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+<d>
+We're at a tipping point in human history, a species poised between gaining the stars and losing the planet we call home.
+Even in just the past few years, we've greatly expanded our knowledge of how Earth fits within the context of our universe.
+NASA's Kepler mission has discovered thousands of potential planets around other stars, indicating that Earth is but one of billions of planets in our galaxy.
+Kepler is a space telescope that measures the subtle dimming of stars as planets pass in front of them, blocking just a little bit of that light from reaching us.
+Kepler's data reveals planets' sizes as well as their distance from their parent star.
+Together, this helps us understand whether these planets are small and rocky, like the terrestrial planets in our own Solar System, and also how much light they receive from their parent sun.
+In turn, this provides clues as to whether these planets that we discover might be habitable or not.
+Unfortunately, at the same time as we're discovering this treasure trove of potentially habitable worlds, our own planet is sagging under the weight of humanity.
+2014 was the hottest year on record.
+Glaciers and sea ice that have been with us for millennia are now disappearing in a matter of decades.
+These planetary-scale environmental changes that we have set in motion are rapidly outpacing our ability to alter their course.
+But I'm not a climate scientist, I'm an astronomer.
+I study planetary habitability as influenced by stars with the hopes of finding the places in the universe where we might discover life beyond our own planet.
+You could say that I look for choice alien real estate.
+Now, as somebody who is deeply embedded in the search for life in the universe, I can tell you that the more you look for planets like Earth, the more you appreciate our own planet itself.
+Each one of these new worlds invites a comparison between the newly discovered planet and the planets we know best: those of our own Solar System.
+Consider our neighbor, Mars.
+Mars is small and rocky, and though it's a bit far from the Sun, it might be considered a potentially habitable world if found by a mission like Kepler.
+Indeed, it's possible that Mars was habitable in the past, and in part, this is why we study Mars so much.
+Our rovers, like Curiosity, crawl across its surface, scratching for clues as to the origins of life as we know it.
+Orbiters like the MAVEN mission sample the Martian atmosphere, trying to understand how Mars might have lost its past habitability.
+Private spaceflight companies now offer not just a short trip to near space but the tantalizing possibility of living our lives on Mars.
+But though these Martian vistas resemble the deserts of our own home world, places that are tied in our imagination to ideas about pioneering and frontiers, compared to Earth Mars is a pretty terrible place to live.
+Consider the extent to which we have not colonized the deserts of our own planet, places that are lush by comparison with Mars.
+Even in the driest, highest places on Earth, the air is sweet and thick with oxygen exhaled from thousands of miles away by our rainforests.
+I worry -- I worry that this excitement about colonizing Mars and other planets carries with it a long, dark shadow: the implication and belief by some that Mars will be there to save us from the self-inflicted destruction of the only truly habitable planet we know of, the Earth.
+As much as I love interplanetary exploration, I deeply disagree with this idea.
+There are many excellent reasons to go to Mars, but for anyone to tell you that Mars will be there to back up humanity is like the captain of the Titanic telling you that the real party is happening later on the lifeboats.
+Thank you.
+But the goals of interplanetary exploration and planetary preservation are not opposed to one another.
+No, they're in fact two sides of the same goal: to understand, preserve and improve life into the future.
+The extreme environments of our own world are alien vistas.
+They're just closer to home.
+If we can understand how to create and maintain habitable spaces out of hostile, inhospitable spaces here on Earth, perhaps we can meet the needs of both preserving our own environment and moving beyond it.
+I leave you with a final thought experiment: Fermi's paradox.
+Many years ago, the physicist Enrico Fermi asked that, given the fact that our universe has been around for a very long time and we expect that there are many planets within it, we should have found evidence for alien life by now.
+So where are they?
+Well, one possible solution to Fermi's paradox is that, as civilizations become technologically advanced enough to consider living amongst the stars, they lose sight of how important it is to safeguard the home worlds that fostered that advancement to begin with.
+It is hubris to believe that interplanetary colonization alone will save us from ourselves, but planetary preservation and interplanetary exploration can work together.
+If we truly believe in our ability to bend the hostile environments of Mars for human habitation, then we should be able to surmount the far easier task of preserving the habitability of the Earth.
+Thank you.
+<d>
+A few years ago, I broke into my own house.
+I had just driven home, it was around midnight in the dead of Montreal winter, I had been visiting my friend, Jeff, across town, and the thermometer on the front porch read minus 40 degrees -- and don't bother asking if that's Celsius or Fahrenheit, minus 40 is where the two scales meet -- it was very cold.
+And as I stood on the front porch fumbling in my pockets, I found I didn't have my keys.
+In fact, I could see them through the window, lying on the dining room table where I had left them.
+So I quickly ran around and tried all the other doors and windows, and they were locked tight.
+I thought about calling a locksmith -- at least I had my cellphone, but at midnight, it could take a while for a locksmith to show up, and it was cold.
+I couldn't go back to my friend Jeff's house for the night because I had an early flight to Europe the next morning, and I needed to get my passport and my suitcase.
+So, desperate and freezing cold, I found a large rock and I broke through the basement window, cleared out the shards of glass, I crawled through, I found a piece of cardboard and taped it up over the opening, figuring that in the morning, on the way to the airport, I could call my contractor and ask him to fix it.
+This was going to be expensive, but probably no more expensive than a middle-of-the-night locksmith, so I figured, under the circumstances, I was coming out even.
+Now, I'm a neuroscientist by training and I know a little bit about how the brain performs under stress.
+It releases cortisol that raises your heart rate, it modulates adrenaline levels and it clouds your thinking.
+So the next morning, when I woke up on too little sleep, worrying about the hole in the window, and a mental note that I had to call my contractor, and the freezing temperatures, and the meetings I had upcoming in Europe, and, you know, with all the cortisol in my brain, my thinking was cloudy, but I didn't know it was cloudy because my thinking was cloudy.
+And it wasn't until I got to the airport check-in counter, that I realized I didn't have my passport.
+So I raced home in the snow and ice, 40 minutes, got my passport, raced back to the airport, I made it just in time, but they had given away my seat to someone else, so I got stuck in the back of the plane, next to the bathrooms, in a seat that wouldn't recline, on an eight-hour flight.
+Well, I had a lot of time to think during those eight hours and no sleep.
+And I started wondering, are there things that I can do, systems that I can put into place, that will prevent bad things from happening?
+Or at least if bad things happen, will minimize the likelihood of it being a total catastrophe.
+So I started thinking about that, but my thoughts didn't crystallize until about a month later.
+I was having dinner with my colleague, Danny Kahneman, the Nobel Prize winner, and I somewhat embarrassedly told him about having broken my window, and, you know, forgotten my passport, and Danny shared with me that he'd been practicing something called prospective hindsight.
+It's something that he had gotten from the psychologist Gary Klein, who had written about it a few years before, also called the pre-mortem.
+Now, you all know what the postmortem is.
+Whenever there's a disaster, a team of experts come in and they try to figure out what went wrong, right?
+Well, in the pre-mortem, Danny explained, you look ahead and you try to figure out all the things that could go wrong, and then you try to figure out what you can do to prevent those things from happening, or to minimize the damage.
+So what I want to talk to you about today are some of the things we can do in the form of a pre-mortem.
+Some of them are obvious, some of them are not so obvious.
+I'll start with the obvious ones.
+Around the home, designate a place for things that are easily lost.
+Now, this sounds like common sense, and it is, but there's a lot of science to back this up, based on the way our spatial memory works.
+There's a structure in the brain called the hippocampus, that evolved over tens of thousands of years, to keep track of the locations of important things -- where the well is, where fish can be found, that stand of fruit trees, where the friendly and enemy tribes live.
+The hippocampus is the part of the brain that in London taxicab drivers becomes enlarged.
+It's the part of the brain that allows squirrels to find their nuts.
+And if you're wondering, somebody actually did the experiment where they cut off the olfactory sense of the squirrels, and they could still find their nuts.
+They weren't using smell, they were using the hippocampus, this exquisitely evolved mechanism in the brain for finding things.
+But it's really good for things that don't move around much, not so good for things that move around.
+So this is why we lose car keys and reading glasses and passports.
+So in the home, designate a spot for your keys -- a hook by the door, maybe a decorative bowl.
+For your passport, a particular drawer.
+For your reading glasses, a particular table.
+If you designate a spot and you're scrupulous about it, your things will always be there when you look for them.
+What about travel?
+Take a cell phone picture of your credit cards, your driver's license, your passport, mail it to yourself so it's in the cloud.
+If these things are lost or stolen, you can facilitate replacement.
+Now these are some rather obvious things.
+Remember, when you're under stress, the brain releases cortisol.
+Cortisol is toxic, and it causes cloudy thinking.
+So part of the practice of the pre-mortem is to recognize that under stress you're not going to be at your best, and you should put systems in place.
+And there's perhaps no more stressful a situation than when you're confronted with a medical decision to make.
+And at some point, all of us are going to be in that position, where we have to make a very important decision about the future of our medical care or that of a loved one, to help them with a decision.
+And so I want to talk about that.
+And I'm going to talk about a very particular medical condition.
+But this stands as a proxy for all kinds of medical decision-making, and indeed for financial decision-making, and social decision-making -- any kind of decision you have to make that would benefit from a rational assessment of the facts.
+So suppose you go to your doctor and the doctor says, "I just got your lab work back, your cholesterol's a little high."
+Now, you all know that high cholesterol is associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, heart attack, stroke.
+And so you're thinking having high cholesterol isn't the best thing, and so the doctor says, "You know, I'd like to give you a drug that will help you lower your cholesterol, a statin."
+And you've probably heard of statins, you know that they're among the most widely prescribed drugs in the world today, you probably even know people who take them.
+And so you're thinking, "Yeah! Give me the statin."
+But there's a question you should ask at this point, a statistic you should ask for that most doctors don't like talking about, and pharmaceutical companies like talking about even less.
+It's for the number needed to treat.
+Now, what is this, the NNT?
+It's the number of people that need to take a drug or undergo a surgery or any medical procedure before one person is helped.
+And you're thinking, what kind of crazy statistic is that?
+The number should be one.
+My doctor wouldn't prescribe something to me if it's not going to help.
+But actually, medical practice doesn't work that way.
+And it's not the doctor's fault, if it's anybody's fault, it's the fault of scientists like me.
+We haven't figured out the underlying mechanisms well enough.
+But GlaxoSmithKline estimates that 90 percent of the drugs work in only 30 to 50 percent of the people.
+So the number needed to treat for the most widely prescribed statin, what do you suppose it is?
+How many people have to take it before one person is helped?
+300.
+This is according to research by research practitioners Jerome Groopman and Pamela Hartzband, independently confirmed by Bloomberg.com.
+I ran through the numbers myself.
+300 people have to take the drug for a year before one heart attack, stroke or other adverse event is prevented.
+Now you're probably thinking, "Well, OK, one in 300 chance of lowering my cholesterol.
+Why not, doc? Give me the prescription anyway."
+But you should ask at this point for another statistic, and that is, "Tell me about the side effects." Right?
+So for this particular drug, the side effects occur in five percent of the patients.
+And they include terrible things -- debilitating muscle and joint pain, gastrointestinal distress -- but now you're thinking, "Five percent, not very likely it's going to happen to me, I'll still take the drug."
+But wait a minute.
+Remember under stress you're not thinking clearly.
+So think about how you're going to work through this ahead of time, so you don't have to manufacture the chain of reasoning on the spot.
+300 people take the drug, right? One person's helped, five percent of those 300 have side effects, that's 15 people.
+You're 15 times more likely to be harmed by the drug than you are to be helped by the drug.
+Now, I'm not saying whether you should take the statin or not.
+I'm just saying you should have this conversation with your doctor.
+Medical ethics requires it, it's part of the principle of informed consent.
+You have the right to have access to this kind of information to begin the conversation about whether you want to take the risks or not.
+Now you might be thinking I've pulled this number out of the air for shock value, but in fact it's rather typical, this number needed to treat.
+For the most widely performed surgery on men over the age of 50, removal of the prostate for cancer, the number needed to treat is 49.
+That's right, 49 surgeries are done for every one person who's helped.
+And the side effects in that case occur in 50 percent of the patients.
+They include impotence, erectile dysfunction, urinary incontinence, rectal tearing, fecal incontinence.
+And if you're lucky, and you're one of the 50 percent who has these, they'll only last for a year or two.
+So the idea of the pre-mortem is to think ahead of time to the questions that you might be able to ask that will push the conversation forward.
+You don't want to have to manufacture all of this on the spot.
+And you also want to think about things like quality of life.
+Because you have a choice oftentimes, do you I want a shorter life that's pain-free, or a longer life that might have a great deal of pain towards the end?
+These are things to talk about and think about now, with your family and your loved ones.
+You might change your mind in the heat of the moment, but at least you're practiced with this kind of thinking.
+Remember, our brain under stress releases cortisol, and one of the things that happens at that moment is a whole bunch on systems shut down.
+There's an evolutionary reason for this.
+Face-to-face with a predator, you don't need your digestive system, or your libido, or your immune system, because if you're body is expending metabolism on those things and you don't react quickly, you might become the lion's lunch, and then none of those things matter.
+Unfortunately, one of the things that goes out the window during those times of stress is rational, logical thinking, as Danny Kahneman and his colleagues have shown.
+So we need to train ourselves to think ahead to these kinds of situations.
+I think the important point here is recognizing that all of us are flawed.
+We all are going to fail now and then.
+The idea is to think ahead to what those failures might be, to put systems in place that will help minimize the damage, or to prevent the bad things from happening in the first place.
+Getting back to that snowy night in Montreal, when I got back from my trip, I had my contractor install a combination lock next to the door, with a key to the front door in it, an easy to remember combination.
+And I have to admit, I still have piles of mail that haven't been sorted, and piles of emails that I haven't gone through.
+So I'm not completely organized, but I see organization as a gradual process, and I'm getting there.
+Thank you very much.
+<d>
+Piano, "p", is my favorite musical symbol.
+It means to play softly.
+If you're playing a musical instrument and you notice a "p" in the score, you need to play softer.
+Two p's -- even softer.
+Four p's -- extremely soft.
+This is my drawing of a p-tree, which demonstrates no matter how many thousands upon thousands of p's there may be, you'll never reach complete silence.
+That's my current definition of silence: a very obscure sound.
+I'd like to share a little bit about the history of American Sign Language, ASL, plus a bit of my own background.
+French sign language was brought to America during the early 1800s, and as time went by, mixed with local signs, it evolved into the language we know today as ASL.
+So it has a history of about 200 years.
+I was born deaf, and I was taught to believe that sound wasn't a part of my life.
+And I believed it to be true.
+Yet, I realize now that that wasn't the case at all.
+Sound was very much a part of my life, really, on my mind every day.
+As a Deaf person living in a world of sound, it's as if I was living in a foreign country, blindly following its rules, customs, behaviors and norms without ever questioning them.
+So how is it that I understand sound?
+Well, I watch how people behave and respond to sound.
+You people are like my loudspeakers, and amplify sound.
+I learn and mirror that behavior.
+At the same time, I've learned that I create sound, and I've seen how people respond to me.
+Thus I've learned, for example... "Don't slam the door!"
+"Don't make too much noise when you're eating from the potato-chip bag!"
+"Don't burp, and when you're eating, make sure you don't scrape your utensils on the plate."
+All of these things I term "sound etiquette."
+Maybe I think about sound etiquette more than the average hearing person does.
+I'm hyper-vigilant around sound.
+And I'm always waiting in eager nervous anticipation around sound, about what's to come next.
+Hence, this drawing.
+TBD, to be decided.
+TBC, to be continued.
+TBA, to be announced.
+And you notice the staff -- there are no notes contained in the lines.
+That's because the lines already contain sound through the subtle smudges and smears.
+In Deaf culture, movement is equivalent to sound.
+This is a sign for "staff" in ASL.
+A typical staff contains five lines.
+Yet for me, signing it with my thumb sticking up like that doesn't feel natural.
+That's why you'll notice in my drawings, I stick to four lines on paper.
+In the year 2008, I had the opportunity to travel to Berlin, Germany, for an artist residency there.
+Prior to this time, I had been working as a painter.
+During this summer, I visited different museums and gallery spaces, and as I went from one place to the next, I noticed there was no visual art there.
+At that time, sound was trending, and this struck me... there was no visual art, everything was auditory.
+Now sound has come into my art territory.
+Is it going to further distance me from art?
+I realized that doesn't have to be the case at all.
+I actually know sound.
+I know it so well that it doesn't have to be something just experienced through the ears.
+It could be felt tactually, or experienced as a visual, or even as an idea.
+So I decided to reclaim ownership of sound and to put it into my art practice.
+And everything that I had been taught regarding sound, I decided to do away with and unlearn.
+I started creating a new body of work.
+And when I presented this to the art community, I was blown away with the amount of support and attention I received.
+I realized: sound is like money, power, control -- social currency.
+In the back of my mind, I've always felt that sound was your thing, a hearing person's thing.
+And sound is so powerful that it could either disempower me and my artwork, or it could empower me.
+I chose to be empowered.
+There's a massive culture around spoken language.
+And just because I don't use my literal voice to communicate, in society's eyes it's as if I don't have a voice at all.
+So I need to work with individuals who can support me as an equal and become my voice.
+And that way, I'm able to maintain relevancy in society today.
+So at school, at work and institutions, I work with many different ASL interpreters.
+And their voice becomes my voice and identity.
+They help me to be heard.
+And their voices hold value and currency.
+Ironically, by borrowing out their voices, I'm able to maintain a temporary form of currency, kind of like taking out a loan with a very high interest rate.
+If I didn't continue this practice, I feel that I could just fade off into oblivion and not maintain any form of social currency.
+So with sound as my new art medium, I delved into the world of music.
+And I was surprised to see the similarities between music and ASL.
+For example, a musical note cannot be fully captured and expressed on paper.
+And the same holds true for a concept in ASL.
+They're both highly spatial and highly inflected -- meaning that subtle changes can affect the entire meaning of both signs and sounds.
+I'd like to share with you a piano metaphor, to have you have a better understanding of how ASL works.
+So, envision a piano.
+ASL is broken down into many different grammatical parameters.
+If you assign a different parameter to each finger as you play the piano -- such as facial expression, body movement, speed, hand shape and so on, as you play the piano -- English is a linear language, as if one key is being pressed at a time.
+However, ASL is more like a chord -- all 10 fingers need to come down simultaneously to express a clear concept or idea in ASL.
+If just one of those keys were to change the chord, it would create a completely different meaning.
+The same applies to music in regards to pitch, tone and volume.
+In ASL, by playing around with these different grammatical parameters, you can express different ideas.
+For example, take the sign TO-LOOK-AT.
+This is the sign TO-LOOK-AT.
+I'm looking at you.
+Staring at you.
+Oh -- busted.
+Uh-oh.
+What are you looking at?
+Aw, stop.
+I then started thinking, "What if I was to look at ASL through a musical lens?"
+If I was to create a sign and repeat it over and over, it could become like a piece of visual music.
+For example, this is the sign for "day," as the sun rises and sets.
+This is "all day."
+If I was to repeat it and slow it down, visually it looks like a piece of music.
+All... day.
+I feel the same holds true for "all night."
+"All night."
+This is ALL-NIGHT, represented in this drawing.
+And this led me to thinking about three different kinds of nights: "last night," "overnight," "all night long."
+I feel like the third one has a lot more musicality than the other two.
+This represents how time is expressed in ASL and how the distance from your body can express the changes in time.
+For example, 1H is one hand, 2H is two hand, present tense happens closest and in front of the body, future is in front of the body and the past is to your back.
+So, the first example is "a long time ago."
+Then "past," "used to" and the last one, which is my favorite, with the very romantic and dramatic notion to it, "once upon a time."
+"Common time" is a musical term with a specific time signature of four beats per measure.
+Yet when I see the word "common time," what automatically comes to mind for me is "at the same time."
+So notice RH: right hand, LH: left hand.
+We have the staff across the head and the chest.
+I'm now going to demonstrate a hand shape called the "flash claw."
+Can you please follow along with me?
+Everybody, hands up.
+Now we're going to do it in both the head and the chest, kind of like "common time" or at the same time.
+Yes, got it.
+That means "to fall in love" in International Sign Language.
+International Sign Language, as you know, is a visual tool to help communicate across cultures and sign languages around the world.
+The second one I'd like to demonstrate is this -- please follow along with me again.
+And now this.
+This is "colonization" in ASL.
+Now the third -- please follow along again.
+And again.
+This is "enlightenment" in ASL.
+So let's do all three together.
+"Fall in love," "colonization" and "enlightenment."
+Good job, everyone.
+Notice how all three signs are very similar, they all happen at the head and the chest, but they convey quite different meanings.
+So it's amazing to see how ASL is alive and thriving, just like music is.
+However, in this day and age, we live in a very audio-centric world.
+And just because ASL has no sound to it, it automatically holds no social currency.
+We need to start thinking harder about what defines social currency and allow ASL to develop its own form of currency -- without sound.
+And this could possibly be a step to lead to a more inclusive society.
+And maybe people will understand that you don't need to be deaf to learn ASL, nor do you have to be hearing to learn music.
+ASL is such a rich treasure that I'd like you to have the same experience.
+And I'd like to invite you to open your ears, to open your eyes, take part in our culture and experience our visual language.
+And you never know, you might just fall in love with us.
+Thank you.
+<d>
+When I was a kid, my parents would tell me, "You can make a mess, but you have to clean up after yourself."
+So freedom came with responsibility.
+But my imagination would take me to all these wonderful places, where everything was possible.
+So I grew up in a bubble of innocence -- or a bubble of ignorance, I should say, because adults would lie to us to protect us from the ugly truth.
+And growing up, I found out that adults make a mess, and they're not very good at cleaning up after themselves.
+Fast forward, I am an adult now, and I teach citizen science and invention at the Hong Kong Harbour School.
+And it doesn't take too long before my students walk on a beach and stumble upon piles of trash.
+So as good citizens, we clean up the beaches -- and no, he is not drinking alcohol, and if he is, I did not give it to him.
+And so it's sad to say, but today more than 80 percent of the oceans have plastic in them.
+It's a horrifying fact.
+And in past decades, we've been taking those big ships out and those big nets, and we collect those plastic bits that we look at under a microscope, and we sort them, and then we put this data onto a map.
+But that takes forever, it's very expensive, and so it's quite risky to take those big boats out.
+So with my students, ages six to 15, we've been dreaming of inventing a better way.
+So we've transformed our tiny Hong Kong classroom into a workshop.
+And so we started building this small workbench, with different heights, so even really short kids can participate.
+And let me tell you, kids with power tools are awesome and safe.
+Not really.
+And so, back to plastic.
+We collect this plastic and we grind it to the size we find it in the ocean, which is very small because it breaks down.
+And so this is how we work.
+I let the imaginations of my students run wild.
+And my job is to try to collect the best of each kid's idea and try to combine it into something that hopefully would work.
+And so we have agreed that instead of collecting plastic bits, we are going to collect only the data.
+So we're going to get an image of the plastic with a robot -- so robots, kids get very excited.
+And the next thing we do -- we do what we call "rapid prototyping."
+We are so rapid at prototyping that the lunch is still in the lunchbox when we're hacking it.
+And we hack table lamps and webcams, into plumbing fixtures and we assemble that into a floating robot that will be slowly moving through water and through the plastic that we have there -- and this is the image that we get in the robot.
+So we see the plastic pieces floating slowly through the sensor, and the computer on board will process this image, and measure the size of each particle, so we have a rough estimate of how much plastic there is in the water.
+So we documented this invention step by step on a website for inventors called Instructables, in the hope that somebody would make it even better.
+What was really cool about this project was that the students saw a local problem, and boom -- they are trying to immediately address it.
+But my students in Hong Kong are hyperconnected kids.
+And they watch the news, they watch the Internet, and they came across this image.
+This was a child, probably under 10, cleaning up an oil spill bare-handed, in the Sundarbans, which is the world's largest mangrove forest in Bangladesh.
+So they were very shocked, because this is the water they drink, this is the water they bathe in, this is the water they fish in -- this is the place where they live.
+And also you can see the water is brown, the mud is brown and oil is brown, so when everything is mixed up, it's really hard to see what's in the water.
+But, there's a technology that's rather simple, that's called spectrometry, that allows you see what's in the water.
+So we built a rough prototype of a spectrometer, and you can shine light through different substances that produce different spectrums, so that can help you identify what's in the water.
+So we packed this prototype of a sensor, and we shipped it to Bangladesh.
+So what was cool about this project was that beyond addressing a local problem, or looking at a local problem, my students used their empathy and their sense of being creative to help, remotely, other kids.
+So I was very compelled by doing the second experiments, and I wanted to take it even further -- maybe addressing an even harder problem, and it's also closer to my heart.
+So I'm half Japanese and half French, and maybe you remember in 2011 there was a massive earthquake in Japan.
+It was so violent that it triggered several giant waves -- they are called tsunami -- and those tsunami destroyed many cities on the eastern coast of Japan.
+More than 14,000 people died in an instant.
+Also, it damaged the nuclear power plant of Fukushima, the nuclear power plant just by the water.
+And today, I read the reports and an average of 300 tons are leaking from the nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean.
+And today the whole Pacific Ocean has traces of contamination of cesium-137.
+If you go outside on the West Coast, you can measure Fukushima everywhere.
+But if you look at the map, it can look like most of the radioactivity has been washed away from the Japanese coast, and most of it is now -- it looks like it's safe, it's blue.
+Well, reality is a bit more complicated than this.
+So I've been going to Fukushima every year since the accident, and I measure independently and with other scientists, on land, in the river -- and this time we wanted to take the kids.
+So of course we didn't take the kids, the parents wouldn't allow that to happen.
+But every night we would report to "Mission Control" -- different masks they're wearing.
+It could look like they didn't take the work seriously, but they really did because they're going to have to live with radioactivity their whole life.
+And so what we did with them is that we'd discuss the data we collected that day, and talk about where we should be going next -- strategy, itinerary, etc...
+And to do this, we built a very rough topographical map of the region around the nuclear power plant.
+And so we built the elevation map, we sprinkled pigments to represent real-time data for radioactivity, and we sprayed water to simulate the rainfall.
+And with this we could see that the radioactive dust was washing from the top of the mountain into the river system, and leaking into the ocean.
+So it was a rough estimate.
+But with this in mind, we organized this expedition, which was the closest civilians have been to the nuclear power plant.
+We are sailing 1.5 kilometers away from the nuclear power plant, and with the help of the local fisherman, we are collecting sediment from the seabed with a custom sediment sampler we've invented and built.
+We pack the sediment into small bags, we then dispatch them to hundreds of small bags that we send to different universities, and we produce the map of the seabed radioactivity, especially in estuaries where the fish will reproduce, and I will hope that we will have improved the safety of the local fishermen and of your favorite sushi.
+You can see a progression here -- we've gone from a local problem to a remote problem to a global problem.
+And it's been super exciting to work at these different scales, with also very simple, open-source technologies.
+But at the same time, it's been increasingly frustrating because we have only started to measure the damage that we have done.
+We haven't even started to try to solve the problems.
+And so I wonder if we should just take a leap and try to invent better ways to do all these things.
+And so the classroom started to feel a little bit small, so we found an industrial site in Hong Kong, and we turned it into the largest mega-space focused on social and environmental impact.
+It's in central Hong Kong, and it's a place we can work with wood, metal, chemistry, a bit of biology, a bit of optics, basically you can build pretty much everything there.
+And its a place where adults and kids can play together.
+It's a place where kids' dreams can come true, with the help of adults, and where adults can be kids again.
+Acceleration! Acceleration!
+We're asking questions such as, can we invent the future of mobility with renewable energy?
+For example.
+Or, can we help the mobility of the aging population by transforming very standard wheelchairs into cool, electric vehicles?
+So plastic, oil and radioactivity are horrible, horrible legacies, but the very worst legacy that we can leave our children is lies.
+We can no longer afford to shield the kids from the ugly truth because we need their imagination to invent the solutions.
+So citizen scientists, makers, dreamers -- we must prepare the next generation that cares about the environment and people, and that can actually do something about it.
+Thank you.
+<d>
+Two twin domes, two radically opposed design cultures.
+One is made of thousands of steel parts, the other of a single silk thread.
+One is synthetic, the other organic.
+One is imposed on the environment, the other creates it.
+One is designed for nature, the other is designed by her.
+Michelangelo said that when he looked at raw marble, he saw a figure struggling to be free.
+The chisel was Michelangelo's only tool.
+But living things are not chiseled.
+They grow.
+And in our smallest units of life, our cells, we carry all the information that's required for every other cell to function and to replicate.
+Tools also have consequences.
+At least since the Industrial Revolution, the world of design has been dominated by the rigors of manufacturing and mass production.
+Assembly lines have dictated a world made of parts, framing the imagination of designers and architects who have been trained to think about their objects as assemblies of discrete parts with distinct functions.
+But you don't find homogenous material assemblies in nature.
+Take human skin, for example.
+Our facial skins are thin with large pores.
+Our back skins are thicker, with small pores.
+One acts mainly as filter, the other mainly as barrier, and yet it's the same skin: no parts, no assemblies.
+It's a system that gradually varies its functionality by varying elasticity.
+So here this is a split screen to represent my split world view, the split personality of every designer and architect operating today between the chisel and the gene, between machine and organism, between assembly and growth, between Henry Ford and Charles Darwin.
+These two worldviews, my left brain and right brain, analysis and synthesis, will play out on the two screens behind me.
+My work, at its simplest level, is about uniting these two worldviews, moving away from assembly and closer into growth.
+You're probably asking yourselves: Why now?
+Why was this not possible 10 or even five years ago?
+We live in a very special time in history, a rare time, a time when the confluence of four fields is giving designers access to tools we've never had access to before.
+These fields are computational design, allowing us to design complex forms with simple code; additive manufacturing, letting us produce parts by adding material rather than carving it out; materials engineering, which lets us design the behavior of materials in high resolution; and synthetic biology, enabling us to design new biological functionality by editing DNA.
+And at the intersection of these four fields, my team and I create.
+Please meet the minds and hands of my students.
+We design objects and products and structures and tools across scales, from the large-scale, like this robotic arm with an 80-foot diameter reach with a vehicular base that will one day soon print entire buildings, to nanoscale graphics made entirely of genetically engineered microorganisms that glow in the dark.
+Here we've reimagined the mashrabiya, an archetype of ancient Arabic architecture, and created a screen where every aperture is uniquely sized to shape the form of light and heat moving through it.
+In our next project, we explore the possibility of creating a cape and skirt -- this was for a Paris fashion show with Iris van Herpen -- like a second skin that are made of a single part, stiff at the contours, flexible around the waist.
+Together with my long-term 3D printing collaborator Stratasys, we 3D-printed this cape and skirt with no seams between the cells, and I'll show more objects like it.
+This helmet combines stiff and soft materials in 20-micron resolution.
+This is the resolution of a human hair. It's also the resolution of a CT scanner.
+That designers have access to such high-resolution analytic and synthetic tools, enables to design products that fit not only the shape of our bodies, but also the physiological makeup of our tissues.
+Next, we designed an acoustic chair, a chair that would be at once structural, comfortable and would also absorb sound.
+Professor Carter, my collaborator, and I turned to nature for inspiration, and by designing this irregular surface pattern, it becomes sound-absorbent.
+We printed its surface out of 44 different properties, varying in rigidity, opacity and color, corresponding to pressure points on the human body.
+Its surface, as in nature, varies its functionality not by adding another material or another assembly, but by continuously and delicately varying material property.
+But is nature ideal?
+Are there no parts in nature?
+I wasn't raised in a religious Jewish home, but when I was young, my grandmother used to tell me stories from the Hebrew Bible, and one of them stuck with me and came to define much of what I care about.
+As she recounts: "On the third day of Creation, God commands the Earth to grow a fruit-bearing fruit tree."
+For this first fruit tree, there was to be no differentiation between trunk, branches, leaves and fruit.
+The whole tree was a fruit.
+Instead, the land grew trees that have bark and stems and flowers.
+The land created a world made of parts.
+I often ask myself, "What would design be like if objects were made of a single part?
+Would we return to a better state of creation?"
+So we looked for that biblical material, that fruit-bearing fruit tree kind of material, and we found it.
+The second-most abundant biopolymer on the planet is called chitin, and some 100 million tons of it are produced every year by organisms such as shrimps, crabs, scorpions and butterflies.
+We thought if we could tune its properties, we could generate structures that are multifunctional out of a single part.
+So that's what we did.
+We called Legal Seafood -- we ordered a bunch of shrimp shells, we grinded them and we produced chitosan paste.
+By varying chemical concentrations, we were able to achieve a wide array of properties -- from dark, stiff and opaque, to light, soft and transparent.
+In order to print the structures in large scale, we built a robotically controlled extrusion system with multiple nozzles.
+The robot would vary material properties on the fly and create these 12-foot-long structures made of a single material, 100 percent recyclable.
+When the parts are ready, they're left to dry and find a form naturally upon contact with air.
+So why are we still designing with plastics?
+The air bubbles that were a byproduct of the printing process were used to contain photosynthetic microorganisms that first appeared on our planet 3.5 billion year ago, as we learned yesterday.
+Together with our collaborators at Harvard and MIT, we embedded bacteria that were genetically engineered to rapidly capture carbon from the atmosphere and convert it into sugar.
+For the first time, we were able to generate structures that would seamlessly transition from beam to mesh, and if scaled even larger, to windows.
+A fruit-bearing fruit tree.
+Working with an ancient material, one of the first lifeforms on the planet, plenty of water and a little bit of synthetic biology, we were able to transform a structure made of shrimp shells into an architecture that behaves like a tree.
+And here's the best part: for objects designed to biodegrade, put them in the sea, and they will nourish marine life; place them in soil, and they will help grow a tree.
+The setting for our next exploration using the same design principles was the solar system.
+We looked for the possibility of creating life-sustaining clothing for interplanetary voyages.
+To do that, we needed to contain bacteria and be able to control their flow.
+So like the periodic table, we came up with our own table of the elements: new lifeforms that were computationally grown, additively manufactured and biologically augmented.
+I like to think of synthetic biology as liquid alchemy, only instead of transmuting precious metals, you're synthesizing new biological functionality inside very small channels.
+It's called microfluidics.
+We 3D-printed our own channels in order to control the flow of these liquid bacterial cultures.
+In our first piece of clothing, we combined two microorganisms.
+The first is cyanobacteria.
+It lives in our oceans and in freshwater ponds.
+And the second, E. coli, the bacterium that inhabits the human gut.
+One converts light into sugar, the other consumes that sugar and produces biofuels useful for the built environment.
+Now, these two microorganisms never interact in nature.
+In fact, they never met each other.
+They've been here, engineered for the first time, to have a relationship inside a piece of clothing.
+Think of it as evolution not by natural selection, but evolution by design.
+In order to contain these relationships, we've created a single channel that resembles the digestive tract, that will help flow these bacteria and alter their function along the way.
+We then started growing these channels on the human body, varying material properties according to the desired functionality.
+Where we wanted more photosynthesis, we would design more transparent channels.
+This wearable digestive system, when it's stretched end to end, spans 60 meters.
+This is half the length of a football field, and 10 times as long as our small intestines.
+And here it is for the first time unveiled at TED -- our first photosynthetic wearable, liquid channels glowing with life inside a wearable clothing.
+Thank you.
+Mary Shelley said, "We are unfashioned creatures, but only half made up."
+What if design could provide that other half?
+What if we could create structures that would augment living matter?
+What if we could create personal microbiomes that would scan our skins, repair damaged tissue and sustain our bodies?
+Think of this as a form of edited biology.
+This entire collection, Wanderers, that was named after planets, was not to me really about fashion per se, but it provided an opportunity to speculate about the future of our race on our planet and beyond, to combine scientific insight with lots of mystery and to move away from the age of the machine to a new age of symbiosis between our bodies, the microorganisms that we inhabit, our products and even our buildings.
+I call this material ecology.
+To do this, we always need to return back to nature.
+By now, you know that a 3D printer prints material in layers. You also know that nature doesn't.
+It grows. It adds with sophistication.
+This silkworm cocoon, for example, creates a highly sophisticated architecture, a home inside which to metamorphisize.
+No additive manufacturing today gets even close to this level of sophistication.
+It does so by combining not two materials, but two proteins in different concentrations.
+One acts as the structure, the other is the glue, or the matrix, holding those fibers together.
+And this happens across scales.
+The silkworm first attaches itself to the environment -- it creates a tensile structure -- and it then starts spinning a compressive cocoon.
+Tension and compression, the two forces of life, manifested in a single material.
+In order to better understand how this complex process works, we glued a tiny earth magnet to the head of a silkworm, to the spinneret.
+We placed it inside a box with magnetic sensors, and that allowed us to create this 3-dimensional point cloud and visualize the complex architecture of the silkworm cocoon.
+However, when we placed the silkworm on a flat patch, not inside a box, we realized it would spin a flat cocoon and it would still healthily metamorphisize.
+So we started designing different environments, different scaffolds, and we discovered that the shape, the composition, the structure of the cocoon, was directly informed by the environment.
+Silkworms are often boiled to death inside their cocoons, their silk unraveled and used in the textile industry.
+We realized that designing these templates allowed us to give shape to raw silk without boiling a single cocoon.
+They would healthily metamorphisize, and we would be able to create these things.
+So we scaled this process up to architectural scale.
+We had a robot spin the template out of silk, and we placed it on our site.
+We knew silkworms migrated toward darker and colder areas, so we used a sun path diagram to reveal the distribution of light and heat on our structure.
+We then created holes, or apertures, that would lock in the rays of light and heat, distributing those silkworms on the structure.
+We were ready to receive the caterpillars.
+We ordered 6,500 silkworms from an online silk farm.
+And after four weeks of feeding, they were ready to spin with us.
+We placed them carefully at the bottom rim of the scaffold, and as they spin they pupate, they mate, they lay eggs, and life begins all over again -- just like us but much, much shorter.
+Bucky Fuller said that tension is the great integrity, and he was right.
+As they spin biological silk over robotically spun silk, they give this entire pavilion its integrity.
+And over two to three weeks, 6,500 silkworms spin 6,500 kilometers.
+In a curious symmetry, this is also the length of the Silk Road.
+The moths, after they hatch, produce 1.5 million eggs.
+This could be used for 250 additional pavilions for the future.
+So here they are, the two worldviews.
+One spins silk out of a robotic arm, the other fills in the gaps.
+If the final frontier of design is to breathe life into the products and the buildings around us, to form a two-material ecology, then designers must unite these two worldviews. Which brings us back, of course, to the beginning.
+Here's to a new age of design, a new age of creation, that takes us from a nature-inspired design to a design-inspired nature, and that demands of us for the first time that we mother nature.
+Thank you.
+<d>
+Raise your hand if you've ever been asked the question "What do you want to be when you grow up?"
+Now if you had to guess, how old would you say you were when you were first asked this question?
+You can just hold up fingers.
+Three. Five. Three. Five. Five. OK.
+Now, raise your hand if the question "What do you want to be when you grow up?" has ever caused you any anxiety.
+Any anxiety at all.
+I'm someone who's never been able to answer the question "What do you want to be when you grow up?"
+See, the problem wasn't that I didn't have any interests -- it's that I had too many.
+In high school, I liked English and math and art and I built websites and I played guitar in a punk band called Frustrated Telephone Operator.
+Maybe you've heard of us.
+This continued after high school, and at a certain point, I began to notice this pattern in myself where I would become interested in an area and I would dive in, become all-consumed, and I'd get to be pretty good at whatever it was, and then I would hit this point where I'd start to get bored.
+And usually I would try and persist anyway, because I had already devoted so much time and energy and sometimes money into this field.
+But eventually this sense of boredom, this feeling of, like, yeah, I got this, this isn't challenging anymore -- it would get to be too much.
+And I would have to let it go.
+But then I would become interested in something else, something totally unrelated, and I would dive into that, and become all-consumed, and I'd be like, "Yes! I found my thing," and then I would hit this point again where I'd start to get bored.
+And eventually, I would let it go.
+But then I would discover something new and totally different, and I would dive into that.
+This pattern caused me a lot of anxiety, for two reasons.
+The first was that I wasn't sure how I was going to turn any of this into a career.
+I thought that I would eventually have to pick one thing, deny all of my other passions, and just resign myself to being bored.
+The other reason it caused me so much anxiety was a little bit more personal.
+I worried that there was something wrong with this, and something wrong with me for being unable to stick with anything.
+I worried that I was afraid of commitment, or that I was scattered, or that I was self-sabotaging, afraid of my own success.
+If you can relate to my story and to these feelings, I'd like you to ask yourself a question that I wish I had asked myself back then.
+Ask yourself where you learned to assign the meaning of wrong or abnormal to doing many things.
+I'll tell you where you learned it: you learned it from the culture.
+We are first asked the question "What do you want to be when you grow up?" when we're about five years old.
+And the truth is that no one really cares what you say when you're that age.
+It's considered an innocuous question, posed to little kids to elicit cute replies, like, "I want to be an astronaut," or "I want to be a ballerina," or "I want to be a pirate."
+Insert Halloween costume here.
+But this question gets asked of us again and again as we get older in various forms -- for instance, high school students might get asked what major they're going to pick in college.
+And at some point, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" goes from being the cute exercise it once was to the thing that keeps us up at night.
+Why?
+See, while this question inspires kids to dream about what they could be, it does not inspire them to dream about all that they could be.
+In fact, it does just the opposite, because when someone asks you what you want to be, you can't reply with 20 different things, though well-meaning adults will likely chuckle and be like, "Oh, how cute, but you can't be a violin maker and a psychologist.
+You have to choose."
+This is Dr. Bob Childs -- and he's a luthier and psychotherapist.
+And this is Amy Ng, a magazine editor turned illustrator, entrepreneur, teacher and creative director.
+But most kids don't hear about people like this.
+All they hear is that they're going to have to choose.
+But it's more than that.
+The notion of the narrowly focused life is highly romanticized in our culture.
+It's this idea of destiny or the one true calling, the idea that we each have one great thing we are meant to do during our time on this earth, and you need to figure out what that thing is and devote your life to it.
+But what if you're someone who isn't wired this way?
+What if there are a lot of different subjects that you're curious about, and many different things you want to do?
+Well, there is no room for someone like you in this framework.
+And so you might feel alone.
+You might feel like you don't have a purpose.
+And you might feel like there's something wrong with you.
+There's nothing wrong with you.
+What you are is a multipotentialite.
+A multipotentialite is someone with many interests and creative pursuits.
+It's a mouthful to say.
+It might help if you break it up into three parts: multi, potential, and ite.
+You can also use one of the other terms that connote the same idea, such as polymath, the Renaissance person.
+Actually, during the Renaissance period, it was considered the ideal to be well-versed in multiple disciplines.
+Barbara Sher refers to us as "scanners."
+Use whichever term you like, or invent your own.
+I have to say I find it sort of fitting that as a community, we cannot agree on a single identity.
+It's easy to see your multipotentiality as a limitation or an affliction that you need to overcome.
+But what I've learned through speaking with people and writing about these ideas on my website, is that there are some tremendous strengths to being this way.
+Here are three multipotentialite super powers.
+One: idea synthesis.
+That is, combining two or more fields and creating something new at the intersection.
+Sha Hwang and Rachel Binx drew from their shared interests in cartography, data visualization, travel, mathematics and design, when they founded Meshu.
+Meshu is a company that creates custom geographically-inspired jewelry.
+Sha and Rachel came up with this unique idea not despite, but because of their eclectic mix of skills and experiences.
+Innovation happens at the intersections.
+That's where the new ideas come from.
+And multipotentialites, with all of their backgrounds, are able to access a lot of these points of intersection.
+The second multipotentialite superpower is rapid learning.
+When multipotentialites become interested in something, we go hard.
+We observe everything we can get our hands on.
+We're also used to being beginners, because we've been beginners so many times in the past, and this means that we're less afraid of trying new things and stepping out of our comfort zones.
+What's more, many skills are transferable across disciplines, and we bring everything we've learned to every new area we pursue, so we're rarely starting from scratch.
+Nora Dunn is a full-time traveler and freelance writer.
+As a child concert pianist, she honed an incredible ability to develop muscle memory.
+Now, she's the fastest typist she knows.
+Before becoming a writer, Nora was a financial planner.
+She had to learn the finer mechanics of sales when she was starting her practice, and this skill now helps her write compelling pitches to editors.
+It is rarely a waste of time to pursue something you're drawn to, even if you end up quitting.
+You might apply that knowledge in a different field entirely, in a way that you couldn't have anticipated.
+The third multipotentialite superpower is adaptability; that is, the ability to morph into whatever you need to be in a given situation.
+Abe Cajudo is sometimes a video director, sometimes a web designer, sometimes a Kickstarter consultant, sometimes a teacher, and sometimes, apparently, James Bond.
+He's valuable because he does good work.
+He's even more valuable because he can take on various roles, depending on his clients' needs.
+Fast Company magazine identified adaptability as the single most important skill to develop in order to thrive in the 21st century.
+The economic world is changing so quickly and unpredictably that it is the individuals and organizations that can pivot in order to meet the needs of the market that are really going to thrive.
+Idea synthesis, rapid learning and adaptability: three skills that multipotentialites are very adept at, and three skills that they might lose if pressured to narrow their focus.
+As a society, we have a vested interest in encouraging multipotentialites to be themselves.
+We have a lot of complex, multidimensional problems in the world right now, and we need creative, out-of-the-box thinkers to tackle them.
+Now, let's say that you are, in your heart, a specialist.
+You came out of the womb knowing you wanted to be a pediatric neurosurgeon.
+Don't worry -- there's nothing wrong with you, either.
+In fact, some of the best teams are comprised of a specialist and multipotentialite paired together.
+The specialist can dive in deep and implement ideas, while the multipotentialite brings a breadth of knowledge to the project.
+It's a beautiful partnership.
+But we should all be designing lives and careers that are aligned with how we're wired.
+And sadly, multipotentialites are largely being encouraged simply to be more like their specialist peers.
+So with that said, if there is one thing you take away from this talk, I hope that it is this: embrace your inner wiring, whatever that may be.
+If you're a specialist at heart, then by all means, specialize.
+That is where you'll do your best work.
+But to the multipotentialites in the room, including those of you who may have just realized in the last 12 minutes that you are one -- to you I say: embrace your many passions.
+Follow your curiosity down those rabbit holes.
+Explore your intersections.
+Embracing our inner wiring leads to a happier, more authentic life.
+And perhaps more importantly -- multipotentialites, the world needs us.
+Thank you.
+<d>
+In the year 1901, a woman called Auguste was taken to a medical asylum in Frankfurt.
+Auguste was delusional and couldn't remember even the most basic details of her life.
+Her doctor was called Alois.
+Alois didn't know how to help Auguste, but he watched over her until, sadly, she passed away in 1906.
+After she died, Alois performed an autopsy and found strange plaques and tangles in Auguste's brain -- the likes of which he'd never seen before.
+Now here's the even more striking thing.
+If Auguste had instead been alive today, we could offer her no more help than Alois was able to 114 years ago.
+Alois was Dr. Alois Alzheimer.
+And Auguste Deter was the first patient to be diagnosed with what we now call Alzheimer's disease.
+Since 1901, medicine has advanced greatly.
+We've discovered antibiotics and vaccines to protect us from infections, many treatments for cancer, antiretrovirals for HIV, statins for heart disease and much more.
+But we've made essentially no progress at all in treating Alzheimer's disease.
+I'm part of a team of scientists who has been working to find a cure for Alzheimer's for over a decade.
+So I think about this all the time.
+Alzheimer's now affects 40 million people worldwide.
+But by 2050, it will affect 150 million people -- which, by the way, will include many of you.
+If you're hoping to live to be 85 or older, your chance of getting Alzheimer's will be almost one in two.
+In other words, odds are you'll spend your golden years either suffering from Alzheimer's or helping to look after a friend or loved one with Alzheimer's.
+Already in the United States alone, Alzheimer's care costs 200 billion dollars every year.
+One out of every five Medicare dollars get spent on Alzheimer's.
+It is today the most expensive disease, and costs are projected to increase fivefold by 2050, as the baby boomer generation ages.
+It may surprise you that, put simply, Alzheimer's is one of the biggest medical and social challenges of our generation.
+But we've done relatively little to address it.
+Today, of the top 10 causes of death worldwide, Alzheimer's is the only one we cannot prevent, cure or even slow down.
+We understand less about the science of Alzheimer's than other diseases because we've invested less time and money into researching it.
+The US government spends 10 times more every year on cancer research than on Alzheimer's despite the fact that Alzheimer's costs us more and causes a similar number of deaths each year as cancer.
+The lack of resources stems from a more fundamental cause: a lack of awareness.
+Because here's what few people know but everyone should: Alzheimer's is a disease, and we can cure it.
+For most of the past 114 years, everyone, including scientists, mistakenly confused Alzheimer's with aging.
+We thought that becoming senile was a normal and inevitable part of getting old.
+But we only have to look at a picture of a healthy aged brain compared to the brain of an Alzheimer's patient to see the real physical damage caused by this disease.
+As well as triggering severe loss of memory and mental abilities, the damage to the brain caused by Alzheimer's significantly reduces life expectancy and is always fatal.
+Remember Dr. Alzheimer found strange plaques and tangles in Auguste's brain a century ago.
+For almost a century, we didn't know much about these.
+Today we know they're made from protein molecules.
+You can imagine a protein molecule as a piece of paper that normally folds into an elaborate piece of origami.
+There are spots on the paper that are sticky.
+And when it folds correctly, these sticky bits end up on the inside.
+But sometimes things go wrong, and some sticky bits are on the outside.
+This causes the protein molecules to stick to each other, forming clumps that eventually become large plaques and tangles.
+That's what we see in the brains of Alzheimer's patients.
+We've spent the past 10 years at the University of Cambridge trying to understand how this malfunction works.
+There are many steps, and identifying which step to try to block is complex -- like defusing a bomb.
+Cutting one wire might do nothing. Cutting others might make the bomb explore.
+We have to find the right step to block, and then create a drug that does it.
+Until recently, we for the most part have been cutting wires and hoping for the best.
+But now we've got together a diverse group of people -- medics, biologists, geneticists, chemists, physicists, engineers and mathematicians.
+And together, we've managed to identify a critical step in the process and are now testing a new class of drugs which would specifically block this step and stop the disease.
+Now let me show you some of our latest results.
+No one outside of our lab has seen these yet.
+Let's look at some videos of what happened when we tested these new drugs in worms.
+So these are healthy worms, and you can see they're moving around normally.
+These worms, on the other hand, have protein molecules sticking together inside them -- like humans with Alzheimer's.
+And you can see they're clearly sick.
+But if we give our new drugs to these worms at an early stage, then we see that they're healthy, and they live a normal lifespan.
+This is just an initial positive result, but research like this shows us that Alzheimer's is a disease that we can understand and we can cure.
+After 114 years of waiting, there's finally real hope for what can be achieved in the next 10 or 20 years. But to grow that hope, to finally beat Alzheimer's, we need help.
+This isn't about scientists like me -- it's about you.
+We need you to raise awareness that Alzheimer's is a disease and that if we try, we can beat it.
+In the case of other diseases, patients and their families have led the charge for more research and put pressure on governments, the pharmaceutical industry, scientists and regulators.
+That was essential for advancing treatment for HIV in the late 1980s.
+Today, we see that same drive to beat cancer.
+But Alzheimer's patients are often unable to speak up for themselves. And their families, the hidden victims, caring for their loved ones night and day, are often too worn out to go out and advocate for change.
+So, it really is down to you.
+Alzheimer's isn't, for the most part, a genetic disease.
+Everyone with a brain is at risk.
+Today, there are 40 million patients like Auguste, who can't create the change they need for themselves.
+Help speak up for them, and help demand a cure.
+Thank you.
+<d>
+I published this article in the New York Times Modern Love column in January of this year.
+"To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This."
+And the article is about a psychological study designed to create romantic love in the laboratory, and my own experience trying the study myself one night last summer.
+So the procedure is fairly simple: two strangers take turns asking each other 36 increasingly personal questions and then they stare into each other's eyes without speaking for four minutes.
+So here are a couple of sample questions. Number 12: If you could wake up tomorrow having gained any one quality or ability, what would it be?
+Number 28: When did you last cry in front of another person?
+By yourself?
+As you can see, they really do get more personal as they go along.
+Number 30, I really like this one: Tell your partner what you like about them; be very honest this time, saying things you might not say to someone you just met.
+So when I first came across this study a few years earlier, one detail really stuck out to me, and that was the rumor that two of the participants had gotten married six months later, and they'd invited the entire lab to the ceremony.
+So I was of course very skeptical about this process of just manufacturing romantic love, but of course I was intrigued.
+And when I got the chance to try this study myself, with someone I knew but not particularly well, I wasn't expecting to fall in love.
+But then we did, and --
+And I thought it made a good story, so I sent it to the Modern Love column a few months later.
+Now, this was published in January, and now it is August, so I'm guessing that some of you are probably wondering, are we still together?
+And the reason I think you might be wondering this is because I have been asked this question again and again and again for the past seven months.
+And this question is really what I want to talk about today.
+But let's come back to it.
+So the week before the article came out, I was very nervous.
+I had been working on a book about love stories for the past few years, so I had gotten used to writing about my own experiences with romantic love on my blog.
+But a blog post might get a couple hundred views at the most, and those were usually just my Facebook friends, and I figured my article in the New York Times would probably get a few thousand views.
+And that felt like a lot of attention on a relatively new relationship.
+But as it turned out, I had no idea.
+So the article was published online on a Friday evening, and by Saturday, this had happened to the traffic on my blog.
+And by Sunday, both the Today Show and Good Morning America had called.
+Within a month, the article would receive over 8 million views, and I was, to say the least, underprepared for this sort of attention.
+It's one thing to work up the confidence to write honestly about your experiences with love, but it is another thing to discover that your love life has made international news -- and to realize that people across the world are genuinely invested in the status of your new relationship.
+And when people called or emailed, which they did every day for weeks, they always asked the same question first: are you guys still together?
+In fact, as I was preparing this talk, I did a quick search of my email inbox for the phrase "Are you still together?" and several messages popped up immediately.
+They were from students and journalists and friendly strangers like this one.
+I did radio interviews and they asked.
+I even gave a talk, and one woman shouted up to the stage, "Hey Mandy, where's your boyfriend?"
+And I promptly turned bright red.
+I understand that this is part of the deal.
+If you write about your relationship in an international newspaper, you should expect people to feel comfortable asking about it.
+But I just wasn't prepared for the scope of the response.
+The 36 questions seem to have taken on a life of their own.
+In fact, the New York Times published a follow-up article for Valentine's Day, which featured readers' experiences of trying the study themselves, with varying degrees of success.
+So my first impulse in the face of all of this attention was to become very protective of my own relationship.
+I said no to every request for the two of us to do a media appearance together.
+I turned down TV interviews, and I said no to every request for photos of the two us.
+I think I was afraid that we would become inadvertent icons for the process of falling in love, a position I did not at all feel qualified for.
+And I get it: people didn't just want to know if the study worked, they wanted to know if it really worked: that is, if it was capable of producing love that would last, not just a fling, but real love, sustainable love.
+But this was a question I didn't feel capable of answering.
+My own relationship was only a few months old, and I felt like people were asking the wrong question in the first place.
+What would knowing whether or not we were still together really tell them?
+If the answer was no, would it make the experience of doing these 36 questions any less worthwhile?
+Dr. Arthur Aron first wrote about these questions in this study here in 1997, and here, the researcher's goal was not to produce romantic love.
+Instead, they wanted to foster interpersonal closeness among college students, by using what Aron called "sustained, escalating, reciprocal, personalistic self-disclosure."
+Sounds romantic, doesn't it?
+But the study did work.
+The participants did feel closer after doing it, and several subsequent studies have also used Aron's fast friends protocol as a way to quickly create trust and intimacy between strangers.
+They've used it between members of the police and members of community, and they've used it between people of opposing political ideologies.
+The original version of the story, the one that I tried last summer, that pairs the personal questions with four minutes of eye contact, was referenced in this article, but unfortunately it was never published.
+So a few months ago, I was giving a talk at a small liberal arts college, and a student came up to me afterwards and he said, kind of shyly, "So, I tried your study, and it didn't work."
+He seemed a little mystified by this.
+"You mean, you didn't fall in love with the person you did it with?" I asked.
+"Well..." He paused.
+"I think she just wants to be friends."
+"But did you become better friends?" I asked.
+"Did you feel like you got to really know each other after doing the study?"
+He nodded.
+"So, then it worked," I said.
+I don't think this is the answer he was looking for.
+In fact, I don't think this is the answer that any of us are looking for when it comes to love.
+I first came across this study when I was 29 and I was going through a really difficult breakup.
+I had been in the relationship since I was 20, which was basically my entire adult life, and he was my first real love, and I had no idea how or if I could make a life without him.
+So I turned to science.
+I researched everything I could find about the science of romantic love, and I think I was hoping that it might somehow inoculate me from heartache.
+I don't know if I realized this at the time -- I thought I was just doing research for this book I was writing -- but it seems really obvious in retrospect.
+I hoped that if I armed myself with the knowledge of romantic love, I might never have to feel as terrible and lonely as I did then.
+And all this knowledge has been useful in some ways.
+I am more patient with love. I am more relaxed.
+I am more confident about asking for what I want.
+But I can also see myself more clearly, and I can see that what I want is sometimes more than can reasonably be asked for.
+What I want from love is a guarantee, not just that I am loved today and that I will be loved tomorrow, but that I will continue to be loved by the person I love indefinitely.
+Maybe it's this possibility of a guarantee that people were really asking about when they wanted to know if we were still together.
+So the story that the media told about the 36 questions was that there might be a shortcut to falling in love.
+There might be a way to somehow mitigate some of the risk involved, and this is a very appealing story, because falling in love feels amazing, but it's also terrifying.
+The moment you admit to loving someone, you admit to having a lot to lose, and it's true that these questions do provide a mechanism for getting to know someone quickly, which is also a mechanism for being known, and I think this is the thing that most of us really want from love: to be known, to be seen, to be understood.
+But I think when it comes to love, we are too willing to accept the short version of the story.
+The version of the story that asks, "Are you still together?" and is content with a yes or no answer.
+So rather than that question, I would propose we ask some more difficult questions, questions like: How do you decide who deserves your love and who does not?
+How do you stay in love when things get difficult, and how do you know when to just cut and run?
+How do you live with the doubt that inevitably creeps into every relationship, or even harder, how do you live with your partner's doubt?
+I don't necessarily know the answers to these questions, but I think they're an important start at having a more thoughtful conversation about what it means to love someone.
+So, if you want it, the short version of the story of my relationship is this: a year ago, an acquaintance and I did a study designed to create romantic love, and we fell in love, and we are still together, and I am so glad.
+But falling in love is not the same thing as staying in love.
+Falling in love is the easy part.
+So at the end of my article, I wrote, "Love didn't happen to us.
+We're in love because we each made the choice to be."
+And I cringe a little when I read that now, not because it isn't true, but because at the time, I really hadn't considered everything that was contained in that choice.
+I didn't consider how many times we would each have to make that choice, and how many times I will continue to have to make that choice without knowing whether or not he will always choose me.
+I want it to be enough to have asked and answered 36 questions, and to have chosen to love someone so generous and kind and fun and to have broadcast that choice in the biggest newspaper in America.
+But what I have done instead is turn my relationship into the kind of myth I don't quite believe in.
+And what I want, what perhaps I will spend my life wanting, is for that myth to be true.
+I want the happy ending implied by the title to my article, which is, incidentally, the only part of the article that I didn't actually write.
+But what I have instead is the chance to make the choice to love someone, and the hope that he will choose to love me back, and it is terrifying, but that's the deal with love.
+<d>
+I was raised by lesbians in the mountains, and I sort of came like a forest gnome to New York City a while back.
+Really messed with my head, but I'll get into that later.
+I'll start with when I was eight years old. I took a wood box, and I buried a dollar bill, a pen and a fork inside this box in Colorado.
+And I thought some strange humanoids or aliens in 500 years would find this box and learn about the way our species exchanged ideas, maybe how we ate our spaghetti. I really didn't know.
+Anyway, this is kind of funny, because here I am, 30 years later, and I'm still making boxes.
+Now, at some point I was in Hawaii -- I like to hike and surf and do all that weird stuff, and I was making a collage for my ma.
+And I took a dictionary and I ripped it up, and I made it into a sort of Agnes Martin grid, and I poured resin all over it and a bee got stuck.
+Now, she's afraid of bees and she's allergic to them, so I poured more resin on the canvas, thinking I could hide it or something.
+Instead, the opposite happened: It sort of created a magnification, like a magnifying glass, on the dictionary text.
+So what did I do? I built more boxes.
+This time, I started putting electronics, frogs, strange bottles I'd find in the street -- anything I could find -- because I was always finding things my whole life, and trying to make relationships and tell stories between these objects.
+So I started drawing around the objects, and I realized: Holy moly, I can draw in space!
+I can make free-floating lines, like the way you would draw around a dead body at a crime scene.
+So I took the objects out, and I created my own taxonomy of invented specimens.
+First, botanical -- which you can kind of get a sense of.
+Then I made some weird insects and creatures.
+It was really fun; I was just drawing on the layers of resin.
+And it was cool, because I was actually starting to have shows and stuff, I was making some money, I could take my girlfriend for dinner, and like, go to Sizzler.
+It was some good shit, man.
+At some point, I got up to the human form, life-size resin sculptures with drawings of humans inside the layers.
+This was great, except for one thing: I was going to die.
+I didn't know what to do, because the resin was going to kill me.
+And I went to bed every night thinking about it.
+So I tried using glass. I started drawing on the layers of glass, almost like if you drew on a window, then you put another window, and another window, and you had all these windows together that made a three-dimensional composition.
+And this really worked, because I could stop using the resin.
+So I did this for years, which culminated in a very large work, which I call "The Triptych."
+"The Triptych" was largely inspired by Hieronymus Bosch's "The Garden of Earthly Delights," which is a painting in the Museo del Prado in Spain.
+Do you guys know this painting?
+Good, it's a cool painting.
+It's kind of ahead of its time, they say.
+So, "The Triptych." I'll walk you through this piece.
+It weighs 24,000 pounds. It's 18 feet long. It's double-sided, so it's 36 feet of composition. It's kind of weird.
+Well, that's the blood fountain.
+To the left, you have Jesus and the locusts.
+There's a cave where all these animal-headed creatures travel between two worlds.
+They go from the representational world, to this analog-mesh underworld, where they're hiding.
+This is where the animal-headed creatures are by the lighthouse, and they're all about to commit mass suicide into the ocean.
+The ocean is made up of thousands of elements.
+This is a bird god tied up to a battleship.
+Billy Graham is in the ocean; the Horizon from the oil spill; Waldo; Osama Bin Laden's shelter -- there's all kinds of weird stuff that you can find if you look really hard, in the ocean.
+Anyway, this is a lady creature.
+She's coming out of the ocean, and she's spitting oil into one hand and she has clouds coming out of her other hand.
+Her hands are like scales, and she has the mythological reference of the Earth and cosmos in balance.
+So that's one side of "The Triptych."
+It's a little narrative thing.
+That's her hand that she's spitting into.
+And then, when you go to the other side, she has like a trunk, like a bird's beak, and she's spitting clouds out of her trunk.
+Then she has an 18-foot-long serpent's tail that connects "The Triptych."
+Anyway, her tail catches on fire from the back of the volcano.
+I don't know why that happened.
+That happens, you know.
+Her tail terminates in a cycloptic eyeball, made out of 1986 terrorist cards.
+Have you guys seen those?
+They were made in the 1980's, they're like baseball cards of terrorists.
+Way ahead of their time.
+That will bring you to my latest project.
+I'm in the middle of two projects: One's called "Psychogeographies."
+It's about a six-year project to make 100 of these humans.
+Each one is an archive of our culture, through our ripped-up media and matter, whether it's encyclopedias or dictionaries or magazines.
+But each one acts as a sort of an archive in the shape of a human, and they travel in groups of 20, 4, or 12 at a time.
+They're like cells -- they come together, they divide.
+And you kind of walk through them. It's taking me years.
+Each one is basically a 3,000-pound microscope slide with a human stuck inside.
+This one has a little cave in his chest.
+That's his head; there's the chest, you can kind of see the beginning.
+I'm going to go down the body for you: There's a waterfall coming out of his chest, covering his penis -- or not-penis, or whatever it is, a kind of androgynous thing.
+I'll take you quickly through these works, because I can't explain them for too long.
+There are the layers, you can kind of see it.
+That's a body getting split in half.
+This one has two heads, and it's communicating between the two heads.
+You can see the pills coming out, going into one head from this weird statue.
+There's a little forest scene inside the chest cavity.
+Can you see that?
+Anyway, this talk's all about these boxes, like the boxes we're in.
+This box we're in, the solar system is a box.
+This brings you to my latest box.
+It's a brick box. It's called Pioneer Works.
+Inside of this box is a physicist, a neuroscientist, a painter, a musician, a writer, a radio station, a museum, a school, a publishing arm to disseminate all the content we make there into the world; a garden.
+We shake this box up, and all these people kind of start hitting each other like particles.
+And I think that's the way you change the world.
+You redefine your insides and the box that you're living in.
+And you come together to realize that we're all in this together, that this delusion of difference -- this idea of countries, of borders, of religion -- doesn't work.
+We're all really made up of the same stuff, in the same box.
+And if we don't start exchanging that stuff sweetly and nicely, we're all going to die real soon.
+Thank you very much.
+<d>
+What do you do when you have a headache?
+You swallow an aspirin.
+But for this pill to get to your head, where the pain is, it goes through your stomach, intestines and various other organs first.
+Swallowing pills is the most effective and painless way of delivering any medication in the body.
+The downside, though, is that swallowing any medication leads to its dilution.
+And this is a big problem, particularly in HIV patients.
+When they take their anti-HIV drugs, these drugs are good for lowering the virus in the blood, and increasing the CD4 cell counts. But they are also notorious for their adverse side effects, but mostly bad, because they get diluted by the time they get to the blood, and worse, by the time they get to the sites where it matters most: within the HIV viral reservoirs.
+These areas in the body -- such as the lymph nodes, the nervous system, as well as the lungs -- where the virus is sleeping, and will not readily get delivered in the blood of patients that are under consistent anti-HIV drugs therapy.
+However, upon discontinuation of therapy, the virus can awake and infect new cells in the blood.
+Now, all this is a big problem in treating HIV with the current drug treatment, which is a life-long treatment that must be swallowed by patients.
+One day, I sat and thought, "Can we deliver anti-HIV directly within its reservoir sites, without the risk of drug dilution?"
+As a laser scientist, the answer was just before my eyes: Lasers, of course.
+If they can be used for dentistry, for diabetic wound-healing and surgery, they can be used for anything imaginable, including transporting drugs into cells.
+As a matter of fact, we are currently using laser pulses to poke or drill extremely tiny holes, which open and close almost immediately in HIV-infected cells, in order to deliver drugs within them.
+"How is that possible?" you may ask.
+Well, we shine a very powerful but super-tiny laser beam onto the membrane of HIV-infected cells while these cells are immersed in liquid containing the drug.
+The laser pierces the cell, while the cell swallows the drug in a matter of microseconds.
+Before you even know it, the induced hole becomes immediately repaired.
+Now, we are currently testing this technology in test tubes or in Petri dishes, but the goal is to get this technology in the human body, apply it in the human body.
+"How is that possible?" you may ask.
+Well, the answer is: through a three-headed device.
+Using the first head, which is our laser, we will make an incision in the site of infection. Using the second head, which is a camera, we meander to the site of infection.
+Finally, using a third head, which is a drug-spreading sprinkler, we deliver the drugs directly at the site of infection, while the laser is again used to poke those cells open.
+Well, this might not seem like much right now.
+But one day, if successful, this technology can lead to complete eradication of HIV in the body.
+Yes. A cure for HIV.
+This is every HIV researcher's dream -- in our case, a cure lead by lasers.
+Thank you.
+<d>
+For the past decade, I've been studying non-state armed groups: armed organizations like terrorists, insurgents or militias.
+I document what these groups do when they're not shooting.
+My goal is to better understand these violent actors and to study ways to encourage transition from violent engagement to nonviolent confrontation.
+I work in the field, in the policy world and in the library.
+Understanding non-state armed groups is key to solving most ongoing conflict, because war has changed.
+It used to be a contest between states. No longer.
+It is now a conflict between states and non-state actors.
+For example, of the 216 peace agreements signed between 1975 and 2011, 196 of them were between a state and a non-state actor.
+So we need to understand these groups; we need to either engage them or defeat them in any conflict resolution process that has to be successful.
+So how do we do that?
+We need to know what makes these organizations tick.
+We know a lot about how they fight, why they fight, but no one looks at what they're doing when they're not fighting.
+Yet, armed struggle and unarmed politics are related.
+It is all part of the same organization.
+We cannot understand these groups, let alone defeat them, if we don't have the full picture.
+And armed groups today are complex organizations.
+Take the Lebanese Hezbollah, known for its violent confrontation against Israel.
+But since its creation in the early 1980s, Hezbollah has also set up a political party, a social-service network, and a military apparatus.
+Similarly, the Palestinian Hamas, known for its suicide attacks against Israel, also runs the Gaza Strip since 2007.
+So these groups do way more than just shoot.
+They multi-task.
+They set up complex communication machines -- radio stations, TV channels, Internet websites and social media strategies.
+And up here, you have the ISIS magazine, printed in English and published to recruit.
+Armed groups also invest in complex fund-raising -- not looting, but setting up profitable businesses; for example, construction companies.
+Now, these activities are keys.
+They allow these groups to increase their strength, increase their funds, to better recruit and to build their brand.
+Armed groups also do something else: they build stronger bonds with the population by investing in social services.
+They build schools, they run hospitals, they set up vocational-training programs or micro-loan programs.
+Hezbollah offers all of these services and more.
+Armed groups also seek to win the population over by offering something that the state is not providing: safety and security.
+The initial rise of the Taliban in war-torn Afghanistan, or even the beginning of the ascent of ISIS, can be understood also by looking at these groups' efforts to provide security.
+Now, unfortunately, in these cases, the provision of security came at an unbearably high price for the population.
+But in general, providing social services fills a gap, a governance gap left by the government, and allows these groups to increase their strength and their power.
+For example, the 2006 electoral victory of the Palestinian Hamas cannot be understood without acknowledging the group's social work.
+Now, this is a really complex picture, yet in the West, when we look at armed groups, we only think of the violent side.
+But that's not enough to understand these groups' strength, strategy or long-term vision.
+These groups are hybrid.
+They rise because they fill a gap left by the government, and they emerge to be both armed and political, engage in violent struggle and provide governance.
+And the more these organizations are complex and sophisticated, the less we can think of them as the opposite of a state.
+Now, what do you call a group like Hezbollah?
+They run part of a territory, they administer all their functions, they pick up the garbage, they run the sewage system.
+Is this a state? Is it a rebel group?
+Or maybe something else, something different and new?
+And what about ISIS?
+The lines are blurred.
+We live in a world of states, non-states, and in-between, and the more states are weak, like in the Middle East today, the more non-state actors step in and fill that gap.
+This matters for governments, because to counter these groups, they will have to invest more in non-military tools.
+Filling that governance gap has to be at the center of any sustainable approach.
+This also matters very much for peacemaking and peacebuilding.
+If we better understand armed groups, we will better know what incentives to offer to encourage the transition from violence to nonviolence.
+So in this new contest between states and non-states, military power can win some battles, but it will not give us peace nor stability.
+To achieve these objectives, what we need is a long-term investment in filling that security gap, in filling that governance gap that allowed these groups to thrive in the first place.
+Thank you.
+<d>
+I am failing as a woman, I am failing as a feminist.
+I have passionate opinions about gender equality, but I worry that to freely accept the label of "feminist," would not be fair to good feminists.
+I'm a feminist, but I'm a rather bad one.
+Oh, so I call myself a Bad Feminist.
+Or at least, I wrote an essay, and then I wrote a book called "Bad Feminist," and then in interviews, people started calling me The Bad Feminist.
+So, what started as a bit of an inside joke with myself and a willful provocation, has become a thing.
+Let me take a step back.
+When I was younger, mostly in my teens and 20s, I had strange ideas about feminists as hairy, angry, man-hating, sex-hating women -- as if those are bad things.
+These days, I look at how women are treated the world over, and anger, in particular, seems like a perfectly reasonable response.
+But back then, I worried about the tone people used when suggesting I might be a feminist.
+The feminist label was an accusation, it was an "F" word, and not a nice one.
+I was labeled a woman who doesn't play by the rules, who expects too much, who thinks far too highly of myself, by daring to believe I'm equal -- superior to a man.
+You don't want to be that rebel woman, until you realize that you very much are that woman, and cannot imagine being anyone else.
+As I got older, I began to accept that I am, indeed, a feminist, and a proud one.
+I hold certain truths to be self-evident: Women are equal to men.
+We deserve equal pay for equal work.
+We have the right to move through the world as we choose, free from harassment or violence.
+We have the right to easy, affordable access to birth control, and reproductive services.
+We have the right to make choices about our bodies, free from legislative oversight or evangelical doctrine.
+We have the right to respect.
+There's more.
+When we talk about the needs of women, we have to consider the other identities we inhabit.
+We are not just women.
+We are people with different bodies, gender expressions, faiths, sexualities, class backgrounds, abilities, and so much more.
+We need to take into account these differences and how they affect us, as much as we account for what we have in common.
+Without this kind of inclusion, our feminism is nothing.
+I hold these truths to be self-evident, but let me be clear: I'm a mess.
+I am full of contradictions.
+There are many ways in which I'm doing feminism wrong.
+I have another confession.
+When I drive to work, I listen to thuggish rap at a very loud volume.
+Even though the lyrics are degrading to women -- these lyrics offend me to my core -- the classic Yin Yang Twins song "Salt Shaker" -- it is amazing.
+"Make it work with your wet t-shirt.
+Bitch, you gotta shake it 'til your camel starts to hurt!"
+Think about it.
+Poetry, right?
+I am utterly mortified by my music choices.
+I firmly believe in man work, which is anything I don't want to do, including -- all domestic tasks, but also: bug killing, trash removal, lawn care and vehicle maintenance.
+I want no part of any of that.
+Pink is my favorite color.
+I enjoy fashion magazines and pretty things.
+I watch "The Bachelor" and romantic comedies, and I have absurd fantasies about fairy tales coming true.
+Some of my transgressions are more flagrant.
+If a woman wants to take her husband's name, that is her choice, and it is not my place to judge.
+If a woman chooses to stay home to raise her children, I embrace that choice, too.
+The problem is not that she makes herself economically vulnerable in that choice; the problem is that our society is set up to make women economically vulnerable when they choose.
+Let's deal with that.
+I reject the mainstream feminism that has historically ignored or deflected the needs of women of color, working-class women, queer women and transgender women, in favor of supporting white, middle- and upper-class straight women.
+Listen, if that's good feminism -- I am a very bad feminist.
+There is also this: As a feminist, I feel a lot of pressure.
+We have this tendency to put visible feminists on a pedestal.
+We expect them to pose perfectly.
+When they disappoint us, we gleefully knock them from the very pedestal we put them on.
+Like I said, I am a mess -- consider me knocked off that pedestal before you ever try to put me up there.
+Too many women, particularly groundbreaking women and industry leaders, are afraid to be labeled as feminists.
+They're afraid to stand up and say, "Yes, I am a feminist," for fear of what that label means, for fear of being unable to live up to unrealistic expectations.
+Take, for example, Beyoncé, or as I call her, The Goddess.
+She has emerged, in recent years, as a visible feminist.
+At the 2014 MTV Video Music Awards, she performed in front of the word "feminist" 10 feet high.
+It was a glorious spectacle to see this pop star openly embracing feminism and letting young women and men know that being a feminist is something to celebrate.
+As the moment faded, cultural critics began endlessly debating whether or not Beyoncé was, indeed, a feminist.
+They graded her feminism, instead of simply taking a grown, accomplished woman at her word.
+We demand perfection from feminists, because we are still fighting for so much, we want so much, we need so damn much.
+We go far beyond reasonable, constructive criticism, to dissecting any given woman's feminism, tearing it apart until there's nothing left.
+We do not need to do that.
+Bad feminism -- or really, more inclusive feminism -- is a starting point.
+But what happens next?
+We go from acknowledging our imperfections to accountability, or walking the walk, and being a little bit brave.
+If I listen to degrading music, I am creating a demand for which artists are more than happy to contribute a limitless supply.
+These artists are not going to change how they talk about women in their songs until we demand that change by affecting their bottom line.
+Certainly, it is difficult.
+Why must it be so catchy?
+It's hard to make the better choice, and it is so easy to justify a lesser one.
+But -- when I justify bad choices, I make it harder for women to achieve equality, the equality that we all deserve, and I need to own that.
+I think of my nieces, ages three and four.
+They are gorgeous and headstrong, brilliant girls, who are a whole lot of brave.
+I want them to thrive in a world where they are valued for the powerful creatures they are.
+I think of them, and suddenly, the better choice becomes far easier to make.
+We can all make better choices.
+We can change the channel when a television show treats sexual violence against women like sport, Game of Thrones.
+We can change the radio station when we hear songs that treat women as nothing.
+We can spend our box office dollars elsewhere when movies don't treat women as anything more than decorative objects.
+We can stop supporting professional sports where the athletes treat their partners like punching bags.
+In other ways, men -- and especially straight white men -- can say, "No, I will not publish with your magazine, or participate in your project, or otherwise work with you, until you include a fair number of women, both as participants and decision makers.
+I won't work with you until your publication, or your organization, is more inclusive of all kinds of difference."
+Those of us who are underrepresented and invited to participate in such projects, can also decline to be included until more of us are invited through the glass ceiling, and we are tokens no more.
+Without these efforts, without taking these stands, our accomplishments are going to mean very little.
+We can commit these small acts of bravery and hope that our choices trickle upward to the people in power -- editors, movie and music producers, CEOs, lawmakers -- the people who can make bigger, braver choices to create lasting, meaningful change.
+We can also boldly claim our feminism -- good, bad, or anywhere in between.
+The last line of my book "Bad Feminist" says, "I would rather be a bad feminist than no feminist at all."
+This is true for so many reasons, but first and foremost, I say this because once upon a time, my voice was stolen from me, and feminism helped me to get my voice back.
+There was an incident.
+I call it an incident so I can carry the burden of what happened.
+Some boys broke me, when I was so young, I did not know what boys can do to break a girl.
+They treated me like I was nothing.
+I began to believe I was nothing.
+They stole my voice, and in the after, I did not dare to believe that anything I might say could matter.
+But -- I had writing.
+And there, I wrote myself back together.
+I wrote myself toward a stronger version of myself.
+I read the words of women who might understand a story like mine, and women who looked like me, and understood what it was like to move through the world with brown skin.
+I read the words of women who showed me I was not nothing.
+I learned to write like them, and then I learned to write as myself.
+I found my voice again, and I started to believe that my voice is powerful beyond measure.
+Through writing and feminism, I also found that if I was a little bit brave, another woman might hear me and see me and recognize that none of us are the nothing the world tries to tell us we are.
+In one hand, I hold the power to accomplish anything.
+And in my other, I hold the humbling reality that I am just one woman.
+I am a bad feminist, I am a good woman, I am trying to become better in how I think, and what I say, and what I do, without abandoning everything that makes me human.
+I hope that we can all do the same.
+I hope that we can all be a little bit brave, when we most need such bravery.
+<d>
+Just after Christmas last year, 132 kids in California got the measles by either visiting Disneyland or being exposed to someone who'd been there.
+The virus then hopped the Canadian border, infecting more than 100 children in Quebec.
+One of the tragic things about this outbreak is that measles, which can be fatal to a child with a weakened immune system, is one of the most easily preventable diseases in the world.
+An effective vaccine against it has been available for more than half a century, but many of the kids involved in the Disneyland outbreak had not been vaccinated because their parents were afraid of something allegedly even worse: autism.
+But wait -- wasn't the paper that sparked the controversy about autism and vaccines debunked, retracted, and branded a deliberate fraud by the British Medical Journal?
+Don't most science-savvy people know that the theory that vaccines cause autism is B.S.?
+I think most of you do, but millions of parents worldwide continue to fear that vaccines put their kids at risk for autism.
+Why?
+Here's why.
+This is a graph of autism prevalence estimates rising over time.
+For most of the 20th century, autism was considered an incredibly rare condition.
+The few psychologists and pediatricians who'd even heard of it figured they would get through their entire careers without seeing a single case.
+For decades, the prevalence estimates remained stable at just three or four children in 10,000.
+But then, in the 1990s, the numbers started to skyrocket.
+Fundraising organizations like Autism Speaks routinely refer to autism as an epidemic, as if you could catch it from another kid at Disneyland.
+So what's going on?
+If it isn't vaccines, what is it?
+If you ask the folks down at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta what's going on, they tend to rely on phrases like "broadened diagnostic criteria" and "better case finding" to explain these rising numbers.
+But that kind of language doesn't do much to allay the fears of a young mother who is searching her two-year-old's face for eye contact.
+If the diagnostic criteria had to be broadened, why were they so narrow in the first place?
+Why were cases of autism so hard to find before the 1990s?
+Five years ago, I decided to try to uncover the answers to these questions.
+I learned that what happened has less to do with the slow and cautious progress of science than it does with the seductive power of storytelling.
+For most of the 20th century, clinicians told one story about what autism is and how it was discovered, but that story turned out to be wrong, and the consequences of it are having a devastating impact on global public health.
+There was a second, more accurate story of autism which had been lost and forgotten in obscure corners of the clinical literature.
+This second story tells us everything about how we got here and where we need to go next.
+The first story starts with a child psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins Hospital named Leo Kanner.
+In 1943, Kanner published a paper describing 11 young patients who seemed to inhabit private worlds, ignoring the people around them, even their own parents.
+They could amuse themselves for hours by flapping their hands in front of their faces, but they were panicked by little things like their favorite toy being moved from its usual place without their knowledge.
+Based on the patients who were brought to his clinic, Kanner speculated that autism is very rare.
+By the 1950s, as the world's leading authority on the subject, he declared that he had seen less than 150 true cases of his syndrome while fielding referrals from as far away as South Africa.
+That's actually not surprising, because Kanner's criteria for diagnosing autism were incredibly selective.
+For example, he discouraged giving the diagnosis to children who had seizures but now we know that epilepsy is very common in autism.
+He once bragged that he had turned nine out of 10 kids referred to his office as autistic by other clinicians without giving them an autism diagnosis.
+Kanner was a smart guy, but a number of his theories didn't pan out.
+He classified autism as a form of infantile psychosis caused by cold and unaffectionate parents.
+These children, he said, had been kept neatly in a refrigerator that didn't defrost.
+At the same time, however, Kanner noticed that some of his young patients had special abilities that clustered in certain areas like music, math and memory.
+One boy in his clinic could distinguish between 18 symphonies before he turned two.
+When his mother put on one of his favorite records, he would correctly declare, "Beethoven!"
+But Kanner took a dim view of these abilities, claiming that the kids were just regurgitating things they'd heard their pompous parents say, desperate to earn their approval.
+As a result, autism became a source of shame and stigma for families, and two generations of autistic children were shipped off to institutions for their own good, becoming invisible to the world at large.
+Amazingly, it wasn't until the 1970s that researchers began to test Kanner's theory that autism was rare.
+Lorna Wing was a cognitive psychologist in London who thought that Kanner's theory of refrigerator parenting were "bloody stupid," as she told me.
+She and her husband John were warm and affectionate people, and they had a profoundly autistic daughter named Susie.
+Lorna and John knew how hard it was to raise a child like Susie without support services, special education, and the other resources that are out of reach without a diagnosis.
+To make the case to the National Health Service that more resources were needed for autistic children and their families, Lorna and her colleague Judith Gould decided to do something that should have been done 30 years earlier.
+They undertook a study of autism prevalence in the general population.
+They pounded the pavement in a London suburb called Camberwell to try to find autistic children in the community.
+What they saw made clear that Kanner's model was way too narrow, while the reality of autism was much more colorful and diverse.
+Some kids couldn't talk at all, while others waxed on at length about their fascination with astrophysics, dinosaurs or the genealogy of royalty.
+In other words, these children didn't fit into nice, neat boxes, as Judith put it, and they saw lots of them, way more than Kanner's monolithic model would have predicted.
+At first, they were at a loss to make sense of their data.
+How had no one noticed these children before?
+But then Lorna came upon a reference to a paper that had been published in German in 1944, the year after Kanner's paper, and then forgotten, buried with the ashes of a terrible time that no one wanted to remember or think about.
+Kanner knew about this competing paper, but scrupulously avoided mentioning it in his own work.
+It had never even been translated into English, but luckily, Lorna's husband spoke German, and he translated it for her.
+The paper offered an alternate story of autism.
+Its author was a man named Hans Asperger, who ran a combination clinic and residential school in Vienna in the 1930s.
+Asperger's ideas about teaching children with learning differences were progressive even by contemporary standards.
+Mornings at his clinic began with exercise classes set to music, and the children put on plays on Sunday afternoons.
+Instead of blaming parents for causing autism, Asperger framed it as a lifelong, polygenetic disability that requires compassionate forms of support and accommodations over the course of one's whole life.
+Rather than treating the kids in his clinic like patients, Asperger called them his little professors, and enlisted their help in developing methods of education that were particularly suited to them.
+Crucially, Asperger viewed autism as a diverse continuum that spans an astonishing range of giftedness and disability.
+He believed that autism and autistic traits are common and always have been, seeing aspects of this continuum in familiar archetypes from pop culture like the socially awkward scientist and the absent-minded professor.
+He went so far as to say, it seems that for success in science and art, a dash of autism is essential.
+Lorna and Judith realized that Kanner had been as wrong about autism being rare as he had been about parents causing it.
+Over the next several years, they quietly worked with the American Psychiatric Association to broaden the criteria for diagnosis to reflect the diversity of what they called "the autism spectrum."
+In the late '80s and early 1990s, their changes went into effect, swapping out Kanner's narrow model for Asperger's broad and inclusive one.
+These changes weren't happening in a vacuum.
+By coincidence, as Lorna and Judith worked behind the scenes to reform the criteria, people all over the world were seeing an autistic adult for the first time.
+Before "Rain Man" came out in 1988, only a tiny, ingrown circle of experts knew what autism looked like, but after Dustin Hoffman's unforgettable performance as Raymond Babbitt earned "Rain Man" four Academy Awards, pediatricians, psychologists, teachers and parents all over the world knew what autism looked like.
+Coincidentally, at the same time, the first easy-to-use clinical tests for diagnosing autism were introduced.
+You no longer had to have a connection to that tiny circle of experts to get your child evaluated.
+The combination of "Rain Man," the changes to the criteria, and the introduction of these tests created a network effect, a perfect storm of autism awareness.
+The number of diagnoses started to soar, just as Lorna and Judith predicted, indeed hoped, that it would, enabling autistic people and their families to finally get the support and services they deserved.
+Then Andrew Wakefield came along to blame the spike in diagnoses on vaccines, a simple, powerful, and seductively believable story that was as wrong as Kanner's theory that autism was rare.
+If the CDC's current estimate, that one in 68 kids in America are on the spectrum, is correct, autistics are one of the largest minority groups in the world.
+In recent years, autistic people have come together on the Internet to reject the notion that they are puzzles to be solved by the next medical breakthrough, coining the term "neurodiversity" to celebrate the varieties of human cognition.
+One way to understand neurodiversity is to think in terms of human operating systems.
+Just because a P.C. is not running Windows doesn't mean that it's broken.
+By autistic standards, the normal human brain is easily distractable, obsessively social, and suffers from a deficit of attention to detail.
+To be sure, autistic people have a hard time living in a world not built for them.
+Seventy years later, we're still catching up to Asperger, who believed that the "cure" for the most disabling aspects of autism is to be found in understanding teachers, accommodating employers, supportive communities, and parents who have faith in their children's potential.
+An autistic man named Zosia Zaks once said, "We need all hands on deck to right the ship of humanity."
+As we sail into an uncertain future, we need every form of human intelligence on the planet working together to tackle the challenges that we face as a society.
+We can't afford to waste a brain.
+Thank you.
+<d>
+So this is James Risen.    
+You may know him as the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter  for The New York Times.    
+Long before anybody knew Edward Snowden's name,  Risen wrote a book in which he famously exposed  that the NSA was illegally wiretapping the phone calls of Americans.    
+But it's another chapter in that book  that may have an even more lasting impact.    
+In it, he describes a catastrophic US intelligence operation  in which the CIA quite literally handed over blueprints  of a nuclear bomb to Iran.    
+If that sounds crazy, go read it.    
+It's an incredible story.    
+But you know who didn't like that chapter?    
+The US government.    
+For nearly a decade afterwards,  Risen was the subject of a US government investigation  in which prosecutors demanded that he testify  against one of his alleged sources.    
+And along the way, he became the face for the US government's recent pattern  of prosecuting whistleblowers and spying on journalists.    
+You see, under the First Amendment,  the press has the right to publish secret information in the public interest.    
+But it's impossible to exercise that right if the media can't also gather that news  and protect the identities of the brave men and women  who get it to them.    
+So when the government came knocking,  Risen did what many brave reporters have done before him:  he refused  and said he'd rather go to jail.    
+So from 2007 to 2015,  Risen lived under the specter of going to federal prison.    
+That is, until just days before the trial, when a curious thing happened.    
+Suddenly, after years of claiming it was vital to their case,  the government dropped their demands to Risen altogether.    
+It turns out, in the age of electronic surveillance,  there are very few places reporters and sources can hide.    
+And instead of trying and failing to have Risen testify,  they could have his digital trail testify against him instead.    
+So completely in secret and without his consent,  prosecutors got Risen's phone records.    
+They got his email records, his financial and banking information,  his credit reports,  even travel records with a list of flights he had taken.    
+And it was among this information that they used to convict Jeffrey Sterling,  Risen's alleged source and CIA whistleblower.    
+Sadly, this is only one case of many.    
+President Obama ran on a promise to protect whistleblowers,  and instead, his Justice Department has prosecuted more  than all other administrations combined.    
+Now, you can see how this could be a problem,  especially because the government considers so much of what it does secret.    
+Since 9/11, virtually every important story about national security  has been the result of a whistleblower coming to a journalist.    
+So we risk seeing the press unable to do their job  that the First Amendment is supposed to protect  because of the government's expanded ability to spy on everyone.    
+But just as technology has allowed the government  to circumvent reporters' rights,  the press can also use technology  to protect their sources even better than before.    
+And they can start from the moment they begin speaking with them,  rather than on the witness stand after the fact.    
+Communications software now exists  that wasn't available when Risen was writing his book,  and is much more surveillance-resistant than regular emails or phone calls.    
+For example, one such tool is SecureDrop,  an open-source whistleblower submission system  that was originally created by the late Internet luminary Aaron Swartz,  and is now developed at the non-profit where I work,  Freedom of the Press Foundation.    
+Instead of sending an email,  you go to a news organization's website,  like this one here on The Washington Post.    
+From there, you can upload a document or send information  much like you would on any other contact form.    
+It'll then be encrypted and stored on a server  that only the news organization has access to.    
+So the government can no longer secretly demand the information,  and much of the information they would demand  wouldn't be available in the first place.    
+SecureDrop, though, is really only a small part of the puzzle  for protecting press freedom in the 21st century.    
+Unfortunately, governments all over the world  are constantly developing new spying techniques  that put us all at risk.    
+And it's up to us going forward to make sure  that it's not just the tech-savvy whistleblowers,  like Edward Snowden, who have an avenue for exposing wrongdoing.    
+It's just as vital that we protect the next veteran's health care whistleblower  alerting us to overcrowded hospitals,  or the next environmental worker  sounding the alarm about Flint's dirty water,  or a Wall Street insider  warning us of the next financial crisis.    
+After all, these tools weren't just built to help the brave men and women  who expose crimes,  but are meant to protect all of our rights under the Constitution.    
+Thank you.    
+<d>
+[On April 3, 2016 we saw the largest data leak in history.]  [The Panama Papers exposed rich and powerful people]  [hiding vast amounts of money in offshore accounts.]  [What does this mean?]  [We called Robert Palmer of Global Witness to explain.]  This week, there have been a whole slew and deluge of stories  coming out from the leak of 11 million documents  from a Panamanian-based law firm called Mossack Fonseca.    
+The release of these papers from Panama lifts the veil on a tiny piece  of the secretive offshore world.    
+We get an insight into how clients and banks and lawyers  go to companies like Mossack Fonseca  and say, "OK, we want an anonymous company,  can you give us one?"    
+So you actually get to see the emails,  you get to see the exchanges of messages,  you get to see the mechanics of how this works,  how this operates.    
+Now, this has already started to have pretty immediate repercussions.    
+The Prime Minister of Iceland has resigned.    
+We've also had news  that an ally of the brutal Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Assad  has also got offshore companies.    
+There's been allegations of a $2 billion money trail  that leads back to President Vladimir Putin of Russia  via his close childhood friend,  who happens to be a top cellist.    
+And there will be a lot of rich individuals out there  and others who will be nervous about the next set of stories  and the next set of leaked documents.    
+Now, this sounds like the plot of a spy thriller  or a John Grisham novel.    
+It seems very distant from you, me, ordinary people.    
+Why should we care about this?    
+But the truth is that if rich and powerful individuals  are able to keep their money offshore  and not pay the taxes that they should,  it means that there is less money for vital public services  like healthcare, education, roads.    
+And that affects all of us.    
+Now, for my organization Global Witness,  this exposé has been phenomenal.    
+We have the world's media and political leaders  talking about how individuals can use offshore secrecy  to hide and disguise their assets --  something we have been talking about and exposing for a decade.    
+Now, I think a lot of people find this entire world baffling and confusing,  and hard to understand how this sort of offshore world works.    
+I like to think of it a bit like a Russian doll.    
+So you can have one company stacked inside another company,  stacked inside another company,  making it almost impossible to really understand  who is behind these structures.    
+It can be very difficult for law enforcement  or tax authorities, journalists, civil society  to really understand what's going on.    
+I also think it's interesting  that there's been less coverage of this issue in the United States.    
+And that's perhaps because some prominent US people  just haven't figured in this exposé, in this scandal.    
+Now, that's not because there are no rich Americans  who are stashing their assets offshore.    
+It's just because of the way in which offshore works,  Mossack Fonseca has fewer American clients.    
+I think if we saw leaks from the Cayman Islands  or even from Delaware or Wyoming or Nevada,  you would see many more cases and examples linking back to Americans.    
+In fact, in a number of US states you need less information,  you need to provide less information to get a company  than you do to get a library card.    
+That sort of secrecy in America has allowed employees of school districts  to rip off schoolchildren.    
+It has allowed scammers to rip off vulnerable investors.    
+This is the sort of behavior that affects all of us.    
+Now, at Global Witness,  we wanted to see what this actually looked like in practice.    
+How does this actually work?    
+So what we did  is we sent in an undercover investigator to 13 Manhattan law firms.    
+Our investigator posed as an African minister  who wanted to move suspect funds into the United States  to buy a house, a yacht, a jet.    
+Now, what was truly shocking was that all but one of those lawyers  provided our investigator with suggestions  on how to move those suspect funds.    
+These were all preliminary meetings,  and none of the lawyers took us on as a client  and of course no money moved hands,  but it really shows the problem with the system.    
+It's also important  to not just think about this as individual cases.    
+This is not just about an individual lawyer  who's spoken to our undercover investigator and provided suggestions.    
+It's not just about a particular senior politician  who's been caught up in a scandal.    
+This is about how a system works,  that entrenches corruption, tax evasion, poverty and instability.    
+And in order to tackle this,  we need to change the game.    
+We need to change the rules of the game  to make this sort of behavior harder.    
+This may seem like doom and gloom,  like there's nothing we can do about it,  like nothing has ever changed,  like there will always be rich and powerful individuals.    
+But as a natural optimist,  I do see that we are starting to get some change.    
+Over the last couple of years,  we've seen a real push towards greater transparency  when it comes to company ownership.    
+This issue was put on the political agenda  by the UK Prime Minister David Cameron  at a big G8 Summit that was held in Northern Ireland in 2013.    
+And since then, the European Union is going to be creating  central registers at a national level  of who really owns and controls companies across Europe.    
+One of the things that is sad is that, actually, the US is lagging behind.    
+There's bipartisan legislation that had been introduced  in the House and the Senate,  but it isn't making as much progress as we'd like to see.    
+So we'd really want to see the Panama leaks,  this huge peek into the offshore world,  be used as a way of opening up in the US and around the world.    
+For us at Global Witness, this is a moment for change.    
+We need ordinary people to get angry  at the way in which people can hide their identity  behind secret companies.    
+We need business leaders to stand up and say,  "Secrecy like this is not good for business."    
+We need political leaders to recognize the problem,  and to commit to changing the law to open up this sort of secrecy.    
+Together, we can end the secrecy  that is currently allowing tax evasion,  corruption, money laundering to flourish.    
+<d>
+I want to tell you the story  about the time I almost got kidnapped  in the trunk of a red Mazda Miata.    
+It's the day after graduating from design school  and I'm having a yard sale.    
+And this guy pulls up in this red Mazda  and he starts looking through my stuff.    
+And he buys a piece of art that I made.    
+And it turns out he's alone in town for the night,  driving cross-country on a road trip  before he goes into the Peace Corps.    
+So I invite him out for a beer  and he tells me all about his passion  for making a difference in the world.    
+Now it's starting to get late,  and I'm getting pretty tired.    
+As I motion for the tab,  I make the mistake of asking him,  "So where are you staying tonight?"    
+And he makes it worse by saying,  "Actually, I don't have a place."    
+And I'm thinking, "Oh, man!"    
+What do you do?    
+We've all been there, right?    
+Do I offer to host this guy?    
+But, I just met him -- I mean,  he says he's going to the Peace Corps,  but I don't really know if he's going to the Peace Corps  and I don't want to end up kidnapped in the trunk of a Miata.    
+That's a small trunk!    
+So then I hear myself saying,  "Hey, I have an airbed you can stay on in my living room."    
+And the voice in my head goes,  "Wait, what?"    
+That night, I'm laying in bed,  I'm staring at the ceiling and thinking,  "Oh my god, what have I done?    
+There's a complete stranger sleeping in my living room.    
+What if he's psychotic?"    
+My anxiety grows so much,  I leap out of bed,  I sneak on my tiptoes to the door,  and I lock the bedroom door.    
+It turns out he was not psychotic.    
+We've kept in touch ever since.    
+And the piece of art he bought at the yard sale  is hanging in his classroom; he's a teacher now.    
+This was my first hosting experience,  and it completely changed my perspective.    
+Maybe the people that my childhood taught me to label as strangers  were actually friends waiting to be discovered.    
+The idea of hosting people on airbeds gradually became natural to me  and when I moved to San Francisco, I brought the airbed with me.    
+So now it's two years later.    
+I'm unemployed, I'm almost broke,  my roommate moves out, and then the rent goes up.    
+And then I learn there's a design conference coming to town,  and all the hotels are sold out.    
+And I've always believed that turning fear into fun  is the gift of creativity.    
+So here's what I pitch my best friend and my new roommate Brian Chesky:  "Brian, thought of a way to make a few bucks --  turning our place into 'designers bed and breakfast,'  offering young designers who come to town a place to crash,  complete with wireless Internet, a small desk space,  sleeping mat, and breakfast each morning.    
+Ha!"    
+We built a basic website and Airbed and Breakfast was born.    
+Three lucky guests got to stay  on a 20-dollar airbed on the hardwood floor.    
+But they loved it, and so did we.    
+I swear, the ham and Swiss cheese omelets we made  tasted totally different because we made them for our guests.    
+We took them on adventures around the city,  and when we said goodbye to the last guest,  the door latch clicked,  Brian and I just stared at each other.    
+Did we just discover it was possible to make friends  while also making rent?    
+The wheels had started to turn.    
+My old roommate, Nate Blecharczyk,  joined as engineering co-founder.    
+And we buckled down to see  if we could turn this into a business.    
+Here's what we pitched investors:  "We want to build a website  where people publicly post pictures of their most intimate spaces,  their bedrooms, the bathrooms --  the kinds of rooms you usually keep closed when people come over.    
+And then, over the Internet,  they're going to invite complete strangers to come sleep in their homes.    
+It's going to be huge!"    
+We sat back, and we waited for the rocket ship to blast off.    
+It did not.    
+No one in their right minds would invest in a service  that allows strangers to sleep in people's homes.    
+Why?    
+Because we've all been taught as kids, strangers equal danger.    
+Now, when you're faced with a problem, you fall back on what you know,  and all we really knew was design.    
+In art school, you learn that design is much more  than the look and feel of something -- it's the whole experience.    
+We learned to do that for objects,  but here, we were aiming to build Olympic trust  between people who had never met.    
+Could design make that happen?    
+Is it possible to design for trust?    
+I want to give you a sense of the flavor of trust  that we were aiming to achieve.    
+I've got a 30-second experiment  that will push you past your comfort zone.    
+If you're up for it, give me a thumbs-up.    
+OK, I need you to take out your phones.    
+Now that you have your phone out,  I'd like you to unlock your phone.    
+Now hand your unlocked phone to the person on your left.    
+That tiny sense of panic you're feeling right now --    is exactly how hosts feel the first time they open their home.    
+Because the only thing more personal than your phone  is your home.    
+People don't just see your messages,  they see your bedroom,  your kitchen, your toilet.    
+Now, how does it feel holding someone's unlocked phone?    
+Most of us feel really responsible.    
+That's how most guests feel when they stay in a home.    
+And it's because of this that our company can even exist.    
+By the way, who's holding Al Gore's phone?    
+Would you tell Twitter he's running for President?    
+OK, you can hand your phones back now.    
+So now that you've experienced the kind of trust challenge  we were facing,  I'd love to share a few discoveries we've made along the way.    
+What if we changed one small thing  about the design of that experiment?    
+What if your neighbor had introduced themselves first, with their name,  where they're from, the name of their kids or their dog?    
+Imagine that they had 150 reviews of people saying,  "They're great at holding unlocked phones!"    
+Now how would you feel about handing your phone over?    
+a well-designed reputation system is key for building trust.    
+And we didn't actually get it right the first time.    
+It's hard for people to leave bad reviews.    
+Eventually, we learned to wait until both guests and hosts  left the review before we reveal them.    
+Now, here's a discovery we made just last week.    
+We did a joint study with Stanford,  where we looked at people's willingness to trust someone  based on how similar they are in age, location and geography.    
+The research showed, not surprisingly,  we prefer people who are like us.    
+The more different somebody is,  the less we trust them.    
+Now, that's a natural social bias.    
+But what's interesting is what happens when you add reputation into the mix,  in this case, with reviews.    
+Now, if you've got less than three reviews,  nothing changes.    
+But if you've got more than 10,  everything changes.    
+High reputation beats high similarity.    
+The right design can actually help us overcome  one of our most deeply rooted biases.    
+Now we also learned that building the right amount of trust  takes the right amount of disclosure.    
+This is what happens when a guest first messages a host.    
+If you share too little, like, "Yo,"  acceptance rates go down.    
+And if you share too much, like,  "I'm having issues with my mother,"    acceptance rates also go down.    
+But there's a zone that's just right,  like, "Love the artwork in your place. Coming for vacation with my family."    
+So how do we design for just the right amount of disclosure?    
+We use the size of the box to suggest the right length,  and we guide them with prompts to encourage sharing.    
+We bet our whole company  on the hope that,  with the right design,  people would be willing to overcome the stranger-danger bias.    
+What we didn't realize  is just how many people  were ready and waiting to put the bias aside.    
+This is a graph that shows our rate of adoption.    
+There's three things happening here.    
+The first, an unbelievable amount of luck.    
+The second is the efforts of our team.    
+And third is the existence of a previously unsatisfied need.    
+Now, things have been going pretty well.    
+Obviously, there are times when things don't work out.    
+Guests have thrown unauthorized parties  and trashed homes.    
+Hosts have left guests stranded in the rain.    
+In the early days, I was customer service,  and those calls came right to my cell phone.    
+I was at the front lines of trust breaking.    
+And there's nothing worse than those calls,  it hurts to even think about them.    
+And the disappointment in the sound of someone's voice  was and, I would say, still is  our single greatest motivator to keep improving.    
+Thankfully, out of the 123 million nights we've ever hosted,  less than a fraction of a percent have been problematic.    
+Turns out, people are justified in their trust.    
+And when trust works out right,  it can be absolutely magical.    
+We had a guest stay with a host in Uruguay,  and he suffered a heart attack.    
+The host rushed him to the hospital.    
+They donated their own blood for his operation.    
+Let me read you his review.    
+"Excellent house for sedentary travelers  prone to myocardial infarctions.    
+The area is beautiful and has direct access to the best hospitals.    
+Javier and Alejandra instantly become guardian angels  who will save your life without even knowing you.    
+They will rush you to the hospital in their own car while you're dying  and stay in the waiting room while the doctors give you a bypass.    
+They don't want you to feel lonely, they bring you books to read.    
+And they let you stay at their house extra nights without charging you.    
+Highly recommended!"    
+Of course, not every stay is like that.    
+But this connection beyond the transaction  is exactly what the sharing economy is aiming for.    
+Now, when I heard that term,  I have to admit, it tripped me up.    
+How do sharing and transactions go together?    
+So let's be clear; it is about commerce.    
+But if you just called it the rental economy,  it would be incomplete.    
+The sharing economy is commerce with the promise of human connection.    
+People share a part of themselves,  and that changes everything.    
+You know how most travel today is, like,  I think of it like fast food --  it's efficient and consistent,  at the cost of local and authentic.    
+What if travel were like a magnificent buffet  of local experiences?    
+What if anywhere you visited,  there was a central marketplace of locals  offering to get you thoroughly drunk  on a pub crawl in neighborhoods you didn't even know existed.    
+Or learning to cook from the chef of a five-star restaurant?    
+Today, homes are designed around the idea of privacy and separation.    
+What if homes were designed to be shared from the ground up?    
+What would that look like?    
+What if cities embraced a culture of sharing?    
+I see a future of shared cities that bring us community and connection  instead of isolation and separation.    
+In South Korea, in the city of Seoul,  they've actually even started this.    
+They've repurposed hundreds of government parking spots  to be shared by residents.    
+They're connecting students who need a place to live  with empty-nesters who have extra rooms.    
+And they've started an incubator to help fund the next generation  Tonight, just on our service,  785,000 people  in 191 countries  will either stay in a stranger's home  or welcome one into theirs.    
+Clearly, it's not as crazy as we were taught.    
+We didn't invent anything new.    
+Hospitality has been around forever.    
+There's been many other websites like ours.    
+So, why did ours eventually take off?    
+Luck and timing aside,  I've learned that you can take the components of trust,  and you can design for that.    
+Design can overcome our most deeply rooted  stranger-danger bias.    
+And that's amazing to me.    
+It blows my mind.    
+I think about this every time I see a red Miata go by.    
+Now, we know design won't solve all the world's problems.    
+But if it can help out with this one,  if it can make a dent in this,  it makes me wonder, what else can we design for next?    
+Thank you.    
+<d>
+What do you think when you look at me?    
+A woman of faith? An expert?    
+Maybe even a sister.    
+Or oppressed,  brainwashed,  a terrorist.    
+Or just an airport security line delay.    
+That one's actually true.    
+If some of your perceptions were negative, I don't really blame you.    
+That's just how the media has been portraying  people who look like me.    
+One study found  that 80 percent of news coverage about Islam and Muslims is negative.    
+And studies show that Americans say that most don't know a Muslim.    
+I guess people don't talk to their Uber drivers.    
+Well, for those of you who have never met a Muslim,  it's great to meet you.    
+Let me tell you who I am.    
+I'm a mom, a coffee lover --  double espresso, cream on the side.    
+I'm an introvert.    
+I'm a wannabe fitness fanatic.    
+And I'm a practicing, spiritual Muslim.    
+But not like Lady Gaga says, because baby, I wasn't born this way.    
+It was a choice.    
+When I was 17, I decided to come out.    
+No, not as a gay person like some of my friends,  but as a Muslim,  and decided to start wearing the hijab, my head covering.    
+My feminist friends were aghast:  "Why are you oppressing yourself?"    
+The funny thing was,  it was actually at that time a feminist declaration of independence  from the pressure I felt as a 17-year-old,  to conform to a perfect and unattainable standard of beauty.    
+I didn't just passively accept the faith of my parents.    
+I wrestled with the Quran.    
+I read and reflected and questioned and doubted  and, ultimately, believed.    
+My relationship with God -- it was not love at first sight.    
+It was a trust and a slow surrender  that deepened with every reading of the Quran.    
+Its rhythmic beauty sometimes moves me to tears.    
+I see myself in it. I feel that God knows me.    
+Have you ever felt like someone sees you, completely understands you  and yet loves you anyway?    
+That's how it feels.    
+And so later, I got married,  and like all good Egyptians,  started my career as an engineer.    
+I later had a child, after getting married,  and I was living essentially the Egyptian-American dream.    
+And then that terrible morning of September, 2001.    
+I think a lot of you probably remember exactly where you were that morning.    
+I was sitting in my kitchen finishing breakfast,  and I look up on the screen and see the words "Breaking News."    
+There was smoke, airplanes flying into buildings,  people jumping out of buildings.    
+What was this?    
+An accident?    
+A malfunction?    
+My shock quickly turned to outrage.    
+Who would do this?    
+And I switch the channel and I hear,  "... Muslim terrorist ...,"  "... in the name of Islam ...,"  "... Middle-Eastern descent ...,"  "... jihad ...,"  "... we should bomb Mecca."    
+Oh my God.    
+Not only had my country been attacked,  but in a flash,  somebody else's actions had turned me from a citizen  to a suspect.    
+That same day, we had to drive across Middle America  to move to a new city to start grad school.    
+And I remember sitting in the passenger seat  as we drove in silence,  crouched as low as I could go in my seat,  for the first time in my life, afraid for anyone to know I was a Muslim.    
+We moved into our apartment that night in a new town  in what felt like a completely different world.    
+And then I was hearing and seeing and reading  warnings from national Muslim organizations  saying things like, "Be alert," "Be aware,"  "Stay in well-lit areas," "Don't congregate."    
+I stayed inside all week.    
+And then it was Friday that same week,  the day that Muslims congregate for worship.    
+And again the warnings were, "Don't go that first Friday,  it could be a target."    
+And I was watching the news, wall-to-wall coverage.    
+Emotions were so raw, understandably,  and I was also hearing about attacks on Muslims,  or people who were perceived to be Muslim, being pulled out and beaten in the street.    
+Mosques were actually firebombed.    
+And I thought, we should just stay home.    
+And yet, something didn't feel right.    
+Because those people who attacked our country  attacked our country.    
+I get it that people were angry at the terrorists.    
+Guess what? So was I.    
+And so to have to explain yourself all the time isn't easy.    
+I don't mind questions. I love questions.    
+It's the accusations that are tough.    
+Today we hear people actually saying things like,  "There's a problem in this country, and it's called Muslims.    
+When are we going to get rid of them?"    
+So, some people want to ban Muslims and close down mosques.    
+They talk about my community kind of like we're a tumor  in the body of America.    
+And the only question is, are we malignant or benign?    
+You know, a malignant tumor you extract altogether,  and a benign tumor you just keep under surveillance.    
+The choices don't make sense, because it's the wrong question.    
+Muslims, like all other Americans, aren't a tumor in the body of America,  we're a vital organ.    
+Thank you.    
+Muslims are inventors and teachers,  first responders and Olympic athletes.    
+Now, is closing down mosques going to make America safer?    
+It might free up some parking spots,  but it will not end terrorism.    
+Going to a mosque regularly is actually linked  to having more tolerant views of people of other faiths  and greater civic engagement.    
+And as one police chief in the Washington, DC area  recently told me,  people don't actually get radicalized at mosques.    
+They get radicalized in their basement or bedroom, in front of a computer.    
+And what you find about the radicalization process  is it starts online,  is the person gets cut off from their community,  from even their family,  so that the extremist group can brainwash them  into believing that they, the terrorists, are the true Muslims,  and everyone else who abhors their behavior and ideology  are sellouts or apostates.    
+So if we want to prevent radicalization,  we have to keep people going to the mosque.    
+Now, some will still argue Islam is a violent religion.    
+After all, a group like ISIS bases its brutality on the Quran.    
+Now, as a Muslim, as a mother, as a human being,  I think we need to do everything we can to stop a group like ISIS.    
+But we would be giving in to their narrative  if we cast them as representatives of a faith of 1.6 billion people.    
+Thank you.    
+ISIS has as much to do with Islam  as the Ku Klux Klan has to do with Christianity.    
+Both groups claim to base their ideology on their holy book.    
+But when you look at them, they're not motivated  by what they read in their holy book.    
+It's their brutality that makes them read these things into the scripture.    
+Recently, a prominent imam told me a story that really took me aback.    
+He said that a girl came to him  because she was thinking of going to join ISIS.    
+And I was really surprised and asked him,  had she been in contact with a radical religious leader?    
+And he said the problem was quite the opposite,  that every cleric that she had talked to had shut her down  and said that her rage, her sense of injustice in the world,  was just going to get her in trouble.    
+And so with nowhere to channel and make sense of this anger,  she was a prime target to be exploited  by extremists promising her a solution.    
+What this imam did was to connect her back to God and to her community.    
+He didn't shame her for her rage -- instead, he gave her constructive ways  to make real change in the world.    
+What she learned at that mosque prevented her from going to join ISIS.    
+I've told you a little bit  about how Islamophobia affects me and my family.    
+But how does it impact ordinary Americans?    
+How does it impact everyone else?    
+How does consuming fear 24 hours a day affect the health of our democracy,  the health of our free thought?    
+Well, one study -- actually, several studies in neuroscience --  show that when we're afraid, at least three things happen.    
+We become more accepting of authoritarianism,  conformity and prejudice.    
+One study showed that when subjects were exposed to news stories  that were negative about Muslims,  they became more accepting of military attacks on Muslim countries  and policies that curtail the rights of American Muslims.    
+Now, this isn't just academic.    
+When you look at when anti-Muslim sentiment spiked  between 2001 and 2013,  it happened three times,  but it wasn't around terrorist attacks.    
+It was in the run up to the Iraq War and during two election cycles.    
+So Islamophobia isn't just the natural response to Muslim terrorism  as I would have expected.    
+It can actually be a tool of public manipulation,  eroding the very foundation of a free society,  which is rational and well-informed citizens.    
+Muslims are like canaries in the coal mine.    
+We might be the first to feel it,  but the toxic air of fear is harming us all.    
+And assigning collective guilt  isn't just about having to explain yourself all the time.    
+Deah and his wife Yusor were a young married couple  living in Chapel Hill, North Carolina,  where they both went to school.    
+Deah was an athlete.    
+He was in dental school, talented, promising ...    
+And his sister would tell me that he was the sweetest,  most generous human being she knew.    
+She was visiting him there and he showed her his resume,  and she was amazed.    
+She said, "When did my baby brother become such an accomplished young man?"    
+Just a few weeks after Suzanne's visit to her brother and his new wife,  their neighbor,  Craig Stephen Hicks,  murdered them,  as well as Yusor's sister, Razan, who was visiting for the afternoon,  in their apartment,  execution style,  after posting anti-Muslim statements on his Facebook page.    
+He shot Deah eight times.    
+So bigotry isn't just immoral, it can even be lethal.    
+So, back to my story.    
+What happened after 9/11?    
+Did we go to the mosque or did we play it safe and stay home?    
+Well, we talked it over,  and it might seem like a small decision, but to us,  it was about what kind of America we wanted to leave for our kids:  one that would control us by fear  or one where we were practicing our religion freely.    
+So we decided to go to the mosque.    
+And we put my son in his car seat,  buckled him in, and we drove silently, intensely, to the mosque.    
+I took him out, I took off my shoes, I walked into the prayer hall  and what I saw made me stop.    
+The place was completely full.    
+And then the imam made an announcement,  thanking and welcoming our guests,  because half the congregation  were Christians, Jews, Buddhists, atheists,  people of faith and no faith,  who had come not to attack us, but to stand in solidarity with us.    
+I just break down at this time.    
+These people were there because they chose courage and compassion  over panic and prejudice.    
+What will you choose?    
+What will you choose at this time of fear and bigotry?    
+Will you play it safe?    
+Or will you join those who say  we are better than that?    
+Thank you.    
+Thank you so much.    
+Helen Walters: So Dalia, you seem to have struck a chord.    
+But I wonder,  what would you say to those who might argue  that you're giving a TED Talk,  you're clearly a deep thinker,  you work at a fancy think tank,  you're an exception, you're not the rule.    
+What would you say to those people?    
+Dalia Mogahed: I would say, don't let this stage distract you,  I'm completely ordinary.    
+I'm not an exception.    
+My story is not unusual.    
+I am as ordinary as they come.    
+When you look at Muslims around the world --  and I've done this, I've done the largest study ever done  on Muslims around the world --  people want ordinary things.    
+They want prosperity for their family,  they want jobs  and they want to live in peace.    
+So I am not in any way an exception.    
+When you meet people who seem like an exception to the rule,  oftentimes it's that the rule is broken,  not that they're an exception to it.    
+HW: Thank you so much. Dalia Mogahed.    
+<d>
+What started as a platform for hobbyists  is poised to become a multibillion-dollar industry.    
+Inspection, environmental monitoring, photography and film and journalism:  these are some of the potential applications for commercial drones,  and their enablers are the capabilities being developed  at research facilities around the world.    
+For example, before aerial package delivery  entered our social consciousness,  an autonomous fleet of flying machines built a six-meter-tall tower  composed of 1,500 bricks  in front of a live audience at the FRAC Centre in France,  and several years ago, they started to fly with ropes.    
+By tethering flying machines,  they can achieve high speeds and accelerations in very tight spaces.    
+They can also autonomously build tensile structures.    
+Skills learned include how to carry loads,  how to cope with disturbances,  and in general, how to interact with the physical world.    
+Today we want to show you some new projects that we've been working on.    
+Their aim is to push the boundary of what can be achieved  with autonomous flight.    
+Now, for a system to function autonomously,  it must collectively know the location of its mobile objects in space.    
+Back at our lab at ETH Zurich,  we often use external cameras to locate objects,  which then allows us to focus our efforts  on the rapid development of highly dynamic tasks.    
+For the demos you will see today, however,  we will use new localization technology developed by Verity Studios,  a spin-off from our lab.    
+There are no external cameras.    
+Each flying machine uses onboard sensors to determine its location in space  and onboard computation to determine what its actions should be.    
+The only external commands are high-level ones  such as "take off" and "land."    
+This is a so-called tail-sitter.    
+It's an aircraft that tries to have its cake and eat it.    
+Like other fixed-wing aircraft, it is efficient in forward flight,  much more so than helicopters and variations thereof.    
+Unlike most other fixed-wing aircraft, however,  it is capable of hovering,  which has huge advantages for takeoff, landing  and general versatility.    
+There is no free lunch, unfortunately.    
+One of the limitations with tail-sitters  is that they're susceptible to disturbances such as wind gusts.    
+We're developing new control architectures and algorithms  that address this limitation.    
+The idea is for the aircraft to recover  no matter what state it finds itself in,  and through practice, improve its performance over time.    
+OK.    
+When doing research,  we often ask ourselves fundamental abstract questions  that try to get at the heart of a matter.    
+For example, one such question would be,  what is the minimum number of moving parts needed for controlled flight?    
+Now, there are practical reasons  why you may want to know the answer to such a question.    
+Helicopters, for example,  are affectionately known as machines with a thousand moving parts  all conspiring to do you bodily harm.    
+It turns out that decades ago,  skilled pilots were able to fly remote-controlled aircraft  that had only two moving parts:  a propeller and a tail rudder.    
+We recently discovered that it could be done with just one.    
+This is the monospinner,  the world's mechanically simplest controllable flying machine,  invented just a few months ago.    
+It has only one moving part, a propeller.    
+It has no flaps, no hinges, no ailerons,  no other actuators, no other control surfaces,  just a simple propeller.    
+Even though it's mechanically simple,  there's a lot going on in its little electronic brain  to allow it to fly in a stable fashion and to move anywhere it wants in space.    
+Even so, it doesn't yet have  the sophisticated algorithms of the tail-sitter,  which means that in order to get it to fly,  I have to throw it just right.    
+And because the probability of me throwing it just right is very low,  given everybody watching me,  what we're going to do instead  is show you a video that we shot last night.    
+If the monospinner is an exercise in frugality,  this machine here, the omnicopter, with its eight propellers,  is an exercise in excess.    
+What can you do with all this surplus?    
+The thing to notice is that it is highly symmetric.    
+As a result, it is ambivalent to orientation.    
+This gives it an extraordinary capability.    
+It can move anywhere it wants in space  irrespective of where it is facing  and even of how it is rotating.    
+It has its own complexities,  mainly having to do with the interacting flows  from its eight propellers.    
+Some of this can be modeled, while the rest can be learned on the fly.    
+Let's take a look.    
+If flying machines are going to enter part of our daily lives,  they will need to become extremely safe and reliable.    
+This machine over here  is actually two separate two-propeller flying machines.    
+This one wants to spin clockwise.    
+This other one wants to spin counterclockwise.    
+When you put them together,  they behave like one high-performance quadrocopter.    
+If anything goes wrong, however --  a motor fails, a propeller fails, electronics, even a battery pack --  the machine can still fly, albeit in a degraded fashion.    
+We're going to demonstrate this to you now by disabling one of its halves.    
+This last demonstration  is an exploration of synthetic swarms.    
+The large number of autonomous, coordinated entities  offers a new palette for aesthetic expression.    
+We've taken commercially available micro quadcopters,  each weighing less than a slice of bread, by the way,  and outfitted them with our localization technology  and custom algorithms.    
+Because each unit knows where it is in space  and is self-controlled,  there is really no limit to their number.    
+Hopefully, these demonstrations will motivate you to dream up  new revolutionary roles for flying machines.    
+That ultrasafe one over there for example  has aspirations to become a flying lampshade on Broadway.    
+The reality is that it is difficult to predict  the impact of nascent technology.    
+And for folks like us, the real reward is the journey and the act of creation.    
+It's a continual reminder  of how wonderful and magical the universe we live in is,  that it allows creative, clever creatures  to sculpt it in such spectacular ways.    
+The fact that this technology  has such huge commercial and economic potential  is just icing on the cake.    
+Thank you.    
+<d>
+1.3 billion years ago,  in a distant, distant galaxy,  two black holes locked into a spiral,  converting three Suns' worth of stuff  into pure energy in a tenth of a second.    
+For that brief moment in time,  the glow was brighter than all the stars  in all the galaxies  in all of the known Universe.    
+It was a very  big  bang.    
+But they didn't release their energy in light.    
+I mean, you know, they're black holes.    
+All that energy was pumped into the fabric of space and time itself,  making the Universe explode in gravitational waves.    
+Let me give you a sense of the timescale at work here.    
+1.3 billion years ago,  Earth had just managed to evolve multicellular life.    
+Since then, Earth has made and evolved  corals, fish, plants, dinosaurs, people and even -- God save us -- the Internet.    
+And about 25 years ago,  a particularly audacious set of people --  Rai Weiss at MIT, Kip Thorne and Ronald Drever at Caltech --  to build a giant laser detector  with which to search for the gravitational waves  from things like colliding black holes.    
+Now, most people thought they were nuts.    
+But enough people realized that they were brilliant nuts  that the US National Science Foundation decided to fund their crazy idea.    
+So after decades of development,  construction and imagination  and a breathtaking amount of hard work,  they built their detector, called LIGO:  The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory.    
+For the last several years,  LIGO's been undergoing a huge expansion in its accuracy,  a tremendous improvement in its detection ability.    
+It's now called Advanced LIGO as a result.    
+In early September of 2015,  LIGO turned on for a final test run  while they sorted out a few lingering details.    
+And on September 14 of 2015,  just days after the detector had gone live,  the gravitational waves from those colliding black holes  passed through the Earth.    
+And they passed through you and me.    
+And they passed through the detector.    
+Scott Hughes: There's two moments in my life  more emotionally intense than that.    
+One is the birth of my daughter.    
+The other is when I had to say goodbye to my father when he was terminally ill.    
+You know, it was the payoff of my career, basically.    
+Everything I'd been working on -- it's no longer science fiction!   Allan Adams: So that's my very good friend and collaborator, Scott Hughes,  a theoretical physicist at MIT,  who has been studying gravitational waves from black holes  and the signals that they could impart on observatories like LIGO,  So let me take a moment to tell you what I mean by a gravitational wave.    
+A gravitational wave is a ripple  in the shape of space and time.    
+As the wave passes by,  it stretches space and everything in it  in one direction,  and compresses it in the other.    
+This has led to countless instructors of general relativity  doing a really silly dance to demonstrate in their classes on general relativity.    
+"It stretches and expands, it stretches and expands."    
+So the trouble with gravitational waves  is that they're very weak; they're preposterously weak.    
+For example, the waves that hit us on September 14 --  and yes, every single one of you stretched and compressed  under the action of that wave --  when the waves hit, they stretched the average person  by one part in 10 to the 21.    
+That's a decimal place, 20 zeroes,  That's why everyone thought the LIGO people were nuts.    
+Even with a laser detector five kilometers long -- and that's already crazy --  they would have to measure the length of those detectors  to less than one thousandth of the radius of the nucleus  of an atom.    
+And that's preposterous.    
+So towards the end of his classic text on gravity,  described the hunt for gravitational waves as follows:  He said, "The technical difficulties to be surmounted  in constructing such detectors are enormous.    
+But physicists are ingenious,  and with the support of a broad lay public,  all obstacles will surely be overcome."    
+Thorne published that in 1973,  42 years before he succeeded.    
+Now, coming back to LIGO,  Scott likes to say that LIGO acts like an ear more than it does like an eye.    
+I want to explain what that means.    
+Visible light has a wavelength, a size,  that's much smaller than the things around you,  the features on people's faces,  the size of your cell phone.    
+And that's really useful,  because it lets you make an image or a map of the things around you,  by looking at the light coming from different spots  in the scene about you.    
+Sound is different.    
+Audible sound has a wavelength that can be up to 50 feet long.    
+And that makes it really difficult --  in fact, in practical purposes, impossible -- to make an image  of something you really care about.    
+Your child's face.    
+Instead, we use sound to listen for features like pitch  and tone and rhythm and volume  to infer a story behind the sounds.    
+That's Alice talking.    
+That's Bob interrupting.    
+Silly Bob.    
+So, the same is true of gravitational waves.    
+We can't use them to make simple images of things out in the Universe.    
+But by listening to changes  in the amplitude and frequency of those waves,  we can hear the story that those waves are telling.    
+And at least for LIGO,  the frequencies that it can hear are in the audio band.    
+So if we convert the wave patterns into pressure waves and air, into sound,  we can literally hear the Universe speaking to us.    
+For example, listening to gravity, just in this way,  can tell us a lot about the collision of two black holes,  something my colleague Scott has spent an awful lot of time thinking about.    
+SH: If the two black holes are non-spinning, you get a very simple chirp: whoop!    
+If the two bodies are spinning very rapidly, I have that same chirp,  but with a modulation on top of it,  so it kind of goes: whir, whir, whir!    
+It's sort of the vocabulary of spin imprinted on this waveform.    
+AA: So on September 14, 2015,  a date that's definitely going to live in my memory,  LIGO heard this:  [Whirring sound]  So if you know how to listen, that is the sound of --   SH: ... two black holes, each of about 30 solar masses,  that were whirling around at a rate  comparable to what goes on in your blender.    
+AA: It's worth pausing here to think about what that means.    
+Two black holes, the densest thing in the Universe,  one with a mass of 29 Suns  and one with a mass of 36 Suns,  whirling around each other 100 times per second  before they collide.    
+Just imagine the power of that.    
+It's fantastic.    
+And we know it because we heard it.    
+That's the lasting importance of LIGO.    
+It's an entirely new way to observe the Universe  that we've never had before.    
+It's a way that lets us hear the Universe  and hear the invisible.    
+And there's a lot out there that we can't see --  in practice or even in principle.    
+So supernova, for example:  I would love to know why very massive stars explode in supernovae.    
+They're very useful;  we've learned a lot about the Universe from them.    
+The problem is, all the interesting physics happens in the core,  and the core is hidden behind thousands of kilometers  of iron and carbon and silicon.    
+We'll never see through it, it's opaque to light.    
+Gravitational waves go through iron as if it were glass --  The Big Bang: I would love to be able to explore  the first few moments of the Universe,  but we'll never see them,  because the Big Bang itself is obscured by its own afterglow.    
+With gravitational waves,  we should be able to see all the way back to the beginning.    
+Perhaps most importantly,  I'm positive that there are things out there  that we've never seen  that we may never be able to see  and that we haven't even imagined --  things that we'll only discover by listening.    
+And in fact, even in that very first event,  LIGO found things that we didn't expect.    
+Here's my colleague and one of the key members of the LIGO collaboration,  Matt Evans, my colleague at MIT, addressing exactly that:   Matt Evans: The kinds of stars which produce the black holes  that we observed here  are the dinosaurs of the Universe.    
+They're these massive things that are old, from prehistoric times,  and the black holes are kind of like the dinosaur bones  with which we do this archeology.    
+So it lets us really get a whole nother angle  on what's out there in the Universe  and how the stars came to be, and in the end, of course,  how we came to be out of this whole mess.    
+AA: Our challenge now  is to be as audacious as possible.    
+Thanks to LIGO, we know how to build exquisite detectors  that can listen to the Universe,  to the rustle and the chirp of the cosmos.    
+Our job is to dream up and build new observatories --  a whole new generation of observatories --  on the ground, in space.    
+I mean, what could be more glorious than listening to the Big Bang itself?    
+Our job now is to dream big.    
+Dream with us.    
+Thank you.    
+<d>
+So a while ago, I tried an experiment.    
+For one year, I would say yes to all the things that scared me.    
+Anything that made me nervous, took me out of my comfort zone,  I forced myself to say yes to.    
+Did I want to speak in public?    
+No, but yes.    
+Did I want to be on live TV?    
+No, but yes.    
+Did I want to try acting?    
+No, no, no, but yes, yes, yes.    
+And a crazy thing happened:  the very act of doing the thing that scared me  made it not scary.    
+My fear of public speaking, my social anxiety, poof, gone.    
+It's amazing, the power of one word.    
+"Yes" changed my life.    
+"Yes" changed me.    
+But there was one particular yes  that affected my life in the most profound way,  in a way I never imagined,  and it started with a question from my toddler.    
+I have these three amazing daughters, Harper, Beckett and Emerson,  and Emerson is a toddler who inexplicably refers to everyone as "honey."    
+as though she's a Southern waitress.    
+"Honey, I'm gonna need some milk for my sippy cup."    
+The Southern waitress asked me to play with her one evening  when I was on my way somewhere, and I said, "Yes."    
+And that yes was the beginning of a new way of life for my family.    
+I made a vow that from now on,  every time one of my children asks me to play,  no matter what I'm doing or where I'm going,  I say yes, every single time.    
+Almost. I'm not perfect at it, but I try hard to practice it.    
+And it's had a magical effect on me,  on my children, on our family.    
+But it's also had a stunning side effect,  and it wasn't until recently that I fully understood it,  that I understood that saying yes to playing with my children  likely saved my career.    
+See, I have what most people would call a dream job.    
+I'm a writer. I imagine. I make stuff up for a living.    
+Dream job.    
+No.    
+I'm a titan.    
+Dream job.    
+I create television. I executive produce television.    
+I make television, a great deal of television.    
+In one way or another, this TV season,  I'm responsible for bringing about 70 hours of programming to the world.    
+Four television programs, 70 hours of TV --    Three shows in production at a time, sometimes four.    
+Each show creates hundreds of jobs that didn't exist before.    
+The budget for one episode of network television  can be anywhere from three to six million dollars.    
+Let's just say five.    
+A new episode made every nine days times four shows,  so every nine days that's 20 million dollars worth of television,  four television programs, 70 hours of TV,  three shows in production at a time, sometimes four,  16 episodes going on at all times:  24 episodes of "Grey's," 21 episodes of "Scandal,"  15 episodes of "How To Get Away With Murder,"  10 episodes of "The Catch," that's 70 hours of TV,    
+that's 350 million dollars for a season.    
+In America, my television shows  are back to back to back on Thursday night.    
+Around the world, my shows air in 256 territories in 67 languages  for an audience of 30 million people.    
+My brain is global,  and 45 hours of that 70 hours of TV are shows I personally created  and not just produced, so on top of everything else,  I need to find time, real quiet, creative time,  to gather my fans around the campfire  and tell my stories.    
+Four television programs, 70 hours of TV,  three shows in production at a time,  sometimes four, 350 million dollars, campfires burning all over the world.    
+You know who else is doing that?    
+Nobody, so like I said, I'm a titan.    
+Dream job.    
+Now, I don't tell you this to impress you.    
+I tell you this because I know what you think of when you hear the word "writer."    
+I tell you this so that all of you out there who work so hard,  whether you run a company or a country or a classroom  or a store or a home,  take me seriously when I talk about working,  so you'll get that I don't peck at a computer and imagine all day,  so you'll hear me when I say  that I understand that a dream job is not about dreaming.    
+It's all job, all work, all reality, all blood, all sweat, no tears.    
+I work a lot, very hard, and I love it.    
+When I'm hard at work, when I'm deep in it,  there is no other feeling.    
+For me, my work is at all times building a nation out of thin air.    
+It is manning the troops. It is painting a canvas.    
+It is hitting every high note. It is running a marathon.    
+It is being Beyoncé.    
+And it is all of those things at the same time.    
+I love working.    
+It is creative and mechanical and exhausting and exhilarating  and hilarious and disturbing and clinical and maternal  and cruel and judicious,  and what makes it all so good is the hum.    
+There is some kind of shift inside me when the work gets good.    
+A hum begins in my brain,  and it grows and it grows and that hum sounds like the open road,  and I could drive it forever.    
+And a lot of people, when I try to explain the hum,  they assume that I'm talking about the writing,  that my writing brings me joy.    
+And don't get me wrong, it does.    
+But the hum --  it wasn't until I started making television  that I started working, working and making  and building and creating and collaborating,  that I discovered this thing, this buzz, this rush, this hum.    
+The hum is more than writing.    
+The hum is action and activity. The hum is a drug.    
+The hum is music. The hum is light and air.    
+The hum is God's whisper right in my ear.    
+And when you have a hum like that,  you can't help but strive for greatness.    
+That feeling, you can't help but strive for greatness at any cost.    
+That's called the hum.    
+Or, maybe it's called being a workaholic.    
+Maybe it's called genius.    
+Maybe it's called ego.    
+Maybe it's just fear of failure.    
+I don't know.    
+I just know that I'm not built for failure,  and I just know that I love the hum.    
+I just know that I want to tell you I'm a titan,  and I know that I don't want to question it.    
+But here's the thing:  the more successful I become,  the more shows, the more episodes, the more barriers broken,  the more work there is to do,  the more balls in the air,  the more eyes on me, the more history stares,  the more expectations there are.    
+The more I work to be successful,  the more I need to work.    
+And what did I say about work?    
+I love working, right?    
+The nation I'm building, the marathon I'm running,  the troops, the canvas, the high note, the hum,  the hum, the hum.    
+I like that hum. I love that hum.    
+I need that hum. I am that hum.    
+Am I nothing but that hum?    
+And then the hum stopped.    
+Overworked, overused,  overdone, burned out.    
+The hum stopped.    
+Now, my three daughters are used to the truth  that their mother is a single working titan.    
+Harper tells people,  "My mom won't be there, but you can text my nanny."    
+And Emerson says, "Honey, I'm wanting to go to ShondaLand."    
+They're children of a titan.    
+They're baby titans.    
+They were 12, 3, and 1 when the hum stopped.    
+The hum of the engine died.    
+I stopped loving work. I couldn't restart the engine.    
+The hum would not come back.    
+My hum was broken.    
+I was doing the same things I always did, all the same titan work,  15-hour days, working straight through the weekends,  no regrets, never surrender, a titan never sleeps, a titan never quits,  full hearts, clear eyes, yada, whatever.    
+But there was no hum.    
+Inside me was silence.    
+Four television programs, 70 hours of TV, three shows in production at a time,  sometimes four.    
+Four television programs, 70 hours of TV, three shows in production at a time ...    
+I was the perfect titan.    
+I was a titan you could take home to your mother.    
+All the colors were the same, and I was no longer having any fun.    
+And it was my life.    
+It was all I did.    
+I was the hum, and the hum was me.    
+So what do you do when the thing you do,  the work you love, starts to taste like dust?    
+Now, I know somebody's out there thinking,  "Cry me a river, stupid writer titan lady."    
+But you know, you do,  if you make, if you work, if you love what you do,  being a teacher, being a banker, being a mother, being a painter,  being Bill Gates,  if you simply love another person and that gives you the hum,  if you know the hum,  if you know what the hum feels like, if you have been to the hum,  when the hum stops, who are you?    
+What are you?    
+What am I?    
+Am I still a titan?    
+If the song of my heart ceases to play, can I survive in the silence?    
+And then my Southern waitress toddler asks me a question.    
+I'm on my way out the door, I'm late, and she says,  "Momma, wanna play?"    
+And I'm just about to say no, when I realize two things.    
+One, I'm supposed to say yes to everything,  and two, my Southern waitress didn't call me "honey."    
+She's not calling everyone "honey" anymore.    
+When did that happen?    
+I'm missing it, being a titan and mourning my hum,  and here she is changing right before my eyes.    
+And so she says, "Momma, wanna play?"    
+And I say, "Yes."    
+There's nothing special about it.    
+We play, and we're joined by her sisters,  and there's a lot of laughing,  and I give a dramatic reading from the book Everybody Poops.    
+Nothing out of the ordinary.    
+And yet, it is extraordinary,  because in my pain and my panic,  in the homelessness of my humlessness,  I have nothing to do but pay attention.    
+I focus.    
+I am still.    
+The nation I'm building, the marathon I'm running,  the troops, the canvas, the high note does not exist.    
+All that exists are sticky fingers  and gooey kisses and tiny voices and crayons  and that song about letting go  of whatever it is that Frozen girl needs to let go of.    
+It's all peace and simplicity.    
+The air is so rare in this place for me that I can barely breathe.    
+I can barely believe I'm breathing.    
+Play is the opposite of work.    
+And I am happy.    
+Something in me loosens.    
+A door in my brain swings open,  and a rush of energy comes.    
+And it's not instantaneous, but it happens, it does happen.    
+I feel it.    
+A hum creeps back.    
+Not at full volume, barely there,  it's quiet, and I have to stay very still to hear it, but it is there.    
+Not the hum, but a hum.    
+And now I feel like I know a very magical secret.    
+Well, let's not get carried away.    
+It's just love. That's all it is.    
+No magic. No secret. It's just love.    
+It's just something we forgot.    
+The hum, the work hum, the hum of the titan,  that's just a replacement.    
+If I have to ask you who I am,  if I have to tell you who I am,  if I describe myself in terms of shows  and hours of television and how globally badass my brain is,  I have forgotten what the real hum is.    
+The hum is not power and the hum is not work-specific.    
+The hum is joy-specific.    
+The real hum is love-specific.    
+The hum is the electricity that comes from being excited by life.    
+The real hum is confidence and peace.    
+The real hum ignores the stare of history,  and the balls in the air, and the expectation, and the pressure.    
+The real hum is singular and original.    
+The real hum is God's whisper in my ear,  but maybe God was whispering the wrong words,  because which one of the gods was telling me I was the titan?    
+It's just love.    
+We could all use a little more love,  a lot more love.    
+Any time my child asks me to play,  I will say yes.    
+I make it a firm rule for one reason,  to give myself permission,  to free me from all of my workaholic guilt.    
+It's a law, so I don't have a choice,  and I don't have a choice,  not if I want to feel the hum.    
+I wish it were that easy,  but I'm not good at playing.    
+I'm not interested in doing it the way I'm interested in doing work.    
+The truth is incredibly humbling and humiliating to face.    
+I don't like playing.    
+I work all the time because I like working.    
+I like working more than I like being at home.    
+Facing that fact is incredibly difficult to handle,  because what kind of person likes working more than being at home?    
+Well, me.    
+I mean, let's be honest, I call myself a titan.    
+I've got issues.    
+And one of those issues isn't that I am too relaxed.    
+We run around the yard, up and back and up and back.    
+We have 30-second dance parties.    
+We sing show tunes. We play with balls.    
+I blow bubbles and they pop them.    
+And I feel stiff and delirious and confused most of the time.    
+I itch for my cell phone always.    
+But it is OK.    
+My tiny humans show me how to live and the hum of the universe fills me up.    
+I play and I play until I begin to wonder  why we ever stop playing in the first place.    
+You can do it too,  say yes every time your child asks you to play.    
+Are you thinking that maybe I'm an idiot in diamond shoes?    
+You're right, but you can still do this.    
+You have time.    
+You know why? Because you're not Rihanna and you're not a Muppet.    
+Your child does not think you're that interesting.    
+You only need 15 minutes.    
+My two- and four-year-old only ever want to play with me for about 15 minutes or so  before they think to themselves they want to do something else.    
+It's an amazing 15 minutes, but it's 15 minutes.    
+If I'm not a ladybug or a piece of candy, I'm invisible after 15 minutes.    
+And my 13-year-old, if I can get a 13-year-old to talk to me for 15 minutes  I'm Parent of the Year.    
+15 minutes is all you need.    
+I can totally pull off 15 minutes of uninterrupted time on my worst day.    
+Uninterrupted is the key.    
+No cell phone, no laundry, no anything.    
+You have a busy life. You have to get dinner on the table.    
+You have to force them to bathe. But you can do 15 minutes.    
+My kids are my happy place, they're my world,  but it doesn't have to be your kids,  the fuel that feeds your hum,  the place where life feels more good than not good.    
+It's not about playing with your kids,  it's about joy.    
+It's about playing in general.    
+Give yourself the 15 minutes.    
+Find what makes you feel good.    
+Just figure it out and play in that arena.    
+I'm not perfect at it. In fact, I fail as often as I succeed,  seeing friends, reading books, staring into space.    
+"Wanna play?" starts to become shorthand for indulging myself  in ways I'd given up on right around the time I got my first TV show,  right around the time I became a titan-in-training,  right around the time I started competing with myself for ways unknown.    
+15 minutes? What could be wrong with giving myself my full attention  for 15 minutes?    
+Turns out, nothing.    
+The very act of not working has made it possible for the hum to return,  as if the hum's engine could only refuel while I was away.    
+Work doesn't work without play.    
+It takes a little time, but after a few months,  one day the floodgates open  and there's a rush, and I find myself standing in my office  filled with an unfamiliar melody, full on groove inside me,  and around me, and it sends me spinning with ideas,  and the humming road is open, and I can drive it and drive it,  and I love working again.    
+But now, I like that hum, but I don't love that hum.    
+I don't need that hum.    
+I am not that hum. That hum is not me,  not anymore.    
+I am bubbles and sticky fingers and dinners with friends.    
+I am that hum.    
+Life's hum.    
+Love's hum.    
+Work's hum is still a piece of me, it is just no longer all of me,  and I am so grateful.    
+And I don't give a crap about being a titan,  because I have never once seen a titan play Red Rover, Red Rover.    
+I said yes to less work and more play, and somehow I still run my world.    
+My brain is still global. My campfires still burn.    
+The more I play, the happier I am, and the happier my kids are.    
+The more I play, the more I feel like a good mother.    
+The more I play, the freer my mind becomes.    
+The more I play, the better I work.    
+The more I play, the more I feel the hum,  the nation I'm building, the marathon I'm running,  the troops, the canvas, the high note, the hum, the hum,  the other hum, the real hum, life's hum.    
+The more I feel that hum, the more this strange, quivering, uncocooned,  awkward, brand new,  alive non-titan feels like me.    
+The more I feel that hum, the more I know who I am.    
+I'm a writer, I make stuff up, I imagine.    
+That part of the job, that's living the dream.    
+That's the dream of the job.    
+Because a dream job should be a little bit dreamy.    
+I said yes to less work and more play.    
+Titans need not apply.    
+Wanna play?    
+Thank you.    
+<d>
+So I'm a neurosurgeon.    
+And like most of my colleagues,  I have to deal, every day, with human tragedies.    
+I realize how your life can change from one second to the other  after a major stroke or after a car accident.    
+And what is very frustrating for us neurosurgeons  is to realize that unlike other organs of the body,  the brain has very little ability for self-repair.    
+And after a major injury of your central nervous system,  the patients often remain with a severe handicap.    
+And that's probably the reason why I've chosen  to be a functional neurosurgeon.    
+What is a functional neurosurgeon?    
+It's a doctor who is trying to improve a neurological function  through different surgical strategies.    
+You've certainly heard of one of the famous ones  called deep brain stimulation,  where you implant an electrode in the depths of the brain  in order to modulate a circuit of neurons  to improve a neurological function.    
+It's really an amazing technology  in that it has improved the destiny of patients  with Parkinson's disease,  with severe tremor, with severe pain.    
+However, neuromodulation does not mean neuro-repair.    
+And the dream of functional neurosurgeons  is to repair the brain.    
+I think  that we are approaching this dream.    
+And I would like to show you  that we are very close to this.    
+And that with a little bit of help,  the brain is able to help itself.    
+So the story started 15 years ago.    
+At that time, I was a chief resident  working days and nights in the emergency room.    
+I often had to take care of patients with head trauma.    
+You have to imagine that when a patient comes in with a severe head trauma,  his brain is swelling  and he's increasing his intracranial pressure.    
+And in order to save his life,  you have to decrease this intracranial pressure.    
+you sometimes have to remove a piece of swollen brain.    
+So instead of throwing away these pieces of swollen brain,  we decided with Jean-François Brunet,  who is a colleague of mine, a biologist,  to study them.    
+What do I mean by that?    
+We wanted to grow cells from these pieces of tissue.    
+It's not an easy task.    
+Growing cells from a piece of tissue  is a bit the same as growing very small children  out from their family.    
+So you need to find the right nutrients,  the warmth, the humidity  and all the nice environments to make them thrive.    
+So that's exactly what we had to do with these cells.    
+And after many attempts,  Jean-François did it.    
+And that's what he saw under his microscope.    
+And that was, for us, a major surprise.    
+Why?    
+Because this looks exactly the same as a stem cell culture,  with large green cells surrounding small, immature cells.    
+And you may remember from biology class  that stem cells are immature cells,  able to turn into any type of cell of the body.    
+The adult brain has stem cells, but they're very rare  and they're located in deep and small niches  in the depths of the brain.    
+So it was surprising to get this kind of stem cell culture  from the superficial part of swollen brain we had  in the operating theater.    
+And there was another intriguing observation:  Regular stem cells are very active cells --  cells that divide, divide, divide very quickly.    
+And they never die, they're immortal cells.    
+But these cells behave differently.    
+They divide slowly,  and after a few weeks of culture,  they even died.    
+So we were in front of a strange new cell population  that looked like stem cells but behaved differently.    
+And it took us a long time to understand where they came from.    
+They come from these cells.    
+These blue and red cells are called doublecortin-positive cells.    
+All of you have them in your brain.    
+They represent four percent of your cortical brain cells.    
+They have a very important role during the development stage.    
+When you were fetuses,  they helped your brain to fold itself.    
+But why do they stay in your head?    
+This, we don't know.    
+We think that they may participate in brain repair  because we find them in higher concentration  close to brain lesions.    
+But it's not so sure.    
+But there is one clear thing --  that from these cells,  we got our stem cell culture.    
+And we were in front of a potential new source of cells  to repair the brain.    
+And we had to prove this.    
+we decided to design an experimental paradigm.    
+The idea was to biopsy a piece of brain  in a non-eloquent area of the brain,  and then to culture the cells  exactly the way Jean-François did it in his lab.    
+And then label them, to put color in them  in order to be able to track them in the brain.    
+And the last step was to re-implant them  in the same individual.    
+We call these  autologous grafts -- autografts.    
+So the first question we had,  "What will happen if we re-implant these cells in a normal brain,  and what will happen if we re-implant the same cells  in a lesioned brain?"    
+Thanks to the help of professor Eric Rouiller,  we worked with monkeys.    
+So in the first-case scenario,  we re-implanted the cells in the normal brain  and what we saw is that they completely disappeared after a few weeks,  as if they were taken from the brain,  they go back home,  the space is already busy,  they are not needed there, so they disappear.    
+In the second-case scenario,  we performed the lesion,  we re-implanted exactly the same cells,  and in this case, the cells remained --  and they became mature neurons.    
+And that's the image of what we could observe under the microscope.    
+Those are the cells that were re-implanted.    
+And the proof they carry,  these little spots, those are the cells that we've labeled  in vitro, when they were in culture.    
+But we could not stop here, of course.    
+Do these cells also help a monkey to recover after a lesion?    
+So for that, we trained monkeys to perform a manual dexterity task.    
+They had to retrieve food pellets from a tray.    
+They were very good at it.    
+And when they had reached a plateau of performance,  we did a lesion in the motor cortex corresponding to the hand motion.    
+So the monkeys were plegic,  they could not move their hand anymore.    
+And exactly the same as humans would do,  they spontaneously recovered to a certain extent,  exactly the same as after a stroke.    
+Patients are completely plegic,  and then they try to recover due to a brain plasticity mechanism,  they recover to a certain extent,  exactly the same for the monkey.    
+So when we were sure that the monkey had reached his plateau  of spontaneous recovery,  we implanted his own cells.    
+So on the left side, you see the monkey that has spontaneously recovered.    
+He's at about 40 to 50 percent of his previous performance  before the lesion.    
+He's not so accurate, not so quick.    
+And look now, when we re-impant the cells:  Two months after re-implantation, the same individual.    
+It was also very exciting results for us, I tell you.    
+Since that time, we've understood much more about these cells.    
+We know that we can cryopreserve them,  we can use them later on.    
+We know that we can apply them in other neuropathological models,  like Parkinson's disease, for example.    
+But our dream is still to implant them in humans.    
+And I really hope that I'll be able to show you soon  that the human brain is giving us the tools to repair itself.    
+Thank you.    
+Bruno Giussani: Jocelyne, this is amazing,  and I'm sure that right now, there are several dozen people in the audience,  possibly even a majority,  who are thinking, "I know somebody who can use this."    
+I do, in any case.    
+And of course the question is,  what are the biggest obstacles  before you can go into human clinical trials?    
+Jocelyne Bloch: The biggest obstacles are regulations.   So, from these exciting results, you need to fill out  about two kilograms of papers and forms  to be able to go through these kind of trials.    
+BG: Which is understandable, the brain is delicate, etc.    
+JB: Yes, it is, but it takes a long time  and a lot of patience and almost a professional team to do it, you know?    
+BG: If you project yourself --  having done the research  and having tried to get permission to start the trials,  if you project yourself out in time,  how many years before somebody gets into a hospital  and this therapy is available?    
+JB: So, it's very difficult to say.    
+It depends, first, on the approval of the trial.    
+Will the regulation allow us to do it soon?    
+And then, you have to perform this kind of study  in a small group of patients.    
+So it takes, already, a long time to select the patients,  do the treatment  and evaluate if it's useful to do this kind of treatment.    
+And then you have to deploy this to a multicentric trial.    
+You have to really prove first that it's useful  before offering this treatment up for everybody.    
+BG: And safe, of course. JB: Of course.    
+BG: Jocelyne, thank you for coming to TED and sharing this.    
+BG: Thank you.    
+<d>
+Democracy.    
+In the West,  we make a colossal mistake taking it for granted.    
+We see democracy  not as the most fragile of flowers that it really is,  but we see it as part of our society's furniture.    
+We tend to think of it as an intransigent given.    
+We mistakenly believe that capitalism begets inevitably democracy.    
+It doesn't.    
+Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew and his great imitators in Beijing  that it is perfectly possible to have a flourishing capitalism,  spectacular growth,  while politics remains democracy-free.    
+Indeed, democracy is receding in our neck of the woods,  here in Europe.    
+Earlier this year, while I was representing Greece --  the newly elected Greek government --  in the Eurogroup as its Finance Minister,  I was told in no uncertain terms that our nation's democratic process --  our elections --  could not be allowed to interfere  with economic policies that were being implemented in Greece.    
+At that moment,  I felt that there could be no greater vindication of Lee Kuan Yew,  or the Chinese Communist Party,  indeed of some recalcitrant friends of mine who kept telling me  that democracy would be banned if it ever threatened to change anything.    
+Tonight, here, I want to present to you  an economic case for an authentic democracy.    
+I want to ask you to join me in believing again  that Lee Kuan Yew,  the Chinese Communist Party  and indeed the Eurogroup  are wrong in believing that we can dispense with democracy --  that we need an authentic, boisterous democracy.    
+And without democracy,  our societies will be nastier,  our future bleak  and our great, new technologies wasted.    
+Speaking of waste,  allow me to point out an interesting paradox  that is threatening our economies as we speak.    
+I call it the twin peaks paradox.    
+One peak you understand --  you know it, you recognize it --  is the mountain of debts that has been casting a long shadow  over the United States, Europe, the whole world.    
+We all recognize the mountain of debts.    
+But few people discern its twin.    
+A mountain of idle cash  belonging to rich savers and to corporations,  too terrified to invest it  into the productive activities that can generate the incomes  from which you can extinguish the mountain of debts  and which can produce all those things that humanity desperately needs,  like green energy.    
+Now let me give you two numbers.    
+Over the last three months,  in the United States, in Britain and in the Eurozone,  we have invested, collectively, 3.4 trillion dollars  on all the wealth-producing goods --  things like industrial plants, machinery,  office blocks, schools,  roads, railways, machinery, and so on and so forth.    
+$3.4 trillion sounds like a lot of money  until you compare it to the $5.1 trillion  that has been slushing around in the same countries,  in our financial institutions,  doing absolutely nothing during the same period  except inflating stock exchanges and bidding up house prices.    
+So a mountain of debt and a mountain of idle cash  form twin peaks, failing to cancel each other out through the normal operation of the markets.    
+The result is stagnant wages,  more than a quarter of 25- to 54-year-olds in America, in Japan and in Europe  And consequently, low aggregate demand,  which in a never-ending cycle, reinforces the pessimism of the investors,  who, fearing low demand, reproduce it by not investing --  exactly like Oedipus' father,  who, terrified by the prophecy of the oracle  that his son would grow up to kill him,    
+unwittingly engineered the conditions  that ensured that Oedipus, his son, would kill him.    
+This is my quarrel with capitalism.    
+Its gross wastefulness,  all this idle cash,  should be energized to improve lives,  to develop human talents,  and indeed to finance all these technologies,  green technologies,  which are absolutely essential for saving planet Earth.    
+Am I right in believing that democracy might be the answer?    
+I believe so,  but before we move on,  what do we mean by democracy?    
+Aristotle defined democracy  as the constitution in which the free and the poor,  being in the majority, control government.    
+Now, of course Athenian democracy excluded too many.    
+Women, migrants and, of course, the slaves.    
+But it would be a mistake  to dismiss the significance of ancient Athenian democracy  on the basis of whom it excluded.    
+What was more pertinent, and continues to be so about ancient Athenian democracy,  was the inclusion of the working poor,  who not only acquired the right to free speech,  but more importantly, crucially,  they acquired the rights to political judgments  that were afforded equal weight  in the decision-making concerning matters of state.    
+Now, of course, Athenian democracy didn't last long.    
+Like a candle that burns brightly, it burned out quickly.    
+And indeed,  our liberal democracies today do not have their roots in ancient Athens.    
+They have their roots in the Magna Carta,  in the 1688 Glorious Revolution,  indeed in the American constitution.    
+Whereas Athenian democracy was focusing on the masterless citizen  and empowering the working poor,  our liberal democracies are founded on the Magna Carta tradition,  which was, after all, a charter for masters.    
+And indeed, liberal democracy only surfaced when it was possible  to separate fully the political sphere from the economic sphere,  so as to confine the democratic process fully in the political sphere,  leaving the economic sphere --  the corporate world, if you want --  as a democracy-free zone.    
+Now, in our democracies today,  this separation of the economic from the political sphere,  it gave rise to an inexorable, epic struggle between the two,  with the economic sphere colonizing the political sphere, eating into its power.    
+Have you wondered why politicians are not what they used to be?    
+It's not because their DNA has degenerated.    
+It is rather because one can be in government today and not in power,  because power has migrated from the political to the economic sphere,  which is separate.    
+I spoke about my quarrel with capitalism.    
+If you think about it,  it is a little bit like a population of predators,  that are so successful in decimating the prey that they must feed on,  that in the end they starve.    
+Similarly,  the economic sphere has been colonizing and cannibalizing the political sphere  to such an extent that it is undermining itself,  Corporate power is increasing,  political goods are devaluing,  inequality is rising,  aggregate demand is falling  and CEOs of corporations are too scared to invest the cash of their corporations.    
+So the more capitalism succeeds in taking the demos out of democracy,  the taller the twin peaks  and the greater the waste of human resources  and humanity's wealth.    
+Clearly, if this is right,  we must reunite the political and economic spheres  and better do it with a demos being in control,  like in ancient Athens except without the slaves  or the exclusion of women and migrants.    
+Now, this is not an original idea.    
+The Marxist left had that idea 100 years ago  and it didn't go very well, did it?    
+The lesson that we learned from the Soviet debacle  is that only by a miracle will the working poor be reempowered,  as they were in ancient Athens,  without creating new forms of brutality and waste.    
+But there is a solution:  eliminate the working poor.    
+Capitalism's doing it  by replacing low-wage workers with automata, androids, robots.    
+The problem is  that as long as the economic and the political spheres are separate,  automation makes the twin peaks taller,  the waste loftier  and the social conflicts deeper,  including -- soon, I believe --  in places like China.    
+So we need to reconfigure,  we need to reunite the economic and the political spheres,  but we'd better do it by democratizing the reunified sphere,  lest we end up with a surveillance-mad hyperautocracy  that makes The Matrix, the movie, look like a documentary.    
+So the question is not whether capitalism will survive  the technological innovations it is spawning.    
+The more interesting question  is whether capitalism will be succeeded by something resembling a Matrix dystopia  or something much closer to a Star Trek-like society,  where machines serve the humans  and the humans expend their energies exploring the universe  and indulging in long debates about the meaning of life  in some ancient, Athenian-like, high tech agora.    
+I think we can afford to be optimistic.    
+But what would it take, what would it look like  to have this Star Trek-like utopia, instead of the Matrix-like dystopia?    
+In practical terms,  allow me to share just briefly,  a couple of examples.    
+At the level of the enterprise,  imagine a capital market,  where you earn capital as you work,  and where your capital follows you from one job to another,  from one company to another,  and the company --  whichever one you happen to work at at that time --  is solely owned by those who happen to work in it at that moment.    
+Then all income stems from capital, from profits,  and the very concept of wage labor becomes obsolete.    
+No more separation between those who own but do not work in the company  and those who work but do not own the company;  no more tug-of-war between capital and labor;  no great gap between investment and saving;  indeed, no towering twin peaks.    
+At the level of the global political economy,  imagine for a moment  that our national currencies have a free-floating exchange rate,  with a universal, global, digital currency,  one that is issued by the International Monetary Fund,  on behalf of all humanity.    
+And imagine further  that all international trade is denominated in this currency --  let's call it "the cosmos,"  in units of cosmos --  with every government agreeing to be paying into a common fund  a sum of cosmos units proportional to the country's trade deficit,  or indeed to a country's trade surplus.    
+And imagine that that fund is utilized to invest in green technologies,  especially in parts of the world where investment funding is scarce.    
+This is not a new idea.    
+It's what, effectively, John Maynard Keynes proposed  in 1944 at the Bretton Woods Conference.    
+The problem is  that back then, they didn't have the technology to implement it.    
+Now we do,  especially in the context of a reunified political-economic sphere.    
+The world that I am describing to you  is simultaneously libertarian,  in that it prioritizes empowered individuals,  Marxist,  since it will have confined to the dustbin of history  the division between capital and labor,  and Keynesian,  global Keynesian.    
+But above all else,  it is a world in which we will be able to imagine an authentic democracy.    
+Will such a world dawn?    
+Or shall we descend into a Matrix-like dystopia?    
+The answer lies in the political choice that we shall be making collectively.    
+It is our choice,  and we'd better make it democratically.    
+Thank you.    
+Bruno Giussani: Yanis ...    
+It was you who described yourself in your bios as a libertarian Marxist.    
+What is the relevance of Marx's analysis today?    
+Yanis Varoufakis: Well, if there was any relevance in what I just said,  then Marx is relevant.    
+Because the whole point of reunifying the political and economic is --  if we don't do it,  then technological innovation is going to create  such a massive fall in aggregate demand,  what Larry Summers refers to as secular stagnation.    
+With this crisis migrating from one part of the world,  as it is now,  it will destabilize not only our democracies,  but even the emerging world that is not that keen on liberal democracy.    
+So if this analysis holds water, then Marx is absolutely relevant.    
+But so is Hayek,  that's why I'm a libertarian Marxist,  and so is Keynes,  so that's why I'm totally confused.    
+BG: Indeed, and possibly we are too, now.    
+YV: If you are not confused, you are not thinking, OK?    
+BG: That's a very, very Greek philosopher kind of thing to say --  YV: That was Einstein, actually --  BG: During your talk you mentioned Singapore and China,  and last night at the speaker dinner,  you expressed a pretty strong opinion about how the West looks at China.    
+Would you like to share that?    
+YV: Well, there's a great degree of hypocrisy.    
+In our liberal democracies, we have a semblance of democracy.    
+It's because we have confined, as I was saying in my talk,  democracy to the political sphere,  while leaving the one sphere where all the action is --  the economic sphere --  a completely democracy-free zone.    
+In a sense,  if I am allowed to be provocative,  China today is closer to Britain in the 19th century.    
+Because remember,  we tend to associate liberalism with democracy --  that's a mistake, historically.    
+Liberalism, liberal, it's like John Stuart Mill.    
+John Stuart Mill was particularly skeptical about the democratic process.    
+So what you are seeing now in China is a very similar process  to the one that we had in Britain during the Industrial Revolution,  especially the transition from the first to the second.    
+And to be castigating China  for doing that which the West did in the 19th century,  smacks of hypocrisy.    
+BG: I am sure that many people here are wondering about your experience  as the Finance Minister of Greece earlier this year.    
+YV: I knew this was coming.    
+BG: Yes.    
+BG: Six months after,  how do you look back at the first half of the year?    
+YV: Extremely exciting, from a personal point of view,  and very disappointing,  because we had an opportunity to reboot the Eurozone.    
+Not just Greece, the Eurozone.    
+To move away from the complacency  and the constant denial that there was a massive --  and there is a massive architectural fault line  going through the Eurozone,  which is threatening, massively, the whole of the European Union process.    
+We had an opportunity on the basis of the Greek program --  was the first program to manifest that denial --  to put it right.    
+And, unfortunately,  the powers in the Eurozone,  in the Eurogroup,  chose to maintain denial.    
+But you know what happens.    
+This is the experience of the Soviet Union.    
+When you try to keep alive an economic system that architecturally cannot survive,  through political will and through authoritarianism,  you may succeed in prolonging it,  but when change happens  it happens very abruptly and catastrophically.    
+BG: What kind of change are you foreseeing?    
+YV: Well, there's no doubt  that if we don't change the architecture of the Eurozone,  the Eurozone has no future.    
+BG: Did you make any mistakes when you were Finance Minister?    
+YV: Every day.    
+BG: For example? YV: Anybody who looks back --    No, but seriously.    
+If there's any Minister of Finance, or of anything else for that matter,  who tells you after six months in a job,  especially in such a stressful situation,  that they have made no mistake, they're dangerous people.    
+Of course I made mistakes.    
+The greatest mistake was to sign the application  for the extension of a loan agreement  in the end of February.    
+I was imagining  that there was a genuine interest on the side of the creditors  to find common ground.    
+And there wasn't.    
+They were simply interested in crushing our government,  just because they did not want to have to deal with the architectural fault lines  that were running through the Eurozone.    
+And because they didn't want to admit  that for five years they were implementing a catastrophic program in Greece.    
+We lost one-third of our nominal GDP.    
+This is worse than the Great Depression.    
+And no one has come clean from the troika of lenders that have been imposing this policy  to say, "This was a colossal mistake."    
+BG: Despite all this,  and despite the aggressiveness of the discussion,  you seem to be remaining quite pro-European.    
+YV: Absolutely.    
+Look, my criticism of the European Union and the Eurozone  comes from a person who lives and breathes Europe.    
+My greatest fear is that the Eurozone will not survive.    
+Because if it doesn't,  the centrifugal forces that will be unleashed  and they will destroy the European Union.    
+And that will be catastrophic not just for Europe  but for the whole global economy.    
+We are probably the largest economy in the world.    
+And if we allow ourselves  to fall into a route of the postmodern 1930's,  which seems to me to be what we are doing,  then that will be detrimental  to the future of Europeans and non-Europeans alike.    
+BG: We definitely hope you are wrong on that point.    
+Yanis, thank you for coming to TED.    
+YV: Thank you.    
+<d>
+Roy Price is a man that most of you have probably never heard about,  even though he may have been responsible  for 22 somewhat mediocre minutes of your life on April 19, 2013.    
+He may have also been responsible for 22 very entertaining minutes,  but not very many of you.    
+And all of that goes back to a decision  that Roy had to make about three years ago.    
+So you see, Roy Price is a senior executive with Amazon Studios.    
+That's the TV production company of Amazon.    
+He's 47 years old, slim, spiky hair,  describes himself on Twitter as "movies, TV, technology, tacos."    
+And Roy Price has a very responsible job, because it's his responsibility  to pick the shows, the original content that Amazon is going to make.    
+And of course that's a highly competitive space.    
+I mean, there are so many TV shows already out there,  that Roy can't just choose any show.    
+He has to find shows that are really, really great.    
+So in other words, he has to find shows  that are on the very right end of this curve here.    
+So this curve here is the rating distribution  of about 2,500 TV shows on the website IMDB,  and the rating goes from one to 10,  and the height here shows you how many shows get that rating.    
+So if your show gets a rating of nine points or higher, that's a winner.    
+Then you have a top two percent show.    
+That's shows like "Breaking Bad," "Game of Thrones," "The Wire,"  so all of these shows that are addictive,  whereafter you've watched a season, your brain is basically like,  "Where can I get more of these episodes?"    
+That kind of show.    
+On the left side, just for clarity, here on that end,  you have a show called "Toddlers and Tiaras" --    -- which should tell you enough  about what's going on on that end of the curve.    
+Now, Roy Price is not worried about getting on the left end of the curve,  because I think you would have to have some serious brainpower  to undercut "Toddlers and Tiaras."    
+So what he's worried about is this middle bulge here,  the bulge of average TV,  you know, those shows that aren't really good or really bad,  they don't really get you excited.    
+So he needs to make sure that he's really on the right end of this.    
+So the pressure is on, and of course it's also the first time  that Amazon is even doing something like this,  so Roy Price does not want to take any chances.    
+He wants to engineer success.    
+He needs a guaranteed success,  and so what he does is, he holds a competition.    
+So he takes a bunch of ideas for TV shows,  and from those ideas, through an evaluation,  they select eight candidates for TV shows,  and then he just makes the first episode of each one of these shows  and puts them online for free for everyone to watch.    
+And so when Amazon is giving out free stuff, you're going to take it, right?    
+So millions of viewers are watching those episodes.    
+What they don't realize is that, while they're watching their shows,  actually, they are being watched.    
+They are being watched by Roy Price and his team,  who record everything.    
+They record when somebody presses play, when somebody presses pause,  what parts they skip, what parts they watch again.    
+So they collect millions of data points,  because they want to have those data points  to then decide which show they should make.    
+And sure enough, so they collect all the data,  they do all the data crunching, and an answer emerges,  and the answer is,  "Amazon should do a sitcom about four Republican US Senators."    
+They did that show.    
+So does anyone know the name of the show?    
+Yes, "Alpha House,"  but it seems like not too many of you here remember that show, actually,  because it didn't turn out that great.    
+It's actually just an average show,  actually -- literally, in fact, because the average of this curve here is at 7.4,  and "Alpha House" lands at 7.5,  so a slightly above average show,  but certainly not what Roy Price and his team were aiming for.    
+Meanwhile, however, at about the same time,  at another company,  another executive did manage to land a top show using data analysis,  and his name is Ted,  Ted Sarandos, who is the Chief Content Officer of Netflix,  and just like Roy, he's on a constant mission  to find that great TV show,  and he uses data as well to do that,  except he does it a little bit differently.    
+So instead of holding a competition, what he did -- and his team of course --  was they looked at all the data they already had about Netflix viewers,  you know, the ratings they give their shows,  the viewing histories, what shows people like, and so on.    
+And then they use that data to discover  all of these little bits and pieces about the audience:  what kinds of shows they like,  what kind of producers, what kind of actors.    
+And once they had all of these pieces together,  they took a leap of faith,  and they decided to license  not a sitcom about four Senators  but a drama series about a single Senator.    
+You guys know the show?    
+Yes, "House of Cards," and Netflix of course, nailed it with that show,  at least for the first two seasons.    
+"House of Cards" gets a 9.1 rating on this curve,  so it's exactly where they wanted it to be.    
+Now, the question of course is, what happened here?    
+So you have two very competitive, data-savvy companies.    
+They connect all of these millions of data points,  and then it works beautifully for one of them,  and it doesn't work for the other one.    
+So why?    
+Because logic kind of tells you that this should be working all the time.    
+I mean, if you're collecting millions of data points on a decision you're going to make,  then you should be able to make a pretty good decision.    
+You have 200 years of statistics to rely on.    
+You're amplifying it with very powerful computers.    
+The least you could expect is good TV, right?    
+And if data analysis does not work that way,  then it actually gets a little scary,  because we live in a time where we're turning to data more and more  to make very serious decisions that go far beyond TV.    
+Does anyone here know the company Multi-Health Systems?    
+No one. OK, that's good actually.    
+OK, so Multi-Health Systems is a software company,  and I hope that nobody here in this room  ever comes into contact with that software,  because if you do, it means you're in prison.    
+If someone here in the US is in prison, and they apply for parole,  then it's very likely that data analysis software from that company  will be used in determining whether to grant that parole.    
+So it's the same principle as Amazon and Netflix,  but now instead of deciding whether a TV show is going to be good or bad,  you're deciding whether a person is going to be good or bad.    
+And mediocre TV, 22 minutes, that can be pretty bad,  but more years in prison, I guess, even worse.    
+And unfortunately, there is actually some evidence that this data analysis,  despite having lots of data, does not always produce optimum results.    
+And that's not because a company like Multi-Health Systems  doesn't know what to do with data.    
+Even the most data-savvy companies get it wrong.    
+Yes, even Google gets it wrong sometimes.    
+In 2009, Google announced that they were able, with data analysis,  to predict outbreaks of influenza, the nasty kind of flu,  by doing data analysis on their Google searches.    
+And it worked beautifully, and it made a big splash in the news,  including the pinnacle of scientific success: a publication in the journal "Nature."    
+It worked beautifully for year after year after year,  until one year it failed.    
+And nobody could even tell exactly why.    
+It just didn't work that year, and of course that again made big news,  of a publication from the journal "Nature."    
+So even the most data-savvy companies, Amazon and Google,  they sometimes get it wrong.    
+And despite all those failures,  data is moving rapidly into real-life decision-making --  into the workplace,  law enforcement,  medicine.    
+So we should better make sure that data is helping.    
+Now, personally I've seen a lot of this struggle with data myself,  because I work in computational genetics,  which is also a field where lots of very smart people  are using unimaginable amounts of data to make pretty serious decisions  like deciding on a cancer therapy or developing a drug.    
+And over the years, I've noticed a sort of pattern  or kind of rule, if you will, about the difference  between successful decision-making with data  and unsuccessful decision-making,  and I find this a pattern worth sharing, and it goes something like this.    
+So whenever you're solving a complex problem,  you're doing essentially two things.    
+The first one is, you take that problem apart into its bits and pieces  so that you can deeply analyze those bits and pieces,  You put all of these bits and pieces back together again  to come to your conclusion.    
+And sometimes you have to do it over again,  but it's always those two things:  taking apart and putting back together again.    
+And now the crucial thing is  that data and data analysis is only good for the first part.    
+Data and data analysis, no matter how powerful,  can only help you taking a problem apart and understanding its pieces.    
+It's not suited to put those pieces back together again  and then to come to a conclusion.    
+There's another tool that can do that, and we all have it, and that tool is the brain.    
+If there's one thing a brain is good at,  it's taking bits and pieces back together again,  even when you have incomplete information,  and coming to a good conclusion,  especially if it's the brain of an expert.    
+And that's why I believe that Netflix was so successful,  because they used data and brains where they belong in the process.    
+They use data to first understand lots of pieces about their audience  that they otherwise wouldn't have been able to understand at that depth,  but then the decision to take all these bits and pieces  and put them back together again and make a show like "House of Cards,"  that was nowhere in the data.    
+Ted Sarandos and his team made that decision to license that show,  which also meant, by the way, that they were taking  a pretty big personal risk with that decision.    
+And Amazon, on the other hand, they did it the wrong way around.    
+They used data all the way to drive their decision-making,  first when they held their competition of TV ideas,  then when they selected "Alpha House" to make as a show.    
+Which of course was a very safe decision for them,  because they could always point at the data, saying,  "This is what the data tells us."    
+But it didn't lead to the exceptional results that they were hoping for.    
+So data is of course a massively useful tool to make better decisions,  but I believe that things go wrong  when data is starting to drive those decisions.    
+No matter how powerful, data is just a tool,  and to keep that in mind, I find this device here quite useful.    
+Many of you will ...    
+Before there was data,  this was the decision-making device to use.    
+Many of you will know this.    
+This toy here is called the Magic 8 Ball,  and it's really amazing,  because if you have a decision to make, a yes or no question,  all you have to do is you shake the ball, and then you get an answer --  "Most Likely" -- right here in this window in real time.    
+I'll have it out later for tech demos.    
+Now, the thing is, of course -- so I've made some decisions in my life  where, in hindsight, I should have just listened to the ball.    
+But, you know, of course, if you have the data available,  you want to replace this with something much more sophisticated,  like data analysis to come to a better decision.    
+But that does not change the basic setup.    
+So the ball may get smarter and smarter and smarter,  but I believe it's still on us to make the decisions  if we want to achieve something extraordinary, on the right end of the curve.    
+And I find that a very encouraging message, in fact,  that even in the face of huge amounts of data,  it still pays off to make decisions,  to be an expert in what you're doing  and take risks.    
+Because in the end, it's not data,  it's risks that will land you on the right end of the curve.    
+Thank you.