use it . "
we have testing , we go to the lab , we try it again , we have refinement .
but you know what we do on the last mile ?
" oh , this is a good idea . people will like this . let 's put it out there . "
the amount of resources we put in are disparate .
we put billions of dollars into fuel-efficient technologies .
how much are we putting into energy behavior change in a credible , systematic , testing way ?
now , i think that we 're on the verge of something big .
we 're on the verge of a whole new social science .
it 's a social science that recognizes - much like science recognizes the complexity of the body , biology recognizes the complexity of the body - we 'll recognize the complexity of the human mind .
the careful testing , retesting , design , are going to open up vistas of understanding , complexities , difficult things .
and those vistas will both create new science , and fundamental change in the world as we see it , in the next hundred years .
all right . thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : sendhil , thank you so much .
so , this whole area is so fascinating .
i mean , it sometimes feels , listening to behavioral economists that they are kind of putting into place academically , what great marketers have sort of intuitively known for a long time .
how much is your field talking to great marketers about their insights into human psychology ?
because they 've seen it on the ground .
sendhil mullainathan : yeah , we spend a lot of time talking to marketers , and i think 60 percent of it is exactly what you say , there are insights to be gleaned there .
forty percent of it is about what marketing is .
marketing is selling an ad to a firm .
so , in some sense , a lot of marketing is about convincing a ceo , " this is a good ad campaign . "
so , there is a little bit of slippage there .
that 's just a caveat . that 's different from actually having an effective ad campaign .
and one of the new movements in marketing is : how do we actually measure effectiveness ? are we effective ?
ca : how you take your insights here and actually get them integrated into working business models on the ground , in indian villages , for example ?
sm : so , the scientific method i alluded to is pretty important .
we work closely with companies that have operational capacity , or nonprofits that have operational capacity .
and then we say , " well , you want to get this behavior change .
let 's come up with a few ideas , test them , see which is working , go back , synthesize , and try to come up with a thing that works , " and then we 're able to scale with partners .
it 's kind of the model that has worked in other contexts .
if you have biological problems we try and fix it , see if it works , and then work the scale .
ca : alright sendhil , thanks so much for coming to ted . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- by the end of this year , there 'll be nearly a billion people on this planet that actively use social networking sites .
the one thing that all of them have in common is that they 're going to die .
while that might be a somewhat morbid thought , i think it has some really profound implications that are worth exploring .
what first got me thinking about this was a blog post authored earlier this year by derek k. miller , who was a science and technology journalist who died of cancer .
and what miller did was have his family and friends write a post that went out shortly after he died .
here 's what he wrote in starting that out .
he said , " here it is . i 'm dead , and this is my last post to my blog .
in advance , i asked that once my body finally shut down from the punishments of my cancer , then my family and friends publish this prepared message i wrote - the first part of the process of turning this from an active website to an archive . "
now , while as a journalist , miller 's archive may have been better written and more carefully curated than most , the fact of the matter is that all of us today are creating an archive that 's something completely different than anything that 's been created by any previous generation .
consider a few stats for a moment .
right now there are 48 hours of video being uploaded to youtube every single minute .
there are 200 million tweets being posted every day .
and the average facebook user is creating 90 pieces of content each month .
so when you think about your parents or your grandparents , at best they may have created some photos or home videos , or a diary that lives in a box somewhere .
but today we 're all creating this incredibly rich digital archive that 's going to live in the cloud indefinitely , years after we 're gone .
and i think that 's going to create some incredibly intriguing opportunities for technologists .
now to be clear , i 'm a journalist and not a technologist , so what i 'd like to do briefly is paint a picture of what the present and the future are going to look like .
now we 're already seeing some services that are designed to let us decide what happens to our online profile and our social media accounts after we die .
one of them actually , fittingly enough , found me when i checked into a deli at a restaurant in new york on foursquare .
-lrb- recording -rrb- adam ostrow : hello .
death : adam ?
ao : yeah .
death : death can catch you anywhere , anytime , even at the organic .
ao : who is this ?
death : go to ifidie.net before it 's too late .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- adam ostrow : kind of creepy , right ?
so what that service does , quite simply , is let you create a message or a video that can be posted to facebook after you die .
another service right now is called 1,000 memories .
and what this lets you do is create an online tribute to your loved ones , complete with photos and videos and stories that they can post after you die .
but what i think comes next is far more interesting .
now a lot of you are probably familiar with deb roy who , back in march , demonstrated how he was able to analyze more than 90,000 hours of home video .
i think as machines ' ability to understand human language and process vast amounts of data continues to improve , it 's going to become possible to analyze an entire life 's worth of content - the tweets , the photos , the videos , the blog posts - that we 're producing in such massive numbers .
and i think as that happens , it 's going to become possible for our digital personas to continue to interact in the real world long after we 're gone thanks to the vastness of the amount of content we 're creating and technology 's ability to make sense of it all .
now we 're already starting to see some experiments here .
one service called my next tweet analyzes your entire twitter stream , everything you 've posted onto twitter , to make some predictions as to what you might say next .
well right now , as you can see , the results can be somewhat comical .
you can imagine what something like this might look like five , 10 or 20 years from now as our technical capabilities improve .
taking it a step further , mit 's media lab is working on robots that can interact more like humans .
but what if those robots were able to interact based on the unique characteristics of a specific person based on the hundreds of thousands of pieces of content that person produces in their lifetime ?
finally , think back to this famous scene from election night 2008 back in the united states , where cnn beamed a live hologram of hip hop artist will.i.am into their studio for an interview with anderson cooper .
what if we were able to use that same type of technology to beam a representation of our loved ones into our living rooms - interacting in a very lifelike way based on all the content they created while they were alive ?
i think that 's going to become completely possible as the amount of data we 're producing and technology 's ability to understand it both expand exponentially .
now in closing , i think what we all need to be thinking about is if we want that to become our reality - and if so , what it means for a definition of life and everything that comes after it .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so how would you run a whole country without oil ?
that 's the question that sort of hit me in the middle of a davos afternoon about four years ago .
it never left my brain .
and i started playing with it more like a puzzle .
the original thought i had : this must be ethanol .
so i went out and researched ethanol , and found out you need the amazon in your backyard in every country .
about six months later i figured out it must be hydrogen , until some scientist told me the unfortunate truth , which is , you actually use more clean electrons than the ones you get inside a car , if you use hydrogen .
so that is not going to be the path to go .
and then sort of through a process of wandering around , i got to the thought that actually if you could convert an entire country to electric cars , in a way that is convenient and affordable , you could get to a solution .
now i started this from a point of view that it has to be something that scales en masse .
not how do you build one car , but how do you scale this so that it can become something that is used by 99 percent of the population ?
the thought that came to mind is that it needs to be as good as any car that you would have today .
so one , it has to be more convenient than a car .
and two , it has be more affordable than today 's cars .
affordable is not a 40,000 dollar sedan , right ?
alright ? that 's not something that we can finance or buy today .
and convenient is not something that you drive for an hour and charge for eight .
so we 're bound with the laws of physics and the laws of economics .
and so the thought that i started with was how do you do this , still within the boundary of the science we know today - no time for science fair , no time for playing around with things or waiting for the magic battery to show up .
how do you do it within the economics that we have today ?
how do you do it from the power of the consumer up ?
and not from the power of an edict down .
on a random visit to tesla on some afternoon , i actually found out that the answer comes from separating between the car ownership and the battery ownership .
in a sense if you want to think about it this is the classic " batteries not included . "
now if you separate between the two , you could actually answer the need for a convenient car by creating a network , by creating a network before the cars show up .
the network has two components in them .
first component is you charge the car whenever you stop - ends up that cars are these strange beasts that drive for about two hours and park for about 22 hours .
if you drive a car in the morning and drive it back in the afternoon the ratio of charge to drive is about a minute for a minute .
and so the first thought that came to mind is , everywhere we park we have electric power .
now it sounds crazy . but in some places around the world , like scandinavia , you already have that .
if you park your car and did n't plug in the heater , when you come back you do n't have a car . it just does n't work .
now that last mile , last foot , in a sense , is the first step of the infrastructure .
the second step of the infrastructure needs to take care of the range extension .
see we 're bound by today 's technology on batteries , which is about 120 miles if you want to stay within reasonable space and weight limitations .
120 miles is a good enough range for a lot of people .
but you never want to get stuck .
so what we added is a second element to our network , which is a battery swap system .
you drive . you take your depleted battery out .
a full battery comes on . and you drive on .
you do n't do it as a human being . you do it as a machine .
it looks like a car wash . you come into your car wash .
and a plate comes up , holds your battery , takes it out , puts it back in , and within two minutes you 're back on the road and you can go again .
if you had charge spots everywhere , and you had battery swap stations everywhere , how often would you do it ? and it ends up that you 'd do swapping less times than you stop at a gas station .
as a matter of fact , we added to the contract .
we said that if you stop to swap your battery more than 50 times a year we start paying you money because it 's an inconvenience .
then we looked at the question of the affordability .
we looked at the question , what happens when the battery is disconnected from the car .
what is the cost of that battery ?
everybody tells us batteries are so expensive .
what we found out , when you move from molecules to electrons , something interesting happens .
we can go back to the original economics of the car and look at it again .
the battery is not the gas tank , in a sense .
remember in your car you have a gas tank .
you have the crude oil .
and you have refining and delivery of that crude oil as what we call petrol or gasoline .
the battery in this sense , is the crude oil .
we have a battery bay . it costs the same hundred dollars as the gas tank .
but the crude oil is replaced with a battery .
just it does n't burn . it consumes itself step after step after step .
it has 2,000 life cycles these days .
and so it 's sort of a mini well .
we were asked in the past when we bought an electric car to pay for the entire well , for the life of the car .
nobody wants to buy a mini well when they buy a car .
in a sense what we 've done is we 've created a new consumable .
you , today , buy gasoline miles .
and we created electric miles .
and the price of electric miles ends up being a very interesting number .
today 2010 , in volume , when we come to market , it is eight cents a mile .
those of you who have a hard time calculating what that means - in the average consumer environment we 're in in the u.s.
20 miles per gallon that 's a buck 50 , a buck 60 a gallon .
that 's cheaper than today 's gasoline , even in the u.s.
in europe where taxes are in place , that 's the equivalent to a minus 60 dollar barrel .
but e-miles follow moore 's law .
they go from eight cents a mile in 2010 , to four cents a mile in 2015 , to two cents a mile by 2020 .
why ? because batteries life cycle improve - a bit of improvement on energy density , which reduces the price .
and these prices are actually with clean electrons .
we do not use any electrons that come from coal .
so in a sense this is an absolute zero-carbon , zero-fossil fuel electric mile at two cents a mile by 2020 .
now even if we get to 40 miles per gallon by 2020 , which is our desire .
imagine only 40 miles per gallon cars would be on the road .
that is an 80 cent gallon .
an 80 cent gallon means , if the entire pacific would convert to crude oil , and we 'd let any oil company bring it out and refine it , they still ca n't compete with two cents a mile .
that 's a new economic factor , which is fascinating to most people .
now this would have been a wonderful paper .
that 's how i solved it in my head . it was a white paper i handed out to governments .
and some governments told me that it 's fascinating that the younger generation actually thinks about these things .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- until i got to the true young global leader , shimon peres , president of israel , and he ran a beautiful manipulation on me .
first he let me go to the prime minister of the country , who told me , if you can find the money you need for this network , 200 million dollars , and if you can find a car company that will build that car in mass volume , in two million cars - that 's what we needed in israel - i 'll give you country to invest the 200 million into .
peres thought that was a great idea .
so we went out , and we looked at all the car companies .
we sent letters to all the car companies .
three of them never showed up . one of them asked us if we would stay with hybrids and they would give us a discount .
but one of them carlos ghosn , ceo of renault and nissan , when asked about hybrids said something very fascinating .
he said hybrids are like mermaids .
when you want a fish you get a woman and when you need a woman you get a fish .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and ghosn came up and said , " i have the car , mr. peres ; i will build you the cars . "
and actually true to form , renault has put a billion and a half dollars in building nine different types of cars that fit this kind of model that will come into the market in mass volume - mass volume being the first year , 100 thousand cars .
it 's the first mass-volume electric car , zero-emission electric car in the market .
i was running , as chris said , to be the ceo of a large software company called sap and then peres said , " well wo n't you run this project ? "
and i said , " i 'm ready for ceo " and he said , " oh no no no no no . you 've got to explain to me , what is more important than saving your country and saving the world , that you would go and do ? "
and i had to quit and come and do this thing called a better place .
we then decided to scale it up .
we went to other countries . as i said we went to denmark .
and denmark set this beautiful policy ; it 's called the iq test .
it 's inversely proportional to taxes .
they put 180 percent tax on gasoline cars and zero tax on zero-emission cars .
so if you want to buy a gasoline car in denmark , it costs you about 60,000 euros .
if you buy our car it 's about 20,000 euros .
if you fail the iq test they ask you to leave the country .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we then were sort of coined as the guys who run only in small islands .
i know most people do n't think of israel as a small island , but israel is an island - it 's a transportation island .
if your car is driving outside israel it 's been stolen .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- if you 're thinking about it in terms of islands , we decided to go to the biggest island that we could find , and that was australia . the third country we announced was australia .
it 's got three centers - in brisbane , in melbourne , in sydney - and one freeway , one electric freeway that connects them .
the next island was not too hard to find , and that was hawaii .
we decided to come into the u.s.
and pick the two best places - the one where you did n't need any range extension .
hawaii you can drive around the island on one battery .
and if you really have a long day you can switch , and keep on driving around the island .
the second one was the san francisco bay area where gavin newsom created a beautiful policy across all the mayors .
he decided that he 's going to take over the state , unofficially , and then officially , and then created this beautiful region one policy .
in the san francisco bay area not only do you have the highest concentration of priuses , but you also have the perfect range extender .
it 's called the other car .
as we stared scaling it up we looked at what is the problem to come up to the u.s. ?
why is this a big issue ?
and the most fascinating thing we 've learned is that , when you have small problems on the individual level , like the price of gasoline to drive every morning .
you do n't notice it , but when the aggregate comes up you 're dead . alright ?
so the price of oil , much like lots of other curves that we 've seen , goes along a depletion curve .
the foundation of this curve is that we keep losing the wells that are close to the ground .
and we keep getting wells that are farther away from the ground .
it becomes more and more and more expensive to dig them out .
you think , well it 's been up , it 's been down , its been up , it 's going to keep on going up and down .
here is the problem : at 147 dollars a barrel , which we were in six months ago , the u.s. spent a ton of money to get oil .
then we lost our economy and we went back down to 47 - sometimes it 's 40 , sometimes it 's 50 .
now we 're running a stimulus package .
it 's called the trillion-dollar stimulus package .
we 're going to revive the economy . hopefully it happens between now and 2015 , somewhere in that space .
what happens when the economy recovers ?
by 2015 we would have had at least 250 million new cars even at the pace we 're going at right now .
that 's another 30 percent demand on oil .
that is another 25 million barrels a day .
that 's all the u.s. usage today .
in other words at some point when we 've recovered we go up to the peak .
and then we do the opec stimulus package also known as 200 dollars a barrel .
we take our money and we give it away .
you know what happens at that point ?
we go back down . it 's going to go up and down .
and the downs are going to be much longer and the ups are going to be much shorter .
and that 's the difference between problems that are additive , like co2 , which we go slowly up and then we tip , and problems that are depletive , in which we lose what we have , which oscillate , and they oscillate until we lose everything we 've got .
now we actually looked at what the answer would be .
right ? remember in the campaign : one million hybrid cars by 2015 .
that is 0.5 percent of the u.s. oil consumption .
that is oh point oh well percent of the rest of the world .
that wo n't do much difference .
we looked at an mit study : ten million electric cars on the global roads .
ten million out of 500 million we will add between now and then .
that is the most pessimistic number you can have .
it 's also the most optimistic number because it means we will scale this industry from 100 thousand cars is 2011 , to 10 million cars by 2016 - 100 x growth in less than five years .
you have to remember that the world today is bringing in so many cars .
we have 10 million cars by region .
that 's an enormous amount of cars .
china is adding those cars - india , russia , brazil .
we have all these regions .
europe has solved it . they just put a tax on gasoline .
they 'll be the first in line to get off because their prices are high .
china solves it by an edict . at some point they 'll just declare that no gasoline car will come into a city , and that will be it .
the indians do n't even understand why we think of it as a problem because most people in india fill two or three gallons every time .
for them to get a battery that goes 120 miles is an extension on range , not a reduction in range .
we 're the only ones who do n't have the price set right .
we do n't have the industry set right .
we do n't have any incentive to go and resolve it across the u.s.
now where is the car industry on that ?
very interesting . the car industry has been focused just on themselves .
they basically looked at it and said , " car 1.0 we 'll solve everything within the car itself . "
no infrastructure , no problem .
we forgot about the entire chain around us .
all this stuff that happens around .
we are looking at the emergence of a car 2.0 - a whole new market , a whole new business model .
the business model in which the money that is actually coming in , to drive the car - the minutes , the miles if you want , that you are all familiar with - subsidize the price of the car , just like cellphones . you 'll pay for the miles .
and some of it will go back to the car maker .
some of it will go back to your own pocket .
but our cars are actually going to be cheaper than gasoline cars .
you 're looking at a world where cars are matched with windmills .
in denmark , we will drive all the cars in denmark from windmills , not from oil .
in israel , we 've asked to put a solar farm in the south of israel .
and people said , " oh that 's a very very large space that you 're asking for . "
and we said , " what if we had proven that in the same space we found oil for the country for the next hundred years ? "
and they said , " we tried . there is n't any . "
we said , " no no , but what if we prove it ? "
and they said , " well you can dig . " and we decided to dig up , instead of digging down .
these are perfect matches to one another .
now all you need is about 10 percent of the electricity generated .
think of it as a project that spans over about 10 years .
that 's one percent a year .
now when we 're looking at solving big problems , we need to start thinking in two numbers .
and those are not 20 percent by 2020 .
the two numbers are zero - as in zero footprint or zero oil - and scale it infinity .
and when we go to cop15 at the end of this year we ca n't stop thinking of padding co2 .
we have to start thinking about giving kickers to countries that are willing to go to this kind of scale .
one car emits four tons .
and actually 700 and change million cars today emit 2.8 billion tons of co2 .
that 's , in the additive , about 25 percent of our problem .
cars and trucks add up to about 25 percent of the world 's co2 emissions .
we have to come and attack this problem with a focus , with an effort that actually says , we 're going to go to zero before the world ends .
i actually shared that with some legislators here in the u.s.
i shared it with a gentleman called bobby kennedy jr . , who is one of my idols .
i told him one of the reasons that his uncle was remembered is because he said we 're going to send a man to the moon , and we 'll do it by the end of the decade .
we did n't say we 're going to send a man 20 percent to the moon .
and there will be about a 20 percent chance we 'll recover him .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- he actually shared with me another story , which is from about 200 years ago .
200 years ago , in parliament , in great britain , there was a long argument over economy versus morality .
25 percent - just like 25 percent emissions today comes from cars - 25 percent of their energy for the entire industrial world in the u.k.
came from a source of energy that was immoral : human slaves .
and there was an argument . should we stop using slaves ?
and what would it do to our economy ?
and people said , " well we need to take time to do it .
let 's not do it immediately . maybe we free the kids and keep the slaves .
and after a month of arguments they decided to stop slavery , and the industrial revolution started within less than one year .
and the u.k. had 100 years of economic growth .
we have to make the right moral decision .
we have to make it immediately .
we need to have presidential leadership just like we had in israel that said we will end oil .
and we need to do it not within 20 years or 50 years , but within this presidential term because if we do n't , we will lose our economy , right after we 'd lost our morality .
thank you all very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so if someone asked you for the three words that would sum up your reputation , what would you say ?
how would people describe your judgment , your knowledge , your behaviors , in different situations ?
today i 'd like to explore with you why the answer to this question will become profoundly important in an age where reputation will be your most valuable asset .
i 'd like to start by introducing you to someone whose life has been changed by a marketplace fueled by reputation .
sebastian sandys has been a bed and breakfast host on airbnb since 2008 .
i caught up with him recently , where , over the course of several cups of tea , he told me how hosting guests from all over the world has enriched his life .
more than 50 people have come to stay in the 18th-century watchhouse he lives in with his cat , squeak .
now , i mention squeak because sebastian 's first guest happened to see a rather large mouse run across the kitchen , and she promised that she would refrain from leaving a bad review on one condition : he got a cat .
and so sebastian bought squeak to protect his reputation .
now , as many of you know , airbnb is a peer-to-peer marketplace that matches people who have space to rent with people who are looking for a place to stay in over 192 countries .
the places being rented out are things that you might expect , like spare rooms and holiday homes , but part of the magic is the unique places that you can now access : treehouses , teepees , airplane hangars , igloos .
if you do n't like the hotel , there 's a castle down the road that you can rent for 5,000 dollars a night .
it 's a fantastic example of how technology is creating a market for things that never had a marketplace before .
now let me show you these heat maps of paris to see how insanely fast it 's growing .
this image here is from 2008 .
the pink dots represent host properties .
even four years ago , letting strangers stay in your home seemed like a crazy idea .
now the same view in 2010 .
and now , 2012 .
there is an airbnb host on almost every main street in paris .
now , what 's happening here is people are realizing the power of technology to unlock the idling capacity and value of all kinds of assets , from skills to spaces to material possessions , in ways and on a scale never possible before .
it 's an economy and culture called collaborative consumption , and , through it , people like sebastian are becoming micro-entrepreneurs .
they 're empowered to make money and save money from their existing assets .
but the real magic and the secret source behind collaborative consumption marketplaces like airbnb is n't the inventory or the money .
it 's using the power of technology to build trust between strangers .
this side of airbnb really hit home to sebastian last summer during the london riots .
he woke up around 9 , and he checked his email and he saw a bunch of messages all asking him if he was okay .
former guests from around the world had seen that the riots were happening just down the street , and wanted to check if he needed anything .
sebastian actually said to me , he said , " thirteen former guests contacted me before my own mother rang . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- now , this little anecdote gets to the heart of why i 'm really passionate about collaborative consumption , and why , after i finished my book , i decided i 'm going to try and spread this into a global movement .
because at its core , it 's about empowerment .
it 's about empowering people to make meaningful connections , connections that are enabling us to rediscover a humanness that we 've lost somewhere along the way , by engaging in marketplaces like airbnb , like kickstarter , like etsy , that are built on personal relationships versus empty transactions .
now the irony is that these ideas are actually taking us back to old market principles and collaborative behaviors that are hard-wired in all of us .
they 're just being reinvented in ways that are relevant for the facebook age .
we 're literally beginning to realize that we have wired our world to share , swap , rent , barter or trade just about anything . we 're sharing our cars on whipcar , our bikes on spinlister , our offices on loosecubes , our gardens on landshare . we 're lending and borrowing money from strangers on zopa and lending club .
we are trading lessons on everything from sushi-making to coding on skillshare , and we 're even sharing our pets on dogvacay .
now welcome to the wonderful world of collaborative consumption that 's enabling us to match wants with haves in more democratic ways .
now , collaborative consumption is creating the start of a transformation in the way we think about supply and demand , but it 's also a part of a massive value shift underway , where instead of consuming to keep up with the joneses , people are consuming to get to know the joneses .
but the key reason why it 's taking off now so fast is because every new advancement of technology increases the efficiency and the social glue of trust to make sharing easier and easier .
now , i 've looked at thousands of these marketplaces , and trust and efficiency are always the critical ingredients .
let me give you an example .
meet 46-year-old chris mok , who has , i bet , the best job title here of superrabbit .
now , four years ago , chris lost his job , unfortunately , as an art buyer at macy 's , and like so many people , he struggled to find a new one during the recession .
and then he happened to stumble across a post about taskrabbit .
now , the story behind taskrabbit starts like so many great stories with a very cute dog by the name of kobe .
now what happened was , in february 2008 , leah and her husband were waiting for a cab to take them out for dinner , when kobe came trotting up to them and he was salivating with saliva .
they realized they 'd run out of dog food .
kevin had to cancel the cab and trudge out in the snow .
now , later that evening , the two self-confessed tech geeks starting talking about how cool it would be if some kind of ebay for errands existed .
six months later , leah quit her job , and taskrabbit was born .
at the time , she did n't realize that she was actually hitting on a bigger idea she later called service networking .
it 's essentially about how we use our online relationships to get things done in the real world .
now the way taskrabbit works is , people outsource the tasks that they want doing , name the price they 're willing to pay , and then vetted rabbits yes , there 's actually a four-stage , rigorous interview process that 's designed to find the people that would make great personal assistants and weed out the dodgy rabbits .
now , there 's over 4,000 rabbits across the united states and 5,000 more on the waiting list .
now the tasks being posted are things that you might expect , like help with household chores or doing some supermarket runs .
i actually learned the other day that 12 and a half thousand loads of laundry have been cleaned and folded through taskrabbit .
but i love that the number one task posted , over a hundred times a day , is something that many of us have felt the pain of doing : yes , assembling ikea furniture . -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- it 's brilliant . now , we may laugh , but chris here is actually making up to 5,000 dollars a month running errands around his life .
and 70 percent of this new labor force were previously unemployed or underemployed .
i think taskrabbit and other examples of collaborative consumption are like lemonade stands on steroids . they 're just brilliant .
now , when you think about it , it 's amazing , right , that over the past 20 years , we 've evolved from trusting people online to share information to trusting to handing over our credit card information , and now we 're entering the third trust wave : connecting trustworthy strangers to create all kinds of people-powered marketplaces .
i actually came across this fascinating study by the pew center this week that revealed that an active facebook user is three times as likely as a non-internet user to believe that most people are trustworthy .
virtual trust will transform the way we trust one another face to face .
now , with all of my optimism , and i am an optimist , comes a healthy dose of caution , or rather , an urgent need to address some pressing , complex questions .
how to ensure our digital identities reflect our real world identities ? do we want them to be the same ?
how do we mimic the way trust is built face-to-face online ?
how do we stop people who 've behaved badly in one community doing so under a different guise ?
in a similar way that companies often use some kind of credit rating to decide whether to give you a mobile plan , or the rate of a mortgage , marketplaces that depend on transactions between relative strangers need some kind of device to let you know that sebastian and chris are good eggs , and that device is reputation .
reputation is the measurement of how much a community trusts you .
let 's just take a look at chris .
you can see that over 200 people have given him an average rating over 4.99 out of 5 .
there are over 20 pages of reviews of his work describing him as super-friendly and fast , and he 's reached level 25 , the highest level , making him a superrabbit .
now - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - i love that word , superrabbit .
and interestingly , what chris has noted is that as his reputation has gone up , so has his chances of winning a bid and how much he can charge .
in other words , for superrabbits , reputation has a real world value .
now , i know what you might be thinking .
well , this is n't anything new . just think of power sellers on ebay or star ratings on amazon .
the difference today is that , with every trade we make , comment we leave , person we flag , badge we earn , we leave a reputation trail of how well we can and ca n't be trusted .
and it 's not just the breadth but the volume of reputation data out there that is staggering .
just consider this : five million nights have been booked on airbnb in the past six months alone .
30 million rides have been shared on carpooling.com.
this year , two billion dollars worth of loans will go through peer-to-peer lending platforms .
this adds up to millions of pieces of reputation data on how well we behave or misbehave .
now , capturing and correlating the trails of information that we leave in different places is a massive challenge , but one we 're being asked to figure out .
what the likes of sebastian are starting to rightfully ask is , should n't they own their reputation data ?
should n't the reputation that he 's personally invested on building on airbnb mean that it should travel with him from one community to another ?
what i mean by this is , say he started selling second-hand books on amazon . why should he have to start from scratch ?
it 's a bit like when i moved from new york to sydney .
it was ridiculous . i could n't get a mobile phone plan because my credit history did n't travel with me .
i was essentially a ghost in the system .
now i 'm not suggesting that the next stage of the reputation economy is about adding up multiple ratings into some kind of empty score .
people 's lives are too complex , and who wants to do that ?
i also want to be clear that this is n't about adding up tweets and likes and friends in a clout-like fashion .
those guys are measuring influence , not behaviors that indicate our trustworthiness .
but the most important thing that we have to keep in mind is that reputation is largely contextual .
just because sebastian is a wonderful host does not mean that he can assemble ikea furniture .
the big challenge is figuring out what data makes sense to pull , because the future 's going to be driven by a smart aggregation of reputation , not a single algorithm .
it 's only a matter of time before we 'll be able to perform a facebook- or google-like search and see a complete picture of someone 's behaviors in different contexts over time .
i envision a realtime stream of who has trusted you , when , where and why , your reliability on taskrabbit , your cleanliness as a guest on airbnb , the knowledge that you display on quora or -lsb- unclear -rsb- , they 'll all live together in one place , and this will live in some kind of reputation dashboard that will paint a picture of your reputation capital .
now this is a concept that i 'm currently researching and writing my next book on , and currently define as the worth of your reputation , your intentions , capabilities and values across communities and marketplaces .
this is n't some far-off frontier .
there are actually a wave of startups like connect.me and legit and trustcloud that are figuring out how you can aggregate , monitor and use your online reputation .
now , i realize that this concept may sound a little big brother to some of you , and yes , there are some enormous transparency and privacy issues to solve , but ultimately , if we can collect our personal reputation , we can actually control it more , and extract the immense value that will flow from it .
also , more so than our credit history , we can actually shape our reputation .
just think of sebastian and how he bought the cat to influence his .
now privacy issues aside , the other really interesting issue i 'm looking at is how do we empower digital ghosts , people -lsb- who -rsb- for whatever reason , are not active online , but are some of the most trustworthy people in the world ?
how do we take their contributions to their jobs , their communities and their families , and convert that value into reputation capital ?
ultimately , when we get it right , reputation capital could create a massive positive disruption in who has power , trust and influence .
a three-digit score , your traditional credit history , that only 30 percent of us actually know what it is , will no longer be the determining factor in how much things cost , what we can access , and , in many instances , limit what we can do in the world .
indeed , reputation is a currency that i believe will become more powerful than our credit history in the 21st century .
reputation will be the currency that says that you can trust me .
now the interesting thing is , reputation is the socioeconomic lubricant that makes collaborative consumption work and scale , but the sources it will be generated from , and its applications , are far bigger than this space alone .
let me give you one example from the world of recruiting , where reputation data will make the résumé seem like an archaic relic of the past .
four years ago , tech bloggers and entrepreneurs joel spolsky and jeff atwood , decided to start something called stack overflow .
now , stack overflow is basically a platform where experienced programmers can ask other good programmers highly detailed technical questions on things like tiny pixels and chrome extensions .
this site receives five and a half thousand questions a day , and 80 percent of these receive accurate answers .
now users earn reputation in a whole range of ways , but it 's basically by convincing their peers they know what they 're talking about .
now a few months after this site launched , the founders heard about something interesting , and it actually did n't surprise them .
what they heard was that users were putting their reputation scores on the top of their résumés , and that recruiters were searching the platform to find people with unique talents .
now thousands of programmers today are finding better jobs this way , because stack overflow and the reputation dashboards provide a priceless window into how someone really behaves , and what their peers think of them .
but the bigger principle of what 's happening behind stack overflow , i think , is incredibly exciting .
people are starting to realize that the reputation they generate in one place has value beyond the environments from which it was built .
you know , it 's very interesting .
when you talk to super-users , whether that 's superrabbits or super-people on stack overflow , or uberhosts , they all talk about how having a high reputation unlocks a sense of their own power .
on stack overflow , it creates a level playing field , enabling the people with the real talent to rise to the top .
on airbnb , the people often become more important than the spaces . on taskrabbit , it gives people control of their economic activity .
now at the end of my tea with sebastian , he told me how , on a bad , rainy day , when he has n't had a customer in his bookstore , he thinks of all the people around the world who 've said something wonderful about him , and what that says about him as a person .
he 's turning 50 this year , and he 's convinced that the rich tapestry of reputation he 's built on airbnb will lead him to doing something interesting with the rest of his life .
you know , there are only a few windows in history where the opportunity exists to reinvent part of how our socioeconomic system works .
we 're living through one of those moments .
i believe that we are at the start of a collaborative revolution that will be as significant as the industrial revolution .
in the 20th century , the invention of traditional credit transformed our consumer system , and in many ways controlled who had access to what .
in the 21st century , new trust networks , and the reputation capital they generate , will reinvent the way we think about wealth , markets , power and personal identity , in ways we ca n't yet even imagine .
thank you very much . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- you know , i 've talked about some of these projects before - about the human genome and what that might mean , and discovering new sets of genes .
we 're actually starting at a new point : we 've been digitizing biology , and now we 're trying to go from that digital code into a new phase of biology with designing and synthesizing life .
so , we 've always been trying to ask big questions .
" what is life ? " is something that i think many biologists have been trying to understand at various levels .
we 've tried various approaches , paring it down to minimal components .
we 've been digitizing it now for almost 20 years ; when we sequenced the human genome , it was going from the analog world of biology into the digital world of the computer .
now we 're trying to ask , " can we regenerate life or can we create new life out of this digital universe ? "
this is the map of a small organism , mycoplasma genitalium , that has the smallest genome for a species that can self-replicate in the laboratory , and we 've been trying to just see if we can come up with an even smaller genome .
we 're able to knock out on the order of 100 genes out of the 500 or so that are here .
when we look at its metabolic map , it 's relatively simple compared to ours - trust me , this is simple - but when we look at all the genes that we can knock out one at a time , it 's very unlikely that this would yield a living cell .
so we decided the only way forward was to actually synthesize this chromosome so we could vary the components to ask some of these most fundamental questions .
and so we started down the road of : can we synthesize a chromosome ?
can chemistry permit making these really large molecules where we 've never been before ?
and if we do , can we boot up a chromosome ?
a chromosome , by the way , is just a piece of inert chemical material .
so , our pace of digitizing life has been increasing at an exponential pace .
our ability to write the genetic code has been moving pretty slowly but has been increasing , and our latest point would put it on , now , an exponential curve .
we started this over 15 years ago .
it took several stages , in fact , starting with a bioethical review before we did the first experiments .
but it turns out synthesizing dna is very difficult .
there are tens of thousands of machines around the world that make small pieces of dna - 30 to 50 letters in length - and it 's a degenerate process , so the longer you make the piece , the more errors there are .
so we had to create a new method for putting these little pieces together and correct all the errors .
and this was our first attempt , starting with the digital information of the genome of phi x174 .
it 's a small virus that kills bacteria .
we designed the pieces , went through our error correction and had a dna molecule of about 5,000 letters .
the exciting phase came when we took this piece of inert chemical and put it in the bacteria , and the bacteria started to read this genetic code , made the viral particles .
the viral particles then were released from the cells and came back and killed the e. coli .
i was talking to the oil industry recently and i said they clearly understood that model .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- they laughed more than you guys are . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and so , we think this is a situation where the software can actually build its own hardware in a biological system .
but we wanted to go much larger : we wanted to build the entire bacterial chromosome - it 's over 580,000 letters of genetic code - so we thought we 'd build them in cassettes the size of the viruses so we could actually vary the cassettes to understand what the actual components of a living cell are .
design is critical , and if you 're starting with digital information in the computer , that digital information has to be really accurate .
when we first sequenced this genome in 1995 , the standard of accuracy was one error per 10,000 base pairs .
we actually found , on resequencing it , 30 errors ; had we used that original sequence , it never would have been able to be booted up .
part of the design is designing pieces that are 50 letters long that have to overlap with all the other 50-letter pieces to build smaller subunits we have to design so they can go together .
we design unique elements into this .
you may have read that we put watermarks in .
think of this : we have a four-letter genetic code - a , c , g and t.
triplets of those letters code for roughly 20 amino acids , such that there 's a single letter designation for each of the amino acids .
so we can use the genetic code to write out words , sentences , thoughts .
initially , all we did was autograph it .
some people were disappointed there was not poetry .
we designed these pieces so we can just chew back with enzymes ; there are enzymes that repair them and put them together .
and we started making pieces , starting with pieces that were 5,000 to 7,000 letters , put those together to make 24,000-letter pieces , then put sets of those going up to 72,000 .
at each stage , we grew up these pieces in abundance so we could sequence them because we 're trying to create a process that 's extremely robust that you can see in a minute .
we 're trying to get to the point of automation .
so , this looks like a basketball playoff .
when we get into these really large pieces over 100,000 base pairs , they wo n't any longer grow readily in e. coli - it exhausts all the modern tools of molecular biology - and so we turned to other mechanisms .
we knew there 's a mechanism called homologous recombination that biology uses to repair dna that can put pieces together .
here 's an example of it : there 's an organism called deinococcus radiodurans that can take three millions rads of radiation .
you can see in the top panel , its chromosome just gets blown apart .
twelve to 24 hours later , it put it back together exactly as it was before .
we have thousands of organisms that can do this .
these organisms can be totally desiccated ; they can live in a vacuum .
i am absolutely certain that life can exist in outer space , move around , find a new aqueous environment .
in fact , nasa has shown a lot of this is out there .
here 's an actual micrograph of the molecule we built using these processes , actually just using yeast mechanisms with the right design of the pieces we put them in ; yeast puts them together automatically .
this is not an electron micrograph ; this is just a regular photomicrograph .
it 's such a large molecule we can see it with a light microscope .
these are pictures over about a six-second period .
so , this is the publication we had just a short while ago .
this is over 580,000 letters of genetic code ; it 's the largest molecule ever made by humans of a defined structure .
it 's over 300 million molecular weight .
if we printed it out at a 10 font with no spacing , it takes 142 pages just to print this genetic code .
well , how do we boot up a chromosome ? how do we activate this ?
obviously , with a virus it 's pretty simple ; it 's much more complicated dealing with bacteria .
it 's also simpler when you go into eukaryotes like ourselves : you can just pop out the nucleus and pop in another one , and that 's what you 've all heard about with cloning .
with bacteria and archaea , the chromosome is integrated into the cell , but we recently showed that we can do a complete transplant of a chromosome from one cell to another and activate it .
we purified a chromosome from one microbial species - roughly , these two are as distant as human and mice - we added a few extra genes so we could select for this chromosome , we digested it with enzymes to kill all the proteins , and it was pretty stunning when we put this in the cell - and you 'll appreciate our very sophisticated graphics here .
the new chromosome went into the cell .
in fact , we thought this might be as far as it went , but we tried to design the process a little bit further .
this is a major mechanism of evolution right here .
we find all kinds of species that have taken up a second chromosome or a third one from somewhere , adding thousands of new traits in a second to that species .
so , people who think of evolution as just one gene changing at a time have missed much of biology .
there are enzymes called restriction enzymes that actually digest dna .
the chromosome that was in the cell does n't have one ; the chromosome we put in does .
it got expressed and it recognized the other chromosome as foreign material , chewed it up , and so we ended up just with a cell with the new chromosome .
it turned blue because of the genes we put in it .
and with a very short period of time , all the characteristics of one species were lost and it converted totally into the new species based on the new software that we put in the cell .
all the proteins changed , the membranes changed ; when we read the genetic code , it 's exactly what we had transferred in .
so , this may sound like genomic alchemy , but we can , by moving the software of dna around , change things quite dramatically .
now i 've argued , this is not genesis ; this is building on three and a half billion years of evolution .
and i 've argued that we 're about to perhaps create a new version of the cambrian explosion , where there 's massive new speciation based on this digital design .
why do this ?
i think this is pretty obvious in terms of some of the needs .
we 're about to go from six and a half to nine billion people over the next 40 years .
to put it in context for myself : i was born in 1946 .
there are now three people on the planet for every one of us that existed in 1946 ; within 40 years , there 'll be four .
we have trouble feeding , providing fresh , clean water , medicines , fuel for the six and a half billion .
it 's going to be a stretch to do it for nine .
we use over five billion tons of coal , 30 billion-plus barrels of oil - that 's a hundred million barrels a day .
when we try to think of biological processes or any process to replace that , it 's going to be a huge challenge .
then of course , there 's all that co2 from this material that ends up in the atmosphere .
we now , from our discovery around the world , have a database with about 20 million genes , and i like to think of these as the design components of the future .
the electronics industry only had a dozen or so components , and look at the diversity that came out of that .
we 're limited here primarily by a biological reality and our imagination .
we now have techniques , because of these rapid methods of synthesis , to do what we 're calling combinatorial genomics .
we have the ability now to build a large robot that can make a million chromosomes a day .
when you think of processing these 20 million different genes or trying to optimize processes to produce octane or to produce pharmaceuticals , new vaccines , we can just with a small team , do more molecular biology than the last 20 years of all science .
and it 's just standard selection : we can select for viability , chemical or fuel production , vaccine production , etc .
this is a screen snapshot of some true design software that we 're working on to actually be able to sit down and design species in the computer .
you know , we do n't know necessarily what it 'll look like : we know exactly what their genetic code looks like .
we 're focusing on now fourth-generation fuels .
you 've seen recently , corn to ethanol is just a bad experiment .
we have second- and third-generation fuels that will be coming out relatively soon that are sugar , to much higher-value fuels like octane or different types of butanol .
but the only way we think that biology can have a major impact without further increasing the cost of food and limiting its availability is if we start with co2 as its feedstock , and so we 're working with designing cells to go down this road .
and we think we 'll have the first fourth-generation fuels in about 18 months .
sunlight and co2 is one method ...
-lrb- applause -rrb- but in our discovery around the world , we have all kinds of other methods .
this is an organism we described in 1996 .
it lives in the deep ocean , about a mile and a half deep , almost at boiling-water temperatures .
it takes co2 to methane using molecular hydrogen as its energy source .
we 're looking to see if we can take captured co2 , which can easily be piped to sites , convert that co2 back into fuel to drive this process .
so , in a short period of time , we think that we might be able to increase what the basic question is of " what is life ? "
we truly , you know , have modest goals of replacing the whole petrol-chemical industry - -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- yeah . if you ca n't do that at ted , where can you ? - -lrb- laughter -rrb- become a major source of energy ...
but also , we 're now working on using these same tools to come up with instant sets of vaccines .
you 've seen this year with flu ; we 're always a year behind and a dollar short when it comes to the right vaccine .
i think that can be changed by building combinatorial vaccines in advance .
here 's what the future may begin to look like with changing , now , the evolutionary tree , speeding up evolution with synthetic bacteria , archaea and , eventually , eukaryotes .
we 're a ways away from improving people : our goal is just to make sure that we have a chance to survive long enough to maybe do that . thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'll start with my favorite muse , emily dickinson , who said that wonder is not knowledge , neither is it ignorance .
it 's something which is suspended between what we believe we can be , and a tradition we may have forgotten .
and i think , when i listen to these incredible people here , i 've been so inspired - so many incredible ideas , so many visions .
and yet , when i look at the environment outside , you see how resistant architecture is to change .
you see how resistant it is to those very ideas .
we can think them out . we can create incredible things .
and yet , at the end , it 's so hard to change a wall .
we applaud the well-mannered box .
but to create a space that never existed is what interests me ; to create something that has never been , a space that we have never entered except in our minds and our spirits .
and i think that 's really what architecture is based on .
architecture is not based on concrete and steel and the elements of the soil .
it 's based on wonder .
and that wonder is really what has created the greatest cities , the greatest spaces that we have had .
and i think that is indeed what architecture is . it is a story .
by the way , it is a story that is told through its hard materials .
but it is a story of effort and struggle against improbabilities .
if you think of the great buildings , of the cathedrals , of the temples , of the pyramids , of pagodas , of cities in india and beyond , you think of how incredible this is that that was realized not by some abstract idea , but by people .
so , anything that has been made can be unmade .
anything that has been made can be made better .
there it is : the things that i really believe are of important architecture .
these are the dimensions that i like to work with .
it 's something very personal .
it 's not , perhaps , the dimensions appreciated by art critics or architecture critics or city planners .
but i think these are the necessary oxygen for us to live in buildings , to live in cities , to connect ourselves in a social space .
and i therefore believe that optimism is what drives architecture forward .
it 's the only profession where you have to believe in the future .
you can be a general , a politician , an economist who is depressed , a musician in a minor key , a painter in dark colors .
but architecture is that complete ecstasy that the future can be better .
and it is that belief that i think drives society .
and today we have a kind of evangelical pessimism all around us .
and yet it is in times like this that i think architecture can thrive with big ideas , ideas that are not small . think of the great cities .
think of the empire state building , the rockefeller center .
they were built in times that were not really the best of times in a certain way .
and yet that energy and power of architecture has driven an entire social and political space that these buildings occupy .
so again , i am a believer in the expressive .
i have never been a fan of the neutral .
i do n't like neutrality in life , in anything .
i think expression .
and it 's like espresso coffee , you know , you take the essence of the coffee .
that 's what expression is .
it 's been missing in much of the architecture , because we think architecture is the realm of the neutered , the realm of the kind of a state that has no opinion , that has no value .
and yet , i believe it is the expression - expression of the city , expression of our own space - that gives meaning to architecture .
and , of course , expressive spaces are not mute .
expressive spaces are not spaces that simply confirm what we already know .
expressive spaces may disturb us .
and i think that 's also part of life .
life is not just an anesthetic to make us smile , but to reach out across the abyss of history , to places we have never been , and would have perhaps been , had we not been so lucky .
so again , radical versus conservative .
radical , what does it mean ? it 's something which is rooted , and something which is rooted deep in a tradition .
and i think that is what architecture is , it 's radical .
it 's not just a conservation in formaldehyde of dead forms .
it is actually a living connection to the cosmic event that we are part of , and a story that is certainly ongoing .
it 's not something that has a good ending or a bad ending .
it 's actually a story in which our acts themselves are pushing the story in a particular way .
so again i am a believer in the radical architecture .
you know the soviet architecture of that building is the conservation .
it 's like the old las vegas used to be .
it 's about conserving emotions , conserving the traditions that have obstructed the mind in moving forward and of course what is radical is to confront them .
and i think our architecture is a confrontation with our own senses .
therefore i believe it should not be cool .
there is a lot of appreciation for the kind of cool architecture .
i 've always been an opponent of it . i think emotion is needed .
life without emotion would really not be life .
even the mind is emotional .
there is no reason which does not take a position in the ethical sphere , in the philosophical mystery of what we are .
so i think emotion is a dimension that is important to introduce into city space , into city life .
and of course , we are all about the struggle of emotions .
and i think that is what makes the world a wondrous place .
and of course , the confrontation of the cool , the unemotional with emotion , is a conversation that i think cities themselves have fostered .
i think that is the progress of cities .
it 's not only the forms of cities , but the fact that they incarnate emotions , not just of those who build them , but of those who live there as well .
inexplicable versus understood . you know , too often we want to understand everything .
but architecture is not the language of words .
it 's a language . but it is not a language that can be reduced to a series of programmatic notes that we can verbally write .
too many buildings that you see outside that are so banal tell you a story , but the story is very short , which says , " we have no story to tell you . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so the important thing actually , is to introduce the actual architectural dimensions , which might be totally inexplicable in words , because they operate in proportions , in materials , in light .
they connect themselves into various sources , into a kind of complex vector matrix that is n't really frontal but is really embedded in the lives , and in the history of a city , and of a people .
so again , the notion that a building should just be explicit i think is a false notion , which has reduced architecture into banality .
hand versus the computer .
of course , what would we be without computers ?
our whole practice depends on computing .
but the computer should not just be the glove of the hand ; the hand should really be the driver of the computing power .
because i believe that the hand in all its primitive , in all its physiological obscurity , has a source , though the source is unknown , though we do n't have to be mystical about it .
we realize that the hand has been given us by forces that are beyond our own autonomy .
and i think when i draw drawings which may imitate the computer , but are not computer drawings - drawings that can come from sources that are completely not known , not normal , not seen , yet the hand - and that 's what i really , to all of you who are working - how can we make the computer respond to our hand rather than the hand responding to the computer .
i think that 's part of what the complexity of architecture is .
because certainly we have gotten used to the propaganda that the simple is the good . but i do n't believe it .
listening to all of you , the complexity of thought , the complexity of layers of meaning is overwhelming .
and i think we should n't shy away in architecture , you know , brain surgery , atomic theory , genetics , economics are complex complex fields .
there is no reason that architecture should shy away and present this illusory world of the simple .
it is complex . space is complex .
space is something that folds out of itself into completely new worlds .
and as wondrous as it is , it can not be reduced to a kind of simplification that we have often come to be admired .
and yet , our lives are complex .
our emotions are complex .
our intellectual desires are complex .
so i do believe that architecture as i see it needs to mirror that complexity in every single space that we have , in every intimacy that we possess .
of course that means that architecture is political .
the political is not an enemy of architecture .
the politeama is the city . it 's all of us together .
and i 've always believed that the act of architecture , even a private house , when somebody else will see it , is a political act , because it will be visible to others .
and we live in a world which is connecting us more and more .
so again , the evasion of that sphere , which has been so endemic to that sort of pure architecture , the autonomous architecture that is just an abstract object has never appealed to me .
and i do believe that this interaction with the history , with history that is often very difficult , to grapple with it , to create a position that is beyond our normal expectations and to create a critique .
because architecture is also the asking of questions .
it 's not only the giving of answers .
it 's also , just like life , the asking of questions .
therefore it is important that it be real .
you know we can simulate almost anything .
but the one thing that can be ever simulated is the human heart , the human soul .
and architecture is so closely intertwined with it because we are born somewhere and we die somewhere .
so the reality of architecture is visceral . it 's not intellectual .
it 's not something that comes to us from books and theories .
it 's the real that we touch - the door , the window , the threshold , the bed - such prosaic objects . and yet , i try , in every building , to take that virtual world , which is so enigmatic and so rich , and create something in the real world .
create a space for an office , a space of sustainability that really works between that virtuality and yet can be realized as something real .
unexpected versus habitual .
what is a habit ? it 's just a shackle for ourselves .
it 's a self-induced poison .
so the unexpected is always unexpected .
you know , it 's true , the cathedrals , as unexpected , will always be unexpected .
you know frank gehry 's buildings , they will continue to be unexpected in the future .
so not the habitual architecture that instills in us the false sort of stability , but an architecture that is full of tension , an architecture that goes beyond itself to reach a human soul and a human heart , and that breaks out of the shackles of habits .
and of course habits are enforced by architecture .
when we see the same kind of architecture we become immured in that world of those angles , of those lights , of those materials .
we think the world really looks like our buildings .
and yet our buildings are pretty much limited by the techniques and wonders that have been part of them .
so again , the unexpected which is also the raw .
and i often think of the raw and the refined .
what is raw ? the raw , i would say is the naked experience , untouched by luxury , untouched by expensive materials , untouched by the kind of refinement that we associate with high culture .
so the rawness , i think , in space , the fact that sustainability can actually , in the future translate into a raw space , a space that is n't decorated , a space that is not mannered in any source , but a space that might be cool in terms of its temperature , might be refractive to our desires .
a space that does n't always follow us like a dog that has been trained to follow us , but moves ahead into directions of demonstrating other possibilities , other experiences , that have never been part of the vocabulary of architecture .
and of course that juxtaposition is of great interest to me because it creates a kind of a spark of new energy .
and so i do like something which is pointed , not blunt , something which is focused on reality , something that has the power , through its leverage , to transform even a very small space .
so architecture maybe is not so big , like science , but through its focal point it can leverage in an archimedian way what we think the world is really about .
and often it takes just a building to change our experience of what could be done , what has been done , how the world has remained both in between stability and instability .
and of course buildings have their shapes .
those shapes are difficult to change .
and yet , i do believe that in every social space , in every public space , there is a desire to communicate more than just that blunt thought , that blunt technique , but something that pinpoints , and can point in various directions forward , backward , sideways and around .
so that is indeed what is memory .
so i believe that my main interest is to memory .
without memory we would be amnesiacs .
we would not know which way we were going , and why we are going where we 're going .
so i 've been never interested in the forgettable reuse , rehashing of the same things over and over again , which , of course , get accolades of critics .
critics like the performance to be repeated again and again the same way .
but i rather play something completely unheard of , and even with flaws , than repeat the same thing over and over which has been hollowed by its meaninglessness .
so again , memory is the city , memory is the world .
without the memory there would be no story to tell .
there would be nowhere to turn .
the memorable , i think , is really our world , what we think the world is .
and it 's not only our memory , but those who remember us , which means that architecture is not mute .
it 's an art of communication .
it tells a story . the story can reach into obscure desires .
it can reach into sources that are not explicitly available .
it can reach into millennia that have been buried , and return them in a just and unexpected equity .
so again , i think the notion that the best architecture is silent has never appealed to me .
silence maybe is good for a cemetery but not for a city .
cities should be full of vibrations , full of sound , full of music .
and that indeed is the architectural mission that i believe is important , is to create spaces that are vibrant , that are pluralistic , that can transform the most prosaic activities , and raise them to a completely different expectation .
create a shopping center , a swimming place that is more like a museum than like entertainment .
and these are our dreams .
and of course risk . i think architecture should be risky .
you know it costs a lot of money and so on , but yes , it should not play it safe .
it should not play it safe , because if it plays it safe it 's not moving us in a direction that we want to be .
and i think , of course , risk is what underlies the world .
world without risk would not be worth living .
so yes , i do believe that the risk we take in every building .
risks to create spaces that have never been cantilevered to that extent .
risks of spaces that have never been so dizzying , as they should be , for a pioneering city .
risks that really move architecture even with all its flaws , into a space which is much better that the ever again repeated hollowness of a ready-made thing .
and of course that is finally what i believe architecture to be .
it 's about space . it 's not about fashion .
it 's not about decoration .
it 's about creating with minimal means something which can not be repeated , can not be simulated in any other sphere .
and there of course is the space that we need to breathe , is the space we need to dream .
these are the spaces that are not just luxurious spaces for some of us , but are important for everybody in this world .
so again , it 's not about the changing fashions , changing theories .
it 's about carving out a space for trees .
it 's carving out a space where nature can enter the domestic world of a city .
a space where something which has never seen a light of day can enter into the inner workings of a density .
and i think that is really the nature of architecture .
now i am a believer in democracy .
i do n't like beautiful buildings built for totalitarian regimes .
where people can not speak , can not vote , can not do anything .
we too often admire those buildings . we think they are beautiful .
and yet when i think of the poverty of society which does n't give freedom to its people , i do n't admire those buildings .
so democracy , as difficult as it is , i believe in it .
and of course , at ground zero what else ?
it 's such a complex project .
it 's emotional . there is so many interests .
it 's political . there is so many parties to this project .
there is so many interests . there 's money . there 's political power .
there are emotions of the victims .
and yet , in all its messiness , in all its difficulties , i would not have liked somebody to say , " this is the tabula rasa , mister architect - do whatever you want . "
i think nothing good will come out of that .
i think architecture is about consensus .
and it is about the dirty word " compromise . " compromise is not bad .
compromise , if it 's artistic , if it is able to cope with its strategies - and there is my first sketch and the last rendering - it 's not that far away .
and yet , compromise , consensus , that is what i believe in .
and ground zero , despite all its difficulties , it 's moving forward .
it 's difficult . 2011 , 2013 . freedom tower , the memorial .
and that is where i end .
i was inspired when i came here as an immigrant on a ship like millions of others , looking at america from that point of view .
this is america . this is liberty .
this is what we dream about . its individuality , demonstrated in the skyline . it 's resilience .
and finally , it 's the freedom that america represents , not just to me , as an immigrant , but to everyone in the world . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : i 've got a question .
so have you come to peace with the process that happened at ground zero and the loss of the original , incredible design that you came up with ?
daniel libeskind : look . we have to cure ourselves of the notion that we are authoritarian , that we can determine everything that happens .
we have to rely on others , and shape the process in the best way possible .
i came from the bronx . i was taught not to be a loser , not to be somebody who just gives up in a fight .
you have to fight for what you believe . you do n't always win everything you want to win . but you can steer the process .
and i believe that what will be built at ground zero will be meaningful , will be inspiring , will tell other generations of the sacrifices , of the meaning of this event .
not just for new york , but for the world .
chris anderson : thank you so much , daniel libeskind .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i am a cultural omnivore , one whose daily commute is made possible by attachment to an ipod - an ipod that contains wagner and mozart , pop diva christina aguilera , country singer josh turner , gangsta rap artist kirk franklin , concerti , symphonies and more and more .
i 'm a voracious reader , a reader who deals with ian mcewan down to stephanie meyer .
i have read the " twilight " tetralogy .
and one who lives for my home theater , a home theater where i devour dvds , video-on-demand and a lot of television .
for me , " law and order : svu , " tine fey and " 30 rock " and " judge judy " - " the people are real , the cases are real , the rulings are final . "
now , i 'm convinced a lot of you probably share my passions , especially my passion for judge judy , and you 'd fight anybody who attempted to take her away from us , but i 'm a little less convinced that you share the central passion of my life , a passion for the live professional performing arts , performing arts that represent the orchestral repertoire , yes , but jazz as well , modern dance , opera , theater and more and more and more .
you know , frankly it 's a sector that many of us who work in the field worry is being endangered and possibly dismantled by technology .
while we initially heralded the internet as the fantastic new marketing device that was going to solve all our problems , we now realize that the internet is , if anything , too effective in that regard .
depending on who you read , an arts organization or an artist , who tries to attract the attention of a potential single ticket buyer , now competes with between three and 5,000 different marketing messages a typical citizen sees every single day .
we now know in fact that technology is our biggest competitor for leisure time .
five years ago , gen-x 'ers spent 20.7 hours online and tv , the majority on tv .
gen-y 'ers spent even more - 23.8 hours , the majority online .
and now , a typical university entering student arrives at college already having spent 20,000 hours online and an additional 10,000 hours playing video games - a stark reminder that we operate in a cultural context where video games now outsell music and movie recordings combined .
moreover , we 're afraid that technology has altered our very assumptions of cultural consumption .
thanks to the internet , we believe we can get anything we want whenever we want it , delivered to our own doorstep .
we can shop at three in the morning or eight at night , ordering jeans tailor-made for our unique body-types .
expectations of personalization and customization that the live performing arts - which have set curtain times , set venues , attendant inconveniences of travel , parking and the like - simply can not meet .
and we 're all acutely aware : what 's it going to mean in the future when we ask someone to pay a hundred dollars for a symphony , opera or ballet ticket , when that cultural consumer is used to downloading on the internet 24 hours a day for 99 cents a song or for free ?
these are enormous questions for those of us who work in this terrain .
but as particular as they feel to us , we know we 're not alone .
all of us are engaged in a seismic , fundamental realignment of culture and communications , a realignment that is shaking and decimating the newspaper industry , the magazine industry , the book and publishing industry and more .
saddled in the performing arts as we are , by antiquated union agreements that inhibit and often prohibit mechanical reproduction and streaming , locked into large facilities that were designed to ossify the ideal relationship between artist and audience most appropriate to the 19th century and locked into a business model dependent on high ticket revenues , where we charge exorbitant prices .
many of us shudder in the wake of the collapse of tower records and ask ourselves , " are we next ? "
everyone i talk to in performing arts resonates to the words of adrienne rich , who , in " dreams of a common language , " wrote , " we are out in a country that has no language , no laws .
whatever we do together is pure invention .
the maps they gave us are out of date by years . "
and for those of you who love the arts , are n't you glad you invited me here to brighten your day ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- now , rather than saying that we 're on the brink of our own annihilation , i prefer to believe that we are engaged in a fundamental reformation , a reformation like the religious reformation of the 16th century .
the arts reformation , like the religious reformation , is spurred in part by technology , with indeed , the printing press really leading the charge on the religious reformation .
both reformations were predicated on fractious discussion , internal self-doubt and massive realignment of antiquated business models .
and at heart , both reformations , i think were asking the questions : who 's entitled to practice ?
how are they entitled to practice ?
and indeed , do we need anyone to intermediate for us in order to have an experience with a spiritual divine ?
chris anderson , someone i trust you all know , editor-in-chief of wired magazine and author of " the long tail , " really was the first - for me - to nail a lot of this .
he wrote a long time ago , you know , thanks to the invention of the internet , web technology , mini-cams and more , the means of artistic production have been democratized for the first time in all of human history .
in the 1930s , if any of you wanted to make a movie , you had to work for warner brothers or rko because who could afford a movie set and lighting equipment and editing equipment and scoring and more ?
and now who in this room does n't know a 14 year-old hard at work on her second , third , or fourth movie ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- similarly , the means of artistic distribution have been democratized for the first time in human history .
again , in the ' 30s , warner brothers , rko did that for you .
now , go to youtube , facebook ; you have worldwide distribution without leaving the privacy of your own bedroom .
this double impact is occasioning a massive redefinition of the cultural market , a time when anyone is a potential author .
frankly , what we 're seeing now in this environment is a massive time , when the entire world is changing as we move from a time when audience numbers are plummeting .
but the number of arts participants , people who write poetry , who sing songs , who perform in church choirs , is exploding beyond our wildest imaginations .
this group , others have called the " pro ams , " amateur artists doing work at a professional level .
you see them on youtube , in dance competitions , film festivals and more .
they are radically expanding our notions of the potential of an aesthetic vocabulary , while they are challenging and undermining the cultural autonomy of our traditional institutions .
ultimately , we now live in a world defined not by consumption , but by participation .
but i want to be clear , just as the religious reformation did not spell the end to the formal church or to the priesthood ; i believe that our artistic institutions will continue to have importance .
they currently are the best opportunities for artists to have lives of economic dignity - not opulence - of dignity .
and they are the places where artists who deserve and want to work at a certain scale of resources will find a home .
but to view them as synonymous is , by far , too short-sighted .
and indeed , while we 've tended to polarize the amateur from the professional , the single most exciting development in the last five to 10 years has been the rise of the professional hybrid artist , the professional artist who works , not primarily in the concert hall or on the stage ; but most frequently around women 's rights , or human rights , or on global warming issues or aids relief for more - not out of economic necessity , but out of a deep , organic conviction that the work that she or he , is called to do can not be accomplished in the traditional hermetic arts environment .
today 's dance world is not defined solely by the royal winnipeg ballet or the national ballet of canada , but by liz lerman 's dance exchange - a multi-generational , professional dance company , whose dancers range in age from 18 to 82 , and who work with genomic scientists to embody the dna strand and with nuclear physicists at cern .
today 's professional theater community is defined , not only the shaw and stratford festivals , but by the cornerstone theater of los angeles - a collective of artists that after 9/11 , brought together 10 different religious communities - the bahia , the catholic , the muslim , the jewish , even the native american and the gay and lesbian communities of faith , helping them create their own individual plays and one massive play , where they explored the differences in their faith and found commonality as an important first step toward cross-community healing .
today 's performers , like rhodessa jones , work in women 's prisons , helping women prisoners articulate the pain of incarceration , while today 's playwrights and directors work with youth gangs to find alternate channels to violence and more and more and more .
and indeed , i think , rather than being annihilated , the performing arts are posed on the brink of a time when we will be more important than we have ever been .
you know , we 've said for a long time , we are critical to the health of the economic communities in your town .
and absolutely - i hope you know that every dollar spent on a performing arts ticket in a community generates five to seven additional dollars for the local economy , dollars spent in restaurants or on parking , at the fabric stores where we buy fabric for costumes , the piano tuner who tunes the instruments and more .
but the arts are going to be more important to economies as we go forward , especially in industries we ca n't even imagine yet , just as they have been central to the ipod and the computer game industries , which few , if any of us come have foreseen 10 to 15 years ago .
business leadership will depend more and more on emotional intelligence , the ability to listen deeply , to have empathy , to articulate change , to motivate others - the very capacities that the arts cultivate with every encounter .
especially now , as we all must confront the fallacy of a market-only orientation , uninformed by social conscience ; we must seize and celebrate the power of the arts to shape our individual and national characters , and especially characters of the young people , who all too often , are subjected to bombardment of sensation , rather than digested experience .
ultimately , especially now in this world , where we live in a context of regressive and onerous immigration laws , in reality tv that thrives on humiliation , and in a context of analysis , where the thing we hear most repeatedly , day-in , day-out in the united states , in every train station , every bus station , every plane station is , " ladies and gentlemen , please report any suspicious behavior or suspicious individuals to the authorities nearest you , " when all of these ways we are encouraged to view our fellow human being with hostility and fear and contempt and suspicion .
the arts , whatever they do , whenever they call us together , invite us to look at our fellow human being with generosity and curiosity .
god knows , if we ever needed that capacity in human history , we need it now .
you know , we 're bound together , not , i think by technology , entertainment and design , but by common cause .
we work to promote healthy vibrant societies , to ameliorate human suffering , to promote a more thoughtful , substantive , empathic world order .
i salute all of you as activists in that quest and urge you to embrace and hold dear the arts in your work , whatever your purpose may be .
i promise you the hand of the doris duke charitable foundation is stretched out in friendship for now and years to come .
and i thank you for your kindness and your patience in listening to me this afternoon .
thank you , and godspeed .
the first half of the 20th century was an absolute disaster in human affairs , a cataclysm .
we had the first world war , the great depression , the second world war and the rise of the communist nations .
and each one of these forces split the world , tore the world apart , divided the world .
and they threw up walls - political walls , trade walls , transportation walls , communication walls , iron curtains - which divided peoples and nations .
it was only in the second half of the 20th century out of this abyss .
trade walls began to come tumbling down .
here are some data on tariffs : starting at 40 percent , coming down to less than 5 percent .
we globalized the world . and what does that mean ?
it means that we extended cooperation across national boundaries ; we made the world more cooperative .
transportation walls came tumbling down .
you know in 1950 the typical ship carried 5,000 to 10,000 tons worth of goods .
today a container ship can carry 150,000 tons ; it can be manned with a smaller crew ; and unloaded faster than ever before .
communication walls , i do n't have to tell you - the internet - have come tumbling down .
and of course the iron curtains , political walls have come tumbling down .
now all of this has been tremendous for the world .
trade has increased .
here is just a little bit of data .
in 1990 , exports from china to the united states : 15 billion dollars .
by 2007 : over 300 billion dollars .
and perhaps most remarkably , at the beginning of the 21st century , really for the first time in modern history , growth extended to almost all parts of the world .
so china , i 've already mentioned , beginning around 1978 , around the time of the death of mao , growth - ten percent a year .
year after year after year , absolutely incredible .
never before in human history have so many people been raised out of such great poverty as happened in china .
china is the world 's greatest anti-poverty program over the last three decades .
india , starting a little bit later , but in 1990 , begetting tremendous growth .
incomes at that time less than $ 1,000 per year .
and over the next 18 years have almost tripled .
growth of six percent a year . absolutely incredible .
now africa , sub-saharan africa - sub-saharan africa most resistant to growth .
and we can see the tragedy of africa in the first few bars here .
growth was negative .
people were actually getting poorer than their parents , and sometimes even poorer than their grandparents had been .
but at the end of the 20th century , the beginning of the 21st century , we saw growth in africa .
and i think , as you 'll see , there 's reasons for optimism , because i believe that the best is yet to come .
now why .
on the cutting edge today it 's new ideas which are driving growth .
and by that i mean it 's products for which the research and development costs are really high , and the manufacturing costs are low .
more than ever before it is these types of ideas which are driving growth on the cutting edge .
now ideas have this amazing property .
thomas jefferson , i think , really expressed this quite well .
he said , " he who receives an idea from me receives instruction himself , without lessening mine .
as he who lights his candle at mine receives light without darkening me . "
or to put it slightly differently : one apple feeds one man , but an idea can feed the world .
now this is not new . this is practically not new to tedsters .
this is practically the model of ted .
but what is new is that the greater function of ideas is going to drive growth even more than ever before .
this provides a reason why trade and globalization are even more important , more powerful than ever before , and are going to increase growth more than ever before .
and to explain why this is so , i have a question .
suppose that there are two diseases : one of them is rare , the other one is common , but if they are not treated they are equally severe .
if you had to choose , which would you rather have : the common disease or the rare disease ?
common , the common - i think that 's absolutely right , and why ? because there are more drugs to treat common diseases than there are to treat rare diseases .
the reason for this is incentives .
it costs about the same to produce a new drug whether that drug treats 1,000 people , 100,000 people , or a million people .
but the revenues are much greater if the drug treats a million people .
so the incentives are much larger to produce drugs which treat more people .
to put this differently : larger markets save lives .
in this case misery truly does love company .
now think about the following : if china and india were as rich as the united states is today , the market for cancer drugs would be eight times larger than it is now .
now we are not there yet , but it is happening .
as other countries become richer the demand for these pharmaceuticals is going to increase tremendously .
and that means an increase incentive to do research and development , which benefits everyone in the world .
larger markets increase the incentive to produce all kinds of ideas , whether it 's software , whether it 's a computer chip , whether it 's a new design .
for the hollywood people in the audience , this even explains why action movies have larger budgets than comedies : it 's because action movies translate easier into other languages and other cultures , so the market for those movies is larger .
people are willing to invest more , and the budgets are larger .
alright . well if larger markets increase the incentive to produce new ideas , how do we maximize that incentive ?
it 's by having one world market , by globalizing the world .
the way i like to put this is : one idea . ideas are meant to be shared , so one idea can serve one world , one market .
one idea , one world , one market .
well how else can we create new ideas ?
that 's one reason .
globalize trade .
how else can we create new ideas ?
well , more idea creators .
now idea creators , they come from all walks of life .
artists and innovators - many of the people you 've seen on this stage .
i 'm going to focus on scientists and engineers because i have some data on that , and i 'm a data person .
now , today , less than one-tenth of one percent of the world 's population are scientists and engineers .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- the united states has been an idea leader .
a large fraction of those people are in the united states .
but the u.s. is losing its idea leadership .
and for that i am very grateful .
that is a good thing .
it is fortunate that we are becoming less of an idea leader because for too long the united states , and a handful of other developed countries , have shouldered the entire burden of research and development .
but consider the following : if the world as a whole were as wealthy as the united states is now there would be more than five times as many scientists and engineers contributing to ideas which benefit everyone , which are shared by everyone .
i think of the great indian mathematician , ramanujan .
how many ramanujans are there in india today toiling in the fields , barely able to feed themselves , when they could be feeding the world ?
now we 're not there yet .
but it is going to happen in this century .
the real tragedy of the last century is this : if you think about the world 's population as a giant computer , a massively parallel processor , then the great tragedy has been that billions of our processors have been off line .
but in this century china is coming on line .
india is coming on line .
africa is coming on line .
we will see an einstein in africa in this century .
here is just some data . this is china .
1996 : less than one million new university students in china per year ; 2006 : over five million .
now think what this means .
this means we all benefit when another country gets rich .
we should not fear other countries becoming wealthy .
that is something that we should embrace - a wealthy china , a wealthy india , a wealthy africa .
we need a greater demand for ideas - those larger markets i was talking about earlier - and a greater supply of ideas for the world .
now you can see some of the reasons why i 'm optimistic .
globalization is increasing the demand for ideas , the incentive to create new ideas .
investments in education are increasing the supply of new ideas .
in fact if you look at world history you can see some reasons for optimism .
from about the beginnings of humanity to 1500 : zero economic growth , nothing .
1500 to 1800 : maybe a little bit of economic growth , but less in a century than you expect to see in a year today .
1900s : maybe one percent .
twentieth century : a little bit over two percent .
twenty-first century could easily be 3.3 , even higher percent .
even at that rate , by 2100 average gdp per capita in the world will be $ 200,000 .
that 's not u.s. gdp per capita , which will be over a million , but world gdp per capita - $ 200,000 .
that 's not that far .
we wo n't make it .
but some of our grandchildren probably will .
and i should say , i think this is a rather modest prediction .
in kurzweilian terms this is gloomy .
in kurzweilian terms i 'm like the eeyore of economic growth .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- alright what about problems ?
what about a great depression ?
well let 's take a look . let 's take a look at the great depression .
here is gdp per capita from 1900 to 1929 .
now let 's imagine that you were an economist in 1929 , trying to forecast future growth for the united states , not knowing that the economy was about to go off a cliff , not knowing that we were about to enter the greatest economic disaster certainly in the 20th century .
what would you have predicted , not knowing this ?
if you had based your prediction , your forecast on 1900 to 1929 you 'd have predicted something like this .
if you 'd been a little more optimistic - say , based upon the roaring twenties - you 'd have said this .
so what actually happened ?
we went off a cliff but we recovered .
in fact in the second half of the 20th century growth was even higher than anything you would have predicted based upon the first half of the 20th century .
so growth can wash away even what appears to be a great depression .
alright . what else ?
oil . oil . this was a big topic .
when i was writing up my notes oil was $ 140 per barrel .
so people were asking a question . they were saying , " is china drinking our milkshake ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and there is some truth to this , in the sense that we have something of a finite resource , and increased growth is going to push up demand for that .
but i think i do n't have to tell this audience that a higher price of oil is not necessarily a bad thing .
moreover , as everyone knows , look - it 's energy , not oil , which counts .
and higher oil prices mean a greater incentive to invest in energy r & d.
you can see this in the data .
as oil prices go up , energy patents go up .
the world is much better equipped to overcome an increase in the price of oil today , than ever in the past , because of what i 'm talking about .
one idea , one world , one market .
so i 'm optimistic so long as we hew to these two ideas : to keep globalizing world markets , keep extending cooperation across national boundaries , and keep investing in education .
now the united states has a particularly important role to play in this : to keep our education system globalized , to keep our education system open to students from all over the world , because our education system is the candle that other students come to light their own candles .
now remember here what jefferson said .
jefferson said , " when they come and light their candles at ours , they gain light , and we are not darkened . "
but jefferson was n't quite right , was he ?
because the truth is , when they light their candles at ours , there is twice as much light available for everyone .
so my view is : be optimistic .
spread the ideas . spread the light .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- when i was five years old i fell in love with airplanes .
now i 'm talking about the ' 30s .
in the ' 30s an airplane had two wings and a round motor , and was always flown by a guy who looked like cary grant .
he had high leather boots , jodhpurs , an old leather jacket , a wonderful helmet and those marvelous goggles - and , inevitably , a white scarf , to flow in the wind .
he 'd always walk up to his airplane in a kind of saunter , devil-may-care saunter , flick the cigarette away , grab the girl waiting here , give her a kiss .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and then mount his airplane , maybe for the last time .
of course i always wondered what would happen if he 'd kissed the airplane first .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but this was real romance to me .
everything about flying in those years , which was - you have to stop and think for a moment - was probably the most advanced technological thing going on at the time .
so as a youngster , i tried to get close to this by drawing airplanes , constantly drawing airplanes .
it 's the way i got a part of this romance .
and of course , in a way , when i say romance , i mean in part the aesthetics of that whole situation .
i think the word is the holistic experience revolving around a product .
the product was that airplane .
but it built a romance .
even the parts of the airplane had french names .
ze fuselage , ze empanage , ze nessal .
you know , from a romance language .
so that it was something that just got into your spirit .
it did mine .
and i decided i had to get closer than just drawing fantasy airplanes .
i wanted to build airplanes .
so i built model airplanes .
and i found that in doing the model airplanes the appearance drawings were not enough .
you could n't transfer those to the model itself .
if you wanted it to fly you had to learn the discipline of flying .
you had to learn about aeronautics .
you had to learn what made an airplane stay in the air .
and of course , as a model in those years , you could n't control it .
so it had to be self-righting , and stay up without crashing .
so i had to give up the approach of drawing the fantasy shapes and convert it to technical drawings - the shape of the wing , the shape of the fuselage and so on - and build an airplane over these drawings that i knew followed some of the principles of flying .
and in so doing , i could produce a model that would fly , stay in the air .
and it had , once it was in the air , some of this romance that i was in love with .
well the act of drawing airplanes led me to , when i had the opportunity to choose a course in school , led me to sign up for aeronautical engineering .
and when i was sitting in classes - in which no one asked me to draw an airplane - to my surprise .
i had to learn mathematics and mechanics and all this sort of thing .
i 'd wile away my time drawing airplanes in the class .
one day a young man looked over my shoulder , he said , " you draw very well .
you should be in the art department . "
and i said , " why ? "
and he said , " well for one thing , there are more girls there . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so my romance was temporarily shifted .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i went into art because they appreciated drawing .
studied painting ; did n't do very well at that .
went through design , some architecture .
eventually hired myself out as a designer .
and for the following 25 years , living in italy , living in america , i doled out a piece of this romance to anybody who 'd pay for it - this sense , this aesthetic feeling , for the experience revolving around a designed object .
and it exists .
any of you who rode the automobiles - was it yesterday ? - at the track , you know the romance revolving around those high performance cars .
well in 25 years i was mostly putting out pieces of this romance and not getting a lot back in because design on call does n't always connect you with a circumstance in which you can produce things of this nature .
so after 25 years i began to feel as though i was running dry .
and i quit .
and i started up a very small operation - went from 40 people to one , in an effort to rediscover my innocence .
i wanted to get back where the romance was .
and i could n't choose airplanes because they had gotten sort of unromantic at that point , even though i 'd done a lot of airplane work , on the interiors .
so i chose furniture .
and i chose chairs specifically because i knew something about them .
i 'd designed a lot of chairs , over the years for tractors and trucks and submarines - all kinds of things .
but not office chairs .
so i started doing that .
and i found that there were ways to duplicate the same approach that i used to use on the airplane .
only this time , instead of the product being shaped by the wind , it was shaped by the human body .
so the discipline was - as in the airplane you learn a lot about how to deal with the air , for a chair you have to learn a lot about how to deal with the body , and what the body needs , wants , indicates it needs .
and that 's the way , ultimately after some ups and downs , i ended up designing the chair i 'm going to show you .
i should say one more thing . when i was doing those model airplanes , i did everything .
i conceived the kind of airplane .
i basically engineered it .
i built it .
and i flew it .
and that 's the way i work now .
when i started this chair it was not a preconceived notion .
design nowadays , if you mean it , you do n't start with styling sketches .
i started with a lot of loose ideas , roughly eight or nine years ago .
and the loose ideas had something to do with what i knew happened with people in the office , at the work place - people who worked , and used task seating , a great many of them sitting in front of a computer all day long .
and i felt , the one thing they do n't need , is a chair that interferes with their main reason for sitting there .
so i took the approach that the chair should do as much for them as humanly possible or as mechanistically possible so that they did n't have to fuss with it .
so my idea was that , instead of sitting down and reaching for a lot of controls , that you would sit on the chair , and it would automatically balance your weight against the force required to recline .
now that may not mean a lot to some of you .
but you know most good chairs do recline because it 's beneficial to open up this joint between your legs and your upper body for better breathing and better flow .
so that if you sit down on my chair , whether you 're five feet tall or six foot six , it always deals with your weight and transfers the amount of force required to recline in a way that you do n't have to look for something to adjust .
i 'll tell you right up front , this is a trade off .
there are drawbacks to this .
one is : you ca n't accommodate everybody .
there are some very light people , some extremely heavy people , maybe people with a lot of bulk up top .
they begin to fall off the end of your chart .
but the compromise , i felt , was in my favor because most people do n't adjust their chairs .
they will sit in them forever .
i had somebody on the bus out to the racetrack tell me about his sister calling him .
he said she had one of the new , better chairs .
she said , " oh i love it . "
she said , " but it 's too high . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so he said , " well i 'll come over and look at it . "
he came over and looked at it .
he reached down . he pulled a lever . and the chair sank down .
she said , " oh it 's wonderful . how did you do that ? "
and he showed her the lever .
well , that 's typical of a lot of us working in chairs .
and why should you get a 20-page manual about how to run a chair ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i had one for a wristwatch once . 20 pages .
anyway , i felt that it was important that you did n't have to make an adjustment in order to get this kind of action .
the other thing i felt was that armrests had never really been properly approached from the standpoint of how much of an aid they could be to your work life .
but i felt it was too much to ask to have to adjust each individual armrest in order to get it where you wanted .
so i spent a long time .
i said i worked eight or nine years on it .
and each of these things went along sort of in parallel but incrementally were a problem of their own .
i worked a long time on figuring out how to move the arms over a much greater arc - that is up and down - and make them a lot easier , so that you did n't have to use a button .
and so after many trials , many failures , we came up with a very simple arrangement in which we could just move one arm or the other .
and they go up easily .
and stop where you want .
you can put them down , essentially out of the way .
no arms at all .
or you can pull them up where you want them .
and this was another thing that i felt , while not nearly as romantic as cary grant , nevertheless begins to grab a little bit of aesthetic operation , aesthetic performance into a product .
the next area that was of interest to me was the fact that reclining was a very important factor .
and the more you can recline , in a way , the better it is .
the more the angle between here and here opens up - and nowadays , with a screen in front of you , you do n't want to have your eye drop too far in the recline , so we keep it at more or less the same level - but you transfer weight off your tailbones .
would everybody put their hand under their bottom and feel their tailbone ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you feel that bone under there ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- just your own .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- there 's two of them , one on either side .
all the weight of your upper torso - your arms , your head - goes right down through your back , your spine , into those bones when you sit .
and that 's a lot of load .
just relieving your arms with armrests takes 20 percent of that load off .
now that , if your spine is not held in a good position , will help bend your spine the wrong way , and so on .
so to unload that great weight - if that indeed exists - you can recline .
when you recline you take away a lot of that load off your bottom end , and transfer it to your back .
at the same time , as i say , you open up this joint .
and breathability is good .
but to do that , if you have any amount of recline , it gets to the point where you need a headrest because nearly always , automatically hold your head in a vertical position , see ?
as i recline , my head says more or less vertical .
well if you 're reclined a great deal , you have to use muscle force to hold your head there .
so that 's where a headrest comes in .
now headrest is a challenge because you want it to adjust enough so that it 'll fit , you know , a tall guy and a short girl .
so here we are .
i 've got five inches of adjustment here in order to get the headrest in the right place .
but then i knew from experience and looking around in offices where there were chairs with headrests that nobody would ever bother to reach back and turn a knob and adjust the headrest to put it in position .
and you need it in a different position when you 're upright , then when you 're reclined .
so i knew that had to be solved , and had to be automatic .
so if you watch this chair as i recline , the headrest comes up to meet my neck .
ideally you want to put the head support in the cranial area , right there .
so that part of it took a long time to work out .
and there is a variety of other things : the shape of the cushions , the gel we put .
we stole the idea from bicycle seats , and put gel in the cushions and in the armrests to absorb point load - distributes the loading so you do n't get hard spots .
you cant hit your elbow on bottom .
and i did want to demonstrate the fact that the chair can accommodate people .
while you 're sitting in it you can adjust it down for the five-footer , or you can adjust it for the six-foot-six guy - all within the scope of a few simple adjustments .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i love video games .
i 'm also slightly in awe of them .
i 'm in awe of their power in terms of imagination , in terms of technology , in terms of concept .
but i think , above all , i 'm in awe at their power to motivate , to compel us , to transfix us , like really nothing else we 've ever invented has quite done before .
and i think that we can learn some pretty amazing things by looking at how we do this .
and in particular , i think we can learn things about learning .
now the video games industry is far and away the fastest growing of all modern media .
from about 10 billion in 1990 , it 's worth 50 billion dollars globally today , and it shows no sign of slowing down .
in four years ' time , it 's estimated it 'll be worth over 80 billion dollars .
that 's about three times the recorded music industry .
this is pretty stunning , but i do n't think it 's the most telling statistic of all .
the thing that really amazes me is that , today , people spend about eight billion real dollars a year buying virtual items that only exist inside video games .
this is a screenshot from the virtual game world , entropia universe .
earlier this year , a virtual asteroid in it sold for 330,000 real dollars .
and this is a titan class ship in the space game , eve online .
and this virtual object takes 200 real people about 56 days of real time to build , plus countless thousands of hours of effort before that .
and yet , many of these get built .
at the other end of the scale , the game farmville that you may well have heard of , has 70 million players around the world and most of these players are playing it almost every day .
this may all sound really quite alarming to some people , an index of something worrying or wrong in society .
but we 're here for the good news , and the good news is that i think we can explore why this very real human effort , this very intense generation of value , is occurring .
and by answering that question , i think we can take something extremely powerful away .
and i think the most interesting way to think about how all this is going on is in terms of rewards .
and specifically , it 's in terms of the very intense emotional rewards that playing games offers to people both individually and collectively .
now if we look at what 's going on in someone 's head when they are being engaged , two quite different processes are occurring .
on the one hand , there 's the wanting processes .
this is a bit like ambition and drive - i 'm going to do that . i 'm going to work hard .
on the other hand , there 's the liking processes , fun and affection and delight and an enormous flying beast with an orc on the back .
it 's a really great image . it 's pretty cool .
it 's from the game world of warcraft with more than 10 million players globally , one of whom is me , another of whom is my wife .
and this kind of a world , this vast flying beast you can ride around , shows why games are so very good at doing both the wanting and the liking .
because it 's very powerful . it 's pretty awesome .
it gives you great powers .
your ambition is satisfied , but it 's very beautiful .
it 's a very great pleasure to fly around .
and so these combine to form a very intense emotional engagement .
but this is n't the really interesting stuff .
the really interesting stuff about virtuality is what you can measure with it .
because what you can measure in virtuality is everything .
every single thing that every single person who 's ever played in a game has ever done can be measured .
the biggest games in the world today are measuring more than one billion points of data about their players , about what everybody does - far more detail than you 'd ever get from any website .
and this allows something very special to happen in games .
it 's something called the reward schedule .
and by this , i mean looking at what millions upon millions of people have done and carefully calibrating the rate , the nature , the type , the intensity of rewards in games to keep them engaged over staggering amounts of time and effort .
now , to try and explain this in sort of real terms , i want to talk about a kind of task that might fall to you in so many games .
go and get a certain amount of a certain little game-y item .
let 's say , for the sake of argument , my mission is to get 15 pies and i can get 15 pies by killing these cute , little monsters .
simple game quest .
now you can think about this , if you like , as a problem about boxes .
i 've got to keep opening boxes .
i do n't know what 's inside them until i open them .
and i go around opening box after box until i 've got 15 pies .
now , if you take a game like warcraft , you can think about it , if you like , as a great box-opening effort .
the game 's just trying to get people to open about a million boxes , getting better and better stuff in them .
this sounds immensely boring but games are able to make this process incredibly compelling .
and the way they do this is through a combination of probability and data .
let 's think about probability .
if we want to engage someone in the process of opening boxes to try and find pies , we want to make sure it 's neither too easy , nor too difficult , to find a pie .
so what do you do ? well , you look at a million people - no , 100 million people , 100 million box openers - and you work out , if you make the pie rate about 25 percent - that 's neither too frustrating , nor too easy .
it keeps people engaged .
but of course , that 's not all you do - there 's 15 pies .
now , i could make a game called piecraft , where all you had to do was get a million pies or a thousand pies .
that would be very boring .
fifteen is a pretty optimal number .
you find that - you know , between five and 20 is about the right number for keeping people going .
but we do n't just have pies in the boxes .
there 's 100 percent up here .
and what we do is make sure that every time a box is opened , there 's something in it , some little reward that keeps people progressing and engaged .
in most adventure games , it 's a little bit in-game currency , a little bit experience .
but we do n't just do that either .
we also say there 's going to be loads of other items of varying qualities and levels of excitement .
there 's going to be a 10 percent chance you get a pretty good item .
there 's going to be a 0.1 percent chance you get an absolutely awesome item .
and each of these rewards is carefully calibrated to the item .
and also , we say , " well , how many monsters ? should i have the entire world full of a billion monsters ? "
no , we want one or two monsters on the screen at any one time .
so i 'm drawn on . it 's not too easy , not too difficult .
so all this is very powerful .
but we 're in virtuality . these are n't real boxes .
so we can do some rather amazing things .
we notice , looking at all these people opening boxes , that when people get to about 13 out of 15 pies , their perception shifts , they start to get a bit bored , a bit testy .
they 're not rational about probability .
they think this game is unfair .
it 's not giving me my last two pies . i 'm going to give up .
if they 're real boxes , there 's not much we can do , but in a game we can just say , " right , well .
when you get to 13 pies , you 've got 75 percent chance of getting a pie now . "
keep you engaged . look at what people do - adjust the world to match their expectation .
our games do n't always do this .
and one thing they certainly do at the moment is if you got a 0.1 percent awesome item , they make very sure another one does n't appear for a certain length of time to keep the value , to keep it special .
and the point is really that we evolved to be satisfied by the world in particular ways .
over tens and hundreds of thousands of years , we evolved to find certain things stimulating , and as very intelligent , civilized beings , we 're enormously stimulated by problem solving and learning .
but now , we can reverse engineer that and build worlds that expressly tick our evolutionary boxes .
so what does all this mean in practice ?
well , i 've come up with seven things that , i think , show how you can take these lessons from games and use them outside of games .
the first one is very simple : experience bars measuring progress - something that 's been talked about brilliantly by people like jesse schell earlier this year .
it 's already been done at the university of indiana in the states , among other places .
it 's the simple idea that instead of grading people incrementally in little bits and pieces , you give them one profile character avatar which is constantly progressing in tiny , tiny , tiny little increments which they feel are their own .
and everything comes towards that , and they watch it creeping up , and they own that as it goes along .
second , multiple long and short-term aims - 5,000 pies , boring , 15 pies , interesting .
so , you give people lots and lots of different tasks .
you say , it 's about doing 10 of these questions , but another task is turning up to 20 classes on time , but another task is collaborating with other people , another task is showing you 're working five times , another task is hitting this particular target .
you break things down into these calibrated slices that people can choose and do in parallel to keep them engaged and that you can use to point them towards individually beneficial activities .
third , you reward effort .
it 's your 100 percent factor . games are brilliant at this .
every time you do something , you get credit ; you get a credit for trying .
you do n't punish failure . you reward every little bit of effort - a little bit of gold , a little bit of credit . you 've done 20 questions - tick .
it all feeds in as minute reinforcement .
fourth , feedback .
this is absolutely crucial , and virtuality is dazzling at delivering this .
if you look at some of the most intractable problems in the world today that we 've been hearing amazing things about , it 's very , very hard for people to learn if they can not link consequences to actions .
pollution , global warming , these things - the consequences are distant in time and space .
it 's very hard to learn , to feel a lesson .
but if you can model things for people , if you can give things to people that they can manipulate and play with and where the feedback comes , then they can learn a lesson , they can see , they can move on , they can understand .
and fifth , the element of uncertainty .
now this is the neurological goldmine , if you like , because a known reward excites people , but what really gets them going is the uncertain reward , the reward pitched at the right level of uncertainty , that they did n't quite know whether they were going to get it or not .
the 25 percent . this lights the brain up .
and if you think about using this in testing , in just introducing control elements of randomness in all forms of testing and training , you can transform the levels of people 's engagement by tapping into this very powerful evolutionary mechanism .
when we do n't quite predict something perfectly , we get really excited about it .
we just want to go back and find out more .
as you probably know , the neurotransmitter associated with learning is called dopamine .
it 's associated with reward-seeking behavior .
and something very exciting is just beginning to happen in places like the university of bristol in the u.k. , where we are beginning to be able to model mathematically dopamine levels in the brain .
and what this means is we can predict learning , we can predict enhanced engagement , these windows , these windows of time , in which the learning is taking place at an enhanced level .
and two things really flow from this .
the first has to do with memory , that we can find these moments .
when someone is more likely to remember , we can give them a nugget in a window .
and the second thing is confidence , that we can see how game-playing and reward structures make people braver , make them more willing to take risks , more willing to take on difficulty , harder to discourage .
this can all seem very sinister .
but you know , sort of " our brains have been manipulated ; we 're all addicts . "
the word " addiction " is thrown around .
there are real concerns there .
but the biggest neurological turn-on for people is other people .
this is what really excites us .
in reward terms , it 's not money ; it 's not being given cash - that 's nice - it 's doing stuff with our peers , watching us , collaborating with us .
and i want to tell you a quick story about 1999 - a video game called everquest .
and in this video game , there were two really big dragons , and you had to team up to kill them - 42 people , up to 42 to kill these big dragons .
that 's a problem because they dropped two or three decent items .
so players addressed this problem by spontaneously coming up with a system to motivate each other , fairly and transparently .
what happened was , they paid each other a virtual currency they called " dragon kill points . "
and every time you turned up to go on a mission , you got paid in dragon kill points .
they tracked these on a separate website .
so they tracked their own private currency , and then players could bid afterwards for cool items they wanted - all organized by the players themselves .
now the staggering system , not just that this worked in everquest , but that today , a decade on , every single video game in the world with this kind of task uses a version of this system - tens of millions of people .
and the success rate is at close to 100 percent .
this is a player-developed , self-enforcing , voluntary currency , and it 's incredibly sophisticated player behavior .
and i just want to end by suggesting a few ways in which these principles could fan out into the world .
let 's start with business .
i mean , we 're beginning to see some of the big problems around something like business are recycling and energy conservation .
we 're beginning to see the emergence of wonderful technologies like real-time energy meters .
and i just look at this , and i think , yes , we could take that so much further by allowing people to set targets by setting calibrated targets , by using elements of uncertainty , by using these multiple targets , by using a grand , underlying reward and incentive system , by setting people up to collaborate in terms of groups , in terms of streets to collaborate and compete , to use these very sophisticated group and motivational mechanics we see .
in terms of education , perhaps most obviously of all , we can transform how we engage people .
we can offer people the grand continuity of experience and personal investment .
we can break things down into highly calibrated small tasks .
we can use calculated randomness .
we can reward effort consistently as everything fields together .
and we can use the kind of group behaviors that we see evolving when people are at play together , these really quite unprecedentedly complex cooperative mechanisms .
government , well , one thing that comes to mind is the u.s. government , among others , is literally starting to pay people to lose weight .
so we 're seeing financial reward being used to tackle the great issue of obesity .
but again , those rewards could be calibrated so precisely if we were able to use the vast expertise of gaming systems to just jack up that appeal , to take the data , to take the observations , of millions of human hours and plow that feedback into increasing engagement .
and in the end , it 's this word , " engagement , " that i want to leave you with .
it 's about how individual engagement can be transformed by the psychological and the neurological lessons we can learn from watching people that are playing games .
but it 's also about collective engagement and about the unprecedented laboratory for observing what makes people tick and work and play and engage on a grand scale in games .
and if we can look at these things and learn from them and see how to turn them outwards , then i really think we have something quite revolutionary on our hands .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- when i knew i was going to come to speak to you , i thought , " i gotta call my mother . "
i have a little cuban mother - she 's about that big .
four feet . nothing larger than the sum of her figurative parts .
you still with me ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- i called her up .
" hello , how 're you doing , baby ? "
" hey , ma , i got to talk to you . "
" you 're talking to me already . what 's the matter ? "
i said , " i 've got to talk to a bunch of nice people . "
" you 're always talking to nice people , except when you went to the white house . "
" ma , do n't start ! "
and i told her i was coming to ted , and she said , " what 's the problem ? "
and i said , " well , i 'm not sure . "
i said , " i have to talk to them about stories .
it 's ' technology , entertainment and design . " ' and she said , " well , you design a story when you make it up , it 's entertainment when you tell it , and you 're going to use a microphone . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i said , " you 're a peach , ma . pop there ? "
" what 's the matter ? the pearls of wisdom leaping from my lips like lemmings is no good for you ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- then my pop got on there .
my pop , he 's one of the old souls , you know - old cuban man from camaguey .
camaguey is a province in cuba .
he 's from florida .
he was born there in 1924 .
he grew up in a bohio of dirt floors , and the structure was the kind used by the tainos , our old arawak ancestors .
my father is at once quick-witted , wickedly funny , and then poignancy turns on a dime and leaves you breathless .
" papi , help . "
" i already heard your mother . i think she 's right . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " after what i just told you ? "
my whole life , my father 's been there .
so we talked for a few minutes , and he said , " why do n't you tell them what you believe ? "
i love that , but we do n't have the time .
good storytelling is crafting a story that someone wants to listen to .
great story is the art of letting go .
so i 'm going to tell you a little story .
remember , this tradition comes to us not from the mists of avalon , back in time , but further still , before we were scratching out these stories on papyrus , or we were doing the pictographs on walls in moist , damp caves .
back then , we had an urge , a need , to tell the story .
when lexus wants to sell you a car , they 're telling you a story .
have you been watching the commercials ?
because every one of us has this desire , for once - just once - to tell our story and have it heard .
there are stories you tell from stages .
there 's stories that you may tell in a small group of people with some good wine .
and there 's stories you tell late at night to a friend , maybe once in your life .
and then there are stories that we whisper into a stygian darkness .
i 'm not telling you that story .
i 'm telling you this one .
it 's called , " you 're going to miss me . "
it 's about human connection .
my cuban mother , which i just briefly introduced you to in that short character sketch , came to the united states one thousand years ago .
i was born in 19 - i forget , and i came to this country with them in the aftermath of the cuban revolution .
we went from havana , cuba to decatur , georgia .
and decatur , georgia 's a small southern town .
and in that little southern town , i grew up , and grew up hearing these stories .
but this story only happened a few years ago .
i called my mom .
it was a saturday morning .
and i was calling about how to make ajiaco . it 's a cuban meal .
it 's delicious . it 's savory .
it makes spit froth in the little corners of your mouth - is that enough ? it makes your armpits juicy , you know ?
that kind of food , yeah .
this is the sensory part of the program , people .
i called my mother , and she said , " carmen , i need you to come , please .
i need to go to the mall , and you know your father now , he takes a nap in the afternoon , and i got to go .
i got an errand to run . "
let me parenthetically pause here and tell you - esther , my mother , had stopped driving several years ago , to the collective relief of the entire city of atlanta .
any vehicular outing with that woman from the time i was a young child , guys , naturally included flashing , blue lights .
but she 'd become adept at dodging the boys in blue , and when she did meet them , oh , she had wonderful , well , rapport .
" ma 'am , did you know that was a light you just ran ? "
-lrb- spanish -rrb- " you do n't speak english ? "
" no . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but eventually , every dog has its day , and she ended up in traffic court , where she bartered with the judge for a discount .
there 's a historical marker .
but now she was a septuagenarian , she 'd stopped driving .
and that meant that everyone in the family had to sign up to take her to have her hair dyed , you know , that peculiar color of blue that matches her polyester pants suit , you know , same color as the buick .
anybody ? all right .
little picks on the legs , where she does her needlepoint , and leaves little loops .
rockports - they 're for this .
that 's why they call them that .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this is her ensemble .
and this is the woman that wants me to come on a saturday morning when i have a lot to do , but it does n't take long because cuban guilt is a weighty thing .
i 'm not going political on you but ... and so , i go to my mother 's .
i show up . she 's in the carport .
of course , they have a carport .
the kind with the corrugated roof , you know .
the buick 's parked outside , and she 's jingling , jangling a pair of keys .
" i got a surprise for you , baby ! "
" we taking your car ? "
" not we , i. "
and she reaches into her pocket and pulls out a catastrophe .
somebody 's storytelling . interactive art . you can talk to me .
oh , a driver 's license , a perfectly valid driver 's license .
issued , evidently , by the dmv in her own county of gwinnett .
blithering fucking idiots .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i said , " is that thing real ? "
" i think so . "
" can you even see ? "
" i guess i must . "
" oh , jesus . "
she gets into the car - she 's sitting on two phone books .
i ca n't even make this part up because she 's that tiny .
she 's engineered an umbrella so she can - bam ! - slam the door .
her daughter , me , the village idiot with the ice cream cone in the middle of her forehead , is still standing there , slack-jawed .
" you coming ? you no coming ? "
" oh , my god . " i said , " ok , fine . does pop know you 're driving ? "
" are you kidding me ? "
" how are you doing it ? "
" he 's got to sleep sometime . "
and so we left my father fast asleep , because i knew he 'd kill me if i let her go by herself , and we get in the car .
puts it in reverse . fifty-five out of the driveway , in reverse .
i am buckling in seatbelts from the front .
i 'm yanking them in from the back . i 'm doing double knots .
i mean , i 've got a mouth as dry as the kalahari desert .
i 've got a white-knuckle grip on the door . you know what i 'm talking about ?
and she 's whistling , and finally i do the kind of birth breathing - you know , that one ?
only a couple of women are going uh-huh , uh-huh , uh-huh . right .
and i said , " ma , would you slow down ? "
because now she 's picked up the highway 285 , the perimeter around atlanta , which encompasses now - there 's seven lanes , she 's on all of them , y 'all .
i said , " ma , pick a lane ! "
" they give you seven lanes , they expect you to use them . "
and there she goes , right .
i do n't believe for a minute she has been out and not been stopped .
so , i think , hey , we can talk . it 'll be a diversion .
it 'll help my breathing . it 'll do something for my pulse , maybe .
" mommy , i know you have been stopped . "
" no , no , what you talking about ? "
" you have a license . how long have you been driving ? "
" four or five days . "
" yeah . and you have n't been stopped ? "
" i did not get a ticket . "
i said , " yeah , yeah , yeah , yeah , but come on , come on , come on . "
" ok , so i stopped at a light and there 's a guy , you know , in the back . "
" would this guy have , like , a blue uniform and a terrified look on his face ? "
" you were n't there , do n't start . "
" come on . you got a ticket ? "
" no . " she explained , " the man " - i have to tell you as she did , because it loses something if i do n't , you know - " he come to the window , and he does a thing like this , which tells me he 's pretty old , you know .
so i look up and i 'm thinking , maybe he 's still going to think i 'm kind of cute . "
" ma , are you still doing that ? "
" if it works , it works , baby .
so , i say , ' perdon , yo no hablo ingles . ' well , would n't you know , he had been in honduras for the peace corps . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so he 's talking to her , and at some point she says , " then , you know , it was it . that was it . it was done . "
" yeah ? what ?
he gave you a ticket ? he did n't give you a ticket ? what ? "
" no , i look up , and the light , she change . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you should be terrified .
now , i do n't know if she 's toying with me , kind of like a cat batting back a mouse , batting back a mouse - left paw , right paw , left paw , right paw - but by now , we 've reached the mall .
now , you have all been at a mall during the holidays , yes ?
talk to me . yes . yes . you can say yes .
audience : yes .
carmen agra deedy : all right , then you know that you have now entered parking lot purgatory , praying to that saint of perpetual availability that as you join that serpentine line of cars crawling along , some guy 's going to turn on the brake lights just as you pull up behind him .
but that does n't happen most of the time , right ?
so , first i say , " ma , why are we here ? "
" you mean , like , in the car ? "
" no , do n't - why are we here today ?
it 's saturday . it 's the holidays . "
" because i have to exchange your father 's underwear . "
now , see , this is the kind of machiavellian thinking , that you really have to - you know , in my mind , it 's a rabbit 's warren , this woman 's mind .
do i want to walk in , because unless i have ariadne 's thread to anchor - enough metaphors for you ? - somewhere , i may not get out .
but you know .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " why do we have to take pop 's underwear back now ?
and why ? what is wrong with his underwear ? "
" it will upset you . "
" it wo n't upset me . why ? what ? is something wrong with him ? "
" no , no , no . the only thing with him is , he 's an idiot .
i sent him to the store , which was my first mistake , and he went to buy underwear , and he bought the grippers , and he 's supposed to buy the boxers . "
" why ? "
" i read it on the intersnet . you can not have children . "
" oh , my god ! "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- olivia ? huh ? huh ?
by now , we have now crawled another four feet , and my mother finally says to me , " i knew it , i knew it .
i 'm an immigrant . we make a space . what i tell you ? right there . "
and she points out the passenger window , and i look out , and three - three - aisles down , " look , the chevy . "
you want to laugh , but you do n't know - you 're that politically corrected , have you noticed ?
correct the other direction now , it 's ok .
" look , the chevy - he 's coming this way . "
" mama , mama , mama , wait , wait , wait . the chevy is three aisles away . "
she looks at me like i 'm her , you know , her moron child , the cretin , the one she 's got to speak to very slowly and distinctly .
" i know that , honey . get out of the car and go stand in the parking space till i get there . "
ok , i want a vote . come on , come on . no , no .
how many of you once in your - you were a kid , you were an adult - you stood in a parking space to hold it for someone ?
see , we 're a secret club with a secret handshake .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and years of therapy later , we 're doing great .
we 're doing great . we 're doing fine .
well , i stood up to her .
this is - you know , you 'd think by now i 'm - and still holding ?
i said , " no way , ma , you have embarrassed me my entire life . "
of course , her comeback is , " when have i embarrassed you ? "
-lrb- spanish -rrb- and she 's still talking while she puts the car in park , hits the emergency brake , opens the door , and with a spryness astounding in a woman her age , she jumps out of the car , knocks out the phone books , and then she walks around - she 's carrying her cheap kmart purse with her - around the front of the car .
she has amazing land speed for a woman her age , too .
before i know it , she has skiddled across the parking lot and in between the cars , and people behind me , with that kind of usual religious charity that the holidays bring us , wah-wah wah-wah .
" i 'm coming . " italian hand signals follow .
i scoot over . i close the door . i leave the phone books .
this is new and fast , just so you - are you still with us ?
we 'll wait for the slow ones . ok .
i start , and this is where a child says to me - and the story does n't work if i tell you about her before , because this is my laconic child .
a brevity , brevity of everything with this child .
you know , she eats small portions .
language is something to be meted out in small phonemes , you know - just little hmm , hmm-hmm .
she carries a mean spiral notebook and a pen .
she wields great power .
she listens , because that 's what people who tell stories do first .
but she pauses occasionally and says , " how do you spell that ? what year ? ok . "
when she writes the expose in about 20 years , do n't believe a word of it .
but this is my daughter , lauren , my remarkable daughter , my borderline asperger 's kid .
bless you , dr. watson .
she says , " ma , you got to look ! "
now , when this kid says i got to look , you know .
but it is n't like i have n't seen this crime scene before .
i grew up with this woman .
i said , " lauren , you know what , give me a play-by-play . i ca n't . "
" no , mama , you got to look . "
i got to look . you got to look .
do n't you want to look ?
there she is .
i look in bewildered awe : she 's standing , those rockports slightly apart , but grounded .
she 's holding out that cheap kmart purse , and she is wielding it .
she 's holding back tons of steel with the sheer force of her little personality , in that crone-ish voice , saying things like , " back it up , buddy ! no , it 's reserved ! "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ready ? brace yourselves . here it comes .
" no , my daughter , she 's coming in the buick .
honey , sit up so they can see you . "
oh , jesus . oh , jesus .
i finally come - and now , it 's the south .
i do n't know what part of the country you live in .
i think we all secretly love stories .
we all secretly want our blankie and our boo bear .
we want to curl up and say , " tell it to me , tell it to me .
come on , honey , tell it to me . "
but in the south , we love a good story .
people have pulled aside , i mean , they 've come out of that queue line , they have popped their trunks , pulled out lawn chairs and cool drinks .
bets are placed .
" i 'm with the little lady . damn ! "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and she 's bringing me in with a slight salsa movement .
she is , after all , cuban .
i 'm thinking , " accelerator , break . accelerator , break . "
like you 've never thought that in your life ? right ? yeah .
i pull in . i put the car in park .
engine 's still running - mine , not the car .
i jump out next to her going , " do n't you move ! "
" i 'm not going anywhere . "
she 's got front seat in a greek tragedy .
i come out , and there 's esther .
she 's hugging the purse .
" que ? " which means " what , " and so much more .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " ma , have you no shame ?
people are watching us all around , " right ?
now , some of them you 've got to make up , people .
secret of the trade .
guess what ? some of these stories i sculpt a little , here and there .
some , they 're just right there , right there . put them right there .
she says this to me .
after i say - let me refresh you - " have you no shame ? "
" no . i gave it up with pantyhose - they 're both too binding . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- yeah , you can clap , but then you 're about 30 seconds from the end .
i 'm about to snap like a brittle twig , when suddenly someone taps me on the shoulder .
intrepid soul .
i 'm thinking , " this is my kid . how dare she ?
she jumped out of that car . "
that 's ok , because my mother yells at me , i yell at her .
it 's a beautiful hierarchy , and it works .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i turn around , but it 's not a child . it 's a young woman , a little taller than i , pale green , amused eyes .
with her is a young man - husband , brother , lover , it 's not my job .
and she says , " pardon me , ma 'am " - that 's how we talk down there - " is that your mother ? "
i said , " no , i follow little old women around parking lots to see if they 'll stop . yes , it 's my mother ! "
the boy , now , he says . " well , what my sister meant " - they look at each other , it 's a knowing glance - " god , she 's crazy ! "
i said , -lrb- spanish -rrb- , and the young girl and the young boy say , " no , no , honey , we just want to know one more thing . "
i said , " look , please , let me take care of her , ok , because i know her , and believe me , she 's like a small atomic weapon , you know , you just want to handle her really gingerly . "
and the girl goes , " i know , but , i mean , i swear to god , she reminds us of our mother . "
i almost miss it .
he turns to her on the heel of his shoe .
it 's a half-whisper , " god , i miss her . "
they turn then , shoulder to shoulder , and walk away , lost in their own reverie .
memories of some maddening woman who was the luck of their dna draw .
and i turn to esther , who 's rocking on those ' ports , and says , " you know what , honey ? "
" what , ma ? "
" i 'm going to drive you crazy probably for about 14 , 15 more years , if you 're lucky , but after that , honey , you 're going to miss me . "
-lrb- applause -rrb- that 's how we traveled in the year 1900 .
that 's an open buggy . it does n't have heating .
it does n't have air conditioning .
that horse is pulling it along at one percent of the speed of sound , and the rutted dirt road turns into a quagmire of mud anytime it rains .
that 's a boeing 707 .
only 60 years later , it travels at 80 percent of the speed of sound , and we do n't travel any faster today because commercial supersonic air travel turned out to be a bust .
so i started wondering and pondering , could it be that the best years of american economic growth are behind us ?
and that leads to the suggestion , maybe economic growth is almost over .
some of the reasons for this are not really very controversial .
there are four headwinds that are just hitting the american economy in the face .
they 're demographics , education , debt and inequality .
they 're powerful enough to cut growth in half .
so we need a lot of innovation to offset this decline .
and here 's my theme : because of the headwinds , if innovation continues to be as powerful as it has been in the last 150 years , growth is cut in half .
if innovation is less powerful , invents less great , wonderful things , then growth is going to be even lower than half of history .
now here 's eight centuries of economic growth .
the vertical axis is just percent per year of growth , zero percent a year , one percent a year , two percent a year .
the white line is for the u.k. , and then the u.s.
takes over as the leading nation in the year 1900 , when the line switches to red .
you 'll notice that , for the first four centuries , there 's hardly any growth at all , just 0.2 percent .
then growth gets better and better .
it maxes out in the 1930s , ' 40s and ' 50s , and then it starts slowing down , and here 's a cautionary note .
that last downward notch in the red line is not actual data .
that is a forecast that i made six years ago that growth would slow down to 1.3 percent .
but you know what the actual facts are ?
you know what the growth in per-person income has been in the united states in the last six years ?
negative .
this led to a fantasy .
what if i try to fit a curved line to this historical record ?
i can make the curved line end anywhere i wanted , but i decided i would end it at 0.2 , just like the u.k. growth for the first four centuries .
now the history that we 've achieved is that we 've grown at 2.0 percent per year over the whole period , 1891 to 2007 , and remember it 's been a little bit negative since 2007 .
but if growth slows down , instead of doubling our standard of living every generation , americans in the future ca n't expect to be twice as well off as their parents , or even a quarter -lsb- more well off than -rsb- their parents .
now we 're going to change and look at the level of per capita income .
the vertical axis now is thousands of dollars in today 's prices .
you 'll notice that in 1891 , over on the left , we were at about 5,000 dollars .
today we 're at about 44,000 dollars of total output per member of the population .
now what if we could achieve that historic two-percent growth for the next 70 years ?
well , it 's a matter of arithmetic .
two-percent growth quadruples your standard of living in 70 years .
that means we 'd go from 44,000 to 180,000 .
well , we 're not going to do that , and the reason is the headwinds .
the first headwind is demographics .
it 's a truism that your standard of living rises faster than productivity , rises faster than output per hour , if hours per person increased .
and we got that gift back in the ' 70s and ' 80s when women entered the labor force .
but now it 's turned around .
now hours per person are shrinking , first because of the retirement of the baby boomers , and second because there 's been a very significant dropping out of the labor force of prime age adult males who are in the bottom half of the educational distribution .
the next headwind is education .
we 've got problems all over our educational system despite race to the top .
in college , we 've got cost inflation in higher education that dwarfs cost inflation in medical care .
we have in higher education a trillion dollars of student debt , and our college completion rate is 15 points , 15 percentage points below canada .
we have a lot of debt .
our economy grew from 2000 to 2007 on the back of consumers massively overborrowing .
consumers paying off that debt is one of the main reasons why our economic recovery is so sluggish today .
and everybody of course knows that the federal government debt is growing as a share of gdp at a very rapid rate , and the only way that 's going to stop is some combination of faster growth in taxes or slower growth in entitlements , also called transfer payments .
and that gets us down from the 1.5 , where we 've reached for education , down to 1.3 .
and then we have inequality .
over the 15 years before the financial crisis , the growth rate of the bottom 99 percent of the income distribution was half a point slower than the averages we 've been talking about before .
all the rest went to the top one percent .
so that brings us down to 0.8 .
and that 0.8 is the big challenge .
are we going to grow at 0.8 ?
if so , that 's going to require that our inventions are as important as the ones that happened over the last 150 years .
so let 's see what some of those inventions were .
if you wanted to read in 1875 at night , you needed to have an oil or a gas lamp .
they created pollution , they created odors , they were hard to control , the light was dim , and they were a fire hazard .
by 1929 , electric light was everywhere .
we had the vertical city , the invention of the elevator .
central manhattan became possible .
and then , in addition to that , at the same time , hand tools were replaced by massive electric tools and hand-powered electric tools , all achieved by electricity .
electricity was also very helpful in liberating women .
women , back in the late 19th century , spent two days a week doing the laundry .
they did it on a scrub board .
then they had to hang the clothes out to dry .
then they had to bring them in .
the whole thing took two days out of the seven-day week .
and then we had the electric washing machine .
and by 1950 , they were everywhere .
but the women still had to shop every day , but no they did n't , because electricity brought us the electric refrigerator .
back in the late 19th century , the only source of heat in most homes was a big fireplace in the kitchen that was used for cooking and heating .
the bedrooms were cold . they were unheated .
but by 1929 , certainly by 1950 , we had central heating everywhere .
what about the internal combustion engine , which was invented in 1879 ?
in america , before the motor vehicle , transportation depended entirely on the urban horse , which dropped , without restraint , 25 to 50 pounds of manure on the streets every day together with a gallon of urine .
that comes out at five to 10 tons daily per square mile in cities .
those horses also ate up fully one quarter of american agricultural land .
that 's the percentage of american agricultural land it took to feed the horses .
of course , when the motor vehicle was invented , and it became almost ubiquitous by 1929 , that agricultural land could be used for human consumption or for export .
and here 's an interesting ratio : starting from zero in 1900 , only 30 years later , the ratio of motor vehicles to the number of households in the united states reached 90 percent in just 30 years .
back before the turn of the century , women had another problem .
all the water for cooking , cleaning and bathing had to be carried in buckets and pails in from the outside .
it 's a historical fact that in 1885 , the average north carolina housewife walked 148 miles a year carrying 35 tons of water .
but by 1929 , cities around the country had put in underground water pipes .
they had put in underground sewer pipes , and as a result , one of the great scourges of the late 19th century , waterborne diseases like cholera , began to disappear .
and an amazing fact for techno-optimists is that in the first half of the 20th century , the rate of improvement of life expectancy was three times faster than it was in the second half of the 19th century .
so it 's a truism that things ca n't be more than 100 percent of themselves .
and i 'll just give you a few examples .
we went from one percent to 90 percent of the speed of sound .
electrification , central heat , ownership of motor cars , they all went from zero to 100 percent .
urban environments make people more productive than on the farm .
we went from 25 percent urban to 75 percent by the early postwar years .
what about the electronic revolution ?
here 's an early computer .
it 's amazing . the mainframe computer was invented in 1942 .
by 1960 we had telephone bills , bank statements were being produced by computers .
the earliest cell phones , the earliest personal computers were invented in the 1970s .
the 1980s brought us bill gates , dos , atm machines to replace bank tellers , bar code scanning to cut down on labor in the retail sector .
fast forward through the ' 90s , we had the dotcom revolution and a temporary rise in productivity growth .
but i 'm now going to give you an experiment .
you have to choose either option a or option b.
-lrb- laughter -rrb- option a is you get to keep everything invented up till 10 years ago .
so you get google , you get amazon , you get wikipedia , and you get running water and indoor toilets .
or you get everything invented to yesterday , including facebook and your iphone , but you have to give up , go out to the outhouse , and carry in the water .
hurricane sandy caused a lot of people to lose the 20th century , maybe for a couple of days , in some cases for more than a week , electricity , running water , heating , gasoline for their cars , and a charge for their iphones .
the problem we face is that all these great inventions , we have to match them in the future , and my prediction that we 're not going to match them brings us down from the original two-percent growth down to 0.2 , the fanciful curve that i drew you at the beginning .
so here we are back to the horse and buggy .
i 'd like to award an oscar to the inventors of the 20th century , the people from alexander graham bell to thomas edison to the wright brothers , i 'd like to call them all up here , and they 're going to call back to you .
your challenge is , can you match what we achieved ?
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- each of you possesses the most powerful , dangerous and subversive trait that natural selection has ever devised .
it 's a piece of neural audio technology for rewiring other people 's minds .
i 'm talking about your language , of course , because it allows you to implant a thought from your mind directly into someone else 's mind , and they can attempt to do the same to you , without either of you having to perform surgery .
instead , when you speak , you 're actually using a form of telemetry not so different from the remote control device for your television .
it 's just that , whereas that device relies on pulses of infrared light , your language relies on pulses , discrete pulses , of sound .
and just as you use the remote control device to alter the internal settings of your television to suit your mood , you use your language to alter the settings inside someone else 's brain to suit your interests .
languages are genes talking , getting things that they want .
and just imagine the sense of wonder in a baby when it first discovers that , merely by uttering a sound , it can get objects to move across a room as if by magic , and maybe even into its mouth .
now language 's subversive power has been recognized throughout the ages in censorship , in books you ca n't read , phrases you ca n't use and words you ca n't say .
in fact , the tower of babel story in the bible is a fable and warning about the power of language .
according to that story , early humans developed the conceit that , by using their language to work together , they could build a tower that would take them all the way to heaven .
now god , angered at this attempt to usurp his power , destroyed the tower , and then to ensure that it would never be rebuilt , he scattered the people by giving them different languages - confused them by giving them different languages .
and this leads to the wonderful irony that our languages exist to prevent us from communicating .
even today , we know that there are words we can not use , phrases we can not say , because if we do so , we might be accosted , jailed , or even killed .
and all of this from a puff of air emanating from our mouths .
now all this fuss about a single one of our traits tells us there 's something worth explaining .
and that is how and why did this remarkable trait evolve , and why did it evolve only in our species ?
now it 's a little bit of a surprise that to get an answer to that question , in the chimpanzees .
now these chimpanzees are using tools , and we take that as a sign of their intelligence .
but if they really were intelligent , why would they use a stick to extract termites from the ground rather than a shovel ?
and if they really were intelligent , why would they crack open nuts with a rock ?
why would n't they just go to a shop and buy a bag of nuts that somebody else had already cracked open for them ?
why not ? i mean , that 's what we do .
now the reason the chimpanzees do n't do that is that they lack what psychologists and anthropologists call social learning .
they seem to lack the ability to learn from others by copying or imitating or simply watching .
as a result , they ca n't improve on others ' ideas or learn from others ' mistakes - benefit from others ' wisdom .
and so they just do the same thing over and over and over again .
in fact , we could go away for a million years and come back and these chimpanzees would be doing the same thing with the same sticks for the termites and the same rocks to crack open the nuts .
now this may sound arrogant , or even full of hubris .
how do we know this ?
because this is exactly what our ancestors , the homo erectus , did .
these upright apes evolved on the african savanna about two million years ago , and they made these splendid hand axes that fit wonderfully into your hands .
but if we look at the fossil record , we see that they made the same hand axe over and over and over again for one million years .
you can follow it through the fossil record .
now if we make some guesses about how long homo erectus lived , what their generation time was , that 's about 40,000 generations of parents to offspring , and other individuals watching , in which that hand axe did n't change .
it 's not even clear that our very close genetic relatives , the neanderthals , had social learning .
sure enough , their tools were more complicated than those of homo erectus , but they too showed very little change over the 300,000 years or so that those species , the neanderthals , lived in eurasia .
okay , so what this tells us is that , contrary to the old adage , " monkey see , monkey do , " the surprise really is that all of the other animals really can not do that - at least not very much .
and even this picture has the suspicious taint of being rigged about it - something from a barnum & bailey circus .
but by comparison , we can learn .
we can learn by watching other people and copying or imitating what they can do .
we can then choose , from among a range of options , the best one .
we can benefit from others ' ideas .
we can build on their wisdom .
and as a result , our ideas do accumulate , and our technology progresses .
and this cumulative cultural adaptation , as anthropologists call this accumulation of ideas , is responsible for everything around you in your bustling and teeming everyday lives .
i mean the world has changed out of all proportion to what we would recognize even 1,000 or 2,000 years ago .
and all of this because of cumulative cultural adaptation .
the chairs you 're sitting in , the lights in this auditorium , my microphone , the ipads and ipods that you carry around with you - all are a result of cumulative cultural adaptation .
now to many commentators , cumulative cultural adaptation , or social learning , is job done , end of story .
our species can make stuff , therefore we prospered in a way that no other species has .
in fact , we can even make the " stuff of life " - as i just said , all the stuff around us .
but in fact , it turns out that some time around 200,000 years ago , when our species first arose and acquired social learning , that this was really the beginning of our story , not the end of our story .
because our acquisition of social learning would create a social and evolutionary dilemma , the resolution of which , it 's fair to say , would determine not only the future course of our psychology , but the future course of the entire world .
and most importantly for this , it 'll tell us why we have language .
and the reason that dilemma arose is , it turns out , that social learning is visual theft .
if i can learn by watching you , i can steal your best ideas , and i can benefit from your efforts , without having to put in the time and energy that you did into developing them .
if i can watch which lure you use to catch a fish , or i can watch how you flake your hand axe to make it better , or if i follow you secretly to your mushroom patch , i can benefit from your knowledge and wisdom and skills , and maybe even catch that fish before you do .
social learning really is visual theft .
and in any species that acquired it , it would behoove you to hide your best ideas , lest somebody steal them from you .
and so some time around 200,000 years ago , our species confronted this crisis .
and we really had only two options for dealing with the conflicts that visual theft would bring .
one of those options was that we could have retreated into small family groups .
because then the benefits of our ideas and knowledge would flow just to our relatives .
had we chosen this option , sometime around 200,000 years ago , we would probably still be living like the neanderthals were when we first entered europe 40,000 years ago .
and this is because in small groups there are fewer ideas , there are fewer innovations .
and small groups are more prone to accidents and bad luck .
so if we 'd chosen that path , our evolutionary path would have led into the forest - and been a short one indeed .
the other option we could choose was to develop the systems of communication that would allow us to share ideas and to cooperate amongst others .
choosing this option would mean that a vastly greater fund of accumulated knowledge and wisdom would become available to any one individual than would ever arise from within an individual family or an individual person on their own .
well , we chose the second option , and language is the result .
language evolved to solve the crisis of visual theft .
language is a piece of social technology for enhancing the benefits of cooperation - for reaching agreements , for striking deals and for coordinating our activities .
and you can see that , in a developing society that was beginning to acquire language , not having language would be a like a bird without wings .
just as wings open up this sphere of air for birds to exploit , language opened up the sphere of cooperation for humans to exploit .
and we take this utterly for granted , because we 're a species that is so at home with language , but you have to realize that even the simplest acts of exchange that we engage in are utterly dependent upon language .
and to see why , consider two scenarios from early in our evolution .
let 's imagine that you are really good at making arrowheads , but you 're hopeless at making the wooden shafts with the flight feathers attached .
two other people you know are very good at making the wooden shafts , but they 're hopeless at making the arrowheads .
so what you do is - one of those people has not really acquired language yet .
and let 's pretend the other one is good at language skills .
so what you do one day is you take a pile of arrowheads , and you walk up to the one that ca n't speak very well , and you put the arrowheads down in front of him , hoping that he 'll get the idea that you want to trade your arrowheads for finished arrows .
but he looks at the pile of arrowheads , thinks they 're a gift , picks them up , smiles and walks off .
now you pursue this guy , gesticulating .
a scuffle ensues and you get stabbed with one of your own arrowheads .
okay , now replay this scene now , and you 're approaching the one who has language .
you put down your arrowheads and say , " i 'd like to trade these arrowheads for finished arrows . i 'll split you 50/50 . "
the other one says , " fine . looks good to me .
we 'll do that . "
now the job is done .
once we have language , we can put our ideas together and cooperate to have a prosperity that we could n't have before we acquired it .
and this is why our species has prospered around the world while the rest of the animals sit behind bars in zoos , languishing .
that 's why we build space shuttles and cathedrals while the rest of the world sticks sticks into the ground to extract termites .
all right , if this view of language and its value in solving the crisis of visual theft is true , any species that acquires it should show an explosion of creativity and prosperity .
and this is exactly what the archeological record shows .
if you look at our ancestors , the neanderthals and the homo erectus , our immediate ancestors , they 're confined to small regions of the world .
but when our species arose about 200,000 years ago , sometime after that we quickly walked out of africa and spread around the entire world , occupying nearly every habitat on earth .
now whereas other species are confined to places that their genes adapt them to , with social learning and language , we could transform the environment to suit our needs .
and so we prospered in a way that no other animal has .
language really is the most potent trait that has ever evolved .
it is the most valuable trait we have for converting new lands and resources into more people and their genes that natural selection has ever devised .
language really is the voice of our genes .
now having evolved language , though , we did something peculiar , even bizarre .
as we spread out around the world , we developed thousands of different languages .
currently , there are about seven or 8,000 different languages spoken on earth .
now you might say , well , this is just natural .
as we diverge , our languages are naturally going to diverge .
but the real puzzle and irony is that the greatest density of different languages on earth is found where people are most tightly packed together .
if we go to the island of papua new guinea , we can find about 800 to 1,000 distinct human languages , different human languages , spoken on that island alone .
there are places on that island where you can encounter a new language every two or three miles .
now , incredible as this sounds , i once met a papuan man , and i asked him if this could possibly be true .
and he said to me , " oh no .
they 're far closer together than that . "
and it 's true ; there are places on that island where you can encounter a new language in under a mile .
and this is also true of some remote oceanic islands .
and so it seems that we use our language , not just to cooperate , but to draw rings around our cooperative groups and to establish identities , and perhaps to protect our knowledge and wisdom and skills from eavesdropping from outside .
and we know this because when we study different language groups and associate them with their cultures , we see that different languages slow the flow of ideas between groups .
they slow the flow of technologies .
and they even slow the flow of genes .
now i ca n't speak for you , but it seems to be the case that we do n't have sex with people we ca n't talk to .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now we have to counter that , though , against the evidence we 've heard that we might have had some rather distasteful genetic dalliances with the neanderthals and the denisovans .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- okay , this tendency we have , this seemingly natural tendency we have , towards isolation , towards keeping to ourselves , crashes head first into our modern world .
this remarkable image is not a map of the world .
in fact , it 's a map of facebook friendship links .
and when you plot those friendship links by their latitude and longitude , it literally draws a map of the world .
our modern world is communicating with itself and with each other more than it has at any time in its past .
and that communication , that connectivity around the world , that globalization now raises a burden .
because these different languages impose a barrier , as we 've just seen , to the transfer of goods and ideas and technologies and wisdom .
and they impose a barrier to cooperation .
and nowhere do we see that more clearly than in the european union , whose 27 member countries speak 23 official languages .
the european union is now spending over one billion euros annually translating among their 23 official languages .
that 's something on the order of 1.45 billion u.s. dollars on translation costs alone .
now think of the absurdity of this situation .
if 27 individuals from those 27 member states sat around table , speaking their 23 languages , some very simple mathematics will tell you that you need an army of 253 translators to anticipate all the pairwise possibilities .
the european union employs a permanent staff of about 2,500 translators .
and in 2007 alone - and i 'm sure there are more recent figures - something on the order of 1.3 million pages were translated into english alone .
and so if language really is the solution to the crisis of visual theft , if language really is the conduit of our cooperation , the technology that our species derived to promote the free flow and exchange of ideas , in our modern world , we confront a question .
and that question is whether in this modern , globalized world we can really afford to have all these different languages .
to put it this way , nature knows no other circumstance in which functionally equivalent traits coexist .
one of them always drives the other extinct .
and we see this in the inexorable march towards standardization .
there are lots and lots of ways of measuring things - weighing them and measuring their length - but the metric system is winning .
there are lots and lots of ways of measuring time , but a really bizarre base 60 system known as hours and minutes and seconds is nearly universal around the world .
there are many , many ways of imprinting cds or dvds , but those are all being standardized as well .
and you can probably think of many , many more in your own everyday lives .
and so our modern world now is confronting us with a dilemma .
and it 's the dilemma that this chinese man faces , who 's language is spoken by more people in the world than any other single language , and yet he is sitting at his blackboard , converting chinese phrases into english language phrases .
and what this does is it raises the possibility to us that in a world in which we want to promote cooperation and exchange , and in a world that might be dependent more than ever before on cooperation to maintain and enhance our levels of prosperity , his actions suggest to us it might be inevitable that we have to confront the idea that our destiny is to be one world with one language .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- matt ridley : mark , one question .
svante found that the foxp2 gene , which seems to be associated with language , was also shared in the same form in neanderthals as us .
do we have any idea how we could have defeated neanderthals if they also had language ?
mark pagel : this is a very good question .
so many of you will be familiar with the idea that there 's this gene called foxp2 that seems to be implicated in some ways in the fine motor control that 's associated with language .
the reason why i do n't believe that tells us that the neanderthals had language is - here 's a simple analogy : ferraris are cars that have engines .
my car has an engine , but it 's not a ferrari .
now the simple answer then is that genes alone do n't , all by themselves , determine the outcome of very complicated things like language .
what we know about this foxp2 and neanderthals is that they may have had fine motor control of their mouths - who knows .
but that does n't tell us they necessarily had language .
mr : thank you very much indeed .
-lrb- applause -rrb- my work is about the behaviors that we all engage in unconsciously , on a collective level .
and what i mean by that , it 's the behaviors that we 're in denial about , and the ones that operate below the surface of our daily awareness .
and as individuals , we all do these things , all the time , everyday .
it 's like when you 're mean to your wife because you 're mad at somebody else .
or when you drink a little too much at a party , just out of anxiety .
or when you overeat because your feelings are hurt , or whatever .
and when we do these kind of things , when 300 million people do unconscious behaviors , then it can add up to a catastrophic consequence that nobody wants , and no one intended .
and that 's what i look at with my photographic work .
this is an image i just recently completed , that is - when you stand back at a distance , it looks like some kind of neo-gothic , cartoon image of a factory spewing out pollution .
and as you get a little bit closer , it starts looking like lots of pipes , like maybe a chemical plant , or a refinery , or maybe a hellish freeway interchange .
and as you get all the way up close , you realize that it 's actually made of lots and lots of plastic cups .
and in fact , this is one million plastic cups , which is the number of plastic cups that are used on airline flights in the united states every six hours .
we use four million cups a day on airline flights , and virtually none of them are reused or recycled .
they just do n't do that in that industry .
now , that number is dwarfed by the number of paper cups we use every day , and that is 40 million cups a day for hot beverages , most of which is coffee .
i could n't fit 40 million cups on a canvas , but i was able to put 410,000 . that 's what 410,000 cups looks like .
that 's 15 minutes of our cup consumption .
and if you could actually stack up that many cups in real life , that 's the size it would be .
and there 's an hour 's worth of our cups .
and there 's a day 's worth of our cups .
you can still see the little people way down there .
that 's as high as a 42-story building , and i put the statue of liberty in there as a scale reference .
speaking of justice , there 's another phenomenon going on in our culture that i find deeply troubling , and that is that america , right now , has the largest percentage of its population in prison of any country on earth .
one out of four people , one out of four humans in prison are americans , imprisoned in our country .
and i wanted to show the number .
the number is 2.3 million americans were incarcerated in 2005 .
and that 's gone up since then , but we do n't have the numbers yet .
so , i wanted to show 2.3 million prison uniforms , and in the actual print of this piece , each uniform is the size of a nickel on its edge .
they 're tiny . they 're barely visible as a piece of material , and to show 2.3 million of them required a canvas that was larger than any printer in the world would print .
and so i had to divide it up into multiple panels that are 10 feet tall by 25 feet wide .
this is that piece installed in a gallery in new york - those are my parents looking at the piece .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- every time i look at this piece , i always wonder if my mom 's whispering to my dad , " he finally folded his laundry . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i want to show you some pieces now that are about addiction .
and this particular one is about cigarette addiction .
i wanted to make a piece that shows the actual number of americans who die from cigarette smoking .
more than 400,000 people die in the united states every year from smoking cigarettes .
and so , this piece is made up of lots and lots of boxes of cigarettes .
and , as you slowly step back , you see that it 's a painting by van gogh , called " skull with cigarette . "
it 's a strange thing to think about , that on 9/11 , when that tragedy happened , 3,000 americans died .
and do you remember the response ?
it reverberated around the world , and will continue to reverberate through time .
it will be something that we talk about in 100 years .
and yet on that same day , 1,100 americans died from smoking .
and the day after that , another 1,100 americans died from smoking .
and every single day since then , 1,100 americans have died .
and today , 1,100 americans are dying from cigarette smoking .
and we are n't talking about it - we dismiss it .
the tobacco lobby , it 's too strong .
we just dismiss it out of our consciousness .
and knowing what we know about the destructive power of cigarettes , we continue to allow our children , our sons and daughters , to be in the presence of the influences that start them smoking .
and this is what the next piece is about .
this is just lots and lots of cigarettes : 65,000 cigarettes , which is equal to the number of teenagers who will start smoking this month , and every month in the u.s.
more than 700,000 children in the united states aged 18 and under begin smoking every year .
one more strange epidemic in the united states that i want to acquaint you with is this phenomenon of abuse and misuse of prescription drugs .
this is an image i 've made out of lots and lots of vicodin .
well , actually , i only had one vicodin that i scanned lots and lots of times .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and so , as you stand back , you see 213,000 vicodin pills , which is the number of hospital emergency room visits yearly in the united states , and anti-anxiety medications .
one-third of all drug overdoses in the u.s. - and that includes cocaine , heroin , alcohol , everything - one-third of drug overdoses are prescription medications .
a strange phenomenon .
this is a piece that i just recently completed about another tragic phenomenon . and that is the phenomenon , this growing obsession we have with breast augmentation surgery .
384,000 women , american women , last year went in for elective breast augmentation surgery .
it 's rapidly becoming the most popular high school graduation gift , given to young girls who are about to go off to college .
so , i made this image out of barbie dolls , and so , as you stand back you see this kind of floral pattern , and as you get all the way back , you see 32,000 barbie dolls , which represents the number of breast augmentation surgeries that are performed in the u.s. each month .
the vast majority of those are on women under the age of 21 .
and strangely enough , the only plastic surgery that is more popular than breast augmentation is liposuction , and most of that is being done by men .
now , i want to emphasize that these are just examples .
i 'm not holding these out as being the biggest issues .
they 're just examples .
and the reason that i do this , it 's because i have this fear that we are n't feeling enough as a culture right now .
there 's this kind of anesthesia in america at the moment .
we 've lost our sense of outrage , our anger and our grief about what 's going on in our culture right now , what 's going on in our country , the atrocities that are being committed in our names around the world .
they 've gone missing ; these feelings have gone missing .
our cultural joy , our national joy is nowhere to be seen .
and one of the causes of this , i think , is that as each of us attempts to build this new kind of worldview , this holoptical worldview , this holographic image that we 're all trying to create in our mind of the interconnection of things : the environmental footprints 1,000 miles away of the things that we buy ; the social consequences 10,000 miles away of the daily decisions that we make as consumers .
as we try to build this view , and try to educate ourselves about the enormity of our culture , the information that we have to work with is these gigantic numbers : numbers in the millions , in the hundreds of millions , in the billions and now in the trillions .
bush 's new budget is in the trillions , and these are numbers that our brain just does n't have the ability to comprehend .
we ca n't make meaning out of these enormous statistics .
and so that 's what i 'm trying to do with my work , is to take these numbers , these statistics from the raw language of data , and to translate them into a more universal visual language , that can be felt .
because my belief is , if we can feel these issues , if we can feel these things more deeply , then they 'll matter to us more than they do now .
and if we can find that , then we 'll be able to find , within each one of us , what it is that we need to find to face the big question , which is : how do we change ?
that , to me , is the big question that we face as a people right now : how do we change ? how do we change as a culture , and how do we each individually take responsibility for the one piece of the solution that we are in charge of , and that is our own behavior ?
my belief is that you do n't have to make yourself bad to look at these issues .
i 'm not pointing the finger at america in a blaming way .
i 'm simply saying , this is who we are right now .
and if there are things that we see that we do n't like about our culture , then we have a choice .
the degree of integrity that each of us can bring to the surface , to bring to this question , the depth of character that we can summon , as we show up for the question of how do we change - it 's already defining us as individuals and as a nation , and it will continue to do that , on into the future .
and it will profoundly affect the well-being , the quality of life of the billions of people who are going to inherit the results of our decisions .
i 'm not speaking abstractly about this , i 'm speaking - this is who we are in this room , right now , in this moment .
thank you and good afternoon .
-lrb- applause -rrb- do you worry about what is going to kill you ?
heart disease , cancer , a car accident ?
most of us worry about things we ca n't control , like war , terrorism , the tragic earthquake that just occurred in haiti .
but what really threatens humanity ?
a few years ago , professor vaclav smil tried to calculate the probability of sudden disasters large enough to change history .
he called these , " massively fatal discontinuities , " meaning that they could kill up to 100 million people in the next 50 years .
he looked at the odds of another world war , of a massive volcanic eruption , even of an asteroid hitting the earth .
but he placed the likelihood of one such event above all others at close to 100 percent , and that is a severe flu pandemic .
now , you might think of flu as just a really bad cold , but it can be a death sentence .
every year , 36,000 people in the united states die of seasonal flu .
in the developing world , the data is much sketchier but the death toll is almost certainly higher .
you know , the problem is if this virus occasionally mutates so dramatically , it essentially is a new virus and then we get a pandemic .
in 1918 , a new virus appeared that killed some 50 to 100 million people .
it spread like wildfire and some died within hours of developing symptoms .
are we safer today ?
well , we seem to have dodged the deadly pandemic this year that most of us feared , but this threat could reappear at any time .
the good news is that we 're at a moment in time when science , technology , globalization is converging to create an unprecedented possibility : the possibility to make history by preventing infectious diseases that still account for one-fifth of all deaths and countless misery on earth .
we can do this .
we 're already preventing millions of deaths with existing vaccines , and if we get these to more people , we can certainly save more lives .
but with new or better vaccines for malaria , tb , hiv , pneumonia , diarrhea , flu , we could end suffering that has been on the earth since the beginning of time .
so , i 'm here to trumpet vaccines for you .
but first , i have to explain why they 're important because vaccines , the power of them , is really like a whisper .
when they work , they can make history , but after a while you can barely hear them .
now , some of us are old enough to have a small , circular scar on our arms from an inoculation we received as children .
but when was the last time you worried about smallpox , a disease that killed half a billion people last century and no longer is with us ?
or polio ? how many of you remember the iron lung ?
we do n't see scenes like this anymore because of vaccines .
now , it 's interesting because there are 30-odd diseases that can be treated with vaccines now , but we 're still threatened by things like hiv and flu .
why is that ?
well , here 's the dirty little secret .
until recently , we have n't had to know exactly how a vaccine worked .
we knew they worked through old-fashioned trial and error .
you took a pathogen , you modified it , you injected it into a person or an animal and you saw what happened .
this worked well for most pathogens , somewhat well for crafty bugs like flu , but not at all for hiv , for which humans have no natural immunity .
so let 's explore how vaccines work .
they basically create a cache of weapons for your immune system which you can deploy when needed .
now , when you get a viral infection , what normally happens is it takes days or weeks for your body to fight back at full strength , and that might be too late .
when you 're pre-immunized , what happens is you have forces in your body pre-trained to recognize and defeat specific foes .
so that 's really how vaccines work .
now , let 's take a look at a video that we 're debuting at ted , for the first time , on how an effective hiv vaccine might work .
-lrb- music -rrb- narrator : a vaccine trains the body in advance how to recognize and neutralize a specific invader .
after hiv penetrates the body 's mucosal barriers , it infects immune cells to replicate .
the invader draws the attention of the immune system 's front-line troops .
dendritic cells , or macrophages , capture the virus and display pieces of it .
memory cells generated by the hiv vaccine are activated when they learn hiv is present from the front-line troops .
these memory cells immediately deploy the exact weapons needed .
memory b cells turn into plasma cells , which produce wave after wave of the specific antibodies that latch onto hiv to prevent it from infecting cells , while squadrons of killer t cells seek out and destroy cells that are already hiv infected .
the virus is defeated .
without a vaccine , these responses would have taken more than a week .
by that time , the battle against hiv would already have been lost .
seth berkley : really cool video , is n't it ?
the antibodies you just saw in this video , in action , are the ones that make most vaccines work .
so the real question then is : how do we ensure that your body makes the exact ones that we need to protect against flu and hiv ?
the principal challenge for both of these viruses is that they 're always changing .
so let 's take a look at the flu virus .
in this rendering of the flu virus , these different colored spikes are what it uses to infect you .
and also , what the antibodies use is a handle to essentially grab and neutralize the virus .
when these mutate , they change their shape , and the antibodies do n't know what they 're looking at anymore .
so that 's why every year you can catch a slightly different strain of flu .
it 's also why in the spring , we have to make a best guess at which three strains are going to prevail the next year , put those into a single vaccine and rush those into production for the fall .
even worse , the most common influenza - influenza a - also infects animals that live in close proximity to humans , and they can recombine in those particular animals .
in addition , wild aquatic birds carry all known strains of influenza .
so , you 've got this situation : in 2003 , we had an h5n1 virus that jumped from birds into humans in a few isolated cases with an apparent mortality rate of 70 percent .
now luckily , that particular virus , although very scary at the time , did not transmit from person to person very easily .
this year 's h1n1 threat was actually a human , avian , swine mixture that arose in mexico .
it was easily transmitted , but , luckily , was pretty mild .
and so , in a sense , our luck is holding out , but you know , another wild bird could fly over at anytime .
now let 's take a look at hiv .
as variable as flu is , hiv makes flu look like the rock of gibraltar .
the virus that causes aids is the trickiest pathogen scientists have ever confronted .
it mutates furiously , it has decoys to evade the immune system , it attacks the very cells that are trying to fight it and it quickly hides itself in your genome .
here 's a slide looking at the genetic variation of flu and comparing that to hiv , a much wilder target .
in the video a moment ago , you saw fleets of new viruses launching from infected cells .
now realize that in a recently infected person , there are millions of these ships ; each one is just slightly different .
finding a weapon that recognizes and sinks all of them makes the job that much harder .
now , in the 27 years since hiv was identified as the cause of aids , we 've developed more drugs to treat hiv than all other viruses put together .
these drugs are n't cures , but they represent a huge triumph of science because they take away the automatic death sentence at least for those who can access them .
the vaccine effort though is really quite different .
large companies moved away from it because they thought the science was so difficult and vaccines were seen as poor business .
many thought that it was just impossible to make an aids vaccine , but today , evidence tells us otherwise .
in september , we had surprising but exciting findings from a clinical trial that took place in thailand .
for the first time , we saw an aids vaccine work in humans - albeit , quite modestly - and that particular vaccine was made almost a decade ago .
newer concepts and early testing now show even greater promise in the best of our animal models .
but in the past few months , researchers have also isolated several new broadly neutralizing antibodies from the blood of an hiv infected individual .
now , what does this mean ?
we saw earlier that hiv is highly variable , that a broad neutralizing antibody latches on and disables multiple variations of the virus .
if you take these and you put them in the best of our monkey models , they provide full protection from infection .
in addition , these researchers found a new site on hiv where the antibodies can grab onto , and what 's so special about this spot is that it changes very little as the virus mutates .
it 's like , as many times as the virus changes its clothes , it 's still wearing the same socks , and now our job is to make sure we get the body to really hate those socks .
so what we 've got is a situation .
the thai results tell us we can make an aids vaccine , and the antibody findings tell us how we might do that .
this strategy , working backwards from an antibody to create a vaccine candidate , has never been done before in vaccine research .
it 's called retro-vaccinology , and its implications extend way beyond that of just hiv .
so think of it this way .
we 've got these new antibodies we 've identified , and we know that they latch onto many , many variations of the virus .
we know that they have to latch onto a specific part , so if we can figure out the precise structure of that part , present that through a vaccine , what we hope is we can prompt your immune system to make these matching antibodies .
and that would create a universal hiv vaccine .
now , it sounds easier than it is because the structure actually looks more like this blue antibody diagram attached to its yellow binding site , and as you can imagine , these three-dimensional structures are much harder to work on .
and if you guys have ideas to help us solve this , we 'd love to hear about it .
but , you know , the research that has occurred from hiv now has really helped with innovation with other diseases .
so for instance , a biotechnology company has now found broadly neutralizing antibodies to influenza , as well as a new antibody target on the flu virus .
they 're currently making a cocktail - an antibody cocktail - that can be used to treat severe , overwhelming cases of flu .
in the longer term , what they can do is use these tools of retro-vaccinology to make a preventive flu vaccine .
now , retro-vaccinology is just one technique within the ambit of so-called rational vaccine design .
let me give you another example .
we talked about before the h and n spikes on the surface of the flu virus .
notice these other , smaller protuberances .
these are largely hidden from the immune system .
now it turns out that these spots also do n't change much when the virus mutates .
if you can cripple these with specific antibodies , you could cripple all versions of the flu .
so far , animal tests indicate that such a vaccine could prevent severe disease , although you might get a mild case .
so if this works in humans , what we 're talking about is a universal flu vaccine , one that does n't need to change every year and would remove the threat of death .
we really could think of flu , then , as just a bad cold .
of course , the best vaccine imaginable is only valuable to the extent we get it to everyone who needs it .
so to do that , we have to combine smart vaccine design with smart production methods and , of course , smart delivery methods .
so i want you to think back a few months ago .
in june , the world health organization declared the first global flu pandemic in 41 years .
the u.s. government promised 150 million doses of vaccine by october 15th for the flu peak .
vaccines were promised to developing countries .
hundreds of millions of dollars were spent and flowed to accelerating vaccine manufacturing .
so what happened ?
well , we first figured out how to make flu vaccines , how to produce them , in the early 1940s .
it was a slow , cumbersome process that depended on chicken eggs , millions of living chicken eggs .
viruses only grow in living things , and so it turned out that , for flu , chicken eggs worked really well .
for most strains , you could get one to two doses of vaccine per egg .
luckily for us , we live in an era of breathtaking biomedical advances .
so today , we get our flu vaccines from ...
chicken eggs , -lrb- laughter -rrb- hundreds of millions of chicken eggs .
almost nothing has changed .
the system is reliable but the problem is you never know how well a strain is going to grow .
this year 's swine flu strain grew very poorly in early production : basically .6 doses per egg .
so , here 's an alarming thought .
what if that wild bird flies by again ?
you could see an avian strain that would infect the poultry flocks , and then we would have no eggs for our vaccines .
so , dan -lsb- barber -rsb- , if you want billions of chicken pellets for your fish farm , i know where to get them .
so right now , the world can produce about 350 million doses of flu vaccine for the three strains , and we can up that to about 1.2 billion doses if we want to target a single variant like swine flu .
but this assumes that our factories are humming because , in 2004 , the u.s. supply was cut in half by contamination at one single plant .
and the process still takes more than half a year .
so are we better prepared than we were in 1918 ?
well , with the new technologies emerging now , i hope we can say definitively , " yes . "
imagine we could produce enough flu vaccine for everyone in the entire world for less than half of what we 're currently spending now in the united states .
with a range of new technologies , we could .
here 's an example : a company i 'm engaged with has found a specific piece of the h spike of flu that sparks the immune system .
if you lop this off and attach it to the tail of a different bacterium , which creates a vigorous immune response , they 've created a very powerful flu fighter .
this vaccine is so small it can be grown in a common bacteria , e. coli .
now , as you know , bacteria reproduce quickly - it 's like making yogurt - and so we could produce enough swine origin flu for the entire world in a few factories , in a few weeks , with no eggs , for a fraction of the cost of current methods .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so here 's a comparison of several of these new vaccine technologies .
and , aside from the radically increased production and huge cost savings - for example , the e. coli method i just talked about - look at the time saved : this would be lives saved .
the developing world , mostly left out of the current response , sees the potential of these alternate technologies and they 're leapfrogging the west .
india , mexico and others are already making experimental flu vaccines , and they may be the first place we see these vaccines in use .
because these technologies are so efficient and relatively cheap , billions of people can have access to lifesaving vaccines if we can figure out how to deliver them .
now think of where this leads us .
new infectious diseases appear or reappear every few years .
some day , perhaps soon , we 'll have a virus that is going to threaten all of us .
will we be quick enough to react before millions die ?
luckily , this year 's flu was relatively mild .
i say , " luckily " in part because virtually no one in the developing world was vaccinated .
so if we have the political and financial foresight to sustain our investments , we will master these and new tools of vaccinology , and with these tools we can produce enough vaccine for everyone at low cost and ensure healthy productive lives .
no longer must flu have to kill half a million people a year .
no longer does aids need to kill two million a year .
no longer do the poor and vulnerable need to be threatened by infectious diseases , or indeed , anybody .
instead of having vaclav smil 's " massively fatal discontinuity " of life , we can ensure the continuity of life .
what the world needs now are these new vaccines , and we can make it happen .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
so , the science is changing .
in your mind , seth - i mean , you must dream about this - what is the kind of time scale on , let 's start with hiv , for a game-changing vaccine that 's actually out there and usable ?
sb : the game change can come at any time , because the problem we have now is we 've shown we can get a vaccine to work in humans ; we just need a better one .
and with these types of antibodies , we know humans can make them .
so , if we can figure out how to do that , then we have the vaccine , and what 's interesting is there already is some evidence that we 're beginning to crack that problem .
so , the challenge is full speed ahead .
ca : in your gut , do you think it 's probably going to be at least another five years ?
sb : you know , everybody says it 's 10 years , but it 's been 10 years every 10 years .
so i hate to put a timeline on scientific innovation , but the investments that have occurred are now paying dividends .
ca : and that 's the same with universal flu vaccine , the same kind of thing ?
sb : i think flu is different . i think what happened with flu is we 've got a bunch - i just showed some of this - a bunch of really cool and useful technologies that are ready to go now .
they look good . the problem has been that , what we did is we invested in traditional technologies because that 's what we were comfortable with .
you also can use adjuvants , which are chemicals you mix .
that 's what europe is doing , so we could have diluted out our supply of flu and made more available , but , going back to what michael specter said , the anti-vaccine crowd did n't really want that to happen .
ca : and malaria 's even further behind ?
sb : no , malaria , there is a candidate that actually showed efficacy in an earlier trial and is currently in phase three trials now .
it probably is n't the perfect vaccine , but it 's moving along .
ca : seth , most of us do work where every month , we produce something ; we get that kind of gratification .
you 've been slaving away at this for more than a decade , and i salute you and your colleagues for what you do .
the world needs people like you . thank you .
sb : thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i think the future of this planet depends on humans , not technology , and we already have the knowledge - we 're kind of at the endgame with knowledge .
but we 're nowhere near the endgame when it comes to our perception .
we still have one foot in the dark ages .
and when you listen to some of the presentations here - and the extraordinary range of human capability , our understandings - and then you contrast it with the fact we still call this planet , " earth : " it 's pretty extraordinary - we have one foot in the dark ages .
just quickly : aristotle , his thing was , " it 's not flat , stupid , it 's round . "
galileo - he had the inquisition , so he had to be a little bit more polite - his was , " it 's not in the middle , you know . "
and hawkes : " it 's not earth , stupid , it 's ocean . "
this is an ocean planet .
t.s. eliot really said it for me - and this should give you goose bumps : " we shall not cease from exploration and the end of our exploring shall be to return where we started and know the place for the first time . "
and the next lines are , " through the unknown remembered gate , where the last of earth discovered is that which is the beginning . "
so i have one message .
it seems to me that we 're all pointed in the wrong direction .
for the rocketeers in the audience : i love what you 're doing , i admire the guts , i admire the courage - but your rockets are pointed in the wrong goddamn direction .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and it 's all a question of perspective .
let me try and tell you - i do n't mean to insult you , but look , if i - and i 'm not doing this for real because it would be an insult , so i 'm going to pretend , and it softens the blow - i 'm going to tell you what you 're thinking .
if i held up a square that was one foot square and the color of earth , and i held up another square that was the root two square - so it 's 1.5 times bigger - and was the color of the oceans ; and i said , what is the relative value of these two things ?
well , it 's the relative importance .
you would say - yeah , yeah , yeah , we all know this ; water covers twice the area of the planet than dry land .
but it 's a question of perception , and if that 's what you 're thinking , if that 's what you think i mean when i say , " this is an ocean planet stupidly called ' earth . " ' if you think that that 's the relative importance , two to one , you 're wrong by a factor of ten .
now , you 're not as thick as two short planks , but you sound like it when you say " earth , " because that demonstration , if i turned around this way - that earth plane would be as thin as paper .
it 's a thin film , two-dimensional existence .
the ocean representation would have a depth to it .
and if you hefted those two things you might find that the relative scale of those is 20 to 1 .
it turns out that something more than 94 percent of life on earth is aquatic .
that means that us terrestrials occupy a minority .
the problem we have in believing that is - you just have to give up this notion that this earth was created for us .
because it 's a problem we have .
if this is an ocean planet and we only have a small minority of this planet , it just interferes with a lot of what humanity thinks .
okay . let me criticize this thing .
i 'm not talking about james cameron - although i could , but i wo n't .
you really do have to go and see his latest film , " aliens of the deep . " it 's incredible .
it features two of these deep rovers , and i can criticize them because these sweet things are mine .
this , i think , represents one of the most beautiful classic submersibles built .
if you look at that sub , you 'll see a sphere .
this is an acryclic sphere .
it generates all of the buoyancy , all of the payload for the craft , and the batteries are down here hanging underneath , exactly like a balloon .
this is the envelope , and this is the gondola , the payload .
also coming up later for criticism are these massive lights .
and this one actually carries two great manipulators .
it actually is a very good working sub - that 's what it was designed for .
the problem with it is - and the reason i will never build another one like it - is that this is a product of two-dimensional thinking .
it 's what we humans do when we go in the ocean as engineers ; we take all our terrestrial hang-ups , all our constraints - importantly , these two-dimensional constraints that we have , and they 're so constrained we do n't even understand it - and we take them underwater .
you notice that jim cameron is sitting in a seat .
a seat works in a two-dimensional world , where gravity blasts down on that seat , ok ?
and in a two-dimensional world , we do know about the third dimension but we do n't use it because to go up requires an awful lot of energy against gravity .
and then our mothers tell us , " careful you do n't fall down " - because you 'll fall over .
now , go into the real atmosphere of this planet .
this planet has an inner atmosphere of water ; it 's its inner atmosphere . it has two atmospheres - a lesser , outer gaseous atmosphere , a lighter one .
most of life on earth is in that inner atmosphere .
and that life enjoys a three-dimensional existence , which is alien to us .
fish do not sit in seats .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- they do n't . their mothers do n't say to little baby fish , " careful you do n't fall over . "
they do n't fall over . they do n't fall .
they live in a three-dimensional world where there is no difference in energy between going this way , that way , that way or that way .
it 's truly a three-dimensional space .
and we 're only just beginning to grasp it .
i do n't know of any other submersible , or even remote , that just takes advantage that this is a three-dimensional space .
this is the way we should be going into the oceans .
this is a three-dimensional machine .
what we need to do is go down into the ocean with the freedom of the animals , and move in this three-dimensional space .
ok , this is good stuff .
this is man 's first attempt at flying underwater .
right now , i 'm just coming down on this gorgeous , big , giant manta ray .
she has twice the wingspan that i do .
there i 'm coming ; she sees me .
and just notice how she rolls under and turns ; she does n't sit there and try and blow air into a tank and kind of flow up or sink down - she just rolls .
and the craft that i 'm in - this has n't been shown before .
chris asked us to show stuff that has n't been shown before .
i wanted you to notice that she actually turned to come back up .
there i am ; i see her coming back , coming up underneath me .
i put reverse thrust and i try and pull gently down .
i 'm trying to do everything very gently .
we spent about three hours together and she 's beginning to trust me .
and this ballet is controlled by this lady here .
she gets about that close and then she pulls away .
so now i try and go after her , but i 'm practicing flying .
this is the first flying machine . this was the first prototype .
this was a fly by wire . it has wings .
there 're no silly buoyancy tanks - it 's permanently , positively buoyant .
and then by moving through the water it 's able to take that control .
now , look at that ; look , it 's - she just blew me away .
she just rolled right away from underneath .
really that 's the only real dive i 've ever made in this machine .
it took 10 years to build .
but this lady here taught me , hah , taught me so much .
we just learned so much in three hours in the water there .
i just had to go and build another machine .
but look here . instead of blowing tanks and coming up slowly without thinking about it , it 's a little bit of back pressure , and that sub just comes straight back up out of the water .
this is an internal sony camera . thank you , sony .
i do n't really look that ugly , but the camera is so close that it 's just distorted .
now , there she goes , right overhead .
this is a wide-angle camera .
she 's just a few inches off the top of my head .
" aah , ha , oh , he just crossed over the top of my head about , oh , i do n't know , just so close . "
i come back up , not for air .
" this is an incredible encounter with a manta . i 'm speechless .
we 've been just feet apart . i 'm going back down now . "
okay , can we cut that ? lights back up please .
-lrb- applause -rrb- trying to fly and keep up with that animal - it was n't the lack of maneuverability that we had .
it was the fact she was going so slow .
i actually designed that to move faster through the water because i thought that was the thing that we needed to do : to move fast and get range .
but after that encounter i really did want to go back with that animal and dance .
she wanted to dance .
and so what we needed to do was increase the wing area so that we just had more grip , develop higher forces .
so the sub that was outside last year - this is the one .
you see the larger wing area here .
also , clearly , it was such a powerful thing , we wanted to try and bring other people but we could n't figure out how to do it .
so we opened the world 's first flight school .
the rational for the world 's first flight school goes something like : when the coastguards come up to me and say - they used to leave us alone when we were diving these goofy little spherical things , but when we started flying around in underwater jet fighters they got a little nervous - they would come up and say , " do you have a license for that ? "
and then i 'd put my sunglasses on , the beard that would all sprout out , and i would say , " i do n't need no stinking license . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " i write these stinking license , " which i do .
so bob gelfond 's around here - but somebody in the audience here has license number 20 .
they 're one of the first subsea aviators .
so we 've run two flight schools .
where the hell that goes , i do n't know , but it 's a lot of fun .
what comes next in 30 seconds ? i ca n't tell you .
but the patent for underwater flight - karen and i , we were looking at it , some business partners wanted us to patent it - we were n't sure about that .
we 've decided we 're just going to let that go .
it just seems wrong to try and patent - -lrb- applause -rrb- - the freedom for underwater flight .
so anybody who wants to copy us and come and join us , go for it .
the other thing is that we 've got much lower costs .
we developed some other technology called spider optics , and craig ventner asked me to make an announcement here this morning : we 're going to be building a beautiful , little , small version of this - unmanned , super deep - for his boat to go and get back some deep sea dna stuff .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
i 'm talking to you about the worst form of human rights violation , the third-largest organized crime , a $ 10 billion industry .
i 'm talking to you about modern-day slavery .
i 'd like to tell you the story of these three children , pranitha , shaheen and anjali .
pranitha 's mother was a woman in prostitution , a prostituted person .
she got infected with hiv , and towards the end of her life , when she was in the final stages of aids , she could not prostitute , so she sold four-year-old pranitha to a broker .
by the time we got the information , we reached there , pranitha was already raped by three men .
shaheen 's background i do n't even know .
we found her in a railway track , raped by many , many men , i do n't know many .
but the indications of that on her body was that her intestine was outside her body .
and when we took her to the hospital she needed 32 stitches to put back her intestine into her body .
we still do n't know who her parents are , who she is .
all that we know that hundreds of men had used her brutally .
anjali 's father , a drunkard , sold his child for pornography .
you 're seeing here images of three years , four-year-olds , and five-year-old children who have been trafficked for commercial sexual exploitation .
in this country , and across the globe , hundreds and thousands of children , as young as three , as young as four , are sold into sexual slavery .
but that 's not the only purpose that human beings are sold for .
they are sold in the name of adoption .
they are sold in the name of organ trade .
camel jockeying , anything , everything .
i work on the issue of commercial sexual exploitation .
and i tell you stories from there .
my own journey to work with these children started as a teenager .
i was 15 when i was gang-raped by eight men .
i do n't remember the rape part of it so much as much as the anger part of it .
yes , there were eight men who defiled me , raped me , but that did n't go into my consciousness .
i never felt like a victim , then or now .
but what lingered from then till now - i am 40 today - is this huge outrageous anger .
two years , i was ostracized , i was stigmatized , i was isolated , because i was a victim .
and that 's what we do to all traffic survivors .
we , as a society , we have phds in victimizing a victim .
right from the age of 15 , when i started looking around me , i started seeing hundreds and thousands of women and children who are left in sexual slavery-like practices , but have absolutely no respite , because we do n't allow them to come in .
where does their journey begin ?
most of them come from very optionless families , not just poor .
you have even the middle class sometimes getting trafficked .
i had this i.s. officer 's daughter , who is 14 years old , studying in ninth standard , who was raped chatting with one individual , and ran away from home because she wanted to become a heroine , who was trafficked .
i have hundreds and thousands of stories of very very well-to-do families , and children from well-to-do families , who are getting trafficked .
these people are deceived , forced .
99.9 percent of them resist being inducted into prostitution .
some pay the price for it .
they 're killed ; we do n't even hear about them .
they are voiceless , -lsb- unclear -rsb- , nameless people .
but the rest , who succumb into it , go through everyday torture .
because the men who come to them are not men who want to make you your girlfriends , or who want to have a family with you .
these are men who buy you for an hour , for a day , and use you , throw you .
each of the girls that i have rescued - i have rescued more than 3,200 girls - each of them tell me one story in common ...
-lrb- applause -rrb- one story about one man , at least , putting chili powder in her vagina , one man taking a cigarette and burning her , one man whipping her .
we are living among those men : they 're our brothers , fathers , uncles , cousins , all around us .
and we are silent about them .
we think it is easy money .
we think it is shortcut .
we think the person likes to do what she 's doing .
but the extra bonuses that she gets is various infections , sexually transmitted infections , hiv , aids , syphilis , gonorrhea , you name it , substance abuse , drugs , everything under the sun .
and one day she gives up on you and me , because we have no options for her .
and therefore she starts normalizing this exploitation .
she believes , " yes , this is it , this is what my destiny is about . "
and this is normal , to get raped by 100 men a day .
and it 's abnormal to live in a shelter .
it 's abnormal to get rehabilitated .
it 's in that context that i work .
it 's in that context that i rescue children .
i 've rescued children as young as three years , and i 've rescued women as old as 40 years .
when i rescued them , one of the biggest challenges i had was where do i begin .
because i had lots of them who were already hiv infected .
one third of the people i rescue are hiv positive .
and therefore my challenge was to understand how can i get out the power from this pain .
and for me , i was my greatest experience .
understanding my own self , understanding my own pain , my own isolation , was my greatest teacher .
because what we did with these girls is to understand their potential .
you see a girl here who is trained as a welder .
she works for a very big company , a workshop in hyderabad , making furnitures .
she earns around 12,000 rupees .
she is an illiterate girl , trained , skilled as a welder .
why welding and why not computers ?
we felt , one of the things that these girls had is immense amount of courage .
they did not have any pardas inside their body , hijabs inside themselves ; they 've crossed the barrier of it .
and therefore they could fight in a male-dominated world , very easily , and not feel very shy about it .
we have trained girls as carpenters , as masons , as security guards , as cab drivers .
and each one of them are excelling in their chosen field , gaining confidence , restoring dignity , and building hopes in their own lives .
these girls are also working in big construction companies like ram-ki construction , as masons , full-time masons .
what has been my challenge ?
my challenge has not been the traffickers who beat me up .
i 've been beaten up more than 14 times in my life .
i ca n't hear from my right ear .
i 've lost a staff of mine who was murdered while on a rescue .
my biggest challenge is society .
it 's you and me .
my biggest challenge is your blocks to accept these victims as our own .
a very supportive friend of mine , a well-wisher of mine , used to give me every month , 2,000 rupees for vegetables .
when her mother fell sick she said , " sunitha , you have so much of contacts .
can you get somebody in my house to work , so that she can look after my mother ? "
and there is a long pause .
and then she says , " not one of our girls . "
it 's very fashionable to talk about human trafficking , in this fantastic a-c hall .
it 's very nice for discussion , discourse , making films and everything .
but it is not nice to bring them to our homes .
it 's not nice to give them employment in our factories , our companies .
it 's not nice for our children to study with their children .
there it ends .
that 's my biggest challenge .
if i 'm here today , i 'm here not only as sunitha krishnan .
i 'm here as a voice of the victims and survivors of human trafficking .
they need your compassion .
they need your empathy .
they need , much more than anything else , your acceptance .
many times when i talk to people , i keep telling them one thing : do n't tell me hundred ways how you can not respond to this problem .
can you ply your mind for that one way that you can respond to the problem ?
and that 's what i 'm here for , asking for your support , demanding for your support , requesting for your support .
can you break your culture of silence ?
can you speak to at least two persons about this story ?
tell them this story . convince them to tell the story to another two persons .
i 'm not asking you all to become mahatma gandhis or martin luther kings , or medha patkars , or something like that .
i 'm asking you , in your limited world , can you open your minds ? can you open your hearts ?
can you just encompass these people too ?
because they are also a part of us .
they are also part of this world .
i 'm asking you , for these children , whose faces you see , they 're no more .
they died of aids last year .
i 'm asking you to help them , accept as human beings - not as philanthropy , not as charity , but as human beings who deserve all our support .
i 'm asking you this because no child , no human being , deserves what these children have gone through .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- my topic is economic growth in china and india .
and the question i want to explore with you is whether or not democracy has helped or has hindered economic growth .
you may say this is not fair , because i 'm selecting two countries to make a case against democracy .
actually , exactly the opposite is what i 'm going to do .
i 'm going to use these two countries to make an economic argument for democracy , rather than against democracy .
the first question there is why china has grown so much faster than india .
over the last 30 years , in terms of the gdp growth rates , china has grown at twice the rate of india .
in the last five years , the two countries have begun to converge somewhat in economic growth .
but over the last 30 years , china undoubtedly has done much better than india .
one simple answer is china has shanghai and india has mumbai .
look at the skyline of shanghai .
this is the pudong area .
the picture on india is the dharavi slum of mumbai in india .
the idea there behind these two pictures is that the chinese government can act above rule of law .
it can plan for the long-term benefits of the country and in the process , evict millions of people - that 's just a small technical issue .
whereas in india , you can not do that , because you have to listen to the public .
you 're being constrained by the public 's opinion .
even prime minister manmohan singh agrees with that view .
in an interview printed in the financial press of india , he said that he wants to make mumbai another shanghai .
this is an oxford-trained economist steeped in humanistic values , and yet he agrees with the high-pressure tactics of shanghai .
so let me call it the shanghai model of economic growth , that emphasizes the following features for promoting economic development : infrastructures , airports , highways , bridges , things like that .
and you need a strong government to do that , because you can not respect private property rights .
you can not be constrained by the public 's opinion .
you need also state ownership , especially of land assets , in order to build and roll out infrastructures very quickly .
the implication of that model is that democracy is a hindrance for economic growth , rather than a facilitator of economic growth .
here 's the key question .
just how important are infrastructures for economic growth ?
this is a key issue .
if you believe that infrastructures are very important for economic growth , then you would argue a strong government is necessary to promote growth .
if you believe that infrastructures are not as important as many people believe , then you will put less emphasis on strong government .
so to illustrate that question , let me give you two countries .
and for the sake of brevity , i 'll call one country country 1 and the other country country 2 .
country 1 has a systematic advantage over country 2 in infrastructures .
country 1 has more telephones , and country 1 has a longer system of railways .
so if i were to ask you , " which is china and which is india , and which country has grown faster ? "
if you believe in the infrastructure view , then you will say , " country 1 must be china .
they must have done better , in terms of economic growth .
and country 2 is possibly india . "
actually the country with more telephones is the soviet union , and the data referred to 1989 .
after the country reported very impressive statistics on telephones , the country collapsed .
that 's not too good .
the picture there is khrushchev .
i know that in 1989 he no longer ruled the soviet union , but that 's the best picture that i can find .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- telephones , infrastructures do not guarantee you economic growth .
country 2 , that has fewer telephones , is china .
since 1989 , the country has performed at a double-digit rate if you know nothing about china and the soviet union other than the fact about their telephones , you would have made a poor prediction about their economic growth in the next two decades .
country 1 , that has a longer system of railways , is actually india .
and country 2 is china .
this is a very little known fact about the two countries .
yes , today china has a huge infrastructure advantage over india .
but for many years , until the late 1990s , china had an infrastructure disadvantage vis-a-vis india .
in developing countries , the most common mode of transportation is the railways , and the british built a lot of railways in india .
india is the smaller of the two countries , and yet it had a longer system of railways until the late 1990s .
so clearly , infrastructure does n't explain why china did better before the late 1990s , as compared with india .
in fact , if you look at the evidence worldwide , the evidence is more supportive of the view that the infrastructure are actually the result of economic growth .
the economy grows , government accumulates more resources , and the government can invest in infrastructure - rather than infrastructure being a cause for economic growth .
and this is clearly the story of the chinese economic growth .
let me look at this question more directly .
is democracy bad for economic growth ?
now let 's turn to two countries , country a and country b.
country a , in 1990 , had about $ 300 per capita gdp as compared with country b , which had $ 460 in per capita gdp .
by 2008 , country a has surpassed country b with $ 700 per capita gdp as compared with $ 650 per capita gdp .
both countries are in asia .
if i were to ask you , " which are the two asian countries ?
and which one is a democracy ? "
you may argue , " well , maybe country a is china and country b is india . "
in fact , country a is democratic india , and country b is pakistan - the country that has a long period of military rule .
and it 's very common that we compare india with china .
that 's because the two countries have about the same population size .
but the more natural comparison is actually between india and pakistan .
those two countries are geographically similar .
they have a complicated , but shared common history .
by that comparison , democracy looks very , very good in terms of economic growth .
so why do economists fall in love with authoritarian governments ?
one reason is the east asian model .
in east asia , we have had successful economic growth stories such as korea , taiwan , hong kong and singapore .
some of these economies were ruled by authoritarian governments in the 60s and 70s and 1980s .
the problem with that view is like asking all the winners of lotteries , " have you won the lottery ? "
and they all tell you , " yes , we have won the lottery . "
and then you draw the conclusion the odds of winning the lottery are 100 percent .
the reason is you never go and bother to ask the losers who also purchased lottery tickets and did n't end up winning the prize .
for each of these successful authoritarian governments in east asia , there 's a matched failure .
korea succeeded , north korea did n't .
taiwan succeeded , china under mao zedong did n't .
burma did n't succeed .
the philippines did n't succeed .
if you look at the statistical evidence worldwide , there 's really no support for the idea that authoritarian governments hold a systematic edge over democracies in terms of economic growth .
so the east asian model has this massive selection bias - it is known as selecting on a dependent variable , something we always tell our students to avoid .
so exactly why did china grow so much faster ?
i will take you to the cultural revolution , when china went mad , and compare that country 's performance with india under indira gandhi .
the question there is : which country did better , china or india ?
china was during the cultural revolution .
it turns out even during the cultural revolution , china out-perfomed india in terms of gdp growth by an average of about 2.2 percent every year in terms of per capita gdp .
so that 's when china was mad .
the whole country went mad .
it must mean that the country had something so advantageous to itself in terms of economic growth to overcome the negative effects of the cultural revolution .
the advantage the country had was human capital - nothing else but human capital .
this is the world development index indicator data in the early 1990s .
and this is the earliest data that i can find .
the adult literacy rate in china is 77 percent as compared with 48 percent in india .
the contrast in literacy rates is especially sharp between chinese women and indian women .
i have n't told you about the definition of literacy .
in china , the definition of literacy is the ability to read and write 1,500 chinese characters .
in india , the definition of literacy , operating definition of literacy , is the ability , the grand ability , to write your own name in whatever language you happen to speak .
the gap between the two countries in terms of literacy is much more substantial than the data here indicated .
if you go to other sources of data such as human development index , that data series , go back to the early 1970s , you see exactly the same contrast .
china held a huge advantage in terms of human capital vis-a-vis india .
life expectancies : as early as 1965 , china had a huge advantage in life expectancy .
on average , as a chinese in 1965 , you lived 10 years more than an average indian .
so if you have a choice between being a chinese and being an indian , you would want to become a chinese in order to live 10 years longer .
if you made that decision in 1965 , the down side of that is the next year we have the cultural revolution .
so you have to always think carefully about these decisions .
if you can not chose your nationality , then you will want to become an indian man .
because , as an indian man , you have about two years of life expectancy advantage vis-a-vis indian women .
this is an extremely strange fact .
it 's very rare among countries to have this kind of pattern .
it shows the systematic discrimination and biases in the indian society against women .
the good news is , by 2006 , india has closed the gap between men and women in terms of life expectancy .
today , indian women have a sizable life expectancy edge over indian men .
so india is reverting to the normal .
but india still has a lot of work to do in terms of gender equality .
these are the two pictures taken of garment factories in guangdong province and garment factories in india .
in china , it 's all women .
60 to 80 percent of the workforce in china is women in the coastal part of the country , whereas in india , it 's all men .
financial times printed this picture of an indian textile factory with the title , " india poised to overtake china in textile . "
by looking at these two pictures , i say no , it wo n't overtake china for a while .
if you look at other east asian countries , women there play a hugely important role in terms of economic take-off - in terms of creating the manufacturing miracle associated with east asia .
india still has a long way to go to catch up with china .
then the issue is , what about the chinese political system ?
you talk about human capital , you talk about education and public health .
what about the political system ?
is n't it true that the one-party political system has facilitated economic growth in china ?
actually , the answer is more nuanced and subtle than that .
it depends on a distinction that you draw between statics of the political system and the dynamics of the political system .
statically , china is a one-party system , authoritarian - there 's no question about it .
dynamically , it has changed over time to become less authoritarian and more democratic .
when you explain change - for example , economic growth ; economic growth is about change - when you explain change , you use other things that have changed to explain change , rather than using the constant to explain change .
sometimes a fixed effect can explain change , but a fixed effect only explains changes in interaction with the things that change .
in terms of the political changes , they have introduced village elections .
they have increased the security of proprietors .
and they have increased the security with long-term land leases .
there are also financial reforms in rural china .
there is also a rural entrepreneurial revolution in china .
to me , the pace of political changes is too slow , too gradual .
and my own view is the country is going to face some substantial challenges , because they have not moved further and faster on political reforms .
but nevertheless , the system has moved in a more liberal direction , moved in a more democratic direction .
you can apply exactly the same dynamic perspective on india .
in fact , when india was growing at a hindu rate of growth - about one percent , two percent a year - that was when india was least democratic .
indira gandhi declared emergency rule in 1975 .
the indian government owned and operated all the tv stations .
a little-known fact about india in the 1990s is that the country not only has undertaken economic reforms , the country has also undertaken political reforms by introducing village self-rule , privatization of media and introducing freedom of information acts .
so the dynamic perspective fits both with china and in india in terms of the direction .
why do many people believe that india is still a growth disaster ?
one reason is they are always comparing india with china .
but china is a superstar in terms of economic growth .
if you are a nba player and you are always being compared to michael jordan , you 're going to look not so impressive .
but that does n't mean that you 're a bad basketball player .
comparing with a superstar is the wrong benchmark .
in fact , if you compare india with the average developing country , even before the more recent period of acceleration of indian growth - now india is growing between eight and nine percent - even before this period , india was ranked fourth in terms of economic growth among emerging economies .
this is a very impressive record indeed .
let 's think about the future : the dragon vis-a-vis the elephant .
which country has the growth momentum ?
china , i believe , still has some of the excellent raw fundamentals - mostly the social capital , the public health , the sense of egalitarianism that you do n't find in india .
but i believe that india has the momentum .
it has the improving fundamentals .
the government has invested in basic education , has invested in basic health .
i believe the government should do more , but nevertheless , the direction it is moving in is the right direction .
india has the right institutional conditions for economic growth , whereas china is still struggling with political reforms .
i believe that the political reforms are a must for china to maintain its growth .
and it 's very important to have political reforms , to have widely shared benefits of economic growth .
i do n't know whether that 's going to happen or not , but i 'm an optimist .
hopefully , five years from now , i 'm going to report to tedglobal that political reforms will happen in china .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- over the last 13 years - one , three , 13 years - i 've been part of an exceptional team at insightec in israel and partners around the world for taking this idea , this concept , noninvasive surgery , from the research lab to routine clinical use .
and this is what i 'll tell you about .
13 years - for some of you , you can empathize with that number .
for me , today , on this date , it 's like a second bar mitzvah experience .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so this dream is really enabled by the convergence of two known technologies .
one is the focused ultrasound , and the other one is the vision-enabled magnetic resonance imaging .
so let 's first talk about focused ultrasound .
and i hold in my hand a tissue-mimicking phantom .
it is made out of silicon .
it is transparent , made just for you .
so you see , it 's all intact , completely transparent .
i 'll take you now to the acoustic lab .
you see the phantom within the aquarium .
this is a setup i put in a physics lab .
on the right-hand side , you see an ultrasonic transducer .
so the ultrasonic transducer emits basically an ultrasonic beam that focuses inside the phantom .
okay , when you hear the click , this is when the energy starts to emit and you see a little lesion form inside the phantom .
okay , so everything around it is whole and intact .
it 's just a lesion formed inside .
so think about , this is in your brain .
we need to reach a target inside the brain .
we can do it without harming any tissue .
so this is , i think , the first kosher hippocratic surgical system .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- okay , so let 's talk a little bit about ultrasound , the force of ultrasound .
you know all about imaging , right , ultrasound imaging .
and you know also about lithotripsy - breaking kidney stones .
but ultrasound can be shaped to be anything in between , because it 's a mechanical force .
basically , it 's a force acting on a tissue that it transverses .
so you can change the intensity , the frequency , the duration , the pulse shape of the ultrasound to create anything from an airbrush to a hammer .
and i am going to show you multiple applications in the medical field that can be enabled just by focusing , physically focusing .
so this idea of harnessing focused ultrasound to treat lesions in the brain is not new at all .
when i was born , this idea was already conceived by pioneers such as the fry brothers and lars leksell , who is know actually as the inventor of the gammaknife .
but you may not know that he tried to perform lobotomies in the brain , noninvasively , with focused ultrasound in the ' 50s .
he failed , so he then invented the gammaknife .
and it makes you ponder why those pioneers failed .
and there was something fundamental that they were missing .
they were missing the vision .
it was n't until the invention of the mr and really the integration of mr with focused ultrasound that we could get the feedback - both the anatomical and the physiological in order to have a completely noninvasive , closed-loop surgical procedure .
so this is how it looks , you know , the operating room of the future today .
this is an mr suite with a focused ultrasound system .
and i will give you several examples .
so the first one is in the brain .
one of the neurological conditions that can be treated with focused ultrasound are movement disorders , like parkinson 's or essential tremor .
what is typical to those conditions , to essential tremor for example , is inability to drink or eat cereal or soup without spilling everything all over you , or write legibly so people can understand it , and be really independent in your life without the help of others .
so i 'd like you to meet john .
john is a retired professor of history from virginia .
so he suffered from essential tremor for many years .
and medication did n't help him anymore .
and many of those patients refused to undergo surgery to have people cut into their brain .
and about four or five months ago , he underwent an experimental procedure .
it is approved under an fdaide at the university of virginia in charlottesville using focused ultrasound to ablate a point in his thalamus .
and this is his handwriting .
" on june 20th , " if you can read it , " 2011 . "
this is his handwriting on the morning of the treatment before going into the mr so now i 'll take you through -lsb- what -rsb- a typical procedure like that looks like , -lsb- what -rsb- noninvasive surgery looks like .
so we put the patient on the mr table .
we attach a transducer , in this case , to the brain , but if it will be a different organ , it will be a different transducer attached to the patient .
and the physician will then take a regular mr scan .
and the objective of that ?
i do n't have a pointer here , but you see the green , sort of rectangle or trapezoid ?
this is the sort of general area of the treatment .
it 's a safety boundary around the target .
it 's a target in the thalamus .
so once those pictures are acquired and the physician has drawn all the necessary safety limits and so on , he selects basically a point - you see the round point in the middle where the cursor is - and he presses this blue button called " sonicate . "
we call this instance of injecting the energy , we call it sonication .
the only handwork the physician does here is moving a mouse .
this is the only device he needs in this treatment .
so he presses " sonicate , " and this is what happens .
you see the transducer , the light blue .
there 's water in between the skull and the transducer .
and it does this burst of energy .
it elevates the temperature .
we first need to verify that we are on target .
so the first sonication is at lower energy .
it does n't do any damage , but it elevates the temperature by a few degrees .
and one of the unique capabilities that we leverage with the mr is the ability to measure temperature noninvasively .
this is really a unique capability of the mr.
it is not being used in regular diagnostic imaging .
but here we can get both the anatomical imaging and the temperature maps in real time .
and you can see the points there on the graph .
the temperature was raised to 43 degrees c temporarily .
this does n't cause any damage .
but the point is we are right on target .
so once the physician verifies that the focus spot is on the target he has chosen , then we move to perform a full-energy ablation like you see here .
and you see the temperature rises to like 55 to 60 degrees c.
if you do it for more than a second , it 's enough to basically destroy the proteins of the cells .
this is the outcome from a patient perspective - same day after the treatment .
this is an immediate relief .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
john is one of -lsb- about -rsb- a dozen very heroic , courageous people who volunteered for the study .
and you have to understand what is in people 's mind when they are willing to take the risk .
and this is a quote from john after he wrote it .
he said , " miraculous . "
and his wife said , " this is the happiest moment of my life . "
and you wonder why .
i mean , one of the messages i like to carry over is , what about defending quality of life ?
i mean , those people lose their independence .
they are dependent on others .
and john today is fully independent .
he returned to a normal life routine .
and he also plays golf , like you do in virginia when you are retired .
okay , so you can see here the spot .
it 's like three millimeters in the middle of the brain .
there 's no damage outside .
he suffers from no neurodeficit .
there 's no recovery needed , no nothing .
he 's back to his normal life .
let 's move now to a more painful subject .
pain is something that can make your life miserable .
and people are suffering from all kinds of pain like neuropathic pain , lower-back pain and cancer pain from bone metastases , when the metastases get to your bones , sometimes they are very painful .
all those i 've indicated have already been shown to be successfully treated by focused ultrasound relieving the pain , again , very fast .
and i would like to tell you about pj .
he 's a 78 year-old farmer who suffered from - how should i say it ? - it 's called pain in the butt .
he had metastases in his right buttock , and he could n't sit even with medication .
he had to forgo all the farm activities .
he was treated with radiation therapy , state-of-the-art radiation therapy , but it did n't help .
many patients like that favor radiation therapy .
and again , he volunteered to a pivotal study that we ran worldwide , also in the u.s.
and his wife actually took him .
they drove like three hours from their farm to the hospital .
he had to sit on a cushion , stand still , not move , because it was very painful .
he took the treatment , and on the way back , he drove the truck by himself .
so again , this is an immediate relief .
and you have to understand what those people feel and what their family experiences when it happens .
he returned again to his daily routine on the farm .
he rides his tractor .
he rides his horse to their mountain cabin regularly .
and he has been very happy .
but now , you ask me , but what about war , the war on cancer ?
show us some primary cancer .
what can be done there ?
so i have good news and bad news .
the good news : there 's a lot that can be done .
and it has been shown actually outside of the u.s.
and doing that in the u.s.
is very painful .
i do n't see , without this nation taking it as some collective will or something that is a national goal to make that happen , it will not happen .
and it 's not just because of regulation ; it 's because of the amount of money needed under the current evidence-based medicine and the size of trials and so on to make it happen .
so the first two applications are breast cancer and prostate cancer .
they were the first to be treated by focused ultrasound .
and we have better-than-surgery results in breasts .
but i have a message for the men here .
we heard here yesterday quyen talking about the adverse event trait in prostate cancer .
there is a unique opportunity now with focused ultrasound guided by mr , because we can actually think about prostate lumpectomy - treating just the focal lesion and not removing the whole gland , and by that , avoiding all the issues with potency and incontinence .
well , there are other cancer tumors in the abdomen - quite lethal , very lethal actually - pancreas , liver , kidney .
the challenge there with a breathing and awake patient - and in all our treatments , the patient is awake and conscious and speaks with the physician - is you have to teach the mr some tricks how to do it in real time .
and this will take time .
this will take two years .
but i have now a message to the ladies .
and this is , in 2004 , the fda has approved mr-guided focused ultrasounds for the treatment of symptomatic uterine fibroids .
women suffer from that disease .
all those tumors have heavy bleeding during periods , abdominal pressure , back pain , frequent urination .
and sometimes , they can not even conceive and become pregnant because of the fibroid .
this is frances .
she was diagnosed with a grapefruit-sized fibroid .
this is a big fibroid .
she was offered a hysterectomy , but this is an inconceivable proposition for someone who wants to keep her pregnancy option .
so she elected to undergo a focused ultrasound procedure in 2008 .
and in 2010 , she became a first-time mother to a healthy baby .
so new life was born .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so in conclusion , i 'd like to leave you with actually four messages .
one is , think about the amount of suffering that is saved from patients undergoing noninvasive surgery , and also the economical and emotional burden removed from their families and communities and the society at large - and i think also from their physicians , by the way .
and the other thing i would like you to think about is the new type of relationship between physician and patients when you have a patient on the table -lsb- who -rsb- is awake and can even monitor the treatment .
in all our treatments , the patient holds a stop sonication button .
he can stop the surgery at any moment .
and with that note , i would like to thank you for listening .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i want to talk to you today about prosperity , about our hopes for a shared and lasting prosperity .
and not just us , but the two billion people worldwide who are still chronically undernourished .
and hope actually is at the heart of this .
in fact , the latin word for hope is at the heart of the word prosperity .
" pro-speras , " " speras , " hope - in accordance with our hopes and expectations .
the irony is , though , that we have cashed-out prosperity almost literally in terms of money and economic growth .
and we 've grown our economies so much that we now stand in a real danger of undermining hope - running down resources , cutting down rainforests , spilling oil into the gulf of mexico , changing the climate - and the only thing that has actually remotely slowed down the relentless rise of carbon emissions over the last two to three decades is recession .
and recession , of course , is n't exactly a recipe for hope either , as we 're busy finding out .
so we 're caught in a kind of trap .
it 's a dilemma , a dilemma of growth .
we ca n't live with it ; we ca n't live without it .
trash the system or crash the planet - it 's a tough choice ; it is n't much of a choice .
and our best avenue of escape from this actually is a kind of blind faith in our own cleverness and technology and efficiency and doing things more efficiently .
now i have n't got anything against efficiency .
and i think we are a clever species sometimes .
but i think we should also just check the numbers , take a reality check here .
so i want you to imagine a world , in 2050 , of around nine billion people , all aspiring to western incomes , western lifestyles .
and i want to ask the question - and we 'll give them that two percent hike in income , in salary each year as well , because we believe in growth .
and i want to ask the question : how far and how fast would be have to move ?
how clever would we have to be ?
how much technology would we need in this world to deliver our carbon targets ?
and here in my chart - on the left-hand side is where we are now .
this is the carbon intensity of economic growth in the economy at the moment .
it 's around about 770 grams of carbon .
in the world i describe to you , we have to be right over here at the right-hand side at six grams of carbon .
it 's a 130-fold improvement , and that is 10 times further and faster than anything we 've ever achieved in industrial history .
maybe we can do it , maybe it 's possible - who knows ?
maybe we can even go further and get an economy that pulls carbon out of the atmosphere , which is what we 're going to need to be doing by the end of the century .
but should n't we just check first that the economic system that we have is remotely capable of delivering this kind of improvement ?
so i want to just spend a couple of minutes on system dynamics .
it 's a bit complex , and i apologize for that .
what i 'll try and do , is i 'll try and paraphrase it is sort of human terms .
so it looks a little bit like this .
firms produce goods for households - that 's us - and provide us with incomes , and that 's even better , because we can spend those incomes on more goods and services .
that 's called the circular flow of the economy .
it looks harmless enough .
i just want to highlight one key feature of this system , which is the role of investment .
now investment constitutes only about a fifth of the national income in most modern economies , but it plays an absolutely vital role .
and what it does essentially is to stimulate further consumption growth .
it does this in a couple of ways - chasing productivity , which drives down prices and encourages us to buy more stuff .
but i want to concentrate in seeking out novelty , the production and consumption of novelty .
joseph schumpeter called this " the process of creative destruction . "
it 's a process of the production and reproduction of novelty , continually chasing expanding consumer markets , consumer goods , new consumer goods .
and this , this is where it gets interesting , because it turns out that human beings have something of an appetite for novelty .
we love new stuff - new material stuff for sure - but also new ideas , new adventures , new experiences .
but the materiality matters too , because in every society that anthropologists have looked at , material stuff operates as a kind of language - a language of goods , a symbolic language that we use to tell each other stories - stories , for example , about how important we are .
status-driven , conspicuous consumption thrives from the language of novelty .
and here , all of a sudden , we have a system that is locking economic structure with social logic - the economic institutions , and who we are as people , locked together to drive an engine of growth .
and this engine is not just economic value ; it is pulling material resources relentlessly through the system , driven by our own insatiable appetites , driven in fact by a sense of anxiety .
adam smith , 200 years ago , spoke about our desire for a life without shame .
a life without shame : in his day , what that meant was a linen shirt , and today , well , you still need the shirt , but you need the hybrid car , the hdtv , two holidays a year in the sun , the netbook and ipad , the list goes on - an almost inexhaustible supply of goods , driven by this anxiety .
and even if we do n't want them , we need to buy them , because , if we do n't buy them , the system crashes .
and to stop it crashing over the last two to three decades , we 've expanded the money supply , expanded credit and debt , so that people can keep buying stuff .
and of course , that expansion was deeply implicated in the crisis .
but this - i just want to show you some data here .
this is what it looks like , essentially , this credit and debt system , just for the u.k.
this was the last 15 years before the crash , and you can see there , consumer debt rose dramatically .
it was above the gdp for three years in a row just before the crisis .
and in the mean time , personal savings absolutely plummeted .
the savings ratio , net savings , were below zero in the middle of 2008 , just before the crash .
this is people expanding debt , drawing down their savings , just to stay in the game .
this is a strange , rather perverse , story , just to put it in very simple terms .
it 's a story about us , people , being persuaded to spend money we do n't have on things we do n't need to create impressions that wo n't last on people we do n't care about .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- but before we consign ourselves to despair , maybe we should just go back and say , " did we get this right ?
is this really how people are ?
is this really how economies behave ? "
and almost straightaway we actually run up against a couple of anomalies .
the first one is in the crisis itself .
in the crisis , in the recession , what do people want to do ?
they want to hunker down , they want to look to the future .
they want to spend less and save more .
but saving is exactly the wrong thing to do from the system point of view .
keynes called this the " paradox of thrift " - saving slows down recovery .
and politicians call on us continually to draw down more debt , to draw down our own savings even further , just so that we can get the show back on the road , so we can keep this growth-based economy going .
it 's an anomaly , it 's a place where the system actually is at odds with who we are as people .
here 's another one - completely different one : why is it that we do n't do the blindingly obvious things we should do to combat climate change , very , very simple things like buying energy-efficient appliances , putting in efficient lights , turning the lights off occasionally , insulating our homes ?
these things save carbon , they save energy , they save us money .
so is it that , though they make perfect economic sense , we do n't do them ?
well , i had my own personal insight into this a few years ago .
it was a sunday evening , sunday afternoon , and it was just after - actually , to be honest , too long after - we had moved into a new house .
and i had finally got around to doing some draft stripping , installing insulation around the windows and doors to keep out the drafts .
and my , then , five year-old daughter was helping me in the way that five year-olds do .
and we 'd been doing this for a while , when she turned to me very solemnly and said , " will this really keep out the giraffes ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " here they are , the giraffes . "
you can hear the five-year-old mind working .
these ones , interestingly , are 400 miles north of here outside barrow-in-furness in cumbria .
goodness knows what they make of the lake district weather .
but actually that childish misrepresentation stuck with me , because it suddenly became clear to me why we do n't do the blindingly obvious things .
we 're too busy keeping out the giraffes - putting the kids on the bus in the morning , getting ourselves to work on time , surviving email overload and shop floor politics , foraging for groceries , throwing together meals , escaping for a couple of precious hours in the evening into prime-time tv or ted online , getting from one end of the day to the other , keeping out the giraffes .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- what is the objective ?
" what is the objective of the consumer ? "
mary douglas asked in an essay on poverty written 35 years ago .
" it is , " she said , " to help create the social world and find a credible place in it . "
that is a deeply humanizing vision of our lives , and it 's a completely different vision than the one that lies at the heart of this economic model .
so who are we ?
who are these people ?
are we these novelty-seeking , hedonistic , selfish individuals ?
or might we actually occasionally be something like the selfless altruist depicted in rembrandt 's lovely , lovely sketch here ?
well psychology actually says there is a tension - a tension between self-regarding behaviors and other regarding behaviors .
and these tensions have deep evolutionary roots , so selfish behavior is adaptive in certain circumstances - fight or flight .
but other regarding behaviors are essential to our evolution as social beings .
and perhaps even more interesting from our point of view , another tension between novelty-seeking behaviors and tradition or conservation .
novelty is adaptive when things are changing and you need to adapt yourself .
tradition is essential to lay down the stability to raise families and form cohesive social groups .
so here , all of a sudden , we 're looking at a map of the human heart .
and it reveals to us , suddenly , the crux of the matter .
what we 've done is we 've created economies .
we 've created systems , which systematically privilege , encourage , one narrow quadrant of the human soul and left the others unregarded .
and in the same token , the solution becomes clear , because this is n't , therefore , about changing human nature .
it is n't , in fact , about curtailing possibilities .
it is about opening up .
it is about allowing ourselves the freedom to become fully human , recognizing the depth and the breadth of the human psyche and building institutions to protect rembrandt 's fragile altruist within .
what does all this mean for economics ?
what would economies look like if we took that vision of human nature at their heart and stretched them along these orthogonal dimensions of the human psyche ?
well , it might look a little bit like the 4,000 community-interest companies that have sprung up in the u.k. over the last five years and a similar rise in b corporations in the united states , enterprises that have ecological and social goals written into their constitution at their heart - companies , in fact , like this one , ecosia .
and i just want to , very quickly , show you this .
ecosia is an internet search engine .
internet search engines work by drawing revenues from sponsored links that appear when you do a search .
and ecosia works in pretty much the same way .
so we can do that here - we can just put in a little search term .
there you go , oxford , that 's where we are . see what comes up .
the difference with ecosia though is that , in ecosia 's case , it draws the revenues in the same way , but it allocates 80 percent of those revenues to a rainforest protection project in the amazon .
and we 're going to do it .
we 're just going to click on naturejobs.uk.
in case anyone out there is looking for a job in a recession , that 's the page to go to .
and what happened then was the sponsor gave revenues to ecosia , and ecosia is giving 80 percent of those revenues to a rainforest protection project .
it 's taking profits from one place and allocating them into the protection of ecological resources .
it 's a different kind of enterprise for a new economy .
it 's a form , if you like , of ecological altruism - perhaps something along those lines . maybe it 's that .
whatever it is , whatever this new economy is , what we need the economy to do , in fact , is to put investment back into the heart of the model , to re-conceive investment .
only now , investment is n't going to be about the relentless and mindless pursuit of consumption growth .
investment has to be a different beast .
investment has to be , in the new economy , protecting and nurturing the ecological assets on which our future depends .
it has to be about transition .
it has to be investing in low-carbon technologies and infrastructures .
we have to invest , in fact , in the idea of a meaningful prosperity , providing capabilities for people to flourish .
and of course , this task has material dimensions .
it would be nonsense to talk about people flourishing if they did n't have food , clothing and shelter .
but it 's also clear that prosperity goes beyond this .
it has social and psychological aims - family , friendship , commitments , society , participating in the life of that society .
and this too requires investment , investment - for example , in places - places where we can connect , places where we can participate , shared spaces , concert halls , gardens , public parks , libraries , museums , quiet centers , places of joy and celebration , places of tranquility and contemplation , sites for the " cultivation of a common citizenship , " in michael sandel 's lovely phrase .
an investment - investment , after all , is just such a basic economic concept - is nothing more nor less than a relationship between the present and the future , a shared present and a common future .
and we need that relationship to reflect , to reclaim hope .
so let me come back , with this sense of hope , to the two billion people still trying to live each day on less than the price of a skinny latte from the cafe next door .
what can we offer those people ?
it 's clear that we have a responsibility to help lift them out of poverty .
it 's clear that we have a responsibility to make room for growth where growth really matters in those poorest nations .
and it 's also clear that we will never achieve that unless we 're capable of redefining a meaningful sense of prosperity in the richer nations , a prosperity that is more meaningful and less materialistic than the growth-based model .
so this is not just a western post-materialist fantasy .
in fact , an african philosopher wrote to me , when " prosperity without growth " was published , pointing out the similarities between this view of prosperity and the traditional african concept of ubuntu .
ubuntu says , " i am because we are . "
prosperity is a shared endeavor .
its roots are long and deep - its foundations , i 've tried to show , exist already , inside each of us .
so this is not about standing in the way of development .
it 's not about overthrowing capitalism .
it 's not about trying to change human nature .
what we 're doing here is we 're taking a few simple steps towards an economics fit for purpose .
and at the heart of that economics , we 're placing a more credible , more robust , and more realistic vision of what it means to be human .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : while they 're taking the podium away , just a quick question .
first of all , economists are n't supposed to be inspiring , so you may need to work on the tone a little .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- can you picture the politicians ever buying into this ?
i mean , can you picture a politician standing up in britain and saying , " gdp fell two percent this year . good news !
we 're actually all happier , and a country 's more beautiful , and our lives are better . "
tim jackson : well that 's clearly not what you 're doing .
you 're not making news out of things falling down .
you 're making news out of the things that tell you that we 're flourishing .
can i picture politicians doing it ?
actually , i already am seeing a little bit of it .
when we first started this kind of work , politicians would stand up , treasury spokesmen would stand up , and accuse us of wanting to go back and live in caves .
and actually in the period through which we 've been working over the last 18 years - partly because of the financial crisis and a little bit of humility in the profession of economics - actually people are engaging in this issue in all sorts of countries around the world .
ca : but is it mainly politicians who are going to have to get their act together , or is it going to be more just civil society and companies ?
tj : it has to be companies . it has to be civil society .
but it has to have political leadership .
this is a kind of agenda , which actually politicians themselves are kind of caught in that dilemma , because they 're hooked on the growth model themselves .
but actually opening up the space to think about different ways of governing , different kinds of politics , and creating the space for civil society and businesses to operate differently - absolutely vital .
ca : and if someone could convince you that we actually can make the - what was it ? - the 130-fold improvement in efficiency , of reduction of carbon footprint , would you then actually like that picture of economic growth into more knowledge-based goods ?
tj : i would still want to know that you could do that and get below zero by the end of the century , in terms of taking carbon out of the atmosphere , and solve the problem of biodiversity and reduce the impact on land use and do something about the erosion of topsoils and the quality of water .
if you can convince me we can do all that , then , yes , i would take the two percent .
ca : tim , thank you for a very important talk . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- now i 'm going to give you a story .
it 's an indian story about an indian woman and her journey .
let me begin with my parents .
i 'm a product of this visionary mother and father .
many years ago , when i was born in the ' 50s - ' 50s and ' 60s did n't belong to girls in india .
they belonged to boys .
they belonged to boys who would join business and inherit business from parents , and girls would be dolled up to get married .
my family , in my city , and almost in the country , was unique .
we were four of us , not one , and fortunately no boys .
we were four girls and no boys .
and my parents were part of a landed property family .
my father defied his own grandfather , almost to the point of disinheritance , because he decided to educate all four of us .
he sent us to one of the best schools in the city and gave us the best education .
as i 've said , when we 're born , we do n't choose our parents , and when we go to school , we do n't choose our school .
children do n't choose a school .
they just get the school which parents choose for them .
so this is the foundation time which i got .
i grew up like this , and so did my other three sisters .
and my father used to say at that time , " i 'm going to spread all my four daughters in four corners of the world . "
i do n't know if he really meant -lsb- that -rsb- , but it happened .
i 'm the only one who 's left in india .
one is a british , another is an american and the third is a canadian .
so we are four of us in four corners of the world .
and since i said they 're my role models , i followed two things which my father and mother gave me .
one , they said , " life is on an incline .
you either go up , or you come down . "
and the second thing , which has stayed with me , which became my philosophy of life , which made all the difference , is : 100 things happen in your life , good or bad .
out of 100 , 90 are your creation .
they 're good . they 're your creation . enjoy it .
if they 're bad , they 're your creation . learn from it .
ten are nature-sent over which you ca n't do a thing .
it 's like a death of a relative , or a cyclone , or a hurricane , or an earthquake .
you ca n't do a thing about it .
you 've got to just respond to the situation .
but that response comes out of those 90 points .
since i 'm a product of this philosophy , of 90/10 , and secondly , " life on an incline , " that 's the way i grew up to be valuing what i got .
i 'm a product of opportunities , rare opportunities in the ' 50s and the ' 60s , which girls did n't get , and i was conscious of the fact that what my parents were giving me was something unique .
because all of my best school friends were getting dolled up to get married with a lot of dowry , and here i was with a tennis racket and going to school and doing all kinds of extracurricular activities .
i thought i must tell you this .
why i said this , is the background .
this is what comes next .
i joined the indian police service as a tough woman , a woman with indefatigable stamina , because i used to run for my tennis titles , etc .
but i joined the indian police service , and then it was a new pattern of policing .
for me the policing stood for power to correct , power to prevent and power to detect .
this is something like a new definition ever given in policing in india - the power to prevent .
because normally it was always said , power to detect , and that 's it , or power to punish .
but i decided no , it 's a power to prevent , because that 's what i learned when i was growing up .
how do i prevent the 10 and never make it more than 10 ?
so this was how it came into my service , and it was different from the men .
i did n't want to make it different from the men , but it was different , because this was the way i was different .
and i redefined policing concepts in india .
i 'm going to take you on two journeys , my policing journey and my prison journey .
what you see , if you see the title called " pm 's car held . "
this was the first time a prime minister of india was given a parking ticket .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's the first time in india , and i can tell you , that 's the last time you 're hearing about it .
it 'll never happen again in india , because now it was once and forever .
and the rule was , because i was sensitive , i was compassionate , i was very sensitive to injustice , and i was very pro-justice .
that 's the reason , as a woman , i joined the indian police service .
i had other options , but i did n't choose them .
so i 'm going to move on .
this is about tough policing , equal policing .
now i was known as " here 's a woman that 's not going to listen . "
so i was sent to all indiscriminate postings , postings which others would say no .
i now went to a prison assignment as a police officer .
normally police officers do n't want to do prison .
they sent me to prison to lock me up , thinking , " now there will be no cars and no vips to be given tickets to .
let 's lock her up . "
here i got a prison assignment .
this was a prison assignment which was one big den of criminals .
obviously , it was .
but 10,000 men , of which only 400 were women - 10,000 - 9,000 plus about 600 were men .
terrorists , rapists , burglars , gangsters - some of them i 'd sent to jail as a police officer outside .
and then how did i deal with them ?
the first day when i went in , i did n't know how to look at them .
and i said , " do you pray ? " when i looked at the group , i said , " do you pray ? "
they saw me as a young , short woman wearing a pathan suit .
i said , " do you pray ? "
and they did n't say anything .
i said , " do you pray ? do you want to pray ? "
they said , " yes . " i said , " all right , let 's pray . "
i prayed for them , and things started to change .
this is a visual of education inside the prison .
friends , this has never happened , where everybody in the prison studies .
i started this with community support .
government had no budget .
it was one of the finest , largest volunteerism in any prison in the world .
this was initiated in delhi prison .
you see one sample of a prisoner teaching a class .
these are hundreds of classes .
nine to eleven , every prisoner went into the education program - the same den in which they thought they would put me behind the bar and things would be forgotten .
we converted this into an ashram - from a prison to an ashram through education .
i think that 's the bigger change .
it was the beginning of a change .
teachers were prisoners . teachers were volunteers .
books came from donated schoolbooks .
stationery was donated .
everything was donated , because there was no budget of education for the prison .
now if i 'd not done that , it would have been a hellhole .
that 's the second landmark .
i want to show you some moments of history in my journey , which probably you would never ever get to see anywhere in the world .
one , the numbers you 'll never get to see .
secondly , this concept .
this was a meditation program inside the prison of over 1,000 prisoners .
one thousand prisoners who sat in meditation .
this was one of the most courageous steps i took as a prison governor .
and this is what transformed .
you want to know more about this , go and see this film , " doing time , doing vipassana . "
you will hear about it , and you will love it .
and write to me on kiranbedi.com , and i 'll respond to you .
let me show you the next slide .
i took the same concept of mindfulness , because , why did i bring meditation into the indian prison ?
because crime is a product of a distorted mind .
it was distortion of mind which needed to be addressed to control .
not by preaching , not by telling , not by reading , but by addressing your mind .
i took the same thing to the police , because police , equally , were prisoners of their minds , and they felt as if it was " we " and " they , " and that the people do n't cooperate .
this worked .
this is a feedback box called a petition box .
this is a concept which i introduced to listen to complaints , listen to grievances .
this was a magic box .
this was a sensitive box .
this is how a prisoner drew how they felt about the prison .
if you see somebody in the blue - yeah , this guy - he was a prisoner , and he was a teacher .
and you see , everybody 's busy . there was no time to waste .
let me wrap it up .
i 'm currently into movements , movements of education of the under-served children , which is thousands - india is all about thousands .
secondly is about the anti-corruption movement in india .
that 's a big way we , as a small group of activists , have drafted an ombudsman bill for the government of india .
friends , you will hear a lot about it .
that 's the movement at the moment i 'm driving , and that 's the movement and ambition of my life .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you . thank you very much . thank you .
thank you . thank you . thank you .
the humanitarian model has barely changed since the early 20th century .
its origins are firmly rooted in the analog age .
and there is a major shift coming on the horizon .
the catalyst for this change was the major earthquake that struck haiti on the 12th of january in 2010 .
haiti was a game changer .
the earthquake destroyed the capital of port-au-prince , claiming the lives of some 320,000 people , rendering homeless about 1.2 million people .
government institutions were completely decapitated , including the presidential palace .
i remember standing on the roof of the ministry of justice in downtown port-au-prince .
it was about two meters high , completely squashed by the violence of the earthquake .
for those of us on the ground in those early days , it was clear for even the most disaster-hardened veterans that haiti was something different .
haiti was something we had n't seen before .
but haiti provided us with something else unprecedented .
haiti allowed us to glimpse into a future of what disaster response might look like in a hyper-connected world where people have access to mobile smart devices .
because out of the urban devastation in port-au-prince came a torrent of sms texts - people crying for help , beseeching us for assistance , sharing data , offering support , looking for their loved ones .
this was a situation that traditional aid agencies had never before encountered .
we were in one of the poorest countries on the planet , but 80 percent of the people had mobile devices in their hands .
and we were unprepared for this , and they were shaping the aid effort .
outside haiti also , things were looking different .
tens of thousands of so-called digital volunteers were scouring the internet , converting tweets that had already been converted from texts and putting these into open-source maps , layering them with all sorts of important information - people like crisis mappers and open street map - and putting these on the web for everybody - the media , the aid organizations and the communities themselves - to participate in and to use .
back in haiti , people were increasingly turning to the medium of sms .
people that were hungry and hurting were signaling their distress , were signaling their need for help .
on street sides all over port-au-prince , entrepreneurs sprung up offering mobile phone charging stations .
they understood more than we did people 's innate need to be connected .
never having been confronted with this type of situation before , we wanted to try and understand how we could tap into this incredible resource , how we could really leverage this incredible use of mobile technology and sms technology .
we started talking with a local telecom provider called voilà , which is a subsidiary of trilogy international .
we had basically three requirements .
we wanted to communicate in a two-way form of communication .
we did n't want to shout ; we needed to listen as well .
we wanted to be able to target specific geographic communities .
we did n't need to talk to the whole country at the same time .
and we wanted it to be easy to use .
out of this rubble of haiti and from this devastation came something that we call tera - the trilogy emergency response application - which has been used to support the aid effort ever since .
it has been used to help communities prepare for disasters .
it has been used to signal early warning in advance of weather-related disasters .
it 's used for public health awareness campaigns such as the prevention of cholera .
and it is even used for sensitive issues such as building awareness around gender-based violence .
but does it work ?
we have just published an evaluation of this program , and the evidence that is there for all to see is quite remarkable .
some 74 percent of people received the data .
those who were intended to receive the data , 74 percent of them received it .
96 percent of them found it useful .
83 percent of them took action - evidence that it is indeed empowering .
and 73 percent of them shared it .
the tera system was developed from haiti with support of engineers in the region .
it is a user-appropriate technology that has been used for humanitarian good to great effect .
technology is transformational .
right across the developing world , citizens and communities are using technology to enable them to bring about change , positive change , the grassroots has been strengthened through the social power of sharing and they are challenging the old models , the old analog models of control and command .
one illustration of the transformational power of technology is in kibera .
kibera is one of africa 's largest slums .
it 's on the outskirts of nairobi , the capital city of kenya .
it 's home to an unknown number of people - some say between 250,000 and 1.2 million .
if you were to arrive in nairobi today and pick up a tourist map , kibera is represented as a lush , green national park devoid of human settlement .
young people living in kibera in their community , with simple handheld devices , gps handheld devices and sms-enabled mobile phones , have literally put themselves on the map .
they have collated crowd-sourced data and rendered the invisible visible .
people like josh and steve are continuing to layer information upon information , real-time information , tweet it and text it onto these maps for all to use .
you can find out about the latest impromptu music session .
you can find out about the latest security incident .
you can find out about places of worship .
you can find out about the health centers .
you can feel the dynamism of this living , breathing community .
they also have their own news network on youtube with 36,000 viewers at the moment .
they 're showing us what can be done with mobile , digital technologies .
they 're showing that the magic of technology can bring the invisible visible .
and they are giving a voice to themselves .
they are telling their own story , bypassing the official narrative .
and we 're seeing from all points on the globe similar stories .
in mongolia for instance , where 30 percent of the people are nomadic , sms information systems are being used to track migration and weather patterns .
sms is even used to hold herder summits from remote participation .
and if people are migrating into urban , unfamiliar , concrete environments , they can also be helped in anticipation with social supporters ready and waiting for them based on sms knowledge .
in nigeria , open-source sms tools are being used by the red cross community workers to gather information from the local community in an attempt to better understand and mitigate the prevalence of malaria .
my colleague , jason peat , who runs this program , tells me it 's 10 times faster and 10 times cheaper than the traditional way of doing things .
and not only is it empowering to the communities , but really importantly , this information stays in the community where it is needed to formulate long-term health polices .
we are on a planet of seven billion people , five billion mobile subscriptions .
by 2015 , there will be three billion smartphones in the world .
the u.n. broadband commission has recently set targets to help broadband access in 50 percent of the developing world , compared to 20 percent today .
we are hurtling towards a hyper-connected world where citizens from all cultures and all social strata will have access to smart , fast mobile devices .
people are understanding , from cairo to oakland , that there are new ways to come together , there are new ways to mobilize , there are new ways to influence .
a transformation is coming which needs to be understood by the humanitarian structures and humanitarian models .
the collective voices of people needs to be more integrated through new technologies into the organizational strategies and plans of actions and not just recycled for fundraising or marketing .
we need to , for example , embrace the big data , the knowledge that is there from market leaders who understand what it means to use and leverage big data .
one idea that i 'd like you to consider , for instance , is to take a look at our it departments .
they 're normally backroom or basement hardware service providers , but they need to be elevated to software strategists .
we need people in our organizations who know what it 's like to work with big data .
we need technology as a core organizational principle .
we need technological strategists in the boardroom who can ask and answer the question , " what would amazon or google do with all of this data ? "
and convert it to humanitarian good .
the possibilities that new digital technologies are bringing can help humanitarian organizations , not only ensure that people 's right to information is met , or that they have their right to communicate , but i think in the future , humanitarian organizations will also have to anticipate the right for people to access critical communication technologies in order to ensure that their voices are heard , that they 're truly participating , that they 're truly empowered in the humanitarian world .
it has always been the elusive ideal to ensure full participation of people affected by disasters in the humanitarian effort .
we now have the tools . we now have the possibilities .
there are no more reasons not to do it .
i believe we need to bring the humanitarian world from analog to digital .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- eric berlow : i 'm an ecologist , and sean 's a physicist , and we both study complex networks .
and we met a couple years ago when we discovered that we had both given a short ted talk about the ecology of war , and we realized that we were connected by the ideas we shared before we ever met .
and then we thought , you know , there are thousands of other talks out there , especially tedx talks , that are popping up all over the world .
how are they connected , and what does that global conversation look like ?
so sean 's going to tell you a little bit about how we did that .
sean gourley : exactly . so we took 24,000 tedx talks from around the world , 147 different countries , and we took these talks and we wanted to find the mathematical structures that underly the ideas behind them .
and we wanted to do that so we could see how they connected with each other .
and so , of course , if you 're going to do this kind of stuff , you need a lot of data .
so the data that you 've got is a great thing called youtube , and we can go down and basically pull all the open information from youtube , all the comments , all the views , who 's watching it , where are they watching it , what are they saying in the comments .
but we can also pull up , using speech-to-text translation , we can pull the entire transcript , and that works even for people with kind of funny accents like myself .
so we can take their transcript and actually do some pretty cool things .
we can take natural language processing algorithms to kind of read through with a computer , line by line , extracting key concepts from this .
and we take those key concepts and they sort of form this mathematical structure of an idea .
and we call that the meme-ome .
and the meme-ome , you know , quite simply , is the mathematics that underlies an idea , and we can do some pretty interesting analysis with it , which i want to share with you now .
so each idea has its own meme-ome , and each idea is unique with that , but of course , ideas , they borrow from each other , they kind of steal sometimes , and they certainly build on each other , and we can go through mathematically and take the meme-ome from one talk and compare it to the meme-ome from every other talk , and if there 's a similarity between the two of them , we can create a link and represent that as a graph , just like eric and i are connected .
so that 's theory , that 's great .
let 's see how it works in actual practice .
so what we 've got here now is the global footprint of all the tedx talks over the last four years exploding out around the world from new york all the way down to little old new zealand in the corner .
and what we did on this is we analyzed the top 25 percent of these , and we started to see where the connections occurred , where they connected with each other .
cameron russell talking about image and beauty connected over into europe .
we 've got a bigger conversation about israel and palestine radiating outwards from the middle east .
and we 've got something a little broader like big data with a truly global footprint reminiscent of a conversation that is happening everywhere .
so from this , we kind of run up against the limits of what we can actually do with a geographic projection , but luckily , computer technology allows us to go out into multidimensional space .
so we can take in our network projection and apply a physics engine to this , and the similar talks kind of smash together , and the different ones fly apart , and what we 're left with is something quite beautiful .
eb : so i want to just point out here that every node is a talk , they 're linked if they share similar ideas , and that comes from a machine reading of entire talk transcripts , and then all these topics that pop out , they 're not from tags and keywords .
they come from the network structure of interconnected ideas . keep going .
sg : absolutely . so i got a little quick on that , but he 's going to slow me down .
we 've got education connected to storytelling triangulated next to social media .
you 've got , of course , the human brain right next to healthcare , which you might expect , but also you 've got video games , which is sort of adjacent , as those two spaces interface with each other .
but i want to take you into one cluster that 's particularly important to me , and that 's the environment .
and i want to kind of zoom in on that and see if we can get a little more resolution .
so as we go in here , what we start to see , apply the physics engine again , we see what 's one conversation is actually composed of many smaller ones .
the structure starts to emerge where we see a kind of fractal behavior of the words and the language that we use to describe the things that are important to us all around this world .
so you 've got food economy and local food at the top , you 've got greenhouse gases , solar and nuclear waste .
what you 're getting is a range of smaller conversations , each connected to each other through the ideas and the language they share , creating a broader concept of the environment .
and of course , from here , we can go and zoom in and see , well , what are young people looking at ?
and they 're looking at energy technology and nuclear fusion .
this is their kind of resonance for the conversation around the environment .
if we split along gender lines , we can see females resonating heavily with food economy , but also out there in hope and optimism .
and so there 's a lot of exciting stuff we can do here , and i 'll throw to eric for the next part .
eb : yeah , i mean , just to point out here , you can not get this kind of perspective from a simple tag search on youtube .
let 's now zoom back out to the entire global conversation out of environment , and look at all the talks together .
now often , when we 're faced with this amount of content , we do a couple of things to simplify it .
we might just say , well , what are the most popular talks out there ?
and a few rise to the surface .
there 's a talk about gratitude .
there 's another one about personal health and nutrition .
and of course , there 's got to be one about porn , right ?
and so then we might say , well , gratitude , that was last year .
what 's trending now ? what 's the popular talk now ?
and we can see that the new , emerging , top trending topic is about digital privacy .
so this is great . it simplifies things .
but there 's so much creative content that 's just buried at the bottom .
and i hate that . how do we bubble stuff up to the surface that 's maybe really creative and interesting ?
well , we can go back to the network structure of ideas to do that .
remember , it 's that network structure that is creating these emergent topics , and let 's say we could take two of them , like cities and genetics , and say , well , are there any talks that creatively bridge these two really different disciplines .
and that 's - essentially , this kind of creative remix is one of the hallmarks of innovation .
well here 's one by jessica green about the microbial ecology of buildings .
it 's literally defining a new field .
and we could go back to those topics and say , well , what talks are central to those conversations ?
in the cities cluster , one of the most central was one by mitch joachim about ecological cities , and in the genetics cluster , we have a talk about synthetic biology by craig venter .
these are talks that are linking many talks within their discipline .
we could go the other direction and say , well , what are talks that are broadly synthesizing a lot of different kinds of fields .
we used a measure of ecological diversity to get this .
like , a talk by steven pinker on the history of violence , very synthetic .
and then , of course , there are talks that are so unique they 're kind of out in the stratosphere , in their own special place , and we call that the colleen flanagan index .
and if you do n't know colleen , she 's an artist , and i asked her , " well , what 's it like out there in the stratosphere of our idea space ? "
and apparently it smells like bacon .
i would n't know .
so we 're using these network motifs to find talks that are unique , ones that are creatively synthesizing a lot of different fields , ones that are central to their topic , and ones that are really creatively bridging disparate fields .
okay ? we never would have found those with our obsession with what 's trending now .
and all of this comes from the architecture of complexity , or the patterns of how things are connected .
sg : so that 's exactly right .
we 've got ourselves in a world that 's massively complex , and we 've been using algorithms to kind of filter it down so we can navigate through it .
and those algorithms , whilst being kind of useful , are also very , very narrow , and we can do better than that , because we can realize that their complexity is not random .
it has mathematical structure , and we can use that mathematical structure to go and explore things like the world of ideas to see what 's being said , to see what 's not being said , and to be a little bit more human and , hopefully , a little smarter .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 'm a contemporary artist and i show in art galleries and museums .
i show a number of photographs and films , but i also make television programs , books and some advertising , all with the same concept .
and it 's about our fixation with celebrity and celebrity culture , and the importance of the image : celebrity is born of photography .
i 'm going to start with how i started with this concept seven years ago , when princess diana died .
there was a sort of a standstill in britain the moment of her death , and people decided to mourn her death in a sort of mass way .
i was fascinated by this phenomenon , so i wondered : could one erase the image of diana , actually quite crudely and physically ?
so , i got a gun and started to shoot at the image of diana , but i could n't erase this from my memory and certainly it was not being erased from the public psyche .
momentum was being built .
the press wrote about her death in rather , i felt , pornographic ways - like , " which bit of artery left which bit of body ? "
and " how did she die in the back of the car ? " - and i was intrigued by this sort of mass voyeurism , so i made these rather gory images .
i then went on wondering whether i could actually replace her image , so i got a look-alike of diana and posed her in the right positions and angles and created something that was in , or existed in , the public imagination .
so people were wondering : was she going to marry dodi ?
was she in love with him ?
was she pregnant ? did she want his baby ?
was she pregnant when she died ?
so i created this image of diana , dodi and their imaginary mixed-race child and this image came out , which caused a huge public outcry at the time .
i then went on to make more comments on the media and press imagery , so i started making reference to media imagery - made it grainy , shot through doorways and so on and so forth - to titillate the public or the viewer further in terms of trying to make the viewer more aware of their own voyeurism .
so , this is an image of diana looking at camilla kissing her husband , and this was a sequence of images .
and this gets shown in art galleries like this , as a sequence .
and similarly with the di-dodian baby imagery - this is another art gallery installation .
i 'm particularly interested in how you ca n't rely on your own perception .
this is jane smith and jo bloggs , for instance , but you think it 's camilla and the queen , and i 'm fascinated how what you think is real is n't necessarily real .
and the camera can lie , and it makes it very , very easy with the mass bombardment of imagery to tell untruths .
so , i continued to work on this project of how photography seduces us and is more interesting to look at than the actual real subject matter .
and at the same time , it removes us from the real subject matter , and this acts as a sort of titillating thing .
so , the photograph becomes this teaser and incites desire and voyeurism ; what you ca n't have , you want more .
in the photograph , the real subject does n't exist so it makes you want that person more .
and that is the way , i think , that celebrity magazines work now : the more pictures you see of these celebrities , the more you feel you know them , but you do n't know them and you want to know them further .
of course , the queen goes to her stud often to watch her horses ...
watch her horses . -lrb- laughter -rrb- .
and then i was sort of making imagery .
in england there 's an expression : " you ca n't imagine the queen on the loo . "
so i 'm trying to penetrate that .
well , here is the image .
all this imagery was creating a lot of fuss and i was cited as a disgusting artist . the press were writing about this , giving full pages about how terrible this was .
which i found very interesting that it was going full cycle : i was making comments about the press and about how we know facts and information only by media - because we do n't know the real people ; very few of us know the real people - but it was going back into the press and they were publicizing , effectively , my filthy work .
so , these are broadsheets , tabloids , debates were being had all about this work , films were being banned before people had actually had the look at the work , politicians were getting involved - all sorts of things - great headlines .
then suddenly , it started to get on front pages .
i was being asked and paid to do front covers .
suddenly i was becoming sort of acceptable , which i found also fascinating .
how one moment - it was disgusting - journalists would lie to me to get a story or a photograph of me , saying my work was wonderful , and the next minute there were terrible headlines about me .
but then this changed suddenly .
i then started to work for magazines and newspapers .
this was , for example , an image that went into tatler .
this was another newspaper image .
it was an april fool actually , and to this day some people think it 's real .
i was sitting next to someone at dinner the other day , and they were saying there 's this great image of the queen sitting outside william hill .
they thought it was real .
i was exploring , at the time , the hyperbole of icons - and diana and marilyn - and the importance of celebrity in our lives .
how they wheedle their way into the collective psyche without us even knowing , and how that should happen .
i explored with actually dressing up as the celebrities myself .
there 's me as diana - i look like the mass murderer myra hindley , i think , in this one . -lrb- laughter -rrb- .
and me as the queen .
i then continued on to make a whole body of work about marilyn - the biggest icon of all - and trying to titillate by shooting through doorways and shutters and so on and so forth , and only showing certain angles to create a reality that , obviously , is completely constructed .
this is the look-alike , so the crafting elements of this is completely enormous .
she looks nothing like marilyn , but by the time we 've made her up and put wigs and makeup on , she looks exactly like marilyn , to the extent that her husband could n't recognize her - or recognize this look-alike - in these photographs , which i find quite interesting .
so , all this work is getting shown in art galleries .
then i made a book .
i was also making a tv series for the bbc at the time .
stills from the tv series went into this book .
but there was a real legal problem because it looks real , but how do you get over that ?
because obviously it 's making a comment about our culture right now : that we ca n't tell what 's real .
how do we know when we 're looking at something whether it 's real or not ?
so , from my point of view , it 's important to publish it , but at the same time it does cause a confusion - intentional on my behalf , but problematic for any outlet that i 'm working with .
so a big disclaimer is put on everything that i do , and i made narratives about all the european or brit celebrities and comments about our public figures .
you know , what does tony blair get up to in private with his fashion guru ?
and also dealing with the perceptions that are put about bin laden , saddam hussein , the links that were put about pre-iraq war .
and what is going to happen to the monarchy ?
because obviously the british public , i think , would prefer william to charles on the throne .
and it 's that wish , or that desire , that i suppose i 'm dealing with in my work .
i 'm not really interested in the celebrity themselves .
i 'm interested in the perception of the celebrity .
and with some look-alikes , they are so good you do n't know whether they 're real or not .
i did an advertising campaign for schweppes , which is coca-cola , and so that was very interesting in terms of the legalities .
it 's highly commercial .
but it was a difficulty for me - because this is my artwork ; should i do advertising ? - at the time .
so i made sure the work was not compromised in any way and that the integrity of the work remained the same .
but the meanings changed in the sense that with the logo on , you 're closing all the lines of interpretation down to selling a product and that 's all you 're doing .
when you take the logo off , you 're opening up the interpretations and making the work inconclusive , opposed to conclusive when you are advertising .
this image is quite interesting , actually , because i think we made it three years ago .
and it 's camilla in her wedding dress , which , again , nearly got re-used now , recently prior to her wedding .
tony blair and cherie . and again , the legalities - we had to be very careful .
it 's obviously a very big commercial company , and so this little , " shh - it 's not really them , " was put on the side of the imagery .
and margaret thatcher visiting jeffery archer in jail .
i then was asked by selfridges to do a series of windows for them , so i built a sauna bath in one of their windows and created little scenes - live scenes with look-alikes inside the windows , and the windows were all steamed up .
so , it 's tony blair reading and practicing his speech ; i 've got them doing yoga inside there with carole caplin ; sven making out with ulrika jonsson , who he was having an affair with at that time .
this was a huge success for them because the imagery got shown in the press the day after in every single newspaper , broadsheets and tabloids .
it was a bit of a road stopper , which was problematic because the police kept on trying to clear away the crowds , but huge fun - it was great for me to do a performance .
also , people were taking photographs of this , so it was being texted around the world extremely quickly , all this imagery .
and the press were interviewing , and i was signing my book . -lrb- laughter -rrb- .
further imagery . i 'm making a new book now with taschen that i 'm working on really for a sort of global market - my previous book was only for the u.k. market - that i suppose it could be called humorous .
i suppose i come from a sort of non-humorous background with serious intent , and then suddenly my work is funny .
and i think it does n't really matter that my work is considered humorous , in a way ; i think it 's a way in for me to deal with the importance of imagery and how we read all our information through imagery .
it 's an extremely fast way of getting information .
it 's extremely difficult if it 's constructed correctly , and there are techniques of constructing iconic imagery .
this image , for example , is sort of spot-on because it exactly sums up what elton may be doing in private , and also what might be happening with saddam hussein , and george bush reading the koran upside-down .
for example , george bush target practice - shooting at bin laden and michael moore .
and then you change the photograph he 's shooting at , and it suddenly becomes rather grim and maybe less accessible . -lrb- laughter -rrb- .
tony blair being used as a mounting block , and rumsfeld and bush laughing with some abu ghraib photos behind , and the seriousness , or the intellect , of bush .
and also , commenting on the behind the scenes - well , as we know now - what goes on in prisons .
and in fact , george bush and tony blair are having great fun during all of this .
and really commenting , you know , based on the perception we have of the celebrities .
what jack nicholson might be up to in his celebrity life , and the fact that he tried to ... he had a bit of road rage and golf-clubbed a driver the other day .
i mean , it 's extremely difficult to find these look-alikes , so i 'm constantly going up to people in the street and trying to ask people to come and be in one of my photographs or films .
and sometimes asking the real celebrity , mistaking them for someone who just looks like the real person , which is highly embarrassing . -lrb- laughter -rrb- .
i 've also been working with the guardian on a topical basis - a page a week in their newspaper - which has been very interesting , working topically .
so , jamie oliver and school dinners ; bush and blair having difficulty getting alongside muslim culture ; the whole of the hunting issue , and the royal family refusing to stop hunting ; and the tsunami issues ; and obviously harry ; blair 's views on gordon brown , which i find very interesting ; condi and bush .
this image i 've decided to show having a reservation about it .
i made it a year ago . and just how meanings change , and there were a terrible thing that has happened , but the fear is lurking around in our minds prior to that .
that 's why this image was made one year ago , and what it means today .
so , i 'll leave you with these clips to have a look . -lrb- music -rrb- chris anderson : thank you .
my work focuses on the connection of both thinking about our community life being part of the environment where architecture grows from the natural local conditions and traditions .
today i brought two recent projects as an example of this .
both projects are in emerging countries , one in ethiopia and another one in tunisia .
and also they have in common that the different analyses from different perspectives becomes an essential part of the final piece of architecture .
the first example started with an invitation to design a multistory shopping mall in ethiopia 's capital city addis ababa .
and this is the type of building we were shown as an example , to my team and myself , of what we had to design .
at first , the first thing i thought was , i want to run away .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- after seeing a few of these buildings - there are many in the city - we realized that they have three very big points .
first , these buildings , they are almost empty because they have very large shops where people can not afford to buy things .
second , they need tons of energy to perform because of the skin treatment with glass that creates heat in the inside , and then you need a lot of cooling .
in a city where this should n't happen because they have really mild weather that ranges from 20 to 25 degrees the whole year .
and third is that their image has nothing to do with africa and with ethiopia .
it is a pity in a place that has such rich culture and traditions .
also during our first visit to ethiopia , i was really captivated by the old merkato that is this open-air structure where thousands of people , they go and buy things every day from small vendors .
and also it has this idea of the public space that uses the outdoors to create activity .
so i thought , this is what i really want to design , not a shopping mall .
but the question was how we could do a multistory , contemporary building with these principles .
the next challenge was when we looked at the site , that is , in a really growing area of the city , where most of these buildings that you see in the image , they were not there .
and it 's also between two parallel streets that do n't have any connection for hundreds of meters .
so the first thing we did was to create a connection between these two streets , putting all the entrances of the building .
and this extends with an inclined atrium that creates an open-air space in the building that self-protects itself with its own shape from the sun and the rain .
and around this void we placed this idea of the market with small shops , that change in each floor because of the shape of the void .
i also thought , how to close the building ?
and i really wanted to find a solution that would respond to the local climate conditions .
and i started thinking about the textile like a shell made of concrete with perforations that would let the air in , and also the light , but in a filtered way .
and then the inspiration came from these beautiful patterns of the ethiopian women 's dresses .
that they have fractal geometry properties and this helped me to shape the whole facade .
and we are building that with these small prefabricated pieces that are the windows that let the air and the light in a controlled way inside the building .
and this is complemented by these small colored glasses that use the light from the inside of the building to light up the building at night .
with these ideas it was not easy first to convince the developers because they were like , " this is not a shopping mall . we did n't ask for that . "
but then we all realized that this idea of the market happened to be a lot more profitable than the idea of the shopping mall because basically they had more shops to sell .
and also that the idea of the facade was much , much cheaper , not only because of the material compared with the glass , but also because we did n't need to have air conditioning anymore .
so we created some budget savings that we used to implement the project .
and the first implementation was to think about how we could make the building self-sufficient in terms of energy in a city that has electricity cuts almost every day .
so we created a huge asset by placing photovoltaics there on the roof .
and then under those panels we thought about the roof like a new public space with gathering areas and bars that would create this urban oasis .
and these porches on the roof , all together they collect the water to reuse for sanitation on the inside .
hopefully by the beginning of next year , because we are already on the fifth floor of the construction .
the second example is a master plan of 2,000 apartments and facilities in the city of tunis .
and for doing such a big project , the biggest project i 've ever designed , i really needed to understand the city of tunis , but also its surroundings and the tradition and culture .
during that analysis i paid special attention to the medina that is this 1,000-year-old structure that used to be closed by a wall , opened by twelve different gates , connected by almost straight lines .
when i went to the site , the first design operation we did was to extend the existing streets , creating 12 initial blocks similar in size and characteristics to the ones we have in barcelona and other cities in europe with these courtyards .
on top of that , we selected some strategic points reminded of this idea of the gates and connecting them by straight lines , and this modified this initial pattern .
and the last operation was to think about the cell , the small cell of the project , like the apartment , as an essential part of the master plan .
and for that i thought , what would be the best orientation in the mediterranean climate for an apartment ?
and it 's north-south , because it creates a thermal difference between both sides of the house and then a natural ventilation .
so we overlap a pattern that makes sure that most of the apartments are perfectly oriented in that direction .
and this is the result that is almost like a combination of the european block and the arab city .
it has these blocks with courtyards , and then on the ground floor you have all these connections for the pedestrians .
and also it responds to the local regulations that establish a higher density on the upper levels and a lower density on the ground floor .
and it also reinforces this idea of the gates .
the volume has this connecting shape that shades itself with three different types of apartments and also lets the light go on the ground floor in a very dense neighborhood and in the courtyards there are the different facilities , such as a gym and a kindergarten and close by , a series of commercial -lsb- spaces -rsb- that bring activity to the ground floor .
the roof , which is my favorite space of the project is almost like giving back to the community the space taken by the construction .
and it 's where all the neighbors , they can go up and socialize , and do activities such as having a two-kilometer run in the morning , jumping from one building to another .
these two examples , they have a common approach in the design process .
and also , they are in emerging countries where you can see the cities literally growing .
in these cities , the impact of architecture in people 's lives of today and tomorrow changes the local communities and economies at the same speed as the buildings grow .
for this reason , i see even more importance to look at architecture finding simple but affordable solutions that enhance the relationship between the community and the environment and that aim to connect nature and people .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- well , i thought there would be a podium , so i 'm a bit scared .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- chris asked me to tell again how we found the structure of dna .
and since , you know , i follow his orders , i 'll do it .
but it slightly bores me .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and , you know , i wrote a book . so i 'll say something - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - i 'll say a little about , you know , how the discovery was made , and why francis and i found it .
and then , i hope maybe i have at least five minutes to say what makes me tick now .
in back of me is a picture of me when i was 17 .
i was at the university of chicago , in my third year , and i was in my third year because the university of chicago let you in after two years of high school .
so you - it was fun to get away from high school - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - because i was very small , and i was no good in sports , or anything like that .
but i should say that my background - my father was , you know , raised to be an episcopalian and republican , but after one year of college , he became an atheist and a democrat .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and my mother was irish catholic , and - but she did n't take religion too seriously .
and by the age of 11 , i was no longer going to sunday mass , and going on birdwatching walks with my father .
so early on , i heard of charles darwin .
i guess , you know , he was the big hero .
and , you know , you understand life as it now exists through evolution .
and at the university of chicago i was a zoology major , and thought i would end up , you know , if i was bright enough , maybe getting a ph.d. from cornell in ornithology .
then , in the chicago paper , there was a review of a book called " what is life ? " by the great physicist , schrodinger .
and that , of course , had been a question i wanted to know .
you know , darwin explained life after it got started , but what was the essence of life ?
and schrodinger said the essence was information present in our chromosomes , and it had to be present on a molecule . i 'd never really thought of molecules before .
you know chromosomes , but this was a molecule , and somehow all the information was probably present in some digital form . and there was the big question of , how did you copy the information ?
so that was the book . and so , from that moment on , i wanted to be a geneticist - understand the gene and , through that , understand life .
so i had , you know , a hero at a distance .
it was n't a baseball player ; it was linus pauling .
and so i applied to caltech and they turned me down .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i went to indiana , which was actually as good as caltech in genetics , and besides , they had a really good basketball team . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so i had a really quite happy life at indiana .
and it was at indiana i got the impression that , you know , the gene was likely to be dna .
and so when i got my ph.d. , i should go and search for dna .
so i first went to copenhagen because i thought , well , maybe i could become a biochemist , but i discovered biochemistry was very boring .
it was n't going anywhere toward , you know , saying what the gene was ; it was just nuclear science . and oh , that 's the book , little book .
you can read it in about two hours .
and - but then i went to a meeting in italy .
and there was an unexpected speaker who was n't on the program , and he talked about dna .
and this was maurice wilkins . he was trained as a physicist , and after the war he wanted to do biophysics , and he picked dna because dna had been determined at the rockefeller institute to possibly be the genetic molecules on the chromosomes .
most people believed it was proteins .
but wilkins , you know , thought dna was the best bet , and he showed this x-ray photograph .
sort of crystalline . so dna had a structure , even though it owed it to probably different molecules carrying different sets of instructions .
so there was something universal about the dna molecule .
so i wanted to work with him , but he did n't want a former birdwatcher , and i ended up in cambridge , england .
so i went to cambridge , because it was really the best place in the world then for x-ray crystallography . and x-ray crystallography is now a subject in , you know , chemistry departments .
i mean , in those days it was the domain of the physicists .
so the best place for x-ray crystallography was at the cavendish laboratory at cambridge .
and there i met francis crick .
i went there without knowing him . he was 35 . i was 23 .
and within a day , we had decided that maybe we could take a shortcut to finding the structure of dna .
not solve it like , you know , in rigorous fashion , but build a model , an electro-model , using some coordinates of , you know , length , all that sort of stuff from x-ray photographs .
but just ask what the molecule - how should it fold up ?
and the reason for doing so , at the center of this photograph , is linus pauling . about six months before , he proposed the alpha helical structure for proteins . and in doing so , he banished the man out on the right , sir lawrence bragg , who was the cavendish professor .
this is a photograph several years later , when bragg had cause to smile .
he certainly was n't smiling when i got there , because he was somewhat humiliated by pauling getting the alpha helix , and the cambridge people failing because they were n't chemists .
and certainly , neither crick or i were chemists , so we tried to build a model . and he knew , francis knew wilkins .
so wilkins said he thought it was the helix .
x-ray diagram , he thought was comparable with the helix .
so we built a three-stranded model .
the people from london came up .
wilkins and this collaborator , or possible collaborator , rosalind franklin , came up and sort of laughed at our model .
they said it was lousy , and it was .
so we were told to build no more models ; we were incompetent .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and so we did n't build any models , and francis sort of continued to work on proteins .
and basically , i did nothing . and - except read .
you know , basically , reading is a good thing ; you get facts .
and we kept telling the people in london that linus pauling 's going to move on to dna .
if dna is that important , linus will know it .
he 'll build a model , and then we 're going to be scooped .
and , in fact , he 'd written the people in london : could he see their x-ray photograph ?
and they had the wisdom to say " no . " so he did n't have it .
but there was ones in the literature .
actually , linus did n't look at them that carefully .
but about , oh , 15 months after i got to cambridge , a rumor began to appear from linus pauling 's son , who was in cambridge , that his father was now working on dna .
and so , one day peter came in and he said he was peter pauling , and he gave me a copy of his father 's manuscripts .
and boy , i was scared because i thought , you know , we may be scooped .
i have nothing to do , no qualifications for anything .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and so there was the paper , and he proposed a three-stranded structure .
and i read it , and it was just - it was crap .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so this was , you know , unexpected from the world 's - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - and so , it was held together by hydrogen bonds between phosphate groups .
well , if the peak ph that cells have is around seven , those hydrogen bonds could n't exist .
we rushed over to the chemistry department and said , " could pauling be right ? " and alex hust said , " no . " so we were happy .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and , you know , we were still in the game , but we were frightened that somebody at caltech would tell linus that he was wrong .
and so bragg said , " build models . "
and a month after we got the pauling manuscript - i should say i took the manuscript to london , and showed the people .
well , i said , linus was wrong and that we 're still in the game and that they should immediately start building models .
but wilkins said " no . " rosalind franklin was leaving in about two months , and after she left he would start building models .
and so i came back with that news to cambridge , and bragg said , " build models . "
well , of course , i wanted to build models .
and there 's a picture of rosalind . she really , you know , in one sense she was a chemist , but really she would have been trained - she did n't know any organic chemistry or quantum chemistry .
she was a crystallographer .
and i think part of the reason she did n't want to build models was , she was n't a chemist , whereas pauling was a chemist .
and so crick and i , you know , started building models , and i 'd learned a little chemistry , but not enough .
well , we got the answer on the 28th february ' 53 .
and it was because of a rule , which , to me , is a very good rule : never be the brightest person in a room , and we were n't .
we were n't the best chemists in the room .
i went in and showed them a pairing i 'd done , and jerry donohue - he was a chemist - he said , it 's wrong .
you 've got - the hydrogen atoms are in the wrong place .
i just put them down like they were in the books .
he said they were wrong .
so the next day , you know , after i thought , " well , he might be right . "
so i changed the locations , and then we found the base pairing , and francis immediately said the chains run in absolute directions .
and we knew we were right .
so it was a pretty , you know , it all happened in about two hours .
from nothing to thing .
and we knew it was big because , you know , if you just put a next to t and g next to c , you have a copying mechanism .
so we saw how genetic information is carried .
it 's the order of the four bases .
so in a sense , it is a sort of digital-type information .
and you copy it by going from strand-separating .
so , you know , if it did n't work this way , you might as well believe it , because you did n't have any other scheme .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but that 's not the way most scientists think .
most scientists are really rather dull .
they said , we wo n't think about it until we know it 's right .
but , you know , we thought , well , it 's at least 95 percent right or 99 percent right .
so think about it . the next five years , there were essentially something like five references to our work in " nature " - none .
and so we were left by ourselves , and trying to do the last part of the trio : how do you - what does this genetic information do ?
it was pretty obvious that it provided the information to an rna molecule , and then how do you go from rna to protein ?
for about three years we just - i tried to solve the structure of rna .
it did n't yield . it did n't give good x-ray photographs .
i was decidedly unhappy ; a girl did n't marry me .
it was really , you know , sort of a shitty time .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so there 's a picture of francis and i before i met the girl , so i 'm still looking happy .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but there is what we did when we did n't know where to go forward : we formed a club and called it the rna tie club .
george gamow , also a great physicist , he designed the tie .
he was one of the members . the question was : how do you go from a four-letter code to the 20-letter code of proteins ?
feynman was a member , and teller , and friends of gamow .
but that 's the only - no , we were only photographed twice .
and on both occasions , you know , one of us was missing the tie .
there 's francis up on the upper right , and alex rich - the m.d.-turned-crystallographer - is next to me .
this was taken in cambridge in september of 1955 .
and i 'm smiling , sort of forced , i think , because the girl i had , boy , she was gone .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and so i did n't really get happy until 1960 , because then we found out , basically , you know , that there are three forms of rna .
and we knew , basically , dna provides the information for rna .
rna provides the information for protein .
and that let marshall nirenberg , you know , take rna - synthetic rna - put it in a system making protein . he made polyphenylalanine , polyphenylalanine . so that 's the first cracking of the genetic code , and it was all over by 1966 .
so there , that 's what chris wanted me to do , it was - so what happened since then ?
well , at that time - i should go back .
when we found the structure of dna , i gave my first talk at cold spring harbor . the physicist , leo szilard , he looked at me and said , " are you going to patent this ? "
and - but he knew patent law , and that we could n't patent it , because you could n't . no use for it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and so dna did n't become a useful molecule , and the lawyers did n't enter into the equation until 1973 , 20 years later , when boyer and cohen in san francisco and stanford came up with their method of recombinant dna , and stanford patented it and made a lot of money .
at least they patented something which , you know , could do useful things .
and then , they learned how to read the letters for the code .
and , boom , we 've , you know , had a biotech industry . and , but we were still a long ways from , you know , answering a question which sort of dominated my childhood , which is : how do you nature-nurture ?
and so i 'll go on . i 'm already out of time , but this is michael wigler , a very , very clever mathematician turned physicist . and he developed a technique which essentially will let us look at sample dna and , eventually , a million spots along it .
there 's a chip there , a conventional one . then there 's one made by a photolithography by a company in madison called nimblegen , which is way ahead of affymetrix .
and we use their technique .
and what you can do is sort of compare dna of normal segs versus cancer .
and you can see on the top that cancers which are bad show insertions or deletions .
so the dna is really badly mucked up , whereas if you have a chance of surviving , the dna is n't so mucked up .
so we think that this will eventually lead to what we call " dna biopsies . " before you get treated for cancer , you should really look at this technique , and get a feeling of the face of the enemy .
it 's not a - it 's only a partial look , but it 's a - i think it 's going to be very , very useful .
so , we started with breast cancer because there 's lots of money for it , no government money .
and now i have a sort of vested interest : i want to do it for prostate cancer . so , you know , you are n't treated if it 's not dangerous .
but wigler , besides looking at cancer cells , looked at normal cells , and made a really sort of surprising observation .
which is , all of us have about 10 places in our genome where we 've lost a gene or gained another one .
so we 're sort of all imperfect . and the question is well , if we 're around here , you know , these little losses or gains might not be too bad .
but if these deletions or amplifications occurred in the wrong gene , maybe we 'll feel sick .
so the first disease he looked at is autism .
and the reason we looked at autism is we had the money to do it .
looking at an individual is about 3,000 dollars . and the parent of a child with asperger 's disease , the high-intelligence autism , had sent his thing to a conventional company ; they did n't do it .
could n't do it by conventional genetics , but just scanning it we began to find genes for autism .
and you can see here , there are a lot of them .
so a lot of autistic kids are autistic because they just lost a big piece of dna .
i mean , big piece at the molecular level .
we saw one autistic kid , about five million bases just missing from one of his chromosomes .
we have n't yet looked at the parents , but the parents probably do n't have that loss , or they would n't be parents .
now , so , our autism study is just beginning . we got three million dollars .
i think it will cost at least 10 to 20 before you 'd be in a position to help parents who 've had an autistic child , or think they may have an autistic child , and can we spot the difference ?
so this same technique should probably look at all .
it 's a wonderful way to find genes .
and so , i 'll conclude by saying we 've looked at 20 people with schizophrenia .
and we thought we 'd probably have to look at several hundred before we got the picture . but as you can see , there 's seven out of 20 had a change which was very high .
and yet , in the controls there were three .
so what 's the meaning of the controls ?
were they crazy also , and we did n't know it ?
or , you know , were they normal ? i would guess they 're normal .
and what we think in schizophrenia is there are genes of predisposure , and whether this is one that predisposes - and then there 's only a sub-segment of the population that 's capable of being schizophrenic .
now , we do n't have really any evidence of it , but i think , to give you a hypothesis , the best guess is that if you 're left-handed , you 're prone to schizophrenia .
30 percent of schizophrenic people are left-handed , and schizophrenia has a very funny genetics , which means 60 percent of the people are genetically left-handed , but only half of it showed . i do n't have the time to say .
now , some people who think they 're right-handed are genetically left-handed . ok . i 'm just saying that , if you think , oh , i do n't carry a left-handed gene so therefore my , you know , children wo n't be at risk of schizophrenia . you might . ok ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so it 's , to me , an extraordinarily exciting time .
we ought to be able to find the gene for bipolar ; there 's a relationship .
and if i had enough money , we 'd find them all this year .
i thank you .
we 've got a real problem with math education right now .
basically , no one 's very happy .
those learning it think it 's disconnected , uninteresting and hard .
those trying to employ them think they do n't know enough .
governments realize that it 's a big deal for our economies , but do n't know how to fix it .
and teachers are also frustrated .
yet math is more important to the world than at any point in human history .
so at one end we 've got falling interest in education in math , and at the other end we 've got a more mathematical world , a more quantitative world than we ever have had .
so what 's the problem , why has this chasm opened up , and what can we do to fix it ?
well actually , i think the answer is staring us right in the face : use computers .
i believe that correctly using computers is the silver bullet for making math education work .
so to explain that , let me first talk a bit about what math looks like in the real world and what it looks like in education .
see , in the real world math is n't necessarily done by mathematicians .
it 's done by geologists , engineers , biologists , all sorts of different people - modeling and simulation .
it 's actually very popular .
but in education it looks very different - dumbed-down problems , lots of calculating , mostly by hand .
lots of things that seem simple and not difficult like in the real world , except if you 're learning it .
and another thing about math : math sometimes looks like math - like in this example here - and sometimes it does n't - like " am i drunk ? "
and then you get an answer that 's quantitative in the modern world .
you would n't have expected that a few years back .
but now you can find out all about - unfortunately , my weight is a little higher than that , but - all about what happens .
so let 's zoom out a bit and ask , why are we teaching people math ?
what 's the point of teaching people math ?
and in particular , why are we teaching them math in general ?
why is it such an important part of education as a sort of compulsory subject ?
well , i think there are about three reasons : technical jobs so critical to the development of our economies , what i call " everyday living " - to function in the world today , you 've got to be pretty quantitative , much more so than a few years ago : figure out your mortgages , being skeptical of government statistics , those kinds of things - and thirdly , what i would call something like logical mind training , logical thinking .
over the years we 've put so much in society into being able to process and think logically . it 's part of human society .
it 's very important to learn that math is a great way to do that .
so let 's ask another question .
what is math ?
what do we mean when we say we 're doing math , or educating people to do math ?
well , i think it 's about four steps , roughly speaking , starting with posing the right question .
what is it that we want to ask ? what is it we 're trying to find out here ?
and this is the thing most screwed up in the outside world , beyond virtually any other part of doing math .
people ask the wrong question , and surprisingly enough , they get the wrong answer , for that reason , if not for others .
so the next thing is take that problem and turn it from a real world problem into a math problem .
that 's stage two .
once you 've done that , then there 's the computation step .
turn it from that into some answer in a mathematical form .
and of course , math is very powerful at doing that .
and then finally , turn it back to the real world .
did it answer the question ?
and also verify it - crucial step .
now here 's the crazy thing right now .
in math education , we 're spending about perhaps 80 percent of the time teaching people to do step three by hand .
yet , that 's the one step computers can do better than any human after years of practice .
instead , we ought to be using computers to do step three and using the students to spend much more effort on learning how to do steps one , two and four - conceptualizing problems , applying them , getting the teacher to run them through how to do that .
see , crucial point here : math is not equal to calculating .
math is a much broader subject than calculating .
now it 's understandable that this has all got intertwined over hundreds of years .
there was only one way to do calculating and that was by hand .
but in the last few decades that has totally changed .
we 've had the biggest transformation of any ancient subject that i could ever imagine with computers .
calculating was typically the limiting step , and now often it is n't .
so i think in terms of the fact that math has been liberated from calculating .
but that math liberation did n't get into education yet .
see , i think of calculating , in a sense , as the machinery of math .
it 's the chore .
it 's the thing you 'd like to avoid if you can , like to get a machine to do .
it 's a means to an end , not an end in itself , and automation allows us to have that machinery .
computers allow us to do that - and this is not a small problem by any means .
i estimated that , just today , across the world , we spent about 106 average world lifetimes teaching people how to calculate by hand .
that 's an amazing amount of human endeavor .
so we better be damn sure - and by the way , they did n't even have fun doing it , most of them - so we better be damn sure that we know why we 're doing that and it has a real purpose .
i think we should be assuming computers for doing the calculating and only doing hand calculations where it really makes sense to teach people that .
and i think there are some cases .
for example : mental arithmetic .
i still do a lot of that , mainly for estimating .
people say , " is such and such true ? "
and i 'll say , " hmm , not sure . " i 'll think about it roughly .
it 's still quicker to do that and more practical .
so i think practicality is one case where it 's worth teaching people by hand .
and then there are certain conceptual things that can also benefit from hand calculating , but i think they 're relatively small in number .
one thing i often ask about is ancient greek and how this relates .
see , the thing we 're doing right now is we 're forcing people to learn mathematics .
it 's a major subject .
i 'm not for one minute suggesting that , if people are interested in hand calculating or in following their own interests in any subject however bizarre - they should do that .
that 's absolutely the right thing , for people to follow their self-interest .
i was somewhat interested in ancient greek , but i do n't think that we should force the entire population to learn a subject like ancient greek .
i do n't think it 's warranted .
so i have this distinction between what we 're making people do and the subject that 's sort of mainstream and the subject that , in a sense , people might follow with their own interest and perhaps even be spiked into doing that .
so what are the issues people bring up with this ?
well one of them is , they say , you need to get the basics first .
you should n't use the machine until you get the basics of the subject .
so my usual question is , what do you mean by " basics ? "
basics of what ?
are the basics of driving a car learning how to service it , or design it for that matter ?
are the basics of writing learning how to sharpen a quill ?
i do n't think so .
i think you need to separate the basics of what you 're trying to do from how it gets done and the machinery of how it gets done and automation allows you to make that separation .
a hundred years ago , it 's certainly true that to drive a car you kind of needed to know a lot about the mechanics of the car and how the ignition timing worked and all sorts of things .
but automation in cars allowed that to separate , so driving is now a quite separate subject , so to speak , from engineering of the car or learning how to service it .
so automation allows this separation and also allows - in the case of driving , and i believe also in the future case of maths - a democratized way of doing that .
it can be spread across a much larger number of people who can really work with that .
so there 's another thing that comes up with basics .
people confuse , in my view , the order of the invention of the tools with the order in which they should use them for teaching .
so just because paper was invented before computers , it does n't necessarily mean you get more to the basics of the subject by using paper instead of a computer to teach mathematics .
my daughter gave me a rather nice anecdote on this .
she enjoys making what she calls " paper laptops . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i asked her one day , " you know , when i was your age , i did n't make these .
why do you think that was ? "
and after a second or two , carefully reflecting , she said , " no paper ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- if you were born after computers and paper , it does n't really matter which order you 're taught with them in , you just want to have the best tool .
so another one that comes up is " computers dumb math down . "
that somehow , if you use a computer , it 's all mindless button-pushing , but if you do it by hand , it 's all intellectual .
this one kind of annoys me , i must say .
do we really believe that the math that most people are doing in school practically today is more than applying procedures to problems they do n't really understand , for reasons they do n't get ?
i do n't think so .
and what 's worse , what they 're learning there is n't even practically useful anymore .
might have been 50 years ago , but it is n't anymore .
when they 're out of education , they do it on a computer .
just to be clear , i think computers can really help with this problem , actually make it more conceptual .
now , of course , like any great tool , they can be used completely mindlessly , like turning everything into a multimedia show , like the example i was shown of solving an equation by hand , where the computer was the teacher - show the student how to manipulate and solve it by hand .
this is just nuts .
why are we using computers to show a student how to solve a problem by hand that the computer should be doing anyway ?
all backwards .
let me show you that you can also make problems harder to calculate .
see , normally in school , you do things like solve quadratic equations .
but you see , when you 're using a computer , you can just substitute .
you can make it a quartic equation . make it kind of harder , calculating-wise .
same principles applied - calculations , harder .
and problems in the real world look nutty and horrible like this .
they 've got hair all over them .
they 're not just simple , dumbed-down things that we see in school math .
and think of the outside world .
do we really believe that engineering and biology and all of these other things that have so benefited from computers and maths have somehow conceptually gotten reduced by using computers ?
i do n't think so - quite the opposite .
so the problem we 've really got in math education is not that computers might dumb it down , but that we have dumbed-down problems right now .
well , another issue people bring up is somehow that hand calculating procedures teach understanding .
so if you go through lots of examples , you can get the answer , you can understand how the basics of the system work better .
i think there is one thing that i think very valid here , which is that i think understanding procedures and processes is important .
but there 's a fantastic way to do that in the modern world .
it 's called programming .
programming is how most procedures and processes get written down these days , and it 's also a great way to engage students much more and to check they really understand .
if you really want to check you understand math then write a program to do it .
so programming is the way i think we should be doing that .
so to be clear , what i really am suggesting here is we have a unique opportunity to make maths both more practical and more conceptual , simultaneously .
i ca n't think of any other subject where that 's recently been possible .
it 's usually some kind of choice between the vocational and the intellectual .
but i think we can do both at the same time here .
and we open up so many more possibilities .
you can do so many more problems .
what i really think we gain from this is students getting intuition and experience in far greater quantities than they 've ever got before .
and experience of harder problems - being able to play with the math , interact with it , feel it .
we want people who can feel the math instinctively .
that 's what computers allow us to do .
another thing it allows us to do is reorder the curriculum .
traditionally it 's been by how difficult it is to calculate , but now we can reorder it by how difficult it is to understand the concepts , however hard the calculating .
so calculus has traditionally been taught very late .
why is this ?
well , it 's damn hard doing the calculations , that 's the problem .
but actually many of the concepts are amenable to a much younger age group .
this was an example i built for my daughter .
and very , very simple .
we were talking about what happens when you increase the number of sides of a polygon to a very large number .
and of course , it turns into a circle .
and by the way , she was also very insistent on being able to change the color , an important feature for this demonstration .
you can see that this is a very early step into limits and differential calculus and what happens when you take things to an extreme - and very small sides and a very large number of sides .
very simple example .
that 's a view of the world that we do n't usually give people for many , many years after this .
and yet , that 's a really important practical view of the world .
so one of the roadblocks we have in moving this agenda forward is exams .
in the end , if we test everyone by hand in exams , it 's kind of hard to get the curricula changed during the semesters .
and one of the reasons it 's so important - so it 's very important to get computers in exams .
and then we can ask questions , real questions , questions like , what 's the best life insurance policy to get ? - real questions that people have in their everyday lives .
and you see , this is n't some dumbed-down model here .
this is an actual model where we can be asked to optimize what happens .
how many years of protection do i need ?
what does that do to the payments and to the interest rates and so forth ?
now i 'm not for one minute suggesting it 's the only kind of question that should be asked in exams , but i think it 's a very important type that right now just gets completely ignored and is critical for people 's real understanding .
so i believe -lsb- there is -rsb- critical reform we have to do in computer-based math .
we have got to make sure that we can move our economies forward , and also our societies , based on the idea that people can really feel mathematics .
this is n't some optional extra .
and the country that does this first will , in my view , leapfrog others in achieving a new economy even , an improved economy , an improved outlook .
in fact , i even talk about us moving from what we often call now the " knowledge economy " to what we might call a " computational knowledge economy , " where high-level math is integral to what everyone does in the way that knowledge currently is .
we can engage so many more students with this , and they can have a better time doing it .
and let 's understand : this is not an incremental sort of change .
we 're trying to cross the chasm here between school math and the real-world math .
and you know if you walk across a chasm , you end up making it worse than if you did n't start at all - bigger disaster .
no , what i 'm suggesting is that we should leap off , we should increase our velocity so it 's high , and we should leap off one side and go the other - of course , having calculated our differential equation very carefully .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so i want to see a completely renewed , changed math curriculum built from the ground up , based on computers being there , computers that are now ubiquitous almost .
calculating machines are everywhere and will be completely everywhere in a small number of years .
now i 'm not even sure if we should brand the subject as math , but what i am sure is it 's the mainstream subject of the future .
let 's go for it , and while we 're about it , let 's have a bit of fun , for us , for the students and for ted here .
thanks .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i moved to boston 10 years ago , from chicago , with an interest in cancer and in chemistry .
you might know that chemistry is the science of making molecules - or to my taste , new drugs for cancer .
and you might also know that , for science and medicine , boston is a bit of a candy store .
you ca n't roll a stop sign in cambridge without hitting a graduate student .
the bar is called the miracle of science .
the billboards say " lab space available . "
and it 's fair to say that in these 10 years , we 've witnessed absolutely the start of a scientific revolution - that of genome medicine .
we know more about the patients that enter our clinic now than ever before .
and we 're able , finally , to answer the question that 's been so pressing for so many years : why do i have cancer ?
this information is also pretty staggering .
you might know that , so far in just the dawn of this revolution , we know that there are perhaps 40,000 unique mutations affecting more than 10,000 genes , and that there are 500 of these genes that are bona-fide drivers , causes of cancer .
yet comparatively , we have about a dozen targeted medications .
and this inadequacy of cancer medicine really hit home when my father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer .
we did n't fly him to boston .
we did n't sequence his genome .
it 's been known for decades what causes this malignancy .
it 's three proteins - ras , myc and p53 .
this is old information we 've known since about the 80s , yet there 's no medicine i can prescribe to a patient with this or any of the numerous solid tumors caused by these three horsemen of the apocalypse that is cancer .
there 's no ras , no myc , no p53 drug .
and you might fairly ask : why is that ?
and the very unsatisfying , yet scientific , answer is it 's too hard .
that for whatever reason , these three proteins have entered a space in the language of our field that 's called the undruggable genome - which is like calling a computer unsurfable or the moon unwalkable .
it 's a horrible term of trade .
but what it means is that we fail to identify a greasy pocket in these proteins , into which we , like molecular locksmiths , can fashion an active , small , organic molecule or drug substance .
now as i was training in clinical medicine and hematology and oncology and stem cell transplantation , what we had instead , cascading through the regulatory network at the fda , were these substances - arsenic , thalidomide and this chemical derivative of nitrogen mustard gas .
and this is the 21st century .
and so , i guess you 'd say , dissatisfied with the performance and quality of these medicines , i went back to school in chemistry with the idea that perhaps by learning the trade of discovery chemistry and approaching it in the context of this brave new world of the open-source , the crowd-source , the collaborative network that we have access to within academia , that we might more quickly bring powerful and targeted therapies to our patients .
and so please consider this a work in progress , but i 'd like to tell you today a story about a very rare cancer called midline carcinoma , about the protein target , the undruggable protein target that causes this cancer , called brd4 , and about a molecule developed at my lab at dana farber cancer institute called jq1 , which we affectionately named for jun qi , the chemist that made this molecule .
now brd4 is an interesting protein .
you might ask yourself , with all the things cancer 's trying to do to kill our patient , how does it remember it 's cancer ?
when it winds up its genome , why does it not turn into an eye , into a liver , as it has all the genes necessary to do this ?
it remembers that it 's cancer .
and the reason is that cancer , like every cell in the body , places little molecular bookmarks , little post-it notes , that remind the cell " i 'm cancer ; i should keep growing . "
and those post-it notes involve this and other proteins of its class - so-called bromodomains .
so we developed an idea , a rationale , that perhaps , if we made a molecule that prevented the post-it note from sticking by entering into the little pocket at the base of this spinning protein , then maybe we could convince cancer cells , certainly those addicted to this brd4 protein , that they 're not cancer .
and so we started to work on this problem .
we developed libraries of compounds and eventually arrived at this and similar substances called jq1 .
now not being a drug company , we could do certain things , we had certain flexibilities , that i respect that a pharmaceutical industry does n't have .
we just started mailing it to our friends .
i have a small lab .
we thought we 'd just send it to people and see how the molecule behaves .
and we sent it to oxford , england where a group of talented crystallographers provided this picture , which helped us understand exactly how this molecule is so potent for this protein target .
it 's what we call a perfect fit of shape complimentarity , or hand in glove .
now this is a very rare cancer , this brd4-addicted cancer .
and so we worked with samples of material that were collected by young pathologists at brigham women 's hospital .
and as we treated these cells with this molecule , we observed something really striking .
the cancer cells , small , round and rapidly dividing , grew these arms and extensions .
they were changing shape .
in effect , the cancer cell was forgetting it was cancer and becoming a normal cell .
this got us very excited .
the next step would be to put this molecule into mice .
the only problem was there 's no mouse model of this rare cancer .
and so at the time that we were doing this research , i was caring for a 29 year-old firefighter from connecticut who was very much at the end of life with this incurable cancer .
this brd4-addicted cancer was growing throughout his left lung , and he had a chest tube in that was draining little bits of debris .
and every nursing shift we would throw this material out .
and so we approached this patient and asked if he would collaborate with us .
could we take this precious and rare cancerous material from this chest tube and drive it across town and put it into mice and try to do a clinical trial and stage it with a prototype drug ?
well that would be impossible and , rightly , illegal to do in humans .
and he obliged us .
at the lurie family center for animal imaging , my colleague , andrew kung , grew this cancer successfully in mice without ever touching plastic .
and you can see this pet scan of a mouse - what we call a pet pet .
the cancer is growing as this red , huge mass in the hind limb of this animal .
and as we treat it with our compound , this addiction to sugar , this rapid growth , faded .
and on the animal on the right , you see that the cancer was responding .
we 've completed now clinical trials in four mouse models of this disease .
and every time , we see the same thing .
the mice with this cancer that get the drug live , and the ones that do n't rapidly perish .
so we started to wonder , what would a drug company do at this point ?
well they probably would keep this a secret until they turn a prototype drug into an active pharmaceutical substance .
and so we did just the opposite .
we published a paper that described this finding at the earliest prototype stage .
we gave the world the chemical identity of this molecule , typically a secret in our discipline .
we told people exactly how to make it .
we gave them our email address , suggesting that , if they write us , we 'll send them a free molecule .
we basically tried to create the most competitive environment for our lab as possible .
and this was , unfortunately , successful .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- because now when we 've shared this molecule , just since december of last year , with 40 laboratories in the united states and 30 more in europe - many of them pharmaceutical companies seeking now to enter this space , to target this rare cancer that , thankfully right now , is quite desirable to study in that industry .
but the science that 's coming back from all of these laboratories about the use of this molecule has provided us insights that we might not have had on our own .
leukemia cells treated with this compound turn into normal white blood cells .
mice with multiple myeloma , an incurable malignancy of the bone marrow , respond dramatically to the treatment with this drug .
you might know that fat has memory .
nice to be able to demonstrate that for you .
and in fact , this molecule prevents this adipocyte , this fat stem cell , from remembering how to make fat such that mice on a high fat diet , like the folks in my hometown of chicago , fail to develop fatty liver , which is a major medical problem .
what this research taught us - not just my lab , but our institute , and harvard medical school more generally - is that we have unique resources in academia for drug discovery - that our center that has tested perhaps more cancer molecules in a scientific way than any other , never made one of its own .
for all the reasons you see listed here , we think there 's a great opportunity for academic centers to participate in this earliest , conceptually-tricky and creative discipline of prototype drug discovery .
so what next ?
we have this molecule , but it 's not a pill yet .
it 's not orally available .
we need to fix it , so that we can deliver it to our patients .
and everyone in the lab , especially following the interaction with these patients , feels quite compelled to deliver a drug substance based on this molecule .
it 's here where i have to say that we could use your help and your insights , your collaborative participation .
unlike a drug company , we do n't have a pipeline that we can deposit these molecules into .
we do n't have a team of salespeople and marketeers that can tell us how to position this drug against the other .
what we do have is the flexibility of an academic center to work with competent , motivated , enthusiastic , hopefully well-funded people to carry these molecules forward into the clinic while preserving our ability to share the prototype drug worldwide .
this molecule will soon leave our benches and go into a small startup company called tensha therapeutics .
and really this is the fourth of these molecules to kind of graduate from our little pipeline of drug discovery , two of which - a topical drug for lymphoma of the skin , an oral substance for the treatment of multiple myeloma - will actually come to the bedside for first clinical trial in july of this year .
for us , a major and exciting milestone .
i want to leave you with just two ideas .
the first is if anything is unique about this research , it 's less the science than the strategy - that this for us was a social experiment , an experiment in what would happen if we were as open and honest at the earliest phase of discovery chemistry research as we could be .
this string of letters and numbers and symbols and parentheses that can be texted , i suppose , or twittered worldwide , is the chemical identity of our pro compound .
it 's the information that we most need from pharmaceutical companies , the information on how these early prototype drugs might work .
yet this information is largely a secret .
and so we seek really to download from the amazing successes of the computer science industry two principles : that of opensource and that of crowdsourcing to quickly , responsibly accelerate the delivery of targeted therapeutics to patients with cancer .
now the business model involves all of you .
this research is funded by the public .
it 's funded by foundations .
and one thing i 've learned in boston is that you people will do anything for cancer - and i love that .
you bike across the state . you walk up and down the river .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i 've never seen really anywhere this unique support for cancer research .
and so i want to thank you for your participation , your collaboration and most of all for your confidence in our ideas .
-lrb- applause -rrb- everybody talks about happiness these days .
i had somebody count the number of books with " happiness " in the title published in the last five years and they gave up after about 40 , and there were many more .
there is a huge wave of interest in happiness , among researchers .
there is a lot of happiness coaching .
everybody would like to make people happier .
but in spite of all this flood of work , there are several cognitive traps that sort of make it almost impossible to think straight about happiness .
and my talk today will be mostly about these cognitive traps .
this applies to laypeople thinking about their own happiness , and it applies to scholars thinking about happiness , because it turns out we 're just as messed up as anybody else is .
the first of these traps is a reluctance to admit complexity .
it turns out that the word " happiness " is just not a useful word anymore , because we apply it to too many different things .
i think there is one particular meaning to which we might restrict it , but by and large , this is something that we 'll have to give up and we 'll have to adopt the more complicated view of what well-being is .
the second trap is a confusion between experience and memory ; basically , it 's between being happy in your life , and being happy about your life or happy with your life .
and those are two very different concepts , and they 're both lumped in the notion of happiness .
and the third is the focusing illusion , and it 's the unfortunate fact that we ca n't think about any circumstance that affects well-being without distorting its importance .
i mean , this is a real cognitive trap .
there 's just no way of getting it right .
now , i 'd like to start with an example of somebody who had a question-and-answer session after one of my lectures reported a story , he said he 'd been listening to a symphony , and it was absolutely glorious music and at the very end of the recording , there was a dreadful screeching sound .
and then he added , really quite emotionally , it ruined the whole experience .
but it had n't .
what it had ruined were the memories of the experience .
he had had the experience .
he had had 20 minutes of glorious music .
they counted for nothing because he was left with a memory ; the memory was ruined , and the memory was all that he had gotten to keep .
what this is telling us , really , is that we might be thinking of ourselves and of other people in terms of two selves .
there is an experiencing self , who lives in the present and knows the present , is capable of re-living the past , but basically it has only the present .
it 's the experiencing self that the doctor approaches - you know , when the doctor asks , " does it hurt now when i touch you here ? "
and then there is a remembering self , and the remembering self is the one that keeps score , and maintains the story of our life , and it 's the one that the doctor approaches in asking the question , " how have you been feeling lately ? "
or " how was your trip to albania ? " or something like that .
those are two very different entities , the experiencing self and the remembering self , and getting confused between them is part of the mess about the notion of happiness .
now , the remembering self is a storyteller .
and that really starts with a basic response of our memories - it starts immediately .
we do n't only tell stories when we set out to tell stories .
our memory tells us stories , that is , what we get to keep from our experiences is a story .
and let me begin with one example .
this is an old study .
those are actual patients undergoing a painful procedure .
i wo n't go into detail . it 's no longer painful these days , but it was painful when this study was run in the 1990s .
they were asked to report on their pain every 60 seconds .
here are two patients , those are their recordings .
and you are asked , " who of them suffered more ? "
and it 's a very easy question .
clearly , patient b suffered more - his colonoscopy was longer , and every minute of pain that patient a had , patient b had , and more .
but now there is another question : " how much did these patients think they suffered ? "
and here is a surprise .
the surprise is that patient a had a much worse memory of the colonoscopy than patient b.
the stories of the colonoscopies were different , and because a very critical part of the story is how it ends .
and neither of these stories is very inspiring or great - but one of them is this distinct ... -lrb- laughter -rrb- but one of them is distinctly worse than the other .
and the one that is worse is the one where pain was at its peak at the very end ; it 's a bad story .
how do we know that ?
because we asked these people after their colonoscopy , and much later , too , " how bad was the whole thing , in total ? "
and it was much worse for a than for b , in memory .
now this is a direct conflict between the experiencing self and the remembering self .
from the point of view of the experiencing self , clearly , b had a worse time .
now , what you could do with patient a , and we actually ran clinical experiments , and it has been done , and it does work - you could actually extend the colonoscopy of patient a by just keeping the tube in without jiggling it too much .
that will cause the patient to suffer , but just a little and much less than before .
and if you do that for a couple of minutes , you have made the experiencing self of patient a worse off , and you have the remembering self of patient a a lot better off , because now you have endowed patient a with a better story about his experience .
what defines a story ?
and that is true of the stories that memory delivers for us , and it 's also true of the stories that we make up .
what defines a story are changes , significant moments and endings .
endings are very , very important and , in this case , the ending dominated .
now , the experiencing self lives its life continuously .
it has moments of experience , one after the other .
and you can ask : what happens to these moments ?
and the answer is really straightforward : they are lost forever .
i mean , most of the moments of our life - and i calculated , you know , the psychological present is said to be about three seconds long ; that means that , you know , in a life there are about 600 million of them ; in a month , there are about 600,000 - most of them do n't leave a trace .
most of them are completely ignored by the remembering self .
and yet , somehow you get the sense that they should count , that what happens during these moments of experience is our life .
it 's the finite resource that we 're spending while we 're on this earth .
and how to spend it would seem to be relevant , but that is not the story that the remembering self keeps for us .
so we have the remembering self and the experiencing self , and they 're really quite distinct .
the biggest difference between them is in the handling of time .
from the point of view of the experiencing self , if you have a vacation , and the second week is just as good as the first , then the two-week vacation is twice as good as the one-week vacation .
that 's not the way it works at all for the remembering self .
for the remembering self , a two-week vacation is barely better than the one-week vacation because there are no new memories added .
you have not changed the story .
and in this way , time is actually the critical variable that distinguishes a remembering self from an experiencing self ; time has very little impact on the story .
now , the remembering self does more than remember and tell stories .
it is actually the one that makes decisions because , if you have a patient who has had , say , two colonoscopies with two different surgeons and is deciding which of them to choose , then the one that chooses is the one that has the memory that is less bad , and that 's the surgeon that will be chosen .
the experiencing self has no voice in this choice .
we actually do n't choose between experiences , we choose between memories of experiences .
and even when we think about the future , we do n't think of our future normally as experiences .
we think of our future as anticipated memories .
and basically you can look at this , you know , as a tyranny of the remembering self , and you can think of the remembering self sort of dragging the experiencing self through experiences that the experiencing self does n't need .
i have that sense that when we go on vacations this is very frequently the case ; that is , we go on vacations , in the service of our remembering self .
and this is a bit hard to justify i think .
i mean , how much do we consume our memories ?
that is one of the explanations that is given for the dominance of the remembering self .
and when i think about that , i think about a vacation we had in antarctica a few years ago , which was clearly the best vacation i 've ever had , and i think of it relatively often , relative to how much i think of other vacations .
and i probably have consumed my memories of that three-week trip , i would say , for about 25 minutes in the last four years .
now , if i had ever opened the folder with the 600 pictures in it , i would have spent another hour .
now , that is three weeks , and that is at most an hour and a half .
there seems to be a discrepancy .
now , i may be a bit extreme , you know , in how little appetite i have for consuming memories , but even if you do more of this , there is a genuine question : why do we put so much weight on memory relative to the weight that we put on experiences ?
so i want you to think about a thought experiment .
imagine that for your next vacation , you know that at the end of the vacation all your pictures will be destroyed , and you 'll get an amnesic drug so that you wo n't remember anything .
now , would you choose the same vacation ? -lrb- laughter -rrb- and if you would choose a different vacation , there is a conflict between your two selves , and you need to think about how to adjudicate that conflict , and it 's actually not at all obvious , because if you think in terms of time , then you get one answer , and if you think in terms of memories , you might get another answer .
why do we pick the vacations we do is a problem that confronts us with a choice between the two selves .
now , the two selves bring up two notions of happiness .
there are really two concepts of happiness that we can apply , one per self .
so you can ask : how happy is the experiencing self ?
and then you would ask : how happy are the moments in the experiencing self 's life ?
and they 're all - happiness for moments is a fairly complicated process .
what are the emotions that can be measured ?
and , by the way , now we are capable of getting a pretty good idea of the happiness of the experiencing self over time .
if you ask for the happiness of the remembering self , it 's a completely different thing .
this is not about how happily a person lives .
it is about how satisfied or pleased the person is when that person thinks about her life .
very different notion .
anyone who does n't distinguish those notions is going to mess up the study of happiness , and i belong to a crowd of students of well-being , who 've been messing up the study of happiness for a long time in precisely this way .
the distinction between the happiness of the experiencing self and the satisfaction of the remembering self has been recognized in recent years , and there are now efforts to measure the two separately .
the gallup organization has a world poll where more than half a million people have been asked questions about what they think of their life and about their experiences , and there have been other efforts along those lines .
so in recent years , we have begun to learn about the happiness of the two selves .
and the main lesson i think that we have learned is they are really different .
you can know how satisfied somebody is with their life , and that really does n't teach you much about how happily they 're living their life , and vice versa .
just to give you a sense of the correlation , the correlation is about .5 .
what that means is if you met somebody , and you were told , " oh his father is six feet tall , " how much would you know about his height ?
well , you would know something about his height , but there 's a lot of uncertainty .
you have that much uncertainty .
if i tell you that somebody ranked their life eight on a scale of ten , you have a lot of uncertainty about how happy they are with their experiencing self .
so the correlation is low .
we know something about what controls satisfaction of the happiness self .
we know that money is very important , goals are very important .
we know that happiness is mainly being satisfied with people that we like , spending time with people that we like .
there are other pleasures , but this is dominant .
so if you want to maximize the happiness of the two selves , you are going to end up doing very different things .
the bottom line of what i 've said here is that we really should not think of happiness as a substitute for well-being .
it is a completely different notion .
now , very quickly , another reason we can not think straight about happiness is that we do not attend to the same things when we think about life , and we actually live .
so , if you ask the simple question of how happy people are in california , you are not going to get to the correct answer .
when you ask that question , you think people must be happier in california if , say , you live in ohio .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and what happens is when you think about living in california , you are thinking of the contrast between california and other places , and that contrast , say , is in climate .
well , it turns out that climate is not very important to the experiencing self and it 's not even very important to the reflective self that decides how happy people are .
but now , because the reflective self is in charge , you may end up - some people may end up moving to california .
and it 's sort of interesting to trace what is going to happen to people who move to california in the hope of getting happier .
well , their experiencing self is not going to get happier .
we know that .
but one thing will happen : they will think they are happier , because , when they think about it , they 'll be reminded of how horrible the weather was in ohio , and they will feel they made the right decision .
it is very difficult to think straight about well-being , and i hope i have given you a sense of how difficult it is .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : thank you . i 've got a question for you .
thank you so much .
now , when we were on the phone a few weeks ago , you mentioned to me that there was quite an interesting result came out of that gallup survey .
is that something you can share since you do have a few moments left now ?
daniel kahneman : sure .
i think the most interesting result that we found in the gallup survey is a number , which we absolutely did not expect to find .
we found that with respect to the happiness of the experiencing self .
when we looked at how feelings , vary with income .
and it turns out that , below an income of 60,000 dollars a year , for americans - and that 's a very large sample of americans , like 600,000 , so it 's a large representative sample - below an income of 600,000 dollars a year ...
ca : 60,000 .
dk : 60,000 .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- 60,000 dollars a year , people are unhappy , and they get progressively unhappier the poorer they get .
above that , we get an absolutely flat line .
i mean i 've rarely seen lines so flat .
clearly , what is happening is money does not buy you experiential happiness , but lack of money certainly buys you misery , and we can measure that misery very , very clearly .
in terms of the other self , the remembering self , you get a different story .
the more money you earn , the more satisfied you are .
that does not hold for emotions .
ca : but danny , the whole american endeavor is about life , liberty , the pursuit of happiness .
if people took seriously that finding , i mean , it seems to turn upside down everything we believe about , like for example , taxation policy and so forth .
is there any chance that politicians , that the country generally , would take a finding like that seriously and run public policy based on it ?
dk : you know i think that there is recognition of the role of happiness research in public policy .
the recognition is going to be slow in the united states , no question about that , but in the u.k. , it is happening , and in other countries it is happening .
people are recognizing that they ought to be thinking of happiness when they think of public policy .
it 's going to take a while , and people are going to debate whether they want to study experience happiness , or whether they want to study life evaluation , so we need to have that debate fairly soon .
how to enhance happiness goes very different ways depending on how you think , and whether you think of the remembering self or you think of the experiencing self .
this is going to influence policy , i think , in years to come .
in the united states , efforts are being made to measure the experience happiness of the population .
this is going to be , i think , within the next decade or two , part of national statistics .
ca : well , it seems to me that this issue will - or at least should be - the most interesting policy discussion to track over the next few years .
thank you so much for inventing behavioral economics .
thank you , danny kahneman .
what is going on in this baby 's mind ?
if you 'd asked people this 30 years ago , most people , including psychologists , would have said that this baby was irrational , illogical , egocentric - that he could n't take the perspective of another person or understand cause and effect .
in the last 20 years , developmental science has completely overturned that picture .
so in some ways , we think that this baby 's thinking is like the thinking of the most brilliant scientists .
let me give you just one example of this .
one thing that this baby could be thinking about , that could be going on in his mind , is trying to figure out what 's going on in the mind of that other baby .
after all , one of the things that 's hardest for all of us to do is to figure out what other people are thinking and feeling .
and maybe the hardest thing of all is to figure out that what other people think and feel is n't actually exactly like what we think and feel .
anyone who 's followed politics can testify to how hard that is for some people to get .
we wanted to know if babies and young children could understand this really profound thing about other people .
now the question is : how could we ask them ?
babies , after all , ca n't talk , and if you ask a three year-old to tell you what he thinks , what you 'll get is a beautiful stream of consciousness monologue about ponies and birthdays and things like that .
so how do we actually ask them the question ?
well it turns out that the secret was broccoli .
what we did - betty rapacholi , who was one of my students , and i - was actually to give the babies two bowls of food : one bowl of raw broccoli and one bowl of delicious goldfish crackers .
now all of the babies , even in berkley , like the crackers and do n't like the raw broccoli .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but then what betty did was to take a little taste of food from each bowl .
and she would act as if she liked it or she did n't .
so half the time , she acted as if she liked the crackers and did n't like the broccoli - just like a baby and any other sane person .
but half the time , what she would do is take a little bit of the broccoli and go , " mmmmm , broccoli .
i tasted the broccoli . mmmmm . "
and then she would take a little bit of the crackers , and she 'd go , " eww , yuck , crackers .
i tasted the crackers . eww , yuck . "
so she 'd act as if what she wanted was just the opposite of what the babies wanted .
we did this with 15 and 18 month-old babies .
and then she would simply put her hand out and say , " can you give me some ? "
so the question is : what would the baby give her , what they liked or what she liked ?
and the remarkable thing was that 18 month-old babies , just barely walking and talking , would give her the crackers if she liked the crackers , but they would give her the broccoli if she liked the broccoli .
15 month-olds would stare at her for a long time if she acted as if she liked the broccoli , like they could n't figure this out .
but then after they stared for a long time , they would just give her the crackers , what they thought everybody must like .
so there are two really remarkable things about this .
the first one is that these little 18 month-old babies have already discovered this really profound fact about human nature , that we do n't always want the same thing .
and what 's more , they felt that they should actually do things to help other people get what they wanted .
even more remarkably though , the fact that 15 month-olds did n't do this suggests that these 18 month-olds had learned this deep , profound fact about human nature in the three months from when they were 15 months old .
so children both know more and learn more than we ever would have thought .
and this is just one of hundreds and hundreds of studies over the last 20 years that 's actually demonstrated it .
the question you might ask though is : why do children learn so much ?
and how is it possible for them to learn so much in such a short time ?
i mean , after all , if you look at babies superficially , they seem pretty useless .
and actually in many ways , they 're worse than useless , because we have to put so much time and energy into just keeping them alive .
but if we turn to evolution for an answer to this puzzle of why we spend so much time taking care of useless babies , it turns out that there 's actually an answer .
if we look across many , many different species of animals , not just us primates , but also including other mammals , birds , even marsupials like kangaroos and wombats , it turns out that there 's a relationship between how long a childhood a species has and how big their brains are compared to their bodies and how smart and flexible they are .
and sort of the posterbirds for this idea are the birds up there .
on one side is a new caledonian crow .
and crows and other corvidae , ravens , rooks and so forth , are incredibly smart birds .
they 're as smart as chimpanzees in some respects .
and this is a bird on the cover of science who 's learned how to use a tool to get food .
we have our friend the domestic chicken .
and chickens and ducks and geese and turkeys are basically as dumb as dumps .
so they 're very , very good at pecking for grain , and they 're not much good at doing anything else .
well it turns out that the babies , the new caledonian crow babies , are fledglings .
they depend on their moms to drop worms in their little open mouths for as long as two years , which is a really long time in the life of a bird .
whereas the chickens are actually mature within a couple of months .
so childhood is the reason why the crows end up on the cover of science and the chickens end up in the soup pot .
there 's something about that long childhood that seems to be connected to knowledge and learning .
well what kind of explanation could we have for this ?
well some animals , like the chicken , seem to be beautifully suited to doing just one thing very well .
so they seem to be beautifully suited to pecking grain in one environment .
other creatures , like the crows , are n't very good at doing anything in particular , but they 're extremely good at learning about laws of different environments .
and of course , we human beings are way out on the end of the distribution like the crows .
we have bigger brains relative to our bodies by far than any other animal .
we 're smarter , we 're more flexible , we can learn more , we survive in more different environments , we migrated to cover the world and even go to outer space .
and our babies and children are dependent on us for much longer than the babies of any other species .
my son is 23 .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and at least until they 're 23 , we 're still popping those worms into those little open mouths .
all right , why would we see this correlation ?
well an idea is that that strategy , that learning strategy , is an extremely powerful , great strategy for getting on in the world , but it has one big disadvantage .
and that one big disadvantage is that , until you actually do all that learning , you 're going to be helpless .
so you do n't want to have the mastodon charging at you and be saying to yourself , " a slingshot or maybe a spear might work . which would actually be better ? "
you want to know all that before the mastodons actually show up .
and the way the evolutions seems to have solved that problem is with a kind of division of labor .
so the idea is that we have this early period when we 're completely protected .
we do n't have to do anything . all we have to do is learn .
and then as adults , we can take all those things that we learned when we were babies and children and actually put them to work to do things out there in the world .
so one way of thinking about it is that babies and young children are like the research and development division of the human species .
so they 're the protected blue sky guys who just have to go out and learn and have good ideas , and we 're production and marketing .
we have to take all those ideas that we learned when we were children and actually put them to use .
another way of thinking about it is instead of thinking of babies and children as being like defective grownups , we should think about them as being a different developmental stage of the same species - kind of like caterpillars and butterflies - except that they 're actually the brilliant butterflies who are flitting around the garden and exploring , and we 're the caterpillars who are inching along our narrow , grownup , adult path .
if this is true , if these babies are designed to learn - and this evolutionary story would say children are for learning , that 's what they 're for - we might expect that they would have really powerful learning mechanisms .
and in fact , the baby 's brain seems to be the most powerful learning computer on the planet .
but real computers are actually getting to be a lot better .
and there 's been a revolution in our understanding of machine learning recently .
and it all depends on the ideas of this guy , the reverend thomas bayes , who was a statistician and mathematician in the 18th century .
and essentially what bayes did was to provide a mathematical way using probability theory to characterize , describe , the way that scientists find out about the world .
so what scientists do is they have a hypothesis that they think might be likely to start with .
they go out and test it against the evidence .
the evidence makes them change that hypothesis .
then they test that new hypothesis and so on and so forth .
and what bayes showed was a mathematical way that you could do that .
and that mathematics is at the core of the best machine learning programs that we have now .
and some 10 years ago , i suggested that babies might be doing the same thing .
so if you want to know what 's going on underneath those beautiful brown eyes , i think it actually looks something like this .
this is reverend bayes 's notebook .
so i think those babies are actually making complicated calculations with conditional probabilities that they 're revising to figure out how the world works .
all right , now that might seem like an even taller order to actually demonstrate .
because after all , if you ask even grownups about statistics , they look extremely stupid .
how could it be that children are doing statistics ?
so to test this we used a machine that we have called the blicket detector .
this is a box that lights up and plays music when you put some things on it and not others .
and using this very simple machine , my lab and others have done dozens of studies showing just how good babies are at learning about the world .
let me mention just one that we did with tumar kushner , my student .
if i showed you this detector , you would be likely to think to begin with that the way to make the detector go would be to put a block on top of the detector .
but actually , this detector works in a bit of a strange way .
because if you wave a block over the top of the detector , something you would n't ever think of to begin with , the detector will actually activate two out of three times .
whereas , if you do the likely thing , put the block on the detector , it will only activate two out of six times .
so the unlikely hypothesis actually has stronger evidence .
it looks as if the waving is a more effective strategy than the other strategy .
so we did just this ; we gave four year-olds this pattern of evidence , and we just asked them to make it go .
and sure enough , the four year-olds used the evidence to wave the object on top of the detector .
now there are two things that are really interesting about this .
the first one is , again , remember , these are four year-olds .
they 're just learning how to count .
but unconsciously , they 're doing these quite complicated calculations that will give them a conditional probability measure .
and the other interesting thing is that they 're using that evidence to get to an idea , get to a hypothesis about the world , that seems very unlikely to begin with .
and in studies we 've just been doing in my lab , similar studies , we 've show that four year-olds are actually better at finding out an unlikely hypothesis than adults are when we give them exactly the same task .
so in these circumstances , the children are using statistics to find out about the world , but after all , scientists also do experiments , and we wanted to see if children are doing experiments .
when children do experiments we call it " getting into everything " or else " playing . "
and there 's been a bunch of interesting studies recently that have shown this playing around is really a kind of experimental research program .
here 's one from cristine legare 's lab .
what cristine did was use our blicket detectors .
and what she did was show children that yellow ones made it go and red ones did n't , and then she showed them an anomaly .
and what you 'll see is that this little boy will go through five hypotheses in the space of two minutes .
-lrb- video -rrb- boy : how about this ?
same as the other side .
alison gopnik : okay , so his first hypothesis has just been falsified .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- boy : this one lighted up , and this one nothing .
ag : okay , he 's got his experimental notebook out .
boy : what 's making this light up .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i do n't know .
ag : every scientist will recognize that expression of despair .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- boy : oh , it 's because this needs to be like this , and this needs to be like this .
ag : okay , hypothesis two .
boy : that 's why .
oh .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ag : now this is his next idea .
he told the experimenter to do this , to try putting it out onto the other location .
not working either .
boy : oh , because the light goes only to here , not here .
oh , the bottom of this box has electricity in here , but this does n't have electricity .
ag : okay , that 's a fourth hypothesis .
boy : it 's lighting up .
so when you put four .
so you put four on this one to make it light up and two on this one to make it light up .
ag : okay , there 's his fifth hypothesis .
now that is a particularly - that is a particularly adorable and articulate little boy , but what cristine discovered is this is actually quite typical .
if you look at the way children play , when you ask them to explain something , what they really do is do a series of experiments .
this is actually pretty typical of four year-olds .
well , what 's it like to be this kind of creature ?
what 's it like to be one of these brilliant butterflies who can test five hypotheses in two minutes ?
well , if you go back to those psychologists and philosophers , a lot of them have said that babies and young children were barely conscious if they were conscious at all .
and i think just the opposite is true .
i think babies and children are actually more conscious than we are as adults .
now here 's what we know about how adult consciousness works .
and adults ' attention and consciousness look kind of like a spotlight .
so what happens for adults is we decide that something 's relevant or important , we should pay attention to it .
our consciousness of that thing that we 're attending to becomes extremely bright and vivid , and everything else sort of goes dark .
and we even know something about the way the brain does this .
so what happens when we pay attention is that the prefrontal cortex , the sort of executive part of our brains , sends a signal that makes a little part of our brain much more flexible , more plastic , better at learning , and shuts down activity in all the rest of our brains .
so we have a very focused , purpose-driven kind of attention .
if we look at babies and young children , we see something very different .
i think babies and young children seem to have more of a lantern of consciousness than a spotlight of consciousness .
so babies and young children are very bad at narrowing down to just one thing .
but they 're very good at taking in lots of information from lots of different sources at once .
and if you actually look in their brains , you see that they 're flooded with these neurotransmitters that are really good at inducing learning and plasticity , and the inhibitory parts have n't come on yet .
so when we say that babies and young children are bad at paying attention , what we really mean is that they 're bad at not paying attention .
so they 're bad at getting rid of all the interesting things that could tell them something and just looking at the thing that 's important .
that 's the kind of attention , the kind of consciousness , that we might expect from those butterflies who are designed to learn .
well if we want to think about a way of getting a taste of that kind of baby consciousness as adults , i think the best thing is think about cases where we 're put in a new situation that we 've never been in before - when we fall in love with someone new , or when we 're in a new city for the first time .
and what happens then is not that our consciousness contracts , it expands , so that those three days in paris seem to be more full of consciousness and experience than all the months of being a walking , talking , faculty meeting-attending zombie back home .
and by the way , that coffee , that wonderful coffee you 've been drinking downstairs , actually mimics the effect of those baby neurotransmitters .
so what 's it like to be a baby ?
it 's like being in love in paris for the first time after you 've had three double-espressos .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's a fantastic way to be , but it does tend to leave you waking up crying at three o 'clock in the morning .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now it 's good to be a grownup .
i do n't want to say too much about how wonderful babies are .
it 's good to be a grownup .
we can do things like tie our shoelaces and cross the street by ourselves .
and it makes sense that we put a lot of effort into making babies think like adults do .
but if what we want is to be like those butterflies , to have open-mindedness , open learning , imagination , creativity , innovation , maybe at least some of the time we should be getting the adults to start thinking more like children .
-lrb- applause -rrb- charles and ray were a team . they were husband and wife .
despite the new york times ' and vanity fair 's best efforts recently , they 're not brothers . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and they were a lot of fun .
you know , ray was the one who wore the ampersands in the family .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we are going to focus on charles today , because it is charles ' 100th birthday .
but when i speak of him , i 'm really speaking of both of them as a team .
here 's charles when he was three . so he would be 100 this june .
we have a lot of cool celebrations that we 're going to do .
the thing about their work is that most people come to the door of furniture - i suspect you probably recognize this chair and some of the others i 'm going to show you .
but we 're going to first enter through the door of the big top .
the whole thing about this , though , is that , you know , why am i showing it ?
is it because charles and ray made this film ?
this is actually a training film for a clown college that they had .
they also practiced a clown act when the future of furniture was not nearly as auspicious as it turned out to be .
there is a picture of charles . so let 's watch the next clip .
the film that we 're about to see is a film they made for the moscow world 's fair .
video : this is the land .
it has many contrasts .
it is rough and it is flat .
in places it is cold .
in some it is hot .
too much rain falls on some areas , and not enough on others .
but people live on this land .
and , as in russia , they are drawn together into towns and cities .
here is something of the way they live .
eames demetrios : now , this is a film that was hardly ever seen in the united states .
it was on seven screens and it was 200 feet across .
and it was at the height of the cold war .
the nixon-khrushchev kitchen debate happened about 50 feet from where this was shown .
and yet , how did it start ?
you know , commonality , the first line in charles ' narration was , " the same stars that shine down on russia shine down on the united states . from the sky , our cities look much the same . "
it was that human connection that charles and ray always found in everything .
and you can imagine , and the thing about it is , that they believed that the human mind could handle this number of images because the important thing was to get the gestalt of what the images were about .
so that was just a little snip .
but the thing about charles and ray is that they were always modeling stuff .
they were always trying things out .
i think one of the things i am passionate about , my grandparents work , i 'm passionate about my work , but on top of all that i 'm passionate about a holistic vision of design , where design is a life skill , not a professional skill .
and you know , those of us with kids often want our kids to take music .
i 'm no exception .
but it 's not about them becoming bono or tracy chapman .
it 's about getting that music thing going through their heads and their thinking .
design is the same way . design has to become that same way .
and this is a model that they did of that seven-screen presentation .
and charles just checking it out there .
so now we 're going to go through that door of furniture .
this is an unusual installation of airport seating .
so what we 're going to see is some of the icons of eames furniture .
and the thing about their furniture is that they said the role of the designer was essentially that of a good host , anticipating the needs of the guest .
so those are cool images . but these are ones i think are really cool .
these are all the prototypes . these are the mistakes , although i do n't think mistakes is the right word in design .
it 's just the things you try out to kind of make it work better .
and you know some of them would probably be terrible chairs .
some of them are kind of cool looking . it 's like " hey , why did n't they try that ? "
it was that hands-on iterative process which is so much like vernacular design and folk design in traditional cultures .
and i think that 's one of the commonalities between modernism and traditional design . i think it may be a real common ground as we kind of figure out what on earth to do in the next 20 or 30 years .
the other thing that 's kind of cool is that you look at this and in the media when people say design , they actually mean style .
and i 'm really here to talk about design .
but you know the object is just a pivot .
it 's a pivot between a process and a system .
and this is a little film i made about the making of the eames lounge chair .
the design process for charles and ray never ended in manufacturing .
it continued . they were always trying to make thing better and better .
because it 's like as bill clinton was saying about rwandan health clinics .
it 's not enough to create one .
you 've got to create a system that will work better and better .
so i 've always liked this prototype picture .
because it just kind of , you know , does n't get any more basic than that .
you try things out .
this is a relatively famous chair .
its early version had an " x " base . that 's what the collectors like .
charles and ray liked this one because it was better .
it worked better : " h " base , much more practical .
this is something called a splint .
and i was very touched by dean kamen 's work for the military , or for the soldiers , because charles and ray designed a molded plywood splint . this is it .
and they 'd been working on furniture before .
but doing these splints they learned a lot about the manufacturing process , which was incredibly important to them .
i 'm trying to show you too much , because i want you to really get a broth of ideas and images .
this is a house that charles and ray designed .
my sister is chasing someone else . it 's not me .
although i endorse heartily the fact that he stole her diary , it 's not me .
and then this is a film , on the lower left , that charles and ray made .
now look at that plastic chair .
the house is 1949 .
the chair is done in 1949 .
charles and ray , they did n't obsess about style for it 's own sake .
they did n't say , " our style is curves . let 's make the house curvy . "
they did n't say , " our style is grids . let 's make the chair griddy . "
they focused on the need .
they tried to solve the design problem .
charles used to say , " the extent to which you have a design style is the extent to which you have not solved the design problem . "
it 's kind of a brutal quote .
this is the earlier design of that house .
and again , they managed to figure out a way to make a prototype of a house - architecture , very expensive medium .
here 's a film we 've been hearing things about .
the " powers of ten " is a film they made .
if we watch the next clip , you 're going to see the first version of " powers of ten , " upper left .
the familiar one on the lower right .
the eames ' film tops , lower left .
and a lamp that charles designed for a church .
video : which in turn belongs to a local group of galaxies .
these form part of a grouping system much as the stars do .
they are so many and so varied that from this distance they appear like the stars from earth .
ed : you 've seen that film , and what 's so great about this whole conference is that everybody has been talking about scale .
everybody here is coming at it from a different way .
i want to give you one example .
e.o. wilson once told me that when he looked at ants - he loved them , of course , and he wanted to learn more about them - he consciously looked at them from the standpoint of scale .
so here is the tiny creature .
and yet simply by changing the frame of reference it reveals so much , including what ended up being the ted prize .
modeling , they tried modeling all the time . they were always modeling things .
and i think part of that is that they never delegated understanding .
and i think in our family we were very lucky , because we learned about design backwards .
design was not something other .
it was part of the business of life in general .
it was part of the quality of life .
and here is some family pictures .
and you can see why i 'm down on style , with a haircut like that .
but anyway , -lrb- laughter -rrb- i remember the cut grapefruit that we would have at the eames house when i was a kid .
so we 're going to watch another film .
this is a film , the one called toys .
you can see me , i have the same haircut , in the upper right corner .
upper left is a film they did on toy trains .
lower right is a solar do-nothing toy .
lower left is day-of-the-dead toys .
charles used to say that toys are not as innocent as they appear .
they are often the precursor to bigger things .
and these ideas - that train up there , being about the honest use of materials , is totally the same as the honest use of materials in the plywood .
and now i 'm going to test you .
this is a letter that my grandfather sent to my mom when she was five years old .
so can you read it ?
lucia angel , okay , eye .
audience : saw many trains .
ed : awl , also , good that the leather crafter 's guild is here .
also , what is he doing ? row , rowed .
sun ? no . well is there another name for a sunrise ?
dawn , very good .
also rode on one . i ...
audience : you had , i hope you had - ed : now you 've been to the website dogs of saint louis in the late , in the mid-1930 's , then you 'd know that was a great dane .
so , i hope you had a audience : nice time , time - ed : time at .
citizen kane , rose - audience : rosebud .
ed : no , bud . " d "'s right . at buddy 's - audience : party . love .
ed : okay , good .
so , " i saw many trains and also rode on one .
i hope you had a nice time at buddy 's party . "
so you guys did pretty good , cool .
so my mom and charles had this great relationship where they 'd send those sorts of things back and forth to one another .
and it 's all part of the , you know , they used to say , " take your pleasure seriously . "
these are some images from a project of mine that 's called kymaerica .
it 's sort of an alternative universe .
it 's kind of a reinterpretation of the landscape .
those plaques are plaques we 've been installing around north america .
we 're about to do six in the u.k. next week .
and they honor events in the linear world from the fictional world .
so , of course , since it 's bronze it has to be true .
video : kymaerica with waterfalls , tumbling through our - ed : this is one of the traditional kymaerican songs .
and so we had spelling bees in paris , illinois .
video : your word is n. carolina .
girl : y-i-n-d-i-a-n-a .
ed : and then embassy row is actually a historical site , because in the kymaerican story this is where the parisian diaspora started , where there embassy was .
so you can actually visit and have this three-dimensional fictional experience there .
and the town has really embraced it .
we had the spelling bee in conjunction with the gwomeus club .
but what is really cool is that we take our visual environment as inevitable . and it 's not .
other things could have happened . the japanese could have discovered monterey .
and we could have been born 100,000 years ago .
and there are a lot of fun things . this is the museum of the bench .
they have trading cards and all sorts of cool things .
and you 're kind of trapped in the texture of kymaerica .
the tahatchabe , the great road building culture .
a guy named nobu naga , the so-called japanese columbus .
but now i 'm going to return you to the real world .
and this is cranbrook . i 've got a real treat for you , which is the first film that charles ever made .
so let 's watch that . nobody 's ever seen it .
cranbrook is very generous to let us show it for the first time here .
it 's a film about maya gretel , a famous ceramicist , and a teacher at cranbrook .
and he made it for the 1939 faculty exhibition .
silent . we do n't have a track for it yet .
very simple . it 's just a start . but it 's that learn-by-doing thing .
you want to learn how to make films ? go make a movie .
and you try something out .
but here is what 's really great .
see that chair there ? the orange one ? that 's the organic chair . 1940 .
at the same time that charles was doing that chair , he was doing this film .
so my point is that this scope of vision , this holistic vision of design , was with them from the beginning .
it was n't like " oh , we made some chairs and got successful .
now we 're going to do some movies . "
it was always part of how they looked at the world . and that 's what 's really powerful .
and i think that all of us in this room , as you move design forward , it 's not about just doing one thing .
it 's about how you approach problems . and there is this huge , beautiful commonality between design , business and the world .
so we 're going to do the last clip .
and i 've shown you some of the images . i just want to focus on sound now .
so this is charles ' voice .
charles eames : in india , those without , and the lowest in caste , eat very often , particularly in southern india , and those a little bit up the scale eat off of a sort of a low-fired ceramic dish .
and a little bit higher , why they have a glaze on a thing they call a thali .
if you 're up the scale a little bit more , why , a brass thali .
and then things get to be a little questionable .
there are things like silver-plated thalis .
and there is solid silver thalis .
and i suppose some nut has had a gold thali that he 's eaten off of .
but you can go beyond that .
and the guys that have not only means , but a certain amount of knowledge and understanding , go to the next step , and they eat off a banana leaf .
and i think that in these times when we fall back and regroup , that somehow or other , the banana leaf parable because i 'm not prepared to say that the banana leaf that one eats off of is the same as the other eats off of .
but it is that process that has happened within the man that changes the banana leaf .
ed : i 've been looking forward to sharing that quote with you .
because that 's part of where we 've got to get to .
and i also want to share this one .
" beyond the age of information is the age of choices . "
and i really think that 's where we are .
and it 's kind of cool for me to be part of a family and a tradition where he was talking about that in 1978 .
and part of why this stuff is important and all the things that we do are important , is that these are the ideas we need .
and i think that this is all part of surrendering to the design journey .
that 's what we all need to do .
design is not just for designers anymore . it 's a process . it 's not style .
all that great thinking needs to really get about solving pretty key problems .
i really thank you for your time .
-lrb- applause -rrb- everybody in our society 's life is touched by cancer - if not personally , then through a loved one , a family member , colleague , friend .
and once our lives are touched by cancer , we quickly learn that there are basically three weapons , or three tools , that are available to fight the disease : surgery , radiation and chemotherapy .
and once we get involved in the therapeutic decisions , again either personally or with our loved ones and family members , we also very quickly learn the benefits , the trade-offs and the limitations of these tools .
i 'm very thankful to jay and to mark and the tedmed team for inviting me today to describe a fourth tool , a new tool , that we call tumor treating fields .
tumor treating fields were invented by dr. yoram palti , professor emeritus at the technion in israel .
and they use low-intensity electric fields to fight cancer .
to understand how tumor treating fields work , we first need to understand what are electric fields .
let me first address a few popular misconceptions .
first of all , electric fields are not an electric current that is coursing through the tissue .
electric fields are not ionizing radiation , like x-rays or proton beams , that bombard tissue to disrupt dna .
and electric fields are not magnetism .
what electric fields are are a field of forces .
and these forces act on , attract , bodies that have an electrical charge .
the best way to visualize an electric field is to think of gravity .
gravity is also a field of forces that act on masses .
we can all picture astronauts in space .
they float freely in three dimensions without any forces acting on them .
but as that space shuttle returns to earth , and as the astronauts enter the earth 's gravitational field , they begin to see the effects of gravity .
they begin to be attracted towards earth .
and as they land , they 're fully aligned in the gravitational field .
we 're , of course , all stuck in the earth 's gravitational field right now .
that 's why you 're all in your chairs .
and that 's why we have to use our muscle energy to stand up , to walk around and to lift things .
in cancer , cells rapidly divide and lead to uncontrolled tumor growth .
we can think of a cell from an electrical perspective as if it 's a mini space station .
and in that space station we have the genetic material , the chromosomes , within a nucleus .
and out in the cytoplasmic soup we have special proteins that are required for cell division that float freely in this soup in three dimensions .
importantly , those special proteins are among the most highly charged objects in our body .
as cell division begins the nucleus disintegrates , the chromosomes line up in the middle of the cell and those special proteins undergo a three-dimensional sequence whereby they attach and they literally click into place end-on-end to form chains .
these chains then progress and attach to the genetic material and pull the genetic material from one cell into two cells .
and this is exactly how one cancer cell becomes two cancer cells , two cancer cells become four cancer cells , and we have ultimately uncontrolled tumor growth .
tumor treating fields use externally placed transducers attached to a field generator to create an artificial electric field on that space station .
and when that cellular space station is within the electric field , it acts on those highly charged proteins and aligns them .
and it prevents them from forming those chains , those mitotic spindles , that are necessary to pull the genetic material into the daughter cells .
what we see is that the cells will attempt to divide for several hours .
and they will either enter into this so-called cellular suicide , programmed cell death , or they will form unhealthy daughter cells and enter into apoptosis once they have divided .
and we can observe this .
what i 'm going to show you next are two in vitro experiments .
this is cultures , identical cultures , of cervical cancer cells .
and we 've stained these cultures with a green florescent dye so that we can look at these proteins that form these chains .
the first clip shows a normal cell division without the tumor treating fields .
what we see are , first of all , a very active culture , a lot of divisions , and then very clear nuclei once the cells have separated .
and we can see them dividing throughout .
when we apply the fields - again , in the identical time-scale to the identical culture - you 're going to see something different .
the cells round up for division , but they 're very static in that position .
we 'll see two cells in the upper part of the screen attempting to divide .
the one within the circle manages .
but see how much of the protein is still throughout the nucleus , even in the dividing cell .
the one up there ca n't divide at all .
and then this bubbling , this membrane bubbling , is the hallmark of apoptosis in this cell .
formation of healthy mitotic spindles is necessary for division in all cell types .
we 've applied tumor treating fields to over 20 different cancers in the lab , and we see this effect in all of them .
now importantly , these tumor treating fields have no effect on normal undividing cells .
10 years ago , dr. palti founded a company called novocure to develop his discovery into a practical therapy for patients .
in that time , novocure 's developed two systems - one system for cancers in the head and another system for cancers in the trunk of the body .
the first cancer that we have focused on is the deadly brain cancer , gbm .
gbm affects about 10,000 people in the u.s. each year .
it 's a death sentence .
the expected five year survival is less than five percent .
and the typical patient with optimal therapy survives just a little over a year , and only about seven months from the time that the cancer is first treated and then comes back and starts growing again .
novocure conducted its first phase three randomized trial in patients with recurrent gbm .
so these are patients who had received surgery , high dose radiation to the head and first-line chemotherapy , and that had failed and their tumors had grown back .
we divided the patients into two groups .
the first group received second-line chemotherapy , which is expected to double the life expectancy , versus no treatment at all .
and then the second group received only tumor treating field therapy .
what we saw in that trial is that that the life expectancies of both groups - so the chemotherapy treated group and the tumor treating field group - was the same .
but importantly , the tumor treating field group suffered none of the side effects typical of chemotherapy patients .
they had no pain , suffered none of the infections .
they had no nausea , diarrhea , constipation , fatigue that would be expected .
based on this trial , in april of this year , the fda approved tumor treating fields for the treatment of patients with recurrent gbm .
importantly , it was the first time ever that the fda included in their approval of an oncology treatment a quality of life claim .
so i 'm going to show you now one of the patients from this trial .
robert dill-bundi is a famous swiss cycling champion .
he won the gold medal in moscow in the 4,000 meter pursuit .
and five years ago , robert was diagnosed with gbm .
he received the standard treatments .
he received surgery .
he received high dose radiation to the head .
and he received first-line chemotherapy .
a year after this treatment - in fact , this is his baseline mri .
you can see that the black regions in the upper right quadrant are the areas where he had surgery .
and a year after that treatment , his tumor grew back with a vengeance .
that cloudy white mass that you see is the recurrence of the tumor .
at this point , he was told by his doctors that he had about 3 months to live .
he entered our trial .
and here we can see him getting the therapy .
first of all , these electrodes are noninvasive .
they 're attached to the skin in the area of the tumor .
here you can see that a technician is placing them on there much like bandages .
the patients learn to do this themselves and then the patients can undergo all the activities of their daily life .
there 's none of the tiredness .
there 's none of what is called the " chemo head . "
there 's no sensation .
it does n't interfere with computers or electrical equipment .
and the therapy is delivered continuously at home , without having to go into the hospital either periodically or continually .
these are robert 's mris , again , under only ttfield treatment .
this is a therapy that takes time to work .
it 's a medical device ; it works when it 's on .
but what we can see is , by month six , the tumor has responded and it 's begun to melt away .
it 's still there .
by month 12 , we could argue whether there 's a little bit of material around the edges , but it 's essentially completely gone .
it 's now five years since robert 's diagnosis , and he 's alive , but importantly , he 's healthy and he 's at work .
i 'm going to let him , in this very short clip , describe his impressions of the therapy in his own words .
-lrb- video -rrb- robert dill-bundi : my quality of life , i rate what i have today a bit different than what most people would assume .
i am the happiest , the happiest person in the world .
and every single morning i appreciate life .
every night i fall asleep very well , and i am , i repeat , the happiest man in the world , and i 'm thankful i am alive .
bd : novocure 's also working on lung cancer as the second target .
we 've run a phase two trial in switzerland on , again , recurrent patients - patients who have received standard therapy and whose cancer has come back .
i 'm going to show you another clip of a woman named lydia .
lydia 's a 66 year-old farmer in switzerland .
she was diagnosed with lung cancer five years ago .
she underwent four different regimes of chemotherapy over two years , none of which had an effect .
her cancer continued to grow .
three years ago , she entered the novocure lung cancer trial .
you can see , in her case , she 's wearing her transducer arrays , one of the front of her chest , one on the back , and then the second pair side-to-side over the liver .
you can see the tumor treating field field generator , but importantly you can also see that she is living her life .
she is managing her farm .
she 's interacting with her kids and her grand kids .
and when we talked to her , she said that when she was undergoing chemotherapy , she had to go to the hospital every month for her infusions .
her whole family suffered as her side effect profile came and went .
now she can run all of the activities of her farm .
it 's only the beginning .
-lrb- applause -rrb- in the lab , we 've observed tremendous synergies between chemotherapy and tumor treating fields .
there 's research underway now at harvard medical school to pick the optimum pairs to maximize that benefit .
we also believe that tumor treating fields will work with radiation and interrupt the self-repair mechanisms that we have .
there 's now a new research project underway at the karolinska in sweden to prove that hypothesis .
we have more trials planned for lung cancer , pancreatic cancer , ovarian cancer and breast cancer .
and i firmly believe that in the next 10 years tumor treating fields will be a weapon available to doctors and patients for all of these most-difficult-to-treat solid tumors .
i 'm also very hopeful that in the next decades , we will make big strides on reducing that death rate that has been so challenging in this disease .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- " when the crisis came , the serious limitations of existing economic and financial models immediately became apparent . "
" there is also a strong belief , which i share , that bad or oversimplistic and overconfident economics helped create the crisis . "
now , you 've probably all heard of similar criticism coming from people who are skeptical of capitalism .
but this is different .
this is coming from the heart of finance .
the first quote is from jean-claude trichet when he was governor of the european central bank .
the second quote is from the head of the u.k. financial services authority .
are these people implying that we do n't understand the economic systems that drive our modern societies ?
it gets worse .
" we spend billions of dollars trying to understand the origins of the universe while we still do n't understand the conditions for a stable society , a functioning economy , or peace . "
what 's happening here ? how can this be possible ?
do we really understand more about the fabric of reality than we do about the fabric which emerges from our human interactions ?
unfortunately , the answer is yes .
but there 's an intriguing solution which is coming from what is known as the science of complexity .
to explain what this means and what this thing is , please let me quickly take a couple of steps back .
i ended up in physics by accident .
it was a random encounter when i was young , and since then , i 've often wondered about the amazing success of physics in describing the reality we wake up in every day .
in a nutshell , you can think of physics as follows .
so you take a chunk of reality you want to understand and you translate it into mathematics .
you encode it into equations .
then predictions can be made and tested .
we 're actually really lucky that this works , because no one really knows why the thoughts in our heads should actually relate to the fundamental workings of the universe .
despite the success , physics has its limits .
as dirk helbing pointed out in the last quote , we do n't really understand the complexity that relates to us , that surrounds us .
this paradox is what got me interested in complex systems .
so these are systems which are made up of many interconnected or interacting parts : swarms of birds or fish , ant colonies , ecosystems , brains , financial markets .
these are just a few examples .
interestingly , complex systems are very hard to map into mathematical equations , so the usual physics approach does n't really work here .
so what do we know about complex systems ?
well , it turns out that what looks like complex behavior from the outside is actually the result of a few simple rules of interaction .
this means you can forget about the equations and just start to understand the system by looking at the interactions , so you can actually forget about the equations and you just start to look at the interactions .
and it gets even better , because most complex systems have this amazing property called emergence .
so this means that the system as a whole suddenly starts to show a behavior which can not be understood or predicted by looking at the components of the system .
so the whole is literally more than the sum of its parts .
and all of this also means that you can forget about the individual parts of the system , how complex they are .
so if it 's a cell or a termite or a bird , you just focus on the rules of interaction .
as a result , networks are ideal representations of complex systems .
the nodes in the network are the system 's components and the links are given by the interactions .
so what equations are for physics , complex networks are for the study of complex systems .
this approach has been very successfully applied to many complex systems in physics , biology , computer science , the social sciences , but what about economics ?
where are economic networks ?
this is a surprising and prominent gap in the literature .
the study we published last year called " the network of global corporate control " was the first extensive analysis of economic networks .
the study went viral on the internet and it attracted a lot of attention from the international media .
this is quite remarkable , because , again , why did no one look at this before ?
similar data has been around for quite some time .
what we looked at in detail was ownership networks .
so here the nodes are companies , people , governments , foundations , etc .
and the links represent the shareholding relations , so shareholder a has x percent of the shares in company b.
and we also assign a value to the company given by the operating revenue .
so ownership networks reveal the patterns of shareholding relations .
in this little example , you can see a few financial institutions with some of the many links highlighted .
now you may think that no one 's looked at this before because ownership networks are really , really boring to study .
well , as ownership is related to control , as i shall explain later , looking at ownership networks actually can give you answers to questions like , who are the key players ?
how are they organized ? are they isolated ?
are they interconnected ?
and what is the overall distribution of control ?
in other words , who controls the world ?
i think this is an interesting question .
and it has implications for systemic risk .
this is a measure of how vulnerable a system is overall .
a high degree of interconnectivity can be bad for stability , because then the stress can spread through the system like an epidemic .
scientists have sometimes criticized economists who believe ideas and concepts are more important than empirical data , because a foundational guideline in science is : let the data speak . okay . let 's do that .
so we started with a database containing 13 million ownership relations from 2007 .
this is a lot of data , and because we wanted to find out who rules the world , we decided to focus on transnational corporations , or tncs for short .
these are companies that operate in more than one country , and we found 43,000 .
in the next step , we built the network around these companies , so we took all the tncs ' shareholders , and the shareholders ' shareholders , etc . , all the way upstream , and we did the same downstream , and ended up with a network containing 600,000 nodes and one million links .
this is the tnc network which we analyzed .
and it turns out to be structured as follows .
so you have a periphery and a center which contains about 75 percent of all the players , and in the center there 's this tiny but dominant core which is made up of highly interconnected companies .
to give you a better picture , think about a metropolitan area .
so you have the suburbs and the periphery , you have a center like a financial district , then the core will be something like the tallest high rise building in the center .
and we already see signs of organization going on here .
thirty-six percent of the tncs are in the core only , but they make up 95 percent of the total operating revenue of all tncs .
okay , so now we analyzed the structure , so how does this relate to the control ?
well , ownership gives voting rights to shareholders .
this is the normal notion of control .
and there are different models which allow you to compute the control you get from ownership .
if you have more than 50 percent of the shares in a company , you get control , but usually it depends on the relative distribution of shares .
and the network really matters .
about 10 years ago , mr. tronchetti provera had ownership and control in a small company , which had ownership and control in a bigger company .
you get the idea .
this ended up giving him control in telecom italia with a leverage of 26 .
so this means that , with each euro he invested , he was able to move 26 euros of market value through the chain of ownership relations .
now what we actually computed in our study was the control over the tncs ' value .
this allowed us to assign a degree of influence to each shareholder .
this is very much in the sense of max weber 's idea of potential power , which is the probability of imposing one 's own will despite the opposition of others .
if you want to compute the flow in an ownership network , this is what you have to do .
it 's actually not that hard to understand .
let me explain by giving you this analogy .
so think about water flowing in pipes where the pipes have different thickness .
so similarly , the control is flowing in the ownership networks and is accumulating at the nodes .
so what did we find after computing all this network control ?
well , it turns out that the 737 top shareholders have the potential to collectively control 80 percent of the tncs ' value .
now remember , we started out with 600,000 nodes , so these 737 top players make up a bit more than 0.1 percent .
they 're mostly financial institutions in the u.s. and the u.k.
and it gets even more extreme .
there are 146 top players in the core , and they together have the potential to collectively control 40 percent of the tncs ' value .
what should you take home from all of this ?
well , the high degree of control you saw is very extreme by any standard .
the high degree of interconnectivity of the top players in the core could pose a significant systemic risk to the global economy and we could easily reproduce the tnc network with a few simple rules .
this means that its structure is probably the result of self-organization .
it 's an emergent property which depends on the rules of interaction in the system , so it 's probably not the result of a top-down approach like a global conspiracy .
our study " is an impression of the moon 's surface .
it 's not a street map . "
so you should take the exact numbers in our study with a grain of salt , yet it " gave us a tantalizing glimpse of a brave new world of finance . "
we hope to have opened the door for more such research in this direction , so the remaining unknown terrain will be charted in the future .
and this is slowly starting .
we 're seeing the emergence of long-term and highly-funded programs which aim at understanding our networked world from a complexity point of view .
but this journey has only just begun , so we will have to wait before we see the first results .
now there is still a big problem , in my opinion .
ideas relating to finance , economics , politics , society , are very often tainted by people 's personal ideologies .
i really hope that this complexity perspective allows for some common ground to be found .
it would be really great if it has the power to help end the gridlock created by conflicting ideas , which appears to be paralyzing our globalized world .
reality is so complex , we need to move away from dogma .
but this is just my own personal ideology .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i woke up in the middle of the night with the sound of heavy explosion .
it was deep at night .
i do not remember what time it was .
i just remember the sound was so heavy and so very shocking .
everything in my room was shaking - my heart , my windows , my bed , everything .
i looked out the windows and i saw a full half-circle of explosion .
i thought it was just like the movies , but the movies had not conveyed them in the powerful image that i was seeing full of bright red and orange and gray , and a full circle of explosion .
and i kept on staring at it until it disappeared .
i went back to my bed , and i prayed , and i secretly thanked god that that missile did not land on my family 's home , that it did not kill my family that night .
thirty years have passed , and i still feel guilty about that prayer , for the next day , i learned that that missile landed on my brother 's friend 's home and killed him and his father , but did not kill his mother or his sister .
his mother showed up the next week at my brother 's classroom and begged seven-year-old kids to share with her any picture they may have of her son , for she had lost everything .
this is not a story of a nameless survivor of war , and nameless refugees , whose stereotypical images we see in our newspapers and our tv with tattered clothes , dirty face , scared eyes .
this is not a story of a nameless someone who lived in some war , who we do not know their hopes , their dreams , their accomplishments , their families , their beliefs , their values .
this is my story .
i was that girl .
i am another image and vision of another survivor of war .
i am that refugee , and i am that girl .
you see , i grew up in war-torn iraq , and i believe that there are two sides of wars and we 've only seen one side of it .
we only talk about one side of it .
but there 's another side that i have witnessed as someone who lived in it and someone who ended up working in it .
i grew up with the colors of war - the red colors of fire and blood , the brown tones of earth as it explodes in our faces and the piercing silver of an exploded missile , so bright that nothing can protect your eyes from it .
i grew up with the sounds of war - the staccato sounds of gunfire , the wrenching booms of explosions , ominous drones of jets flying overhead and the wailing warning sounds of sirens .
these are the sounds you would expect , but they are also the sounds of dissonant concerts of a flock of birds screeching in the night , the high-pitched honest cries of children and the thunderous , unbearable silence .
" war , " a friend of mine said , " is not about sound at all .
it is actually about silence , the silence of humanity . "
i have since left iraq and founded a group called women for women international that ends up working with women survivors of wars .
in my travels and in my work , from congo to afghanistan , from sudan to rwanda , i have learned not only that the colors and the sounds of war are the same , but the fears of war are the same .
you know , there is a fear of dying , and do not believe any movie character where the hero is not afraid .
it is very scary to go through that feeling of " i am about to die " or " i could die in this explosion . "
but there 's also the fear of losing loved ones , and i think that 's even worse .
it 's too painful . you do n't want to think about it .
but i think the worst kind of fear is the fear - as samia , a bosnian woman , once told me , who survived the four-years besiege of sarajevo ; she said , " the fear of losing the ' i ' in me , the fear of losing the ' i ' in me . "
that 's what my mother in iraq used to tell me .
it 's like dying from inside-out .
a palestinian woman once told me , " it is not about the fear of one death , " she said , " sometimes i feel i die 10 times in one day , " as she was describing the marches of soldiers and the sounds of their bullets .
she said , " but it 's not fair , because there is only one life , and there should only be one death . "
we have been only seeing one side of war .
we have only been discussing and consumed with high-level preoccupations over troop levels , drawdown timelines , surges and sting operations , when we should be examining the details of where the social fabric has been most torn , where the community has improvised and survived and shown acts of resilience and amazing courage just to keep life going .
we have been so consumed with seemingly objective discussions of politics , tactics , weapons , dollars and casualties .
this is the language of sterility .
how casually we treat casualties in the context of this topic .
this is where we conceive of rape and casualties as inevitabilities .
eighty percent of refugees around the world are women and children . oh .
ninety percent of modern war casualties are civilians .
seventy-five percent of them are women and children .
how interesting .
oh , half a million women in rwanda get raped in 100 days .
or , as we speak now , hundreds of thousands of congolese women are getting raped and mutilated .
how interesting .
these just become numbers that we refer to .
the front of wars is increasingly non-human eyes peering down on our perceived enemies from space , guiding missiles toward unseen targets , while the human conduct of the orchestra of media relations in the event that this particular drone attack hits a villager instead of an extremist .
it is a chess game .
you learn to play an international relations school on your way out and up to national and international leadership .
checkmate .
we are missing a completely other side of wars .
we are missing my mother 's story , who made sure with every siren , with every raid , with every cut off-of electricity , she played puppet shows for my brothers and i , so we would not be scared of the sounds of explosions .
we are missing the story of fareeda , a music teacher , a piano teacher , in sarajevo , who made sure that she kept the music school open every single day in the four years of besiege in sarajevo and walked to that school , despite the snipers shooting at that school and at her , and kept the piano , the violin , the cello playing the whole duration of the war , with students wearing their gloves and hats and coats .
that was her fight .
that was her resistance .
we are missing the story of nehia , a palestinian woman in gaza who , the minute there was a cease-fire in the last year 's war , she left out of home , collected all the flour and baked as much bread for every neighbor to have , in case there is no cease-fire the day after .
we are missing the stories of violet , who , despite surviving genocide in the church massacre , she kept on going on , burying bodies , cleaning homes , cleaning the streets .
we are missing stories of women who are literally keeping life going in the midst of wars .
do you know - do you know that people fall in love in war and go to school and go to factories and hospitals and get divorced and go dancing and go playing and live life going ?
and the ones who are keeping that life are women .
there are two sides of war .
there is a side that fights , and there is a side that keeps the schools and the factories and the hospitals open .
there is a side that is focused on winning battles , and there is a side that is focused on winning life .
there is a side that leads the front-line discussion , and there is a side that leads the back-line discussion .
there is a side that thinks that peace is the end of fighting , and there is a side that thinks that peace is the arrival of schools and jobs .
there is a side that is led by men , and there is a side that is led by women .
and in order for us to understand how do we build lasting peace , we must understand war and peace from both sides .
we must have a full picture of what that means .
in order for us to understand what actually peace means , we need to understand , as one sudanese woman once told me , " peace is the fact that my toenails are growing back again . "
she grew up in sudan , in southern sudan , for 20 years of war , where it killed one million people and displaced five million refugees .
many women were taken as slaves by rebels and soldiers , as sexual slaves who were forced also to carry the ammunition and the water and the food for the soldiers .
so that woman walked for 20 years , so she would not be kidnapped again .
and only when there was some sort of peace , her toenails grew back again .
we need to understand peace from a toenail 's perspective .
we need to understand that we can not actually have negotiations of ending of wars or peace without fully including women at the negotiating table .
i find it amazing that the only group of people who are not fighting and not killing and not pillaging and not burning and not raping , and the group of people who are mostly - though not exclusively - who are keeping life going in the midst of war , are not included in the negotiating table .
and i do argue that women lead the back-line discussion , but there are also men who are excluded from that discussion .
the doctors who are not fighting , the artists , the students , the men who refuse to pick up the guns , they are , too , excluded from the negotiating tables .
there is no way we can talk about a lasting peace , building of democracy , sustainable economies , any kind of stabilities , if we do not fully include women at the negotiating table .
not one , but 50 percent .
there is no way we can talk about the building of stability if we do n't start investing in women and girls .
did you know that one year of the world 's military spending equals 700 years of the u.n. budget and equals 2,928 years of the u.n. budget allocated for women ?
if we just reverse that distribution of funds , perhaps we could have a better lasting peace in this world .
and last , but not least , we need to invest in peace and women , not only because it is the right thing to do , not only because it is the right thing to do , for all of us to build sustainable and lasting peace today , but it is for the future .
a congolese woman , who was telling me about how her children saw their father killed in front of them and saw her raped in front of them and mutilated in front of them , and her children saw their nine-year-old sibling killed in front of them , how they 're doing okay right now .
she got into women for women international 's program .
she got a support network .
she learned about her rights .
we taught her vocational and business skills . we helped her get a job .
she was earning 450 dollars . she was doing okay .
she was sending them to school . have a new home .
she said , " but what i worry about the most is not any of that .
i worry that my children have hate in their hearts , and when they want to grow up , they want to fight again the killers of their father and their brother . "
we need to invest in women , because that 's our only chance to ensure that there is no more war in the future .
that mother has a better chance to heal her children than any peace agreement can do .
are there good news ? of course , there are good news . there are lots of good news .
to start with , these women that i told you about are dancing and singing every single day , and if they can , who are we not to dance ?
that girl that i told you about ended up starting women for women international group that impacted one million people , sent 80 million dollars , and i started this from zero , nothing , nada , -lsb- unclear -rsb- .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- they are women who are standing on their feet in spite of their circumstances , not because of it .
think of how the world can be a much better place if , for a change , we have a better equality , we have equality , we have a representation and we understand war , both from the front-line and the back-line discussion .
rumi , a 13th-century sufi poet , says , " out beyond the worlds of right-doings and wrong-doings , there is a field .
i will meet you there .
when the soul lies down in that grass , the world is too full to talk about .
ideas , language , even the phrase ' each other ' no longer makes any sense . "
i humbly add - humbly add - that out beyond the worlds of war and peace , there is a field , and there are many women and men -lsb- who -rsb- are meeting there .
let us make this field a much bigger place .
let us all meet in that field .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- humans in the developed world spend more than 90 percent of their lives indoors , where they breathe in and come into contact with trillions of life forms invisible to the naked eye : microorganisms .
buildings are complex ecosystems that are an important source of microbes that are good for us , and some that are bad for us .
what determines the types and distributions of microbes indoors ?
buildings are colonized by airborne microbes that enter through windows and through mechanical ventilation systems .
and they are brought inside by humans and other creatures .
the fate of microbes indoors depends on complex interactions with humans , and with the human-built environment .
and today , architects and biologists are working together to explore smart building design that will create healthy buildings for us .
we spend an extraordinary amount of time in buildings that are extremely controlled environments , like this building here - environments that have mechanical ventilation systems that include filtering , heating and air conditioning .
given the amount of time that we spend indoors , it 's important to understand how this affects our health .
at the biology and the built environment center , we carried out a study in a hospital where we sampled air and pulled the dna out of microbes in the air .
and we looked at three different types of rooms .
we looked at rooms that were mechanically ventilated , which are the data points in the blue .
we looked at rooms that were naturally ventilated , where the hospital let us turn off the mechanical ventilation in a wing of the building and pry open the windows that were no longer operable , but they made them operable for our study .
and we also sampled the outdoor air .
if you look at the x-axis of this graph , you 'll see that what we commonly want to do - which is keeping the outdoors out - we accomplished that with mechanical ventilation .
so if you look at the green data points , which is air that 's outside , you 'll see that there 's a large amount of microbial diversity , or variety of microbial types .
but if you look at the blue data points , which is mechanically ventilated air , it 's not as diverse .
but being less diverse is not necessarily good for our health .
if you look at the y-axis of this graph , you 'll see that , in the mechanically ventilated air , you have a higher probability of encountering a potential pathogen , or germ , than if you 're outdoors .
so to understand why this was the case , we took our data and put it into an ordination diagram , which is a statistical map that tells you something about how related the microbial communities are in the different samples .
the data points that are closer together have microbial communities that are more similar than data points that are far apart .
and the first things that you can see from this graph is , if you look at the blue data points , which are the mechanically ventilated air , they 're not simply a subset of the green data points , which are the outdoor air .
what we 've found is that mechanically ventilated air looks like humans .
it has microbes on it that are commonly associated with our skin and with our mouth , our spit .
and this is because we 're all constantly shedding microbes .
so all of you right now are sharing your microbes with one another .
and when you 're outdoors , that type of air has microbes that are commonly associated with plant leaves and with dirt .
why does this matter ?
it matters because the health care industry is the second most energy intensive industry in the united states .
hospitals use two and a half times the amount of energy as office buildings .
and the model that we 're working with in hospitals , and also with many , many different buildings , is to keep the outdoors out .
and this model may not necessarily be the best for our health .
and given the extraordinary amount of nosocomial infections , or hospital-acquired infections , this is a clue that it 's a good time to reconsider our current practices .
so just as we manage national parks , where we promote the growth of some species and we inhibit the growth of others , we 're working towards thinking about buildings using an ecosystem framework where we can promote the kinds of microbes that we want to have indoors .
i 've heard somebody say that you 're as healthy as your gut .
and for this reason , many people eat probiotic yogurt so they can promote a healthy gut flora .
and what we ultimately want to do is to be able to use this concept to promote a healthy group of microorganisms inside .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- everyone needs a coach .
it does n't matter whether you 're a basketball player , a tennis player , a gymnast or a bridge player .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- my bridge coach , sharon osberg , says there are more pictures of the back of her head than anyone else 's in the world . -lrb- laughter -rrb- sorry , sharon . here you go .
we all need people who will give us feedback .
that 's how we improve .
unfortunately , there 's one group of people who get almost no systematic feedback to help them do their jobs better , and these people have one of the most important jobs in the world .
i 'm talking about teachers .
when melinda and i learned how little useful feedback most teachers get , we were blown away .
until recently , over 98 percent of teachers just got one word of feedback : satisfactory .
if all my bridge coach ever told me was that i was " satisfactory , " i would have no hope of ever getting better .
how would i know who was the best ?
how would i know what i was doing differently ?
today , districts are revamping the way they evaluate teachers , but we still give them almost no feedback that actually helps them improve their practice .
our teachers deserve better .
the system we have today is n't fair to them .
it 's not fair to students , and it 's putting america 's global leadership at risk .
so today i want to talk about how we can help all teachers get the tools for improvement they want and deserve .
let 's start by asking who 's doing well .
well , unfortunately there 's no international ranking tables for teacher feedback systems .
so i looked at the countries whose students perform well academically , and looked at what they 're doing to help their teachers improve .
consider the rankings for reading proficiency .
the u.s. is n't number one .
we 're not even in the top 10 .
we 're tied for 15th with iceland and poland .
now , out of all the places that do better than the u.s. in reading , how many of them have a formal system for helping teachers improve ?
eleven out of 14 .
the u.s. is tied for 15th in reading , but we 're 23rd in science and 31st in math .
so there 's really only one area where we 're near the top , and that 's in failing to give our teachers the help they need to develop their skills .
let 's look at the best academic performer : the province of shanghai , china .
now , they rank number one across the board , in reading , math and science , and one of the keys to shanghai 's incredible success is the way they help teachers keep improving .
they made sure that younger teachers get a chance to watch master teachers at work .
they have weekly study groups , where teachers get together and talk about what 's working .
they even require each teacher to observe and give feedback to their colleagues .
you might ask , why is a system like this so important ?
it 's because there 's so much variation in the teaching profession .
some teachers are far more effective than others .
in fact , there are teachers throughout the country who are helping their students make extraordinary gains .
if today 's average teacher could become as good as those teachers , our students would be blowing away the rest of the world .
so we need a system that helps all our teachers be as good as the best .
what would that system look like ?
well , to find out , our foundation has been working with 3,000 teachers in districts across the country on a project called measures of effective teaching .
we had observers watch videos of teachers in the classroom and rate how they did on a range of practices .
for example , did they ask their students challenging questions ?
did they find multiple ways to explain an idea ?
we also had students fill out surveys with questions like , " does your teacher know when the class understands a lesson ? "
" do you learn to correct your mistakes ? "
and what we found is very exciting .
first , the teachers who did well on these observations had far better student outcomes .
so it tells us we 're asking the right questions .
and second , teachers in the program told us that these videos and these surveys from the students were very helpful diagnostic tools , because they pointed to specific places where they can improve .
i want to show you what this video component of met looks like in action .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- video -rrb- sarah brown wessling : good morning everybody .
let 's talk about what 's going on today .
to get started , we 're doing a peer review day , okay ?
a peer review day , and our goal by the end of class is for you to be able to determine whether or not you have moves to prove in your essays .
my name is sarah brown wessling .
i am a high school english teacher at johnston high school in johnston , iowa .
turn to somebody next to you .
tell them what you think i mean when i talk about moves to prove . i 've talk about - i think that there is a difference for teachers between the abstract of how we see our practice and then the concrete reality of it .
okay , so i would like you to please bring up your papers .
i think what video offers for us is a certain degree of reality .
you ca n't really dispute what you see on the video , and there is a lot to be learned from that , and there are a lot of ways that we can grow as a profession when we actually get to see this .
i just have a flip camera and a little tripod and invested in this tiny little wide-angle lens .
at the beginning of class , i just perch it in the back of the classroom . it 's not a perfect shot .
it does n't catch every little thing that 's going on .
but i can hear the sound . i can see a lot .
and i 'm able to learn a lot from it .
so it really has been a simple but powerful tool in my own reflection .
all right , let 's take a look at the long one first , okay ?
once i 'm finished taping , then i put it in my computer , and then i 'll scan it and take a peek at it .
if i do n't write things down , i do n't remember them .
so having the notes is a part of my thinking process , and i discover what i 'm seeing as i 'm writing .
i really have used it for my own personal growth and my own personal reflection on teaching strategy and methodology and classroom management , and just all of those different facets of the classroom .
i 'm glad that we 've actually done the process before so we can kind of compare what works , what does n't .
i think that video exposes so much of what 's intrinsic to us as teachers in ways that help us learn and help us understand , and then help our broader communities understand what this complex work is really all about .
i think it is a way to exemplify and illustrate things that we can not convey in a lesson plan , things you can not convey in a standard , things that you can not even sometimes convey in a book of pedagogy .
alrighty , everybody , have a great weekend .
i 'll see you later .
-lsb- every classroom could look like that -rsb- -lrb- applause -rrb- bill gates : one day , we 'd like every classroom in america to look something like that .
but we still have more work to do .
diagnosing areas where a teacher needs to improve is only half the battle .
we also have to give them the tools they need to act on the diagnosis .
if you learn that you need to improve the way you teach fractions , you should be able to watch a video of the best person in the world teaching fractions .
so building this complete teacher feedback and improvement system wo n't be easy .
for example , i know some teachers are n't immediately comfortable with the idea of a camera in the classroom .
that 's understandable , but our experience with met suggests that if teachers manage the process , if they collect video in their own classrooms , and they pick the lessons they want to submit , a lot of them will be eager to participate .
building this system will also require a considerable investment .
our foundation estimates that it could cost up to five billion dollars .
now that 's a big number , but to put it in perspective , it 's less than two percent of what we spend every year on teacher salaries .
the impact for teachers would be phenomenal .
we would finally have a way to give them feedback , as well as the means to act on it .
but this system would have an even more important benefit for our country .
it would put us on a path to making sure all our students get a great education , find a career that 's fulfilling and rewarding , and have a chance to live out their dreams .
this would n't just make us a more successful country .
it would also make us a more fair and just one , too .
i 'm excited about the opportunity to give all our teachers the support they want and deserve .
i hope you are too .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- in the next 18 minutes , i 'm going to take you on a journey .
and it 's a journey that you and i have been on for many years now , and it began some 50 years ago , when humans first stepped off our planet .
and in those 50 years , not only did we literally , physically set foot on the moon , but we have dispatched robotic spacecraft to all the planets - all eight of them - and we have landed on asteroids , we have rendezvoused with comets , and , at this point in time , we have a spacecraft on its way to pluto , the body formerly known as a planet .
and all of these robotic missions are part of a bigger human journey : a voyage to understand something , to get a sense of our cosmic place , to understand something of our origins , and how earth , our planet , and we , living on it , came to be .
and of all the places in the solar system that we might go to and search for answers to questions like this , there 's saturn . and we have been to saturn before - we visited saturn in the early 1980s - but our investigations of saturn have become far more in-depth in detail since the cassini spacecraft , traveling across interplanetary space for seven years , glided into orbit around saturn in the summer of 2004 , and became at that point the farthest robotic outpost that humanity had ever established around the sun .
now , the saturn system is a rich planetary system .
it offers mystery , scientific insight and obviously splendor beyond compare , and the investigation of this system has enormous cosmic reach .
in fact , just studying the rings alone , we stand to learn a lot about the discs of stars and gas that we call the spiral galaxies .
and here 's a beautiful picture of the andromeda nebula , which is our closest , largest spiral galaxy to the milky way .
and then , here 's a beautiful composite of the whirlpool galaxy , taken by the hubble space telescope .
so the journey back to saturn is really part of and is also a metaphor for a much larger human voyage to understand the interconnectedness of everything around us , and also how humans fit into that picture .
and it pains me that i ca n't tell you all that we have learned with cassini .
i ca n't show you all the beautiful pictures that we 've taken in the last two and a half years , because i simply do n't have the time .
so i 'm going to concentrate on two of the most exciting stories that have emerged out of this major exploratory expedition that we are conducting around saturn , and have been for the past two and a half years .
saturn is accompanied by a very large and diverse collection of moons .
they range in size from a few kilometers across to as big across as the u.s.
most of the beautiful pictures we 've taken of saturn , in fact , show saturn in accompaniment with some of its moons . here 's saturn with dione , and then , here 's saturn showing the rings edge-on , showing you just how vertically thin they are , with the moon enceladus .
now , two of the 47 moons that saturn has are standouts .
and those are titan and enceladus . titan is saturn 's largest moon , and , until cassini had arrived there , was the largest single expanse of unexplored terrain that we had remaining in our solar system .
and it is a body that has long intrigued people who 've watched the planets .
it has a very large , thick atmosphere , and in fact , its surface environment was believed to be more like the environment we have here on the earth , or at least had in the past , than any other body in the solar system .
its atmosphere is largely molecular nitrogen , like you are breathing here in this room , except that its atmosphere is suffused with simple organic materials like methane and propane and ethane .
and these molecules high up in the atmosphere of titan get broken down , and their products join together to make haze particles .
this haze is ubiquitous . it 's completely global and enveloping titan .
and that 's why you can not see down to the surface with our eyes in the visible region of the spectrum .
but these haze particles , it was surmised , before we got there with cassini , over billions and billions of years , gently drifted down to the surface and coated the surface in a thick organic sludge .
so like the equivalent , the titan equivalent , of tar , or oil , or what - we did n't know what .
but this is what we suspected . and these molecules , especially methane and ethane , can be liquids at the surface temperatures of titan .
and so it turns out that methane is to titan what water is to the earth .
it 's a condensable in the atmosphere , and so recognizing this circumstance brought to the fore a whole world of bizarre possibilities . you can have methane clouds , ok , and above those clouds , you have this hundreds of kilometers of haze , which prevent any sunlight from getting to the surface .
the temperature at the surface is some 350 degrees below zero fahrenheit .
but despite that cold , you could have rain falling down on the surface of titan .
and doing on titan what rain does on the earth : it carves gullies ; it forms rivers and cataracts ; it can create canyons ; it can pool in large basins and craters .
it can wash the sludge off high mountain peaks and hills , down into the lowlands . so stop and think for a minute .
try to imagine what the surface of titan might look like .
it 's dark . high noon on titan is as dark as deep earth twilight on the earth .
it 's cold , it 's eerie , it 's misty , it might be raining , and you might be standing on the shores of lake michigan brimming with paint thinner . -lrb- laughter -rrb- that is the view that we had of the surface of titan before we got there with cassini , and i can tell you that what we have found on titan , though it is not the same in detail , is every bit as fascinating as that story is .
and for us , it has been like - the cassini people - it has been like a jules verne adventure come true .
as i said , it has a thick , extensive atmosphere .
this is a picture of titan , backlit by the sun , with the rings as a beautiful backdrop .
and yet another moon there - i do n't even know which one it is . it 's a very extensive atmosphere .
we have instruments on cassini which can see down to the surface through this atmosphere , and my camera system is one of them .
and we have taken pictures like this .
and what you see is bright and dark regions , and that 's about as far as it got for us .
it was so mystifying : we could n't make out what we were seeing on titan .
when you look closer at this region , you start to see things like sinuous channels - we did n't know . you see a few round things .
this , we later found out , is , in fact , a crater , but there are very few craters on the surface of titan , meaning it 's a very young surface .
and there are features that look tectonic .
they look like they 've been pulled apart .
whenever you see anything linear on a planet , it means there 's been a fracture , like a fault .
and so it 's been tectonically altered .
but we could n't make sense of our images , until , six months after we got into orbit , an event occurred that many have regarded as the highlight of cassini 's investigation of titan .
and that was the deployment of the huygens probe , the european-built huygens probe that cassini had carried for seven years across the solar system . we deployed it to the atmosphere of titan , it took two and a half hours to descend , and it landed on the surface .
and i just want to emphasize how significant an event this is .
this is a device of human making , and it landed in the outer solar system for the first time in human history .
it is so significant that , in my mind , this was an event that should have been celebrated with ticker tape parades in every city across the u.s. and europe , and sadly , that was n't the case .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- .
it was significant for another reason . this is an international mission , and this event was celebrated in europe , in germany , and the celebratory presentations were given in english accents , and american accents , and german accents , and french and italian and dutch accents .
it was a moving demonstration of what the words " united nations " are supposed to mean : a true union of nations joined together in a colossal effort for good .
and , in this case , it was a massive undertaking to explore a planet , and to come to understand a planetary system that , for all of human history , had been unreachable , and now humans had actually touched it .
so it was - i mean , i 'm getting goose bumps just talking about it .
it was a tremendously emotional event , and it 's something that i will personally never forget , and you should n't either .
-lrb- applause -rrb- .
but anyway , the probe took measurements of the atmosphere on the way down , and it also took panoramic pictures .
and i ca n't tell you what it was like to see the first pictures of titan 's surface from the probe . and this is what we saw .
and it was a shocker , because it was everything we wanted those other pictures taken from orbit to be .
it was an unambiguous pattern , a geological pattern .
it 's a dendritic drainage pattern that can be formed only by the flow of liquids .
and you can follow these channels and you can see how they all converge .
and they converge into this channel here , which drains into this region .
you are looking at a shoreline .
was this a shoreline of fluids ? we did n't know .
but this is somewhat of a shoreline .
this picture is taken at 16 kilometers .
this is the picture taken at eight kilometers , ok ? again , the shoreline .
okay , now , 16 kilometers , eight kilometers - this is roughly an airline altitude .
if you were going to take an airplane trip across the u.s. , you would be flying at these altitudes .
so , this is the picture you would have at the window of titanian airlines as you fly across the surface of titan . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and then finally , the probe came to rest on the surface , and i 'm going to show you , ladies and gentlemen , the first picture ever taken from the surface of a moon in the outer solar system .
and here is the horizon , ok ?
these are probably water ice pebbles , yes ?
-lrb- applause -rrb- .
and obviously , it landed in one of these flat , dark regions and it did n't sink out of sight . so it was n't fluid that we landed in .
what the probe came down in was basically the titan equivalent of a mud flat .
this is an unconsolidated ground that is suffused with liquid methane .
and it 's probably the case that this material has washed off the highlands of titan through these channels that we saw , and has drained over billions of years to fill in low-lying basins .
and that is what the huygens probe landed in .
but still , there was no sign in our images , or even in the huygens ' images , of any large , open bodies of fluids .
where were they ? it got even more puzzling when we found dunes .
ok , so this is our movie of the equatorial region of titan , showing these dunes . these are dunes that are 100 meters tall , separated by a few kilometers , and they go on for miles and miles and miles .
there 's hundreds , up to a 1,000 or 1,200 miles of dunes .
this is the saharan desert of titan .
it 's obviously a place which is very dry , or you would n't get dunes .
so again , it got puzzling that there were no bodies of fluid , until finally , we saw lakes in the polar regions .
and there is a lake scene in the south polar region of titan .
it 's about the size of lake ontario .
and then , only a week and a half ago , we flew over the north pole of titan and found , again , we found a feature here the size of the caspian sea .
so it seems that the liquids , for some reason we do n't understand , or during at least this season , are apparently at the poles of titan .
and i think you would agree that we have found titan is a remarkable , mystical place . it 's exotic , it 's alien , but yet strangely earth-like , and having earth-like geological formations and a tremendous geographical diversity , and is a fascinating world whose only rival in the solar system for complexity and richness is the earth itself .
and so now we go onto enceladus . enceladus is a small moon , it 's about a tenth the size of titan . and you can see it here next to england , just to show you the size . this is not meant to be a threat .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- .
and enceladus is very white , it 's very bright , and its surface is obviously wrecked with fractures .
it is a very geologically active body .
but the mother lode of discoveries on enceladus was found at the south pole - and we 're looking at the south pole here - where we found this system of fractures .
and they 're a different color because they 're a different composition .
they are coated . these fractures are coated with organic materials .
moreover , this whole , entire region , the south polar region , has elevated temperatures . it 's the hottest place on the planet , on the body .
that 's as bizarre as finding that the antarctic on the earth is hotter than the tropics .
and then , when we took additional pictures , we discovered that from these fractures are issuing jets of fine , icy particles extending hundreds of miles into space .
and when we color-code this image , to bring out the faint light levels , we see that these jets feed a plume that , in fact , we see , in other images , goes thousands of miles into the space above enceladus .
my team and i have examined images like this , and like this one , and have thought about the other results from cassini .
and we have arrived at the conclusion that these jets may be erupting from pockets of liquid water under the surface of enceladus .
so we have , possibly , liquid water , organic materials and excess heat .
in other words , we have possibly stumbled upon the holy grail of modern day planetary exploration , or in other words , an environment that is potentially suitable for living organisms .
and i do n't think i need to tell you that the discovery of life elsewhere in our solar system , whether it be on enceladus or elsewhere , would have enormous cultural and scientific implications .
because if we could demonstrate that genesis had occurred not once , but twice , independently , in our solar system , then that means , by inference , it has occurred a staggering number of times throughout the universe and its 13.7 billion year history .
right now , earth is the only planet still that we know is teeming with life .
it is precious , it is unique , it is still , so far , the only home we 've ever known .
and if any of you were alert and coherent during the 1960s - and we 'd forgive you , if you were n't , ok - you would remember this very famous picture taken by the apollo 8 astronauts in 1968 .
it was the first time that earth was imaged from space , and it had an enormous impact on our sense of place in the universe , and our sense of responsibility for the protection of our own planet .
well , we on cassini have taken an equivalent first , a picture that no human eye has ever seen before .
it is a total eclipse of the sun , seen from the other side of saturn .
and in this impossibly beautiful picture , you see the main rings backlit by the sun , you see the refracted image of the sun and you see this ring created , in fact , by the exhalations of enceladus .
but as if that were n't brilliant enough , we can spot , in this beautiful image , sight of our own planet , cradled in the arms of saturn 's rings .
now , there is something deeply moving about seeing ourselves from afar , and capturing the sight of our little , blue-ocean planet in the skies of other worlds .
and that , and the perspective of ourselves that we gain from that , may be , in the end , the finest reward that we earn from this journey of discovery that started half a century ago .
and thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- metaphor lives a secret life all around us .
we utter about six metaphors a minute .
metaphorical thinking is essential to how we understand ourselves and others , how we communicate , learn , discover and invent .
but metaphor is a way of thought before it is a way with words .
now , to assist me in explaining this , i 've enlisted the help of one of our greatest philosophers , the reigning king of the metaphorians , a man whose contributions to the field are so great that he himself has become a metaphor .
i am , of course , referring to none other than elvis presley .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , " all shook up " is a great love song .
it 's also a great example of how whenever we deal with anything abstract - ideas , emotions , feelings , concepts , thoughts - we inevitably resort to metaphor .
in " all shook up , " a touch is not a touch , but a chill .
lips are not lips , but volcanoes .
she is not she , but a buttercup .
and love is not love , but being all shook up .
in this , elvis is following aristotle 's classic definition of metaphor as the process of giving the thing a name that belongs to something else .
this is the mathematics of metaphor .
and fortunately it 's very simple .
x equals y.
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this formula works wherever metaphor is present .
elvis uses it , but so does shakespeare in this famous line from " romeo and juliet : " juliet is the sun .
now , here , shakespeare gives the thing , juliet , a name that belongs to something else , the sun .
but whenever we give a thing a name that belongs to something else , we give it a whole network of analogies too .
we mix and match what we know about the metaphor 's source , in this case the sun , with what we know about its target , juliet .
and metaphor gives us a much more vivid understanding of juliet than if shakespeare had literally described what she looks like .
so , how do we make and understand metaphors ?
this might look familiar .
the first step is pattern recognition .
look at this image . what do you see ?
three wayward pac-men , and three pointy brackets are actually present .
what we see , however , are two overlapping triangles .
metaphor is not just the detection of patterns ; it is the creation of patterns .
second step , conceptual synesthesia .
now , synesthesia is the experience of a stimulus in once sense organ in another sense organ as well , such as colored hearing .
people with colored hearing actually see colors when they hear the sounds of words or letters .
we all have synesthetic abilities .
this is the bouba / kiki test .
what you have to do is identify which of these shapes is called bouba , and which is called kiki .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- if you are like 98 percent of other people , you will identify the round , amoeboid shape as bouba , and the sharp , spiky one as kiki .
can we do a quick show of hands ?
does that correspond ?
okay , i think 99.9 would about cover it .
why do we do that ?
because we instinctively find , or create , a pattern between the round shape and the round sound of bouba , and the spiky shape and the spiky sound of kiki .
and many of the metaphors we use everyday are synesthetic .
silence is sweet .
neckties are loud .
sexually attractive people are hot .
sexually unattractive people leave us cold .
metaphor creates a kind of conceptual synesthesia , in which we understand one concept in the context of another .
third step is cognitive dissonance .
this is the stroop test .
what you need to do here is identify as quickly as possible the color of the ink in which these words are printed .
you can take the test now .
if you 're like most people , you will experience a moment of cognitive dissonance when the name of the color is printed in a differently colored ink .
the test shows that we can not ignore the literal meaning of words even when the literal meaning gives the wrong answer .
stroop tests have been done with metaphor as well .
the participants had to identify , as quickly as possible , the literally false sentences .
they took longer to reject metaphors as false than they did to reject literally false sentences .
why ? because we can not ignore the metaphorical meaning of words either .
one of the sentences was , " some jobs are jails . "
now , unless you 're a prison guard , the sentence " some jobs are jails " is literally false .
sadly , it 's metaphorically true .
and the metaphorical truth interferes with our ability to identify it as literally false .
metaphor matters because it 's around us every day , all the time .
metaphor matters because it creates expectations .
pay careful attention the next time you read the financial news .
agent metaphors describe price movements as the deliberate action of a living thing , as in , " the nasdaq climbed higher . "
object metaphors describe price movements as non-living things , as in , " the dow fell like a brick . "
researchers asked a group of people to read a clutch of market commentaries , and then predict the next day 's price trend .
those exposed to agent metaphors had higher expectations that price trends would continue .
and they had those expectations because agent metaphors imply the deliberate action of a living thing pursuing a goal .
if , for example , house prices are routinely described as climbing and climbing , higher and higher , people might naturally assume that that rise is unstoppable .
they may feel confident , say , in taking out mortgages they really ca n't afford .
that 's a hypothetical example of course .
but this is how metaphor misleads .
metaphor also matters because it influences decisions by activating analogies .
a group of students was told that a small democratic country had been invaded and had asked the u.s. for help .
and they had to make a decision .
what should they do ?
intervene , appeal to the u.n. , or do nothing ?
they were each then given one of three descriptions of this hypothetical crisis .
each of which was designed to trigger a different historical analogy : world war ii , vietnam , and the third was historically neutral .
those exposed to the world war ii scenario made more interventionist recommendations than the others .
just as we can not ignore the literal meaning of words , we can not ignore the analogies that are triggered by metaphor .
metaphor matters because it opens the door to discovery .
whenever we solve a problem , or make a discovery , we compare what we know with what we do n't know .
and the only way to find out about the latter is to investigate the ways it might be like the former .
einstein described his scientific method as combinatory play .
he famously used thought experiments , which are essentially elaborate analogies , to come up with some of his greatest discoveries .
by bringing together what we know and what we do n't know through analogy , metaphorical thinking strikes the spark that ignites discovery .
now metaphor is ubiquitous , yet it 's hidden .
but you just have to look at the words around you and you 'll find it .
ralph waldo emerson described language as " fossil poetry . "
but before it was fossil poetry language was fossil metaphor .
and these fossils still breathe .
take the three most famous words in all of western philosophy : " cogito ergo sum . "
that 's routinely translated as , " i think , therefore i am . "
but there is a better translation .
the latin word " cogito " is derived from the prefix " co , " meaning " together , " and the verb " agitare , " meaning " to shake . "
so , the original meaning of " cogito " is to shake together .
and the proper translation of " cogito ergo sum " is " i shake things up , therefore i am . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- metaphor shakes things up , giving us everything from shakespeare to scientific discovery in the process .
the mind is a plastic snow dome , the most beautiful , most interesting , and most itself , when , as elvis put it , it 's all shook up .
and metaphor keeps the mind shaking , rattling and rolling , long after elvis has left the building .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i am going to be talking about secrets .
obviously the best way to divulge a secret is to tell someone to not say anything about it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- secrets . i 'm using powerpoint this year just because , you know , i 'm into the ted thing .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and when you use these things you do n't have to go like that .
you just press it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- oh , man . um , yes .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- yes . i 'm sure ! just change it !
-lrb- laughter -rrb- is bill gates here ?
change it ! come on ! what ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ah ! okay .
that 's not my slides , but it 's okay .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- as you can see , these are all maps .
and maps are important devices for transferring information , especially if you have human cognitive ability .
we can see that all formulas are really maps .
now , as humans , we make maps of places that we seldom even go , which seems a little wasteful of time .
this , of course , is a map of the moon .
there 're some very delightful names .
tranquilacalitis , -lsb- unclear -rsb- . my favorite is frigoris .
what are these people thinking ? frigoris ?
what the frigoris you doing ? names are important .
frigoris ? this is the moon . people could live there one day .
i 'll meet you at frigoris . no . i do n't think so .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- there we see mars , again with various names .
and this is all done , by the way , by the international astronomical union .
this is an actual group of people that sit around naming planetary objects .
this is from their actual book .
these are some of the names that they have chosen , ladies and gentlemen .
i 'll go through a little of them . bolotnitsa .
that , of course , is the slavic swamp mermaid .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now i think the whole concept of a mermaid does n't really blend into the swamp feel .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " oh look ! mermaid come out of swamp . oh boy !
it 's time for bolotnitsa ! "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- djabran fluctus .
if that do n't flow off the tongue , what does ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i mean kids are studying this stuff and they 've got the word " fluctus " up there . that 's wrong .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- one dyslexic kid and he could be ruining his life .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " it fluctus up , mama . "
hikuleo fluctus .
that 's a little more flowing . hikuleo sounds like a kind of a leonardo dicaprio 17 syllable thing .
and that 's the tonga underworld .
and one of my favorites is the itoki fluctus , who is the nicaraguan goddess of insects , stars , and planets .
now , if you 're a goddess of stars and planets would n't you relegate insects to somebody else ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " no , no , really , i 'm so busy with the stars .
would you mind taking the insects ? thank you darling .
oh take the spiders too . i know they 're not insects , but i do n't care .
monkeys , chimps , just get rid of the hairy creatures . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , we 're going to be going to mars one day . and when we do , it 's going to be unfair for the people that are living there to have to live with these ridiculous names .
so , you 'll be on mars , and you 're at hellespointica depressio which has got to be a really " up " place .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- yeah , i 'm at the depressio , and i want to get over to amazonis so i plug it into the mars map , and click the button and there 's my directions .
i go to chrysokeras .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- left to the thymiamata .
then to niliacus lacus , which is not a bad name .
niliacus lacus , try to get the practice , slick-a-tick-a-bacus .
that 's a cool name . i will say that .
so , i hold back a little of my venom for these astronomical misnomers .
and then of course arnon to thoth .
and of course there will be advertisements .
this is from their rule book , the international astronomical union .
and you know they 're international because they put it " en francais " as well .
l 'union astronomique internationale , for those of you who do n't speak french .
i thought i 'd translate for you .
from the rulebook : nomenclature is a tool .
the first consideration , make it clear , simple and unambiguous .
and i think that djabran fluctus , that fits that mode .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's simple , the goddess of goats , very simple .
djabran fluctus .
" now , frank is this clear to you , djabran fluctus ? "
" yeah , that 's the goat goddess right ? the abacazanian ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's clear to me . "
" listen , i 'm going back to the swamp mermaid . can you call me in a little while ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- also , from the actual document i highlighted a part i thought may be of interest .
anyone can suggest changing a name .
so , i look to you , fellow member of the earth community .
we 've got to change this stuff up fast .
so , these are actual names of people that work there .
i did some more investigation .
these are more people working for this group .
and , as you can see , they do n't use their first names .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- these are people naming planets , and they wo n't use their first names .
something is askew here .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- is it because his name is really jupiter blunck ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- is that ganymede andromeda burba ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- is that mars ya marov ?
i do n't know . but it 's investigative material , no doubt .
there are some mapping people who do use their names .
witness please , eugene shoemaker , who , diligently , from a young boy decided he wanted to make maps of celestial bodies .
must have been a very interesting day in the shoemaker house .
" mom , i want to make maps . "
" that 's wonderful eugene . you could make maps of toronto . "
" no , i want to make maps of planets . "
" yeah , go to your room . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- martians , venusians , jovians .
we have names for places where people do n't exist .
that seems a little silly to me .
there are no jovians .
getting back to my premise , i used stamps , by the way , because you do n't have to pay anybody for the rights .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- there is obviously einstein , niels bohr , de fermat 's last theorem , and i 'm not sure whether that 's james coburn or richard harris .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's definitely one of the two . i 'm not really clear which one .
but obviously the point is that numbers are maps .
and within numbers , is there an underlying secret to the universe ?
that is the premise of this particular presentation .
by the way , that 's a natural picture of saturn , no adjustments . i mean that 's just beautiful .
so beautiful that i will even give up a laugh to explain my love of this particular planet , and the day saturday , named after it , wonderfully .
so , formulas relate number to form .
that 's euler , his formula was one of the inspirations that lead to the beginning of string theory which is kind of cool , not that funny , but it is cool .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- he was also famous for having no body .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- which a lot of you are like , " how did he figure that out ? "
he 's got no body , no man , just a head floating high .
here comes euler .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and that 's an icosahedron , which is one of the five sacred solids , very important shapes .
you see the icosahedron again .
the dodecahedron , it 's dual .
there is a dodecahedron which i had to do in my room last night .
the five sacred solids , as you can see there .
which is not to be confused with the five sacred salads .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- blue cheese , ranch , oil and vinegar , thousand islands and house .
i suggest the house .
the reality , now here is something important .
what 's important about this is these shapes are duals of each other .
and you can see how the icosahedron withdraws into the dodecahedron and then they just merge into each other .
so , the whole concept of branes in the universe , if the universe is shaped like a dodecahedron this is a very good map of what could possibly be .
and that is , of course , what we are here to talk about .
what a coincidence !
october 9th , in france , jean-pierre luminet said that the universe is probably shaped like a dodecahedron , based on information that they got from this probe .
this would be a normal wave pattern .
but what they 're seeing , way out there in the far reaches of the microwave background , is this kind of odd undulation .
it does n't plug in to what they suspected a flat universe would be .
so , you can kind of get an idea from this extrapolating that back under this huge picture , so we get this idea of what the primal universe looked like .
and judging from this , it looks a little like a cheeseburger .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , i 'm thinking the universe is either a dodecahedron or a cheeseburger .
and for me , that 's a win-win .
everybody goes , i 'm happy .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- better really hurry up .
i just threw this in because as important as all of our intellectual abilities are , without heart and without love it 's just - it 's all meaningless .
and that , to me , is really beautiful .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- except for that creepy guy in the background .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- getting back to the point of my particular presentation , kepler , one of my great heroes , who realized that these five solids , which i spoke of earlier , were related somehow to the planets , but he could n't prove it . it freaked him out .
but it did lead to newton discovering gravity .
so , maps of things leading to organized understandings of the universe in which we emerge .
now this is isaac from a vietnamese stamp .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i am not suggesting at all that my vietnamese brothers and sisters could maybe use a little art class here and there . but ...
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's not a good picture .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- not a good picture . now , my friends in the island of nevis are a little better . look at that ! that 's isaac newton .
that guy is rockin ' .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- what a handsome cat .
once again , nicaragua let me down .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and copernicus looks like johnny carson , which is really weird .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i do n't get that at all .
once again , these guys rock it out .
isaac is kickin ' ass . man , he looks like a rock star .
this is freaky is a major way .
this is sierra leone .
they got little babies in there , floating in there .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- man . i do n't really need to comment on this .
but i did n't know that isaac newton was in the moody blues . did you ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- when did this happen ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's a different kind of course . and they 've got five apples ?
i mean these guys are extrapolating in realms that are not necessarily valid .
although five is a good number , of course .
ecuador , my friend kepler , as you can see , they call him juan .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- juan ? no ! johannes , not juan .
it was n't carlos chaplain . it 's wrong .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- rené descartes , of course . once again these grenada people , this is like way too sick for anybody 's imagination .
he 's all murky . there is little kids leaning on his leg , little ghosts flying around . we gotta clean this stuff up fast , ladies and gentlemen .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this is , of course , the cartesian coordinates .
once again , that 's sierra leone .
this is again , indicating how numbers relate to space relate to form , maps of the universe .
because that 's why we 're here , really , i think to figure stuff out and to love each other .
descartes . -lrb- laughter -rrb- before the horse . -lrb- laughter -rrb- now , monaco took descartes , and just flipped him around .
now , monaco is problematic for me , and i 'll show you why .
here is a map . all they have is a casino on it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and why franklin delano roosevelt is on their map i do n't even want to hazard a guess .
but i 'd say he 'd been to hellespointica depressio recently .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this is the flag of monaco . ladies and gentlemen , the flag of indonesia . please examine .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- not sure how this came to be , but it 's not right .
in monaco , " no , what are you talking about ?
they are so different .
look , ours is more red , it 's longer .
they stole our flag ! they stole our flag ! "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- bode 's law was n't even his law . it was a guy named titus .
and the reason i just bring this up because it is a law that does n't really work .
that 's jude law and some of his films recently did n't work .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- just a correlation that indicates how things are misinterpreted .
and i wonder if the photographer said , " okay , jude , could you touch your tooth ? that 's good . "
just a tip , if you 're being photographed for press pictures , do n't touch your teeth .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- prime numbers , gauss , one of my favorites .
golden section , i 've been obsessed with this thing since before i was born .
i know that scares a lot of you , but that was my purpose entirely .
there we can see fibonacci numbers related to the golden section , because fibonacci and golden section relate to the unfolding of the measured meter of matter , as i refer to it .
if fibonacci had been on paxil , -lrb- laughter -rrb- that would be the fibonacci series .
" ten milligram , 20 milligram . "
" leonardo , dinner 's ready , put down those books and take your pills . "
" yes , mama . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- alright where is this going ? that 's a good question .
here is the premise that i began 27 years ago .
if numbers can express the laws of this incredible universe that we live , i reason , through some sort of reverse engineering , we could extrapolate from them some basic structural element of this universe .
and that 's what i did . twenty-seven years ago i started working on this .
and i tried to build a particle accelerator .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and that did n't work out well .
so , then i thought a calculator is a metaphor .
i can just divide numbers , that 's like atom smashing .
that 's what i did . that 's how i found moleeds .
moleeds are what i believe the thing that will allow string theory to be proved .
they are the nodes on the string , patterns and relationships , 27 , 37 .
that was the first chart i came up with .
you can see , even if you do n't go for the numbers , the beauty of the symmetry .
the numbers from one to 36 , divided into six groups .
symmetry , pairs .
every top adds up to 37 .
bottom , all 74 .
there is so many intricate relationships that i 'm not going to go there now , because you would say , " hey , go back to the fluctus part . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- circle of fifths , acoustic harmony , geometric symmetry .
i knew those two were related .
once again , the cartesian kind of cross-over .
so , i said if i 'm going to put a circle , see what kind of patterns i get , boom , the red system .
look at that . you ca n't just make this stuff up , ladies and gentlemen .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you ca n't just go around going , " oh , i 'm going to put some triangles in a circle and they 're going to be symmetrical . and they 're all going to add up , and it 's going to be , oh yeah , i figured that out . "
this is beyond anything anybody could just make up .
there is the orange system .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and you 'll see over here , these are multiples of the number 27 .
and they recapitulate that shape , even though that 's a circle of nine and that 's a circle of 36 . it 's nuts .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's the green system . it all folds in half on the green system , right between 18 and 19 .
the blue system . the violet . it 's all there .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- look at that ! i mean you can not make that stuff up .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that just does n't fall out of a tree , ladies and gentlemen .
twenty-seven years of my life !
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and i 'm presenting it here at ted . why ?
because this is the place if aliens land , i hope they come here .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " we are going to destroy the earth . hmmm ... maybe not . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- in this last year i have found these subsequent systems which allow for the mathematic possibilities of the calabi-yau manifolds in a way that does n't necessitate these little hidden dimensions .
which works mathematically , but it just does n't seem god-like to me .
it just seems like it 's not sexy and elegant , it 's hidden .
i do n't want hidden , i want to see it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i found other pairs all have symmetry , even though , unlike the master one , their symmetry is split .
unbelievable . this is like crazy .
am i the only one that sees this ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you know , i did n't just draw this in a day , by the way .
you know , try making some charts like this at home .
you gotta be accurate ! there 's measurement involved , increments .
these are maps , by the way .
not stamps , but one day .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- okay , i 'm getting to the punch . golden ratio , it 's crazy .
and look at this , built within it is the golden ratio .
i start looking at that , and look at them again .
they start looking like planets .
i go to jpl .
i look at the orbits of the planets .
i find 18 examples of it in our solar system .
i never told anybody . this is the first thing . this could be history .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- kepler was right .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- eighteen and 19 , the middle of the moleeds , 0.618 is the golden section .
multiply them together , 18.618 x 19.618 is 365.247 .
which is .005 different from the number of days in a year .
hey , you ca n't make this up .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so let me start by taking you back , back into the mists of your memory to perhaps the most anticipated year in your life , but certainly the most anticipated year in all human history : the year 2000 . remember that ?
y2k , the dotcom bubble , stressing about whose party you 're going to go to as the clock strikes midnight , before the champagne goes flat , and then there 's that inchoate yearning that was felt , i think , by many , that the millennium , that the year 2000 , should mean more , more than just a two and some zeroes .
well , amazingly , for once , our world leaders actually lived up to that millennium moment and back in 2000 agreed to some pretty extraordinary stuff : visionary , measurable , long-term targets called the millennium development goals .
now , i 'm sure you all keep a copy of the goals under your pillow , or by the bedside table , but just in case you do n't , and your memory needs some jogging , the deal agreed then goes like this : developing countries promised to at least halve extreme poverty , hunger and deaths from disease , alongside some other targets , by 2015 , and developed nations promised to help them get that done by dropping debts , increasing smart aid , and trade reform .
well , we 're approaching 2015 , so we 'd better assess , how are we doing on these goals ?
but we 've also got to decide , do we like such global goals ?
some people do n't . and if we like them , we 've got to decide what we want to do on these goals going forward .
what does the world want to do together ?
we 've got to decide a process by which we decide .
well , i definitely think these goals are worth building on and seeing through , and here 's just a few reasons why .
incredible partnerships between the private sector , political leaders , philanthropists and amazing grassroots activists across the developing world , but also 250,000 people marched in the streets of edinburgh outside this very building for make poverty history .
all together , they achieved these results : increased the number of people on anti-retrovirals , life-saving anti-aids drugs ; nearly halved deaths from malaria ; vaccinated so many that 5.4 million lives will be saved .
and combined , this is going to result in two million fewer children dying every year , last year , than in the year 2000 .
that 's 5,000 fewer kids dying every day , ten times you lot not dead every day , because of all of these partnerships .
so i think this is amazing living proof of progress that more people should know about , but the challenge of communicating this kind of good news is probably the subject of a different tedtalk .
anyway , for now , anyone involved in getting these results , thank you . i think this proved these goals are worth it .
but there 's still a lot of unfinished business .
still , 7.6 million children die every year of preventable , treatable diseases , and 178 million kids are malnourished to the point of stunting , a horrible term which means physical and cognitive lifelong impairment .
so there 's plainly a lot more to do on the goals we 've got .
but then , a lot of people think there are things that should have been in the original package that were n't agreed back then that should now be included , like sustainable development targets , natural resource governance targets , access to opportunity , to knowledge , equity , fighting corruption .
all of this is measurable and could be in the new goals .
but the key thing here is , what do you think should be in the new goals ?
what do you want ?
are you annoyed that i did n't talk about gender equality or education ?
should those be in the new package of goals ?
and quite frankly , that 's a good question , but there 's going to be some tough tradeoffs and choices here , so you want to hope that the process by which the world decides these new goals is going to be legitimate , right ?
well , as we gather here in edinburgh , technocrats appointed by the u.n. and certain governments , with the best intentions , are busying themselves designing a new package of goals , and currently they 're doing that through pretty much the same old late-20th-century , top-down , elite , closed process .
but , of course , since then , the web and mobile telephony , along with ubiquitous reality tv formats have spread all around the world .
so what we 'd like to propose is that we use them to involve people from all around the world in an historic first : the world 's first truly global poll and consultation , where everyone everywhere has an equal voice for the very first time .
i mean , would n't it be a huge historic missed opportunity not to do this , given that we can ?
there 's hundreds of billions of your aid dollars at stake , tens of millions of lives , or deaths , at stake , and , i 'd argue , the security and future of you and your family is also at stake .
so , if you 're with me , i 'd say there 's three essential steps in this crowdsourcing campaign : collecting , connecting and committing .
so first of all , we 've got to ground this campaign in core polling data .
let 's go into every country that will let us in , ask 1,001 people what they want the new goals to be , making special efforts to reach the poorest , those without access to modern technology , and let 's make sure that their views are at the center of the goals going forward .
then , we 've got to commission a baseline survey to make sure we can monitor and progress the goals going forward . the original goals did n't really have good baseline survey data , and we 're going to need the help of big data through all of this process to make sure we can really monitor the progress .
and then we 've got to connect with the big crowd .
now here , we see the role for an unprecedented coalition of social media giants and upstarts , telecoms companies , reality tv show formats , gaming companies , telecoms , all of them together in kind of their " we are the world " moment .
could they come together and help the millennium development goals get rebranded into the millennial generation 's goals ?
and if just five percent of the five billion plus who are currently connected made a comment , and that comment turned into a commitment , we could crowdsource a force of 300 million people around the world to help see these goals through .
if we have this collected data , and this connected crowd , based upon our experience of campaigning and getting world leaders to commit , i think world leaders will commit to most of the crowdsourced recommendations .
but the question really is , through this process will we all have become committed ?
and if we are , are we ready to iterate , monitor and provide feedback , make sure these promises are really delivering results ?
well , there 's some fantastic examples here to scale up , mostly piloted within africa , actually .
there 's open data kenya , which geocodes and crowdsources information about where projects are , are they delivering results .
often , they 're not in the right place .
and ushahidi , which means " witness " in swahili , which geocodes and crowdsources information in complex emergencies to help target responses .
this is some of the most exciting stuff in development and democracy , where citizens on the edge of a network are helping to force open the process to make sure that the big global aid promises and vague stuff up at the top really delivers for people at a grassroots level and inverts that pyramid .
this openness , this forcing openness , is key , and if it was n't entirely transparent already , i should be open : i 've got a completely transparent agenda .
long-term trends suggest that this century is going to be a tough place to live , with population increases , consumption patterns increasing , and conflict over scarce natural resources .
and look at the state of global politics today .
look at the rio earth summit that happened just last week , or the mexican g20 , also last week .
both , if we 're honest , a bust .
our world leaders , our global politics , currently ca n't get it done .
they need our help . they need the cavalry , and the cavalry 's not going to come from mars .
it 's got to come from us , and i see this process of deciding democratically in a bottom-up fashion what the world wants to work on together as one vital means by which we can crowdsource the force to really build that constituency that 's going to reinvigorate global governance in the 21st century .
i started in 2000 . let me finish in 2030 .
many people made fun of a big campaign a few years ago we had called make poverty history .
it was a naive thought in many people 's minds , and it 's true , it was just a t-shirt slogan that worked for the moment . but look .
the empirical condition of living under a dollar and 25 is trending down , and look where it gets to by 2030 .
it 's getting near zero .
now sure , progress in china and india and poverty reduction there was key to that , but recently also in africa , poverty rates are being reduced .
it will get harder as we get towards zero , as the poor will be increasingly located in post-conflict , fragile states , or maybe in middle income states where they do n't really care about the marginalized .
but i 'm confident , with the right kind of political campaigning and creative and technological innovation combined working together more and more as one , i think we can get this and other goals done .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : jamie , here 's the puzzle to me .
if there was an incident today where a hundred kids died in some tragedy or where , say , a hundred kids were kidnapped and then rescued by special forces , i mean , it would be all over the news for a week , right ?
you just put up , just as one of your numbers there , that 5,000 - is that the number ?
jamie drummond : fewer children every day .
ca : five thousand fewer children dying every day .
i mean , it dwarfs , dwarfs everything that is actually on our news agenda , and it 's invisible .
this must drive you crazy .
jd : it does , and we 're having a huge debate in this country about aid levels , for example , and aid alone is not the whole solution . nobody thinks it is .
but , you know , if people saw the results of this smart aid , i mean , they 'd be going crazy for it .
i wish the 250,000 people who really did march outside this very building knew these results .
right now they do n't , and it would be great to find a way to better communicate it , because we have not .
creatively , we 've failed to communicate this success so far .
if those kinds of efforts just could multiply their voice and amplify it at the key moments , i know for a fact we 'd get better policy .
the mexican g20 need not have been a bust .
rio , if anyone cares about the environment , need not have been a bust , okay ?
but these conferences are going on , and i know people get skeptical and cynical about the big global summits and the promises and their never being kept , but actually , the bits that are , are making a difference , and what the politicians need is more permission from the public .
ca : but you have n't fully worked out the web mechanisms , etc .
by which this might happen .
i mean , if the people here who 've had experience using open platforms , you 're interested to talk with them this week and try to take this forward .
jd : absolutely . ca : all right , well i must say , if this conference led in some way to advancing that idea , that 's a huge idea , and if you carry that forward , that is really awesome , so thank you . jd : i 'd love your help .
ca : thank you , thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- my search is always to find ways to chronicle , to share and to document stories about people , just everyday people .
stories that offer transformation , that lean into transcendence , but that are never sentimental , that never look away from the darkest things about us .
because i really believe that we 're never more beautiful than when we 're most ugly .
because that 's really the moment we really know what we 're made of .
as chris said , i grew up in nigeria with a whole generation - in the ' 80s - of students who were protesting a military dictatorship , which has finally ended .
so it was n't just me , there was a whole generation of us .
but what i 've come to learn is that the world is never saved in grand messianic gestures , but in the simple accumulation of gentle , soft , almost invisible acts of compassion , everyday acts of compassion .
in south africa , they have a phrase called ubuntu .
ubuntu comes out of a philosophy that says , the only way for me to be human is for you to reflect my humanity back at me .
but if you 're like me , my humanity is more like a window .
i do n't really see it , i do n't pay attention to it until there 's , you know , like a bug that 's dead on the window .
then suddenly i see it , and usually , it 's never good .
it 's usually when i 'm cussing in traffic at someone who is trying to drive their car and drink coffee and send emails and make notes .
so what ubuntu really says is that there is no way for us to be human without other people .
it 's really very simple , but really very complicated .
so , i thought i should start with some stories .
i should tell you some stories about remarkable people , so i thought i 'd start with my mother .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and she was dark , too .
my mother was english .
my parents met in oxford in the ' 50s , and my mother moved to nigeria and lived there .
she was five foot two , very feisty and very english .
this is how english my mother is - or was , she just passed .
she came out to california , to los angeles , to visit me , and we went to malibu , which she thought was very disappointing .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and then we went to a fish restaurant , and we had chad , the surfer dude , serving us , and he came up and my mother said , " do you have any specials , young man ? "
and chad says , " sure , like , we have this , like , salmon , that 's , like , rolled in this , like , wasabi , like , crust .
it 's totally rad . "
and my mother turned to me and said , " what language is he speaking ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i said , " english , mum . "
and she shook her head and said , " oh , these americans . we gave them a language , why do n't they use it ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , this woman , who converted from the church of england to catholicism when she married my father - and there 's no one more rabid than a catholic convert - decided to teach in the rural areas in nigeria , particularly among igbo women , the billings ovulation method , which was the only approved birth control by the catholic church .
but her igbo was n't too good .
so she took me along to translate .
i was seven .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , here are these women , who never discuss their period with their husbands , and here i am telling them , " well , how often do you get your period ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and , " do you notice any discharges ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and , " how swollen is your vulva ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- she never would have thought of herself as a feminist , my mother , but she always used to say , " anything a man can do , i can fix . "
-lrb- applause -rrb- and when my father complained about this situation , where she 's taking a seven-year-old boy to teach this birth control , you know , he used to say , " oh , you 're turning him into - you 're teaching him how to be a woman . "
my mother said , " someone has to . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- this woman - during the biafran war , we were caught in the war .
it was my mother with five little children .
it takes her one year , through refugee camp after refugee camp , to make her way to an airstrip where we can fly out of the country .
at every single refugee camp , she has to face off soldiers who want to take my elder brother mark , who was nine , and make him a boy soldier .
can you imagine this five-foot-two woman , standing up to men with guns who want to kill us ?
all through that one year , my mother never cried one time , not once .
but when we were in lisbon , in the airport , about to fly to england , this woman saw my mother wearing this dress , which had been washed so many times it was basically see through , with five really hungry-looking kids , came over and asked her what had happened .
and she told this woman .
and so this woman emptied out her suitcase and gave all of her clothes to my mother , and to us , and the toys of her kids , who did n't like that very much , but - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - that was the only time she cried .
and i remember years later , i was writing about my mother , and i asked her , " why did you cry then ? "
and she said , " you know , you can steel your heart against any kind of trouble , any kind of horror .
but the simple act of kindness from a complete stranger will unstitch you . "
the old women in my father 's village , after this war had happened , memorized the names of every dead person , and they would sing these dirges , made up of these names .
dirges so melancholic that they would scorch you .
and they would sing them only when they planted the rice , as though they were seeding the hearts of the dead into the rice .
but when it came for harvest time , they would sing these joyful songs , that were made up of the names of every child who had been born that year .
and then the next planting season , when they sang the dirge , they would remove as many names of the dead that equaled as many people that were born .
and in this way , these women enacted a lot of transformation , beautiful transformation .
did you know , that before the genocide in rwanda , the word for rape and the word for marriage was the same one ?
but today , women are rebuilding rwanda .
did you also know that after apartheid , when the new government went into the parliament houses , there were no female toilets in the building ?
which would seem to suggest that apartheid was entirely the business of men .
all of this to say , that despite the horror , and despite the death , women are never really counted .
their humanity never seems to matter very much to us .
when i was growing up in nigeria - and i should n't say nigeria , because that 's too general , but in afikpo , the igbo part of the country where i 'm from - there were always rites of passage for young men .
men were taught to be men in the ways in which we are not women , that 's essentially what it is .
and a lot of rituals involved killing , killing little animals , progressing along , so when i turned 13 - and , i mean , it made sense , it was an agrarian community , somebody had to kill the animals , there was no whole foods you could go and get kangaroo steak at - so when i turned 13 , it was my turn now to kill a goat .
and i was this weird , sensitive kid , who could n't really do it , but i had to do it .
and i was supposed to do this alone .
but a friend of mine , called emmanuel , who was significantly older than me , who 'd been a boy soldier during the biafran war , decided to come with me .
which sort of made me feel good , because he 'd seen a lot of things .
now , when i was growing up , he used to tell me stories about how he used to bayonet people , and their intestines would fall out , but they would keep running .
so , this guy comes with me .
and i do n't know if you 've ever heard a goat , or seen one - they sound like human beings , that 's why we call tragedies " a song of a goat . "
my friend brad kessler says that we did n't become human until we started keeping goats .
anyway , a goat 's eyes are like a child 's eyes .
so when i tried to kill this goat and i could n't , emmanuel bent down , he puts his hand over the mouth of the goat , covers its eyes , so i do n't have to look into them , while i kill the goat .
it did n't seem like a lot , for this guy who 'd seen so much , and to whom the killing of a goat must have seemed such a quotidian experience , still found it in himself to try to protect me .
i was a wimp .
i cried for a very long time .
and afterwards , he did n't say a word .
he just sat there watching me cry for an hour .
and then afterwards he said to me , " it will always be difficult , but if you cry like this every time , you will die of heartbreak .
just know that it is enough sometimes to know that it is difficult . "
of course , talking about goats makes me think of sheep , and not in good ways .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , i was born two days after christmas .
so growing up , you know , i had a cake and everything , but i never got any presents , because , born two days after christmas .
so , i was about nine , and my uncle had just come back from germany , and we had the catholic priest over , my mother was entertaining him with tea .
and my uncle suddenly says , " where are chris ' presents ? "
and my mother said , " do n't talk about that in front of guests . "
but he was desperate to show that he 'd just come back , so he summoned me up , and he said , " go into the bedroom , my bedroom .
take anything you want out of the suitcase .
it 's your birthday present . "
i 'm sure he thought i 'd take a book or a shirt , but i found an inflatable sheep .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , i blew it up and ran into the living room , my finger where it should n't have been , i was waving this buzzing sheep around , and my mother looked like she was going to die of shock .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and father mcgetrick was completely unflustered , just stirred his tea and looked at my mother and said , " it 's all right daphne , i 'm scottish . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- my last days in prison , the last 18 months , my cellmate - for the last year , the first year of the last 18 months - my cellmate was 14 years old .
the name was john james , and in those days , if a family member committed a crime , the military would hold you as ransom till your family turned themselves in .
so , here was this 14-year-old kid on death row .
and not everybody on death row was a political prisoner .
there were some really bad people there .
and he had smuggled in two comics , two comic books - " spiderman " and " x-men . "
he was obsessed .
and when he got tired of reading them , he started to teach the men in death row how to read , with these comic books .
and so , i remember night after night , you 'd hear all these men , these really hardened criminals , huddled around john james , reciting , " take that , spidey ! "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's incredible .
i was really worried .
he did n't know what death row meant .
i 'd been there twice , and i was terribly afraid that i was going to die .
and he would always laugh , and say , " come on , man , we 'll make it out . "
then i 'd say , " how do you know ? "
and he said , " oh , i heard it on the grapevine . "
they killed him .
they handcuffed him to a chair , and they tacked his penis to a table with a six-inch nail , then left him there to bleed to death .
that 's how i ended up in solitary , because i let my feelings be known .
all around us , everywhere , there are people like this .
the igbo used to say that they built their own gods .
they would come together as a community , and they would express a wish .
and their wish would then be brought to a priest , who would find a ritual object , and the appropriate sacrifices would be made , and the shrine would be built for the god .
but if the god became unruly and began to ask for human sacrifice , the igbos would destroy the god .
they would knock down the shrine , and they would stop saying the god 's name .
this is how they came to reclaim their humanity .
every day , all of us here , we 're building gods that have gone rampant , and it 's time we started knocking them down and forgetting their names .
it does n't require a tremendous thing .
all it requires is to recognize among us , every day - the few of us that can see - are surrounded by people like the ones i 've told you .
there are some of you in this room , amazing people , who offer all of us the mirror to our own humanity .
i want to end with a poem by an american poet called lucille clifton .
the poem is called " libation , " and it 's for my friend vusi who is in the audience here somewhere .
" libation , north carolina , 1999 .
i offer to this ground , this gin .
i imagine an old man crying here , out of the sight of the overseer .
he pushes his tongue through a hole where his tooth would be , if he were whole .
it aches in that space where his tooth would be , where his land would be , his house , his wife , his son , his beautiful daughter .
he wipes sorrow from his face , and puts his thirsty finger to his thirsty tongue , and tastes the salt .
i call a name that could be his .
this is for you , old man .
this gin , this salty earth . "
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i think i 'll start out and just talk a little bit about what exactly autism is .
autism is a very big continuum that goes from very severe - the child remains non-verbal - all the way up to brilliant scientists and engineers .
and i actually feel at home here , because there 's a lot of autism genetics here .
you would n't have any ...
-lrb- applause -rrb- it 's a continuum of traits .
when does a nerd turn into asperger , which is just mild autism ?
i mean , einstein and mozart and tesla would all be probably diagnosed as autistic spectrum today .
and one of the things that is really going to concern me is getting these kids to be the ones that are going to invent the next energy things , you know , that bill gates talked about this morning .
ok . now , if you want to understand autism , animals .
and i want to talk to you now about different ways of thinking .
you have to get away from verbal language .
i think in pictures , i do n't think in language .
now , the thing about the autistic mind is it attends to details .
ok , this is a test where you either have to pick out the big letters , or pick out the little letters , and the autistic mind picks out the little letters more quickly .
and the thing is , the normal brain ignores the details .
well , if you 're building a bridge , details are pretty important because it will fall down if you ignore the details .
and one of my big concerns with a lot of policy things today is things are getting too abstract .
people are getting away from doing hands-on stuff .
i 'm really concerned that a lot of the schools have taken out the hands-on classes , because art , and classes like that , those are the classes where i excelled .
in my work with cattle , i noticed a lot of little things that most people do n't notice would make the cattle balk . like , for example , this flag waving , right in front of the veterinary facility .
this feed yard was going to tear down their whole veterinary facility ; all they needed to do was move the flag .
rapid movement , contrast .
in the early ' 70s when i started , i got right down in the chutes to see what cattle were seeing .
people thought that was crazy . a coat on a fence would make them balk , shadows would make them balk , a hose on the floor ...
people were n't noticing these things - a chain hanging down - and that 's shown very , very nicely in the movie .
in fact , i loved the movie , how they duplicated all my projects . that 's the geek side .
my drawings got to star in the movie too .
and actually it 's called " temple grandin , " not " thinking in pictures . "
so , what is thinking in pictures ? it 's literally movies in your head .
my mind works like google for images .
now , when i was a young kid i did n't know my thinking was different .
i thought everybody thought in pictures .
and then when i did my book , " thinking in pictures , " i start interviewing people about how they think .
and i was shocked to find out that my thinking was quite different . like if i say , " think about a church steeple " most people get this sort of generalized generic one .
now , maybe that 's not true in this room , but it 's going to be true in a lot of different places .
i see only specific pictures .
they flash up into my memory , just like google for pictures .
and in the movie , they 've got a great scene in there where the word " shoe " is said , and a whole bunch of ' 50s and ' 60s shoes pop into my imagination .
ok , there is my childhood church , that 's specific . there 's some more , fort collins .
ok , how about famous ones ?
and they just kind of come up , kind of like this .
just really quickly , like google for pictures .
and they come up one at a time , and then i think , " ok , well maybe we can have it snow , or we can have a thunderstorm , " and i can hold it there and turn them into videos .
now , visual thinking was a tremendous asset in my work designing cattle-handling facilities .
and i 've worked really hard on improving how cattle are treated at the slaughter plant .
i 'm not going to go into any gucky slaughter slides .
i 've got that stuff up on youtube if you want to look at it .
but , one of the things that i was able to do in my design work is i could actually test run a piece of equipment in my mind , just like a virtual reality computer system .
and this is an aerial view of a recreation of one of my projects that was used in the movie .
that was like just so super cool .
and there were a lot of kind of asperger types and autism types working out there on the movie set too .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but one of the things that really worries me is : where 's the younger version of those kids going today ?
they 're not ending up in silicon valley , where they belong .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- now , one of the things i learned very early on because i was n't that social , is i had to sell my work , and not myself .
and the way i sold livestock jobs is i showed off my drawings , i showed off pictures of things .
another thing that helped me as a little kid is , boy , in the ' 50s , you were taught manners .
you were taught you ca n't pull the merchandise off the shelves in the store and throw it around .
now , when kids get to be in third or fourth grade , you might see that this kid 's going to be a visual thinker , drawing in perspective . now , i want to emphasize that not every autistic kid is going to be a visual thinker .
now , i had this brain scan done several years ago , and i used to joke around about having a gigantic internet trunk line going deep into my visual cortex .
this is tensor imaging .
and my great big internet trunk line is twice as big as the control 's .
the red lines there are me , and the blue lines are the sex and age-matched control .
and there i got a gigantic one , and the control over there , the blue one , has got a really small one .
and some of the research now is showing is that people on the spectrum actually think with primary visual cortex .
now , the thing is , the visual thinker 's just one kind of mind .
you see , the autistic mind tends to be a specialist mind - good at one thing , bad at something else .
and where i was bad was algebra . and i was never allowed to take geometry or trig .
gigantic mistake : i 'm finding a lot of kids who need to skip algebra , go right to geometry and trig .
now , another kind of mind is the pattern thinker .
more abstract . these are your engineers , your computer programmers .
now , this is pattern thinking . that praying mantis is made from a single sheet of paper - no scotch tape , no cuts .
and there in the background is the pattern for folding it .
here are the types of thinking : photo-realistic visual thinkers , like me ; pattern thinkers , music and math minds .
some of these oftentimes have problems with reading .
you also will see these kind of problems with kids that are dyslexic .
you 'll see these different kinds of minds .
and then there 's a verbal mind , they know every fact about everything .
now , another thing is the sensory issues .
i was really concerned about having to wear this gadget on my face .
and i came in half an hour beforehand so i could have it put on and kind of get used to it , and they got it bent so it 's not hitting my chin .
but sensory is an issue . some kids are bothered by fluorescent lights ; others have problems with sound sensitivity .
you know , it 's going to be variable .
now , visual thinking gave me a whole lot of insight into the animal mind .
because think about it : an animal is a sensory-based thinker , not verbal - thinks in pictures , thinks in sounds , thinks in smells .
think about how much information there is there on the local fire hydrant .
he knows who 's been there , when they were there .
are they friend or foe ? is there anybody he can go mate with ?
there 's a ton of information on that fire hydrant .
it 's all very detailed information , and , looking at these kind of details gave me a lot of insight into animals .
now , the animal mind , and also my mind , puts sensory-based information into categories .
man on a horse and a man on the ground - that is viewed as two totally different things .
you could have a horse that 's been abused by a rider .
they 'll be absolutely fine with the veterinarian and with the horseshoer , but you ca n't ride him .
you have another horse , where maybe the horseshoer beat him up and he 'll be terrible for anything on the ground , with the veterinarian , but a person can ride him .
cattle are the same way .
man on a horse , a man on foot - they 're two different things .
you see , it 's a different picture .
see , i want you to think about just how specific this is .
now , this ability to put information into categories , i find a lot of people are not very good at this .
when i 'm out troubleshooting equipment or problems with something in a plant , they do n't seem to be able to figure out , " do i have a training people issue ?
or do i have something wrong with the equipment ? "
in other words , categorize equipment problem from a people problem .
i find a lot of people have difficulty doing that .
now , let 's say i figure out it 's an equipment problem .
is it a minor problem , with something simple i can fix ?
or is the whole design of the system wrong ?
people have a hard time figuring that out .
let 's just look at something like , you know , solving problems with making airlines safer .
yeah , i 'm a million-mile flier .
i do lots and lots of flying , and if i was at the faa , what would i be doing a lot of direct observation of ?
it would be their airplane tails .
you know , five fatal wrecks in the last 20 years , the tail either came off or steering stuff inside the tail broke in some way .
it 's tails , pure and simple .
and when the pilots walk around the plane , guess what ? they ca n't see that stuff inside the tail .
you know , now as i think about that , i 'm pulling up all of that specific information .
it 's specific . see , my thinking 's bottom-up .
i take all the little pieces and i put the pieces together like a puzzle .
now , here is a horse that was deathly afraid of black cowboy hats .
he 'd been abused by somebody with a black cowboy hat .
white cowboy hats , that was absolutely fine .
now , the thing is , the world is going to need all of the different kinds of minds to work together .
we 've got to work on developing all these different kinds of minds .
and one of the things that is driving me really crazy , as i travel around and i do autism meetings , is i 'm seeing a lot of smart , geeky , nerdy kids , and they just are n't very social , and nobody 's working on developing their interest in something like science .
and this brings up the whole thing of my science teacher .
my science teacher is shown absolutely beautifully in the movie .
i was a goofball student . when i was in high school i just did n't care at all about studying , until i had mr. carlock 's science class .
he was now dr. carlock in the movie .
and he got me challenged to figure out an optical illusion room .
this brings up the whole thing of you 've got to show kids interesting stuff .
you know , one of the things that i think maybe ted ought to do is tell all the schools about all the great lectures that are on ted , and there 's all kinds of great stuff on the internet to get these kids turned on .
because i 'm seeing a lot of these geeky nerdy kids , and the teachers out in the midwest , and the other parts of the country , when you get away from these tech areas , they do n't know what to do with these kids .
and they 're not going down the right path .
the thing is , you can make a mind to be more of a thinking and cognitive mind , or your mind can be wired to be more social .
and what some of the research now has shown in autism is there may by extra wiring back here , in the really brilliant mind , and we lose a few social circuits here .
it 's kind of a trade-off between thinking and social .
and then you can get into the point where it 's so severe you 're going to have a person that 's going to be non-verbal .
in the normal human mind language covers up the visual thinking we share with animals .
this is the work of dr. bruce miller .
and he studied alzheimer 's patients that had frontal temporal lobe dementia .
and the dementia ate out the language parts of the brain , and then this artwork came out of somebody who used to install stereos in cars .
now , van gogh does n't know anything about physics , but i think it 's very interesting that there was some work done to show that this eddy pattern in this painting followed a statistical model of turbulence , which brings up the whole interesting idea of maybe some of this mathematical patterns is in our own head .
and the wolfram stuff - i was taking notes and i was writing down all the search words i could use , because i think that 's going to go on in my autism lectures .
we 've got to show these kids interesting stuff .
and they 've taken out the autoshop class and the drafting class and the art class .
i mean art was my best subject in school .
we 've got to think about all these different kinds of minds , and we 've got to absolutely work with these kind of minds , because we absolutely are going to need these kind of people in the future .
and let 's talk about jobs .
ok , my science teacher got me studying because i was a goofball that did n't want to study .
but you know what ? i was getting work experience .
i 'm seeing too many of these smart kids who have n't learned basic things , like how to be on time .
i was taught that when i was eight years old .
you know , how to have table manners at granny 's sunday party .
i was taught that when i was very , very young .
and when i was 13 , i had a job at a dressmaker 's shop sewing clothes .
i did internships in college , i was building things , and i also had to learn how to do assignments .
you know , all i wanted to do was draw pictures of horses when i was little .
my mother said , " well let 's do a picture of something else . "
they 've got to learn how to do something else .
let 's say the kid is fixated on legos .
let 's get him working on building different things .
the thing about the autistic mind is it tends to be fixated .
like if a kid loves racecars , let 's use racecars for math .
let 's figure out how long it takes a racecar to go a certain distance .
in other words , use that fixation in order to motivate that kid , that 's one of the things we need to do .
i really get fed up when they , you know , the teachers , especially when you get away from this part of the country , they do n't know what to do with these smart kids .
it just drives me crazy .
what can visual thinkers do when they grow up ?
they can do graphic design , all kinds of stuff with computers , photography , industrial design .
the pattern thinkers , they 're the ones that are going to be your mathematicians , your software engineers , your computer programmers , all of those kinds of jobs .
and then you 've got the word minds . they make great journalists , and they also make really , really good stage actors .
because the thing about being autistic is , i had to learn social skills like being in a play .
it 's just kind of - you just have to learn it .
and we need to be working with these students .
and this brings up mentors .
you know , my science teacher was not an accredited teacher .
he was a nasa space scientist .
now , some states now are getting it to where if you have a degree in biology , or a degree in chemistry , you can come into the school and teach biology or chemistry .
we need to be doing that .
because what i 'm observing is the good teachers , for a lot of these kids , are out in the community colleges , but we need to be getting some of these good teachers into the high schools .
another thing that can be very , very , very successful is there is a lot of people that may have retired from working in the software industry , and they can teach your kid .
and it does n't matter if what they teach them is old , because what you 're doing is you 're lighting the spark .
you 're getting that kid turned on .
and you get him turned on , then he 'll learn all the new stuff .
mentors are just essential .
i can not emphasize enough what my science teacher did for me .
and we 've got to mentor them , hire them .
and if you bring them in for internships in your companies , the thing about the autism , asperger-y kind of mind , you 've got to give them a specific task . do n't just say , " design new software . "
you 've got to tell them something a lot more specific : " well , we 're designing a software for a phone and it has to do some specific thing .
and it can only use so much memory . "
that 's the kind of specificity you need .
well , that 's the end of my talk .
and i just want to thank everybody for coming .
it was great to be here .
-lrb- applause -rrb- oh , you 've got a question for me ? ok .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : thank you so much for that .
you know , you once wrote , i like this quote , " if by some magic , autism had been eradicated from the face of the earth , then men would still be socializing in front of a wood fire at the entrance to a cave . "
temple grandin : because who do you think made the first stone spears ?
the asperger guy . and if you were to get rid of all the autism genetics there would be no more silicon valley , and the energy crisis would not be solved .
-lrb- applause -rrb- ca : so , i want to ask you a couple other questions , and if any of these feel inappropriate , it 's okay just to say , " next question . "
but if there is someone here who has an autistic child , or knows an autistic child and feels kind of cut off from them , what advice would you give them ?
tg : well , first of all , you 've got to look at age .
if you have a two , three or four year old you know , no speech , no social interaction , i ca n't emphasize enough : do n't wait , you need at least 20 hours a week of one-to-one teaching .
you know , the thing is , autism comes in different degrees .
there 's going to be about half the people on the spectrum that are not going to learn to talk , and they 're not going to be working silicon valley , that would not be a reasonable thing for them to do .
but then you get the smart , geeky kids that have a touch of autism , and that 's where you 've got to get them turned on with doing interesting things .
i got social interaction through shared interest .
i rode horses with other kids , i made model rockets with other kids , did electronics lab with other kids , and in the ' 60s , it was gluing mirrors onto a rubber membrane on a speaker to make a light show .
that was like , we considered that super cool .
ca : is it unrealistic for them to hope or think that that child loves them , as some might , as most , wish ?
tg : well let me tell you , that child will be loyal , and if your house is burning down , they 're going to get you out of it .
ca : wow . so , most people , if you ask them what are they most passionate about , they 'd say things like , " my kids " or " my lover . "
what are you most passionate about ?
tg : i 'm passionate about that the things i do are going to make the world a better place .
when i have a mother of an autistic child say , " my kid went to college because of your book , or one of your lectures , " that makes me happy .
you know , the slaughter plants , i 've worked with them in the ' 80s ; they were absolutely awful .
i developed a really simple scoring system for slaughter plants where you just measure outcomes : how many cattle fell down ?
how many cattle got poked with the prodder ?
how many cattle are mooing their heads off ?
and it 's very , very simple .
you directly observe a few simple things .
it 's worked really well . i get satisfaction out of seeing stuff that makes real change in the real world . we need a lot more of that , and a lot less abstract stuff .
-lrb- applause -rrb- ca : when we were talking on the phone , one of the things you said that really astonished me was you said one thing you were passionate about was server farms . tell me about that .
tg : well the reason why i got really excited when i read about that , it contains knowledge .
it 's libraries .
and to me , knowledge is something that is extremely valuable . so , maybe , over 10 years ago now our library got flooded .
and this is before the internet got really big .
and i was really upset about all the books being wrecked , because it was knowledge being destroyed .
and server farms , or data centers are great libraries of knowledge .
ca : temple , can i just say it 's an absolute delight to have you at ted .
tg : well thank you so much . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- it feels like we 're all suffering from information overload or data glut .
and the good news is there might be an easy solution to that , and that 's using our eyes more .
so , visualizing information , so that we can see the patterns and connections that matter and then designing that information so it makes more sense , or it tells a story , or allows us to focus only on the information that 's important .
failing that , visualized information can just look really cool .
so , let 's see .
this is the $ billion dollar o-gram , and this image arose out of frustration i had with the reporting of billion-dollar amounts in the press .
that is , they 're meaningless without context : 500 billion for this pipeline , 20 billion for this war .
it does n't make any sense , so the only way to understand it is visually and relatively .
so i scraped a load of reported figures from various news outlets and then scaled the boxes according to those amounts .
and the colors here represent the motivation behind the money .
so purple is " fighting , " and red is " giving money away , " and green is " profiteering . "
and what you can see straight away is you start to have a different relationship to the numbers .
you can literally see them .
but more importantly , you start to see patterns and connections between numbers that would otherwise be scattered across multiple news reports .
let me point out some that i really like .
this is opec 's revenue , this green box here - 780 billion a year .
and this little pixel in the corner - three billion - that 's their climate change fund .
americans , incredibly generous people - over 300 billion a year , donated to charity every year , compared with the amount of foreign aid given by the top 17 industrialized nations at 120 billion .
then of course , the iraq war , predicted to cost just 60 billion back in 2003 .
and it mushroomed slightly . afghanistan and iraq mushroomed now to 3,000 billion .
so now it 's great because now we have this texture , and we can add numbers to it as well .
so we could say , well , a new figure comes out ... let 's see african debt .
how much of this diagram do you think might be taken up by the debt that africa owes to the west ?
let 's take a look .
so there it is : 227 billion is what africa owes .
and the recent financial crisis , how much of this diagram might that figure take up ?
what has that cost the world ? let 's take a look at that .
dooosh - which i think is the appropriate sound effect for that much money : 11,900 billion .
so , by visualizing this information , we turned it into a landscape that you can explore with your eyes , a kind of map really , a sort of information map .
and when you 're lost in information , an information map is kind of useful .
so i want to show you another landscape now .
we need to imagine what a landscape of the world 's fears might look like .
let 's take a look .
this is mountains out of molehills , a timeline of global media panic .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so , i 'll label this for you in a second .
but the height here , i want to point out , is the intensity of certain fears as reported in the media .
let me point them out .
so this , swine flu - pink .
bird flu .
sars - brownish here . remember that one ?
the millennium bug , terrible disaster .
these little green peaks are asteroid collisions .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and in summer , here , killer wasps .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so these are what our fears look like over time in our media .
but what i love - and i 'm a journalist - and what i love is finding hidden patterns ; i love being a data detective .
and there 's a very interesting and odd pattern hidden in this data that you can only see when you visualize it .
let me highlight it for you .
see this line , this is a landscape for violent video games .
as you can see , there 's a kind of odd , regular pattern in the data , twin peaks every year .
if we look closer , we see those peaks occur at the same month every year .
why ?
well , november , christmas video games come out , and there may well be an upsurge in the concern about their content .
but april is n't a particularly massive month for video games .
why april ?
well , in april 1999 was the columbine shooting , and since then , that fear has been remembered by the media and echoes through the group mind gradually through the year .
you have retrospectives , anniversaries , court cases , even copy-cat shootings , all pushing that fear into the agenda .
and there 's another pattern here as well . can you spot it ?
see that gap there ? there 's a gap , and it affects all the other stories .
why is there a gap there ?
you see where it starts ? september 2001 , when we had something very real to be scared about .
so , i 've been working as a data journalist for about a year , and i keep hearing a phrase all the time , which is this : " data is the new oil . "
data is the kind of ubiquitous resource that we can shape to provide new innovations and new insights , and it 's all around us , and it can be mined very easily .
it 's not a particularly great metaphor in these times , especially if you live around the gulf of mexico , but i would , perhaps , adapt this metaphor slightly , and i would say that data is the new soil .
because for me , it feels like a fertile , creative medium .
over the years , online , we 've laid down a huge amount of information and data , and we irrigate it with networks and connectivity , and it 's been worked and tilled by unpaid workers and governments .
and , all right , i 'm kind of milking the metaphor a little bit .
but it 's a really fertile medium , and it feels like visualizations , infographics , data visualizations , they feel like flowers blooming from this medium .
but if you look at it directly , it 's just a lot of numbers and disconnected facts .
but if you start working with it and playing with it in a certain way , interesting things can appear and different patterns can be revealed .
let me show you this .
can you guess what this data set is ?
what rises twice a year , once in easter and then two weeks before christmas , has a mini peak every monday , and then flattens out over the summer ?
i 'll take answers .
-lrb- audience : chocolate . -rrb- david mccandless : chocolate .
you might want to get some chocolate in .
any other guesses ?
-lrb- audience : shopping . -rrb- dm : shopping .
yeah , retail therapy might help .
-lrb- audience : sick leave . -rrb- dm : sick leave . yeah , you 'll definitely want to take some time off .
shall we see ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so , the information guru lee byron and myself , we scraped 10,000 status facebook updates for the phrase " break-up " and " broken-up " and this is the pattern we found - people clearing out for spring break , -lrb- laughter -rrb- coming out of very bad weekends on a monday , being single over the summer , and then the lowest day of the year , of course : christmas day .
who would do that ?
so there 's a titanic amount of data out there now , unprecedented .
but if you ask the right kind of question , or you work it in the right kind of way , interesting things can emerge .
so information is beautiful . data is beautiful .
i wonder if i could make my life beautiful .
and here 's my visual c.v.
i 'm not quite sure i 've succeeded .
pretty blocky , the colors are n't that great .
but i wanted to convey something to you .
i started as a programmer , and then i worked as a writer for many years , about 20 years , in print , online and then in advertising , and only recently have i started designing .
and i 've never been to design school .
i 've never studied art or anything .
i just kind of learned through doing .
and when i started designing , i discovered an odd thing about myself .
i already knew how to design , but it was n't like i was amazingly brilliant at it , but more like i was sensitive to the ideas of grids and space and alignment and typography .
it 's almost like being exposed to all this media over the years had instilled a kind of dormant design literacy in me .
and i do n't feel like i 'm unique .
i feel that everyday , all of us now are being blasted by information design .
it 's being poured into our eyes through the web , and we 're all visualizers now ; we 're all demanding a visual aspect to our information .
there 's something almost quite magical about visual information .
it 's effortless , it literally pours in .
and if you 're navigating a dense information jungle , coming across a beautiful graphic or a lovely data visualization , it 's a relief , it 's like coming across a clearing in the jungle .
i was curious about this , so it led me to the work of a danish physicist called tor norretranders , and he converted the bandwidth of the senses into computer terms .
so here we go . this is your senses , pouring into your senses every second .
your sense of sight is the fastest .
it has the same bandwidth as a computer network .
then you have touch , which is about the speed of a usb key .
and then you have hearing and smell , which has the throughput of a hard disk .
and then you have poor old taste , which is like barely the throughput of a pocket calculator .
and that little square in the corner , a naught .7 percent , that 's the amount we 're actually aware of .
so a lot of your vision - the bulk of it is visual , and it 's pouring in .
it 's unconscious .
the eye is exquisitely sensitive to patterns in variations in color , shape and pattern .
it loves them , and it calls them beautiful .
it 's the language of the eye .
if you combine the language of the eye with the language of the mind , which is about words and numbers and concepts , you start speaking two languages simultaneously , each enhancing the other .
so , you have the eye , and then you drop in the concepts .
and that whole thing - it 's two languages both working at the same time .
so we can use this new kind of language , if you like , to alter our perspective or change our views .
let me ask you a simple question with a really simple answer : who has the biggest military budget ?
it 's got to be america , right ?
massive . 609 billion in 2008 - 607 , rather .
so massive , in fact , that it can contain all the other military budgets in the world inside itself .
gobble , gobble , gobble , gobble , gobble .
now , you can see africa 's total debt there and the u.k. budget deficit for reference .
so that might well chime with your view that america is a sort of warmongering military machine , out to overpower the world with its huge industrial-military complex .
but is it true that america has the biggest military budget ?
because america is an incredibly rich country .
in fact , it 's so massively rich that it can contain the four other top industrialized nations ' economies inside itself , it 's so vastly rich .
so its military budget is bound to be enormous .
so , to be fair and to alter our perspective , we have to bring in another data set , and that data set is gdp , or the country 's earnings .
who has the biggest budget as a proportion of gdp ?
let 's have a look .
that changes the picture considerably .
other countries pop into view that you , perhaps , were n't considering , and american drops into eighth .
now you can also do this with soldiers .
who has the most soldiers ? it 's got to be china .
of course , 2.1 million .
again , chiming with your view that china has a militarized regime ready to , you know , mobilize its enormous forces .
but of course , china has an enormous population .
so if we do the same , we see a radically different picture .
china drops to 124th .
it actually has a tiny army when you take other data into consideration .
so , absolute figures , like the military budget , in a connected world , do n't give you the whole picture .
they 're not as true as they could be .
we need relative figures that are connected to other data so that we can see a fuller picture , and then that can lead to us changing our perspective .
as hans rosling , the master , my master , said , " let the dataset change your mindset . "
and if it can do that , maybe it can also change your behavior .
take a look at this one .
i 'm a bit of a health nut .
i love taking supplements and being fit , but i can never understand what 's going on in terms of evidence .
there 's always conflicting evidence .
should i take vitamin c ? should i be taking wheatgrass ?
this is a visualization of all the evidence for nutritional supplements .
this kind of diagram is called a balloon race .
so the higher up the image , the more evidence there is for each supplement .
and the bubbles correspond to popularity as regards to google hits .
so you can immediately apprehend the relationship between efficacy and popularity , but you can also , if you grade the evidence , do a " worth it " line .
so supplements above this line are worth investigating , but only for the conditions listed below , and then the supplements below the line are perhaps not worth investigating .
now this image constitutes a huge amount of work .
we scraped like 1,000 studies from pubmed , the biomedical database , and we compiled them and graded them all .
and it was incredibly frustrating for me because i had a book of 250 visualizations to do for my book , and i spent a month doing this , and i only filled two pages .
but what it points to is that visualizing information like this is a form of knowledge compression .
it 's a way of squeezing an enormous amount of information and understanding into a small space .
and once you 've curated that data , and once you 've cleaned that data , and once it 's there , you can do cool stuff like this .
so i converted this into an interactive app , so i can now generate this application online - this is the visualization online - and i can say , " yeah , brilliant . "
so it spawns itself .
and then i can say , " well , just show me the stuff that affects heart health . "
so let 's filter that out .
so heart is filtered out , so i can see if i 'm curious about that .
i think , " no , no . i do n't want to take any synthetics , i just want to see plants and - just show me herbs and plants . i 've got all the natural ingredients . "
now this app is spawning itself from the data .
the data is all stored in a google doc , and it 's literally generating itself from that data .
so the data is now alive ; this is a living image , and i can update it in a second .
new evidence comes out . i just change a row on a spreadsheet .
doosh ! again , the image recreates itself .
so it 's cool .
it 's kind of living .
but it can go beyond data , and it can go beyond numbers .
i like to apply information visualization to ideas and concepts .
this is a visualization of the political spectrum , an attempt for me to try and understand how it works and how the ideas percolate down from government into society and culture , into families , into individuals , into their beliefs and back around again in a cycle .
what i love about this image is it 's made up of concepts , it explores our worldviews and it helps us - it helps me anyway - to see what others think , to see where they 're coming from .
and it feels just incredibly cool to do that .
what was most exciting for me designing this was that , when i was designing this image , i desperately wanted this side , the left side , to be better than the right side - being a journalist , a left-leaning person - but i could n't , because i would have created a lopsided , biased diagram .
so , in order to really create a full image , i had to honor the perspectives on the right-hand side and at the same time , uncomfortably recognize how many of those qualities were actually in me , which was very , very annoying and uncomfortable .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but not too uncomfortable , because there 's something unthreatening about seeing a political perspective , versus being told or forced to listen to one .
you 're capable of holding conflicting viewpoints joyously when you can see them .
it 's even fun to engage with them because it 's visual .
so that 's what 's exciting to me , seeing how data can change my perspective and change my mind midstream - beautiful , lovely data .
so , just to wrap up , i wanted to say that it feels to me that design is about solving problems and providing elegant solutions , and information design is about solving information problems .
it feels like we have a lot of information problems in our society at the moment , from the overload and the saturation to the breakdown of trust and reliability and runaway skepticism and lack of transparency , or even just interestingness .
i mean , i find information just too interesting .
it has a magnetic quality that draws me in .
so , visualizing information can give us a very quick solution to those kinds of problems .
even when the information is terrible , the visual can be quite beautiful .
often we can get clarity or the answer to a simple question very quickly , like this one , the recent icelandic volcano .
which was emitting the most co2 ?
was it the planes or the volcano , the grounded planes or the volcano ?
so we can have a look .
we look at the data and we see : yep , the volcano emitted 150,000 tons ; the grounded planes would have emitted 345,000 if they were in the sky .
so essentially , we had our first carbon-neutral volcano .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- and that is beautiful . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this is revolution 2.0 .
no one was a hero . no one was a hero .
because everyone was a hero .
everyone has done something .
we all use wikipedia .
if you think of the concept of wikipedia where everyone is collaborating on content , and at the end of the day you 've built the largest encyclopedia in the world .
from just an idea that sounded crazy , you have the largest encyclopedia in the world .
and in the egyptian revolution , the revolution 2.0 , everyone has contributed something , small or big . they contributed something - to bring us one of the most inspiring stories in the history of mankind when it comes to revolutions .
it was actually really inspiring to see all these egyptians completely changing .
if you look at the scene , egypt , for 30 years , had been in a downhill - going into a downhill .
everything was going bad .
everything was going wrong .
we only ranked high when it comes to poverty , corruption , lack of freedom of speech , lack of political activism .
those were the achievements of our great regime .
yet , nothing was happening .
and it 's not because people were happy or people were not frustrated .
in fact , people were extremely frustrated .
but the reason why everyone was silent is what i call the psychological barrier of fear .
everyone was scared .
not everyone . there were actually a few brave egyptians that i have to thank for being so brave - going into protests as a couple of hundred , getting beaten up and arrested .
but in fact , the majority were scared .
everyone did not want really to get in trouble .
a dictator can not live without the force .
they want to make people live in fear .
and that psychological barrier of fear had worked for so many years , and here comes the internet , technology , blackberry , sms .
it 's helping all of us to connect .
platforms like youtube , twitter , facebook were helping us a lot because it basically gave us the impression that , " wow , i 'm not alone .
there are a lot of people who are frustrated . "
there are lots of people who are frustrated .
there are lots of people who actually share the same dream .
there are lots of people who care about their freedom .
they probably have the best life in the world .
they are living in happiness . they are living in their villas .
they are happy . they do n't have problems .
but they are still feeling the pain of the egyptian .
a lot of us , we 're not really happy when we see a video of an egyptian man who 's eating the trash while others are stealing billions of egyptian pounds from the wealth of the country .
the internet has played a great role , helping these people to speak up their minds , to collaborate together , to start thinking together .
it was an educational campaign .
khaled saeed was killed in june 2010 .
i still remember the photo .
i still remember every single detail of that photo .
the photo was horrible .
he was tortured , brutally tortured to death .
but then what was the answer of the regime ?
" he choked on a pile of hash " - that was their answer : " he 's a criminal .
he 's someone who escaped from all these bad things . "
but people did not relate to this .
people did not believe this .
because of the internet , the truth prevailed and everyone knew the truth .
and everyone started to think that " this guy could be my brother . "
he was a middle-class guy .
his photo was remembered by all of us .
a page was created .
an anonymous administrator was basically inviting people to join the page , and there was no plan .
" what are we going to do ? " " i do n't know . "
in a few days , tens of thousands of people there - angry egyptians who were asking the ministry of interior affairs , " enough .
get those who killed this guy .
to just bring them to justice . "
but of course , they do n't listen .
it was an amazing story - how everyone started feeling the ownership .
everyone was an owner in this page .
people started contributing ideas .
in fact , one of the most ridiculous ideas was , " hey , let 's have a silent stand .
let 's get people to go in the street , face the sea , their back to the street , dressed in black , standing up silently for one hour , doing nothing and then just leaving , going back home . "
for some people , that was like , " wow , silent stand .
and next time it 's going to be vibration . "
people were making fun of the idea .
but actually when people went to the street - the first time it was thousands of people in alexandria - it felt like - it was amazing . it was great because it connected people from the virtual world , bringing them to the real world , sharing the same dream , the same frustration , the same anger , the same desire for freedom .
and they were doing this thing .
but did the regime learn anything ? not really .
they were actually attacking them .
they were actually abusing them , despite the fact of how peaceful these guys were - they were not even protesting .
and things had developed until the tunisian revolution .
this whole page was , again , managed by the people .
in fact , the anonymous admin job was to collect ideas , help people to vote on them and actually tell them what they are doing .
people were taking shots and photos ; people were reporting violations of human rights in egypt ; people were suggesting ideas , they were actually voting on ideas , and then they were executing the ideas ; people were creating videos .
everything was done by the people to the people , and that 's the power of the internet .
there was no leader .
the leader was everyone on that page .
the tunisian experiment , as amir was saying , inspired all of us , showed us that there is a way .
yes we can . we can do it .
we have the same problems ; we can just go in the streets .
and when i saw the street on the 25th , i went back and said , " egypt before the 25th is never going to be egypt after the 25th .
the revolution is happening .
this is not the end , this is the beginning of the end . "
i was detained on the 27th night .
thank god i announced the locations and everything .
but they detained me .
and i 'm not going to talk about my experience , because this is not about me .
i was detained for 12 days , blindfolded , handcuffed .
and i did not really hear anything . i did not know anything .
i was not allowed to speak with anyone .
and i went out .
the next day i was in tahrir .
seriously , with the amount of change i had noticed in this square , i thought it was 12 years .
i never had in my mind to see this egyptian , the amazing egyptian .
the fear is no longer fear .
it 's actually strength - it 's power .
people were so empowered .
it was amazing how everyone was so empowered and now asking for their rights .
completely opposite .
extremism became tolerance .
who would -lsb- have -rsb- imagined before the 25th , if i tell you that hundreds of thousands of christians are going to pray and tens of thousands of muslims are going to protect them , and then hundreds of thousands of muslims are going to pray and tens of thousands of christians are going to protect them - this is amazing .
all the stereotypes that the regime was trying to put on us through their so-called propaganda , or mainstream media , are proven wrong .
this whole revolution showed us how ugly such a regime was and how great and amazing the egyptian man , the egyptian woman , how simple and amazing these people are whenever they have a dream .
when i saw that , i went back and i wrote on facebook .
and that was a personal belief , regardless of what 's going on , regardless of the details .
i said that , " we are going to win .
we are going to win because we do n't understand politics .
we 're going to win because we do n't play their dirty games .
we 're going to win because we do n't have an agenda .
we 're going to win because the tears that come from our eyes actually come from our hearts .
we 're going to win because we have dreams .
we 're going to win because we are willing to stand up for our dreams . "
and that 's actually what happened . we won .
and that 's not because of anything , but because we believed in our dream .
the winning here is not the whole details of what 's going to happen in the political scene .
the winning is the winning of the dignity of every single egyptian .
actually , i had this taxi driver telling me , " listen , i am breathing freedom .
i feel that i have dignity that i have lost for so many years . "
for me that 's winning , regardless of all the details .
my last word to you is a statement i believe in , which egyptians have proven to be true , that the power of the people is much stronger than the people in power .
thanks a lot .
-lrb- applause -rrb- this session is on natural wonders , and the bigger conference is on the pursuit of happiness .
i want to try to combine them all , because to me , healing is really the ultimate natural wonder .
your body has a remarkable capacity to begin healing itself , and much more quickly than people had once realized , if you simply stop doing what 's causing the problem .
and so , really , so much of what we do in medicine and life in general is focused on mopping up the floor without also turning off the faucet .
i love doing this work , because it really gives many people new hope and new choices that they did n't have before , and it allows us to talk about things that - not just diet , but that happiness is not - we 're talking about the pursuit of happiness , but when you really look at all the spiritual traditions , what aldous huxley called the " perennial wisdom , " when you get past the named and forms and rituals that really divide people , it 's really about - our nature is to be happy ; our nature is to be peaceful , our nature is to be healthy .
and so it 's not something - happiness is not something you get , health is generally not something that you get .
but rather all of these different practices - you know , the ancient swamis and rabbis and priests and monks and nuns did n't develop these techniques to just manage stress or lower your blood pressure , unclog your arteries , even though it can do all those things .
they 're powerful tools for transformation , for quieting down our mind and bodies to allow us to experience what it feels like to be happy , to be peaceful , to be joyful and to realize that it 's not something that you pursue and get , but rather it 's something that you have already until you disturb it .
i studied yoga for many years with a teacher named swami satchidananda and people would say , " what are you , a hindu ? " he 'd say , " no , i 'm an undo . "
and it 's really about identifying what 's causing us to disturb our innate health and happiness , and then to allow that natural healing to occur .
to me , that 's the real natural wonder .
so , within that larger context , we can talk about diet , stress management - which are really these spiritual practices - moderate exercise , smoking cessation , support groups and community - which i 'll talk more about - and some vitamins and supplements .
and it 's not a diet .
you know , when most people think about the diet i recommend , they think it 's a really strict diet .
for reversing disease , that 's what it takes , but if you 're just trying to be healthy , you have a spectrum of choices .
and to the degree that you can move in a healthy direction , you 're going to live longer , you 're going to feel better , you 're going to lose weight , and so on .
and in our studies , what we 've been able to do is to use very expensive , high-tech , state-of-the-art measures to prove how powerful these very simple and low-tech and low-cost - and in many ways , ancient - interventions , can be .
we first began by looking at heart disease , and when i began doing this work 26 or 27 years ago , it was thought that once you have heart disease it can only get worse .
and what we found was that , instead of getting worse and worse , in many cases it could get better and better , and much more quickly than people had once realized .
this is a representative patient who at the time was 73 - totally needed to have a bypass , decided to do this instead .
we used quantitative arteriography , showing the narrowing .
this is one of the arteries that feed the heart , one of the main arteries , and you can see the narrowing here .
a year later , it 's not as clogged ; normally , it goes the other direction .
these minor changes in blockages caused a 300 percent improvement in blood flow , and using cardiac positron emission tomography , or " pet , " scans , blue and black is no blood flow , orange and white is maximal .
huge differences can occur without drugs , without surgery .
clinically , he literally could n't walk across the street without getting severe chest pain ; within a month , like most people , was pain-free , and within a year , climbing more than 100 floors a day on a stairmaster .
this is not unusual , and it 's part of what enables people to maintain these kinds of changes , because it makes such a big difference in their quality of life .
overall , if you looked at all the arteries in all the patients , they got worse and worse , from one year to five years , in the comparison group .
this is the natural history of heart disease , but it 's really not natural because we found it could get better and better , and much more quickly than people had once thought .
we also found that the more people change , the better they got .
it was n't a function of how old or how sick they were - it was mainly how much they changed , and the oldest patients improved as much as the young ones .
i got this as a christmas card a few years ago from two of the patients in one of our programs .
the younger brother is 86 , the older one 's 95 ; they wanted to show me how much more flexible they were .
and the following year they sent me this one , which i thought was kind of funny .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you just never know .
and what we found was that 99 percent of the patients start to reverse the progression of their heart disease .
now i thought , you know , if we just did good science , that would change medical practice . but , that was a little naive .
it 's important , but not enough .
because we doctors do what we get paid to do , and we get trained to do what we get paid to do , so if we change insurance , then we change medical practice and medical education .
insurance will cover the bypass , it 'll cover the angioplasty ; it wo n't , until recently , cover diet and lifestyle .
so , we began through our nonprofit institute 's training hospitals around the country , and we found that most people could avoid surgery , and not only was it medically effective , it was also cost effective .
and the insurance companies found that they began to save almost 30,000 dollars per patient , and medicare is now in the middle of doing a demonstration project where they 're paying for 1,800 people to go through the program on the sites that we train .
the fortuneteller says , " i give smokers a discount because there 's not as much to tell . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- i like this slide , because it 's a chance to talk about what really motivates people to change , and what does n't .
and what does n't work is fear of dying , and that 's what 's normally used .
everybody who smokes knows it 's not good for you , and still 30 percent of americans smoke - 80 percent in some parts of the world . why do people do it ?
well , because it helps them get through the day .
and i 'll talk more about this , but the real epidemic is n't just heart disease or obesity or smoking - it 's loneliness and depression .
as one woman said , " i 've got 20 friends in this package of cigarettes , and they 're always there for me and nobody else is .
you 're going to take away my 20 friends ? what are you going to give me ? "
or they eat when they get depressed , or they use alcohol to numb the pain , or they work too hard , or watch too much tv .
there are lots of ways we have of avoiding and numbing and bypassing pain , but the point of all of this is to deal with the cause of the problem .
and the pain is not the problem : it 's the symptom .
and telling people they 're going to die is too scary to think about , or , they 're going to get emphysema or heart attack is too scary , and so they do n't want to think about it , so they do n't .
the most effective anti-smoking ad was this one .
you 'll notice the limp cigarette hanging out of his mouth , and " impotence " - the headline is , " impotent " - it 's not emphysema .
what was the biggest selling drug of all time when it was introduced a few years ago ?
viagra , right ? why ? because a lot of guys need it .
it 's not like you say , " hey joe , i 'm having erectile dysfunction , how about you ? "
and yet , look at the number of prescriptions that are being sold .
it 's not so much psychological , it 's vascular , and nicotine makes your arteries constrict .
so does cocaine , so does a high fat diet , so does emotional stress .
so the very behaviors that we think of as being so sexy in our culture are the very ones that leave so many people feeling tired , lethargic , depressed and impotent , and that 's not much fun .
but when you change those behaviors , your brain gets more blood , you think more clearly , you have more energy , your heart gets more blood in ways i 've shown you .
your sexual function improves .
and these things occur within hours . this is a study : a high fat meal , and within one or two hours blood-flow is measurably less - and you 've all experienced this at thanksgiving .
when you eat a big fatty meal , how do you feel ?
you feel kind of sleepy afterwards .
on a low-fat meal , the blood flow does n't go down - it even goes up .
many of you have kids , and you know that 's a big change in your lifestyle , and so people are not afraid to make big changes in lifestyle if they 're worth it .
and the paradox is that when you make big changes , you get big benefits , and you feel so much better so quickly .
for many people , those are choices worth making - not to live longer , but to live better .
i want to talk a little bit about the obesity epidemic , because it really is a problem .
two-thirds of adults are overweight or obese , and diabetes in kids and 30-year-olds has increased 70 percent in the last 10 years . it 's no joke : it 's real .
and just to show you this , this is from the cdc .
these are not election returns ; these are the percentage of people who are overweight .
and if you see from ' 85 to ' 86 to ' 87 , ' 88 , ' 89 , ' 90 , ' 91 - you get a new category , 15 to 20 percent ; ' 92 , ' 93 , ' 94 , ' 95 , ' 96 , ' 97 - you get a new category ; ' 98 , ' 99 , 2000 , and 2001 .
mississippi , more than 25 percent of people are overweight .
why is this ? well , this is one way to lose weight that works very well ...
but it does n't last , which is the problem .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , there 's no mystery in how you lose weight ; you either burn more calories by exercise or you eat fewer calories .
now , one way to eat fewer calories is to eat less food , which is why you can lose weight on any diet if you eat less food , or if you restrict entire categories of foods .
but the problem is , you get hungry , so it 's hard to keep it off .
the other way is to change the type of food .
and fat has nine calories per gram , whereas protein and carbs only have four .
so , when you eat less fat , you eat fewer calories without having to eat less food .
so you can eat the same amount of food , but you 'll be getting fewer calories because the food is less dense in calories .
and it 's the volume of food that affects satiety , rather than the type of food .
you know , i do n't like talking about the atkins diet , but i get asked about it every day , and so i just thought i 'd spend a few minutes on that .
the myth that you hear about is , americans have been told to eat less fat , the percent of calories from fat is down , americans are fatter than ever , therefore fat does n't make you fat .
it 's a half-truth . actually , americans are eating more fat than ever , and even more carbs . and so the percentage is lower , the actual amount is higher , and so the goal is to reduce both .
dr. atkins and i debated each other many times before he died , and we agreed that americans eat too many simple carbs , the " bad carbs , " and these are things like - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - sugar , white flour , white rice , alcohol . and you get a double whammy : you get all these calories that do n't fill you up because you 've removed the fiber , and they get absorbed quickly so your blood sugar zooms up .
your pancreas makes insulin to bring it back down , which is good .
but insulin accelerates the conversion of calories into fat .
so , the goal is not to go to pork rinds and bacon and sausages - these are not health foods - but to go from " bad carbs " to what are called " good carbs . "
and these are things like whole foods , or unrefined carbs : fruits , vegetables , whole wheat flour , brown rice , in their natural forms , are rich in fiber .
and the fiber fills you up before you get too many calories , and it slows the absorption so you do n't get that rapid rise in blood sugar .
so , and you get all the disease-protective substances .
it 's not just what you exclude from your diet , but also what you include that 's protective .
just as all carbs are not bad for you , all fats are not bad for you . there are good fats .
and these are predominantly what are called the omega-3 fatty acids .
you find these , for example , in fish oil .
and the bad fats are things like trans-fatty acids and processed food and saturated fats , which we find in meat .
if you do n't remember anything else from this talk , three grams a day of fish oil can reduce your risk of a heart attack and sudden death by 50 to 80 percent .
three grams a day . they come in one-gram capsules ; more than that just gives you extra fat you do n't need .
it also helps reduce the risk of the most common cancers like breast , prostate and colon cancer .
now , the problem with the atkins diet , everybody knows people who have lost weight on it , but you can lose weight on amphetamines , you know , and fen-phen .
i mean , there are lots of ways of losing weight that are n't good for you .
you want to lose weight in a way that enhances your health rather than the one that harms it .
and the problem is that it 's based on this half-truth , which is that americans eat too many simple carbs , so if you eat fewer simple carbs you 're going to lose weight .
you 'll lose even more weight if you go to whole foods and less fat , and you 'll enhance your health rather than harming it .
he says , " i 've got some good news .
while your cholesterol level has remained the same , the research findings have changed . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- now , what happens to your heart when you go on an atkins diet ?
the red is good at the beginning , and a year later - this is from a study done in a peer-reviewed journal called angiology - there 's more red after a year on a diet like i would recommend , there 's less red , less blood flow after a year on an atkins-type diet .
so , yes , you can lose weight , but your heart is n't happy .
now , one of the studies funded by the atkins center found that 70 percent of the people were constipated , 65 percent had bad breath , 54 percent had headaches - this is not a healthy way to eat .
and so , you might start to lose weight and start to attract people towards you , but when they get too close it 's going to be a problem .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and more seriously , there are case reports now of 16-year-old girls who died after a few weeks on the atkins diet - of bone disease , kidney disease , and so on .
and that 's how your body excretes waste , is through your breath , your bowels and your perspiration .
so when you go on these kinds of diet , they begin to smell bad .
so , an optimal diet is low in fat , low in the bad carbs , high in the good carbs and enough of the good fats .
and then , again , it 's a spectrum : when you move in this direction , you 're going to lose weight , you 're going to feel better and you 're going to gain health .
now , there are ecological reasons for eating lower on the food chain too , whether it 's the deforestation of the amazon , or making more protein available , to the four billion people who live on a dollar a day - not to mention whatever ethical concerns people have .
so , there are lots of reasons for eating this way that go beyond just your health .
now , we 're about to publish the first study looking at the effects of this program on prostate cancer , and , in collaboration with sloane-kettering and with ucsf .
we took 90 men who had biopsy-proven prostate cancer and who had elected , for reasons unrelated to the study , not to have surgery .
we could randomly divide them into two groups , and then we could have one group that is a non-intervention control group to compare to , which we ca n't do with , say , breast cancer , because everyone gets treated .
what we found was that , after a year , none of the experimental group patients who made these lifestyle changes needed treatment , whereas six of the control-group patients needed surgery or radiation .
when we looked at their psa levels - which is a marker for prostate cancer - they got worse in the control group , but they actually got better in the experimental group , and these differences were highly significant .
and then i wondered : was there any relationship between how much people changed their diet and lifestyle - whichever group they were in - and the changes in psa ?
and sure enough , we found a dose-response relationship , just like we found in the arterial blockages in our cardiac studies .
and in order for the psa to go down , they had to make pretty big changes .
i then wondered , well , maybe they 're just changing their psa , but it 's not really affecting the tumor growth .
so we took some of their blood serum and sent it down to ucla ; they added it to a standard line of prostate tumor cells growing in tissue culture , and it inhibited the growth seven times more in the experimental group than in the control group - 70 versus 9 percent .
and finally , i said , i wonder if there 's any relationship between how much people change and how it inhibited their tumor growth , whichever group they happened to be in .
and this really got me excited because again , we found the same pattern : the more people change , the more it affected the growth of their tumors .
and finally , we did mri and mr spectroscopy scans on some of these patients , and the tumor activity is shown in red in this patient , and you can see clearly it 's better a year later , along with the psa going down .
so , if it 's true for prostate cancer , it 'll almost certainly be true for breast cancer as well .
and whether or not you have conventional treatment , in addition , if you make these changes , it may help reduce the risk of recurrence .
the last thing i want to talk about , apropos of the issue of the pursuit of happiness , is that study after study have shown that people who are lonely and depressed - and depression is the other real epidemic in our culture - are many times more likely to get sick and die prematurely , in part because , as we talked about , they 're more likely to smoke and overeat and drink too much and work too hard and so on .
but also , through mechanisms that we do n't fully understand , people who are lonely and depressed are many times - three to five to ten times , in some studies - more likely to get sick and die prematurely .
and depression is treatable . we need to do something about that .
now , on the other hand , anything that promotes intimacy is healing .
it can be sexual intimacy - i happen to think that healing energy and erotic energy are just different forms of the same thing .
friendship , altruism , compassion , service - all the perennial truths that we talked about that are part of all religion and all cultures - once you stop trying to see the differences , these are the things in our own self-interest , because they free us from our suffering and from disease .
and it 's in a sense the most selfish thing that we can do .
just take a look at one study . this was done by david spiegel at stanford .
he took women with metastatic breast cancer , randomly divided them into two groups .
one group of people just met for an hour-and-a-half once a week in a support group .
it was a nurturing , loving environment , where they were encouraged to let down their emotional defenses and talk about how awful it is to have breast cancer with people who understood , because they were going through it too .
they just met once a week for a year .
five years later , those women lived twice as long , and you can see that the people - and that was the only difference between the groups .
it was a randomized control study published in the lancet .
other studies have shown this as well .
so , these simple things that create intimacy are really healing , and even the word healing , it comes from the root " to make whole . "
the word yoga comes from the sanskrit , meaning " union , to yoke , to bring together . "
and the last slide i want to show you is from - i was - again , this swami that i studied with for so many years , and i did a combined oncology and cardiology grand rounds at the university of virginia medical school a couple of years ago .
and at the end of it , somebody said , " hey , swami , what 's the difference between wellness and illness ? "
and so he went up on the board and he wrote the word " illness , " and circled the first letter , and then wrote the word " wellness , " and circled the first two letters ...
to me , it 's just shorthand for what we 're talking about : that anything that creates a sense of connection and community and love is really healing .
and then we can enjoy our lives more fully without getting sick in the process .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- the big residual is always value for money .
all the time we are trying to get value for money .
what we do n't look for is value for many , while we are generating value for money .
do we care about those four billion people whose income levels are less than two dollars a day , the so-called bottom of the pyramid ?
what are the challenges in getting value for money as well as value for many ?
we have described here in terms of the performance and the price .
if you have money , of course , you can get the value .
you can get a mercedes for a very high price , very high performance .
but if you do n't have money , what happens ?
well , you are to ride a bicycle , carrying your own weight and also some other weight , so that you can earn the bread for the day .
well , poor do not remain poor ; they become lower-middle-class .
and if they do so , then , of course , the conditions improve , and they start riding on scooters .
but the challenge is , again , they do n't get much value , because they ca n't afford anything more than the scooter .
the issue is , at that price , can you give them some extra value ?
a super value , in terms of their ability to ride in a car , to get that dignity , to get that safety , looks practically impossible , is n't it .
now , this is something that we see on indian streets all the time .
but many people see the same thing and think things differently , and one of them is here , ratan tata .
the great thing about our leaders is that , should they not only have passion in their belly , which practically all of them have , they 're also very innovative .
an innovator is one who does not know it can not be done .
they believe that things can be done .
but great leaders like ratan have compassion .
and what you said , lakshmi , is absolutely true : it 's not just ratan tata , it 's the house of tatas over time .
let me confirm what she said .
yes , i went barefoot until i was 12 .
i struggled to -lsb- unclear -rsb- day was a huge issue .
and when i finished my ssc , the eleventh standard , i stood eleventh among 125,000 students .
but i was about to leave the school , because my poor mother could n't afford schooling .
and it was -lsb- unclear -rsb- tata trust , which gave me six rupees per month , almost a dollar per month for six years .
that 's how i 'm standing before you .
so that is the house of tata .
-lrb- applause -rrb- innovation , compassion and passion .
they combine all that .
and it was that compassion which bothered them , because when he saw - in fact , he told me about eight or nine years ago how he was driving his own car - he drives his own car by the way - and he saw in the rain , a family like the one that i showed to you getting drenched with an infant .
and then he said , " well , i must give them a car that they can afford , one lakh car , $ 2,000 car . "
of course , as soon as you say something like this people say it is impossible , and that 's what was said by suzuki .
he said , oh , probably he is going to build a three-wheeler with stepney .
and you can see the cartoon here .
well they did n't build that . they built a proper car . nano .
and mind you , i 'm six feet half an inch , ratan is taller than me , and we have ample space in the front and ample space in the back in this particular car .
and incredible car .
and of course , nothing succeeds like success ; the cynics then turned around , and one after the other they also started saying , " yes , we also want to make a car in the nano segment .
we 'll manufacture a car in the nano segment . "
how did this great story unfold , the making of nano ?
let me tell you a bit about it .
for example , how we started : ratan just began with a five-engineer team , young people in their mid-twenties .
and he said , " well , i wo n't define the vehicle for you , but i will define the cost for you .
it is one lakh , 100,000 rupees , and you are to make it within that . "
and he told them , " question the unquestionable .
stretch the envelope . "
and at a point in time , he got so engrossed in the whole challenge , that he himself became a member of the team .
can you believe it ?
i still am told about this story of that single wiper design in which he participated .
until midnight , he 'd be thinking .
early morning he 'll be coming back with sort of solutions .
but who was the team leader ?
the team leader was girish wagh , a 34 year-old boy in -lsb- unclear -rsb- .
and the nano team average age was just 27 years .
and they did innovation in design and beyond .
broke many norms of the standard conventions for the first time .
for example , that a two-cylinder gas engine was used in a car with a single balancer shaft .
adhesives were replacing the rivets .
there was a co-creation , a huge co-creation , with vendors and suppliers .
all ideas on board were welcome .
100 vendors were co-located adjacent to the plant , and innovative business models for automobile dealerships were developed .
imagine that a fellow who sells cloth , for example , will be selling nano .
i mean , it was incredible innovation .
seeking solutions for non-auto sectors .
it was an open innovation , ideas from all over were welcome .
the mechanism of helicopters seats and windows was used , by the way , as well as a dashboard that was inspired by two-wheelers .
the fuel lines and lamps were as in two-wheelers .
and the crux of the matter was , however , getting more from less .
all the time , you have been given an envelope .
you ca n't cross that envelope , which is 100,000 rupees , 2,000 dollars .
and therefore , each component had to have a dual functionality .
and the seat riser , for example , serving as a mounting for the seat as well as a structural part of the functional rigidity .
half the number of parts are contained in nano in comparison to a typical passenger car .
the length is smaller by eight percent by the way .
but the current entry-level cars in comparison to that is eight percent less , but 21 percent more inside space .
and what happened was that - more from less - you can see how much more for how much less .
when the model t was launched - and this is , by the way , all the figures that are adjusted to 2007 dollar prices - model t was 19,700 by ford .
volkswagon was 11,333 .
and british motor was around 11,000 .
and nano was , bang , 2,000 dollars .
this is why you started actually a new paradigm shift , where the same people who could not dream of sitting in a car , who were carrying their entire family in a scooter , started dreaming of being in a car .
and those dreams are getting fulfilled .
this is a photograph of a house and a driver and a car near my own home .
the driver 's name is naran .
he has bought his own nano .
and you can see , there is a physical space that has been created for him , parking that car , along with the owner 's car , but more importantly , they 've created a space in their mind that " yes , my chauffeur is going to come in his own car and park it . "
and that 's why i call it a transformational innovation .
it is not just technological , it is social innovation that we talk about .
and that is where , ladies and gentlemen , this famous theme of getting more from less for more becomes important .
i remember talking about this for the first time in australia , about one and a half years ago , when their academy honored me with a fellowship .
and unbelievably , in 40 years , i was the first indian to be honored .
and the title of my talk was therefore " indian innovation from gandhi to gandhian engineering . "
and i titled this more from less for more and more people as gandhian engineering .
and gandhian engineering , in my judgment , is the one which is going to take the world forward , is going to make a difference , not just for a few , but for everyone .
let me move from mobility in a car to individual mobility for those unfortunates who have lost their legs .
here is an american citizen and his son having an artificial foot .
what is its price ? 20,000 dollars .
and of course , these feet are so designed that they can walk only on such perfect pavement or roads .
unfortunately , that 's not the case in india .
you can see him walk barefoot on an awkward land , sometimes in a marshy land , and so on and so forth .
more importantly , they not only walk far to work , and not only do they cycle to work , but they cycle for work , as you can see here .
and they climb up for their work .
you have to design an artificial foot for such conditions .
a challenge , of course .
four billion people , their incomes are less then two dollars a day .
and if you talk about a 20,000-dollar shoe , you 're talking about 10,000 days of income .
you just do n't have it .
and therefore , you ought to look at alternatives .
and that is how jaipur foot was created in india .
it had a revolutionary prosthetic fitment and delivery system , a quick molding and modular components , enabling custom-made , on-the-spot limb fitments .
you could feel it actually in an hour , by the way , whereas the equivalent other feet took something like a day , as so on .
outer socket made by using heated high-density polyethylene pipes , rather than using heated sheets .
and unique high-ankle design and human-like looks , -lsb- unclear -rsb- and functions .
and i like to show how it looks and how it works .
-lrb- music -rrb- see , he jumps . you can see what stress it must have .
-lrb- text : ... any person with a below the knee limb could do this .
... above the limb , yes , it would be difficult ...
" did it hurt ? "
" no ... not at all . "
... he can run a kilometer in four minutes and 30 seconds ... -rrb- one kilometer in four minutes and 30 seconds .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so that 's what it is all about .
and therefore time took notice of this 28-dollar foot , basically .
-lrb- applause -rrb- an incredible story .
let 's move on to something else .
i 've been talking about getting more from less for more .
let 's move to health .
we 've talked about mobility and the rest of it , let 's talk about health .
what 's happening in the area of health ?
you know , you have new diseases that require new drugs .
and if you look at the drug development 10 years ago and now , what has happened ?
10 years ago , it used to cost about a quarter billion .
today it costs 1.5 billion dollars .
time taken for moving a molecule to marketplace , after all the human and animal testing , was 10 years , now it is 15 years .
are you getting more drugs because you are spending more time and more money ?
no , i 'm sorry .
we used to have 40 , now they have come down to 30 .
so actually we are getting less from more for less and less people .
why less and less people ? because it is so expensive , so very few will be able to basically afford that .
let us just take an example .
psoriasis is very dreadful disease of the skin .
the cost of treatment , 20,000 dollars .
1,000-dollar antibody injections under the skin , by the way , and 20 of them .
time for development - it took around 10 years and 700 million dollars .
let 's start in the spirit of more from less and more for more and start putting some targets .
for example , we do n't want 20,000 dollars ; we do n't have it .
can we do it -lsb- for -rsb- 100 dollars ?
time for development , not 10 years .
we are in a hurry . five years .
cost of development - 300 million dollars .
sorry . i ca n't spend more than 10 million dollars .
looks absolutely audacious .
looks absolutely ridiculous .
you know something ? this has been achieved in india .
these targets have been achieved in india .
and how they have been achieved ...
sir francis bacon once said , " when you wish to achieve results that have not been achieved before , it is an unwise fancy to think that they can be achieved by using methods that have been used before . "
and therefore , the standard process , where you develop a molecule , put it into mice , into men , are not yielding those results - the billions of dollars that have been spent .
the indian cleverness was using its traditional knowledge , however , scientifically validating it and making that journey from men to mice to men , not molecule to mice to men , you know .
and that is how this difference has come .
and you can see this blending of traditional medicine , modern medicine , modern science .
i launched a big program -lsb- unclear -rsb- csir about nine years ago .
he is giving us not just for psoriasis , for cancer and a whole range of things , changing the whole paradigm .
and you can see this indian psoriasis breakthrough obtained by this reverse form of -lsb- unclear -rsb- by doing things differently .
you can see before treatment and after treatment .
this is really getting more from less for more and more people , because these are all affordable treatments now .
let me just remind you of what mahatma gandhi had said .
he had said , " earth provides enough to satisfy every man 's need , but not every man 's greed . "
so the message he was giving us was you must get more from less and less and less so that you can share it for more and more people , not only the current generation , but the future generations .
and he also said , " i would prize every invention of science made for the benefit for all . "
so he was giving you the message that you must have it for more and more people , not just a few people .
and therefore , ladies and gentlemen , this is the theme , getting more from less for more .
and mind you , it is not getting just a little more for just a little less .
it 's not about low cost .
it 's about ultra-low cost .
you can not say it 's a mere treatment 10,000 dollars , but because you are poor i 'll give it for 9,000 .
sorry , it does n't work . you have to give it for 100 dollars , 200 dollars .
is it possible ? it has been made possible , by the way , for certain other different reasons .
so you are not talking about low cost , you are talking about ultra-low cost .
you are not talking about affordability , you are talking about extreme affordability .
because of the four billion people whose income is under two dollars a day .
you 're not talking exclusive innovation .
you 're talking about inclusive innovation .
and therefore , you 're not talking about incremental innovation , you 're talking about disruptive innovation .
the ideas have to be such that you think in completely different terms .
and i would also add , it is not only getting more from less for more by more and more people , the whole world working for it .
i was very touched when i saw a breakthrough the other day .
you know , incubators for infants , for example .
they 're not available in africa .
they 're not available in indian villages .
and infants die .
and incubator costs 2,000 dollars .
and there 's a 25-dollar incubator giving that performance that had been created .
and by whom ?
by young students from standford university on an extreme affordability project that they had , basically .
their heart is in the right place , like ratan tata .
it 's not just innovation , compassion and passion - compassion in the heart and passion in the belly .
that 's the new world that we want to create .
and that is why the message is that of gandhian engineering .
ladies and gentlemen , i 'd like to end before time .
i was also afraid of those 18 minutes .
i 've still one and a half to go .
the message , the final message , is this : india gave a great gift to the world .
what was that ?
-lsb- in the -rsb- 20th century , we gave gandhi to the world .
the 21st century gift , which is very , very important for the whole world , whether it is global economic meltdown , whether it is climate change - any problem that you talk about is gaining more from less for more and more - not only the current generations , for the future generations .
and that can come only from gandhian engineering .
so ladies and gentlemen , i 'm very happy to announce , this gift of the 21st century to the world from india , gandhian engineering .
-lrb- applause -rrb- lakshmi pratury : thank you , dr. mashelkar . -lrb- r.a. mashelkar : thank you very much . -rrb- lp : a quick question for you .
now , when you were a young boy in this school , what were your thoughts , like what did you think you could become ?
what do you think that drove you ?
was there a vision you had ? what is it that drove you ?
ram : i 'll tell you a story that drove me , that transformed my life .
i remember , i went to a poor school , because my mother could not gather the 21 rupees , that half a dollar that was required within the stipulated time .
it was -lsb- unclear -rsb- high school .
but it was a poor school with rich teachers , honestly .
and one of them was -lsb- unclear -rsb- who taught us physics .
one day he took us out into the sun and tried to show us how to find the focal length of a convex lens .
the lens was here . the piece of paper was there . he moved it up and down .
and there was a bright spot up there .
and then he said , " this is the focal length . "
but then he held it for a little while , lakshmi .
and then the paper burned .
when the paper burned , for some reason he turned to me , and he said , " mashelkar , like this , if you do not diffuse your energies , if you focus your energies , you can achieve anything in the world . "
that gave me a great message : focus and you can achieve .
i said , " whoa , science is so wonderful , i have to become a scientist . "
but more importantly , focus and you can achieve .
and that message , very frankly , is valuable for society today .
what does that focal length do ?
it has parallel lines , which are sun rays .
and the property of parallel lines is that they never meet .
what does that convex lens do ?
it makes them meet .
this is convex lens leadership .
you know what today 's leadership is doing ? concave length .
they divide them farther .
so i learned the lesson of convex lens leadership from that .
and when i was at national chemical laboratory -lsb- unclear -rsb- .
when i was at council of scientific industry research - 40 laboratories - when two laboratories were not talking to each other , i would -lsb- unclear -rsb- .
and currently i 'm president of global research alliance , 60,000 scientists in nine counties , right from india to the u.s.
i 'm trying to build a global team , which will look at the global grand challenges that the world is facing .
that was the lesson . that was the inspirational moment .
lp : thank you very much . -lrb- ram : thank you . -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- this is a picture of maurice druon , the honorary perpetual secretary of l 'academie francaise , the french academy .
he is splendidly attired in his 68,000-dollar uniform , befitting the role of the french academy as legislating the correct usage in french and perpetuating the language .
the french academy has two main tasks : it compiles a dictionary of official french .
they 're now working on their ninth edition , which they began in 1930 , and they 've reached the letter p.
they also legislate on correct usage , such as the proper term for what the french call " email , " which ought to be " courriel . "
the world wide web , the french are told , ought to be referred to as " la toile d 'araignee mondiale " - the global spider web - recommendations that the french gaily ignore .
now , this is one model of how language comes to be : namely , it 's legislated by an academy .
but anyone who looks at language realizes that this is a rather silly conceit , that language , rather , emerges from human minds interacting from one another .
and this is visible in the unstoppable change in language - the fact that by the time the academy finishes their dictionary , it will already be well out of date .
we see it in the constant appearance of slang and jargon , of the historical change in languages , in divergence of dialects and the formation of new languages .
so language is not so much a creator or shaper of human nature , so much as a window onto human nature .
in a book that i 'm currently working on , i hope to use language to shed light on a number of aspects of human nature , including the cognitive machinery with which humans conceptualize the world and the relationship types that govern human interaction .
and i 'm going to say a few words about each one this morning .
let me start off with a technical problem in language that i 've worried about for quite some time - and indulge me in my passion for verbs and how they 're used .
the problem is , which verbs go in which constructions ?
the verb is the chassis of the sentence .
it 's the framework onto which the other parts are bolted .
let me give you a quick reminder of something that you 've long forgotten .
an intransitive verb , such as " dine , " for example , ca n't take a direct object .
you have to say , " sam dined , " not , " sam dined the pizza . "
a transitive verb mandates that there has to be an object there : " sam devoured the pizza . " you ca n't just say , " sam devoured . "
there are dozens or scores of verbs of this type , each of which shapes its sentence .
so , a problem in explaining how children learn language , a problem in teaching language to adults so that they do n't make grammatical errors , and a problem in programming computers to use language is which verbs go in which constructions .
for example , the dative construction in english .
you can say , " give a muffin to a mouse , " the prepositional dative .
or , " give a mouse a muffin , " the double-object dative .
" promise anything to her , " " promise her anything , " and so on .
hundreds of verbs can go both ways .
so a tempting generalization for a child , for an adult , for a computer is that any verb that can appear in the construction , " subject-verb-thing-to-a-recipient " can also be expressed as " subject-verb-recipient-thing . "
a handy thing to have , because language is infinite , and you ca n't just parrot back the sentences that you 've heard .
you 've got to extract generalizations so you can produce and understand new sentences .
this would be an example of how to do that .
unfortunately , there appear to be idiosyncratic exceptions .
you can say , " biff drove the car to chicago , " but not , " biff drove chicago the car . "
you can say , " sal gave jason a headache , " but it 's a bit odd to say , " sal gave a headache to jason . "
the solution is that these constructions , despite initial appearance , are not synonymous , that when you crank up the microscope on human cognition , you see that there 's a subtle difference in meaning between them .
so , " give the x to the y , " that construction corresponds to the thought " cause x to go to y. " whereas " give the y the x " corresponds to the thought " cause y to have x. "
now , many events can be subject to either construal , kind of like the classic figure-ground reversal illusions , in which you can either pay attention to the particular object , in which case the space around it recedes from attention , or you can see the faces in the empty space , in which case the object recedes out of consciousness .
how are these construals reflected in language ?
well , in both cases , the thing that is construed as being affected is expressed as the direct object , the noun after the verb .
so , when you think of the event as causing the muffin to go somewhere - where you 're doing something to the muffin - you say , " give the muffin to the mouse . "
when you construe it as " cause the mouse to have something , " you 're doing something to the mouse , and therefore you express it as , " give the mouse the muffin . "
so which verbs go in which construction - the problem with which i began - depends on whether the verb specifies a kind of motion or a kind of possession change .
to give something involves both causing something to go and causing someone to have .
to drive the car only causes something to go , because chicago 's not the kind of thing that can possess something .
only humans can possess things .
and to give someone a headache causes them to have the headache , but it 's not as if you 're taking the headache out of your head and causing it to go to the other person , and implanting it in them .
you may just be loud or obnoxious , or some other way causing them to have the headache .
so , that 's an example of the kind of thing that i do in my day job .
so why should anyone care ?
well , there are a number of interesting conclusions , i think , from this and many similar kinds of analyses of hundreds of english verbs .
first , there 's a level of fine-grained conceptual structure , which we automatically and unconsciously compute every time we produce or utter a sentence , that governs our use of language .
you can think of this as the language of thought , or " mentalese . "
it seems to be based on a fixed set of concepts , which govern dozens of constructions and thousands of verbs - not only in english , but in all other languages - fundamental concepts such as space , time , causation and human intention , such as , what is the means and what is the ends ?
these are reminiscent of the kinds of categories that immanuel kant argued are the basic framework for human thought , and it 's interesting that our unconscious use of language seems to reflect these kantian categories .
does n't care about perceptual qualities , such as color , texture , weight and speed , which virtually never differentiate the use of verbs in different constructions .
an additional twist is that all of the constructions in english are used not only literally , but in a quasi-metaphorical way .
for example , this construction , the dative , is used not only to transfer things , but also for the metaphorical transfer of ideas , as when we say , " she told a story to me " or " told me a story , " " max taught spanish to the students " or " taught the students spanish . "
it 's exactly the same construction , but no muffins , no mice , nothing moving at all .
it evokes the container metaphor of communication , in which we conceive of ideas as objects , sentences as containers , and communication as a kind of sending .
as when we say we " gather " our ideas , to " put " them " into " words , and if our words are n't " empty " or " hollow , " we might get these ideas " across " to a listener , who can " unpack " our words to " extract " their " content . "
and indeed , this kind of verbiage is not the exception , but the rule .
it 's very hard to find any example of abstract language that is not based on some concrete metaphor .
for example , you can use the verb " go " and the prepositions " to " and " from " in a literal , spatial sense .
" the messenger went from paris to istanbul . "
you can also say , " biff went from sick to well . "
he need n't go anywhere . he could have been in bed the whole time , but it 's as if his health is a point in state space that you conceptualize as moving .
or , " the meeting went from three to four , " in which we conceive of time as stretched along a line .
likewise , we use " force " to indicate not only physical force , as in , " rose forced the door to open , " but also interpersonal force , as in , " rose forced sadie to go , " not necessarily by manhandling her , but by issuing a threat .
or , " rose forced herself to go , " as if there were two entities inside rose 's head , engaged in a tug of a war .
second conclusion is that the ability to conceive of a given event in two different ways , such as " cause something to go to someone " and " causing someone to have something , " i think is a fundamental feature of human thought , and it 's the basis for much human argumentation , in which people do n't differ so much on the facts as on how they ought to be construed .
just to give you a few examples : " ending a pregnancy " versus " killing a fetus ; " " a ball of cells " versus " an unborn child ; " " invading iraq " versus " liberating iraq ; " " redistributing wealth " versus " confiscating earnings . "
and i think the biggest picture of all would take seriously the fact that so much of our verbiage about abstract events is based on a concrete metaphor and see human intelligence itself as consisting of a repertoire of concepts - such as objects , space , time , causation and intention - which are useful in a social , knowledge-intensive species , whose evolution you can well imagine , and a process of metaphorical abstraction that allows us to bleach these concepts of their original conceptual content - space , time and force - and apply them to new abstract domains , therefore allowing a species that evolved
to deal with rocks and tools and animals , to conceptualize mathematics , physics , law and other abstract domains .
well , i said i 'd talk about two windows on human nature - the cognitive machinery with which we conceptualize the world , and now i 'm going to say a few words about the relationship types that govern human social interaction , again , as reflected in language .
and i 'll start out with a puzzle , the puzzle of indirect speech acts .
now , i 'm sure most of you have seen the movie " fargo . "
and you might remember the scene in which the kidnapper is pulled over by a police officer , is asked to show his driver 's license and holds his wallet out with a 50-dollar bill extending at a slight angle out of the wallet .
and he says , " i was just thinking that maybe we could take care of it here in fargo , " which everyone , including the audience , interprets as a veiled bribe .
this kind of indirect speech is rampant in language .
for example , in polite requests , if someone says , " if you could pass the guacamole , that would be awesome , " we know exactly what he means , even though that 's a rather bizarre concept being expressed .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " would you like to come up and see my etchings ? "
i think most people understand the intent behind that .
and likewise , if someone says , " nice store you 've got there . it would be a real shame if something happened to it " - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - we understand that as a veiled threat , rather than a musing of hypothetical possibilities .
so the puzzle is , why are bribes , polite requests , solicitations and threats so often veiled ?
no one 's fooled .
both parties know exactly what the speaker means , and the speaker knows the listener knows that the speaker knows that the listener knows , etc . , etc .
so what 's going on ?
i think the key idea is that language is a way of negotiating relationships , and human relationships fall into a number of types .
there 's an influential taxonomy by the anthropologist alan fiske , in which relationships can be categorized , more or less , into communality , which works on the principle " what 's mine is thine , what 's thine is mine , " the kind of mindset that operates within a family , for example ; dominance , whose principle is " do n't mess with me ; " reciprocity , " you scratch my back , i 'll scratch yours ; " and sexuality , in the immortal words of cole porter , " let 's do it . "
now , relationship types can be negotiated .
even though there are default situations in which one of these mindsets can be applied , they can be stretched and extended .
for example , communality applies most naturally within family or friends , but it can be used to try to transfer the mentality of sharing to groups that ordinarily would not be disposed to exercise it .
for example , in brotherhoods , fraternal organizations , sororities , locutions like " the family of man , " you try to get people who are not related to use the relationship type that would ordinarily be appropriate to close kin .
now , mismatches - when one person assumes one relationship type , and another assumes a different one - can be awkward .
if you went over and you helped yourself to a shrimp off your boss ' plate , for example , that would be an awkward situation .
or if a dinner guest after the meal pulled out his wallet and offered to pay you for the meal , that would be rather awkward as well .
in less blatant cases , there 's still a kind of negotiation that often goes on .
in the workplace , for example , there 's often a tension over whether an employee can socialize with the boss , or refer to him or her on a first-name basis .
if two friends have a reciprocal transaction , like selling a car , it 's well known that this can be a source of tension or awkwardness .
in dating , the transition from friendship to sex can lead to , notoriously , various forms of awkwardness , and as can sex in the workplace , in which we call the conflict between a dominant and a sexual relationship " sexual harassment . "
well , what does this have to do with language ?
well , language , as a social interaction , has to satisfy two conditions .
you have to convey the actual content - here we get back to the container metaphor .
you want to express the bribe , the command , the promise , the solicitation and so on , but you also have to negotiate and maintain the kind of relationship you have with the other person .
the solution , i think , is that we use language at two levels : the literal form signals the safest relationship with the listener , whereas the implicated content - the reading between the lines that we count on the listener to perform - allows the listener to derive the interpretation which is most relevant in context , which possibly initiates a changed relationship .
the simplest example of this is in the polite request .
if you express your request as a conditional - " if you could open the window , that would be great " - even though the content is an imperative , the fact that you 're not using the imperative voice means that you 're not acting as if you 're in a relationship of dominance , where you could presuppose the compliance of the other person .
on the other hand , you want the damn guacamole .
by expressing it as an if-then statement , you can get the message across without appearing to boss another person around .
and in a more subtle way , i think , this works for all of the veiled speech acts involving plausible deniability : the bribes , threats , propositions , solicitations and so on .
one way of thinking about it is to imagine what it would be like if language - where it could only be used literally .
and you can think of it in terms of a game-theoretic payoff matrix .
put yourself in the position of the kidnapper wanting to bribe the officer .
there 's a high stakes in the two possibilities of having a dishonest officer or an honest officer .
if you do n't bribe the officer , then you will get a traffic ticket - or , as is the case of " fargo , " worse - whether the honest officer is honest or dishonest .
nothing ventured , nothing gained .
in that case , the consequences are rather severe .
on the other hand , if you extend the bribe , if the officer is dishonest , you get a huge payoff of going free .
if the officer is honest , you get a huge penalty of being arrested for bribery .
so this is a rather fraught situation .
on the other hand , with indirect language , if you issue a veiled bribe , then the dishonest officer could interpret it as a bribe , in which case you get the payoff of going free .
the honest officer ca n't hold you to it as being a bribe , and therefore , you get the nuisance of the traffic ticket .
so you get the best of both worlds .
and a similar analysis , i think , can apply to the potential awkwardness of a sexual solicitation , and other cases where plausible deniability is an asset .
i think this affirms something that 's long been known by diplomats - namely , that the vagueness of language , far from being a bug or an imperfection , actually might be a feature of language , one that we use to our advantage in social interactions .
so to sum up : language is a collective human creation , reflecting human nature , how we conceptualize reality , how we relate to one another .
and then by analyzing the various quirks and complexities of language , i think we can get a window onto what makes us tick .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i 've been fascinated for a lifetime by the beauty , form and function of giant bluefin tuna .
bluefin are warmblooded like us .
they 're the largest of the tunas , the second-largest fish in the sea - bony fish .
they actually are a fish that is endothermic - powers through the ocean with warm muscles like a mammal .
that 's one of our bluefin at the monterey bay aquarium .
you can see in its shape and its streamlined design it 's powered for ocean swimming .
it flies through the ocean on its pectoral fins , gets lift , powers its movements with a lunate tail .
it 's actually got a naked skin for most of its body , so it reduces friction with the water .
this is what one of nature 's finest machines .
now , bluefin were revered by man for all of human history .
for 4,000 years , we fished sustainably for this animal , and it 's evidenced in the art that we see from thousands of years ago .
bluefin are in cave paintings in france .
they 're on coins that date back 3,000 years .
this fish was revered by humankind .
it was fished sustainably till all of time , except for our generation .
bluefin are pursued wherever they go - there is a gold rush on earth , and this is a gold rush for bluefin .
there are traps that fish sustainably up until recently .
and yet , the type of fishing going on today , with pens , with enormous stakes , is really wiping bluefin ecologically off the planet .
now bluefin , in general , goes to one place : japan .
some of you may be guilty of having contributed to the demise of bluefin .
they 're delectable muscle , rich in fat - absolutely taste delicious .
and that 's their problem ; we 're eating them to death .
now in the atlantic , the story is pretty simple .
bluefin have two populations : one large , one small .
the north american population is fished at about 2,000 ton .
the european population and north african - the eastern bluefin tuna - is fished at tremendous levels : 50,000 tons over the last decade almost every year .
the result is whether you 're looking at the west or the eastern bluefin population , there 's been tremendous decline on both sides , as much as 90 percent if you go back with your baseline to 1950 .
for that , bluefin have been given a status equivalent to tigers , to lions , to certain african elephants and to pandas .
these fish have been proposed for an endangered species listing in the past two months .
they were voted on and rejected just two weeks ago , despite outstanding science that shows from two committees this fish meets the criteria of cites i.
and if it 's tunas you do n't care about , perhaps you might be interested that international long lines and pursing chase down tunas and bycatch animals such as leatherbacks , sharks , marlin , albatross .
these animals and their demise occurs in the tuna fisheries .
the challenge we face is that we know very little about tuna , and everyone in the room knows what it looks like when an african lion takes down its prey .
i doubt anyone has seen a giant bluefin feed .
this tuna symbolizes what 's the problem for all of us in the room .
it 's the 21st century , but we really have only just begun to really study our oceans in a deep way .
technology has come of age that 's allowing us to see the earth from space and go deep into the seas remotely .
and we 've got to use these technologies immediately to get a better understanding of how our ocean realm works .
most of us from the ship - even i - look out at the ocean and see this homogeneous sea .
we do n't know where the structure is .
we ca n't tell where are the watering holes like we can on an african plain .
we ca n't see the corridors , and we ca n't see what it is that brings together a tuna , a leatherback and an albatross .
we 're only just beginning to understand how the physical oceanography and the biological oceanography come together to create a seasonal force that actually causes the upwelling that might make a hot spot a hope spot .
the reasons these challenges are great is that technically it 's difficult to go to sea .
it 's hard to study a bluefin on its turf , the entire pacific realm .
it 's really tough to get up close and personal with a mako shark and try to put a tag on it .
and then imagine being bruce mate 's team from osu , getting up close to a blue whale and fixing a tag on the blue whale that stays , an engineering challenge we 've yet to really overcome .
so the story of our team , a dedicated team , is fish and chips .
we basically are taking the same satellite phone parts , or the same parts that are in your computer , chips .
we 're putting them together in unusual ways , and this is taking us into the ocean realm like never before .
and for the first time , we 're able to watch the journey of a tuna beneath the ocean using light and photons to measure sunrise and sunset .
now , i 've been working with tunas for over 15 years .
i have the privilege of being a partner with the monterey bay aquarium .
we 've actually taken a sliver of the ocean , put it behind glass , and we together have put bluefin tuna and yellowfin tuna on display .
when the veil of bubbles lifts every morning , we can actually see a community from the pelagic ocean , one of the only places on earth you can see giant bluefin swim by .
we can see in their beauty of form and function , their ceaseless activity .
they 're flying through their space , ocean space .
and we can bring two million people a year into contact with this fish and show them its beauty .
behind the scenes is a working lab at stanford university partnered with the monterey bay aquarium .
here , for over 14 or 15 years , we 've actually brought in both bluefin and yellowfin in captivity .
we 'd been studying these fish , but first we had to learn how to husbandry them .
what do they like to eat ?
what is it that they 're happy with ?
we go in the tanks with the tuna - we touch their naked skin - it 's pretty amazing . it feels wonderful .
and then , better yet , we 've got our own version of tuna whisperers , our own chuck farwell , alex norton , who can take a big tuna and in one motion , put it into an envelope of water , so that we can actually work with the tuna and learn the techniques it takes to not injure this fish who never sees a boundary in the open sea .
jeff and jason there , are scientists who are going to take a tuna and put it in the equivalent of a treadmill , a flume .
and that tuna thinks it 's going to japan , but it 's staying in place .
we 're actually measuring its oxygen consumption , its energy consumption .
we 're taking this data and building better models .
and when i see that tuna - this is my favorite view - i begin to wonder : how did this fish solve the longitude problem before we did ?
so take a look at that animal .
that 's the closest you 'll probably ever get .
now , the activities from the lab have taught us now how to go out in the open ocean .
so in a program called tag-a-giant we 've actually gone from ireland to canada , from corsica to spain .
we 've fished with many nations around the world in an effort to basically put electronic computers inside giant tunas .
we 've actually tagged 1,100 tunas .
and i 'm going to show you three clips , because i tagged 1,100 tunas .
it 's a very hard process , but it 's a ballet .
we bring the tuna out , we measure it .
a team of fishers , captains , scientists and technicians work together to keep this animal out of the ocean for about four to five minutes .
we put water over its gills , give it oxygen .
and then with a lot of effort , after tagging , putting in the computer , making sure the stalk is sticking out so it senses the environment , we send this fish back into the sea .
and when it goes , we 're always happy .
we see a flick of the tail .
and from our data that gets collected , when that tag comes back , because a fisher returns it for a thousand-dollar reward , we can get tracks beneath the sea for up to five years now , on a backboned animal .
now sometimes the tunas are really large , such as this fish off nantucket .
but that 's about half the size of the biggest tuna we 've ever tagged .
it takes a human effort , a team effort , to bring the fish in .
in this case , what we 're going to do is put a pop-up satellite archival tag on the tuna .
this tag rides on the tuna , senses the environment around the tuna and actually will come off the fish , detach , float to the surface and send back to earth-orbiting satellites position data estimated by math on the tag , pressure data and temperature data .
and so what we get then from the pop-up satellite tag is we get away from having to have a human interaction to recapture the tag .
both the electronic tags i 'm talking about are expensive .
these tags have been engineered by a variety of teams in north america .
they are some of our finest instruments , our new technology in the ocean today .
one community in general has given more to help us than any other community .
and that 's the fisheries off the state of north carolina .
there are two villages , harris and morehead city , every winter for over a decade , held a party called tag-a-giant , and together , fishers worked with us to tag 800 to 900 fish .
in this case , we 're actually going to measure the fish .
we 're going to do something that in recent years we 've started : take a mucus sample .
watch how shiny the skin is ; you can see my reflection there .
and from that mucus , we can get gene profiles , we can get information on gender , checking the pop-up tag one more time , and then it 's out in the ocean .
and this is my favorite .
with the help of my former postdoc , gareth lawson , this is a gorgeous picture of a single tuna .
this tuna is actually moving on a numerical ocean .
the warm is the gulf stream , the cold up there in the gulf of maine .
that 's where the tuna wants to go - it wants to forage on schools of herring - but it ca n't get there . it 's too cold .
but then it warms up , and the tuna pops in , gets some fish , maybe comes back to home base , goes in again and then comes back to winter down there in north carolina and then on to the bahamas .
and my favorite scene , three tunas going into the gulf of mexico .
three tunas tagged .
astronomically , we 're calculating positions .
they 're coming together . that could be tuna sex - and there it is .
that is where the tuna spawn .
so from data like this , we 're able now to put the map up , and in this map you see thousands of positions generated by this decade and a half of tagging .
and now we 're showing that tunas on the western side go to the eastern side .
so two populations of tunas - that is , we have a gulf population , one that we can tag - they go to the gulf of mexico , i showed you that - and a second population .
living amongst our tunas - our north american tunas - are european tunas that go back to the med .
on the hot spots - the hope spots - they 're mixed populations .
and so what we 've done with the science is we 're showing the international commission , building new models , showing them that a two-stock no-mixing model - to this day , used to reject the cites treaty - that model is n't the right model .
this model , a model of overlap , is the way to move forward .
so we can then predict where management places should be .
places like the gulf of mexico and the mediterranean are places where the single species , the single population , can be captured .
these become forthright in places we need to protect .
the center of the atlantic where the mixing is , i could imagine a policy that lets canada and america fish , because they manage their fisheries well , they 're doing a good job .
but in the international realm , where fishing and overfishing has really gone wild , these are the places that we have to make hope spots in .
that 's the size they have to be to protect the bluefin tuna .
now in a second project called tagging of pacific pelagics , we took on the planet as a team , those of us in the census of marine life .
and , funded primarily through sloan foundation and others , we were able to actually go in , in our project - we 're one of 17 field programs and begin to take on tagging large numbers of predators , not just tunas .
so what we 've done is actually gone up to tag salmon shark in alaska , met salmon shark on their home territory , followed them catching salmon and then went in and figured out that , if we take a salmon and put it on a line , we can actually take up a salmon shark - this is the cousin of the white shark - and very carefully - note , i say " very carefully , " - we can actually keep it calm , put a hose in its mouth , keep it off the deck and then tag it with a satellite tag .
that satellite tag will now have your shark phone home and send in a message .
and that shark leaping there , if you look carefully , has an antenna .
it 's a free swimming shark with a satellite tag jumping after salmon , sending home its data .
salmon sharks are n't the only sharks we tag .
but there goes salmon sharks with this meter-level resolution on an ocean of temperature - warm colors are warmer .
salmon sharks go down to the tropics to pup and come into monterey .
now right next door in monterey and up at the farallones are a white shark team led by scott anderson - there - and sal jorgensen .
they can throw out a target - it 's a carpet shaped like a seal - and in will come a white shark , a curious critter that will come right up to our 16-ft. boat .
it 's a several thousand-pound animal .
and we 'll wind in the target .
and we 'll place an acoustic tag that says , " omshark 10165 , " or something like that , acoustically with a ping .
and then we 'll put on a satellite tag that will give us the long-distance journeys with the light-based geolocation algorithms solved on the computer that 's on the fish .
so in this case , sal 's looking at two tags there , and there they are : the white sharks of california going off to the white shark cafe and coming back .
we also tag makos with our noaa colleagues , blue sharks .
and now , together , what we can see on this ocean of color that 's temperature , we can see ten-day worms of makos and salmon sharks .
we have white sharks and blue sharks .
for the first time , an ecoscape as large as ocean-scale , showing where the sharks go .
the tuna team from topp has done the unthinkable : three teams tagged 1,700 tunas , bluefin , yellowfin and albacore all at the same time - carefully rehearsed tagging programs in which we go out , pick up juvenile tunas , put in the tags that actually have the sensors , stick out the tuna and then let them go .
they get returned , and when they get returned , here on a nasa numerical ocean you can see bluefin in blue go across their corridor , returning to the western pacific .
our team from ucsc has tagged elephant seals with tags that are glued on their heads , that come off when they slough .
these elephant seals cover half an ocean , take data down to 1,800 feet - amazing data .
and then there 's scott shaffer and our shearwaters wearing tuna tags , light-based tags , that now are going to take you from new zealand to monterey and back , journeys of 35,000 nautical miles we had never seen before .
but now with light-based geolocation tags that are very small , we can actually see these journeys .
same thing with laysan albatross who travel an entire ocean on a trip sometimes , up to the same zone the tunas use .
you can see why they might be caught .
then there 's george schillinger and our leatherback team out of playa grande tagging leatherbacks that go right past where we are .
and scott benson 's team that showed that leatherbacks go from indonesia all the way to monterey .
so what we can see on this moving ocean is we can finally see where the predators are .
we can actually see how they 're using ecospaces as large as an ocean .
and from this information , we can begin to map the hope spots .
so this is just three years of data right here - and there 's a decade of this data .
we see the pulse and the seasonal activities that these animals are going on .
so what we 're able to do with this information is boil it down to hot spots , 4,000 deployments , a huge herculean task , 2,000 tags in an area , shown here for the first time , off the california coast , that appears to be a gathering place .
and then for sort of an encore from these animals , they 're helping us .
they 're carrying instruments that are actually taking data down to 2,000 meters .
they 're taking information from our planet at very critical places like antarctica and the poles .
those are seals from many countries being released who are sampling underneath the ice sheets and giving us temperature data of oceanographic quality on both poles .
this data , when visualized , is captivating to watch .
we still have n't figured out best how to visualize the data .
and then , as these animals swim and give us the information that 's important to climate issues , we also think it 's critical to get this information to the public , to engage the public with this kind of data .
we did this with the great turtle race - tagged turtles , brought in four million hits .
and now with google 's oceans , we can actually put a white shark in that ocean .
and when we do and it swims , we see this magnificent bathymetry that the shark knows is there on its path as it goes from california to hawaii .
but maybe mission blue can fill in that ocean that we ca n't see .
we 've got the capacity , nasa has the ocean .
we just need to put it together .
so in conclusion , we know where yellowstone is for north america ; it 's off our coast .
we have the technology that 's shown us where it is .
what we need to think about perhaps for mission blue is increasing the biologging capacity .
how is it that we can actually take this type of activity elsewhere ?
and then finally - to basically get the message home - maybe use live links from animals such as blue whales and white sharks .
make killer apps , if you will .
a lot of people are excited when sharks actually went under the golden gate bridge .
let 's connect the public to this activity right on their iphone .
that way we do away with a few internet myths .
so we can save the bluefin tuna .
we can save the white shark .
we have the science and technology .
hope is here . yes we can .
we need just to apply this capacity further in the oceans .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- what i 'm going to do , in the spirit of collaborative creativity , is simply repeat many of the points that the three people before me have already made , but do them - this is called " creative collaboration ; " it 's actually called " borrowing " - but do it through a particular perspective , and that is to ask about the role of users and consumers in this emerging world of collaborative creativity that jimmy and others have talked about .
let me just ask you , to start with , this simple question : who invented the mountain bike ?
because traditional economic theory would say , well , the mountain bike was probably invented by some big bike corporation that had a big r & d lab where they were thinking up new projects , and it came out of there . it did n't come from there .
another answer might be , well , it came from a sort of lone genius working in his garage , who , working away on different kinds of bikes , comes up with a bike out of thin air .
it did n't come from there . the mountain bike came from users , came from young users , particularly a group in northern california , who were frustrated with traditional racing bikes , which were those sort of bikes that eddy merckx rode , or your big brother , and they 're very glamorous .
but also frustrated with the bikes that your dad rode , which sort of had big handlebars like that , and they were too heavy .
so , they got the frames from these big bikes , put them together with the gears from the racing bikes , got the brakes from motorcycles , and sort of mixed and matched various ingredients .
and for the first , i do n't know , three to five years of their life , mountain bikes were known as " clunkers . "
and they were just made in a community of bikers , mainly in northern california .
and then one of these companies that was importing parts for the clunkers decided to set up in business , start selling them to other people , and gradually another company emerged out of that , marin , and it probably was , i do n't know , 10 , maybe even 15 , years , before the big bike companies realized there was a market .
thirty years later , mountain bike sales and mountain bike equipment account for 65 percent of bike sales in america .
that 's 58 billion dollars .
this is a category entirely created by consumers that would not have been created by the mainstream bike market because they could n't see the need , the opportunity ; they did n't have the incentive to innovate .
the one thing i think i disagree with about yochai 's presentation is when he said the internet causes this distributive capacity for innovation to come alive .
it 's when the internet combines with these kinds of passionate pro-am consumers - who are knowledgeable ; they 've got the incentive to innovate ; they 've got the tools ; they want to - that you get this kind of explosion of creative collaboration .
and out of that , you get the need for the kind of things that jimmy was talking about , which is our new kinds of organization , or a better way to put it : how do we organize ourselves without organizations ?
that 's now possible ; you do n't need an organization to be organized , to achieve large and complex tasks , like innovating new software programs .
so this is a huge challenge to the way we think creativity comes about .
the traditional view , still enshrined in much of the way that we think about creativity - in organizations , in government - is that creativity is about special people : wear baseball caps the wrong way round , come to conferences like this , in special places , elite universities , r & d labs in the forests , water , maybe special rooms in companies painted funny colors , you know , bean bags , maybe the odd table-football table .
special people , special places , think up special ideas , then you have a pipeline that takes the ideas down to the waiting consumers , who are passive .
they can say " yes " or " no " to the invention .
that 's the idea of creativity .
what 's the policy recommendation out of that if you 're in government , or you 're running a large company ?
more special people , more special places .
build creative clusters in cities ; create more r & d parks , so on and so forth .
expand the pipeline down to the consumers .
well this view , i think , is increasingly wrong .
i think it 's always been wrong , because i think always creativity has been highly collaborative , and it 's probably been largely interactive .
but it 's increasingly wrong , and one of the reasons it 's wrong is that the ideas are flowing back up the pipeline .
the ideas are coming back from the consumers , and they 're often ahead of the producers .
why is that ?
well , one issue is that radical innovation , when you 've got ideas that affect a large number of technologies or people , have a great deal of uncertainty attached to them .
the payoffs to innovation are greatest where the uncertainty is highest .
and when you get a radical innovation , it 's often very uncertain how it can be applied .
the whole history of telephony is a story of dealing with that uncertainty .
the very first landline telephones , the inventors thought that they would be used for people to listen in to live performances from west end theaters .
when the mobile telephone companies invented sms , they had no idea what it was for ; it was only when that technology got into the hands of teenage users that they invented the use .
so the more radical the innovation , the more the uncertainty , the more you need innovation in use to work out what a technology is for .
all of our patents , our entire approach to patents and invention , is based on the idea that the inventor knows what the invention is for ; we can say what it 's for .
more and more , the inventors of things it will be worked out in use , in collaboration with users .
we like to think that invention is a sort of moment of creation : there is a moment of birth when someone comes up with an idea .
the truth is that most creativity is cumulative and collaborative ; like wikipedia , it develops over a long period of time .
the second reason why users are more and more important is that they are the source of big , disruptive innovations .
if you want to find the big new ideas , it 's often difficult to find them in mainstream markets , in big organizations .
and just look inside large organizations and you 'll see why that is so .
so , you 're in a big corporation .
you 're obviously keen to go up the corporate ladder .
do you go into your board and say , " look , i 've got a fantastic idea for an embryonic product in a marginal market , with consumers we 've never dealt with before , and i 'm not sure it 's going to have a big payoff , but it could be really , really big in the future ? "
no , what you do , is you go in and you say , " i 've got a fantastic idea for an incremental innovation to an existing product we sell through existing channels to existing users , and i can guarantee you get this much return out of it over the next three years . "
big corporations have an in-built tendency to reinforce past success .
they 've got so much sunk in it that it 's very difficult for them to spot emerging new markets . emerging new markets , then , are the breeding grounds for passionate users .
best example : who in the music industry , 30 years ago , would have said , " yes , let 's invent a musical form which is all about dispossessed black men in ghettos expressing their frustration with the world through a form of music that many people find initially quite difficult to listen to .
that sounds like a winner ; we 'll go with it . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- .
so what happens ? rap music is created by the users .
they do it on their own tapes , with their own recording equipment ; they distribute it themselves .
30 years later , rap music is the dominant musical form of popular culture - would never have come from the big companies .
had to start - this is the third point - with these pro-ams .
this is the phrase that i 've used in some stuff which i 've done with a think tank in london called demos , where we 've been looking at these people who are amateurs - i.e. , they do it for the love of it - but they want to do it to very high standards .
and across a whole range of fields - from software , astronomy , natural sciences , vast areas of leisure and culture like kite-surfing , so on and so forth - you find people who want to do things because they love it , but they want to do these things to very high standards .
they work at their leisure , if you like .
they take their leisure very seriously : they acquire skills ; they invest time ; they use technology that 's getting cheaper - it 's not just the internet : cameras , design technology , leisure technology , surfboards , so on and so forth .
largely through globalization , a lot of this equipment has got a lot cheaper .
more knowledgeable consumers , more educated , more able to connect with one another , more able to do things together .
consumption , in that sense , is an expression of their productive potential .
why , we found , people were interested in this , is that at work they do n't feel very expressed .
they do n't feel as if they 're doing something that really matters to them , so they pick up these kinds of activities .
this has huge organizational implications for very large areas of life .
take astronomy as an example , which yochai has already mentioned .
twenty years ago , 30 years ago , only big professional astronomers with very big telescopes could see far into space .
and there 's a big telescope in northern england called jodrell bank , and when i was a kid , it was amazing , because the moon shots would take off , and this thing would move on rails .
and it was huge - it was absolutely enormous .
now , six amateur astronomers , working with the internet , with dobsonian digital telescopes - which are pretty much open source - with some light sensors developed over the last 10 years , the internet - they can do what jodrell bank could only do 30 years ago .
so here in astronomy , you have this vast explosion of new productive resources .
the users can be producers .
what does this mean , then , for our organizational landscape ?
well , just imagine a world , for the moment , divided into two camps .
over here , you 've got the old , traditional corporate model : special people , special places ; patent it , push it down the pipeline to largely waiting , passive consumers .
over here , let 's imagine we 've got wikipedia , linux , and beyond - open source .
this is open ; this is closed .
this is new ; this is traditional .
well , the first thing you can say , i think with certainty , is what yochai has said already - is there is a great big struggle between those two organizational forms .
these people over there will do everything they can to stop these kinds of organizations succeeding , because they 're threatened by them .
and so the debates about copyright , digital rights , so on and so forth - these are all about trying to stifle , in my view , these kinds of organizations .
what we 're seeing is a complete corruption of the idea of patents and copyright .
meant to be a way to incentivize invention , meant to be a way to orchestrate the dissemination of knowledge , they are increasingly being used by large companies to create thickets of patents to prevent innovation taking place .
let me just give you two examples .
the first is : imagine yourself going to a venture capitalist and saying , " i 've got a fantastic idea .
i 've invented this brilliant new program that is much , much better than microsoft outlook . "
which venture capitalist in their right mind is going to give you any money to set up a venture competing with microsoft , with microsoft outlook ? no one .
that is why the competition with microsoft is bound to come - will only come - from an open-source kind of project .
so , there is a huge competitive argument about sustaining the capacity for open-source and consumer-driven innovation , because it 's one of the greatest competitive levers against monopoly .
there 'll be huge professional arguments as well .
because the professionals , over here in these closed organizations - they might be academics ; they might be programmers ; they might be doctors ; they might be journalists - my former profession - say , " no , no - you ca n't trust these people over here . "
when i started in journalism - financial times , 20 years ago - it was very , very exciting to see someone reading the newspaper .
and you 'd kind of look over their shoulder on the tube to see if they were reading your article .
usually they were reading the share prices , and the bit of the paper with your article on was on the floor , or something like that , and you know , " for heaven 's sake , what are they doing !
they 're not reading my brilliant article ! "
and we allowed users , readers , two places where they could contribute to the paper : the letters page , where they could write a letter in , and we would condescend to them , cut it in half , and print it three days later .
or the op-ed page , where if they knew the editor - had been to school with him , slept with his wife - they could write an article for the op-ed page .
those were the two places .
shock , horror : now , the readers want to be writers and publishers .
that 's not their role ; they 're supposed to read what we write .
but they do n't want to be journalists . the journalists think that the bloggers want to be journalists ; they do n't want to be journalists ; they just want to have a voice .
they want to , as jimmy said , they want to have a dialogue , a conversation .
they want to be part of that flow of information .
what 's happening there is that the whole domain of creativity is expanding .
so , there 's going to be a tremendous struggle .
but , also , there 's going to be tremendous movement from the open to the closed .
what you 'll see , i think , is two things that are critical , and these , i think , are two challenges for the open movement .
the first is : can we really survive on volunteers ?
if this is so critical , do we not need it funded , organized , supported in much more structured ways ?
i think the idea of creating the red cross for information and knowledge is a fantastic idea , but can we really organize that , just on volunteers ?
what kind of changes do we need in public policy and funding to make that possible ?
what 's the role of the bbc , for instance , in that world ?
what should be the role of public policy ?
and finally , what i think you will see is the intelligent , closed organizations moving increasingly in the open direction .
so it 's not going to be a contest between two camps , but , in between them , you 'll find all sorts of interesting places that people will occupy .
new organizational models coming about , mixing closed and open in tricky ways .
it wo n't be so clear-cut ; it wo n't be microsoft versus linux - there 'll be all sorts of things in between .
and those organizational models , it turns out , are incredibly powerful , and the people who can understand them will be very , very successful .
let me just give you one final example of what that means .
i was in shanghai , in an office block built on what was a rice paddy five years ago - one of the 2,500 skyscrapers they 've built in shanghai in the last 10 years .
and i was having dinner with this guy called timothy chan .
timothy chan set up an internet business in 2000 .
did n't go into the internet , kept his money , decided to go into computer games .
he runs a company called shanda , which is the largest computer games company in china .
nine thousand servers all over china , has 250 million subscribers .
at any one time , there are four million people playing one of his games .
how many people does he employ to service that population ?
500 people .
well , how can he service 250 million people from 500 employees ?
because basically , he does n't service them .
he gives them a platform ; he gives them some rules ; he gives them the tools and then he kind of orchestrates the conversation ; he orchestrates the action .
but actually , a lot of the content is created by the users themselves .
and it creates a kind of stickiness between the community and the company which is really , really powerful .
the best measure of that : so you go into one of his games , you create a character that you develop in the course of the game .
if , for some reason , your credit card bounces , or there 's some other problem , you lose your character .
you 've got two options .
one option : you can create a new character , right from scratch , but with none of the history of your player .
that costs about 100 dollars .
or you can get on a plane , fly to shanghai , queue up outside shanda 's offices - cost probably 600 , 700 dollars - and reclaim your character , get your history back .
every morning , there are 600 people queuing outside their offices to reclaim these characters . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so this is about companies built on communities , that provide communities with tools , resources , platforms in which they can share .
he 's not open source , but it 's very , very powerful .
so here is one of the challenges , i think , for people like me , who do a lot of work with government .
if you 're a games company , and you 've got a million players in your game , you only need one percent of them to be co-developers , contributing ideas , and you 've got a development workforce of 10,000 people .
imagine you could take all the children in education in britain , and one percent of them were co-developers of education .
what would that do to the resources available to the education system ?
or if you got one percent of the patients in the nhs to , in some sense , be co-producers of health .
the reason why - despite all the efforts to cut it down , why these open models will still start emerging with tremendous force , is that they multiply our productive resources .
and one of the reasons they do that is that they turn users into producers , consumers into designers .
thank you very much .
you hear that this is the era of environment - or biology , or information technology ...
well , it 's the era of a lot of different things that we 're in right now . but one thing for sure : it 's the era of change . there 's more change going on than ever has occurred in the history of human life on earth .
and you all sort of know it , but it 's hard to get it so that you really understand it .
and i 've tried to put together something that 's a good start for this .
i 've tried to show in this - though the color does n't come out - that what i 'm concerned with is the little 50-year time bubble that you are in . you tend to be interested in a generation past , a generation future - your parents , your kids , things you can change over the next few decades - and this 50-year time bubble you kind of move along in . and in that 50 years , if you look at the population curve , you find the population of humans on the earth more than doubles and we 're up three-and-a-half times since i was born . when you have a new baby ,
by the time that kid gets out of high school more people will be added than existed on earth when i was born .
this is unprecedented , and it 's big .
where it goes in the future is questioned . so that 's the human part .
now , the human part related to animals : look at the left side of that .
what i call the human portion - humans and their livestock and pets - versus the natural portion - all the other wild animals and just - these are vertebrates and all the birds , etc . , in the land and air , not in the water . how does it balance ?
certainly , 10,000 years ago , the civilization 's beginning , the human portion was less than one tenth of one percent . let 's look at it now .
you follow this curve and you see the whiter spot in the middle - that 's your 50-year time bubble . humans , livestock and pets are now 97 percent of that integrated total mass on earth and all wild nature is three percent . we have won . the next generation does n't even have to worry about this game - it is over .
and the biggest problem came in the last 25 years : it went from 25 percent up to that 97 percent .
and this really is a sobering picture upon realizing that we , humans , are in charge of life on earth ; we 're like the capricious gods of old greek myths , kind of playing with life - and not a great deal of wisdom injected into it .
now , the third curve is information technology .
this is moore 's law plotted here , which relates to density of information , but it has been pretty good for showing a lot of other things about information technology - computers , their use , internet , etc . and what 's important is it just goes straight up through the top of the curve , and has no real limits to it . now try and contrast these .
this is the size of the earth going through that same - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - frame . and to make it really clear , i 've put all four on one graph .
there 's no need to see the little detailed words on it .
that first one is humans-versus-nature ; we 've won , there 's no more gain . human population .
and so if you 're looking for growth industries to get into , that 's not a good one - protecting natural creatures . human population is going up ; it 's going to continue for quite a while .
good business in obstetricians , morticians , and farming , housing , etc . - they all deal with human bodies , which require being fed , transported , housed and so on . and the information technology , which connects to our brains , has no limit - now , that is a wonderful field to be in . you 're looking for growth opportunity ?
it 's just going up through the roof .
and then , the size of the earth . somehow making these all compatible with the earth looks like a pretty bad industry to be involved with .
so , that 's the stage out of all this . i find , for reasons i do n't understand , i really do have a goal .
and the goal is that the world be desirable and sustainable when my kids reach my age - and i think that 's - in other words , the next generation . i think that 's a goal that we probably all share .
i think it 's a hopeless goal . technologically , it 's achievable ; economically , it 's achievable ; politically , it means sort of the habits , institutions of people - it 's impossible .
the institutions of the past with all their inertia are just irrelevant for the future , except they 're there and we have to deal with them . i spend about 15 percent of my time trying to save the world , the other 85 percent , the usual - and whatever else we devote ourselves to .
and in that 15 percent , the main focus is on human mind , thinking skills , somehow trying to unleash kids from the straightjacket of school , which is putting information and dogma into them , get them so they really think , ask tough questions , argue about serious subjects , do n't believe everything that 's in the book , think broadly or creative . they can be .
our school systems are very flawed and do not reward you for the things that are important in life or for the survival of civilization ; they reward you for a lot of learning and sopping up stuff .
we ca n't go into that today because there is n't time - it 's a broad subject . one thing for sure , in the future there is an essential feature - necessary , but not sufficient - which is doing more with less . we 've got to be doing things with more efficiency using less energy , less material .
your great-great grandparents got by on muscle power , and yet we all think there 's this huge power that 's essential for our lifestyle . and with all the wonderful technology we have we can do things that are much more efficient : conserve , recycle , etc .
let me just rush very quickly through things that we 've done .
human-powered airplane - gossamer condor sort of started me in this direction in 1976 and 77 , winning the kremer prize in aviation history , followed by the albatross . and we began making various odd planes and creatures .
here 's a giant flying replica of a pterosaur that has no tail .
trying to have it fly straight is like trying to shoot an arrow with the feathered end forward . it was a tough job , and boy it made me have a lot of respect for nature .
this was the full size of the original creature .
we did things on land , in the air , on water - vehicles of all different kinds , usually with some electronics or electric power systems in them . i find they 're all the same , whether its land , air or water .
i 'll be focusing on the air here . this is a solar-powered airplane - 165 miles carrying a person from france to england as a symbol that solar power is going to be an important part of our future . then we did the solar car for general motors - the sunracer - that won the race in australia .
we got a lot of people thinking about electric cars , what you could do with them . a few years later , when we suggested to gm that now is the time and we could do a thing called the impact , they sponsored it , and here 's the impact that we developed with them on their programs . this is the demonstrator . and they put huge effort into turning it into a commercial product .
with that preamble , let 's show the first two-minute videotape , which shows a little airplane for surveillance and moving to a giant airplane .
narrator : a tiny airplane , the av pointer serves for surveillance - in effect , a pair of roving eyeglasses . a cutting-edge example of where miniaturization can lead if the operator is remote from the vehicle . it is convenient to carry , assemble and launch by hand . battery-powered , it is silent and rarely noticed .
it sends high-resolution video pictures back to the operator .
with onboard gps , it can navigate autonomously , and it is rugged enough to self-land without damage .
the modern sailplane is superbly efficient .
some can glide as flat as 60 feet forward for every foot of descent .
they are powered only by the energy they can extract from the atmosphere - an atmosphere nature stirs up by solar energy .
humans and soaring birds have found nature to be generous in providing replenishable energy . sailplanes have flown over 1,000 miles , and the altitude record is over 50,000 feet .
-lrb- music -rrb- the solar challenger was made to serve as a symbol that photovoltaic cells can produce real power and will be part of the world 's energy future .
in 1981 , it flew 163 miles from paris to england , solely on the power of sunbeams , and established a basis for the pathfinder .
-lrb- music -rrb- the message from all these vehicles is that ideas and technology can be harnessed to produce remarkable gains in doing more with less - gains that can help us attain a desirable balance between technology and nature . the stakes are high as we speed toward a challenging future .
buckminster fuller said it clearly : " there are no passengers on spaceship earth , only crew . we , the crew , can and must do more with less - much less . "
paul maccready : if we could have the second video , the one-minute , put in as quickly as you can , which - this will show the pathfinder airplane in some flights this past year in hawaii , and will show a sequence of some of the beauty behind it after it had just flown to 71,530 feet - higher than any propeller airplane has ever flown .
it 's amazing : just on the puny power of the sun - by having a super lightweight plane , you 're able to get it up there .
it 's part of a long-term program nasa sponsored .
and we worked very closely with the whole thing being a team effort , and with wonderful results like that flight .
and we 're working on a bigger plane - 220-foot span - and an intermediate-size , one with a regenerative fuel cell that can store excess energy during the day , feed it back at night , and stay up 65,000 feet for months at a time .
-lrb- music -rrb- ray morgan 's voice will come in here .
there he 's the project manager . anything they do is certainly a team effort . he ran this program . here 's ...
some things he showed as a celebration at the very end .
ray morgan : we 'd just ended a seven-month deployment of hawaii .
for those who live on the mainland , it was tough being away from home .
the friendly support , the quiet confidence , congenial hospitality shown by our hawaiian and military hosts - -lrb- music -rrb- this is starting - made the experience enjoyable and unforgettable .
pm : we have real-time ir scans going out through the internet while the plane is flying . and it 's exploring without polluting the stratosphere . that 's its goal : the stratosphere , the blanket that really controls the radiation of the earth and permits life on earth to be the success that it is - probing that is very important . and also we consider it as a sort of poor man 's stationary satellite , because it can stay right overhead for months at a time , 2,000 times closer than the real gfc synchronous satellite .
we could n't bring one here to fly it and show you .
but now let 's look at the other end .
in the video you saw that nine-pound or eight-pound pointer airplane surveillance drone that keenan has developed and just done a remarkable job . where some have servos that have gotten down to , oh , 18 or 25 grams , his weigh one-third of a gram . and what he 's going to bring out here is a surveillance drone that weighs about 2 ounces - that includes the video camera , the batteries that run it , the telemetry , the receiver and so on . and we 'll fly it , we hope , with the same success that we had last night when we did the practice .
so matt keenan , just any time you 're - all right - ready to let her go . but first , we 're going to make sure that it 's appearing on the screen , so you see what it sees .
you can imagine yourself being a mouse or fly inside of it , looking out of its camera .
matt keenan : it 's switched on .
pm : but now we 're trying to get the video . there we go .
mk : can you bring up the house lights ?
pm : yeah , the house lights and we 'll see you all better and be able to fly the plane better .
mk : all right , we 'll try to do a few laps around and bring it back in .
here we go .
-lrb- applause -rrb- pm : the video worked right for the first few and i do n't know why it - there it goes .
oh , that was only a minute , but i think you 'd be safe to have that near the end of the flight , perhaps .
all right .
if this hits you , it will not hurt you .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ok .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you very much . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- but now , as they say in infomercials , we have something much better for you , which we 're working on : planes that are only six inches - 15 centimeters - in size .
and matt 's plane was on the cover of popular science last month , showing what this can lead to . and in a while , something this size will have gps and a video camera in it . we 've had one of these fly nine miles through the air at 35 miles an hour with just a little battery in it .
but there 's a lot of technology going .
there are just milestones along the way of some remarkable things .
this one does n't have the video in it , but you get a little feel from what it can do .
ok , here we go .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- mk : sorry .
ok .
-lrb- applause -rrb- pm : if you can pass it down when you 're done . yeah , i think - i lost a little orientation ; i looked up into this light .
it hit the building . and the building was poorly placed , actually .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but you 're beginning to see what can be done .
we 're working on projects now - even wing-flapping things the size of hawk moths - darpa contracts , working with caltech , ucla .
where all this leads , i do n't know . is it practical ? i do n't know .
but like any basic research , when you 're really forced to do things that are way beyond existing technology , you can get there with micro-technology , nanotechnology .
you can do amazing things when you realize what nature has been doing all along . as you get to these small scales , you realize we have a lot to learn from nature - not with 747s - but when you get down to the nature 's realm , nature has 200 million years of experience .
it never makes a mistake . because if you make a mistake , you do n't leave any progeny .
we should have nothing but success stories from nature , for you or for birds , and we 're learning a lot from its fascinating subjects .
in concluding , i want to get back to the big picture and i have just two final slides to try and put it in perspective .
the first i 'll just read . at last , i put in three sentences and had it say what i wanted .
over billions of years on a unique sphere , chance has painted a thin covering of life - complex , improbable , wonderful and fragile . suddenly , we humans - a recently arrived species , no longer subject to the checks and balances inherent in nature - have grown in population , technology and intelligence to a position of terrible power . we now wield the paintbrush .
and that 's serious : we 're not very bright . we 're short on wisdom ; we 're high on technology . where 's it going to lead ?
well , inspired by the sentences , i decided to wield the paintbrush .
every 25 years i do a picture . here 's the one - tries to show that the world is n't getting any bigger .
sort of a timeline , very non-linear scale , nature rates and trilobites and dinosaurs , and eventually we saw some humans with caves ... birds were flying overhead , after pterosaurs .
and then we get to the civilization above the little tv set with a gun on it . then traffic jams , and power systems , and some dots for digital . where it 's going to lead - i have no idea .
and so i just put robotic and natural cockroaches out there , but you can fill in whatever you want . this is not a forecast .
this is a warning , and we have to think seriously about it .
and that time when this is happening is not 100 years or 500 years .
things are going on this decade , next decade ; it 's a very short time that we have to decide what we are going to do .
and if we can get some agreement on where we want the world to be - desirable , sustainable when your kids reach your age - i think we actually can reach it . now , i said this was a warning , not a forecast . that was before - i painted this before we started in on making robotic versions of hawk moths and cockroaches , and now i 'm beginning to wonder seriously - was this more of a forecast than i wanted ?
i personally think the surviving intelligent life form on earth is not going to be carbon-based ; it 's going to be silicon-based .
and so where it all goes , i do n't know .
the one final bit of sparkle we 'll put in at the very end here is an utterly impractical flight vehicle , which is a little ornithopter wing-flapping device that - rubber-band powered - that we 'll show you .
mk : 32 gram . sorry , one gram .
pm : last night we gave it a few too many turns and it tried to bash the roof out also . it 's about a gram .
the tube there 's hollow , about paper-thin .
and if this lands on you , i assure you it will not hurt you .
but if you reach out to grab it or hold it , you will destroy it .
so , be gentle , just act like a wooden indian or something .
and when it comes down - and we 'll see how it goes .
we consider this to be sort of the spirit of ted .
-lrb- applause -rrb- and you wonder , is it practical ? and it turns out if i had not been - -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- unfortunately , we have some light bulb changes .
we can probably get it down , but it 's possible it 's gone up to a greater destiny up there - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - than it ever had . and i wanted to make - -lrb- applause -rrb- just - -lrb- applause -rrb- but i want to make just two points . one is , you think it 's frivolous ; there 's nothing to it . and yet if i had not been making ornithopters like that , a little bit cruder , in 1939 - a long , long time ago - there would n't have been a gossamer condor , there would n't have been an albatross , a solar challenger , there would n't be an impact car , there would n't be a mandate
on zero-emission vehicles in california .
a lot of these things - or similar - would have happened some time , probably a decade later . i did n't realize at the time i was doing inquiry-based , hands-on things with teams , like they 're trying to get in education systems .
so i think that , as a symbol , it 's important .
and i believe that also is important . you can think of it as a sort of a symbol for learning and ted that somehow gets you thinking of technology and nature , and puts it all together in things that are - that make this conference , i think , more important than any that 's taken place in this country in this decade .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- people are living longer and societies are getting grayer .
you hear about it all the time .
you read about it in your newspapers .
you hear about it on your television sets .
sometimes i 'm concerned that we hear about it so much that we 've come to accept longer lives with a kind of a complacency , even ease .
but make no mistake , longer lives can and , i believe , will improve quality of life at all ages .
now to put this in perspective , let me just zoom out for a minute .
more years were added to average life expectancy in the 20th century than all years added across all prior millennia of human evolution combined .
in the blink of an eye , we nearly doubled the length of time that we 're living .
so if you ever feel like you do n't have this aging thing quite pegged , do n't kick yourself .
it 's brand new .
and because fertility rates fell across that very same period that life expectancy was going up , that pyramid that has always represented the distribution of age in the population , with many young ones at the bottom winnowed to a tiny peak of older people who make it and survive to old age is being reshaped into a rectangle .
and now , if you 're the kind of person who can get chills from population statistics , these are the ones that should do it .
because what that means is that for the first time in the history of the species , the majority of babies born in the developed world are having the opportunity to grow old .
how did this happen ?
well we 're no genetically hardier than our ancestors were 10,000 years ago .
this increase in life expectancy is the remarkable product of culture - the crucible that holds science and technology and wide-scale changes in behavior that improve health and well-being .
through cultural changes , our ancestors largely eliminated early death so that people can now live out their full lives .
now there are problems associated with aging - diseases , poverty , loss of social status .
it 's hardly time to rest on our laurels .
but the more we learn about aging , the clearer it becomes that a sweeping downward course is grossly inaccurate .
aging brings some rather remarkable improvements - increased knowledge , expertise - and emotional aspects of life improve .
that 's right , older people are happy .
they 're happier than middle-aged people , and younger people certainly .
study after study is coming to the same conclusion .
the cdc recently conducted a survey where they asked respondents simply to tell them whether they experienced significant psychological distress in the previous week .
and fewer older people answered affirmatively to that question than middle-aged people , and younger people as well .
and a recent gallup poll asked participants how much stress and worry and anger they had experienced the previous day .
and stress , worry , anger all decrease with age .
now social scientists call this the paradox of aging .
after all , aging is not a piece of cake .
so we 've asked all sorts of questions to see if we could undo this finding .
we 've asked whether it may be that the current generations of older people are and always have been the greatest generations .
that is that younger people today may not typically experience these improvements as they grow older .
we 've asked , well maybe older people are just trying to put a positive spin on an otherwise depressing existence .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but the more we 've tried to disavow this finding , the more evidence we find to support it .
years ago , my colleagues and i embarked on a study where we followed the same group of people over a 10-year period .
originally the sample was aged 18 to 94 .
and we studied whether and how their emotional experiences changed as they grew older .
our participants would carry electronic pagers for a week at a time , and we 'd page them throughout the day and evenings at random times .
and every time we paged them we 'd ask them to answer several questions - on a one to seven scale , how happy are you right now ?
how sad are you right now ?
how frustrated are you right now ? - so that we could get a sense of the kinds of emotions and feelings they were having in their day-to-day lives .
and using this intense study of individuals , we find that it 's not one particular generation that 's doing better than the others , but the same individuals over time come to report relatively greater positive experience .
now you see this slight downturn at very advanced ages .
and there is a slight downturn .
but at no point does it return to the levels we see in early adulthood .
now it 's really too simplistic to say that older people are " happy . "
in our study , they are more positive , but they 're also more likely than younger people to experience mixed emotions - sadness at the same time you experience happiness ; you know , that tear in the eye when you 're smiling at a friend .
and other research has shown that older people seem to engage with sadness more comfortably .
they 're more accepting of sadness than younger people are .
and we suspect that this may help to explain why older people are better than younger people at solving hotly-charged emotional conflicts and debates .
older people can view injustice with compassion , but not despair .
and all things being equal , older people direct their cognitive resources , like attention and memory , to positive information more than negative .
if we show older , middle-aged , younger people images , like the ones you see on the screen , and we later ask them to recall all the images that they can , older people , but not younger people , remember more positive images than negative images .
we 've asked older and younger people to view faces in laboratory studies , some frowning , some smiling .
older people look toward the smiling faces and away from the frowning , angry faces .
in day-to-day life , this translates into greater enjoyment and satisfaction .
but as social scientists , we continue to ask about possible alternatives .
we 've said , well maybe older people report more positive emotions because they 're cognitively impaired .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we 've said , could it be that positive emotions are simply easier to process than negative emotions , and so you switch to the positive emotions ?
maybe our neural centers in our brain are degraded such that we 're unable to process negative emotions anymore .
but that 's not the case .
the most mentally sharp older adults are the ones who show this positivity effect the most .
and under conditions where it really matters , older people do process the negative information just as well as the positive information .
so how can this be ?
well in our research , we 've found that these changes are grounded fundamentally in the uniquely human ability to monitor time - not just clock time and calendar time , but lifetime .
and if there 's a paradox of aging , it 's that recognizing that we wo n't live forever changes our perspective on life in positive ways .
when time horizons are long and nebulous , as they typically are in youth , people are constantly preparing , trying to soak up all the information they possibly can , taking risks , exploring .
we might spend time with people we do n't even like because it 's somehow interesting .
we might learn something unexpected .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we go on blind dates .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you know , after all , if it does n't work out , there 's always tomorrow .
people over 50 do n't go on blind dates .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- as we age , our time horizons grow shorter and our goals change .
when we recognize that we do n't have all the time in the world , we see our priorities most clearly .
we take less notice of trivial matters .
we savor life .
we 're more appreciative , more open to reconciliation .
we invest in more emotionally important parts of life , and life gets better , so we 're happier day-to-day .
but that same shift in perspective leads us to have less tolerance than ever for injustice .
by 2015 , there will be more people in the united states over the age of 60 than under 15 .
what will happen to societies that are top-heavy with older people ?
the numbers wo n't determine the outcome .
culture will .
if we invest in science and technology and find solutions for the real problems that older people face and we capitalize on the very real strengths of older people , then added years of life can dramatically improve quality of life at all ages .
societies with millions of talented , emotionally stable citizens who are healthier and better educated than any generations before them , armed with knowledge about the practical matters of life and motivated to solve the big issues can be better societies than we have ever known .
my father , who is 92 , likes to say , " let 's stop talking only about how to save the old folks and start talking about how to get them to save us all . "
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so i 'm a city planner , an urban designer , former arts advocate , trained in architecture and art history , and i want to talk to you today not about design but about america and how america can be more economically resilient , how america can be healthier , and how america can be more environmentally sustainable .
and i realize this is a global forum , but i think i need to talk about america because there is a history , in some places , not all , of american ideas being appropriated , being emulated , for better or for worse , around the world .
and the worst idea we 've ever had is suburban sprawl .
it 's being emulated in many places as we speak .
by suburban sprawl , i refer to the reorganization of the landscape and the creation of the landscape around the requirement of automobile use , and that the automobile that was once an instrument of freedom has become a gas-belching , time-wasting and life-threatening prosthetic device that many of us need just to , most americans , in fact , need , just to live their daily lives .
and there 's an alternative .
you know , we say , half the world is living in cities .
well , in america , that living in cities , for many of them , they 're living in cities still where they 're dependent on that automobile .
and what i work for , and to do , is to make our cities more walkable .
but i ca n't give design arguments for that that will have as much impact as the arguments that i 've learned from the economists , the epidemiologists and the environmentalists .
so these are the three arguments that i 'm going to give you quickly today .
when i was growing up in the ' 70s , the typical american spent one tenth of their income , american family , on transportation .
since then , we 've doubled the number of roads in america , and we now spend one fifth of our income on transportation .
working families , which are defined as earning between 20,000 and 50,000 dollars a year in america are spending more now on transportation than on housing , slightly more , because of this phenomenon called " drive till you qualify , " finding homes further and further and further from the city centers and from their jobs , so that they 're locked in this , two , three hours , four hours a day of commuting .
and these are the neighborhoods , for example , in the central valley of california that were n't hurt when the housing bubble burst and when the price of gas went up ; they were decimated .
and in fact , these are many of the half-vacant communities that you see today .
imagine putting everything you have into your mortgage , it goes underwater , and you have to pay twice as much for all the driving that you 're doing .
so we know what it 's done to our society and all the extra work we have to do to support our cars .
what happens when a city decides it 's going to set other priorities ?
and probably the best example we have here in america is portland , oregon .
portland made a bunch of decisions in the 1970s that began to distinguish it from almost every other american city .
while most other cities were growing an undifferentiated spare tire of sprawl , they instituted an urban growth boundary .
while most cities were reaming out their roads , removing parallel parking and trees in order to flow more traffic , they instituted a skinny streets program .
and while most cities were investing in more roads and more highways , they actually invested in bicycling and in walking .
and they spent 60 million dollars on bike facilities , which seems like a lot of money , but it was spent over about 30 years , so two million dollars a year - not that much - and half the price of the one cloverleaf that they decided to rebuild in that city .
these changes and others like them changed the way that portlanders live , and their vehicle-miles traveled per day , the amount that each person drives , actually peaked in 1996 , has been dropping ever since , and they now drive 20 percent less than the rest of the country .
the typical portland citizen drives four miles less , and 11 minutes less per day than they did before .
the economist joe cortright did the math and he found out that those four miles plus those 11 minutes adds up to fully three and a half percent of all income earned in the region .
so if they 're not spending that money on driving - and by the way , 85 percent of the money we spend on driving leaves the local economy - if they 're not spending that money on driving , what are they spending it on ?
well , portland is reputed to have the most roof racks per capita , the most independent bookstores per capita , the most strip clubs per capita .
these are all exaggerations , slight exaggerations of a fundamental truth , which is portlanders spend a lot more on recreation of all kinds than the rest of america .
actually , oregonians spend more on alcohol than most other states , which may be a good thing or a bad thing , but it makes you glad they 're driving less .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but actually , they 're spending most of it in their homes , and home investment is about as local an investment as you can get .
but there 's a whole other portland story , which is n't part of this calculus , which is that young , educated people have been moving to portland in droves , so that between the last two censuses , they had a 50-percent increase in college-educated millennials , which is five times what you saw anywhere else in the country , or , i should say , of the national average .
so on the one hand , a city saves money for its residents by being more walkable and more bikeable , but on the other hand , it also is the cool kind of city that people want to be in these days .
so the best economic strategy you can have as a city is not the old way of trying to attract corporations and trying to have a biotech cluster or a medical cluster , or an aerospace cluster , but to become a place where people want to be .
and millennials , certainly , these engines of entrepreneurship , 64 percent of whom decide first where they want to live , then they move there , then they look for a job , they will come to your city .
the health argument is a scary one , and you 've probably heard part of this argument before .
again , back in the ' 70s , a lot 's changed since then , back in the ' 70s , one in 10 americans was obese .
now one out of three americans is obese , and a second third of the population is overweight .
twenty-five percent of young men and 40 percent of young women are too heavy to enlist in our own military forces .
according to the center for disease control , fully one third of all children born after 2000 will get diabetes .
we have the first generation of children in america who are predicted to live shorter lives than their parents .
i believe that this american healthcare crisis that we 've all heard about is an urban design crisis , and that the design of our cities lies at the cure .
because we 've talked a long time about diet , and we know that diet impacts weight , and weight of course impacts health .
but we 've only started talking about inactivity , and how inactivity born of our landscape , inactivity that comes from the fact that we live in a place where there is no longer any such thing as a useful walk , is driving our weight up .
and we finally have the studies , one in britain called " gluttony versus sloth " that tracked weight against diet and tracked weight against inactivity , and found a much higher , stronger correlation between the latter two .
dr. james levine at , in this case , the aptly-named mayo clinic put his test subjects in electronic underwear , held their diet steady , and then started pumping the calories in .
some people gained weight , some people did n't gain weight .
expecting some metabolic or dna factor at work , they were shocked to learn that the only difference between the subjects that they could figure out was the amount they were moving , and that in fact those who gained weight were sitting , on average , two hours more per day than those who did n't .
so we have these studies that tie weight to inactivity , but even more , we now have studies that tie weight to where you live .
do you live in a more walkable city or do you live in a less walkable city , or where in your city do you live ?
in san diego , they used walk score - walk score rates every address in america and soon the world in terms of how walkable it is - they used walk score to designate more walkable neighborhoods and less walkable neighborhoods .
well guess what ? if you lived in a more walkable neighborhood , you were 35 percent likely to be overweight .
if you lived in a less walkable neighborhood , you were 60 percent likely to be overweight .
so we have study after study now that 's tying where you live to your health , particularly as in america , the biggest health crisis we have is this one that 's stemming from environmental-induced inactivity .
and i learned a new word last week .
they call these neighborhoods " obesageneric . "
i may have that wrong , but you get the idea .
now that 's one thing , of course .
briefly mentioning , we have an asthma epidemic in this country .
you probably have n't thought that much about it .
fourteen americans die each day from asthma , three times what it was in the ' 90s , and it 's almost all coming from car exhaust .
american pollution does not come from factories anymore , it comes from tailpipes , and the amount that people are driving in your city , your urban vmt , is a good prediction of the asthma problems in your city .
and then finally , in terms of driving , there 's the issue of the single-largest killer of healthy adults , and one of the largest killers of all people , is car crashes .
and we take car crashes for granted .
we figure it 's a natural risk of being on the road .
but in fact , here in america , 12 people out of every 100,000 die every year from car crashes .
we 're pretty safe here .
well , guess what ? in england , it 's seven per 100,000 .
it 's japan , it 's four per 100,000 .
do you know where it 's three per 100,000 ?
new york city .
san francisco , the same thing . portland , the same thing .
oh , so cities make us safer because we 're driving less ?
tulsa : 14 per 100,000 .
orlando : 20 per 100,000 .
it 's not whether you 're in the city or not , it 's how is your city designed ?
was it designed around cars or around people ?
because if your city is designed around cars , it 's really good at smashing them into each other .
that 's part of a much larger health argument .
finally , the environmental argument is fascinating , because the environmentalists turned on a dime about 10 years ago .
the environmental movement in america has historically been an anti-city movement from jefferson on .
" cities are pestilential to the health , to the liberties , to the morals of man .
if we continue to pile upon ourselves in cities , as they do in europe , we shall become as corrupt as they are in europe and take to eating one another as they do there . "
he apparently had a sense of humor .
and then the american environmental movement has been a classically arcadian movement .
to become more environmental , we move into the country , we commune with nature , we build suburbs .
but , of course , we 've seen what that does .
the carbon mapping of america , where is the co2 being emitted , for many years only hammered this argument in more strongly .
if you look at any carbon map , because we map it per square mile , any carbon map of the u.s. , it looks like a night sky satellite photo of the u.s. , hottest in the cities , cooler in the suburbs , dark , peaceful in the countryside .
until some economists said , you know , is that the right way to measure co2 ?
there are only so many people in this country at any given time , and we can choose to live where perhaps we would have a lighter impact .
and they said , let 's measure co2 per household , and when they did that , the maps just flipped , coolest in the center city , warmer in the suburbs , and red hot in these exurban " drive till you qualify " neighborhoods .
so a fundamental shift , and now you have environmentalists and economists like ed glaeser saying we are a destructive species .
if you love nature , the best thing you can do is stay the heck away from it , move to a city , and the denser the better , and the denser cities like manhattan are the cities that perform the best .
so the average manhattanite is consuming gasoline at the rate the rest of the nation has n't seen since the ' 20s , consuming half of the electricity of dallas .
but of course , we can do better .
canadian cities , they consume half the gasoline of american cities .
european cities consume half as much again .
so obviously , we can do better , and we want to do better , and we 're all trying to be green .
my final argument in this topic is that i think we 're trying to be green the wrong way , and i 'm one of many people who believes that this focus on gadgets , on accessorizing - what can i add to my house , what can i add to what i 've already got to make my lifestyle more sustainable ? - has kind of dominated the discussion .
so i 'm not immune to this .
my wife and i built a new house on an abandoned lot in washington , d.c. , and we did our best to clear the shelves of the sustainability store .
we 've got the solar photovoltaic system , solar hot water heater , dual-flush toilets , bamboo floors .
a log burning in my german high-tech stove apparently , supposedly , contributes less carbon to the atmosphere than were it left alone to decompose in the forest .
yet all of these innovations - that 's what they said in the brochure .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- all of these innovations together contribute a fraction of what we contribute by living in a walkable neighborhood three blocks from a metro in the heart of a city .
we 've changed all our light bulbs to energy-savers , and you should do the same thing , but changing all your light bulbs to energy-savers saves as much energy in a year as moving to a walkable city does in a week .
and we do n't want to have this argument .
politicians and marketers are afraid of marketing green as a " lifestyle choice . "
you do n't want to tell americans , god forbid , that they have to change their lifestyle .
but what if lifestyle was really about quality of life and about perhaps something that we would all enjoy more , something that would be better than what we have right now ?
well , the gold standard of quality of life rankings , it 's called the mercer survey .
you may have heard of it .
they rank hundreds of nations worldwide according to 10 criteria that they believe add up to quality of life : health , economics , education , housing , you name it .
there 's six more . short talk .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and it 's very interesting to see that the highest-ranking american city , honolulu , number 28 , is followed by kind of the usual suspects of seattle and boston and all walkable cities .
the driving cities in the sun belt , the dallases and the phoenixes and , sorry , atlanta , these cities are not appearing on the list .
but who 's doing even better ?
the canadian cities like vancouver , where again , they 're burning half the fuel .
and then it 's usually won by cities where they speak german , like dusseldorf or vienna , where they 're burning , again , half as much fuel .
and you see this alignment , this strange alignment .
is being more sustainble what gives you a higher quality of life ?
i would argue the same thing that makes you more sustainble is what gives you a higher quality of life , and that 's living in a walkable neighborhood .
so sustainability , which includes our wealth and our health may not be a direct function of our sustainability .
but particularly here in america , we are polluting so much because we 're throwing away our time and our money and our lives on the highway , then these two problems would seem to share the same solution , which is to make our cities more walkable .
doing so is n't easy , but it can be done , it has been done , and it 's being done now in more than a few cities , around the globe and in our country .
i take some solace from winston churchill , who put it this way : " the americans can be counted on to do the right thing once they have exhausted the alternatives . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- for the next few minutes we 're going to talk about energy , and it 's going to be a bit of a varied talk .
i 'll try to spin a story about energy , and oil 's a convenient starting place .
the talk will be broadly about energy , but oil 's a good place to start .
and one of the reasons is this is remarkable stuff .
you take about eight or so carbon atoms , about 20 hydrogen atoms , you put them together in exactly the right way and you get this marvelous liquid : very energy-dense and very easy to refine into a number of very useful products and fuels .
it 's great stuff .
now , as far as it goes , there 's a lot of oil out there in the world .
here 's my little pocket map of where it 's all located .
a bigger one for you to look at .
but this is it , this is the oil in the world .
geologists have a pretty good idea of where the oil is .
this is about 100 trillion gallons of crude oil still to be developed and produced in the world today .
now , that 's just one story about oil , and we could end it there and say , " well , oil 's going to last forever because , well , there 's just a lot of it . "
but there 's actually more to the story than that .
oh , by the way , if you think you 're very far from some of this oil , 1000 meters below where you 're all sitting is one of the largest producing oil fields in the world .
come talk to me about it , i 'll fill in some of the details if you want .
so , that 's one of the stories of oil ; there 's just a lot of it .
but what about oil ? where is it in the energy system ?
here 's a little snapshot of 150 years of oil , and it 's been a dominant part of our energy system for most of those 150 years .
now , here 's another little secret i 'm going to tell you about : for the last 25 years , oil has been playing less and less of a role in global energy systems .
there was one kind of peak oil in 1985 , when oil represented 50 percent of global energy supply .
now , it 's about 35 percent .
it 's been declining and i believe it will continue to decline .
gasoline consumption in the u.s. probably peaked in 2007 and is declining .
so oil is playing a less significant role every year .
and so , 25 years ago , there was a peak oil ; just like , in the 1920s , there was a peak coal ; and a hundred years before that , there was a peak wood .
this is a very important picture of the evolution of energy systems .
and what 's been taking up the slack in the last few decades ?
well , a lot of natural gas and a little bit of nuclear , for starters .
and what goes on in the future ?
well , i think out ahead of us a few decades is peak gas , and beyond that , peak renewables .
now , i 'll tell you another little , very important story about this picture .
now , i 'm not pretending that energy use in total is n't increasing , it is - that 's another part of the story . come talk to me about it , we 'll fill in some of the details - but there 's a very important message here : this is 200 years of history , and for 200 years we 've been systematically decarbonizing our energy system .
energy systems of the world becoming progressively - year on year , decade on decade , century on century - becoming less carbon intense .
and that continues into the future with the renewables that we 're developing today , reaching maybe 30 percent of primary energy by mid century .
now that might be the end of the story - okay , we just replace it all with conventional renewables - but i think , actually , there 's more to the story than that .
and to tell the next part of the story - and this is looking out say 2100 and beyond .
what is the future of truly sustainable , carbon-free energy ?
well , we have to take a little excursion , and we 'll start in central texas .
here 's a piece of limestone .
i picked it up outside of marble falls , texas .
it 's about 400 million years old .
and it 's just limestone , nothing really special about it .
now , here 's a piece of chalk .
i picked this up at mit . it 's a little younger .
and it 's different than this limestone , you can see that .
you would n't build a building out of this stuff , and you would n't try to give a lecture and write on the chalkboard with this .
yeah , it 's very different - no , it 's not different .
it 's not different , it 's the same stuff : calcium carbonate , calcium carbonate .
what 's different is how the molecules are put together .
now , if you think that 's kind of neat , the story gets really neat right now .
off the coast of california comes this : it 's an abalone shell .
now , millions of abalone every year make this shell .
oh , by the way , just in case you were n't already guessing , it 's calcium carbonate .
it 's the same stuff as this and the same stuff as this .
but it 's not the same stuff ; it 's different .
it 's thousands of times , maybe 3,000 times tougher than this .
and why ? because the lowly abalone is able to lay down the calcium carbonate crystals in layers , making this beautiful , iridescent mother of pearl .
very specialized material that the abalone self-assembles , millions of abalone , all the time , every day , every year .
this is pretty incredible stuff .
all the same , what 's different ?
how the molecules are put together .
now , what does this have to do with energy ?
here 's a piece of coal .
and i 'll suggest that this coal is about as exciting as this chalk .
now , whether we 're talking about fuels or energy carriers , or perhaps novel materials for batteries or fuel cells , nature has n't ever built those perfect materials yet because nature did n't need to .
nature did n't need to because , unlike the abalone shell , the survival of a species did n't depend on building those materials , until maybe now when it might just matter .
so , when we think about the future of energy , imagine what would it be like if instead of this , we could build the energy equivalent of this just by rearranging the molecules differently .
and so that is my story .
the oil will never run out .
it 's not because we have a lot of it .
it 's not because we 're going to build a bajillion windmills .
it 's because , well , thousands of years ago , people invented ideas - they had ideas , innovations , technology - and the stone age ended , not because we ran out of stones .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's ideas , it 's innovation , it 's technology that will end the age of oil , long before we run out of oil .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i was one of the founding members of the axis of evil comedy tour .
the other founding members included ahmed ahmed , who is an egyptian-american , who actually had the idea to go to the middle east and try it out .
before we went out as a tour , he went out solo and did it first .
then there was aron kader , who was the palestinian-american .
and then there was me , the iranian-american of the group .
now , being iranian-american presents its own set of problems , as you know .
those two countries are n't getting along these days .
so it causes a lot of inner conflict , you know , like part of me likes me , part of me hates me .
part of me thinks i should have a nuclear program , the other part thinks i ca n't be trusted with one .
these are dilemmas i have every day .
but i was born in iran ; i 'm now an american citizen , which means i have the american passport , which means i can travel .
because if you only have the iranian passport , you 're kind of limited to the countries you can go to with open arms , you know - syria , venezuela , north korea .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so anyone who 's gotten their passport in america will tell you , when you get your passport , it still says what country you were born in .
so i remember getting my american passport .
i was like , " woohoo ! i 'm going to travel . "
and i opened it up , it said , " born in iran . " i 'm like , " oh , come on , man . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " i 'm trying to go places . "
but what 's interesting is , i 've never had trouble traveling in any other western countries with my american passport , even though it says , " born in iran . " no problems .
where i 've had some problems is some of the arab countries , because i guess some of the arab countries are n't getting along with iran either .
and so i was in kuwait recently , doing a comedy show with some other american comedians .
they all went through , and then the border patrol saw my american passport .
" ah ha ! american , great . "
then he opened it up . " born in iran ? wait . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and he started asking me questions .
he said , " what is your father 's name ? "
i said , " well , he 's passed away , but his name was khosro . "
he goes , " what is your grandfather 's name ? "
i said , " he passed away a long time ago .
his name was jabbar . "
he says , " you wait . i 'll be back , " and he walked away .
and i started freaking out , because i do n't know what kind of crap my grandfather was into .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- thought the guy was going to come back and be like , " we 've been looking for you for 200 years . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " your grandfather has a parking violation . it 's way overdue .
you owe us two billion dollars . "
but as you can see , when i talk , i speak with an american accent , which you would think as an iranian-american actor , i should be able to play any part , good , bad , what have you .
but a lot of times in hollywood , when casting directors find out you 're of middle eastern descent , they go , " oh , you 're iranian . great .
can you say ' i will kill you in the name of allah ? " ' " i could say that , but what if i were to say , ' hello . i 'm your doctor ? " ' they go , " great . and then you hijack the hospital . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- like i think you 're missing the point here .
do n't get me wrong , i do n't mind playing bad guys .
i want to play a bad guy . i want to rob a bank .
i want to rob a bank in a film . i want to rob a bank in a film , but do it with a gun , with a gun , not with a bomb strapped around me , right .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- because i imagine the director : " maz , i think your character would rob the bank with a bomb around him . "
" why would i do that ?
if i want the money , why would i kill myself ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- right .
-lrb- applause -rrb- " gimme all your money , or i 'll blow myself up . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " well , then blow yourself up .
just do it outside , please . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but the fact is , there 's good people everywhere .
that 's what i try and show in my stand-up . there 's good people everywhere .
all it takes in one person to mess it up .
like a couple months ago in times square in new york , there was this pakistani muslim guy who tried to blow up a car bomb .
now , i happened to be in times square that night doing a comedy show .
and a few months before that , there was a white american guy in austin , texas who flew his airplane into the irs building , and i happened to be in austin that day doing a stand-up comedy show .
now i 'll tell you , as a middle eastern male , when you show up around a lot of these activities , you start feeling guilty at one point .
i was watching the news . i 'm like , " am i involved in this crap ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " i did n't get the memo . what 's going on ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but what was interesting was , the pakistani muslim guy - see he gives a bad name to muslims and middle easterners and pakistanis from all over the world .
and one thing that happened there was also the pakistani taliban took credit for that failed car bombing .
my question is : why would you take credit for a failed car bombing ?
" we just wanted to say we tried . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " and furthermore , it is the thought that counts . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- " and in conclusion , win some , lose some . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but what happened was , when the white guy flew his plane into the building , i know all my middle eastern and muslim friends in the states were watching tv , going , " please , do n't be middle eastern .
do n't be hassan . do n't be hussein . "
and the name came out jack . i 'm like , " woooo !
that 's not one of us . "
but i kept watching the news in case they came back , they were like , " before he did it , he converted to islam . "
" damn it ! why jack ? why ? "
but the fact is , i 've been lucky to get a chance to perform all over the world , and i did a lot of shows in the middle east .
i just did a seven-country solo tour .
i was in oman , and i was in saudi arabia .
i was in dubai .
and it 's great , there 's good people everywhere .
and you learn great things about these places .
i encourage people always to go visit these places .
for example , dubai - cool place .
they 're obsessed with having the biggest , tallest , longest , as we all know .
they have a mall there , the dubai mall .
it is so big , they have taxis in the mall .
i was walking . i heard " beep , beep . "
i 'm like , " what are you doing here ? "
he goes , " i 'm going to the zara store . it 's three miles away .
out of my way . out of my way . out of my way . "
and what 's crazy - there 's a recession going on , even in dubai , but you would n't know by the prices .
like in the dubai mall , they sell frozen yogurt by the gram .
it 's like a drug deal .
i was walking by . the guy goes , " psst . habibi , my friend . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " you want some frozen yogurt ?
come here . come here . come here .
i have one gram , five gram , 10 gram . how many gram do you want ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i bought five grams . 10 dollars . 10 dollars ! i said , " what 's in this ? "
he 's like , " good stuff , man . columbian . top of the line . top of the line . "
the other thing you learn sometimes when you travel to these countries in the middle east , sometimes in latin american countries , south american countries - a lot of times when they build stuff , there 's no rules and regulations .
for example , i took my two year-old son to the playground at the dubai mall .
and i 've taken my two year-old son to playgrounds all over the united states .
and when you put your two year-old on a slide in the united states , they put something on the slide to slow the kid down as he comes down the slide .
not in the middle east .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i put my two year-old on the slide ; he went frrmrmm ! he took off .
i went down . i go , " where 's my son ? "
" on the third floor , sir . on the third floor . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " you take a taxi . you go to zara . make a left . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " try the yogurt . it 's very good . little expensive . "
but one of the things i try to do with my stand-up is to break stereotypes .
and i 've been guilty of stereotyping as well .
i was in dubai . and there 's a lot of indians who work in dubai .
and they do n't get paid that well .
and i got it in my head that all the indians there must be workers .
and i forgot there 's obviously successful indians in dubai as well .
i was doing a show , and they said , " we 're going to send a driver to pick you up . "
so i went down to the lobby , and i saw this indian guy .
i go , " he 's got to be my driver . "
because he was standing there in like a cheap suit , thin mustache , staring at me .
so i went over , " excuse me , sir , are you my driver ? "
he goes , " no , sir . i own the hotel . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i go , " i 'm sorry . then why were you staring at me ? "
he goes , " i thought you were my driver . "
-lrb- applause -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'll leave you guys with this : i try , with my stand-up , to break stereotypes , present middle easterners in a positive light - muslims in a positive light - and i hope that in the coming years , more film and television programs come out of hollywood presenting us in a positive light .
who knows , maybe one day we 'll even have our own james bond , right .
" my name is bond , jamal bond . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- til then , i 'll keep telling jokes . i hope you keep laughing .
have a good day . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i believe that there are new , hidden tensions that are actually happening between people and institutions - institutions that are the institutions that people inhabit in their daily life : schools , hospitals , workplaces , factories , offices , etc .
and something that i see happening is something that i would like to call a sort of " democratization of intimacy . "
and what do i mean by that ?
i mean that what people are doing is , in fact , they are sort of , with their communication channels , they are breaking an imposed isolation that these institutions are imposing on them .
how are they doing this ? they 're doing it in a very simple way , by calling their mom from work , by iming from their office to their friends , by texting under the desk .
the pictures that you 're seeing behind me are people that i visited in the last few months .
and i asked them to come along with the person they communicate with most .
and somebody brought a boyfriend , somebody a father .
one young woman brought her grandfather .
for 20 years , i 've been looking at how people use channels such as email , the mobile phone , texting , etc .
what we 're actually going to see is that , fundamentally , people are communicating on a regular basis with five , six , seven of their most intimate sphere .
now , lets take some data . facebook .
recently some sociologists from facebook - facebook is the channel that you would expect is the most enlargening of all channels .
and an average user , said cameron marlow , from facebook , has about 120 friends .
but he actually talks to , has two-way exchanges with , about four to six people on a regular base , depending on his gender .
academic research on instant messaging also shows 100 people on buddy lists , but fundamentally people chat with two , three , four - anyway , less than five .
my own research on cellphones and voice calls shows that 80 percent of the calls are actually made to four people . 80 percent .
and when you go to skype , it 's down to two people .
a lot of sociologists actually are quite disappointed .
i mean , i 've been a bit disappointed sometimes when i saw this data and all this deployment , just for five people .
and some sociologists actually feel that it 's a closure , it 's a cocooning , that we 're disengaging from the public .
and i would actually , i would like to show you that if we actually look at who is doing it , and from where they 're doing it , actually there is an incredible social transformation .
there are three stories that i think are quite good examples .
the first gentleman , he 's a baker .
and so he starts working every morning at four o 'clock in the morning .
and around eight o 'clock he sort of sneaks away from his oven , cleans his hands from the flour and calls his wife .
he just wants to wish her a good day , because that 's the start of her day .
and i 've heard this story a number of times .
a young factory worker who works night shifts , who manages to sneak away from the factory floor , where there is cctv by the way , and find a corner , where at 11 o 'clock at night he can call his girlfriend and just say goodnight .
or a mother who , at four o 'clock , suddenly manages to find a corner in the toilet to check that her children are safely home .
then there is another couple , there is a brazilian couple .
they 've lived in italy for a number of years .
they skype with their families a few times a week .
but once a fortnight , they actually put the computer on their dining table , pull out the webcam and actually have dinner with their family in sao paulo . and they have a big event of it .
and i heard this story the first time a couple of years ago from a very modest family of immigrants from kosovo in switzerland .
they had set up a big screen in their living room , and every morning they had breakfast with their grandmother .
but danny miller , who is a very good anthropologist who is working on filipina migrant women who leave their children back in the philippines , was telling me about how much parenting is going on through skype , and how much these mothers are engaged with their children through skype .
and then there is the third couple . they are two friends .
they chat to each other every day , a few times a day actually .
and finally , finally , they 've managed to put instant messaging on their computers at work .
and now , obviously , they have it open .
whenever they have a moment they chat to each other .
and this is exactly what we 've been seeing with teenagers and kids doing it in school , under the table , and texting under the table to their friends .
so , none of these cases are unique .
i mean , i could tell you hundreds of them .
but what is really exceptional is the setting .
so , think of the three settings i 've talked to you about : factory , migration , office .
but it could be in a school , it could be an administration , it could be a hospital .
three settings that , if we just step back 15 years , if you just think back 15 years , when you clocked in , when you clocked in to an office , when you clocked in to a factory , there was no contact for the whole duration of the time , there was no contact with your private sphere .
if you were lucky there was a public phone hanging in the corridor or somewhere .
if you were in management , oh , that was a different story .
maybe you had a direct line .
if you were not , you maybe had to go through an operator .
but basically , when you walked into those buildings , the private sphere was left behind you .
and this has become such a norm of our professional lives , such a norm and such an expectation .
and it had nothing to do with technical capability .
the phones were there . but the expectation was once you moved in there your commitment was fully to the task at hand , fully to the people around you .
that was where the focus had to be .
and this has become such a cultural norm that we actually school our children for them to be capable to do this cleavage .
if you think nursery , kindergarten , first years of school are just dedicated to take away the children , to make them used to staying long hours away from their family .
and then the school enacts perfectly well .
it mimics perfectly all the rituals that we will find in offices : rituals of entry , rituals of exit , the schedules , the uniforms in this country , things that identify you , team-building activities , team building that will allow you to basically be with a random group of kids , or a random group of people that you will have to be with for a number of time .
and of course , the major thing : learn to pay attention , to concentrate and focus your attention .
this only started about 150 years ago .
it only started with the birth of modern bureaucracy , and of industrial revolution .
when people basically had to go somewhere else to work and carry out the work .
and when with modern bureaucracy there was a very rational approach , where there was a clear distinction between the private sphere and the public sphere .
so , until then , basically people were living on top of their trades .
they were living on top of the land they were laboring .
they were living on top of the workshops where they were working .
and if you think , it 's permeated our whole culture , even our cities .
if you think of medieval cities , medieval cities the boroughs all have the names of the guilds and professions that lived there .
now we have sprawling residential suburbias that are well distinct from production areas and commercial areas .
and actually , over these 150 years , there has been a very clear class system that also has emerged .
so the lower the status of the job and of the person carrying out , the more removed he would be from his personal sphere .
people have taken this amazing possibility of actually being in contact all through the day or in all types of situations .
and they are doing it massively .
the pew institute , which produces good data on a regular basis on , for instance , in the states , says that - and i think that this number is conservative - 50 percent of anybody with email access at work is actually doing private email from his office .
i really think that the number is conservative .
in my own research , we saw that the peak for private email is actually 11 o 'clock in the morning , whatever the country .
75 percent of people admit doing private conversations from work on their mobile phones .
100 percent are using text .
the point is that this re-appropriation of the personal sphere is not terribly successful with all institutions .
i 'm always surprised the u.s. army sociologists are discussing of the impact for instance , of soldiers in iraq having daily contact with their families .
but there are many institutions that are actually blocking this access .
and every day , every single day , i read news that makes me cringe , like a $ 15 fine to kids in texas , for using , every time they take out their mobile phone in school .
immediate dismissal to bus drivers in new york , if seen with a mobile phone in a hand .
companies blocking access to im or to facebook .
behind issues of security and safety , which have always been the arguments for social control , in fact what is going on is that these institutions are trying to decide who , in fact , has a right to self determine their attention , to decide , whether they should , or not , be isolated .
and they are actually trying to block , in a certain sense , this movement of a greater possibility of intimacy .
roger ebert : these are my words , but this is not my voice .
this is alex , the best computer voice i 've been able to find , which comes as standard equipment on every macintosh .
for most of my life , i never gave a second thought to my ability to speak .
it was like breathing .
in those days , i was living in a fool 's paradise .
after surgeries for cancer took away my ability to speak , eat or drink , i was forced to enter this virtual world in which a computer does some of my living for me .
for several days now , we have enjoyed brilliant and articulate speakers here at ted .
i used to be able to talk like that .
maybe i was n't as smart , but i was at least as talkative .
i want to devote my talk today to the act of speaking itself , and how the act of speaking or not speaking is tied so indelibly to one 's identity as to force the birth of a new person when it is taken away .
however , i 've found that listening to a computer voice for any great length of time can be monotonous .
so i 've decided to recruit some of my ted friends to read my words aloud for me .
i will start with my wife , chaz .
chaz ebert : it was chaz who stood by my side through three attempts to reconstruct my jaw and restore my ability to speak .
going into the first surgery for a recurrence of salivary cancer in 2006 , i expected to be out of the hospital in time to return to my movie review show , ' ebert and roeper at the movies . ' i had pre-taped enough shows to get me through six weeks of surgery and recuperation .
the doctors took a fibula bone from my leg and some tissue from my shoulder to fashion into a new jaw .
my tongue , larynx and vocal cords were still healthy and unaffected .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- ce : i was optimistic , and all was right with the world .
the first surgery was a great success .
i saw myself in the mirror and i looked pretty good .
two weeks later , i was ready to return home .
i was using my ipod to play the leonard cohen song ' i 'm your man ' for my doctors and nurses .
suddenly , i had an episode of catastrophic bleeding .
my carotid artery had ruptured .
thank god i was still in my hospital room and my doctors were right there .
chaz told me that if that song had n't played for so long , i might have already been in the car , on the way home , and would have died right there and then .
so thank you , leonard cohen , for saving my life .
-lrb- applause -rrb- there was a second surgery - which held up for five or six days and then it also fell apart .
and then a third attempt , which also patched me back together pretty well , until it failed .
a doctor from brazil said he had never seen anyone survive a carotid artery rupture .
and before i left the hospital , after a year of being hospitalized , i had seven ruptures of my carotid artery .
there was no particular day when anyone told me i would never speak again ; it just sort of became obvious .
human speech is an ingenious manipulation of our breath within the sound chamber of our mouth and respiratory system .
we need to be able to hold and manipulate that breath in order to form sounds .
therefore , the system must be essentially airtight in order to capture air .
because i had lost my jaw , i could no longer form a seal , and therefore my tongue and all of my other vocal equipment was rendered powerless .
dean ornish : at first for a long time , i wrote messages in notebooks .
then i tried typing words on my laptop and using its built in voice .
this was faster , and nobody had to try to read my handwriting .
i tried out various computer voices that were available online , and for several months i had a british accent , which chaz called sir lawrence . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " it was the clearest i could find .
then apple released the alex voice , which was the best i 'd heard .
it knew things like the difference between an exclamation point and a question mark .
when it saw a period , it knew how to make a sentence sound like it was ending instead of staying up in the air .
there are all sorts of html codes you can use to control the timing and inflection of computer voices , and i 've experimented with them .
for me , they share a fundamental problem : they 're too slow .
when i find myself in a conversational situation , i need to type fast and to jump right in .
people do n't have the time or the patience to wait for me to fool around with the codes for every word or phrase .
but what value do we place on the sound of our own voice ?
how does that affect who you are as a person ?
when people hear alex speaking my words , do they experience a disconnect ?
does that create a separation or a distance from one person to the next ?
how did i feel not being able to speak ?
i felt , and i still feel , a lot of distance from the human mainstream .
i 've become uncomfortable when i 'm separated from my laptop .
even then , i 'm aware that most people have little patience for my speaking difficulties .
so chaz suggested finding a company that could make a customized voice using my tv show voice from a period of 30 years .
at first i was against it .
i thought it would be creepy to hear my own voice coming from a computer .
there was something comforting about a voice that was not my own .
but i decided then to just give it a try .
so we contacted a company in scotland that created personalized computer voices .
they 'd never made one from previously-recorded materials .
all of their voices had been made by a speaker recording original words in a control booth .
but they were willing to give it a try .
so i sent them many hours of recordings of my voice , including several audio commentary tracks that i 'd made for movies on dvds .
and it sounded like me , it really did .
there was a reason for that ; it was me .
but it was n't that simple .
the tapes from my tv show were n't very useful because there were too many other kinds of audio involved - movie soundtracks , for example , or gene siskel arguing with me - -lrb- laughter -rrb- and my words often had a particular emphasis that did n't fit into a sentence well enough .
i 'll let you hear a sample of that voice .
these are a few of the comments i recorded for use when chaz and i appeared on the oprah winfrey program .
and here 's the voice we call roger jr .
or roger 2.0 .
roger 2.0 : oprah , i ca n't tell you how great it is to be back on your show .
we have been talking for a long time , and now here we are again .
this is the first version of my computer voice .
it still needs improvement , but at least it sounds like me and not like hal 9000 .
when i heard it the first time , it sent chills down my spine .
when i type anything , this voice will speak whatever i type .
when i read something , it will read in my voice .
i have typed these words in advance , as i did n't think it would be thrilling to sit here watching me typing .
the voice was created by a company in scotland named cereproc .
it makes me feel good that many of the words you are hearing were first spoken while i was commenting on " casablanca " and " citizen kane . "
this is the first voice they 've created for an individual .
there are several very good voices available for computers , but they all sound like somebody else , while this voice sounds like me .
i plan to use it on television , radio and the internet .
people who need a voice should know that most computers already come with built-in speaking systems .
many blind people use them to read pages on the web to themselves .
but i 've got to say , in first grade , they said i talked too much , and now i still can .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- roger ebert : as you can hear , it sounds like me , but the words jump up and down .
the flow is n't natural .
the good people in scotland are still improving my voice , and i 'm optimistic about it .
but so far , the apple alex voice is the best one i 've heard .
i wrote a blog about it and actually got a comment from the actor who played alex .
he said he recorded many long hours in various intonations to be used in the voice .
a very large sample is needed .
john hunter : all my life i was a motormouth .
now i have spoken my last words , and i do n't even remember for sure what they were .
i feel like the hero of that harlan ellison story titled " i have no mouth and i must scream . "
on wednesday , david christian explained to us what a tiny instant the human race represents in the time-span of the universe .
for almost all of its millions and billions of years , there was no life on earth at all .
for almost all the years of life on earth , there was no intelligent life .
only after we learned to pass knowledge from one generation to the next , did civilization become possible .
in cosmological terms , that was about 10 minutes ago .
finally came mankind 's most advanced and mysterious tool , the computer .
that has mostly happened in my lifetime .
some of the famous early computers were being built in my hometown of urbana , the birthplace of hal 9000 .
when i heard the amazing talk by salman khan on wednesday , about the khan academy website that teaches hundreds of subjects to students all over the world , i had a flashback .
it was about 1960 .
as a local newspaper reporter still in high school , i was sent over to the computer lab of the university of illinois to interview the creators of something called plato .
the initials stood for programmed logic for automated teaching operations .
this was a computer-assisted instruction system , which in those days ran on a computer named illiac .
the programmers said it could assist students in their learning .
i doubt , on that day 50 years ago , they even dreamed of what salman khan has accomplished .
but that 's not the point .
the point is plato was only 50 years ago , an instant in time .
it continued to evolve and operated in one form or another on more and more sophisticated computers , until only five years ago .
i have learned from wikipedia that , starting with that humble beginning , plato established forums , message boards , online testing , email , chat rooms , picture languages , instant messaging , remote screen sharing and multiple-player games .
since the first web browser was also developed in urbana , it appears that my hometown in downstate illinois was the birthplace of much of the virtual , online universe we occupy today .
but i 'm not here from the chamber of commerce .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'm here as a man who wants to communicate .
all of this has happened in my lifetime .
i started writing on a computer back in the 1970s when one of the first atech systems was installed at the chicago sun-times .
i was in line at radio shack to buy one of the first model 100 's .
and when i told the people in the press room at the academy awards that they 'd better install some phone lines for internet connections , they did n't know what i was talking about .
when i bought my first desktop , it was a dec rainbow .
does anybody remember that ? "
-lrb- applause -rrb- " the sun times sent me to the cannes film festival with a portable computer the size of a suitcase named the porteram telebubble .
i joined compuserve when it had fewer numbers than i currently have followers on twitter .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- ce : all of this has happened in the blink of an eye .
it is unimaginable what will happen next .
it makes me incredibly fortunate to live at this moment in history .
indeed , i am lucky to live in history at all , because without intelligence and memory there is no history .
for billions of years , the universe evolved completely without notice .
now we live in the age of the internet , which seems to be creating a form of global consciousness .
and because of it , i can communicate as well as i ever could .
we are born into a box of time and space .
we use words and communication to break out of it and to reach out to others .
for me , the internet began as a useful tool and now has become something i rely on for my actual daily existence .
i can not speak ; i can only type so fast .
computer voices are sometimes not very sophisticated , but with my computer , i can communicate more widely than ever before .
i feel as if my blog , my email , twitter and facebook have given me a substitute for everyday conversation .
they are n't an improvement , but they 're the best i can do .
they give me a way to speak .
not everybody has the patience of my wife , chaz .
but online , everybody speaks at the same speed .
this whole adventure has been a learning experience .
every time there was a surgery that failed , i was left with a little less flesh and bone .
now i have no jaw left at all .
while harvesting tissue from both my shoulders , the surgeries left me with back pain and reduced my ability to walk easily .
ironic that my legs are fine , and it 's my shoulders that slow up my walk .
when you see me today , i look like the phantom of the opera .
but no you do n't .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- it is human nature to look at someone like me and assume i have lost some of my marbles .
people - -lrb- applause -rrb- people talk loudly - i 'm so sorry .
excuse me .
-lrb- applause -rrb- people talk loudly and slowly to me .
sometimes they assume i am deaf .
there are people who do n't want to make eye contact .
believe me , he did n't mean this as - anyway , let me just read it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you should never let your wife read something like this .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- it is human nature to look away from illness .
we do n't enjoy a reminder of our own fragile mortality .
that 's why writing on the internet has become a lifesaver for me .
my ability to think and write have not been affected .
and on the web , my real voice finds expression .
i have also met many other disabled people who communicate this way .
one of my twitter friends can type only with his toes .
one of the funniest blogs on the web is written by a friend of mine named smartass cripple .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- google him and he will make you laugh .
all of these people are saying , in one way or another , that what you see is not all you get .
so i have not come here to complain .
i have much to make me happy and relieved .
i seem , for the time being , to be cancer-free .
i am writing as well as ever .
i am productive .
if i were in this condition at any point before a few cosmological instants ago , i would be as isolated as a hermit .
i would be trapped inside my head .
because of the rush of human knowledge , because of the digital revolution , i have a voice , and i do not need to scream .
re : wait . i have one more thing to add .
a guy goes into a psychiatrist .
the psychiatrist says , " you 're crazy . "
the guy says , " i want a second opinion . "
the psychiatrist says , " all right , you 're ugly . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- you all know the test for artificial intelligence - the turing test .
a human judge has a conversation with a human and a computer .
if the judge ca n't tell the machine apart from the human , the machine has passed the test .
i now propose a test for computer voices - the ebert test .
if a computer voice can successfully tell a joke and do the timing and delivery as well as henny youngman , then that 's the voice i want .
-lrb- applause -rrb- let 's just get started here .
okay , just a moment .
-lrb- whirring -rrb- all right .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- oh , sorry .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- beatboxing -rrb- thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the key question is , " when are we going to get fusion ? "
it 's really been a long time since we 've known about fusion .
we 've known about fusion since 1920 , when sir arthur stanley eddington and the british association for the advancement of science conjectured that that 's why the sun shines .
i 've always been very worried about resource .
i do n't know about you , but when my mother gave me food , i always sorted the ones i disliked from the ones i liked .
and i ate the disliked ones first , because the ones you like , you want to save .
and as a child you 're always worried about resource .
and once it was sort of explained to me how fast we were using up the world 's resources , i got very upset , about as upset as i did when i realized that the earth will only last about five billion years before it 's swallowed by the sun .
big events in my life , a strange child .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- energy , at the moment , is dominated by resource .
the countries that make a lot of money out of energy have something underneath them .
coal-powered industrial revolution in this country - oil , gas , sorry .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- gas , i 'm probably the only person who really enjoys it when mister putin turns off the gas tap , because my budget goes up .
we 're really dominated now by those things that we 're using up faster and faster and faster .
and as we try to lift billions of people out of poverty in the third world , in the developing world , we 're using energy faster and faster .
and those resources are going away .
and the way we 'll make energy in the future is not from resource , it 's really from knowledge .
if you look 50 years into the future , the way we probably will be making energy is probably one of these three , with some wind , with some other things , but these are going to be the base load energy drivers .
solar can do it , and we certainly have to develop solar .
but we have a lot of knowledge to gain before we can make solar the base load energy supply for the world .
fission .
our government is going to put in six new nuclear power stations .
they 're going to put in six new nuclear power stations , and probably more after that .
china is building nuclear power stations . everybody is .
because they know that that is one sure way to do carbon-free energy .
but if you wanted to know what the perfect energy source is , the perfect energy source is one that does n't take up much space , has a virtually inexhaustible supply , is safe , does n't put any carbon into the atmosphere , does n't leave any long-lived radioactive waste : it 's fusion .
but there is a catch . of course there is always a catch in these cases .
fusion is very hard to do .
we 've been trying for 50 years .
okay . what is fusion ? here comes the nuclear physics .
and sorry about that , but this is what turns me on .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i was a strange child .
nuclear energy comes for a simple reason .
the most stable nucleus is iron , right in the middle of the periodic table .
it 's a medium-sized nucleus .
and you want to go towards iron if you want to get energy .
so , uranium , which is very big , wants to split .
but small atoms want to join together , small nuclei want to join together to make bigger ones to go towards iron .
and you can get energy out this way .
and indeed that 's exactly what stars do .
in the middle of stars , you 're joining hydrogen together to make helium and then helium together to make carbon , to make oxygen , all the things that you 're made of are made in the middle of stars .
but it 's a hard process to do because , as you know , the middle of a star is quite hot , almost by definition .
and there is one reaction that 's probably the easiest fusion reaction to do .
it 's between two isotopes of hydrogen , two kinds of hydrogen : deuterium , which is heavy hydrogen , which you can get from seawater , and tritium which is super-heavy hydrogen .
these two nuclei , when they 're far apart , are charged .
and you push them together and they repel .
but when you get them close enough , something called the strong force starts to act and pulls them together .
so , most of the time they repel .
you get them closer and closer and closer and then at some point the strong force grips them together .
for a moment they become helium 5 , because they 've got five particles inside them .
so , that 's that process there . deuterium and tritium goes together makes helium 5 .
helium splits out , and a neutron comes out and lots of energy comes out .
if you can get something to about 150 million degrees , things will be rattling around so fast that every time they collide in just the right configuration , this will happen , and it will release energy .
and that energy is what powers fusion .
and it 's this reaction that we want to do .
there is one trickiness about this reaction .
well , there is a trickiness that you have to make it 150 million degrees , but there is a trickiness about the reaction yet .
it 's pretty hot .
the trickiness about the reaction is that tritium does n't exist in nature .
you have to make it from something else .
and you make if from lithium . that reaction at the bottom , that 's lithium 6 , plus a neutron , will give you more helium , plus tritium .
and that 's the way you make your tritium .
but fortunately , if you can do this fusion reaction , you 've got a neutron , so you can make that happen .
now , why the hell would we bother to do this ?
this is basically why we would bother to do it .
if you just plot how much fuel we 've got left , in units of present world consumption .
and as you go across there you see a few tens of years of oil - the blue line , by the way , is the lowest estimate of existing resources .
and the yellow line is the most optimistic estimate .
and as you go across there you will see that we 've got a few tens of years , and perhaps 100 years of fossil fuels left .
and god knows we do n't really want to burn all of it , because it will make an awful lot of carbon in the air .
and then we get to uranium .
and with current reactor technology we really do n't have very much uranium .
and we will have to extract uranium from sea water , which is the yellow line , to make conventional nuclear power stations actually do very much for us .
this is a bit shocking , because in fact our government is relying on that for us to meet kyoto , and do all those kind of things .
to go any further you would have to have breeder technology .
and breeder technology is fast breeders . and that 's pretty dangerous .
the big thing , on the right , is the lithium we have in the world .
and lithium is in sea water . that 's the yellow line .
and we have 30 million years worth of fusion fuel in sea water .
everybody can get it . that 's why we want to do fusion .
is it cost-competitive ?
we make estimates of what we think it would cost to actually make a fusion power plant .
and we get within about the same price as current electricity .
so , how would we make it ?
we have to hold something at 150 million degrees .
and , in fact , we 've done this .
we hold it with a magnetic field .
and inside it , right in the middle of this toroidal shape , doughnut shape , right in the middle is 150 million degrees .
it boils away in the middle at 150 million degrees .
and in fact we can make fusion happen .
and just down the road , this is jet .
it 's the only machine in the world that 's actually done fusion .
when people say fusion is 30 years away , and always will be , i say , " yeah , but we 've actually done it . " right ?
we can do fusion . in the center of this device we made 16 megawatts of fusion power in 1997 .
and in 2013 we 're going to fire it up again and break all those records .
but that 's not really fusion power . that 's just making some fusion happen .
we 've got to take that , we 've got to make that into a fusion reactor .
because we want 30 million years worth of fusion power for the earth .
this is the device we 're building now .
it gets very expensive to do this research .
it turns out you ca n't do fusion on a table top despite all that cold fusion nonsense . right ?
you ca n't . you have to do it in a very big device .
more than half the world 's population is involved in building this device in southern france , which is a nice place to put an experiment .
seven nations are involved in building this .
it 's going to cost us 10 billion . and we 'll produce half a gigawatt of fusion power .
but that 's not electricity yet .
we have to get to this .
we have to get to a power plant .
we have to start putting electricity on the grid in this very complex technology .
and i 'd really like it to happen a lot faster than it is .
but at the moment , all we can imagine is sometime in the 2030s .
i wish this were different . we really need it now .
we 're going to have a problem with power in the next five years in this country .
so 2030 looks like an infinity away .
but we ca n't abandon it now ; we have to push forward , get fusion to happen .
i wish we had more money , i wish we had more resources .
but this is what we 're aiming at , sometime in the 2030s - real electric power from fusion . thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- let 's begin with a story .
once upon a time - well actually less than two years ago - in a kingdom not so very far away , there was a man who traveled many miles to come to work at the jewel in the kingdom 's crown - an internationally famous company .
let 's call it island networks .
now this kingdom had many resources and mighty ambitions , but the one thing it lacked was people .
and so it invited workers from around the world to come and help it build the nation .
but in order to enter and to stay these migrants had to pass a few tests .
and so it was , our man presented himself to authorities in the kingdom , looking forward to settling into his new life .
but then something unexpected happened .
the medical personnel who took blood samples from the man never actually told him what they were testing for .
he was n't offered counseling before or after the test , which is best medical practice .
he was never informed of the results of the test .
and yet , a couple of weeks later , he was picked up and taken to prison where he was subjected to a medical exam , including a full-body search in full view of the others in the cell .
he was released , but then a day or two later , he was taken to the airport and he was deported .
what on earth did this man do to merit this treatment ?
what was his terrible crime ?
he was infected with hiv .
now the kingdom is one of about 50 countries that imposes restrictions on the entry or stay of people living with hiv .
the kingdom argues that its laws allow it to detain or deport foreigners who pose a risk to the economy or the security or the public health or the morals of the state .
but these laws , when applied to people living with hiv , to which these countries are signatories .
but you know what ?
matters of principle aside , practically speaking , these laws drive hiv underground .
people are less likely to come forth to be tested or treated or to disclose their condition , none of which helps these individuals or the communities these laws purport to protect .
today we can prevent the transmission of hiv .
and with treatment , it is a manageable condition .
we are very far from the days when the only practical response to dread disease was to have banished the afflicted - like this , " the exile of the leper . "
so you tell me why , in our age of science , we still have laws and policies which come from an age of superstition .
time for a quick show of hands .
who here has been touched by hiv - either because you yourself have the virus or you have a family member or a friend or a colleague who is living with hiv ?
hands up .
wow . wow .
that 's a significant number of us .
you know better than anyone that hiv brings out the best and the worst in humanity .
and the laws reflect these attitudes .
i 'm not just talking about laws on the books , but laws as they are enforced on the streets and laws as they are decided in the courts .
and i 'm not just talking about laws as they relate to people living with hiv , but people who are at greatest risk of infection - people such as those who inject drugs or sex workers or transgendered persons or migrants or prisoners .
and in many parts of the world that includes women and children who are especially vulnerable .
now there are laws in many parts of the world which reflect the best of human nature .
these laws treat people touched by hiv with compassion and acceptance .
these laws respect universal human rights and they are grounded in evidence .
these laws ensure that people living with hiv and those at greatest risk are protected from violence and discrimination and that they get access to prevention and to treatment .
unfortunately , these good laws of really bad law - law which is grounded in moral judgement and in fear and in misinformation , laws which specifically punish people living with hiv or those at greatest risk .
these laws fly in the face of science , and they are grounded in prejudice and in ignorance and in a rewriting of tradition and a selective reading of religion .
but you know what ? you do n't have to take my word for it .
we 're going to hear from two people who are on the sharp end of the law .
the first is nick rhoades . he 's an american .
and he was convicted under the u.s. state of iowa 's law on hiv transmission and exposure - neither of which offense he actually committed .
-lrb- video -rrb- nick rhoades : if something is against the law then that is telling society that is unacceptable , that 's bad behavior .
and i think the severity of that punishment tells you how bad you are as a person .
you 're a class b felon , lifetime sex offender .
you are a very , very , very bad person .
and you did a very , very , very bad thing .
and so that 's just programmed into you .
and you go through the correctional system and everyone 's telling you the same thing .
and you 're just like , i 'm a very bad person .
shereen el-feki : it 's not just a question of unfair or ineffective laws .
some countries have good laws , laws which could stem the tide of hiv .
the problem is that these laws are flouted .
because stigma gives unofficial license to treat people living with hiv or those at greatest risk unlike other citizens .
and this is exactly what happened to helma and dongo from namibia .
-lrb- video -rrb- hilma : i found out when i went to the hospital for a pregnancy check-up .
the nurse announced that every pregnant woman must also be tested for hiv that day .
i took the test and the result showed i was positive .
that 's the day i found out .
the nurse said to me , " why should you people bcome pregnant when you know you are hiv positive ?
why are you pregnant when you are living positive ? "
i am sure now that is the reason they sterilized me .
because i am hiv positive .
they did n't give the forms to me or explain what was in the form .
the nurse just came with it already marked where i had to sign .
and with the labor pain , i did n't have the strength to ask them to read it to me .
i just signed .
se : hilma and nick and our man in the kingdom are among the 34 million people living with hiv according to recent estimates .
they 're the lucky ones because they 're still alive .
according to those same estimates , in 2010 1.8 million people died of aids related causes .
these are terrible and tragic figures .
but if we look a little more broadly into the statistics , we actually see some reason for hope .
looking globally , the number of new infections of hiv is declining .
and looking globally as well , deaths are also starting to fall .
there are many reasons for these positive developments , but one of the most remarkable is in the increase in the number of people around the world on anti-retroviral therapy , the medicines they need to keep their hiv in check .
now there are still many problems .
only about half of the people who need treatment are currently receiving it .
in some parts of the world - like here in the middle east and north africa - new infections are rising and so are deaths .
and the money , the money we need for the global response to hiv , that is shrinking .
but for the first time in three decades into this epidemic we have a real chance to come to grips with hiv .
but in order to do that we need to tackle an epidemic of really bad law .
it 's for this reason that the global commission on hiv and the law , of which i 'm a member , was established by the agencies of the united nations - to look at the ways that legal environments are affecting people living with hiv and those at greatest risk , and to recommend what should be done to make the law an ally , not an enemy , of the global response to hiv .
let me give you just one example of the way a legal environment can make a positive difference .
people who inject drugs are one of those groups i mentioned .
they 're at high risk of hiv through contaminated injection equipment and other risk-related behaviors .
in fact , one in every 10 new infections of hiv is among people who inject drugs .
now drug use or possession is illegal in almost every country .
but some countries take a harder line on this than others .
in thailand people who use drugs , or are merely suspected of using drugs , are placed in detention centers , like the one you see here , where they are supposed to clean up .
there is absolutely no evidence cures their drug dependence .
there is , however , ample evidence to show that incarcerating people increases their risk of hiv and other infections .
we know how to reduce hiv transmission and other risks in people who inject drugs .
it 's called harm reduction , and it involves , among other things , providing clean needles and syringes , offering opioid substitution therapy and other evidence-based treatments to reduce drug dependence .
it involves providing information and education and condoms to reduce hiv transmission , and also providing hiv testing and counseling and treatment should people become infected .
where the legal environment allows for harm reduction the results are striking .
australia and switzerland were two countries which introduced harm reduction very early on in their hiv epidemics , and they have a very low rate of hiv among injecting drug users .
the u.s. and malaysia came to harm reduction a little later , and they have higher rates of hiv in these populations .
thailand and russia , however , have resisted harm reduction and have stringent laws which punish drug use .
and hey , surprise , very high rates of hiv among people who are injecting drugs .
at the global commission we have studied the evidence , and we 've heard the experiences of over 700 people from 140 countries .
and the trend ? well the trend is clear .
where you criminalize people living with hiv or those at greatest risk , you fuel the epidemic .
now coming up with a vaccine for hiv or a cure for aids - now that 's rocket science .
but changing the law is n't .
and in fact , a number of countries are starting to make progress on a number of points .
to begin , countries need to review their legislation as it touches hiv and vulnerable groups .
on the back of those reviews , governments should repeal laws that punish or discriminate against people living with hiv or those at greatest risk .
repealing a law is n't easy , and it 's particularly difficult when it relates to touchy subjects like drugs and sex .
but there 's plenty you can do while that process is underway .
one of the key points is to reform the police so that they have better practices on the ground .
so for example , outreach workers who are distributing condoms to vulnerable populations are not themselves subject to police harassment or abuse or arbitrary arrest .
we can also train judges so that they find flexibilities in the law and so that they rule on the side of tolerance rather than prejudice .
we can retool prisons so that hiv prevention and harm reduction is available to prisoners .
the key to all this is reinforcing civil society .
because civil society is key to raising awareness among vulnerable groups of their legal rights .
but awareness needs action .
and so we need to ensure that these people who are living with hiv or at greatest risk of hiv have access to legal services and they have equal access to the courts .
and also important is talking to communities so that we change interpretations of religious or customary law , which is too often used to justify punishment and fuel stigma .
for many of us here hiv is not an abstract threat .
it hits very close to home .
the law , on the other hand , can seem remote , arcane , the stuff of specialists , but it is n't .
because for those of us who live in democracies , or in aspiring democracies , the law begins with us .
laws that treat people living with hiv or those at greatest risk with respect start with the way that we treat them ourselves : as equals .
if we are going to stop the spread of hiv in our lifetime , then that is the change we need to spread .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- everything is interconnected .
as a shinnecock indian , i was raised to know this .
we are a small fishing tribe situated on the southeastern tip of long island near the town of southampton in new york .
when i was a little girl , my grandfather took me to sit outside in the sun on a hot summer day .
there were no clouds in the sky .
and after a while i began to perspire .
and he pointed up to the sky , and he said , " look , do you see that ?
that 's part of you up there .
that 's your water that helps to make the cloud that becomes the rain that feeds the plants that feeds the animals . "
in my continued exploration of subjects in nature that have the ability to illustrate the interconnection of all life , i started storm chasing in 2008 after my daughter said , " mom , you should do that . "
and so three days later , driving very fast , i found myself stalking a single type of giant cloud called the super cell , capable of producing grapefruit-size hail and spectacular tornadoes , although only two percent actually do .
these clouds can grow so big , up to 50 miles wide and reach up to 65,000 feet into the atmosphere .
they can grow so big , blocking all daylight , making it very dark and ominous standing under them .
storm chasing is a very tactile experience .
there 's a warm , moist wind blowing at your back and the smell of the earth , the wheat , the grass , the charged particles .
and then there are the colors in the clouds of hail forming , the greens and the turquoise blues .
i 've learned to respect the lightning .
my hair used to be straight .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'm just kidding .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- what really excites me about these storms is their movement , the way they swirl and spin and undulate , with their lava lamp-like mammatus clouds .
they become lovely monsters .
when i 'm photographing them , i can not help but remember my grandfather 's lesson .
as i stand under them , i see not just a cloud , but understand that what i have the privilege to witness is the same forces , the same process in a small-scale version that helped to create our galaxy , our solar system , our sun and even this very planet .
all my relations . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i was listed on the online biography that said i was a design missionary .
that 's a bit lofty ; i 'm really more of something like a street walker .
i spend a lot of time in urban areas looking for design , and studying design in the public sector .
i take about 5,000 photographs a year , and i thought that i would edit from these , and try to come up with some images that might be appropriate and interesting to you .
and i used three criteria : the first was , i thought i 'd talk about real design within reach , design that 's free , not design not quite within reach , as we 're fondly known by our competition and competitors , but stuff that you can find on the streets , stuff that was free , stuff that was available to all people , and stuff that probably contains some other important messages .
i 'll use these sidewalks in rio as an example .
a very common public design done in the ' 50s .
it 's got a nice kind of flowing , organic form , very consistent with the brazilian culture - i think good design adds to culture .
wholly inconsistent with san francisco or new york .
but i think these are my sort of information highways : i live in much more of an analog world , where pedestrian traffic and interaction and diversity exchange , and where i think the simple things under our feet have a great amount of meaning to us .
how did i get started in this business ?
i was a ceramic designer for about 10 years , and just loved utilitarian form - simple things that we use every day , little compositions of color and surface on form .
this led me to starting a company called design within reach , a company dealing with simple forms , making good designers available to us , and also selling the personalities and character of the designers as well , and it seems to have worked .
a couple of years into the process , i spent a lot of time in europe traveling around , looking for design .
and i had a bit of a wake-up call in amsterdam : i was there going into the design stores , and mixing with our crowd of designers , and i recognized that a whole lot of stuff pretty much looked the same , and the effect of globalization has had that in our community also .
we know a lot about what 's going on with design around the world , and it 's getting increasingly more difficult to find design that reflects a unique culture .
i was walking around on the streets of amsterdam and i recognized , you know , the big story from amsterdam is n't what 's in the design stores , it 's what 's out on the streets , and maybe it 's self-explanatory , but a city that has n't been taken over by modernism , that 's preserved its kind of architecture and character , and where the bicycle plays an important part of the way in which people get around and where pedestrian rights are protected .
and i write a newsletter that goes out every week , and i wrote an article about this , and it got such enormous response that i realized that design , that common design , that 's in the public area means a lot to people , and establishes kind of a groundwork and a dialog .
i then kind of thought about the other cities in europe where i spend a lot of time looking for design , like basel , where vitra is located , or in northern italy - all cities where there are a whole lot of bicycles , and where pedestrian areas - and i came to the conclusion that perhaps there was something about these important design centers that dealt with bicycles and foot traffic , and i 'm sure the skeptic eye would say , no , the correlation there is that there are universities and schools where people ca n't afford cars , but it did seem that in many of these areas
pedestrian traffic was protected .
you would n't look at this and call this a designer bike : a designer bike is made of titanium or molybdenum .
but i began looking at design in a place like amsterdam and recognized , you know , the first job of design is to serve a social purpose .
and so i look at this bike as not being a designer bike , but being a very good example of design .
and since that time in amsterdam , i spent an increasing amount of time in the cities , looking at design for common evidence of design that really is n't under so much of a designer 's signature .
i was in buenos aires very recently , and i went to see this bridge by santiago calatrava .
he 's a spanish architect and designer .
and the tourist brochures pointed me in the direction of this bridge - i love bridges , metaphorically and symbolically and structurally - and it was a bit of a disappointment , because of the sludge from the river was encrusted on it ; it really was n't in use .
and i recognized that oftentimes design , when you 're set up to see design , but there were lots of other things going on in this area : it was a kind of construction zone ; a lot of buildings were going up .
and , approaching a building from a distance , you do n't see too much ; you get a little closer , and you arrive at a nice little composition that might remind you of a mondrian or a diebenkorn or something .
but to me it was an example of industrial materials with a little bit of colors and animation and a nice little still life - kind of unintended piece of design .
and going a little closer , you get a different perspective .
i find these little vignettes , these little accidental pieces of design , to be refreshing .
they give me , i do n't know , a sense of correctness in the world and some visual delight in the knowledge that the building will probably never look as good as this simple industrial scaffolding that is there to serve .
down the road , there was another building , a nice visual structure : horizontal , vertical elements , little decorative lines going across , these magenta squiggles , the workmen being reduced to decorative elements , just a nice , kind of , breakup of the urban place .
and , you know , that no longer exists .
you 've captured it for a moment , and finding this little still life 's like listening to little songs or something : it gives me an enormous amount of pleasure .
antoine predock designed a wonderful ball stadium in san diego called petco park .
a terrific use of local materials , but inside you could find some interior compositions .
some people go to baseball stadiums to look at games ; i go and see design relationships .
just a wonderful kind of breakup of architecture , and the way that the trees form vertical elements .
red is a color in the landscape that is often on stop signs .
it takes your attention ; it has a great amount of emotion ; it stares back at you the way that a figure might .
just a piece of barrier tape construction stuff in italy .
construction site in new york : red having this kind of emotional power that 's almost an equivalent with the way in which - cuteness of puppies and such .
side street in italy .
red drew me into this little composition , optimistic to me in the sense that maybe the public service 's mailbox , door service , plumbing .
it looks as if these different public services work together to create some nice little compositions .
in italy , you know , almost everything , kind of , looks good .
simple menus put on a board , achieving , kind of , the sort of balance .
but i 'm convinced that it 's because you 're walking around the streets and seeing things .
red can be comical : it can draw your attention to the poor little personality of the little fire hydrant suffering from bad civic planning in havana .
color can animate simple blocks , simple materials : walking in new york , i 'll stop .
i do n't always know why i take photographs of things .
a nice visual composition of symmetry .
curves against sharp things .
it 's a comment on the way in which we deal with public seating in the city of new york .
i 've come across some other just , kind of , curious relationships of bollards on the street that have different interpretations , but - these things amuse me .
sometimes a trash can - this is just in the street in san francisco - a trash can that 's been left there for 18 months creates a nice 45-degree angle against these other relationships , and turns a common parking spot into a nice little piece of sculpture .
so , there 's this sort of silent hand of design at work that i see in places that i go .
havana is a wonderful area .
it 's quite free of commercial clutter : you do n't see our logos and brands and names , and therefore you 're alert to things physically .
and this is a great protection of a pedestrian zone , and the repurposing of some colonial cannons to do that .
and cuba needs to be far more resourceful , because of the blockades and things , but a really wonderful playground .
i 've often wondered why italy is really a leader in modern design .
in our area , in furnishings , they 're sort of way at the top .
the dutch are good also , but the italians are good .
and i came across this little street in venice , where the communist headquarters were sharing a wall with this catholic shrine .
and i realized that , you know , italy is a place where they can accept these different ideologies and deal with diversity and not have the problem , or they can choose to ignore them , but these - you do n't have warring factions , and i think that maybe the tolerance of the absurdity which has made italy so innovative and so tolerant .
the past and the present work quite well together in italy also , and i think that it 's recognizable there , and has an important effect on culture , because their public spaces are protected , their sidewalks are protected , and you 're actually able to confront these things physically , and i think this helps people get over their fear of modernism and other such things .
a change might be a typical street corner in san francisco .
and i use this - this is , sort of , what i consider to be urban spam .
i notice this stuff because i walk a lot , but here , private industry is really kind of making a mess of the public sector .
and as i look at it , i sort of say , you know , the publications that report on problems in the urban area also contribute to it , and it 's just my call to say to all of us , public policy wo n't change this at all ; private industry has to work to take things like this seriously .
the extreme might be in italy where , again , there 's kind of some type of control over what 's happening in the environment is very evident , even in the way that they sell and distribute periodicals .
i walk to work every day or ride my scooter , and i come down and park in this little spot .
and i came down one day , and all the bikes were red .
now , this is not going to impress you guys who photoshop , and can do stuff , but this was an actual moment when i got off my bike , and i looked and i thought , it 's as if all of my biker brethren had kind of gotten together and conspired to make a little statement .
and it reminded me that - to keep in the present , to look out for these kinds of things .
it gave me possibilities for wonder - if maybe it 's a yellow day in san francisco , and we could all agree , and create some installations .
but it also reminded me of the power of pattern and repetition to make an effect in our mind .
and i do n't know if there 's a stronger kind of effect than pattern and the way it unites kind of disparate elements .
i was at the art show in miami in december , and spent a couple of hours looking at fine art , and amazed at the prices of art and how expensive it is , but having a great time looking at it .
and i came outside , and the valets for this car service had created , you know , quite a nice little collage of these car keys , and my closest equivalent were a group of prayer tags that i had seen in tokyo .
and i thought that if pattern can unite these disparate elements , it can do just about anything .
i do n't have very many shots of people , because they kind of get in the way of studying pure form .
i was in a small restaurant in spain , having lunch - one of those nice days where you had the place kind of to yourself , and you have a glass of wine , and enjoying the local area and the culture and the food and the quiet , and feeling very lucky , and a bus load of tourists arrived , emptied out , filled up the restaurant .
in a very short period of time , completely changed the atmosphere and character with loud voices and large bodies and such , and we had to get up and leave ; it was just that uncomfortable .
and at that moment , the sun came out , and through this perforated screen , a pattern was cast over these bodies and they kind of faded into the rear , and we left the restaurant kind of feeling o.k. about stuff .
and i do think pattern has the capability of eradicating some of the most evil forces of society , such as bad form in restaurants , but quite seriously , it was a statement to me that one thing that you do , sort of , see is the aggressive nature of the industrial world has produced - kind of , large masses of things , and when you - in monoculture , and i think the preservation of diversity in culture is something that 's important to us .
the last shots that i have deal with - coming back to this theme of sidewalks , and i wanted to say something here about - i 'm , kind of , optimistic , you know .
post-second world war , the influence of the automobile has really been devastating in a lot of our cities .
a lot of urban areas have been converted into parking lots in a sort of indiscriminate use .
a lot of the planning departments became subordinated to the transportation department . it 's as easy to rag on cars as it is on wal-mart ; i 'm not going to do that .
but they 're real examples in urbanization and the change that 's occurred in the last number of years , and the heightened sensitivity to the importance of our urban environments as cultural centers .
i think that they are , that the statements that we make in this public sector are our contributions to a larger whole .
cities are the place where we 're most likely to encounter diversity and to mix with other people .
we go there for stimulation in art and all those other things .
but i think people have recognized the sanctity of our urban areas .
a place like chicago has really reached kind of a level of international stature .
the u.s. is actually becoming a bit of a leader in kind of enlightened urban planning and renewal , and i want to single out a place like chicago , where i look at some guy like mayor daley as a bit of a design hero for being able to work through the political processes and all that to improve an area .
you would expect a city like this to have upgraded flower boxes on michigan avenue where wealthy people shop , but if you actually go along the street you find the flower boxes change from street to street : there 's actual diversity in the plants .
and the idea that a city group can maintain different types of foliage is really quite exceptional .
there are common elements of this that you 'll see throughout chicago , and then there are your big-d design statements : the pritzker pavilion done by frank gehry .
my measure of this as being an important bit of design is not so much the way that it looks , but the fact that it performs a very important social function .
there are a lot of free concerts , for example , that go on in this area ; it has a phenomenal acoustic system .
but the commitment that the city has made to the public area is significant , and almost an international model .
i work on the mayor 's council in san francisco , on the international design council for mayors , and chicago is looked at as the pinnacle , and i really would like to salute mayor daley and the folks there .
i thought that i should include at least one shot of technology for you guys .
this is also in millennium park in chicago , where the spanish artist-designer plensa has created , kind of , a digital readout in this park that reflects back the characters and personalities of the people in this area .
and it 's a welcoming area , i think , inclusive of diversity , reflective of diversity , and i think this marriage of both technology and art in the public sector is an area where the u.s.
can really take a leadership role , and chicago is one example .
thank you very much .
at the break , i was asked by several people about my comments about the aging debate .
and this will be my only comment on it .
and that is , i understand that optimists greatly outlive pessimists .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- what i 'm going to tell you about in my 18 minutes is how we 're about to switch from reading the genetic code to the first stages of beginning to write the code ourselves .
it 's only 10 years ago this month when we published the first sequence of a free-living organism , that of haemophilus influenzae .
that took a genome project from 13 years down to four months .
we can now do that same genome project in the order of two to eight hours .
so in the last decade , a large number of genomes have been added : most human pathogens , a couple of plants , several insects and several mammals , including the human genome .
genomics at this stage of the thinking from a little over 10 years ago was , by the end of this year , we might have between three and five genomes sequenced ; it 's on the order of several hundred .
we just got a grant from the gordon and betty moore foundation to sequence 130 genomes this year , as a side project from environmental organisms .
so the rate of reading the genetic code has changed .
but as we look , what 's out there , we 've barely scratched the surface on what is available on this planet .
most people do n't realize it , because they 're invisible , but microbes make up about a half of the earth 's biomass , whereas all animals only make up about one one-thousandth of all the biomass .
and maybe it 's something that people in oxford do n't do very often , but if you ever make it to the sea , and you swallow a mouthful of seawater , keep in mind that each milliliter has about a million bacteria and on the order of 10 million viruses .
less than 5,000 microbial species and so we decided to do something about it .
and we started the sorcerer ii expedition , where we were , as with great oceanographic expeditions , trying to sample the ocean every 200 miles .
we started in bermuda for our test project , then moved up to halifax , working down the u.s. east coast , the caribbean sea , the panama canal , through to the galapagos , then across the pacific , and we 're in the process now of working our way across the indian ocean .
it 's very tough duty ; we 're doing this on a sailing vessel , in part to help excite young people about going into science .
the experiments are incredibly simple .
we just take seawater and we filter it , and we collect different size organisms on different filters , and then take their dna back to our lab in rockville , where we can sequence a hundred million letters of the genetic code every 24 hours .
and with doing this , we 've made some amazing discoveries .
for example , it was thought that the visual pigments that are in our eyes - there was only one or two organisms in the environment that had these same pigments .
it turns out , almost every species in the upper parts of the ocean in warm parts of the world have these same photoreceptors , and use sunlight as the source of their energy and communication .
from one site , from one barrel of seawater , we discovered 1.3 million new genes and as many as 50,000 new species .
we 've extended this to the air now with a grant from the sloan foundation .
we 're measuring how many viruses and bacteria all of us are breathing in and out every day , particularly on airplanes or closed auditoriums .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we filter through some simple apparatuses ; we collect on the order of a billion microbes from just a day filtering on top of a building in new york city .
and we 're in the process of sequencing all that at the present time .
just on the data collection side , just where we are through the galapagos , we 're finding that almost every 200 miles , we see tremendous diversity in the samples in the ocean .
some of these make logical sense , in terms of different temperature gradients .
so this is a satellite photograph based on temperatures - red being warm , blue being cold - and we found there 's a tremendous difference between the warm water samples and the cold water samples , in terms of abundant species .
the other thing that surprised us quite a bit is these photoreceptors detect different wavelengths of light , and we can predict that based on their amino acid sequence .
and these vary tremendously from region to region .
maybe not surprisingly , in the deep ocean , where it 's mostly blue , the photoreceptors tend to see blue light .
when there 's a lot of chlorophyll around , they see a lot of green light .
but they vary even more , possibly moving towards infrared and ultraviolet in the extremes .
just to try and get an assessment of what our gene repertoire was , we assembled all the data - including all of ours thus far from the expedition , which represents more than half of all the gene data on the planet - and it totaled around 29 million genes .
and we tried to put these into gene families to see what these discoveries are : are we just discovering new members of known families , or are we discovering new families ?
and it turns out we have about 50,000 major gene families , but every new sample we take in the environment adds in a linear fashion to these new families .
so we 're at the earliest stages of discovery about basic genes , components and life on this planet .
when we look at the so-called evolutionary tree , we 're up on the upper right-hand corner with the animals .
of those roughly 29 million genes , we only have around 24,000 in our genome .
and if you take all animals together , we probably share less than 30,000 and probably maybe a dozen or more thousand different gene families .
i view that these genes are now not only the design components of evolution .
and we think in a gene-centric view - maybe going back to richard dawkins ' ideas - than in a genome-centric view , which are different constructs of these gene components .
synthetic dna , the ability to synthesize dna , has changed at sort of the same pace that dna sequencing has over the last decade or two , and is getting very rapid and very cheap .
our first thought about synthetic genomics came when we sequenced the second genome back in 1995 , and that from mycoplasma genitalium .
and we have really nice t-shirts that say , you know , " i heart my genitalium . "
this is actually just a microorganism .
but it has roughly 500 genes .
haemophilus had 1,800 genes .
and we simply asked the question , if one species needs 800 , another 500 , is there a smaller set of genes that might comprise a minimal operating system ?
so we started doing transposon mutagenesis .
transposons are just small pieces of dna that randomly insert in the genetic code .
and if they insert in the middle of the gene , they disrupt its function .
so we made a map of all the genes that could take transposon insertions and we called those " non-essential genes . "
but it turns out the environment is very critical for this , and you can only define an essential or non-essential gene based on exactly what 's in the environment .
we also tried to take a more directly intellectual approach with the genomes of 13 related organisms , and we tried to compare all of those , to see what they had in common .
and we got these overlapping circles . and we found only 173 genes common to all 13 organisms .
the pool expanded a little bit if we ignored one intracellular parasite ; it expanded even more when we looked at core sets of genes of around 310 or so .
so we think that we can expand or contract genomes , depending on your point of view here , to maybe 300 to 400 genes from the minimal of 500 .
the only way to prove these ideas was to construct an artificial chromosome with those genes in them , and we had to do this in a cassette-based fashion .
we found that synthesizing accurate dna in large pieces was extremely difficult .
ham smith and clyde hutchison , my colleagues on this , developed an exciting new method that allowed us to synthesize a 5,000-base pair virus in only a two-week period that was 100 percent accurate , in terms of its sequence and its biology .
it was a quite exciting experiment - when we just took the synthetic piece of dna , injected it in the bacteria and all of a sudden , that dna started driving the production of the virus particles that turned around and then killed the bacteria .
this was not the first synthetic virus - a polio virus had been made a year before - but it was only one ten-thousandth as active and it took three years to do .
this is a cartoon of the structure of phi x 174 .
this is a case where the software now builds its own hardware , and that 's the notions that we have with biology .
people immediately jump to concerns about biological warfare , and i had recent testimony before a senate committee , and a special committee the u.s. government has set up to review this area .
and i think it 's important to keep reality in mind , versus what happens with people 's imaginations .
basically , any virus that 's been sequenced today - that genome can be made .
and people immediately freak out about things about ebola or smallpox , but the dna from this organism is not infective .
so even if somebody made the smallpox genome , that dna itself would not cause infections .
the real concern that security departments have is designer viruses .
and there 's only two countries , the u.s. and the former soviet union , that had major efforts on trying to create biological warfare agents .
if that research is truly discontinued , there should be very little activity on the know-how to make designer viruses in the future .
i think single-cell organisms are possible within two years .
and possibly eukaryotic cells , those that we have , are possible within a decade .
so we 're now making several dozen different constructs , because we can vary the cassettes and the genes that go into this artificial chromosome .
the key is , how do you put all of the others ?
we start with these fragments , and then we have a homologous recombination system that reassembles those into a chromosome .
this is derived from an organism , deinococcus radiodurans , that can take three million rads of radiation and not be killed .
it reassembles its genome after this radiation burst in about 12 to 24 hours , after its chromosomes are literally blown apart .
this organism is ubiquitous on the planet , and exists perhaps now in outer space due to all our travel there .
this is a glass beaker after about half a million rads of radiation .
the glass started to burn and crack , while the microbes sitting in the bottom just got happier and happier .
here 's an actual picture of what happens : the top of this shows the genome after 1.7 million rads of radiation .
the chromosome is literally blown apart .
and here 's that same dna automatically reassembled 24 hours later .
it 's truly stunning that these organisms can do that , and we probably have thousands , if not tens of thousands , of different species on this planet that are capable of doing that .
after these genomes are synthesized , the first step is just transplanting them into a cell without a genome .
so we think synthetic cells are going to have tremendous potential , not only for understanding the basis of biology but for hopefully environmental and society issues .
for example , from the third organism we sequenced , methanococcus jannaschii - it lives in boiling water temperatures ; its energy source is hydrogen and all its carbon comes from co2 it captures back from the environment .
so we know lots of different pathways , thousands of different organisms now that live off of co2 , and can capture that back .
so instead of using carbon from oil for synthetic processes , we have the chance of using carbon and capturing it back from the atmosphere , converting that into biopolymers or other products .
we have one organism that lives off of carbon monoxide , and we use as a reducing power to split water to produce hydrogen and oxygen .
also , there 's numerous pathways that can be engineered metabolizing methane .
and dupont has a major program with statoil in norway to capture and convert the methane from the gas fields there into useful products .
within a short while , i think there 's going to be a new field called " combinatorial genomics , " because with these new synthesis capabilities , these vast gene array repertoires and the homologous recombination , we think we can design a robot to make maybe a million different chromosomes a day .
and therefore , as with all biology , you get selection through screening , whether you 're screening for hydrogen production , or chemical production , or just viability .
to understand the role of these genes is going to be well within reach .
we 're trying to modify photosynthesis to produce hydrogen directly from sunlight .
photosynthesis is modulated by oxygen , and we have an oxygen-insensitive hydrogenase that we think will totally change this process .
we 're also combining cellulases , the enzymes that break down complex sugars into simple sugars and fermentation in the same cell for producing ethanol .
pharmaceutical production is already under way in major laboratories using microbes .
the chemistry from compounds in the environment is orders of magnitude more complex than our best chemists can produce .
i think future engineered species could be the source of food , hopefully a source of energy , environmental remediation and perhaps replacing the petrochemical industry .
let me just close with ethical and policy studies .
we delayed the start of our experiments in 1999 until we completed a year-and-a-half bioethical review as to whether we should try and make an artificial species .
every major religion participated in this .
it was actually a very strange study , because the various religious leaders were using their scriptures as law books , and they could n't find anything in them prohibiting making life , so it must be ok . the only ultimate concerns were biological warfare aspects of this , but gave us the go ahead to start these experiments right now the sloan foundation has just funded a multi-institutional study on this , to work out what the risk and benefits to society are , and the rules that scientific teams such as my own should be using in this area , and we 're trying to set good examples as we go forward .
these are complex issues .
except for the threat of bio-terrorism , they 're very simple issues in terms of , can we design things to produce clean energy , perhaps revolutionizing what developing countries can do and provide through various simple processes .
thank you very much .
imagine spending seven years at mit and research laboratories , only to find out that you 're a performance artist .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'm also a software engineer , and i make lots of different kinds of art with the computer .
and i think the main thing that i 'm interested in is trying to find a way of making the computer into a personal mode of expression .
and many of you out there are the heads of macromedia and microsoft , and in a way those are my bane : i think there 's a great homogenizing force that software imposes on people and limits the way they think of course , it 's also a great liberating force that makes possible , you know , publishing and so forth , and standards , and so on .
but , in a way , the computer makes possible much more than what most people think , and my art has just been about trying to find a personal way of using the computer , and so i end up writing software to do that .
chris has asked me to do a short performance , and so i 'm going to take just this time - maybe 10 minutes - to do that , and hopefully at the end have just a moment to show you a couple of my other projects in video form .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- we 've got about a minute left .
i 'd just like to show a clip from a most recent project .
i did a performance with two singers who specialize in making strange noises with their mouths .
and this just came off last september at ars electronica ; we repeated it in england .
and the idea is to visualize their speech and song behind them with a large screen .
we used a computer vision tracking system in order to know where they were .
and since we know where their heads are , and we have a wireless mic on them that we 're processing the sound from , we 're able to create visualizations which are linked very tightly to what they 're doing with their speech .
this will take about 30 seconds or so .
he 's making a , kind of , cheek-flapping sound .
well , suffice it to say it 's not all like that , but that 's part of it .
thanks very much . there 's always lots more .
i 'm overtime , so i just wanted to say you can , if you 're in new york , you can check out my work at the whitney biennial next week , and also at bitforms gallery in chelsea .
and with that , i think i should give up the stage , so , thank you so much .
i do n't know your name . audience member : howard . howard .
thom mayne : howard ? i 'm sitting next to howard . i do n't know howard , obviously , and he 's going , i hope you 're not next .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- amazing . amazing performance .
i kind of erased everything in my brain to follow that .
let me start some place . i 'm interested - i kind of do the same thing , but i do n't move my body . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and instead of using human figures to develop ideas of time and space , i work in the mineral world . i work with more or less inert matter .
and i organize it . and , well , it 's also a bit different because an architect versus , let 's say , a dance company finally is a negotiation between one 's private world , one 's conceptual world , the world of ideas , the world of aspirations , of inventions , with the relationship of the exterior world and all the limitations , the naysayers .
because i have to say , for my whole career , if there 's anything that 's been consistent , it 's been that you ca n't do it .
no matter what i 've done , what i 've tried to do , everybody says it ca n't be done .
and it 's continuous across the complete spectrum of the various kind of realities that you confront with your ideas .
and to be an architect , somehow you have to negotiate between left and right , and you have to negotiate between this very private place where ideas take place and the outside world , and then make it understood .
i can start any number of places , because this process is also - i think - very different from some of the morning sessions , which you had such a kind of very clear , such a lineal idea , like the last one , say , with howard , that i think the creative process in architecture , the design process , is extremely circuitous . it 's labyrinthine .
it 's calvino 's idea of the quickest way between two points is the circuitous line , not the straight line .
and definitely my life has been part of that .
i 'm going to start with some simple kind of notions of how we organize things .
but basically , what we do is , we try to give coherence to the world .
we make physical things , buildings that become a part in an accretional process ; they make cities .
and those things are the reflection of the processes , and the time that they are made .
and what i 'm doing is attempting to synthesize the way one sees the world and the territories which are useful as generative material .
because , really , all i 'm interested in , always , as an architect , is the way things are produced because that 's what i do . right ?
and it 's not based on an a priori notion .
i have no interest at all in conceiving something in my brain and saying , " this is what it looks like . " in fact , somebody mentioned - ewan , maybe it was you in your introduction - about this is what architects - did somebody say it 's what business people come to , it 's what the corporate world comes to when they want to make it look like something at the end of the line ? huh . wow .
it does n't work that way for me at all .
i have no interest in that whatsoever .
architecture is the beginning of something , because it 's - if you 're not involved in first principles , if you 're not involved in the absolute , the beginning of that generative process , it 's cake decoration .
and i 've nothing wrong with cake decoration and cake decorators , if anybody 's involved in cake decorations - it 's not what i 'm interested in doing . -lrb- laughter -rrb- and so , in the formation of things , in giving it form , in concretizing these things , it starts with some notion of how one organizes .
and i 've had for 30 years an interest in a series of complexities where a series of forces are brought to bear , and to understand the nature of the final result of that , representing the building itself .
there 's been a continual relationship between inventions , which are private , and reality , which has been important to me .
a project which is part of an exhibition in copenhagen 10 years ago , which was the modeling of a hippocampus - the territory of the brain that records short-term memory - and the documentation of that , the imaginative and documentation of that through a series of drawings which literally attempt to organize that experience .
and it had to do with the notion of walking a kilometer , observing every kilometer a particular object of desire , and then placing that within this .
and the notion was that i could make an organization not built on normal coherencies , but built on non-sequiturs , built on randomness .
and i 'd been extremely interested in this notion of randomness as it produces architectural work and as it definitely connects to the notion of the city , an accretional notion of the city , and that led to various ideas of organization .
and then this led to broader ideas of buildings that come together through the multiplicity of systems .
and it 's not any single system that makes the work .
it 's the relationship - it 's the dynamics between the systems - which have the power to transform and invent and produce an architecture that is - that would otherwise not exist .
and those systems could be identified , and they could be grouped together .
and of course , today , with the technology of the computer and with the rapid prototyping , etc . , we have the mechanisms to understand and to respond to these systems , and to allow them to adjust to the various accommodations of functionalities because that 's all we do .
we 're producing spaces that accommodate human activity .
and what i 'm interested in is not the styling of that , but the relationship of that as it enhances that activity .
and that directly connects to ideas of city-making .
this is a project that we just finished in penang for a very , very large city project that came directly out of this process , which is the result of the multiplicity of forces that produce it .
and the project - again , enormous , enormous competition - on the hudson river and in new york that we were asked to do three years ago , which uses these processes .
and what you 're looking at are possibilities that have to do with the generation of the city as one applies a methodology that uses notions of these multiple forces , that deals with the enormity of the problem , the complexity of the problem , when we 're designing cities at larger and larger aggregates .
because one of the issues today is that the economic aggregate is driving the development aggregate , and as the aggregates get larger we require more and more complex investigation processes to solve these problems .
and that led us directly to the olympic village .
i was in new york on monday presenting it to the ioc .
we won the competition - what was it , nine months ago ?
again , a direct reflection from using these processes to develop extremely complicated , very large-scale organisms .
and then , also , was working with broad strategies .
in this case , we only used 15 of the 60 acres of land , and the 45 acres was a park and would become the legacy of the olympic village .
and it would become the second largest park in the boroughs , etc .
its position , of course , in the middle of manhattan - it 's on hunter 's point .
and then the broader ideas of city-making start having direct influences on architecture , on the elements that make up the broader scheme , the buildings themselves , and start guiding us .
architecture for me has been an investigation of a multiplicity of forces that could come from literally any place .
and so i can start this discussion in any number of places , and i 've chosen three or four to talk about .
and it has also to do with an interest in the vast kind of territory that architecture touches .
it literally is connected to anything in terms of knowledge base .
there 's just no place that it does n't somehow have a connective tissue to .
this is jim dine , and it 's the absence of presence , etc .
it 's the clothing , the skin , without the presence of the character .
it became kind of an idea for the notion of the surface of a work , and it was used in a project where we could unravel that surface , and it was a figurative idea that was going to be folded and made into a very , kind of complex space .
and the idea was the relationship of the space , which was made up of the fold of the image , and the dialectic or the conflict between the figuration , and the clarity of the image and the complexity of the space , which were in dialog .
and it made us rethink the whole notion of how we work and how we make things , and it led us to ideas that were closer to fashion design as we flattened out surfaces , and then brought them back together as they could make spatial combinations .
and this was the first prototype in korea , as we 're dealing with a dynamic envelope , and then the same characteristic of the fabric .
it has a material identity and it 's translucent and it 's porous , and it allows us for a very different notion of what a skin of a building is .
and that turned right away into another project .
this is the caltrans building in los angeles .
and now we 're seeing as the skin and the body is differentiated .
again , it 's a very , very simple notion .
if you look at most buildings , what you look at is the building , the facade , and it is the building .
and all of a sudden we 're kind of moving away , and we 're separating the skin from the body , and that 's going to lead to broader performance criteria , which i 'm going to talk about in a minute .
and you 're looking at how it drapes over and differentiates from the body .
and then , again , the building itself , middle of los angeles , right across from city hall .
and as it moves , it takes pieces of the earth with it . it bends up .
it 's part of a sign system , which was part of the kind of legacy of los angeles - the two-dimension , three-dimension signing , etc .
and then it allows one to penetrate the work itself .
it 's transparent , and it allows you to understand , i think , what is always the most interesting thing in any building , which is the actual constructional processes that make it .
and it 's probably the most intense kind of territory of the work , which is not occupied , because architecture is always the most interesting in some mechanism when it 's separated from function , and this is an area that allows for that .
and then the skin starts transforming into other materials .
we 're using light as a building material in this case .
we 're working with keith sonnier in new york , and we 're making this large outside room , which is possible in los angeles , and which is very much reflective of the urban , the contemporary urban environments that you would find in shibuya or you 'd find in mexico city or sao paulo , etc . , that have to do with activating the city over a longer span of time .
and that was very much part of the notion of the urban objective of this project in los angeles .
and , again , all of it promoting transparency .
and an image which may be closest talks about the use of light as a medium , that light becomes literally a building material .
well , that immediately turned into something much broader , and as a scope .
and again , we 're looking at an early sketch where i 'm understanding now that the skin can be a transition between the ground and the tower .
this is a building in san francisco which is under construction .
and now it turned into something much , much broader as a problem , and it has to do with performance .
this will be the first building in the united states that took - well , i ca n't say it took the air conditioning out . it 's a hybrid .
i wanted a pure thing , and i ca n't get it .
it 's a wrong attitude , actually , because the hybrid is probably more interesting .
but we took the air conditioning out of the tower .
there 's some air conditioning left in the base , but the skin now moves on hydraulics .
it forces air through a venturi force if there 's no wind .
it adjusts continually . and we removed the air conditioning .
huge , huge thing . half a million dollars a year delta .
10 of these - it 's just under a million square feet - 800 and some thousand square feet - 10 of these would power sausalito - the delta on this .
and so now what we 're looking at , as the projects get larger in scale , as they interface with broader problems , that they expand the capabilities in terms of their performance .
well , i could also start here .
we could talk about the relationship at a more biological sense of the relationship of building and ground .
well , our research - my generation for sure , people who were going to school in the late ' 60s - made very much a shift out of the internal focus of architecture , looking at architecture within its own territory , and we were much more affected by film , by what was going on in the art world , etc .
this is , of course , michael heizer .
and when i saw this , first an image and then visited , it completely changed the way i thought after that point .
and i understood that building really could be the augmentation of the earth 's surface , and it completely shifted the notion of building ground in the most basic sense .
and then - well , he was probably looking at this - this is nazca ; this is 700 years ago - the most amazing four-kilometer land sculptures .
they 're just totally incredible .
and that led us to then completely rethinking how we draw , how we work .
this is the first sketch of a high school in pomona - well , whatever it is , a model , a conceptual , kind of idea .
and it 's the reshaping of the earth to make it occupiable .
so it puts 200,000 square feet of stuff that make a high school work in the surface of that earth .
there it is modeled as it was developing into a piece of work .
and there it is , again , as it 's starting to get resolved tectonically , and then there 's the school .
and , of course , we 're interested in participating with education .
i have absolutely no interest in producing a building that just accommodates x , y and z function .
what i 'm interested in are how these ideas participate in the educational process of young people .
it demands some sort of notion of inquiry because it 's a system that 's developed not sculpturally .
it 's an idea that started from my first discussion .
it has to do with a broad , consistent logic , and that logic could be understood as one occupies the building .
and there 's an overt - at least , there 's an attempt to make a very overt notion of a building that connects to the land in a very different way because i was interested in a very didactic approach to the problem , as one would understand that .
and the second project that was just finished in los angeles that uses some of the same ideas . it uses landscape as a major idea .
then , again , we 're doing the headquarters for noaa - national oceanographic and atmospheric agency - outside of washington in maryland .
and this is how they see the world .
they have 22 satellites zipping around at plus or minus 100 miles , and the site 's in red .
and what we really want to do - well , the architects , if there are architects out there , this is the laugier hut ; this is the primitive hut that 's been around for so long - and what we wanted to do is really build this , because they see themselves as the caretakers of the world , and we wanted them to look down at their satellite , how they see their own site , that eight-acre site , and we wanted nothing left . we wanted it to stay green .
there 's actually three baseball fields on it right now , and they 're going to stay there .
we put one piece directly north-south , and it holds the dishes at the ears , right ?
and then right below that the processing , and the mission lift , and the mission control room , and all the other spaces are underground .
and what you look at is an aircraft carrier that 's performance-driven by the cone vision of these satellite dishes .
and that the building itself is occupied in the lower portion , broken up by a series of courts , and it 's five acres of uninterrupted , horizontal space for their administrative offices .
and then that , in turn , propelled us to look at larger-scale projects where this notion of landscape building interface becomes a connective tissue .
the new capital competition for berlin , four years ago .
and again we just finished the ecb - actually coop himmelblau in vienna just won this project , where the building was separated into a series of landscape elements that became part of a connective tissue of a park , which is parallel to the river , and develops ideas of the buildings themselves and becomes part of the connective fabric - the social , cultural and the landscape , recreational fabric of the city .
and the building is no longer seen as an autonomous thing , but something that 's only inextricably connected to this city and this place at this time .
and a project that was realized in austria , the hooper bank , which again used this idea of connecting typology , the traditional buildings , and morphology , or the relationship of the development of land as an idea , into a complex , which is a piece of a city where we can see part of it is literally just this augmenting , this movement of the land that 's a very simple idea of just lifting it up and occupying it , and other parts are much more energetic and intense .
and talk about that intensity in terms of the collisions of the kind of events they make that have to do with putting a series of systems together , and then where part of it is in the ground , part of it is oppositional lifts .
one enters the building as it lifts off the ground , and it becomes part of the idea .
and then the skin - the edges of this - all promote the dynamic , the movement of the building as a series of seismic shifts , geologic shifts . right ?
and it makes for event space and then it breaks in places that allow you to peer into the interior , and those interiors , again , are promoting transparency for the workplace , which has been a continual interest of ours .
and then , again , in a more , kind of traditional setting , this is a graduate student housing in toronto , and it 's very much about the relationship of a building as it makes a connective tissue to the city .
the main idea was the gateway , where it breaks the site , and the building occupies both the public space and the private space .
and it 's that territory of - it 's this thing .
i visited the site many times , and everybody , kind of - you can see this from two kilometers away ; it 's an exact center of the street , and the whole notion is to engage the public , to engage buildings as part of the public tissue of the city .
and finally , one of the most interesting projects - it 's a courthouse .
and what i want to talk about - this is the supreme court , of course - and , well , i 'm dealing with michael hogan , the chief justice of oregon .
you could not proceed without making this negotiation between one 's own values and the relationship of the character you 're working with and how he understands the court , because i 'm showing him , of course , corbusier at savoy , which is 1928 , which is the beginning of modern architecture .
well , then we get to this image .
and this is where the project started . because i 'm going , i 'm interested in the phenomenon that 's taking place in here .
and really what we 're talking about is constructing reality .
and i 'm a character that 's extremely interested in understanding the nature of that constructed reality because there 's no such thing as nature any more . nature is gone .
nature in the 19th-century sense , alright ?
nature is only a cultural edifice today , right ?
we construct it and we construct those ideas .
and then of course , this one , our governor at the moment .
and we spent some time with conan , believe it or not , and then that led us to , kind of , the very differences of our worlds from a legal and an artistic , architectural .
and it forced us to talk about notions of how we work , and the dynamics of that , and what other sources of the work is .
and it led us to the project , the courthouse , which is absolutely a part of a negotiation between tradition and pieces of the traditional courthouse .
you 'll find a stair that 's the same length as the supreme court .
here 's a piano nobile , which is a device used in the renaissance .
the courts were made of that . the skin is this series of layers that reflect even rusticated stonework , but which were embedded with fragments of the constitution , which were part of the little process , all set on a plinth that defined it from the community .
thank you so much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- what i thought i would talk about today is the transition from one mode of thinking about nature to another that 's tracked by architecture .
what 's interesting about architects is , we always have tried to justify beauty by looking to nature , and arguably , beautiful architecture has always been looking at a model of nature .
so , for roughly 300 years , the hot debate in architecture was whether the number five or the number seven was a better proportion to think about architecture , because the nose was one-fifth of your head , or because your head was one-seventh of your body .
and the reason that that was the model of beauty and of nature was because the decimal point had not been invented yet - it was n't the 16th century - and everybody had to dimension a building in terms of fractions , so a room would be dimensioned as one-fourth of a facade ; the structural dais of that might be dimensioned as 10 units , and you would get down to the small elements by fractional subdivision : finer and finer and finer .
in the 15th century , the decimal point was invented ; architects stopped using fractions , and they had a new model of nature .
so , what 's going on today which is calculus-based and which is using digital tools , and that has a lot of implications to the way we think about beauty and form , and it has a lot of implications in the way we think about nature .
the best example of this would probably be the gothic , and the gothic was invented after the invention of calculus , although the gothic architects were n't really using calculus to define their forms .
but what was important is , the gothic moment in architecture was the first time that force and motion was thought of in terms of form .
so , examples like christopher wren 's king 's cross : you can see that the structural forces of the vaulting get articulated as lines , so you 're really actually seeing the expression of structural force and form .
much later , robert maillart 's bridges , which optimize structural form with a calculus curvature almost like a parabola .
the hanging chain models of antonio gaudi , the catalan architect .
the end of the 19th century , beginning of the 20th century , and how that hanging chain model translates into archways and vaulting .
so , in all of these examples , structure is the determining force .
frei otto was starting to use foam bubble diagrams and foam bubble models to generate his mannheim concert hall .
interestingly , in the last 10 years norman foster used a similar heat thermal transfer model to generate the roof of the national gallery , with the structural engineer chris williams .
in all these examples , there 's one ideal form , because these are thought in terms of structure .
and as an architect , i 've always found these kinds of systems very limiting , because i 'm not interested in ideal forms and i 'm not interested in optimizing to some perfect moment .
so , what i thought i would bring up is another component that needs to be thought of , whenever you think about nature , and that 's basically the invention of generic form in genetic evolution .
my hero is actually not darwin ; it 's a guy named william bateson , father of greg bateson , who was here for a long time in monterey .
and he was what you 'd call a teratologist : he looked at all of the monstrosities and mutations to find rules and laws , rather than looking at the norms .
so , instead of trying to find the ideal type or the ideal average , he 'd always look for the exception . so , in this example , which is an example of what 's called bateson 's rule , he has two kinds of mutations of a human thumb .
when i first saw this image , 10 years ago , i actually found it very strange and beautiful at the same time .
beautiful , because it has symmetry .
so , what he found is that in all cases of thumb mutations , instead of having a thumb , you would either get another opposable thumb , or you would get four fingers .
so , the mutations reverted to symmetry .
and bateson invented the concept of symmetry breaking , which is that wherever you lose information in a system , you revert back to symmetry .
so , symmetry was n't the sign of order and organization - which is what i was always understanding , and as is an architect - symmetry was the absence of information .
so , whenever you lost information , you 'd move to symmetry ; whenever you added information to a system , you would break symmetry .
so , this whole idea of natural form shifted at that moment from looking for ideal shapes to looking for a combination of information and generic form .
you know , literally after seeing that image , and finding out what bateson was working with , we started to use these rules for symmetry breaking and branching to start to think about architectural form .
to just talk for a minute about the digital mediums that we 're using now and how they integrate calculus : the fact that they 're calculus-based means that we do n't have to think about dimension in terms of ideal units or discreet elements .
so , in architecture we deal with big assemblies of components , so there might be up to , say , 50,000 pieces of material in this room you 're sitting in right now that all need to get organized .
now , typically you 'd think that they would all be the same : like , the chairs you 're sitting in would all be the same dimension .
you know , i have n't verified this , but it 's the norm that every chair would be a slightly different dimension , because you 'd want to space them all out for everybody 's sight lines .
the elements that make up the ceiling grid and the lighting , they 're all losing their modular quality , and moving more and more to these infinitesimal dimensions .
that 's because we 're all using calculus tools for manufacturing and for design .
calculus is also a mathematics of curves .
so , even a straight line , defined with calculus , is a curve .
it 's just a curve without inflection .
so , a new vocabulary of form is now pervading all design fields : whether it 's automobiles , architecture , products , etc . , it 's really being affected by this digital medium of curvature .
the intricacies of scale that come out of that - you know , in the example of the nose to the face , there 's a fractional part-to-whole idea .
with calculus , the whole idea of subdivision is more complex , because the whole and the parts are one continuous series .
it 's too early in the morning for a lecture on calculus , so i brought some images to just describe how that works .
this is a korean church that we did in queens .
and in this example , you can see that the components of this stair are repetitive , but they 're repetitive without being modular .
each one of the elements in this structure is a unique distance and dimension , and all of the connections are unique angles .
now , the only way we could design that , or possibly construct it , is by using a calculus-based definition of the form .
it also is much more dynamic , so that you can see that the same form opens and closes in a very dynamic way as you move across it , because it has this quality of vector in motion built into it .
so the same space that appears to be a kind of closed volume , when seen from the other side becomes a kind of open vista .
and you also get a sense of visual movement in the space , because every one of the elements is changing in a pattern , so that pattern leads your eye towards the altar .
i think that 's one of the main changes , also , in architecture : that we 're starting to look now not for some ideal form , like a latin cross for a church , but actually all the traits of a church : so , light that comes from behind from an invisible source , directionality that focuses you towards an altar .
it turns out it 's not rocket science to design a sacred space .
you just need to incorporate a certain number of traits in a very kind of genetic way .
so , these are the different perspectives of that interior , which has a very complex set of orientations all in a simple form .
in terms of construction and manufacturing , this is a kilometer-long housing block that was built in the ' 70s in amsterdam .
and here we 've broken the 500 apartments up into small neighborhoods , and differentiated those neighborhoods .
i wo n't go into too much description of any of these projects , but what you can see is that the escalators and elevators that circulate people along the face of the building are all held up by 122 structural trusses .
because we 're using escalators to move people , all of these trusses are picking up diagonal loads .
so , every one of them is a little bit different-shaped as you move down the length of the building .
so , working with bentley and microstation , we 've written a custom piece of software that networks all of the components together into these chunks of information , so that if we change any element along the length of the building , not only does that change distribute through each one of the trusses , but each one of the trusses then distributes that information down the length of the entire facade of the building .
so it 's a single calculation for every single component of the building that we 're adding onto .
so , it 's tens of millions of calculations just to design one connection between a piece of structural steel and another piece of structural steel .
but what it gives us is a harmonic and synthesized relationship of all these components , one to another .
this idea has , kind of , brought me into doing some product design , and it 's because design firms that have connections to architects , like , i 'm working with vitra , which is a furniture company , and alessi , which is a houseware company .
they saw this actually solving a problem : this ability to differentiate components but keep them synthetic .
so , not to pick on bmw , or to celebrate them , but take bmw as an example .
they have to , in 2005 , have a distinct identity for all their models of cars .
so , the 300 series , or whatever their newest car is , the 100 series that 's coming out , has to look like the 700 series , at the other end of their product line , so they need a distinct , coherent identity , which is bmw .
at the same time , there 's a person paying 30,000 dollars for a 300-series car , and a person paying 70,000 dollars for a 700 series , and that person paying more than double does n't want their car to look too much like the bottom-of-the-market car .
so they have to also discriminate between these products .
so , as manufacturing starts to allow more design options , this problem gets exacerbated , of the whole and the parts .
now , as an architect , part-to-whole relationships is all i think about , but in terms of product design it 's becoming more and more of an issue for companies .
so , the first kind of test product we did was with alessi , which was for a coffee and tea set .
it 's an incredibly expensive coffee and tea set ; we knew that at the beginning . so , i actually went to some people i knew down south in san diego , and we used an exploded titanium forming method that 's used in the aerospace industry .
basically what we can do , is just cut a graphite mold , put it in an oven , heat it to 1,000 degrees , gently inflate titanium that 's soft , and then explode it at the last minute into this form .
but what 's great about it is , the forms are only a few hundred dollars .
the titanium 's several thousand dollars , but the forms are very cheap .
so , we designed a system here of eight curves that could be swapped , very similar to that housing project i showed you , and we could recombine those together , so that we always had ergonomic shapes that always had the same volume and could always be produced in the same way .
that way , each one of these tools we could pay for with a few hundred dollars , and get incredible variation in the components .
and this is one of those examples of the sets .
so , for me , what was important is that this coffee set - which is just a coffee pot , a teapot , and those are the pots sitting on a tray - that they would have a coherence - so , they would be greg lynn alessi coffee pots - but that everyone who bought one would have a one-of-a-kind object that was unique in some way .
to go back to architecture , what 's organic about architecture as a field , unlike product design , is this whole issue of holism and of monumentality is really our realm .
like , we have to design things which are coherent as a single object , but also break down into small rooms and have an identity of both the big scale and the small scale .
architects tend to work with signature , so that an architect needs a signature and that signature has to work across the scale of houses up to , say , skyscrapers , and that problem of signatures is a thing we 're very good at maintaining and working with ; and intricacy , which is the relationship of , say , the shape of a building , its structure , its windows , its color , its pattern . these are real architectural problems .
so , my kind of hero for this in the natural world are these tropical frogs .
i got interested in them because they 're the most extreme example of a surface where the texture and the - let 's call it the decoration - i know the frog does n't think of it as decoration , but that 's how it works - are all intricately connected to one another .
so a change in the form indicates a change in the color pattern .
so , the pattern and the form are n't the same thing , but they really work together and are fused in some way .
so , when doing a center for the national parks in costa rica , we tried to use that idea of a gradient color and a change in texture as the structure moves across the surface of the building .
we also used a continuity of change from a main exhibition hall to a natural history museum , so it 's all one continuous change in the massing , but within that massing are very different kinds of spaces and forms .
in a housing project in valencia , spain , we 're doing , the different towers of housing fused together in shared curves so you get a single mass , like a kind of monolith , but it breaks down into individual elements .
and you can see that that change in massing also gives all 48 of the apartments a unique shape and size , but always within a , kind of , controlled limit , an envelope of change .
i work with a group of other architects .
we have a company called united architects .
we were one of the finalists for the world trade center site design .
and i think this just shows how we were approaching the problem of incredibly large-scale construction .
we wanted to make a kind of gothic cathedral around the footprints of the world trade center site .
and to do that , we tried to connect up the five towers into a single system .
and we looked at , from the 1950s on , there were numerous examples of other architects trying to do the same thing .
we really approached it at the level of the typology of the building , where we could build these five separate towers , but they would all join at the 60th floor and make a kind of single monolithic mass .
with united architects , also , we made a proposal for the european central bank headquarters that used the same system , but this time in a much more monolithic mass , like a sphere .
but again , you can see this , kind of , organic fusion of multiple building elements to make a thing which is whole , but breaks down into smaller parts , but in an incredibly organic way .
finally , i 'd like to just show you some of the effects of using digital fabrication .
about six years ago , i bought one of these cnc mills , to just replace , kind of , young people cutting their fingers off all the time building models .
and i also bought a laser cutter and started to fabricate within my own shop , kind of , large-scale building elements and models , where we could go directly to the tooling .
what i found out is that the tooling , if you intervened in the software , actually produced decorative effects .
so , for these interiors , like this shop in stockholm , sweden , or this installation wall in the netherlands at the netherlands architecture institute , we could use the texture that the tool would leave to produce a lot of the spatial effects , and we could integrate the texture of the wall with the form of the wall with the material .
so , in vacuum-formed plastic , in fiberglass , and then even at the level of structural steel , which you think of as being linear and modular .
the steel industry is so far ahead of the design industry that if you take advantage of it you can even start to think of beams and columns all rolled together into a single system which is highly efficient , but also produces decorative effects and formal effects that are very beautiful and organic .
thanks very much .
i was asked to come here and speak about creation .
and i only have 15 minutes , and i see they 're counting already .
and i can - in 15 minutes , i think i can touch only a very rather janitorial branch of creation , which i call " creativity . "
creativity is how we cope with creation .
while creation sometimes seems a bit un-graspable , or even pointless , creativity is always meaningful .
see , for instance , in this picture .
you know , creation is what put that dog in that picture , and creativity is what makes us see a chicken on his hindquarters .
when you think about - you know , creativity has a lot to do with causality too .
you know , when i was a teenager , i was a creator .
i just did things .
then i became an adult and started knowing who i was , and tried to maintain that persona - i became creative .
it was n't until i actually did a book and a retrospective exhibition , that i could track exactly - looks like all the craziest things that i had done , all my drinking , all my parties - they followed a straight line that brings me to the point that actually i 'm talking to you at this moment .
though it 's actually true , you know , the reason i 'm talking to you right now is because i was born in brazil .
if i was born in monterey , probably would be in brazil .
you know , i was born in brazil and grew up in the ' 70s under a climate of political distress , and i was forced to learn to communicate in a very specific way - in a sort of a semiotic black market .
you could n't really say what you wanted to say ; you had to invent ways of doing it .
you did n't trust information very much .
that led me to another step of why i 'm here today , is because i really liked media of all kinds .
i was a media junkie , and eventually got involved with advertising .
my first job in brazil was actually to develop a way to improve the readability of billboards , and based on speed , angle of approach and actually blocks of text .
it was very - actually , it was a very good study , and got me a job in an ad agency .
and they also decided that i had to - to give me a very ugly plexiglas trophy for it .
and another point - why i 'm here - is that the day i went to pick up the plexiglas trophy , i rented a tuxedo for the first time in my life , picked the thing - did n't have any friends .
on my way out , i had to break a fight apart .
somebody was hitting somebody else with brass knuckles .
they were in tuxedos , and fighting . it was very ugly .
and also - advertising people do that all the time - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - and i - well , what happened is when i went back , it was on the way back to my car , the guy who got hit decided to grab a gun - i do n't know why he had a gun - and shoot the first person he decided to be his aggressor .
the first person was wearing a black tie , a tuxedo . it was me .
luckily , it was n't fatal , as you can all see .
and , even more luckily , the guy said that he was sorry and i bribed him for compensation money , otherwise i press charges .
and that 's how - with this money i paid for a ticket to come to the united states in 1983 , and that 's very - the basic reason i 'm talking to you here today : because i got shot . -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- well , when i started working with my own work , i decided that i should n't do images .
you know , i became - i took this very iconoclastic approach .
because when i decided to go into advertising , i wanted to do - i wanted to airbrush naked people on ice , for whiskey commercials , that 's what i really wanted to do . -lrb- laughter -rrb- but i - they did n't let me do it , so i just - you know , they would only let me do other things .
but i was n't into selling whiskey ; i was into selling ice .
the first works were actually objects .
it was kind of a mixture of found object , product design and advertising .
and i called them relics .
they were displayed first at stux gallery in 1983 .
this is the clown skull .
is a remnant of a race of - a very evolved race of entertainers .
they lived in brazil , long time ago . -lrb- laughter -rrb- this is the ashanti joystick .
unfortunately , it has become obsolete because it was designed for atari platform .
a playstation ii is in the works , maybe for the next ted i 'll bring it .
the rocking podium . -lrb- laughter -rrb- this is the pre-columbian coffeemaker . -lrb- laughter -rrb- actually , the idea came out of an argument that i had at starbucks , that i insisted that i was n't having colombian coffee ; the coffee was actually pre-columbian .
the bonsai table .
the entire encyclopedia britannica bound in a single volume , for travel purposes .
and the half tombstone , for people who are not dead yet .
i wanted to take that into the realm of images , and i decided to make things that had the same identity conflicts .
so i decided to do work with clouds .
because clouds can mean anything you want .
but now i wanted to work in a very low-tech way , so something that would mean at the same time a lump of cotton , a cloud and durer 's praying hands - although this looks a lot more like mickey mouse 's praying hands .
but i was still , you know - this is a kitty cloud .
they 're called " equivalents , " after alfred stieglitz 's work .
" the snail . "
but i was still working with sculpture , and i was really trying to go flatter and flatter .
" the teapot . "
i had a chance to go to florence , in - i think it was ' 94 , and i saw ghiberti 's " door of paradise . "
and he did something that was very tricky .
he put together two different media from different periods of time .
first , he got an age-old way of making it , which was relief , and he worked this with three-point perspective , which was brand-new technology at the time .
and it 's totally overkill .
and your eye does n't know which level to read .
and you become trapped into this kind of representation .
so i decided to make these very simple renderings , that at first they are taken as a line drawing - you know , something that 's very - and then i did it with wire .
the idea was to - because everybody overlooks white - like pencil drawings , you know ?
and they would look at it - " ah , it 's a pencil drawing . "
then you have this double take and see that it 's actually something that existed in time .
it had a physicality , and you start going deeper and deeper into sort of narrative that goes this way , towards the image . so this is " monkey with leica . "
" relaxation . "
" fiat lux . "
and the same way the history of representation evolved from line drawings to shaded drawings .
and i wanted to deal with other subjects .
i started taking that into the realm of landscape , which is something that 's almost a picture of nothing .
i made these pictures called " pictures of thread , " and i named them after the amount of yards that i used to represent each picture .
these always end up being a photograph at the end , or more like an etching in this case .
so this is a lighthouse .
this is " 6,500 yards , " after corot . " 9,000 yards , " after gerhard richter .
and i do n't know how many yards , after john constable .
departing from the lines , i decided to tackle the idea of points , like which is more similar to the type of representation that we find in photographs themselves .
i had met a group of children in the caribbean island of saint kitts , and i did work and play with them .
i got some photographs from them .
upon my arrival in new york , i decided - they were children of sugar plantation workers .
and by manipulating sugar over a black paper , i made portraits of them .
these are - -lrb- applause -rrb- - thank you . this is " valentina , the fastest . "
it was just the name of the child , with the little thing you get to know of somebody that you meet very briefly .
" valicia . "
" jacynthe . "
but another layer of representation was still introduced .
because i was doing this while i was making these pictures , i realized that i could add still another thing i was trying to make a subject - something that would interfere with the themes , so chocolate is very good , because it has - it brings to mind ideas that go from scatology to romance .
and so i decided to make these pictures , and they were very large , so you had to walk away from it to be able to see them .
so they 're called " pictures of chocolate . "
freud probably could explain chocolate better than i. he was the first subject .
and jackson pollock also .
pictures of crowds are particularly interesting , because , you know , you go to that - you try to figure out the threshold with something you can define very easily , like a face , goes into becoming just a texture .
" paparazzi . "
i used the dust at the whitney museum to render some pieces of their collection .
and i picked minimalist pieces because they 're about specificity .
and you render this with the most non-specific material , which is dust itself .
like , you know , you have the skin particles of every single museum visitor .
they do a dna scan of this , they will come up with a great mailing list .
this is richard serra .
i bought a computer , and -lsb- they -rsb- told me it had millions of colors in it .
you know an artist 's first response to this is , who counted it ? you know ?
and i realized that i never worked with color , because i had a hard time controlling the idea of single colors .
but once they 're applied to numeric structure , then you can feel more comfortable .
so the first time i worked with colors was by making these mosaics of pantone swatches .
they end up being very large pictures , and i photographed with a very large camera - an 8x10 camera .
so you can see the surface of every single swatch - like in this picture of chuck close .
and you have to walk very far to be able to see it .
also , the reference to gerhard richter 's use of color charts - and the idea also entering another realm of representation that 's very common to us today , which is the bit map .
i ended up narrowing the subject to monet 's " haystacks . "
this is something i used to do as a joke - you know , make - the same like - robert smithson 's " spiral jetty " - and then leaving traces , as if it was done on a tabletop .
i tried to prove that he did n't do that thing in the salt lake .
but then , just doing the models , i was trying to explore the relationship between the model and the original .
and i felt that i would have to actually go there and make some earthworks myself .
i opt for very simple line drawings - kind of stupid looking .
and at the same time , i was doing these very large constructions , being 150 meters away .
now i would do very small ones , which would be like - but under the same light , and i would show them together , so the viewer would have to really figure it out what one he was looking .
i was n't interested in the very large things , or in the small things .
i was more interested in the things in between , you know , because you can leave an enormous range for ambiguity there .
this is like you see - the size of a person over there .
this is a pipe .
a hanger .
and this is another thing that i did - you know working - everybody loves to watch somebody draw , but not many people have a chance to watch somebody draw in - a lot of people at the same time , to evidence a single drawing .
and i love this work , because i did these cartoonish clouds over manhattan for a period of two months .
and it was quite wonderful , because i had an interest - an early interest - in theater , that 's justified on this thing .
in theater , you have the character and the actor in the same place , trying to negotiate each other in front of an audience .
and in this , you 'd have like a - something that looks like a cloud , and it is a cloud at the same time .
so they 're like perfect actors .
my interest in acting , especially bad acting , goes a long way .
actually , i once paid like 60 dollars to see a very great actor to do a version of " king lear , " and i felt really robbed , because by the time the actor started being king lear , he stopped being the great actor that i had paid money to see .
on the other hand , you know , i paid like three dollars , i think - and i went to a warehouse in queens to see a version of " othello " by an amateur group .
and it was quite fascinating , because you know the guy - his name was joey grimaldi - he impersonated the moorish general - you know , for the first three minutes he was really that general , and then he went back into plumber , he worked as a plumber , so - plumber , general , plumber , general - so for three dollars , i saw two tragedies for the price of one .
see , i think it 's not really about impression , making people fall for a really perfect illusion , as much as it is to make - i usually work at the lowest threshold of visual illusion .
because it 's not about fooling somebody , it 's actually giving somebody a measure of their own belief : how much you want to be fooled .
that 's why we pay to go to magic shows and things like that .
well , i think that 's it .
my time is nearly up .
thank you very much .
i guess the story actually has to start maybe back in the the 1960s , when i was seven or eight years old , watching jacques cousteau documentaries on the living room floor with my mask and flippers on .
then after every episode , i had to go up to the bathtub and swim around the bathtub and look at the drain , because that 's all there was to look at .
and by the time i turned 16 , i pursued a career in marine science , in exploration and diving , and lived in underwater habitats , like this one off the florida keys , for 30 days total .
brian skerry took this shot . thanks , brian .
and i 've dived in deep-sea submersibles around the world .
and this one is the deepest diving submarine in the world , operated by the japanese government .
and sylvia earle and i were on an expedition in this submarine 20 years ago in japan .
and on my dive , i went down 18,000 feet , to an area that i thought would be pristine wilderness area on the sea floor .
but when i got there , i found lots of plastic garbage and other debris .
and it was really a turning point in my life , where i started to realize that i could n't just go have fun doing science and exploration .
i needed to put it into a context .
i needed to head towards conservation goals .
so i began to work with national geographic society and others and led expeditions to antarctica .
i led three diving expeditions to antarctica .
ten years ago was a seminal trip , where we explored that big iceberg , b-15 , the largest iceberg in history , that broke off the ross ice shelf .
and we developed techniques to dive inside and under the iceberg , such as heating pads on our kidneys with a battery that we dragged around , so that , as the blood flowed through our kidneys , it would get a little boost of warmth before going back into our bodies .
but after three trips to antarctica , i decided that it might be nicer to work in warmer water .
and that same year , 10 years ago , i headed north to the phoenix islands .
and i 'm going to tell you that story here in a moment .
but before i do , i just want you to ponder this graph for a moment .
you may have seen this in other forms , but the top line is the amount of protected area on land , globally , and it 's about 12 percent .
and you can see that it kind of hockey sticks up around the 1960s and ' 70s , and it 's on kind of a nice trajectory right now .
and that 's probably because that 's when everybody got aware of the environment and earth day and all the stuff that happened in the ' 60s with the hippies and everything really did , i think , have an affect on global awareness .
but the ocean-protected area is basically flat line until right about now - it appears to be ticking up .
and i do believe that we are at the hockey stick point of the protected area in the ocean .
i think we would have gotten there a lot earlier if we could see what happens in the ocean like we can see what happens on land .
but unfortunately , the ocean is opaque , and we ca n't see what 's going on .
and therefore we 're way behind on protection .
but scuba diving , submersibles and all the work that we 're setting about to do here will help rectify that .
so where are the phoenix islands ?
they were the world 's largest marine-protected area up until last week when the chagos archipelago was declared .
it 's in the mid-pacific . it 's about five days from anywhere .
if you want to get to the phoenix islands , it 's five days from fiji , it 's five days from hawaii , it 's five days from samoa .
it 's out in the middle of the pacific , right around the equator .
i had never heard of the islands 10 years ago , nor the country , kiribati , that owns them , till two friends of mine who run a liveaboard dive boat in fiji said , " greg , would you lead a scientific expedition up to these islands ?
they 've never been dived . "
and i said , " yeah .
but tell me where they are and the country that owns them . "
so that 's when i first learned of the islands and had no idea what i was getting into .
but i was in for the adventure .
let me give you a little peek here of the phoenix islands-protected area .
it 's a very deep-water part of our planet .
the average depths are about 12,000 ft .
there 's lots of seamounts in the phoenix islands , which are specifically part of the protected area .
seamounts are important for biodiversity .
there 's actually more mountains in the ocean than there are on land .
it 's an interesting fact .
and the phoenix islands is very rich in those seamounts .
so it 's a deep - think about it in a big three-dimensional space , very deep three-dimensional space with herds of tuna , whales , all kinds of deep sea marine life like we 've seen here before .
that 's the vessel that we took up there for these studies , early on , and that 's what the islands look like - you can see in the background .
they 're very low to the water , and they 're all uninhabited , except one island has about 35 caretakers on it .
and they 've been uninhabited for most of time because even in the ancient days , these islands were too far away from the bright lights of fiji and hawaii and tahiti for those ancient polynesian mariners that were traversing the pacific so widely .
but we got up there , and i had the unique and wonderful scientific opportunity and personal opportunity to get to a place that had never been dived and just get to an island and go , " okay , where are we going to dive ?
let 's try there , " and then falling into the water .
both my personal and my professional life changed .
suddenly , i saw a world that i had never seen before in the ocean - schools of fish that were so dense they dulled the penetration of sunlight from the surface , coral reefs that were continuous and solid and colorful , large fish everywhere , manta rays .
it was an ecosystem . parrotfish spawning - this is about 5,000 longnose parrotfish spawning at the entrance to one of the phoenix islands .
you can see the fish are balled up and then there 's a little cloudy area there where they 're exchanging the eggs and sperm for reproduction - events that the ocean is supposed to do , but struggles to do in many places now because of human activity .
the phoenix islands and all the equatorial parts of our planet are very important for tuna fisheries , especially this yellowfin tuna that you see here .
phoenix islands is a major tuna location .
and sharks - we had sharks on our early dives , up to 150 sharks at once , which is an indication of a very , very healthy , very strong , system .
so i thought the scenes of never-ending wilderness would go on forever , but they did finally come to an end .
and we explored the surface of the islands as well - very important bird nesting site , some of the most important bird-nesting sites in the pacific , in the world .
and we finished our trip .
and that 's the area again .
you can see the islands - there are eight islands - that pop out of the water .
the peaks that do n't come out of the water are the seamounts .
remember , a seamount turns into an island when it hits the surface .
and what 's the context of the phoenix islands ?
where do these exist ?
well they exist in the republic of kiribati , and kiribati is located in the central pacific in three island groups .
in the west we have the gilbert islands .
in the center we have the phoenix islands , which is the subject that i 'm talking about .
and then over to the east we have the line islands .
it 's the largest atoll nation in the world .
and they have about 110,000 people they control 3.4 million cubic miles of ocean , and that 's between one and two percent of all the ocean water on the planet .
and when i was first going up there , i barely knew the name of this country 10 years ago , and people would ask me , " why are you going to this place called kiribati ? "
and it reminded me of that old joke where the bank robber comes out of the courthouse handcuffed , and the reporter yells , " hey , willy . why do you rob banks ? "
and he says , " cause that 's where all the money is . "
and i would tell people , " why do i go to kiribati ?
because that 's where all the ocean is . "
they basically are one nation that controls most of the equatorial waters of the central pacific ocean .
they 're also a country that is in dire danger .
sea levels are rising , and kiribati , along with 42 other nations in the world , will be under water within 50 to 100 years due to climate change and the associated sea-level rise from thermal expansion and the melting of freshwater into the ocean .
the islands rise only one to two meters above the surface .
some of the islands have already gone under water .
and these nations are faced with a real problem .
we as a world are faced with a problem .
what do we do with displaced fellow earthlings who no longer have a home on the planet ?
the president of the maldives conducted a mock cabinet meeting underwater recently to highlight the dire straits of these countries .
so it 's something we need to focus on .
but back to the phoenix islands , which is the subject of this talk .
after i got back , i said , okay , this is amazing , what we found .
i 'd like to go back and share it with the government of kiribati , who are over in tarawa , the westernmost group .
so i started contacting them - because they had actually given me a permit to do this - and i said , " i want to come up and tell you what we found . "
and for some reason they did n't want me to come , or it was hard to find a time and a place , and it took a while , but finally they said , " okay , you can come .
but if you come , you have to buy lunch for everybody who comes to the seminar . "
so i said , " okay , i 'm happy to buy lunch .
just get whatever anybody wants . "
so david obura , a coral reef biologist , and i went to tarawa , and we presented for two hours on the amazing findings of the phoenix islands .
and the country never knew this . they never had any data from this area .
they 'd never had any information from the phoenix islands .
after the talk , the minister of fisheries walked up to me and he said , " greg , do you realize that you are the first scientist who has ever come back and told us what they did ? "
he said , " we often issue these permits to do research in our waters , but usually we get a note two or three years later , or a reprint .
but you 're the first one who 's ever come back and told us what you did .
and we really appreciate that . and we 're buying you lunch today .
and are you free for dinner ? "
and i was free for dinner , and i went out to dinner with the minister of fisheries in kiribati .
and over the course of dinner , i learned that kiribati gains most of its revenue - it 's a very poor country - but it gains what revenue is has by selling access to foreign nations to take fish out of its waters , because kiribati does not have the capacity to take the fish itself .
and the deal that they strike is the extracting country gives kiribati five percent of the landed value .
so if the united states removes a million dollars ' worth of lobsters from a reef , kiribati gets 50,000 dollars .
and , you know , it did n't seem like a very good deal to me .
so i asked the minister over dinner , i said , " would you consider a situation where you would still get paid - we do the math and figure out what the value of the resource is - but you leave fish and the sharks and the shrimp in the water ? "
he stopped , and he said , " yes , we would like to do that to deal with our overfishing problem , and i think we would call it a reverse fishing license . "
he coined the term " reverse fishing license . "
so i said , " yes , a ' reverse fishing license . " ' so we walked away from this dinner really not knowing where to go at that point .
i went back to the states and started looking around to see if i could find examples where reverse fishing licenses had been issued , and it turned out there were none .
there were no oceanic deals where countries were compensated for not fishing .
it had occurred on land , in rainforests of south america and africa , where landowners had been paid not to cut the trees down .
and conservation international had struck some of those deals .
so i went to conservation international and brought them in as a partner and went through the process of valuing the fishery resource , deciding how much kiribati should be compensated , what the range of the fishes were , brought in a whole bunch of other partners - the government of australia , the government of new zealand , the world bank .
the oak foundation and national geographic have been big funders of this as well .
and we basically founded the park on the idea of an endowment that would pay the equivalent lost fishing license fees to this very poor country to keep the area intact .
halfway through this process , i met the president of kiribati , president anote tong .
he 's a really important leader , a real visionary , forward-thinking man , and he told me two things when i approached him .
he said , " greg , there 's two things i 'd like you to do .
one is , remember i 'm a politician , so you 've got to go out and work with my ministers and convince the people of kiribati that this is a good idea .
secondly , i 'd like you to create principles that will transcend my own presidency .
i do n't want to do something like this if it 's going to go away after i 'm voted out of office . "
so we had very strong leadership , very good vision and a lot of science , a lot of lawyers involved .
many , many steps were taken to pull this off .
and it was primarily because kiribati realized that this was in their own self-interest to do this .
they realized that this was a common cause that they had found with the conservation community .
then in 2002 , when this was all going full-swing , a coral-bleaching event happened in the phoenix islands .
here 's this resource that we 're looking to save , and it turns out it 's the hottest heating event that we can find on record .
the ocean heated up as it does sometimes , and the hot spot formed and stalled right over the phoenix islands for six months .
it was over 32 degrees celsius for six months and it basically killed 60 percent of the coral .
so suddenly we had this area that we were protecting , but now it appeared to be dead , at least in the coral areas .
of course the deep-sea areas and the open ocean areas were fine , but the coral , which everybody likes to look at , was in trouble .
well , the good news is it 's recovered and recovering fast , faster than any reef we 've seen .
this picture was just taken by brian skerry a few months ago when we returned to the phoenix islands and discovered that , because it is a protected area and has healthy fish populations that keep the algae grazed down and keep the rest of the reef healthy , the coral is booming , is just booming back .
it 's almost like if a person has multiple diseases , it 's hard to get well , you might die , but if you only have one disease to deal with , you can get better .
and that 's the story with climate-change heating .
it 's the only threat , the only influence that the reef had to deal with .
there was no fishing , there was no pollution , there was no coastal development , and the reef is on a full-bore recovery .
now i remember that dinner i had with the minister of fisheries 10 years ago when we first brought this up and i got quite animated during the dinner and said , " well , i think that the conservation community might embrace this idea , minister . "
he paused and put his hands together and said , " yes , greg , but the devil will be in the details , " he said .
and it certainly was .
the last 10 years have been detail after detail ranging from creating legislation to multiple research expeditions to communication plans , as i said , teams of lawyers , mous , creating the phoenix islands trust board .
and we are now in the process of raising the full endowment .
kiribati has frozen extracting activities at its current state while we raise the endowment .
we just had our first pipa trust board meeting three weeks ago .
so it 's a fully functional up-and-running entity that negotiates the reverse fishing license with the country .
and the pipa trust board holds that license and pays the country for this .
so it 's a very solid , very well thought-out , very well grounded system , and it was a bottom-up system , and that was very important with this work , from the bottom up to secure this .
so the conditions for success here are listed .
you can read them yourselves .
but i would say the most important one in my mind was working within the market forces of the situation .
and that insured that we could move this forward and it would have both the self-interest of kiribati as well as the self-interest of the world .
and i 'll leave you with one final slide , that is : how do we scale this up ?
how do we realize sylvia 's dream ?
where eventually do we take this ?
here 's the pacific with large mpas and large conservation zones on it .
and as you can see , we have a patchwork across this ocean .
i 've just described to you the one story behind that rectangular area in the middle , the phoenix islands , but every other green patch on that has its own story .
and what we need to do now is look at the whole pacific ocean in its entirety and make a network of mpas across the pacific so that we have our world 's largest ocean protected and self-sustaining over time .
thank you very much . -lrb- applause -rrb- imagine , if you will - a gift .
i 'd like for you to picture it in your mind .
it 's not too big - about the size of a golf ball .
so envision what it looks like all wrapped up .
but before i show you what 's inside , i will tell you , it 's going to do incredible things for you .
it will bring all of your family together .
you will feel loved and appreciated like never before and reconnect with friends and acquaintances you have n't heard from in years .
adoration and admiration will overwhelm you .
it will recalibrate what 's most important in your life .
it will redefine your sense of spirituality and faith .
you 'll have a new understanding and trust in your body .
you 'll have unsurpassed vitality and energy .
you 'll expand your vocabulary , meet new people , and you 'll have a healthier lifestyle .
and get this - you 'll have an eight-week vacation of doing absolutely nothing .
you 'll eat countless gourmet meals .
flowers will arrive by the truckload .
people will say to you , " you look great . have you had any work done ? "
and you 'll have a lifetime supply of good drugs .
you 'll be challenged , inspired , motivated and humbled .
your life will have new meaning .
peace , health , serenity , happiness , nirvana .
the price ?
$ 55,000 , and that 's an incredible deal .
by now i know you 're dying to know what it is and where you can get one .
does amazon carry it ?
does it have the apple logo on it ?
is there a waiting list ?
not likely .
this gift came to me about five months ago .
it looked more like this when it was all wrapped up - not quite so pretty .
and this , and then this .
it was a rare gem - a brain tumor , hemangioblastoma - the gift that keeps on giving .
and while i 'm okay now , i would n't wish this gift for you .
i 'm not sure you 'd want it .
but i would n't change my experience .
it profoundly altered my life in ways i did n't expect in all the ways i just shared with you .
so the next time you 're faced with something that 's unexpected , unwanted and uncertain , consider that it just may be a gift .
-lrb- applause -rrb- the question today is not : why did we invade afghanistan ?
the question is : why are we still in afghanistan one decade later ?
why are we spending $ 135 billion ?
why have we got 130,000 troops on the ground ?
why were more people killed last month than in any preceding month of this conflict ?
how has this happened ?
the last 20 years has been the age of intervention , and afghanistan is simply one act in a five-act tragedy .
we came out of the end of the cold war in despair .
we faced rwanda ; we faced bosnia , and then we rediscovered our confidence .
in the third act , we went into bosnia and kosovo and we seemed to succeed .
in the fourth act , with our hubris , our overconfidence developing , we invaded iraq and afghanistan , and in the fifth act , we plunged into a humiliating mess .
so the question is : what are we doing ?
why are we still stuck in afghanistan ?
and the answer , of course , that we keep being given is as follows : we 're told that we went into afghanistan because of 9/11 , and that we remain there because the taliban poses an existential threat to global security .
in the words of president obama , " if the taliban take over again , they will invite back al-qaeda , who will try to kill as many of our people as they possibly can . "
the story that we 're told is that there was a " light footprint " initially - in other words , that we ended up in a situation where we did n't have enough troops , we did n't have enough resources , that afghans were frustrated - they felt there was n't enough progress and economic development and security , and therefore the taliban came back - that we responded in 2005 and 2006 with troop deployments , but we still did n't put enough troops on the ground .
and that it was n't until 2009 , when president obama signed off on a surge , that we finally had , in the words of secretary clinton , " the strategy , the leadership and the resources . "
so , as the president now reassures us , we are on track to achieve our goals .
all of this is wrong .
every one of those statements is wrong .
afghanistan does not pose an existential threat to global security .
it is extremely unlikely the taliban would ever be able to take over the country - extremely unlikely they 'd be able to seize kabul .
they simply do n't have a conventional military option .
and even if they were able to do so , even if i 'm wrong , it 's extremely unlikely the taliban would invite back al-qaeda .
from the taliban 's point of view , that was their number one mistake last time .
if they had n't invited back al-qaeda , they would still be in power today .
and even if i 'm wrong about those two things , even if they were able to take back the country , even if they were to invite back al-qaeda , it 's extremely unlikely that al-qaeda would significantly enhance its ability to harm the united states or harm europe .
because this is n't the 1990s anymore .
if the al-qaeda base was to be established near ghazni , we would hit them very hard , and it would be very , very difficult for the taliban to protect them .
furthermore , it 's simply not true that what went wrong in afghanistan is the light footprint .
in my experience , in fact , the light footprint was extremely helpful .
and these troops that we brought in - it 's a great picture of david beckham there on the sub-machine gun - made the situation worse , not better .
when i walked across afghanistan in the winter of 2001-2002 , what i saw was scenes like this .
a girl , if you 're lucky , in the corner of a dark room - lucky to be able to look at the koran .
but in those early days when we 're told we did n't have enough troops and enough resources , we made a lot of progress in afghanistan .
within a few months , there were two and a half million more girls in school .
in sangin where i was sick in 2002 , the nearest health clinic was within three days walk .
today , there are 14 health clinics in that area alone .
there was amazing improvements .
we went from almost no afghans having mobile telephones during the taliban to a situation where , almost overnight , three million afghans had mobile telephones .
and we had progress in the free media .
we had progress in elections - all of this with the so-called light footprint .
but when we began to bring more money , when we began to invest more resources , things got worse , not better . how ?
well first see , if you put 125 billion dollars a year into a country like afghanistan where the entire revenue of the afghan state is one billion dollars a year , you drown everything .
it 's not simply corruption and waste that you create ; you essentially replace the priorities of the afghan government , the elected afghan government , with the micromanaging tendencies of foreigners on short tours with their own priorities .
and the same is true for the troops .
when i walked across afghanistan , i stayed with people like this .
this is commandant haji malem mohsin khan of kamenj .
commandant haji malem mohsin khan of kamenj was a great host .
he was very generous , like many of the afghans i stayed with .
but he was also considerably more conservative , considerably more anti-foreign , considerably more islamist than we 'd like to acknowledge .
this man , for example , mullah mustafa , tried to shoot me .
and the reason i 'm looking a little bit perplexed in this photograph is i was somewhat frightened , and i was too afraid on this occasion to ask him , having run for an hour through the desert and taken refuge in this house , why he had turned up and wanted to have his photograph taken with me .
but 18 months later , i asked him why he had tried to shoot me .
and mullah mustafa - he 's the man with the pen and paper - explained that the man sitting immediately to the left as you look at the photograph , nadir shah had bet him that he could n't hit me .
now this is not to say afghanistan is a place full of people like mullah mustafa .
it 's not ; it 's a wonderful place full of incredible energy and intelligence .
but it is a place where the putting-in of the troops has increased the violence rather than decreased it .
2005 , anthony fitzherbert , an agricultural engineer , could travel through helmand , could stay in nad ali , sangin and ghoresh , which are now the names of villages where fighting is taking place .
today , he could never do that .
so the idea that we deployed the troops to respond to the taliban insurgency is mistaken .
rather than preceding the insurgency , the taliban followed the troop deployment , and as far as i 'm concerned , the troop deployment caused their return .
now is this a new idea ?
no , there have been any number of people saying this over the last seven years .
i ran a center at harvard from 2008 to 2010 , and there were people like michael semple there who speak afghan languages fluently , who 've traveled to almost every district in the country .
andrew wilder , for example , born on the pakistan-iranian border , served his whole life in pakistan and afghanistan .
paul fishstein who began working there in 1978 - worked for save the children , ran the afghan research and evaluation unit .
these are people who were able to say consistently that the increase in development aid was making afghanistan less secure , not more secure - that the counter-insurgency strategy was not working and would not work .
and yet , nobody listened to them .
instead , there was a litany of astonishing optimism .
beginning in 2004 , every general came in saying , " i 've inherited a dismal situation , but finally i have the right resources and the correct strategy , which will deliver , " in general barno 's word in 2004 , the " decisive year . "
well guess what ? it did n't .
but it was n't sufficient to prevent general abuzaid saying that he had the strategy and the resources to deliver , in 2005 , the " decisive year . "
or general david richards to come in 2006 and say he had the strategy and the resources to deliver the " crunch year . "
or in 2007 , the norwegian deputy foreign minister , espen eide , to say that that would deliver the " decisive year . "
or in 2008 , major general champoux to come in and say he would deliver the " decisive year . "
or in 2009 , my great friend , general stanley mcchrystal , who said that he was " knee-deep in the decisive year . "
or in 2010 , the u.k. foreign secretary , david miliband , who said that at last we would deliver the " decisive year . "
and you 'll be delighted to hear in 2011 , today , that guido westerwelle , the german foreign minister , assures us that we are in the " decisive year . "
-lrb- applause -rrb- how do we allow any of this to happen ?
well the answer , of course , is , if you spend 125 billion or 130 billion dollars a year in a country , you co-opt almost everybody .
even the aid agencies , who begin to receive an enormous amount of money from the u.s. and the european governments to build schools and clinics , are somewhat disinclined to challenge the idea that afghanistan is an existential threat to global security .
they 're worried , in other words , that if anybody believes that it was n't such a threat - oxfam , save the children would n't get the money to build their hospitals and schools .
it 's also very difficult to confront a general with medals on his chest .
it 's very difficult for a politician , because you 're afraid that many lives have been lost in vain .
you feel deep , deep guilt .
you exaggerate your fears , and you 're terrified about the humiliation of defeat .
what is the solution to this ?
well the solution to this is we need to find a way that people like michael semple , or those other people , who are telling the truth , who know the country , who 've spent 30 years on the ground - and most importantly of all , the missing component of this - afghans themselves , who understand what is going on .
we need to somehow get their message to the policymakers .
and this is very difficult to do because of our structures .
the first thing we need to change is the structures of our government .
very , very sadly , our foreign services , the united nations , the military in these countries have very little idea of what 's going on .
the average british soldier is on a tour of only six months ; italian soldiers , on tours of four months ; the american military , on tours of 12 months .
diplomats are locked in embassy compounds .
when they go out , they travel in these curious armored vehicles with these somewhat threatening security teams who ready 24 hours in advance who say you can only stay on the ground for an hour .
in the british embassy in afghanistan in 2008 , an embassy of 350 people , there were only three people who could speak dari , the main language of afghanistan , at a decent level .
and there was not a single pashto speaker .
in the afghan section in london responsible for governing afghan policy on the ground , i was told last year that there was not a single staff member of the foreign office in that section who had ever served on a posting in afghanistan .
so we need to change that institutional culture .
and i could make the same points about the united states and the united nations .
secondly , we need to aim off of the optimism of the generals .
we need to make sure that we 're a little bit suspicious , that we understand that optimism is in the dna of the military , that we do n't respond to it with quite as much alacrity .
and thirdly , we need to have some humility .
we need to begin from the position that our knowledge , our power , our legitimacy is limited .
this does n't mean that intervention around the world is a disaster .
it is n't .
bosnia and kosovo were signal successes , great successes .
today when you go to bosnia it is almost impossible to believe that what we saw in the early 1990s happened .
it 's almost impossible to believe the progress we 've made since 1994 .
refugee return , which the united nations high commission for refugees thought would be extremely unlikely , has largely happened .
a million properties have been returned .
borders between the bosniak territory and the bosnian-serb territory have calmed down .
the national army has shrunk .
the crime rates in bosnia today are lower than they are in sweden .
this has been done by an incredible , principled effort by the international community , and , of course , above all , by bosnians themselves .
but you need to look at context .
and this is what we 've lost in afghanistan and iraq .
you need to understand that in those places what really mattered was , firstly , the role of tudman and milosevic in coming to the agreement , and then the fact those men went , that the regional situation improved , that the european union could offer bosnia something extraordinary : the chance to be part of a new thing , a new club , a chance to join something bigger .
and finally , we need to understand that in bosnia and kosovo , a lot of the secret of what we did , a lot of the secret of our success , was our humility - was the tentative nature of our engagement .
we criticized people a lot in bosnia for being quite slow to take on war criminals .
we criticized them for being quite slow to return refugees .
but that slowness , that caution , the fact that president clinton initially said that american troops would only be deployed for a year , turned out to be a strength , and it helped us to put our priorities right .
one of the saddest things about our involvement in afghanistan is that we 've got our priorities out of sync .
we 're not matching our resources to our priorities .
because if what we 're interested in is terrorism , pakistan is far more important than afghanistan .
if what we 're interested in is regional stability , egypt is far more important .
if what we 're worried about is poverty and development , sub-saharan africa is far more important .
this does n't mean that afghanistan does n't matter , but that it 's one of 40 countries in the world with which we need to engage .
so if i can finish with a metaphor for intervention , what we need to think of is something like mountain rescue .
why mountain rescue ?
because when people talk about intervention , they imagine that some scientific theory - the rand corporation goes around counting 43 previous insurgencies producing mathematical formula saying you need one trained counter-insurgent for every 20 members of the population .
this is the wrong way of looking at it .
you need to look at it in the way that you look at mountain rescue .
when you 're doing mountain rescue , you do n't take a doctorate in mountain rescue , you look for somebody who knows the terrain .
it 's about context .
you understand that you can prepare , but the amount of preparation you can do is limited - you can take some water , you can have a map , you can have a pack .
but what really matters is two kinds of problems - problems that occur on the mountain which you could n't anticipate , such as , for example , ice on a slope , but which you can get around , and problems which you could n't anticipate and which you ca n't get around , like a sudden blizzard or an avalanche or a change in the weather .
and the key to this is a guide who has been on that mountain , in every temperature , at every period - a guide who , above all , knows when to turn back , who does n't press on relentlessly when conditions turn against them .
what we look for in firemen , in climbers , in policemen , and what we should look for in intervention , is intelligent risk takers - not people who plunge blind off a cliff , not people who jump into a burning room , but who weigh their risks , weigh their responsibilities .
because the worst thing we have done in afghanistan is this idea that failure is not an option .
it makes failure invisible , inconceivable and inevitable .
and if we can resist this crazy slogan , we shall discover - in egypt , in syria , in libya , and anywhere else we go in the world - that if we can often do much less than we pretend , we can do much more than we fear .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you . thank you very much .
thank you . thank you very much .
thank you . thank you . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- thank you .
thank you . thank you .
thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- bruno giussani : rory , you mentioned libya at the end .
just briefly , what 's your take on the current events there and the intervention ?
rory stewart : okay , i think libya poses the classic problem .
the problem in libya is that we are always pushing for the black or white .
we imagine there are only two choices : either full engagement and troop deployment or total isolation .
and we are always being tempted up to our neck .
we put our toes in and we go up to our neck .
what we should have done in libya is we should have stuck to the u.n. resolution .
we should have limited ourselves very , very strictly to the protection of the civilian population in benghazi .
we could have done that .
we set up a no-fly zone within 48 hours because gaddafi had no planes within 48 hours .
instead of which , we 've allowed ourselves to be tempted towards regime change .
in doing so , we 've destroyed our credibility with the security council , which means it 's very difficult to get a resolution on syria , and we 're setting ourselves up again for failure .
once more , humility , limits , honesty , realistic expectations and we could have achieved something to be proud of .
bg : rory , thank you very much .
rs : thank you . -lrb- bg : thank you . -rrb- what i want to talk about today is one idea .
it 's an idea for a new kind of school , which turns on its head much of our conventional thinking about what schools are for and how they work .
and it might just be coming to a neighborhood near you soon .
where it comes from is an organization called the young foundation , which , over many decades , has come up with many innovations in education , like the open university and things like extended schools , schools for social entrepreneurs , summer universities and the school of everything .
and about five years ago , we asked what was the most important need for innovation in schooling here in the u.k.
and we felt the most important priority was to bring together two sets of problems .
one was large numbers of bored teenagers who just did n't like school , could n't see any relationship between what they learned in school and future jobs .
and employers who kept complaining that the kids coming out of school were n't actually ready for real work , did n't have the right attitudes and experience .
and so we try to ask : what kind of school would have the teenagers fighting to get in , not fighting to stay out ?
and after hundreds of conversations with teenagers and teachers and parents and employers and schools from paraguay to australia , and looking at some of the academic research , which showed the importance of what 's now called non-cognitive skills - the skills of motivation , resilience - and that these are as important as the cognitive skills - formal academic skills - we came up with an answer , a very simple answer in a way , which we called the studio school .
and we called it a studio school to go back to the original idea of a studio in the renaissance where work and learning are integrated .
you work by learning , and you learn by working .
and the design we came up with had the following characteristics .
first of all , we wanted small schools - about 300 , 400 pupils - 14 to 19 year-olds , and critically , about 80 percent of the curriculum done not through sitting in classrooms , but through real-life , practical projects , working on commission to businesses , ngo 's and others .
that every pupil would have a coach , as well as teachers , who would have timetables much more like a work environment in a business .
and all of this will be done within the public system , funded by public money , but independently run .
and all at no extra cost , no selection , and allowing the pupils the route into university , even if many of them would want to become entrepreneurs and have manual jobs as well .
underlying it was some very simple ideas that large numbers of teenagers learn best by doing things , they learn best in teams and they learn best by doing things for real - all the opposite of what mainstream schooling actually does .
now that was a nice idea , so we moved into the rapid prototyping phase .
we tried it out , first in luton - famous for its airport and not much else , i fear - and in blackpool - famous for its beaches and leisure .
and what we found - and we got quite a lot of things wrong and then improved them - but we found that the young people loved it .
they found it much more motivational , much more exciting than traditional education .
and perhaps most important of all , two years later when the exam results came through , the pupils who had been put on these field trials who were in the lowest performing groups had jumped right to the top - in fact , pretty much at the top decile of performance in terms of gcse 's , which is the british marking system .
now not surprisingly , that influenced some people to think we were onto something .
the minister of education down south in london described himself as a " big fan . "
and the business organizations thought we were onto something in terms of a way of preparing children much better for real-life work today .
and indeed , the head of the chambers of commerce is now the chairman of the studio schools trust and helping it , not just with big businesses , but small businesses all over the country .
we started with two schools .
that 's grown this year to about 10 .
and next year , we 're expecting about 35 schools open across england , and another 40 areas want to have their own schools opening - a pretty rapid spread of this idea .
interestingly , it 's happened almost entirely without media coverage .
it 's happened almost entirely without big money behind it .
it spread almost entirely through word of mouth , virally , across teachers , parents , people involved in education .
and it spread because of the power of an idea - so the very , very simple idea about turning education on its head and putting the things which were marginal , things like working in teams , doing practical projects , and putting them right at the heart of learning , rather than on the edges .
now there 's a whole set of new schools opening up this autumn .
this is one from yorkshire where , in fact , my nephew , i hope , will be able to attend it .
and this one is focused on creative and media industries .
other ones have a focus on health care , tourism , engineering and other fields .
we think we 're onto something .
it 's not perfect yet , but we think this is one idea which can transform the lives of thousands , possibly millions , of teenagers who are really bored by schooling .
it does n't animate them .
they 're not like all of you who can sit in rows and hear things said to you for hour after hour .
they want to do things , they want to get their hands dirty , they want education to be for real .
and my hope is that some of you out there may be able to help us .
we feel we 're on the beginning of a journey of experiment and improvement to turn the studio school idea into something which is present , not as a universal answer for every child , but at least as an answer for some children in every part of the world .
and i hope that a few of you at least can help us make that happen .
thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- shall i ask for a show of hands or a clapping of people in different generations ?
i 'm interested in how many are three to 12 years old .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- none , huh ?
all right .
i 'm going to talk about dinosaurs .
do you remember dinosaurs when you were that age ?
-lrb- applause -rrb- dinosaurs are kind of funny , you know .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- we 're going to kind of go in a different direction right now .
i hope you all realize that .
so i 'll just give you my message up front : try not to go extinct .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- that 's it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- people ask me a lot - in fact , one of the most asked questions i get is , why do children like dinosaurs so much ?
what 's the fascination ?
and i usually just say , " well dinosaurs were big , different and gone . "
they 're all gone .
well that 's not true , but we 'll get to the goose in a minute .
so that 's sort of the theme : big , different and gone .
the title of my talk : shape-shifting dinosaurs : the cause of a premature extinction .
now i assume that we remember dinosaurs .
and there 's lots of different shapes .
lots of different kinds .
a long time ago , back in the early 1900s , museums were out looking for dinosaurs .
they went out and gathered them up .
and this is an interesting story .
every museum wanted a little bigger or better one than anybody else had .
so if the museum in toronto went out and collected a tyrannosaur , a big one , then the museum in ottawa wanted a bigger one and a better one .
and that happened for all museums .
so everyone was out looking for all these bigger and better dinosaurs .
and this was in the early 1900s .
by about 1970 , some scientists were sitting around and they thought , " what in the world ?
look at these dinosaurs .
they 're all big .
where are all the little ones ? "
and they thought about it and they even wrote papers about it : " where are the little dinosaurs ? "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- well , go to a museum , you 'll see , see how many baby dinosaurs there are .
people assumed - and this was actually a problem - people assumed that if they had little dinosaurs , if they had juvenile dinosaurs , they 'd be easy to identify .
you 'd have a big dinosaur and a littler dinosaur .
but all they had were big dinosaurs .
and it comes down to a couple of things .
first off , scientists have egos , and scientists like to name dinosaurs .
they like to name anything .
everybody likes to have their own animal that they named .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and so every time they found something that looked a little different , they named it something different .
and what happened , of course , is we ended up with a whole bunch of different dinosaurs .
in 1975 , a light went on in somebody 's head .
dr. peter dodson at the university of pennsylvania actually realized that dinosaurs grew kind of like birds do , which is different than the way reptiles grow .
and in fact , he used the cassowary as an example .
and it 's kind of cool - if you look at the cassowary , or any of the birds that have crests on their heads , they actually grow to about 80 percent adult size before the crest starts to grow .
now think about that .
they 're basically retaining their juvenile characteristics very late in what we call ontogeny .
so allometric cranial ontogeny is relative skull growth .
so you can see that if you actually found one that was 80 percent grown and you did n't know that it was going to grow up to a cassowary , you would think they were two different animals .
so this was a problem , and peter dodson pointed this out using some duck-billed dinosaurs then called hypacrosaurus .
and he showed that if you were to take a baby and an adult and make an average of what it should look like , if it grew in sort of a linear fashion , it would have a crest about half the size of the adult .
but the actual sub-adult at 65 percent had no crest at all .
so this was interesting .
so this is where people went astray again .
i mean , if they 'd have just taken that , taken peter dodson 's work , and gone on with that , then we would have a lot less dinosaurs than we have .
but scientists have egos ; they like to name things .
and so they went on naming dinosaurs because they were different .
now we have a way of actually testing to see whether a dinosaur , or any animal , is a young one or an older one .
and that 's by actually cutting into their bones .
but cutting into the bones of a dinosaur is hard to do , as you can imagine , because in museums bones are precious .
you go into a museum and they take really good care of them .
they put them in foam , little containers .
they 're very well taken care of .
they do n't like it if you come in and want to saw them open and look inside .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so they do n't normally let you do that .
but i have a museum and i collect dinosaurs and i can saw mine open .
so that 's what i do .
-lrb- applause -rrb- so if you cut open a little dinosaur , it 's very spongy inside like a.
and if you cut into an older dinosaur , it 's very massive .
you can tell it 's mature bone .
so it 's real easy to tell them apart .
so what i want to do is show you these .
in north america in the northern plains of the united states and the southern plains of alberta and saskatchewan , there 's this unit of rock called the hell creek formation that produces the last dinosaurs that lived on earth .
and there are 12 of them that everyone recognizes - i mean the 12 primary dinosaurs that went extinct .
and so we will evaluate them .
and that 's sort of what i 've been doing .
so my students , my staff , we 've been cutting them open .
now as you can imagine , cutting open a leg bone is one thing , but when you go to a museum and say , " you do n't mind if i cut open your dinosaur 's skull do you ? "
they say , " go away . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so here are 12 dinosaurs .
and we want to look at these three first .
so these are dinosaurs that are called pachycephalosaurs .
and everybody knows that these three animals are related .
and the assumption is is that they 're related like cousins or whatever .
but no one ever considered that they might be more closely related .
in other words , people looked at them and they saw the differences .
and you all know that if you are going to determine whether you 're related to your brother or your sister , you ca n't do it by looking at differences .
you can only determine relatedness by looking for similarities .
so people were looking at these and they were talking about how different they are .
pachycephalosaurus has a big , thick dome on its head , and it 's got some little bumps on the back of its head , and it 's got a bunch of gnarly things on the end of its nose .
and then stygimoloch , another dinosaur from the same age , lived at the same time , has spikes sticking out the back of its head .
it 's got a little , tiny dome , and it 's got a bunch of gnarly stuff on its nose .
and then there 's this thing called dracorex , hogwart 's eye .
guess where that came from ? dragon .
so here 's a dinosaur that has spikes sticking out of its head , no dome and gnarly stuff on its nose .
nobody noticed the gnarly stuff sort of looked alike .
but they did look at these three and they said , " these are three different dinosaurs , and dracorex is probably the most primitive of them .
and the other one is more primitive than the other .
it 's unclear to me how they actually sorted these three of them out .
but if you line them up , if you just take those three skulls and just line them up , they line up like this .
dracorex is the littlest one , stygimoloch is the middle size one , pachycephalosaurus is the largest one .
and one would think , that should give me a clue .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but it did n't give them a clue .
because , well we know why .
scientists like to name things .
so if we cut open dracorex - i cut open our dracorex - and look , it was spongy inside , really spongy inside .
i mean , it is a juvenile and it 's growing really fast .
so it is going to get bigger .
if you cut open stygimoloch , it is doing the same thing .
the dome , that little dome , is growing really fast .
it 's inflating very fast .
what 's interesting is the spike on the back of the dracorex was growing very fast as well .
the spikes on the back of the stygimoloch are actually resorbing , which means they 're getting smaller as that dome is getting bigger .
and if we look at pachycephalosaurus , pachycephalosaurus has a solid dome and its little bumps on the back of its head were also resorbing .
so just with these three dinosaurs , you can easily - as a scientist - we can easily hypothesize that it is just a growth series of the same animal .
which of course means that stygimoloch and dracorex are extinct .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- okay .
which of course means we have 10 primary dinosaurs to deal with .
so a colleague of mine at berkley , he and i were looking at triceratops .
and before the year 2000 - now remember , triceratops was first found in the 1800s - before 2000 , no one had ever seen a juvenile triceratops .
there 's a triceratops in every museum in the world , but no one had ever collected a juvenile .
and we know why , right ?
because everybody wants to have a big one .
so everyone had a big one .
so we went out and collected a whole bunch of stuff and we found a whole bunch of little ones .
they 're everywhere . they 're all over the place .
so we have a whole bunch of them at our museum .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- and everybody says it 's because i have a little museum .
when you have a little museum , you have little dinosaurs .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- if you look at the triceratops , you can see it 's changing , it 's shape-shifting .
as the juveniles are growing up , their horns actually curve backwards .
and then as they grow older , the horns grow forward .
and that 's pretty cool .
if you look along the edge of the frill , they have these little triangular bones that actually grow big as triangles and then they flatten against the frill pretty much like the spikes do on the pachycephalosaurs .
and then , because the juveniles are in my collection , i cut them open and look inside .
and the little one is really spongy .
and the middle size one is really spongy .
but what was interesting was the adult triceratops was also spongy .
and this is a skull that is two meters long .
it 's a big skull .
but there 's another dinosaur that is found in this formation that looks like a triceratops , except it 's bigger , and it 's called torosaurus .
and torosaurus , when we cut into it , has mature bone .
but it 's got these big holes in its shield .
and everybody says , " a triceratops and a torosaurus ca n't possibly be the same animal because one of them 's bigger than the other one . "
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " and it has holes in its frill . "
and i said , " well do we have any juvenile torosauruses ? "
and they said , " well no , but it has holes in its frill . "
so one of my graduate students , john scannella , looked through our whole collection and he actually discovered that the hole starting to form in triceratops and , of course it 's open , in torosaurus - so he found the transitional ones between triceratops and torosaurus , which was pretty cool .
so now we know that torosaurus is actually a grownup triceratops .
now when we name dinosaurs , when we name anything , the original name gets to stick and the second name is thrown out .
so torosaurus is extinct .
triceratops , if you 've heard the news , a lot of the newscasters got it all wrong .
they thought torosaurus should be kept and triceratops thrown out , but that 's not going to happen .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- all right , so we can do this with a bunch of dinosaurs .
i mean , here 's edmontosaurus and anatotitan .
anatotitan : giant duck .
it 's a giant duck-bill dinosaur .
here 's another one .
so we look at the bone histology .
the bone histology tells us that edmontosaurus is a juvenile , or at least a sub-adult , and the other one is an adult and we have an ontogeny .
and we get rid of anatotitan .
so we can just keep doing this .
and the last one is t. rex .
so there 's these two dinosaurs , t. rex and nanotyrannus .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- again , makes you wonder .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- but they had a good question .
they were looking at them and they said , " one 's got 17 teeth , and the biggest one 's got 12 teeth .
and that does n't make any sense at all , because we do n't know of any dinosaurs that gain teeth as they get older .
so it must be true - they must be different . "
so we cut into them .
and sure enough , nanotyrannus has juvenile bone and the bigger one has more mature bone .
it looks like it could still get bigger .
and at the museum of the rockies where we work , i have four t. rexes , so i can cut a whole bunch of them .
but i did n't have to cut any of them really , because i just lined up their jaws and it turned out the biggest one had 12 teeth and the next smallest one had 13 and the next smallest had 14 .
and of course , nano has 17 .
and we just went out and looked at other people 's collections and we found one that has sort of 15 teeth .
so again , real easy to say that tyrannosaurus ontogeny included nanotyrannus , and therefore we can take out another dinosaur .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- so when it comes down to our end cretaceous , we have seven left .
and that 's a good number .
that 's a good number to go extinct , i think .
now as you can imagine , this is not very popular with fourth-graders .
fourth-graders love their dinosaurs , they memorize them .
and they 're not happy with this .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- thank you very much .
-lrb- applause -rrb- today , i 'm going to talk to you about sketching electronics .
i 'm , among several other things , an electrical engineer , and that means that i spend a good amount of time designing and building new pieces of technology , and what i 've found is that the process of designing and building electronics is problematic in all sorts of ways .
so it 's a really slow process , it 's really expensive , and the outcome of that process , namely electronic circuit boards , are limited in all sorts of kind of interesting ways .
so they 're really small , generally , they 're square and flat and hard , and frankly , most of them just are n't very attractive , and so my team and i have been thinking of ways to really change and mix up the process and the outcome of designing electronics .
and so what if you could design and build electronics like this ? so what if you could do it extremely quickly , extremely inexpensively , and maybe more interestingly , really fluidly and expressively and even improvisationally ?
would n't that be so cool , and that would n't that open up all sorts of new possibilities ?
i 'm going to share with you two projects that are investigations along these lines , and we 'll start with this one .
-lrb- video -rrb- magnetic electronic pieces and ferrous paper .
a conductive pen from the lewis lab at uiuc .
sticker templates .
speed x 4 .
making a switch .
music : dj shadow .
adding some intelligence with a microcontroller .
sketching an interface .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- pretty cool , huh ? we think so .
so now that we developed these tools and found these materials that let us do these things , we started to realize that , essentially , anything that we can do with paper , anything that we can do with a piece of paper and a pen we can now do with electronics .
so the next project that i want to show you is kind of a deeper exploration of that possibility .
and i 'll kind of let it speak for itself .
-lrb- music -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- so the next step for us in this process is now to find a way to let all of you build things like this , and so the way that we 're approaching that is by teaching workshops to people where we explain how they can use these kinds of tools , and then also working to get the tools and the materials and techniques out into the real world in a variety of ways .
and so sometime soon , you 'll be able to play and build and sketch with electronics in this fundamentally new way .
so thank you very much . -lrb- applause -rrb- this man is wearing what we call a bee beard . -lrb- laughter -rrb- a beard full of bees .
now , this is what many of you might picture when you think about honeybees , maybe insects , or maybe anything that has more legs than two .
and let me start by telling you , i gotcha .
i understand that . but , there are many things to know , and i want you to open your minds here , keep them open , and change your perspective about honeybees .
notice that this man is not getting stung .
he probably has a queen bee tied to his chin , and the other bees are attracted to it .
so this really demonstrates our relationship with honeybees , and that goes deep back for thousands of years .
we 're very co-evolved , because we depend on bees for pollination and , even more recently , as an economic commodity .
many of you may have heard that honeybees are disappearing , not just dying , but they 're gone .
we do n't even find dead bodies .
this is called colony collapse disorder , and it 's bizarre . researchers around the globe still do not know what 's causing it , but what we do know is that , with the declining numbers of bees , the costs of over 130 fruit and vegetable crops so honeybees are important for their role in the economy as well as in agriculture .
here you can see some pictures of what are called green roofs , or urban agriculture .
we 're familiar with the image on the left that shows a local neighborhood garden in the south end .
that 's where i call home . i have a beehive in the backyard .
and perhaps a green roof in the future , when we 're further utilizing urban areas , where there are stacks of garden spaces .
check out this image above the orange line in boston .
try to spot the beehive . it 's there .
it 's on the rooftop , right on the corner there , and it 's been there for a couple of years now .
the way that urban beekeeping currently operates is that the beehives are quite hidden , and it 's not because they need to be .
it 's just because people are uncomfortable with the idea , and that 's why i want you today to try to think about this , think about the benefits of bees in cities and why they really are a terrific thing .
let me give you a brief rundown on how pollination works .
so we know flowers , we know fruits and vegetables , even some alfalfa in hay that the livestock for the meats that we eat , rely on pollinators , but you 've got male and female parts to a plant here , and basically pollinators are attracted to plants for their nectar , and in the process , a bee will visit some flowers and pick up some pollen , or that male kind of sperm counterpart , along the way , and then travel to different flowers , and eventually an apple , in this case , will be produced .
you can see the orientation . the stem is down .
the blossom end has fallen off by the time we eat it , but that 's a basic overview of how pollination works .
and let 's think about urban living , not today , and not in the past , but what about in a hundred years ?
what 's it gonna look like ? we have huge grand challenges these days of habitat loss . we have more and more people , billions of people , in 100 years , god knows how many people , and how little space there will be to fit all of them , so we need to change the way that we see cities , and looking at this picture on the left of new york city today , you can see how gray and brown it is .
we have tar paper on the rooftops that bounces heat back into the atmosphere , contributing to global climate change , no doubt .
what about in 100 years , if we have green rooftops everywhere , and gardening , and we create our own crops right in the cities ? we save on the costs of transportation , we save on a healthier diet , and we also educate and create new jobs locally .
we need bees for the future of our cities and urban living .
here 's some data that we collected through our company with best bees , where we deliver , install and manage honeybee hives for anybody who wants them , in the city , in the countryside , and we introduce honeybees , and the idea of beekeeping in your own backyard or rooftop or fire escape , for even that matter , and seeing how simple it is and how possible it is .
there 's a counterintuitive trend that we noticed in these numbers . so let 's look at the first metric here , overwintering survival .
now this has been a huge problem for many years , basically since the late 1980s , when the varroa mite came and brought many different viruses , bacteria and fungal diseases with it .
overwintering success is hard , and that 's when most of the colonies are lost , and we found that in the cities , bees are surviving better than they are in the country .
a bit counterintuitive , right ?
we think , oh , bees , countryside , agriculture , but that 's not what the bees are showing .
the bees like it in the city . -lrb- laughter -rrb- furthermore , they also produce more honey .
the urban honey is delicious .
the bees in boston on the rooftop of the seaport hotel , where we have hundreds of thousands of bees flying overheard right now that i 'm sure none of you noticed when we walked by , are going to all of the local community gardens and making delicious , healthy honey that just tastes like the flowers in our city .
so the yield for urban hives , in terms of honey production , is higher as well as the overwintering survival , compared to rural areas .
again , a bit counterintuitive .
and looking back historically at the timeline of honeybee health , we can go back to the year 950 and see that there was also a great mortality of bees in ireland .
so the problems of bees today is n't necessarily something new . it has been happening since over a thousand years ago , but what we do n't really notice are these problems in cities .
so one thing i want to encourage you to think about is the idea of what an urban island is .
you think in the city maybe the temperature 's warmer .
why are bees doing better in the city ?
this is a big question now to help us understand why they should be in the city .
perhaps there 's more pollen in the city .
with the trains coming in to urban hubs , they can carry pollen with them , very light pollen , and it 's just a big supermarket in the city .
a lot of linden trees live along the railroad tracks .
perhaps there are fewer pesticides in the cities than there are in -lsb- rural -rsb- areas .
perhaps there are other things that we 're just not thinking about yet , but that 's one idea to think about , urban islands .
and colony collapse disorder is not the only thing affecting honeybees . honeybees are dying , and it 's a huge , huge grand challenge of our time .
what you can see up here is a map of the world , and we 're tracking the spread of this varroa mite .
now , the varroa mite is what changed the game in beekeeping , and you can see , at the top right , the years are changing , we 're coming up to modern times , and you can see the spread of the varroa mite from the early 1900s through now .
it 's 1968 , and we 're pretty much covering asia .
1971 , we saw it spread to europe and south america , and then , when we get to the 1980s , and specifically to 1987 , the varroa mite finally came to north america and to the united states , and that is when the game changed for honeybees in the united states .
many of us will remember our childhood growing up , maybe you got stung by a bee , you saw bees on flowers .
think of the kids today . their childhood 's a bit different .
they do n't experience this .
the bees just are n't around anymore .
so we need bees and they 're disappearing and it 's a big problem .
what can we do here ?
so , what i do is honeybee research .
i got my ph.d. studying honeybee health .
i started in 2005 studying honeybees .
in 2006 , honeybees started disappearing , so suddenly , like , this little nerd kid going to school working with bugs - -lrb- laughter -rrb- - became very relevant in the world .
and it worked out that way .
so my research focuses on ways to make bees healthier .
i do n't research what 's killing the bees , per se .
i 'm not one of the many researchers around the world who 's looking at the effects of pesticides or diseases or habitat loss and poor nutrition on bees .
we 're looking at ways to make bees healthier through vaccines , through yogurt , like probiotics , and other types of therapies in ways that can be fed orally to bees , and this process is so easy , even a 7-year-old can do it .
you just mix up some pollen , sugar and water , and whatever active ingredient you want to put in , and you just give it right to the bees . no chemicals involved , just immune boosters .
humans think about our own health in a prospective way .
we exercise , we eat healthy , we take vitamins .
why do n't we think about honeybees in that same type of way ?
bring them to areas where they 're thriving and try to make them healthier before they get sick .
i spent many years in grad school trying to poke bees and do vaccines with needles . -lrb- laughter -rrb- like , years , years at the bench , " oh my gosh , it 's 3 a.m.
and i 'm still pricking bees . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- and then one day i said , " why do n't we just do an oral vaccine ? "
it 's like , " ugh , " so that 's what we do . -lrb- laughter -rrb- i 'd love to share with you some images of urban beehives , because they can be anything .
i mean , really open your mind with this .
you can paint a hive to match your home .
you can hide a hive inside your home .
these are three hives on the rooftop of the fairmont copley plaza hotel , and they 're beautiful here . i mean , we matched the new color of the inside of their rooms to do some type of a stained wood with blue for their sheets , and these bees are terrific , and they also will use herbs that are growing in the garden .
that 's what the chefs go to to use for their cooking , and the honey - they do live events - they 'll use that honey at their bars .
honey is a great nutritional substitute for regular sugar because there are different types of sugars in there .
we also have a classroom hives project , where - this is a nonprofit venture - we 're spreading the word around the world for how honeybee hives can be taken into the classroom or into the museum setting , behind glass , and used as an educational tool .
this hive that you see here has been in fenway high school for many years now .
the bees fly right into the outfield of fenway park .
nobody notices it . if you 're not a flower , these bees do not care about you . -lrb- laughter -rrb- they do n't . they do n't . they 'll say , " s 'cuse me , flying around . " -lrb- laughter -rrb- some other images here in telling a part of the story that really made urban beekeeping terrific is in new york city , beekeeping was illegal until 2010 .
that 's a big problem , because what 's going to pollinate all of the gardens and the produce locally ? hands ?
i mean , locally in boston , there is a terrific company called green city growers , and they are going and pollinating their squash crops by hand with q-tips , and if they miss that three day window , there 's no fruit .
their clients are n't happy , and people go hungry .
so this is important .
we have also some images of honey from brooklyn .
now , this was a mystery in the new york times where the honey was very red , and the new york state forensics department came in and they actually did some science to match the red dye with that found in a maraschino cherry factory down the street . -lrb- laughter -rrb- so you can tailor your honey to taste however you want by planting bee-friendly flowers .
paris has been a terrific model for urban beekeeping .
they 've had hives on the rooftop of their opera house for many years now , and that 's what really got people started , thinking , " wow , we can do this , and we should do this . "
also in london , and in europe across the board , they 're very advanced in their use of green rooftops and integrating beehives , and i 'll show you an ending note here .
i would like to encourage you to open your mind .
what can you do to save the bees or to help them or to think of sustainable cities in the future ?
well , really , just change your perspective .
try to understand that bees are very important .
a bee is n't going to sting you if you see it .
the bee dies . honeybees die when they sting , so they do n't want to do it either . -lrb- laughter -rrb- it 's nothing to panic about . they 're all over the city .
you could even get your own hive if you want .
there are great resources available , and there are even companies that will help get you set up and mentor you and it 's important for our educational system in the world for students to learn about agriculture worldwide such as this little girl , who , again , is not even getting stung .
thank you . -lrb- applause -rrb- the great texts of the ancient world do n't survive to us in their original form .
they survive because medieval scribes copied them and copied them and copied them .
and so it is with archimedes , the great greek mathematician .
everything we know about archimedes as a mathematician we know about because of just three books , and they 're called a , b and c.
and a was lost by an italian humanist in 1564 .
and b was last heard of in the pope 's library about a hundred miles north of rome in viterbo in 1311 .
now codex c was only discovered in 1906 , and it landed on my desk in baltimore on the 19th of january , 1999 .
and this is codex c here .
now codex c is actually buried in this book .
it 's buried treasure .
because this book is actually a prayer book .
it was finished by a guy called johannes myrones on the 14th of april , 1229 .
and to make his prayer book he used parchment .
but he did n't use new parchment , he used parchment recycled from earlier manuscripts , and there were seven of them .
and archimedes codex c was just one of those seven .
he took apart the archimedes manuscript and the other seven manuscripts .
he erased all of their texts , and then he cut the sheets down in the middle , he shuffled them up , and he rotated them 90 degrees , and he wrote prayers on top of these books .
and essentially these seven manuscripts disappeared for 700 years , and we have a prayer book .
the prayer book was discovered by this guy , johan ludvig heiberg , in 1906 .
and with just a magnifying glass , he transcribed as much of the text as he could .
and the thing is that he found two texts in this manuscript that were unique texts .
they were n't in a and b at all ; they were completely new texts by archimedes , and they were called " the method " and " the stomachion . "
and it became a world famous manuscript .
now it should be clear by now that this book is in bad condition .
it got in worse condition in the 20th century after heiberg saw it .
forgeries were painted over it , and it suffered very badly from mold .
this book is the definition of a write-off .
it 's the sort of book that you thought would be in an institution .
but it 's not in an institution , it was bought by a private owner in 1998 .
why did he buy this book ?
because he wanted to make that which was fragile safe .
he wanted to make that which was unique ubiquitous .
he wanted to make that which was expensive free .
and he wanted to do this as a matter of principle .
because not many people are really going to read archimedes in ancient greek , but they should have the chance to do it .
so he gathered around himself the friends of archimedes , and he promised to pay for all the work .
and it was an expensive job , but actually it would n't be as much as you think because these people , they did n't come from money , they came from archimedes .
and they came from all sorts of different backgrounds .
they came from particle physics , they came from classical philology , they came from book conservation , they came from ancient mathematics , they came from data management , they came from scientific imaging and program management .
and they got together to work on this manuscript .
the first problem was a conservation problem .
and this is the sort of thing that we had to deal with : there was glue on the spine of the book .
and if you look at this photograph carefully , the bottom half of this is rather brown .
and that glue is hide glue .
now if you 're a conservator , you can take off this glue reasonably easily .
the top half is elmer 's wood glue .
it 's polyvinyl acetate emulsion that does n't dissolve in water once it 's dry .
and it 's much tougher than the parchment that it was written on .
and so before we could start imaging archimedes , we had to take this book apart .
so it took four years to take apart .
and this is a rare action shot , ladies and gentlemen .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- another thing is that we had to get rid of all the wax , because this was used in the liturgical services of the greek orthodox church and they 'd used candle wax .
and the candle wax was dirty , and we could n't image through the wax .
so very carefully we had to mechanically scrape off all the wax .
it 's hard to tell you exactly how bad this condition of this book is , but it came out in little bits very often .
and normally in a book , you would n't worry about the little bits , but these little bits might contain unique archimedes text .
so , tiny fragments we actually managed to put back in the right place .
then , having done that , we started to image the manuscript .
and we imaged the manuscript in 14 different wavebands of light .
because if you look at something in different wavebands of light , you see different things .
and here is an image of a page imaged in 14 different wavebands of light .
but none of them worked .
so what we did was we processed the images together , and we put two images into one blank screen .
and here are two different images of the archimedes manuscript .
and the image on the left is the normal red image .
and the image on the right is an ultraviolet image .
and in the image on the right you might be able to see some of the archimedes writing .
if you merge them together into one digital canvas , the parchment is bright in both images and it comes out bright .
the prayer book is dark in both images and it comes out dark .
the archimedes text is dark in one image and bright in another .
and it 'll come out dark but red , and then you can start to read it rather clearly .
and that 's what it looks like .
now that 's a before and after image , but you do n't read the image on the screen like that .
you zoom in and you zoom in and you zoom in and you zoom in , and you can just read it now .
-lrb- applause -rrb- if you process the same two images in a different way , you can actually get rid of the prayer book text .
and this is terribly important , because the diagrams in the manuscript are the unique source for the diagrams that archimedes drew in the sand in the fourth century b.c.
and there we are , i can give them to you .
with this kind of imaging - this kind of infrared , ultraviolet , invisible light imaging - we were never going to image through the gold ground forgeries .
how were we going to do that ?
well we took the manuscript , and we decided to image it in x-ray fluorescence imaging .
so an x-ray comes in in the diagram on the left and it knocks out an electron from the inner shell of an atom .
and that electron disappears .
and as it disappears , an electron from a shell farther out jumps in and takes its place .
and when it takes its place , it sheds electromagnetic radiation .
it sheds an x-ray .
and this x-ray is specific in its wavelength to the atom that it hits .
and what we wanted to get was the iron .
because the ink was written in iron .
and if we can map where this x-ray that comes out , where it comes from , we can map all the iron on the page , then theoretically we can read the image .
the thing is that you need a very powerful light source to do this .
so we took it to the stanford synchrotron radiation laboratory in california , which is a particle accelerator .
electrons go around one way , positrons go around the other .
they meet in the middle , and they create subatomic particles like the charm quark and the tau lepton .
now we were n't actually going to put archimedes in that beam .
but as the electrons go round at the speed of light , they shed x-rays .
and this is the most powerful light source in the solar system .
this is called synchrotron radiation , and it 's normally used to look at things like proteins and that sort of thing .
but we wanted it to look at atoms , at iron atoms , so that we could read the page from before and after .
and lo and behold , we found that we could do it .
it took about 17 minutes to do a single page .
so what did we discover ?
well one of the unique texts in archimedes is called " the stomachion . "
and this did n't exist in codices a and b.
and we knew that it involved this square .
and this is a perfect square , and it 's divided into 14 bits .
but no one knew what archimedes was doing with these 14 bits .
and now we think we know .
he was trying to work out how many ways you can recombine those 14 bits and still make a perfect square .
anyone want to guess the answer ?
it 's 17,152 divided into 536 families .
and the important point about this is that it 's the earliest study in combinatorics in mathematics .
and combinatorics is a wonderful and interesting branch of mathematics .
the really astonishing thing though about this manuscript is that we looked at the other manuscripts that the palimpsester had made , the scribe had made his book out of , and one of them was a manuscript containing text by hyperides .
now hyperides was an athenian orator from the fourth century b.c.
he was an exact contemporary of demosthenes .
and in 338 b.c. he and demosthenes together decided that they wanted to stand up to the military might of philip of macedon .
so athens and thebes went out to fight philip of macedon .
this was a bad idea , because philip of macedon had a son called alexander the great , and they lost the battle of chaeronea .
alexander the great went on to conquer the known world ; hyperides found himself on trial for treason .
and this is the speech that he gave when he was on trial - and it 's a great speech : " best of all , " he says , " is to win .
but if you ca n't win , then you should fight for a noble cause , because then you 'll be remembered .
consider the spartans .
they won enumerable victories , but no one remembers what they are because they were all fought for selfish ends .
the one battle that the spartans fought that everybody remembers is the the battle of thermopylae where they were butchered to a man , but fought for the freedom of greece . "
it was such a great speech that the athenian law courts let him off .
he lived for another 10 years , then the macedonian faction caught up with him .
they cut out his tongue in mockery of his oratory , and no one knows what they did with his body .
so this is the discovery of a lost voice from antiquity , speaking to us , not from the grave , because his grave does n't exist , but from the athenian law courts .
now i should say at this point that normally when you 're looking at medieval manuscripts that have been scraped off , you do n't find unique texts .
and to find two in one manuscript is really something .
to find three is completely weird .
and we found three .
aristotle 's " categories " is one of the foundational texts of western philosophy .
and we found a third century a.d. commentary on it , possibly by galen and probably by porphyry .
now all this data that we collected , all the images , all the raw images , all the transcriptions that we made and that sort of thing have been put online under a creative commons license for anyone to use for any commercial purpose .
-lrb- applause -rrb- why did the owner of the manuscript do this ?
he did this because he understands data as well as books .
now the thing to do with books , if you want to ensure their long-term utility , is to hide them away in closets and let very few people look at them .
the thing to do with data , if you want it to survive , is to let it out and have everybody have it with as little control on that data as possible .
and that 's what he did .
and institutions can learn from this .
because institutions at the moment confine their data with copyright restrictions and that sort of thing .
and if you want to look at medieval manuscripts on the web , at the moment you have to go to the national library of y 's site or the university library of x 's site , which is about the most boring way in which you can deal with digital data .
what you want to do is to aggregate it all together .
because the web of the ancient manuscripts of the future is n't going to be built by institutions .
it 's going to be built by users , by people who get this data together , by people who want to aggregate all sorts of maps from wherever they come from , all sorts of medieval romances from wherever they come from , people who just want to curate their own glorious selection of beautiful things .
and that is the future of the web .
and it 's an attractive and beautiful future , if only we can make it happen .
now we at the walters art museum have followed this example , and we have put up all our manuscripts on the web for people to enjoy - all the raw data , all the descriptions , all the metadata .
under a creative commons license .
now the walters art museum is a small museum and it has beautiful manuscripts , but the data is fantastic .
and the result of this is that if you do a google search on images right now and you type in " illuminated manuscript koran " for example , 24 of the 28 images you 'll find come from my institution .
-lrb- applause -rrb- now , let 's think about this for a minute .
what 's in it for the institution ?
there are all sorts of things that are in it for the institution .
you can talk about the humanities and that sort of thing , but let 's talk about selfish things .
because what 's really in it for the institution is this : now why do people go to the louvre ?
they go to see the mona lisa .
why do they go to see the mona lisa ?
because they already know what she looks like .
and they know what she looks like because they 've seen pictures of her absolutely everywhere .
now , there is no need for these restrictions at all .
and i think that institutions should stand up and release all their data under unrestricted licenses , and it would be a great benefit to everybody .
why do n't we just let everybody have access to this data and curate their own collection of ancient knowledge and wonderful and beautiful things and increase the beauty and the cultural significance of the internet .
thank you very much indeed .
-lrb- applause -rrb- i think all of us have been interested , at one time or another , in the romantic mysteries of all those societies that collapsed , such as the classic maya in the yucatan , the easter islanders , the anasazi , fertile crescent society , angor wat , great zimbabwe and so on . and within the last decade or two , archaeologists have shown us that there were environmental problems underlying many of these past collapses .
but there were also plenty of places in the world where societies have been developing for thousands of years without any sign of a major collapse , such as japan , java , tonga and tikopea . so evidently , societies in some areas are more fragile than in other areas .
how can we understand what makes some societies more fragile than other societies ? the problem is obviously relevant to our situation today , because today as well , there are some societies that have already collapsed , such as somalia and rwanda and the former yugoslavia . there are also societies today that may be close to collapse , such as nepal , indonesia and columbia .
what about ourselves ?
what is there that we can learn from the past that would help us avoid declining or collapsing in the way that so many past societies have ?
obviously the answer to this question is not going to be a single factor . if anyone tells you that there is a single-factor explanation for societal collapses , you know right away that they 're an idiot . this is a complex subject .
but how can we make sense out of the complexities of this subject ?
in analyzing societal collapses , i 've arrived at a five-point framework - a checklist of things that i go through to try and understand collapses . and i 'll illustrate that five-point framework by the extinction of the greenland norse society .
this is a european society with literate records , so we know a good deal about the people and their motivation .
in ad 984 vikings went out to greenland , settled greenland , and around 1450 they died out - the society collapsed , and every one of them ended up dead .
why did they all end up dead ? well , in my five-point framework , the first item on the framework is to look for human impacts on the environment : people inadvertently destroying the resource base on which they depend . and in the case of the viking norse , the vikings inadvertently caused soil erosion and deforestation , which was a particular problem for them because they required forests to make charcoal , to make iron .
so they ended up an iron age european society , virtually unable to make their own iron . a second item on my checklist is climate change . climate can get warmer or colder or dryer or wetter .
in the case of the vikings - in greenland , the climate got colder in the late 1300s , and especially in the 1400s . but a cold climate is n't necessarily fatal , because the inuit - the eskimos inhabiting greenland at the same time - did better , rather than worse , with cold climates . so why did n't the greenland norse as well ?
the third thing on my checklist is relations with neighboring friendly societies that may prop up a society . and if that friendly support is pulled away , that may make a society more likely to collapse . in the case of the greenland norse , they had trade with the mother country - norway - and that trade dwindled : partly because norway got weaker , partly because of sea ice between greenland and norway .
the fourth item on my checklist is relations with hostile societies .
in the case of norse greenland , the hostiles were the inuit - the eskimos sharing greenland - with whom the norse got off to bad relationships . and we know that the inuit killed the norse and , probably of greater importance , may have blocked access to the outer fjords , on which the norse depended for seals at a critical time of the year .
and then finally , the fifth item on my checklist is the political , economic , social and cultural factors in the society that make it more or less likely that the society will perceive and solve its environmental problems . in the case of the greenland norse , cultural factors that made it difficult for them to solve their problems were : their commitments to a christian society investing heavily in cathedrals ; their being a competitive-ranked chiefly society ; and their scorn for the inuit , from whom they refused to learn . so that 's how the five-part framework is relevant to the collapse and eventual extinction of the greenland norse .
what about a society today ?
for the past five years , i 've been taking my wife and kids to southwestern montana , where i worked as a teenager on the hay harvest . and montana , at first sight , seems like the most pristine environment in the united states .
but scratch the surface , and montana suffers from serious problems .
going through the same checklist : human environmental impacts ?
yes , acute in montana . toxic problems from mine waste have caused damage of billions of dollars .
problems from weeds , weed control , cost montana nearly 200 million dollars a year . montana has lost agricultural areas from salinization , problems of forest management , problems of forest fires . second item on my checklist : climate change . yes - the climate in montana is getting warmer and drier , but montana agriculture depends especially on irrigation from the snow pack , and as the snow is melting - for example , as the glaciers in glacier national park are disappearing - that 's bad news for montana irrigation agriculture .
third thing on my checklist : relations with friendlies that can sustain the society . in montana today , more than half of the income of montana is not earned within montana , but is derived from out of state : transfer payments from social security , investments and so on - which makes montana vulnerable to the rest of the united states .
fourth : relations with hostiles . montanans have the same problems as do all americans , in being sensitive to problems created by hostiles overseas affecting our oil supplies , and terrorist attacks . and finally , last item on my checklist : question of how political , economic , social , cultural attitudes play into this . montanans have long-held values , which today seem to be getting in the way of their solving their own problems .
long-held devotion to logging and to mines and to agriculture , and to no government regulation ; values that worked well in the past , but they do n't seem to be working well today .
so , i 'm looking at these issues of collapses for a lot of past societies and for many present societies .
are there any general conclusions that arise ?
in a way , just like tolstoy 's statement about every unhappy marriage being different , every collapsed or endangered society is different - they all have different details . but nevertheless , there are certain common threads that emerge from these comparisons of past societies that did or did not collapse and threatened societies today . one interesting common thread has to do with , in many cases , the rapidity of collapse after a society reaches its peak . there are many societies that do n't wind down gradually , but they build up - get richer and more powerful - and then within a short time , within a few decades
after their peak , they collapse . for example , the classic lowland maya of the yucatan began to collapse in the early 800s - literally a few decades after the maya were building their biggest monuments , and maya population was greatest .
or again , the collapse of the soviet union took place within a couple of decades , maybe within a decade , of the time when the soviet union was at its greatest power .
an analogue would be the growth of bacteria in a petri dish .
these rapid collapses are especially likely where there 's a mismatch between available resources and resource consumption , or a mismatch between economic outlays and economic potential .
in a petri dish , bacteria grow . say they double every generation , and five generations before the end the petri dish is 15/16ths empty , and then the next generation 's 3/4ths empty , and the next generation half empty . within one generation after the petri dish still being half empty , it is full . there 's no more food and the bacteria have collapsed .
so , this is a frequent theme : societies collapse very soon after reaching their peak in power .
what it means to put it mathematically is that , if you 're concerned about a society today , you should be looking not at the value of the mathematical function - the wealth itself - but you should be looking at the first derivative and the second derivatives of the function . that 's one general theme . a second general theme is that there are many , often subtle environmental factors that make some societies more fragile than others . many of those factors are not well understood . for example , why is it that in the pacific , of those hundreds of pacific islands , why did easter island end up as
the most devastating case of complete deforestation ?
it turns out that there were about nine different environmental factors - some , rather subtle ones - that were working against the easter islanders , and they involve fallout of volcanic tephra , latitude , rainfall . perhaps the most subtle of them is that it turns out that a major input of nutrients which protects island environments in the pacific is from the fallout of continental dust from central asia .
easter , of all pacific islands , has the least input of dust from asia restoring the fertility of its soils . but that 's a factor that we did n't even appreciate until 1999 .
so , some societies , for subtle environmental reasons , are more fragile than others . and then finally , another generalization . i 'm now teaching a course at ucla , to ucla undergraduates , on these collapses of societies . what really bugs my ucla undergraduate students is , how on earth did these societies not see what they were doing ?
how could the easter islanders have deforested their environment ?
what did they say when they were cutting down the last palm tree ?
did n't they see what they were doing ? how could societies not perceive their impacts on the environments and stop in time ?
and i would expect that , if our human civilization carries on , then maybe in the next century people will be asking , why on earth did these people today in the year 2003 not see the obvious things that they were doing and take corrective action ?
it seems incredible in the past . in the future , it 'll seem incredible what we are doing today . and so i 've been trying to develop a hierarchical set of considerations about why societies fail to solve their problems - why they fail to perceive the problems or , if they perceive them , why they fail to tackle them . or , if they tackle them , why do they fail to succeed in solving them ?
i 'll just mention two generalizations in this area .
one blueprint for trouble , making collapse likely , is where there is a conflict of interest between the short-term interest of the decision-making elites and the long-term interest of the society as a whole , especially if the elites are able to insulate themselves from the consequences of their actions . where what 's good in the short run for the elite is bad for the society as a whole , there 's a real risk of the elite doing things that would bring the society down in the long run .
for example , among the greenland norse - a competitive rank society - what the chiefs really wanted is more followers and more sheep and more resources to outcompete the neighboring chiefs . and that led the chiefs to do what 's called flogging the land : overstocking the land , forcing tenant farmers into dependency . and that made the chiefs powerful in the short run , but led to the society 's collapse in the long run .
those same issues of conflicts of interest are acute in the united states today . especially because the decision makers in the united states are frequently able to insulate themselves from consequences by living in gated compounds , by drinking bottled water and so on . and within the last couple of years , it 's been obvious that the elite in the business world correctly perceive that they can advance their short-term interest by doing things that are good for them but bad for society as a whole , such as draining a few billion dollars out of enron and other businesses . they are quite correct
that these things are good for them in the short term , although bad for society in the long term .
so , that 's one general conclusion about why societies make bad decisions : conflicts of interest .
and the other generalization that i want to mention is that it 's particularly hard for a society to make quote-unquote good decisions when there is a conflict involving strongly held values that are good in many circumstances but are poor in other circumstances . for example , the greenland norse , in this difficult environment , were held together for four-and-a-half centuries by their shared commitment to religion , and by their strong social cohesion . but those two things - commitment to religion and strong social cohesion - also made it difficult for them to change at the end and to learn from the inuit . or today - australia .
one of the things that enabled australia to survive in this remote outpost of european civilization for 250 years has been their british identity .
but today , their commitment to a british identity is serving australians poorly in their need to adapt to their situation in asia . so it 's particularly difficult to change course when the things that get you in trouble are the things that are also the source of your strength .
what 's going to be the outcome today ?
well , all of us know the dozen sorts of ticking time bombs going on in the modern world , time bombs that have fuses of a few decades to - all of them , not more than 50 years , and any one of which can do us in ; the time bombs of water , of soil , of climate change , invasive species , the photosynthetic ceiling , population problems , toxics , etc . , etc . - listing about 12 of them . and while these time bombs - none of them has a fuse beyond 50 years , and most of them have fuses of a few decades - some of them , in some places ,
have much shorter fuses . at the rate at which we 're going now , the philippines will lose all its accessible loggable forest within five years . and the solomon islands are only one year away from losing their loggable forest , which is their major export . and that 's going to be spectacular for the economy of the solomons . people often ask me , jared , what 's the most important thing that we need to do about the world 's environmental problems ?
and my answer is , the most important thing we need to do is to forget about there being any single thing that is the most important thing we need to do .
instead , there are a dozen things , any one of which could do us in .
and we 've got to get them all right , because if we solve 11 , we fail to solve the 12th - we 're in trouble . for example , if we solve our problems of water and soil and population , but do n't solve our problems of toxics , then we are in trouble .
the fact is that our present course is a non-sustainable course , which means , by definition , that it can not be maintained .
and the outcome is going to get resolved within a few decades .
that means that those of us in this room who are less than 50 or 60 years old will see how these paradoxes are resolved , and those of us who are over the age of 60 may not see the resolution , but our children and grandchildren certainly will .
the resolution is going to achieve either of two forms : either we will resolve these non-sustainable time-fuses in pleasant ways of our own choice by taking remedial action , or else these conflicts are going to get settled in unpleasant ways not of our choice - namely , by war , disease or starvation . but what 's for sure is that our non-sustainable course will get resolved in one way or another in a few decades . in other words , since the theme of this session is choices , we have a choice . does that mean that we should get pessimistic and overwhelmed ? i draw the reverse conclusion .
the big problems facing the world today are not at all things beyond our control . our biggest threat is not an asteroid about to crash into us , something we can do nothing about .
instead , all the major threats facing us today are problems entirely of our own making . and since we made the problems , we can also solve the problems . that then means that it 's entirely in our power to deal with these problems .
in particular , what can all of us do ? for those of you who are interested in these choices , there are lots of things you can do . there 's a lot that we do n't understand , and that we need to understand . and there 's a lot that we already do understand , but are n't doing , and that we need to be doing . thank you .
-lrb- applause -rrb- chris anderson : elon , what kind of crazy dream would persuade you to think of trying to take on the auto industry and build an all-electric car ?
elon musk : well , it goes back to when i was in university .
i thought about , what are the problems that are most likely to affect the future of the world or the future of humanity ?
i think it 's extremely important that we have sustainable transport and sustainable energy production .
that sort of overall sustainable energy problem is the biggest problem that we have to solve this century , independent of environmental concerns .
in fact , even if producing co2 was good for the environment , given that we 're going to run out of hydrocarbons , we need to find some sustainable means of operating .
ca : most of american electricity comes from burning fossil fuels .
how can an electric car that plugs into that electricity help ?
em : right . there 's two elements to that answer .
one is that , even if you take the same source fuel and produce power at the power plant and use it to charge electric cars , you 're still better off .
so if you take , say , natural gas , which is the most prevalent hydrocarbon source fuel , if you burn that in a modern general electric natural gas turbine , you 'll get about 60 percent efficiency .
if you put that same fuel in an internal combustion engine car , you get about 20 percent efficiency .
and the reason is , in the stationary power plant , you can afford to have something that weighs a lot more , is voluminous , and you can take the waste heat and run a steam turbine and generate a secondary power source .
so in effect , even after you 've taken transmission loss into account and everything , even using the same source fuel , you 're at least twice as better off charging an electric car , then burning it at the power plant .
ca : that scale delivers efficiency .
em : yes , it does .
and then the other point is , we have to have sustainable means of power generation anyway , electricity generation .
so given that we have to solve sustainable electricity generation , then it makes sense for us to have electric cars as the mode of transport .
ca : so we 've got some video here of the tesla being assembled , which , if we could play that first video - so what is innovative about this process in this vehicle ?
em : sure . so , in order to accelerate the advent of electric transport , and i should say that i think , actually , all modes of transport will become fully electric with the ironic exception of rockets .
there 's just no way around newton 's third law .
the question is how do you accelerate the advent of electric transport ?
and in order to do that for cars , you have to come up with a really energy efficient car , so that means making it incredibly light , and so what you 're seeing here is the only all-aluminum body and chassis car made in north america .
in fact , we applied a lot of rocket design techniques to make the car light despite having a very large battery pack .
and then it also has the lowest drag coefficient of any car of its size .
so as a result , the energy usage is very low , and it has the most advanced battery pack , and that 's what gives it the range that 's competitive , so you can actually have on the order of a 250-mile range .
ca : i mean , those battery packs are incredibly heavy , but you think the math can still work out intelligently - by combining light body , heavy battery , you can still gain spectacular efficiency .
em : exactly . the rest of the car has to be very light to offset the mass of the pack , and then you have to have a low drag coefficient so that you have good highway range .
and in fact , customers of the model s are sort of competing with each other to try to get the highest possible range .
i think somebody recently got 420 miles out of a single charge .
ca : bruno bowden , who 's here , did that , broke the world record.em : congratulations .
ca : that was the good news . the bad news was that to do it , he had to drive at 18 miles an hour constant speed and got pulled over by the cops . -lrb- laughter -rrb- em : i mean , you can certainly drive - if you drive it 65 miles an hour , under normal conditions , 250 miles is a reasonable number .
ca : let 's show that second video showing the tesla in action on ice .
not at all a dig at the new york times , this , by the way .
what is the most surprising thing about the experience of driving the car ?
em : in creating an electric car , the responsiveness of the car is really incredible .
so we wanted really to have people feel as though they 've almost got to mind meld with the car , so you just feel like you and the car are kind of one , and as you corner and accelerate , it just happens , like the car has esp .
you can do that with an electric car because of its responsiveness .
you ca n't do that with a gasoline car .
i think that 's really a profound difference , and people only experience that when they have a test drive .
ca : i mean , this is a beautiful but expensive car .
is there a road map where this becomes a mass-market vehicle ?
em : yeah . the goal of tesla has always been to have a sort of three-step process , where version one was an expensive car at low volume , version two is medium priced and medium volume , and then version three would be low price , high volume .
so we 're at step two at this point .
so we had a $ 100,000 sports car , which was the roadster .
then we 've got the model s , which starts at around 50,000 dollars .
and our third generation car , which should hopefully be out in about three or four years will be a $ 30,000 car .
but whenever you 've got really new technology , it generally takes about three major versions in order to make it a compelling mass-market product .
and so i think we 're making progress in that direction , and i feel confident that we 'll get there .
ca : i mean , right now , if you 've got a short commute , you can drive , you can get back , you can charge it at home .
there is n't a huge nationwide network of charging stations now that are fast .
do you see that coming , really , truly , or just on a few key routes ?
em : there actually are far more charging stations than people realize , and at tesla we developed something called a supercharging technology , and we 're offering that if you buy a model s for free , forever .
and so this is something that maybe a lot of people do n't realize .
we actually have california and nevada covered , and we 've got the eastern seaboard from boston to d.c. covered .
by the end of this year , you 'll be able to drive from l.a. to new york just using the supercharger network , which charges at five times the rate of anything else .
and the key thing is to have a ratio of drive to stop , to stop time , of about six or seven .
so if you drive for three hours , you want to stop for 20 or 30 minutes , because that 's normally what people will stop for .
so if you start a trip at 9 a.m. , by noon you want to stop to have a bite to eat , hit the restroom , coffee , and keep going .
ca : so your proposition to consumers is , for the full charge , it could take an hour .
so it 's common - do n't expect to be out of here in 10 minutes .
wait for an hour , but the good news is , you 're helping save the planet , and by the way , the electricity is free . you do n't pay anything .
em : actually , what we 're expecting is for people to stop for about 20 to 30 minutes , not for an hour .
it 's actually better to drive for about maybe 160 , 170 miles and then stop for half an hour and then keep going .
that 's the natural cadence of a trip .
ca : all right . so this is only one string to your energy bow .
you 've been working on this solar company solarcity .
what 's unusual about that ?
em : well , as i mentioned earlier , we have to have sustainable electricity production as well as consumption , so i 'm quite confident that the primary means of power generation will be solar .
i mean , it 's really indirect fusion , is what it is .
we 've got this giant fusion generator in the sky called the sun , and we just need to tap a little bit of that energy for purposes of human civilization .
what most people know but do n't realize they know is that the world is almost entirely solar-powered already .
if the sun was n't there , we 'd be a frozen ice ball at three degrees kelvin , and the sun powers the entire system of precipitation .
the whole ecosystem is solar-powered .
ca : but in a gallon of gasoline , you have , effectively , thousands of years of sun power compressed into a small space , so it 's hard to make the numbers work right now on solar , and to remotely compete with , for example , natural gas , fracked natural gas . how are you going to build a business here ?
em : well actually , i 'm confident that solar will beat everything , hands down , including natural gas .
-lrb- applause -rrb- ca : how ?
em : it must , actually . if it does n't , we 're in deep trouble .
ca : but you 're not selling solar panels to consumers .
what are you doing ?
em : no , we actually are . you can buy a solar system or you can lease a solar system .
most people choose to lease .
and the thing about solar power is that it does n't have any feed stock or operational costs , so once it 's installed , it 's just there .
it works for decades . it 'll work for probably a century .
so therefore , the key thing to do is to get the cost of that initial installation low , and then get the cost of the financing low , because that interest - those are the two factors that drive the cost of solar .
and we 've made huge progress in that direction , and that 's why i 'm confident we 'll actually beat natural gas .
ca : so your current proposition to consumers is , do n't pay so much up front .
em : zero.ca : pay zero up front .
we will install panels on your roof .
you will then pay , how long is a typical lease ?
em : typical leases are 20 years , but the value proposition is , as you 're sort of alluding to , quite straightforward .
it 's no money down , and your utility bill decreases .
pretty good deal .
ca : so that seems like a win for the consumer .
no risk , you 'll pay less than you 're paying now .
for you , the dream here then is that - i mean , who owns the electricity from those panels for the longer term ?
i mean , how do you , the company , benefit ?
em : well , essentially , solarcity raises a chunk of capital from say , a company or a bank .
google is one of our big partners here .
and they have an expected return on that capital .
with that capital , solarcity purchases and installs the panel on the roof and then charges the homeowner or business owner a monthly lease payment , which is less than the utility bill .
ca : but you yourself get a long-term commercial benefit from that power .
you 're kind of building a new type of distributed utility .
em : exactly . what it amounts to is a giant distributed utility .
i think it 's a good thing , because utilities have been this monopoly , and people have n't had any choice .
so effectively it 's the first time there 's been competition for this monopoly , because the utilities have been the only ones that owned those power distribution lines , but now it 's on your roof .
so i think it 's actually very empowering for homeowners and businesses .
ca : and you really picture a future where a majority of power in america , within a decade or two , or within your lifetime , it goes solar ?
em : i 'm extremely confident that solar will be at least a plurality of power , and most likely a majority , and i predict it will be a plurality in less than 20 years .
i made that bet with someone - ca : definition of plurality is ?
em : more from solar than any other source .
ca : ah . who did you make the bet with ?
em : with a friend who will remain nameless .
ca : just between us . -lrb- laughter -rrb- em : i made that bet , i think , two or three years ago , so in roughly 18 years , i think we 'll see more power from solar than any other source .
ca : all right , so let 's go back to another bet that you made with yourself , i guess , a kind of crazy bet .
you 'd made some money from the sale of paypal .
you decided to build a space company .
why on earth would someone do that ?
-lrb- laughter -rrb- em : i got that question a lot , that 's true .
people would say , " did you hear the joke about the guy who made a small fortune in the space industry ? "
obviously , " he started with a large one , " is the punchline .
and so i tell people , well , i was trying to figure out the fastest way to turn a large fortune into a small one .
and they 'd look at me , like , " is he serious ? "
ca : and strangely , you were . so what happened ?
em : it was a close call . things almost did n't work out .
we came very close to failure , but we managed to get through that point in 2008 .
the goal of spacex is to try to advance rocket technology , and in particular to try to crack a problem that i think is vital for humanity to become a space-faring civilization , which is to have a rapidly and fully reusable rocket .
ca : would humanity become a space-faring civilization ?
so that was a dream of yours , in a way , from a young age ?
you 've dreamed of mars and beyond ?
em : i did build rockets when i was a kid , but i did n't think i 'd be involved in this .
it was really more from the standpoint of what are the things that need to happen in order for the future to be an exciting and inspiring one ?
and i really think there 's a fundamental difference , if you sort of look into the future , between a humanity that is a space-faring civilization , that 's out there exploring the stars , on multiple planets , and i think that 's really exciting , compared with one where we are forever confined to earth until some eventual extinction event .
ca : so you 've somehow slashed the cost of building a rocket by 75 percent , depending on how you calculate it .
how on earth have you done that ?
nasa has been doing this for years . how have you done this ?
em : well , we 've made significant advances in the technology of the airframe , the engines , the electronics and the launch operation .
there 's a long list of innovations that we 've come up with there that are a little difficult to communicate in this talk , but - ca : not least because you could still get copied , right ?
you have n't patented this stuff . it 's really interesting to me .
em : no , we do n't patent.ca : you did n't patent because you think it 's more dangerous to patent than not to patent .
em : since our primary competitors are national governments , the enforceability of patents is questionable . -lrb- laughter -rrb- -lrb- applause -rrb- ca : that 's really , really interesting .
but the big innovation is still ahead , and you 're working on it now . tell us about this .
em : right , so the big innovation - ca : in fact , let 's roll that video and you can talk us through it , what 's happening here .
em : absolutely . so the thing about rockets is that they 're all expendable .
all rockets that fly today are fully expendable .
the space shuttle was an attempt at a reusable rocket , but even the main tank of the space shuttle was thrown away every time , and the parts that were reusable took a 10,000-person group nine months to refurbish for flight .
so the space shuttle ended up costing a billion dollars per flight .
obviously that does n't work very well for - ca : what just happened there ? we just saw something land ?
em : that 's right . so it 's important that the rocket stages be able to come back , to be able to return to the launch site and be ready to launch again within a matter of hours .
ca : wow . reusable rockets.em : yes . -lrb- applause -rrb- and so what a lot of people do n't realize is , the cost of the fuel , of the propellant , is very small .
it 's much like on a jet .
so the cost of the propellant is about .3 percent of the cost of the rocket .
so it 's possible to achieve , let 's say , roughly 100-fold improvement in the cost of spaceflight if you can effectively reuse the rocket .
that 's why it 's so important .
every mode of transport that we use , whether it 's planes , trains , automobiles , bikes , horses , is reusable , but not rockets .
so we must solve this problem in order to become a space-faring civilization .
ca : you asked me the question earlier of how popular traveling on cruises would be if you had to burn your ships afterward.em : certain cruises are apparently highly problematic .
ca : definitely more expensive .
so that 's potentially absolutely disruptive technology , and , i guess , paves the way for your dream to actually take , at some point , to take humanity to mars at scale .
you 'd like to see a colony on mars .
em : yeah , exactly . spacex , or some combination of companies and governments , needs to make progress in the direction of making life multi-planetary , of establishing a base on another planet , on mars - being the only realistic option - and then building that base up until we 're a true multi-planet species .
ca : so progress on this " let 's make it reusable , " how is that going ? that was just a simulation video we saw .
how 's it going ?
em : we 're actually , we 've been making some good progress recently with something we call the grasshopper test project , where we 're testing the vertical landing portion of the flight , the sort of terminal portion which is quite tricky .
and we 've had some good tests .
ca : can we see that ? em : yeah .
so that 's just to give a sense of scale .
we dressed a cowboy as johnny cash and bolted the mannequin to the rocket . -lrb- laughter -rrb- ca : all right , let 's see that video then , because this is actually amazing when you think about it .
you 've never seen this before . a rocket blasting off and then - em : yeah , so that rocket is about the size of a 12-story building .
-lrb- rocket launch -rrb- so now it 's hovering at about 40 meters , and it 's constantly adjusting the angle , the pitch and yaw of the main engine , and maintaining roll with cold gas thrusters .
ca : how cool is that ? -lrb- applause -rrb- elon , how have you done this ?
these projects are so - paypal , solarcity , tesla , spacex , they 're so spectacularly different , they 're such ambitious projects at scale .
how on earth has one person been able to innovate in this way ?
what is it about you ?
em : i do n't know , actually .
i do n't have a good answer for you .
i work a lot . i mean , a lot .
ca : well , i have a theory.em : okay . all right .
ca : my theory is that you have an ability to think at a system level of design that pulls together design , technology and business , so if ted was tbd , design , technology and business , into one package , synthesize it in a way that very few people can and - and this is the critical thing - feel so damn confident in that clicked-together package that you take crazy risks .
you bet your fortune on it , and you seem to have done that multiple times .
i mean , almost no one can do that .
is that - could we have some of that secret sauce ?
can we put it into our education system ? can someone learn from you ?
it is truly amazing what you 've done .
em : well , thanks . thank you .
well , i do think there 's a good framework for thinking .
it is physics . you know , the sort of first principles reasoning .
generally i think there are - what i mean by that is , boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there , as opposed to reasoning by analogy .
through most of our life , we get through life by reasoning by analogy , which essentially means copying what other people do with slight variations .
and you have to do that .
otherwise , mentally , you would n't be able to get through the day .
but when you want to do something new , you have to apply the physics approach .
physics is really figuring out how to discover new things that are counterintuitive , like quantum mechanics .
it 's really counterintuitive .
so i think that 's an important thing to do , and then also to really pay attention to negative feedback , and solicit it , particularly from friends .
this may sound like simple advice , but hardly anyone does that , and it 's incredibly helpful .
ca : boys and girls watching , study physics .
learn from this man .
elon musk , i wish we had all day , but thank you so much for coming to ted .
em : thank you . ca : that was awesome . that was really , really cool .
look at that . -lrb- applause -rrb- just take a bow . that was fantastic .
thank you so much .
cartoons are basically short stories .
i tried to find one that did n't have a whole lot of words .
not all of them have happy endings .
so how did i get started cartooning ?
i doodled a lot as a kid , and if you spend enough time doodling , sooner or later , something happens : all your career options run out .
so you have to make a living cartooning .
actually , i fell in love with the ocean when i was a little boy , when i was about eight or nine .
and i was particularly fascinated with sharks .
this is some of my early work .
eventually , my mom took the red crayon away , so it was -lsb- unclear -rsb- .
but i 'd like to relay to you a childhood experience of mine that really made me see the ocean differently , and it 's become the foundation of my work because , i feel like , if in a day , i can see the ocean differently , then i can evoke that same kind of change in others , especially kids .
before that day , this is how i saw the ocean .
it 's just a big blue surface .
and this is how we 've seen the ocean since the beginning of time .
it 's a mystery .
there 's been a lot of folklore developed around the ocean , mostly negative .
and that prompted people to make maps like this , with all kinds of wonderful detail on the land , but when you get to the waters edge , the ocean looks like one giant puddle of blue paint .
and this is the way i saw the ocean at school - as if to say , " all geography and science lessons stop at water 's edge .
this part 's not going to be on the test . "
but that day i flew low over the islands - it was a family trip to the caribbean , and i flew in a small plane low over the islands .
this is what i saw . i saw hills and valleys .
i saw forests and meadows .
i saw grottoes and secret gardens and places i 'd love to hide as a kid , if i could only breathe underwater .
and best of all , i saw the animals .
i saw a manta ray that looked as big as the plane i was flying in .
and i flew over a lagoon with a shark in it , and that was the day that my comic strip about a shark was born .
so from that day on , i was an ordinary kid walking around on dry land , but my head was down there , underwater .
up until that day , these were the animals that were most common in my life .
these were the ones i 'd like to draw - all variations of four legs and fur .
but when you got to the ocean , my imagination was no competition for nature .
every time i 'd come up with a crazy cartoon character on the drawing board , i 'd find a critter in the ocean that was even crazier .
and the differences in scale between this tiny sea dragon and this enormous humpback whale was like something out of a science-fiction movie .
whenever i talk to kids , i always like to tell them , the biggest animal that ever lived is still alive .
it 's not a dinosaur ; it 's a whale , animals as big as office buildings still swimming around out there in our ocean .
speaking of dinosaurs , sharks are basically the same fish they were 300 million years ago .
so if you ever fantasize about going back in time and seeing what a dinosaur looked like , that 's what a dinosaur looks like .
so you have living dinosaurs and space aliens , animals that evolved in zero gravity in harsh conditions .
it 's just incredible ; no hollywood designer could come up with something more interesting than that .
or this fangtooth . the particles in the water make it look like it 's floating in outer space .
could you image if we looked through the hubble telescope and we saw that ?
it would start a whole new space race .
but instead , we stick a camera in the deep ocean , and we see a fish , and it does n't capture our imagination as a society .
we say to ourselves , " maybe we can make fish sticks with it or something . "
so , what i 'd like to do now is try a little drawing .
so , i 'm going to try to draw this fangtooth here .
i love to draw the deep sea fish , because they are so ugly , but beautiful in their own way .
maybe we can give him a little bioluminescence here - give him a headlight , maybe a brake light , turn signals .
but it 's easy to see why these animals make such great cartoon characters , their shapes and sizes .
so some of them actually seem to have powers like superheroes in a comic book .
for instance , take these sea turtles .
they kind of have a sixth sense like superman 's x-ray vision .
they can sense the magnetic fields of the earth .
and they can use that sense to navigate hundreds of miles of open ocean .
i kind of give my turtle hands just to make them an easier cartoon character to work with .
or take this sea cucumber .
it 's not an animal we draw cartoons of or draw at all .
he 's like an underwater spiderman .
he shoots out these sticky webs to entangle his enemy .
of course , sea cucumbers shoot them out their rears , which , in my opinion , makes them much more interesting a superhero .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- he ca n't spin a web anytime ; he 's got to pull his pants down first .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- or the blowfish .
the blowfish is like the incredible hulk .
it can change its body into a big , intimidating fish in a matter of seconds .
i 'm going to draw this blowfish uninflated .
and then i 'm going to attempt onscreen animation here .
let 's see .
try and inflate it .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- " you talkin ' to me ? " see , he can inflate himself when he wants to be intimidating .
or take this swordfish .
could you imagine being born with a tool for a nose ?
do you think he wakes up in the morning , looks in the mirror and says , " somebody 's getting stabbed today . "
or this lionfish for instance .
imagine trying to make friends covered with razor-sharp poisonous barbs .
it 's not something you want to put on your facebook page , right ?
my characters are - my lead character 's a shark named sherman .
he 's a great white shark .
and i kind of broke the mold with sherman .
i did n't want to go with this ruthless predator image .
he 's kind of just out there making a living .
he 's sort of a homer simpson with fins .
and then his sidekick is a sea turtle , as i mentioned before , named filmore .
he uses his wonderful skills at navigation to wander the oceans , looking for a mate .
and he does manage to find them , but great navigation skills , lousy pick-up lines .
he never seems to settle on any particular girl .
i have a hermit crab named hawthorne , who does n't get a lot of respect as a hermit crab , so he kind of wishes he were a great white shark .
and then i 'll introduce you to one more character , this guy , ernest , who is basically a juvenile delinquent in a fish body .
so with characters , you can make stories .
sometimes making a story is as easy as putting two characters in a room and seeing what happens .
so , imagine a great white shark and a giant squid in the same bathroom .
-lrb- laughter -rrb- or , sometimes i take them to places that people have never heard of because they 're underwater .
for instance , i took them skiing in the mid-atlantic range , which is this range of mountains in the middle of the atlantic .
i 've taken them to the sea of japan , where they met giant jellyfish .
i 've taken them camping in the kelp forests of california .
this next one here , i did a story on the census of marine life .
and that was a lot of fun because , as most of you know , it 's a real project we 've heard about .
but it was a chance for me to introduce readers to a lot of crazy undersea characters .
so we start off the story with ernest , who volunteers as a census taker .
he goes down and he meets this famous anglerfish .
then he meets the yeti crab , the famous vampire squid - elusive , hard to find - and the dumbo octopus , which looks so much like a cartoon in real life that really did n't have to change a thing when i drew it .
i did another story on marine debris .
i was speaking to a lot of my friends in the conservation business , and they - i asked them , " so what 's one issue you would like everyone to know more about ? "
and they said - this one friend of mine said , " i 've got one word for you : plastic . "
and i told him , " well , i need something a little sexier than that .
plastic just is not going to do it . "
we sort of worked things out .
he wanted me to use words like polyvinyl chloride , which does n't really work in voice balloons very well .
i could n't fit them in .
so what i did was i made an adventure strip .
basically , this bottle travels a long way .
what i 'm trying to tell readers is that plastic does n't really go away ; it just continues to wash downstream .
and a lot of it ends up washing into the ocean , which is a great story if you attach a couple characters to it , especially if they ca n't stand each other , like these two .
so , i sent them to boise , idaho , where they dropped a plastic bottle into the boise sewer system .
and it ended up in the boise river and then on to the columbia river and then to the mouth of the columbia and to the pacific ocean and then on to this place called the great pacific garbage patch - which is this giant pacific gyre in the north pacific , where a lot of this plastic ends up floating around - and then back onto the lagoon .
so that was basically a buddy story with a plastic bottle following along .
so a lot of people remember the plastic bottle anyway , but we really talked about marine debris and plastic in the course of that one .
the third storyline i did about a year and a half ago was probably my most difficult .
it was on shark finning , and i felt really strongly about this issue .
and i felt like , since my main character was a shark , the comic strip was a perfect vehicle for telling the public about this .
now , finning is the act of taking a shark , cutting the valuable fins off and throwing the live animal back in the water .
it 's cruel , it 's wasteful .
there 's nothing funny or entertaining about it , but i really wanted to take this issue on .
i had to kill my main character , who is a shark .
we start with sherman in a chinese restaurant , who gets a fortune that he 's about to get caught by a trawler , which he does .
and then he dies .
he gets finned , and then he gets thrown overboard .
ostensibly , he 's dead now .
and so i killed a character that 's been in the newspaper for 15 years .
so i got a lot of reader feedback on that one .
meanwhile , the other characters are talking about shark fin soup .
i do three or four strips after that where we explore the finning issue and the shark fin soup issue .
sherman 's up in shark heaven .
this is what i love about comic strips , you know .
you really do n't have to worry about the audience suspending its sense of disbelief because , if you start with a talking shark , readers pretty much check their disbelief at the door .
you can kind of do anything .
it becomes a near-death experience for sherman .
meanwhile , ernest finds his fins on the internet .
there was a real website based in china that actually sold shark fins , so i kind of exposed that .
and he clicks the " buy now " button .
and voila , next-day air , they show up , and they surgically reattach them .
i ended that series with a kind of a mail-in petition that encouraged our national marine