-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 origi